The Education of Henry Adams
learned no better. The Paris of Louis Philippe, Guizot, and de
Tocqueville, as well as the London of Robert Peel, Macaulay, and John
Stuart Mill, were but varieties of the same upper-class bourgeoisie
that felt instinctive cousinship with the Boston of Ticknor, Prescott,
and Motley. Even the typical grumbler Carlyle, who cast doubts on the
real capacity of the middle class, and who at times thought himself
eccentric, found friendship and alliances in Boston--still more in
Concord. The system had proved so successful that even Germany wanted
to try it, and Italy yearned for it. England's middle-class government
was the ideal of human progress.
Even the violent reaction after 1848, and the return of all
Europe to military practices, never for a moment shook the true faith.
No one, except Karl Marx, foresaw radical change. What announced it?
The world was producing sixty or seventy million tons of coal, and
might be using nearly a million steam-horsepower, just beginning to
make itself felt. All experience since the creation of man, all divine
revelation or human science, conspired to deceive and betray a
twelve-year-old boy who took for granted that his ideas, which were
alone respectable, would be alone respected.
Viewed from Mount Vernon Street, the problem of life was as
simple as it was classic. Politics offered no difficulties, for there
the moral law was a sure guide. Social perfection was also sure,
because human nature worked for Good, and three instruments were all
she asked--Suffrage, Common Schools, and Press. On these points doubt
was forbidden. Education was divine, and man needed only a correct
knowledge of facts to reach perfection:
"Were half the power that fills the world with terror,
Were half the wealth bestowed on camps and courts,
Given to redeem the human mind from error,
There were no need of arsenals nor forts."
Nothing quieted doubt so completely as the mental calm of the Unitarian
clergy. In uniform excellence of life and character, moral and
intellectual, the score of Unitarian clergymen about Boston, who
controlled society and Harvard College, were never excelled. They
proclaimed as their merit that they insisted on no doctrine, but
taught, or tried to teach, the means of leading a virtuous, useful,
unselfish life, which they held to be sufficient for salvation. For
them, difficulties might be ignored; doubts were waste of thought;
nothing exacted solution. Boston had solved the universe; or had
offered and realized the best solution yet tried. The problem was
worked out.
Of all the conditions of his youth which afterwards puzzled the
grown-up man, this disappearance of religion puzzled him most. The boy
went to church twice every Sunday; he was taught to read his Bible, and
he learned religious poetry by heart; he believed in a mild deism; he
prayed; he went through all the forms; but neither to him nor to his
brothers or sisters was religion real. Even the mild discipline of the
Unitarian Church was so irksome that they all threw it off at the first
possible moment, and never afterwards entered a church. The religious
instinct had vanished, and could not be revived, although one made in
later life many efforts to recover it. That the most powerful emotion
of man, next to the sexual, should disappear, might be a personal
defect of his own; but that the most intelligent society, led by the
most intelligent clergy, in the most moral conditions he ever knew,
should have solved all the problems of the universe so thoroughly as to
have quite ceased making itself anxious about past or future, and
should have persuaded itself that all the problems which had convulsed
human thought from earliest recorded time, were not worth discussing,
seemed to him the most curious social phenomenon he had to account for
in a long life. The faculty of turning away one's eyes as one
approaches a chasm is not unusual, and Boston showed, under the lead of
Mr. Webster, how successfully it could be done in politics; but in
politics a certain number of men did at least protest. In religion and
philosophy no one protested. Such protest as was made took forms more
simple than the silence, like the deism of Theodore Parker, and of the
boy's own cousin Octavius Frothingham, who distressed his father and
scandalized Beacon Street by avowing scepticism that seemed to solve no
old problems, and to raise many new ones. The less aggressive protest
of Ralph Waldo Emerson, was, from an old-world point of view, less
serious. It was naif.
The children reached manhood without knowing religion, and with
the certainty that dogma, metaphysics, and abstract philosophy were not
worth knowing. So one-sided an education could have been possible in no
other country or time, but it became, almost of necessity, the more
literary and political. As the children grew up, they exaggerated the
literary and the political interests. They joined in the dinner-table
discussions and from childhood the boys were accustomed to hear, almost
every day, table-talk as good as they were ever likely to hear again.
The eldest child, Louisa, was one of the most sparkling creatures her
brother met in a long and varied experience of bright women. The oldest
son, John, was afterwards regarded as one of the best talkers in Boston
society, and perhaps the most popular man in the State, though apt to
be on the unpopular side. Palfrey and Dana could be entertaining when
they pleased, and though Charles Sumner could hardly be called light in
hand, he was willing to be amused, and smiled grandly from time to
time; while Mr. Adams, who talked relatively little, was always a good
listener, and laughed over a witticism till he choked.
By way of educating and amusing the children, Mr. Adams read
much aloud, and was sure to read political literature, especially when
it was satirical, like the speeches of Horace Mann and the "Epistles"
of "Hosea Biglow," with great delight to the youth. So he read
Longfellow and Tennyson as their poems appeared, but the children took
possession of Dickens and Thackeray for themselves. Both were too
modern for tastes founded on Pope and Dr. Johnson. The boy Henry soon
became a desultory reader of every book he found readable, but these
were commonly eighteenth-century historians because his father's
library was full of them. In the want of positive instincts, he drifted
into the mental indolence of history. So too, he read shelves of
eighteenth-century poetry, but when his father offered his own set of
Wordsworth as a gift on condition of reading it through, he declined.
Pope and Gray called for no mental effort; they were easy reading; but
the boy was thirty years old before his education reached Wordsworth.
This is the story of an education, and the person or persons
who figure in it are supposed to have values only as educators or
educated. The surroundings concern it only so far as they affect
education. Sumner, Dana, Palfrey, had values of their own, like Hume,
Pope, and Wordsworth, which any one may study in their works; here all
appear only as influences on the mind of a boy very nearly the average
of most boys in physical and mental stature. The influence was wholly
political and literary. His father made no effort to force his mind,
but left him free play, and this was perhaps best. Only in one way his
father rendered him a great service by trying to teach him French and
giving him some idea of a French accent. Otherwise the family was
rather an atmosphere than an influence. The boy had a large and
overpowering set of brothers and sisters, who were modes or replicas of
the same type, getting the same education, struggling with the same
problems, and solving the question, or leaving it unsolved much in the
same way. They knew no more than he what they wanted or what to do for
it, but all were conscious that they would like to control power in
some form; and the same thing could be said of an ant or an elephant.
Their form was tied to politics or literature. They amounted to one
individual with half-a-dozen sides or facets; their temperaments
reacted on each other and made each child more like the other. This was
also education, but in the type, and the Boston or New England type was
well enough known. What no one knew was whether the individual who
thought himself a representative of this type, was fit to deal with
life.
As far as outward bearing went, such a family of turbulent
children, given free rein by their parents, or indifferent to check,
should have come to more or less grief. Certainly no one was strong
enough to control them, least of all their mother, the queen-bee of the
hive, on whom nine-tenths of the burden fell, on whose strength they
all depended, but whose children were much too self-willed and
self-confident to take guidance from her, or from any one else, unless
in the direction they fancied. Father and mother were about equally
helpless. Almost every large family in those days produced at least one
black sheep, and if this generation of Adamses escaped, it was as much
a matter of surprise to them as to their neighbors. By some happy
chance they grew up to be decent citizens, but Henry Adams, as a brand
escaped from the burning, always looked back with astonishment at their
luck. The fact seemed to prove that they were born, like birds, with a
certain innate balance. Home influences alone never saved the New
England boy from ruin, though sometimes they may have helped to ruin
him; and the influences outside of home were negative. If school
helped, it was only by reaction. The dislike of school was so strong as
to be a positive gain. The passionate hatred of school methods was
almost a method in itself. Yet the day-school of that time was
respectable, and the boy had nothing to complain of. In fact, he never
complained. He hated it because he was here with a crowd of other boys
and compelled to learn by memory a quantity of things that did not
amuse him. His memory was slow, and the effort painful. For him to
conceive that his memory could compete for school prizes with machines
of two or three times its power, was to prove himself wanting not only
in memory, but flagrantly in mind. He thought his mind a good enough
machine, if it were given time to act, but it acted wrong if hurried.
Schoolmasters never gave time.
In any and all its forms, the boy detested school, and the
prejudice became deeper with years. He always reckoned his school-days,
from ten to sixteen years old, as time thrown away. Perhaps his needs
turned out to be exceptional, but his existence was exceptional.
Between 1850 and 1900 nearly every one's existence was exceptional. For
success in the life imposed on him he needed, as afterwards appeared,
the facile use of only four tools: Mathematics, French, German, and
Spanish. With these, he could master in very short time any special
branch of inquiry, and feel at home in any society. Latin and Greek, he
could, with the help of the modern languages, learn more completely by
the intelligent work of six weeks than in the six years he spent on
them at school. These four tools were necessary to his success in life,
but he never controlled any one of them.
Thus, at the outset, he was condemned to failure more or less
complete in the life awaiting him, but not more so than his companions.
Indeed, had his father kept the boy at home, and given him half an
hour's direction every day, he would have done more for him than school
ever could do for them. Of course, school-taught men and boys looked
down on home-bred boys, and rather prided themselves on their own
ignorance, but the man of sixty can generally see what he needed in
life, and in Henry Adams's opinion it was not school.