The Education of Henry Adams

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  Equally little could Motley have meant that dinners were good
to look at. Nothing could be worse than the toilettes; nothing
less artistic than the appearance of the company. One's eyes
might be dazzled by family diamonds, but, if an American woman
were present, she was sure to make comments about the way the
jewels were worn. If there was a well-dressed lady at table, she
was either an American or "fast." She attracted as much notice as
though she were on the stage. No one could possibly admire an
English dinner-table.

  Least of all did Motley mean that the taste or the manners were
perfect. The manners of English society were notorious, and the
taste was worse. Without exception every American woman rose in
rebellion against English manners. In fact, the charm of London
which made most impression on Americans was the violence of its
contrasts; the extreme badness of the worst, making background
for the distinction, refinement, or wit of a few, just as the
extreme beauty of a few superb women was more effective against
the plainness of the crowd. The result was mediaeval, and
amusing; sometimes coarse to a degree that might have startled a
roustabout, and sometimes courteous and considerate to a degree
that suggested King Arthur's Round Table; but this artistic
contrast was surely not the perfection that Motley had in his
mind. He meant something scholarly, worldly, and modern; he was
thinking of his own tastes.

  Probably he meant that, in his favorite houses, the tone was
easy, the talk was good, and the standard of scholarship was
high. Even there he would have been forced to qualify his
adjectives. No German would have admitted that English
scholarship was high, or that it was scholarship at all, or that
any wish for scholarship existed in England. Nothing that seemed
to smell of the shop or of the lecture-room was wanted. One might
as well have talked of Renan's Christ at the table of the Bishop
of London, as talk of German philology at the table of an Oxford
don. Society, if a small literary class could be called society,
wanted to be amused in its old way. Sydney Smith, who had amused,
was dead; so was Macaulay, who instructed if he did not amuse;
Thackeray died at Christmas, 1863; Dickens never felt at home,
and seldom appeared, in society; Bulwer Lytton was not sprightly;
Tennyson detested strangers; Carlyle was mostly detested by them;
Darwin never came to town; the men of whom Motley must have been
thinking were such as he might meet at Lord Houghton's
breakfasts: Grote, Jowett, Milman, or Froude; Browning, Matthew
Arnold, or Swinburne; Bishop Wilberforce, Venables, or Hayward;
or perhaps Gladstone, Robert Lowe, or Lord Granville. A
relatively small class, commonly isolated, suppressed, and lost
at the usual London dinner, such society as this was fairly
familiar even to a private secretary, but to the literary
American it might well seem perfection since he could find
nothing of the sort in America. Within the narrow limits of this
class, the American Legation was fairly at home; possibly a score
of houses, all liberal, and all literary, but perfect only in the
eyes of a Harvard College historian. They could teach little
worth learning, for their tastes were antiquated and their
knowledge was ignorance to the next generation. What was
altogether fatal for future purposes, they were only English.

  A social education in such a medium was bound to be useless in
any other, yet Adams had to learn it to the bottom. The one thing
needful for a private secretary, was that he should not only
seem, but should actually be, at home. He studied carefully, and
practised painfully, what seemed to be the favorite
accomplishments of society. Perhaps his nervousness deceived him;
perhaps he took for an ideal of others what was only his
reflected image; but he conceived that the perfection of human
society required that a man should enter a drawing-room where he
was a total stranger, and place himself on the hearth-rug, his
back to the fire, with an air of expectant benevolence, without
curiosity, much as though he had dropped in at a charity concert,
kindly disposed to applaud the performers and to overlook
mistakes. This ideal rarely succeeded in youth, and towards
thirty it took a form of modified insolence and offensive
patronage; but about sixty it mellowed into courtesy, kindliness,
and even deference to the young which had extraordinary charm
both in women and in men. Unfortunately Adams could not wait till
sixty for education; he had his living to earn; and the English
air of patronage would earn no income for him anywhere else.

  After five or six years of constant practice, any one can
acquire the habit of going from one strange company to another
without thinking much of one's self or of them, as though
silently reflecting that "in a world where we are all insects, no
insect is alien; perhaps they are human in parts"; but the dreamy
habit of mind which comes from solitude in crowds is not fitness
for social success except in London. Everywhere else it is
injury. England was a social kingdom whose social coinage had no
currency elsewhere.

  Englishwomen, from the educational point of view, could give
nothing until they approached forty years old. Then they become
very interesting -- very charming -- to the man of fifty. The
young American was not worth the young Englishwoman's notice, and
never received it. Neither understood the other. Only in the
domestic relation, in the country -- never in society at large --
a young American might accidentally make friends with an
Englishwoman of his own age, but it never happened to Henry
Adams. His susceptible nature was left to the mercy of American
girls, which was professional duty rather than education as long
as diplomacy held its own.

  Thus he found himself launched on waters where he had never
meant to sail, and floating along a stream which carried him far
from his port. His third season in London society saw the end of
his diplomatic education, and began for him the social life of a
young man who felt at home in England -- more at home there than
anywhere else. With this feeling, the mere habit of going to
garden-parties, dinners, receptions, and balls had nothing to do.
One might go to scores without a sensation of home. One might
stay in no end of country houses without forgetting that one was
a total stranger and could never be anything else. One might bow
to half the dukes and duchesses in England, and feel only the
more strange. Hundreds of persons might pass with a nod and never
come nearer. Close relation in a place like London is a personal
mystery as profound as chemical affinity. Thousands pass, and one
separates himself from the mass to attach himself to another, and
so make, little by little, a group.

  One morning, April 27, 1863, he was asked to breakfast with Sir
Henry Holland, the old Court physician who had been acquainted
with every American Minister since Edward Everett, and was a
valuable social ally, who had the courage to try to be of use to
everybody, and who, while asking the private secretary to
breakfast one day, was too discreet to betray what he might have
learned about rebel doings at his breakfast-table the day before.
He had been friendly with the Legation, in the teeth of society,
and was still bearing up against the weight of opinion, so that
young Adams could not decline his invitations, although they
obliged him to breakfast in Brook Street at nine o'clock in the
morning, alternately with Mr. James M. Mason. Old Dr. Holland was
himself as hale as a hawk, driving all day bare-headed about
London, and eating Welsh rarebit every night before bed; he
thought that any young man should be pleased to take his early
muffin in Brook Street, and supply a few crumbs of war news for
the daily peckings of eminent patients. Meekly, when summoned,
the private secretary went, and on reaching the front door, this
particular morning, he found there another young man in the act
of rapping the knocker. They entered the breakfastroom together,
where they were introduced to each other, and Adams learned that
the other guest was a Cambridge undergraduate, Charles Milnes
Gaskell, son of James Milnes Gaskell, the Member for Wenlock;
another of the Yorkshire Milneses, from Thornes near Wakefield.
Fate had fixed Adams to Yorkshire. By another chance it happened
that young Milnes Gaskell was intimate at Cambridge with William
Everett who was also about to take his degree. A third chance
inspired Mr. Evarts with a fancy for visiting Cambridge, and led
William Everett to offer his services as host. Adams acted as
courier to Mr. Evarts, and at the end of May they went down for a
few days, when William Everett did the honors as host with a
kindness and attention that made his cousin sorely conscious of
his own social shortcomings. Cambridge was pretty, and the dons
were kind. Mr. Evarts enjoyed his visit but this was merely a
part of the private secretary's day's work. What affected his
whole life was the intimacy then begun with Milnes Gaskell and
his circle of undergraduate friends, just about to enter the
world.

  Intimates are predestined. Adams met in England a thousand
people, great and small; jostled against every one, from royal
princes to gin-shop loafers; attended endless official functions
and private parties; visited every part of the United Kingdom and
was not quite a stranger at the Legations in Paris and Rome; he
knew the societies of certain country houses, and acquired habits
of Sunday-afternoon calls; but all this gave him nothing to do,
and was life wasted. For him nothing whatever could be gained by
escorting American ladies to drawing-rooms or American gentlemen
to levees at St. James's Palace, or bowing solemnly to people
with great titles, at Court balls, or even by awkwardly jostling
royalty at garden-parties; all this was done for the Government,
and neither President Lincoln nor Secretary Seward would ever
know enough of their business to thank him for doing what they
did not know how to get properly done by their own servants; but
for Henry Adams -- not private secretary -- all the time taken up
by such duties was wasted. On the other hand, his few personal
intimacies concerned him alone, and the chance that made him
almost a Yorkshireman was one that must have started under the
Heptarchy.

  More than any other county in England, Yorkshire retained a
sort of social independence of London. Scotland itself was hardly
more distinct. The Yorkshire type had always been the strongest
of the British strains; the Norwegian and the Dane were a
different race from the Saxon. Even Lancashire had not the mass
and the cultivation of the West Riding. London could never quite
absorb Yorkshire, which, in its turn had no great love for London
and freely showed it. To a certain degree, evident enough to
Yorkshiremen, Yorkshire was not English -- or was all England, as
they might choose to express it. This must have been the reason
why young Adams was drawn there rather than elsewhere. Monckton
Milnes alone took the trouble to draw him, and possibly Milnes
was the only man in England with whom Henry Adams, at that
moment, had a chance of calling out such an un-English effort.
Neither Oxford nor Cambridge nor any region south of the Humber
contained a considerable house where a young American would have
been sought as a friend. Eccentricity alone did not account for
it. Monckton Milnes was a singular type, but his distant cousin,
James Milnes Gaskell, was another, quite as marked, in an
opposite sense. Milnes never seemed willing to rest; Milnes
Gaskell never seemed willing to move. In his youth one of a very
famous group -- Arthur Hallam, Tennyson, Manning, Gladstone,
Francis Doyle -- and regarded as one of the most promising; an
adorer of George Canning; in Parliament since coming of age;
married into the powerful connection of the Wynns of Wynstay;
rich according to Yorkshire standards; intimate with his
political leaders; he was one of the numerous Englishmen who
refuse office rather than make the effort of carrying it, and
want power only to make it a source of indolence. He was a
voracious reader and an admirable critic; he had forty years of
parliamentary tradition on his memory; he liked to talk and to
listen; he liked his dinner and, in spite of George Canning, his
dry champagne; he liked wit and anecdote; but he belonged to the
generation of 1830, a generation which could not survive the
telegraph and railway, and which even Yorkshire could hardly
produce again. To an American he was a character even more
unusual and more fascinating than his distant cousin Lord
Houghton.

  Mr. Milnes Gaskell was kind to the young American whom his son
brought to the house, and Mrs. Milnes Gaskell was kinder, for she
thought the American perhaps a less dangerous friend than some
Englishman might be, for her son, and she was probably right. The
American had the sense to see that she was herself one of the
most intelligent and sympathetic women in England; her sister,
Miss Charlotte Wynn, was another; and both were of an age and a
position in society that made their friendship a complirnent as
well as a pleasure. Their consent and approval settled the
matter. In England, the family is a serious fact; once admitted
to it, one is there for life. London might utterly vanish from
one's horizon, but as long as life lasted, Yorkshire lived for
its friends.

  In the year 1857, Mr. James Milnes Gaskell, who had sat for
thirty years in Parliament as one of the Members for the borough
of Wenlock in Shropshire, bought Wenlock Abbey and the estate
that included the old monastic buildings. This new, or old,
plaything amused Mrs. Milnes Gaskell. The Prior's house, a
charming specimen of fifteenth-century architecture, had been
long left to decay as a farmhouse. She put it in order, and went
there to spend a part of the autumn of 1864. Young Adams was one
of her first guests, and drove about Wenlock Edge and the Wrekin
with her, learning the loveliness of this exquisite country, and
its stores of curious antiquity. It was a new and charming
existence; an experience greatly to be envied -- ideal repose and
rural Shakespearian peace -- but a few years of it were likely to
complete his education, and fit him to act a fairly useful part
in life as an Englishman, an ecclesiastic, and a contemporary of
Chaucer.

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CHAPTER XIV

DILETTANTISM (1865-1866)

  THE campaign of 1864 and the reelection of Mr. Lincoln in
November set the American Minister on so firm a footing that he
could safely regard his own anxieties as over, and the anxieties
of Earl Russell and the Emperor Napoleon as begun. With a few
months more his own term of four years would come to an end, and
even though the questions still under discussion with England
should somewhat prolong his stay, he might look forward with some
confidence to his return home in 1865. His son no longer fretted.
The time for going into the army had passed. If he were to be
useful at all, it must be as a son, and as a son he was treated
with the widest indulgence and trust. He knew that he was doing
himself no good by staying in London, but thus far in life he had
done himself no good anywhere, and reached his twenty-seventh
birthday without having advanced a step, that he could see,
beyond his twenty-first. For the most part, his friends were
worse off than he. The war was about to end and they were to be
set adrift in a world they would find altogether strange.

  At this point, as though to cut the last thread of relation,
six months were suddenly dropped out of his life in England. The
London climate had told on some of the family; the physicians
prescribed a winter in Italy. Of course the private secretary was
detached as their escort, since this was one of his professional
functions; and he passed six months, gaining an education as
Italian courier, while the Civil War came to its end. As far as
other education went, he got none, but he was amused. Travelling
in all possible luxury, at some one else's expense, with
diplomatic privileges and position, was a form of travel hitherto
untried. The Cornice in vettura was delightful; Sorrento in
winter offered hills to climb and grottoes to explore, and Naples
near by to visit; Rome at Easter was an experience necessary for
the education of every properly trained private secretary; the
journey north by vettura through Perugia and Sienna was a dream;
the Splugen Pass, if not equal to the Stelvio, was worth seeing;
Paris had always something to show. The chances of accidental
education were not so great as they had been, since one's field
of experience had grown large; but perhaps a season at Baden
Baden in these later days of its brilliancy offered some chances
of instruction, if it were only the sight of fashionable Europe
and America on the race-course watching the Duke of Hamilton, in
the middle, improving his social advantages by the conversation
of Cora Pearl.

  The assassination of President Lincoln fell on the party while
they were at Rome, where it seemed singularly fitting to that
nursery of murderers and murdered, as though America were also
getting educated. Again one went to meditate on the steps of the
Santa Maria in Ara Coeli, but the lesson seemed as shallow as
before. Nothing happened. The travellers changed no plan or
movement. The Minister did not recall them to London. The season
was over before they returned; and when the private secretary sat
down again at his desk in Portland Place before a mass of copy in
arrears, he saw before him a world so changed as to be beyond
connection with the past. His identity, if one could call a
bundle of disconnected memories an identity, seemed to remain;
but his life was once more broken into separate pieces; he was a
spider and had to spin a new web in some new place with a new
attachment.

  All his American friends and contemporaries who were still
alive looked singularly commonplace without uniforms, and
hastened to get married and retire into back streets and suburbs
until they could find employment. Minister Adams, too, was going
home "next fall," and when the fall came, he was going home "next
spring," and when the spring came, President Andrew Johnson was
at loggerheads with the Senate, and found it best to keep things
unchanged. After the usual manner of public servants who had
acquired the habit of office and lost the faculty of will, the
members of the Legation in London continued the daily routine of
English society, which, after becoming a habit, threatened to
become a vice. Had Henry Adams shared a single taste with the
young Englishmen of his time, he would have been lost; but the
custom of pounding up and down Rotten Row every day, on a hack,
was not a taste, and yet was all the sport he shared. Evidently
he must set to work; he must get a new education he must begin a
career of his own.

  Nothing was easier to say, but even his father admitted two
careers to be closed. For the law, diplomacy had unfitted him;
for diplomacy he already knew too much. Any one who had held,
during the four most difficult years of American diplomacy, a
position at the centre of action, with his hands actually
touching the lever of power, could not beg a post of Secretary at
Vienna or Madrid in order to bore himself doing nothing until the
next President should do him the honor to turn him out. For once
all his advisers agreed that diplomacy was not possible.

  In any ordinary system he would have been called back to serve
in the State Department, but, between the President and the
Senate, service of any sort became a delusion. The choice of
career was more difficult than the education which had proved
impracticable. Adams saw no road; in fact there was none. All his
friends were trying one path or another, but none went a way that
he could have taken. John Hay passed through London in order to
bury himself in second-rate Legations for years, before he
drifted home again to join Whitelaw Reid and George Smalley on
the Tribune. Frank Barlow and Frank Bartlett carried
Major-Generals' commissions into small law business. Miles stayed
in the army. Henry Higginson, after a desperate struggle, was
forced into State Street; Charles Adams wandered about, with
brevet-brigadier rank, trying to find employment. Scores of
others tried experiments more or less unsuccessful. Henry Adams
could see easy ways of making a hundred blunders; he could see no
likely way of making a legitimate success. Such as it was, his
so-called education was wanted nowhere.

  One profession alone seemed possible -- the press. In 1860 he
would have said that he was born to be an editor, like at least a
thousand other young graduates from American colleges who entered
the world every year enjoying the same conviction; but in 1866
the situation was altered; the possession of money had become
doubly needful for success, and double energy was essential to
get money. America had more than doubled her scale. Yet the press
was still the last resource of the educated poor who could not be
artists and would not be tutors. Any man who was fit for nothing
else could write an editorial or a criticism. The enormous mass
of misinformation accumulated in ten years of nomad life could
always be worked off on a helpless public, in diluted doses, if
one could but secure a table in the corner of a newspaper office.
The press was an inferior pulpit; an anonymous schoolmaster; a
cheap boarding-school but it was still the nearest approach to a
career for the literary survivor of a wrecked education. For the
press, then, Henry Adams decided to fit himself, and since he
could not go home to get practical training, he set to work to do
what he could in London.

  He knew, as well as any reporter on the New York Herald, that
this was not an American way of beginning, and he knew a certain
number of other drawbacks which the reporter could not see so
clearly. Do what he might, he drew breath only in the atmosphere
of English methods and thoughts; he could breathe none other. His
mother -- who should have been a competent judge, since her
success and popularity in England exceeded that of her husband --
averred that every woman who lived a certain time in England came
to look and dress like an Englishwoman, no matter how she
struggled. Henry Adams felt himself catching an English tone of
mind and processes of thought, though at heart more hostile to
them than ever. As though to make him more helpless and wholly
distort his life, England grew more and more agreeable and
amusing. Minister Adams became, in 1866, almost a historical
monument in London; he held a position altogether his own. His
old opponents disappeared. Lord Palmerston died in October, 1865;
Lord Russell tottered on six months longer, but then vanished
from power; and in July, 1866, the conservatives came into
office. Traditionally the Tories were easier to deal with than
the Whigs, and Minister Adams had no reason to regret the change.
His personal relations were excellent and his personal weight
increased year by year. On that score the private secretary had
no cares, and not much copy. His own position was modest, but it
was enough; the life he led was agreeable; his friends were all
he wanted, and, except that he was at the mercy of politics, he
felt much at ease. Of his daily life he had only to reckon so
many breakfasts; so many dinners; so many receptions, balls,
theatres, and country-parties; so many cards to be left; so many
Americans to be escorted -- the usual routine of every young
American in a Legation; all counting for nothing in sum, because,
even if it had been his official duty -- which it was not -- it
was mere routine, a single, continuous, unbroken act, which led
to nothing and nowhere except Portland Place and the grave.

  The path that led somewhere was the English habit of mind which
deepened its ruts every day. The English mind was like the London
drawing-room, a comfortable and easy spot, filled with bits and
fragments of incoherent furnitures, which were never meant to go
together, and could be arranged in any relation without making a
whole, except by the square room. Philosophy might dispute about
innate ideas till the stars died out in the sky, but about innate
tastes no one, except perhaps a collie dog, has the right to
doubt; least of all, the Englishman, for his tastes are his
being; he drifts after them as unconsciously as a honey-bee
drifts after his flowers, and, in England, every one must drift
with him. Most young Englishmen drifted to the race-course or the
moors or the hunting-field; a few towards books; one or two
followed some form of science; and a number took to what, for
want of a better name, they called Art. Young Adams inherited a
certain taste for the same pursuit from his father who insisted
that he had it not, because he could not see what his son thought
he saw in Turner. The Minister, on the other hand, carried a sort
of aesthetic rag-bag of his own, which he regarded as amusement,
and never called art. So he would wander off on a Sunday to
attend service successively in all the city churches built by Sir
Christopher Wren; or he would disappear from the Legation day
after day to attend coin sales at Sotheby's, where his son
attended alternate sales of drawings, engravings, or
water-colors. Neither knew enough to talk much about the other's
tastes, but the only difference between them was a slight
difference of direction. The Minister's mind like his writings
showed a correctness of form and line that his son would have
been well pleased had he inherited.

  Of all supposed English tastes, that of art was the most
alluring and treacherous. Once drawn into it, one had small
chance of escape, for it had no centre or circumference, no
beginning, middle, or end, no origin, no object, and no
conceivable result as education. In London one met no corrective.
The only American who came by, capable of teaching, was William
Hunt, who stopped to paint the portrait of the Minister which now
completes the family series at Harvard College. Hunt talked
constantly, and was, or afterwards became, a famous teacher, but
Henry Adams did not know enough to learn. Perhaps, too, he had
inherited or acquired a stock of tastes, as young men must, which
he was slow to outgrow. Hunt had no time to sweep out the rubbish
of Adams's mind. The portrait finished, he went.

  As often as he could, Adams ran over to Paris, for sunshine,
and there always sought out Richardson in his attic in the Rue du
Bac, or wherever he lived, and they went off to dine at the
Palais Royal, and talk of whatever interested the students of the
Beaux Arts. Richardson, too, had much to say, but had not yet
seized his style. Adams caught very little of what lay in his
mind, and the less, because, to Adams, everything French was bad
except the restaurants, while the continuous life in England made
French art seem worst of all. This did not prove that English
art, in 1866, was good; far from it; but it helped to make
bric-a-brac of all art, after the manner of England.

  Not in the Legation, or in London, but in Yorkshire at Thornes,
Adams met the man that pushed him furthest in this English garden
of innate disorder called taste. The older daughter of the Milnes
Gaskells had married Francis Turner Palgrave. Few Americans will
ever ask whether any one has described the Palgraves, but the
family was one of the most describable in all England at that
day. Old Sir Francis, the father, had been much the greatest of
all the historians of early England, the only one who was
un-English; and the reason of his superiority lay in his name,
which was Cohen, and his mind which was Cohen also, or at least
not English. He changed his name to Palgrave in order to please
his wife. They had a band of remarkable sons: Francis Turner,
Gifford, Reginald, Inglis; all of whom made their mark. Gifford
was perhaps the most eccentric, but his "Travels" in Arabia were
famous, even among the famous travels of that generation. Francis
Turner -- or, as he was commonly called, Frank Palgrave -- unable
to work off his restlessness in travel like Gifford, and stifled
in the atmosphere of the Board of Education, became a critic. His
art criticisms helped to make the Saturday Review a terror to the
British artist. His literary taste, condensed into the "Golden
Treasury," helped Adams to more literary education than he ever
got from any taste of his own. Palgrave himself held rank as one
of the minor poets; his hymns had vogue. As an art-critic he was
too ferocious to be liked; even Holman Hunt found his temper
humorous; among many rivals, he may perhaps have had a right to
claim the much-disputed rank of being the most unpopular man in
London; but he liked to teach, and asked only for a docile pupil.
Adams was docile enough, for he knew nothing and liked to listen.
Indeed, he had to listen, whether he liked or not, for Palgrave's
voice was strident, and nothing could stop him. Literature,
painting, sculpture, architecture were open fields for his
attacks, which were always intelligent if not always kind, and
when these failed, he readily descended to meaner levels. John
Richard Green, who was Palgrave's precise opposite, and whose
Irish charm of touch and humor defended him from most assaults,
used to tell with delight of Palgrave's call on him just after he
had moved into his new Queen Anne house in Kensington Square:
"Palgrave called yesterday, and the first thing he said was,
'I've counted three anachronisms on your front doorstep.' "

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  Another savage critic, also a poet, was Thomas Woolner, a type
almost more emphatic than Palgrave in a society which resounded
with emphasis. Woolner's sculpture showed none of the rough
assertion that Woolner himself showed, when he was not making
supernatural effort to be courteous, but his busts were
remarkable, and his work altogether was, in Palgrave's clamorous
opinion, the best of his day. He took the matter of British art
-- or want of art -- seriously, almost ferociously, as a personal
grievance and torture; at times he was rather terrifying in the
anarchistic wrath of his denunciation. as Henry Adams felt no
responsibility for English art, and had no American art to offer
for sacrifice, he listened with enjoyment to language much like
Carlyle's, and accepted it without a qualm. On the other hand, as
a third member of this critical group, he fell in with Stopford
Brooke whose tastes lay in the same direction, and whose
expression was modified by clerical propriety. Among these men,
one wandered off into paths of education much too devious and
slippery for an American foot to follow. He would have done
better to go on the race-track, as far as concerned a career.

  Fortunately for him he knew too little ever to be an
art-critic, still less an artist. For some things ignorance is
good, and art is one of them. He knew he knew nothing, and had
not the trained eye or the keen instinct that trusted itself; but
he was curious, as he went on, to find out how much others knew.
He took Palgrave's word as final about a drawing of Rembrandt or
Michael Angelo, and he trusted Woolner implicitly about a Turner;
but when he quoted their authority to any dealer, the dealer
pooh-poohed it, and declared that it had no weight in the trade.
If he went to a sale of drawings or paintings, at Sotheby's or
Christie's, an hour afterwards, he saw these same dealers
watching Palgrave or Woolner for a point, and bidding over them.
He rarely found two dealers agree in judgment. He once bought a
water-color from the artist himself out of his studio, and had it
doubted an hour afterwards by the dealer to whose place he took
it for framing He was reduced to admit that he could not prove
its authenticity; internal evidence was against it.

  One morning in early July, 1867, Palgrave stopped at the
Legation in Portland Place on his way downtown, and offered to
take Adams to Sotheby's, where a small collection of old drawings
was on show. The collection was rather a curious one, said to be
that of Sir Anthony Westcomb, from Liverpool, with an undisturbed
record of a century, but with nothing to attract notice. Probably
none but collectors or experts examined the portfolios. Some
dozens of these were always on hand, following every sale, and
especially on the lookout for old drawings, which became rarer
every year. Turning rapidly over the numbers, Palgrave stopped at
one containing several small drawings, one marked as Rembrandt,
one as Rafael; and putting his finger on the Rafael, after
careful examination; "I should buy this," he said; "it looks to
me like one of those things that sell for five shillings one day,
and fifty pounds the next." Adams marked it for a bid, and the
next morning came down to the auction. The numbers sold slowly,
and at noon he thought he might safely go to lunch. When he came
back, half an hour afterwards, the drawing was gone. Much annoyed
at his own stupidity, since Palgrave had expressly said he wanted
the drawing for himself if he had not in a manner given it to
Adams, the culprit waited for the sale to close, and then asked
the clerk for the name of the buyer. It was Holloway, the
art-dealer, near Covent Garden, whom he slightly knew. Going at
once to the shop he waited till young Holloway came in, with his
purchases under his arm, and without attempt at preface, he said:
"You bought to-day, Mr. Holloway, a number that I wanted. Do you
mind letting me have it?" Holloway took out the parcel, looked
over the drawings, and said that he had bought the number for the
sake of the Rembrandt, which he thought possibly genuine; taking
that out, Adams might have the rest for the price he paid for the
lot -- twelve shillings.

  Thus, down to that moment, every expert in London had probably
seen these drawings. Two of them -- only two -- had thought them
worth buying at any price, and of these two, Palgrave chose the
Rafael, Holloway the one marked as Rembrandt. Adams, the
purchaser of the Rafael, knew nothing whatever on the subject,
but thought he might credit himself with education to the value
of twelve shillings, and call the drawing nothing. Such items of
education commonly came higher.

  He took the drawing to Palgrave. It was closely pasted to an
old, rather thin, cardboard mount, and, on holding it up to the
window, one could see lines on the reverse. "Take it down to Reed
at the British Museum," said Palgrave; "he is Curator of the
drawings, and, if you ask him, he will have it taken off the
mount." Adams amused himself for a day or two by searching
Rafael's works for the figure, which he found at last in the
Parnasso, the figure of Horace, of which, as it happened --
though Adams did not know it -- the British Museum owned a much
finer drawing. At last he took the dirty, little, unfinished
red-chalk sketch to Reed whom he found in the Curator's room,
with some of the finest Rafael drawings in existence, hanging on
the walls. "Yes!" said Mr Reed; "I noticed this at the sale; but
it's not Rafael!" Adams, feeling himself incompetent to discuss
this subject, reported the result to Palgrave, who said that Reed
knew nothing about it. Also this point lay beyond Adams's
competence; but he noted that Reed was in the employ of the
British Museum as Curator of the best -- or nearly the best --
collection in the world, especially of Rafaels, and that he
bought for the Museum. As expert he had rejected both the Rafael
and the Rembrandt at first-sight, and after his attention was
recalled to the Rafael for a further opinion he rejected it
again.

  A week later, Adams returned for the drawing, which Mr. Reed
took out of his drawer and gave him, saying with what seemed a
little doubt or hesitation: "I should tell you that the paper
shows a water-mark, which I kind the same as that of paper used
by Marc Antonio." A little taken back by this method of studying
art, a method which even a poor and ignorant American might use
as well as Rafael himself, Adams asked stupidly: "Then you think
it genuine?" "Possibly!" replied Reed; "but much overdrawn."

  Here was expert opinion after a second revise, with help of
water-marks! In Adams's opinion it was alone worth another twelve
shillings as education; but this was not all. Reed continued:
"The lines on the back seem to be writing, which I cannot read,
but if you will take it down to the manuscript-room, they will
read it for you."

  Adams took the sheet down to the keeper of the manuscripts and
begged him to read the lines. The keeper, after a few minutes'
study, very obligingly said he could not: "It is scratched with
an artist's crayon, very rapidly, with many unusual abbreviations
and old forms. If any one in Europe can read it, it is the old
man at the table yonder, Libri! Take it to him!"

  This expert broke down on the alphabet! He could not even judge
a manuscript; but Adams had no right to complain, for he had
nothing to pay, not even twelve shillings, though he thought
these experts worth more, at least for his education. Accordingly
he carried his paper to Libri, a total stranger to him, and asked
the old man, as deferentially as possible, to tell him whether
the lines had any meaning. Had Adams not been an ignorant person
he would have known all about Libri, but his ignorance was vast,
and perhaps was for the best. Libri looked at the paper, and then
looked again, and at last bade him sit down and wait. Half an
hour passed before he called Adams back and showed him these
lines:--
  "Or questo credo ben che una elleria
   Te offende tanto che te offese il core.
   Perche sei grande nol sei in tua volia;
   Tu vedi e gia non credi il tuo valore;
   Passate gia son tutte gelosie;
   Tu sei di sasso; non hai piu dolore."

  As far as Adams could afterwards recall it, this was Libri's
reading, but he added that the abbreviations were many and
unusual; that the writing was very ancient; and that the word he
read as "elleria" in the first line was not Italian at all.

  By this time, one had got too far beyond one's depth to ask
questions. If Libri could not read Italian, very clearly Adams
had better not offer to help him. He took the drawing, thanked
everybody, and having exhausted the experts of the British
Museum, took a cab to Woolner's studio, where he showed the
figure and repeated Reed's opinion. Woolner snorted: "Reed's a
fool!" he said; "he knows nothing about it; there maybe a rotten
line or two, but the drawing's all right."

  For forty years Adams kept this drawing on his mantelpiece,
partly for its own interest, but largely for curiosity to see
whether any critic or artist would ever stop to look at it. None
ever did, unless he knew the story. Adams himself never wanted to
know more about it. He refused to seek further light. He never
cared to learn whether the drawing was Rafael's, or whether the
verse were Rafael's, or whether even the water-mark was Rafael's.
The experts -- some scores of them including the British Museum,
-- had affirmed that the drawing was worth a certain moiety of
twelve shillings. On that point, also, Adams could offer no
opinion, but he was clear that his education had profited by it
to that extent -- his amusement even more.

  Art was a superb field for education, but at every turn he met
the same old figure, like a battered and illegible signpost that
ought to direct him to the next station but never did. There was
no next station. All the art of a thousand -- or ten thousand --
years had brought England to stuff which Palgrave and Woolner
brayed in their mortars; derided, tore in tatters, growled at,
and howled at, and treated in terms beyond literary usage.
Whistler had not yet made his appearance in London, but the
others did quite as well. What result could a student reach from
it? Once, on returning to London, dining with Stopford Brooke,
some one asked Adams what impression the Royal Academy Exhibition
made on him. With a little hesitation, he suggested that it was
rather a chaos, which he meant for civility; but Stopford Brooke
abruptly met it by asking whether chaos were not better than
death. Truly the question was worth discussion. For his own part,
Adams inclined to think that neither chaos nor death was an
object to him as a searcher of knowledge -- neither would have
vogue in America -- neither would help him to a career. Both of
them led him away from his objects, into an English dilettante
museum of scraps, with nothing but a wall-paper to unite them in
any relation of sequence. Possibly English taste was one degree
more fatal than English scholarship, but even this question was
open to argument. Adams went to the sales and bought what he was
told to buy; now a classical drawing by Rafael or Rubens; now a
water-color by Girtin or Cotman, if possible unfinished because
it was more likely to be a sketch from nature; and he bought them
not because they went together -- on the contrary, they made
rather awkward spots on the wall as they did on the mind -- but
because he could afford to buy those, and not others. Ten pounds
did not go far to buy a Michael Angelo, but was a great deal of
money to a private secretary. The effect was spotty, fragmentary,
feeble; and the more so because the British mind was constructed
in that way -- boasted of it, and held it to be true philosophy
as well as sound method.

  What was worse, no one had a right to denounce the English as
wrong. Artistically their mind was scrappy, and every one knew
it, but perhaps thought itself, history, and nature, were
scrappy, and ought to be studied so. Turning from British art to
British literature, one met the same dangers. The historical
school was a playground of traps and pitfalls. Fatally one fell
into the sink of history -- antiquarianism. For one who nourished
a natural weakness for what was called history, the whole of
British literature in the nineteenth century was antiquarianism
or anecdotage, for no one except Buckle had tried to link it with
ideas, and commonly Buckle was regarded as having failed.
Macaulay was the English historian. Adams had the greatest
admiration for Macaulay, but he felt that any one who should even
distantly imitate Macaulay would perish in self-contempt. One
might as well imitate Shakespeare. Yet evidently something was
wrong here, for the poet and the historian ought to have
different methods, and Macaulay's method ought to be imitable if
it were sound; yet the method was more doubtful than the style.
He was a dramatist; a painter; a poet, like Carlyle. This was the
English mind, method, genius, or whatever one might call it; but
one never could quite admit that the method which ended in Froude
and Kinglake could be sound for America where passion and poetry
were eccentricities. Both Froude and Kinglake, when one met them
at dinner, were very agreeable, very intelligent; and perhaps the
English method was right, and art fragmentary by essence.
History, like everything else, might be a field of scraps, like
the refuse about a Staffordshire iron-furnace. One felt a little
natural reluctance to decline and fall like Silas Wegg on the
golden dust-heap of British refuse; but if one must, one could at
least expect a degree from Oxford and the respect of the
Athenaeum Club.

  While drifting, after the war ended, many old American friends
came abroad for a holiday, and among the rest, Dr. Palfrey, busy
with his "History of New England." Of all the relics of
childhood, Dr. Palfrey was the most sympathetic, and perhaps the
more so because he, too, had wandered into the pleasant meadows
of antiquarianism, and had forgotten the world in his pursuit of
the New England Puritan. Although America seemed becoming more
and more indifferent to the Puritan except as a slightly rococo
ornament, he was only the more amusing as a study for the
Monkbarns of Boston Bay, and Dr. Palfrey took him seriously, as
his clerical education required. His work was rather an Apologia
in the Greek sense; a justification of the ways of God to Man,
or, what was much the same thing, of Puritans to other men; and
the task of justification was onerous enough to require the
occasional relief of a contrast or scapegoat. When Dr. Palfrey
happened on the picturesque but unpuritanic figure of Captain
John Smith, he felt no call to beautify Smith's picture or to
defend his moral character; he became impartial and penetrating.
The famous story of Pocahontas roused his latent New England
scepticism. He suggested to Adams, who wanted to make a position
for himself, that an article in the North American Review on
Captain John Smith's relations with Pocahontas would attract as
much attention, and probably break as much glass, as any other
stone that could be thrown by a beginner. Adams could suggest
nothing better. The task seemed likely to be amusing. So he
planted himself in the British Museum and patiently worked over
all the material he could find, until, at last, after three or
four months of labor, he got it in shape and sent it to Charles
Norton, who was then editing the North American.  Mr. Norton very
civilly and even kindly accepted it. The article appeared in
January, 1867.

  Surely, here was something to ponder over, as a step in
education; something that tended to stagger a sceptic! In spite
of personal wishes, intentions, and prejudices; in spite of civil
wars and diplomatic education; in spite of determination to be
actual, daily, and practical, Henry Adams found himself, at
twenty-eight, still in English society, dragged on one side into
English dilettantism, which of all dilettantism he held the most
futile; and, on the other, into American antiquarianism, which of
all antiquarianism he held the most foolish. This was the result
of five years in London. Even then he knew it to be a false
start. He had wholly lost his way. If he were ever to amount to
anything, he must begin a new education, in a new place, with a
new purpose.

[combinator]

CHAPTER XV

DARWINISM (1867-1868)

  POLITICS, diplomacy, law, art, and history had opened no outlet
for future energy or effort, but a man must do something, even in
Portland Place, when winter is dark and winter evenings are
exceedingly long. At that moment Darwin was convulsing society.
The geological champion of Darwin was Sir Charles Lyell, and the
Lyells were intimate at the Legation. Sir Charles constantly said
of Darwin, what Palgrave said of Tennyson, that the first time he
came to town, Adams should be asked to meet him, but neither of
them ever came to town, or ever cared to meet a young American,
and one could not go to them because they were known to dislike
intrusion. The only Americans who were not allowed to intrude
were the half-dozen in the Legation. Adams was content to read
Darwin, especially his "Origin of Species" and his "Voyage of the
Beagle." He was a Darwinist before the letter; a predestined
follower of the tide; but he was hardly trained to follow
Darwin's evidences. Fragmentary the British mind might be, but in
those days it was doing a great deal of work in a very un-English
way, building up so many and such vast theories on such narrow
foundations as to shock the conservative, and delight the
frivolous. The atomic theory; the correlation and conservation of
energy; the mechanical theory of the universe; the kinetic theory
of gases, and Darwin's Law of Natural Selection, were examples of
what a young man had to take on trust. Neither he nor any one
else knew enough to verify them; in his ignorance of mathematics,
he was particularly helpless; but this never stood in his way.
The ideas were new and seemed to lead somewhere -- to some great
generalization which would finish one's clamor to be educated.
That a beginner should understand them all, or believe them all,
no one could expect, still less exact. Henry Adams was Darwinist
because it was easier than not, for his ignorance exceeded
belief, and one must know something in order to contradict even
such triflers as Tyndall and Huxley.

  By rights, he should have been also a Marxist but some narrow
trait of the New England nature seemed to blight socialism, and
he tried in vain to make himself a convert. He did the next best
thing; he became a Comteist, within the limits of evolution. He
was ready to become anything but quiet. As though the world had
not been enough upset in his time, he was eager to see it upset
more. He had his wish, but he lost his hold on the results by
trying to understand them.

  He never tried to understand Darwin; but he still fancied he
might get the best part of Darwinism from the easier study of
geology; a science which suited idle minds as well as though it
were history. Every curate in England dabbled in geology and
hunted for vestiges of Creation. Darwin hunted only for vestiges
of Natural Selection, and Adams followed him, although he cared
nothing about Selection, unless perhaps for the indirect
amusement of upsetting curates. He felt, like nine men in ten, an
instinctive belief in Evolution, but he felt no more concern in
Natural than in unnatural Selection, though he seized with
greediness the new volume on the "Antiquity of Man" which Sir
Charles Lyell published in 1863 in order to support Darwin by
wrecking the Garden of Eden. Sir Charles next brought out, in
1866, a new edition of his "Principles," then the highest
text-book of geology; but here the Darwinian doctrine grew in
stature. Natural Selection led back to Natural Evolution, and at
last to Natural Uniformity. This was a vast stride. Unbroken
Evolution under uniform conditions pleased every one -- except
curates and bishops; it was the very best substitute for
religion; a safe, conservative practical, thoroughly Common-Law
deity. Such a working system for the universe suited a young man
who had just helped to waste five or ten thousand million dollars
and a million lives, more or less, to enforce unity and
uniformity on people who objected to it; the idea was only too
seductive in its perfection; it had the charm of art. Unity and
Uniformity were the whole motive of philosophy, and if Darwin,

like a true Englishman, preferred to back into it -- to reach God
a posteriori -- rather than start from it, like Spinoza, the
difference of method taught only the moral that the best way of
reaching unity was to unite. Any road was good that arrived.
Life depended on it. One had been, from the first, dragged hither
and thither like a French poodle on a string, following always
the strongest pull, between one form of unity or centralization
and another. The proof that one had acted wisely because of
obeying the primordial habit of nature flattered one's
self-esteem. Steady, uniform, unbroken evolution from lower to
higher seemed easy. So, one day when Sir Charles came to the
Legation to inquire about getting his "Principles" properly
noticed in America, young Adams found nothing simpler than to
suggest that he could do it himself if Sir Charles would tell him
what to say. Youth risks such encounters with the universe before
one succumbs to it, yet even he was surprised at Sir Charles's
ready assent, and still more so at finding himself, after half an
hour's conversation, sitting down to clear the minds of American
geologists about the principles of their profession. This was
getting on fast; Arthur Pendennis had never gone so far.

  The geologists were a hardy class, not likely to be much hurt
by Adams's learning, nor did he throw away much concern on their
account. He undertook the task chiefly to educate, not them, but
himself, and if Sir Isaac Newton had, like Sir Charles Lyell,
asked him to explain for Americans his last edition of the
"Principia," Adams would have jumped at the chance. Unfortunately
the mere reading such works for amusement is quite a different
matter from studying them for criticism. Ignorance must always
begin at the beginning. Adams must inevitably have begun by
asking Sir Isaac for an intelligible reason why the apple fell to
the ground. He did not know enough to be satisfied with the fact.
The Law of Gravitation was so-and-so, but what was Gravitation?
and he would have been thrown quite off his base if Sir Isaac had
answered that he did not know.

  At the very outset Adams struck on Sir Charles's Glacial Theory
or theories. He was ignorant enough to think that the glacial
epoch looked like a chasm between him and a uniformitarian world.
If the glacial period were uniformity, what was catastrophe? To
him the two or three labored guesses that Sir Charles suggested
or borrowed to explain glaciation were proof of nothing, and were
quite unsolid as support for so immense a superstructure as
geological uniformity. If one were at liberty to be as lax in
science as in theology, and to assume unity from the start, one
might better say so, as the Church did, and not invite attack by
appearing weak in evidence. Naturally a young man, altogether
ignorant, could not say this to Sir Charles Lyell or Sir Isaac
Newton; but he was forced to state Sir Charles's views, which he
thought weak as hypotheses and worthless as proofs. Sir Charles
himself seemed shy of them. Adams hinted his heresies in vain. At
last he resorted to what he thought the bold experiment of
inserting a sentence in the text, intended to provoke correction.
"The introduction [by Louis Agassiz] of this new geological agent
seemed at first sight inconsistent with Sir Charles's argument,
obliging him to allow that causes had in fact existed on the
earth capable of producing more violent geological changes than
would be possible in our own day." The hint produced no effect.
Sir Charles said not a word; he let the paragraph stand; and
Adams never knew whether the great Uniformitarian was strict or
lax in his uniformitarian creed; but he doubted.

  Objections fatal to one mind are futile to another, and as far
as concerned the article, the matter ended there, although the
glacial epoch remained a misty region in the young man's
Darwinism. Had it been the only one, he would not have fretted
about it; but uniformity often worked queerly and sometimes did
not work as Natural Selection at all. Finding himself at a loss
for some single figure to illustrate the Law of Natural
Selection, Adams asked Sir Charles for the simplest case of
uniformity on record. Much to his surprise Sir Charles told him
that certain forms, like Terebratula,  appeared to be identical
from the beginning to the end of geological time. Since this was
altogether too much uniformity and much too little selection,
Adams gave up the attempt to begin at the beginning, and tried
starting at the end -- himself. Taking for granted that the
vertebrates would serve his purpose, he asked Sir Charles to
introduce him to the first vertebrate. Infinitely to his
bewilderment, Sir Charles informed him that the first vertebrate
was a very respectable fish, among the earliest of all fossils,
which had lived, and whose bones were still reposing, under
Adams's own favorite Abbey on Wenlock Edge.

  By this time, in 1867 Adams had learned to know Shropshire
familiarly, and it was the part of his diplomatic education which
he loved best. Like Catherine Olney in "Northanger Abbey," he
yearned for nothing so keenly as to feel at home in a
thirteenth-century Abbey, unless it were to haunt a
fifteenth-century Prior's House, and both these joys were his at
Wenlock. With companions or without, he never tired of it.
Whether he rode about the Wrekin, or visited all the historical
haunts from Ludlow Castle and Stokesay to Boscobel and Uriconium;
or followed the Roman road or scratched in the Abbey ruins, all
was amusing and carried a flavor of its own like that of the
Roman Campagna; but perhaps he liked best to ramble over the Edge
on a summer afternoon and look across the Marches to the
mountains of Wales. The peculiar flavor of the scenery has
something to do with absence of evolution; it was better marked
in Egypt: it was felt wherever time-sequences became
interchangeable. One's instinct abhors time. As one lay on the
slope of the Edge, looking sleepily through the summer haze
towards Shrewsbury or Cader Idris or Caer Caradoc or Uriconium,
nothing suggested sequence. The Roman road was twin to the
railroad; Uriconium was well worth Shrewsbury; Wenlock and
Buildwas were far superior to Bridgnorth. The shepherds of
Caractacus or Offa, or the monks of Buildwas, had they approached
where he lay in the grass, would have taken him only for another
and tamer variety of Welsh thief. They would have seen little to
surprise them in the modern landscape unless it were the steam of
a distant railway. One might mix up the terms of time as one
liked, or stuff the present anywhere into the past, measuring
time by Falstaff's Shrewsbury clock, without violent sense of
wrong, as one could do it on the Pacific Ocean; but the triumph
of all was to look south along the Edge to the abode of one's
earliest ancestor and nearest relative, the ganoid fish, whose
name, according to Professor Huxley, was Pteraspis, a cousin of
the sturgeon, and whose kingdom, according to Sir Roderick
Murchison, was called Siluria. Life began and ended there. Behind
that horizon lay only the Cambrian, without vertebrates or any
other organism except a few shell-fish. On the further verge of
the Cambrian rose the crystalline rocks from which every trace of
organic existence had been erased.

  That here, on the Wenlock Edge of time, a young American,
seeking only frivolous amusement, should find a legitimate
parentage as modern as though just caught in the Severn below,
astonished him as much as though he had found Darwin himself. In
the scale of evolution, one vertebrate was as good as another.
For anything he, or any one else, knew, nine hundred and ninety
nine parts of evolution out of a thousand lay behind or below the
Pteraspis . To an American in search of a father, it mattered
nothing whether the father breathed through lungs, or walked on
fins, or on feet. Evolution of mind was altogether another matter
and belonged to another science, but whether one traced descent
from the shark or the wolf was immaterial even in morals. This
matter had been discussed for ages without scientific result. La
Fontaine and other fabulists maintained that the wolf, even in
morals, stood higher than man; and in view of the late civil war,
Adams had doubts of his own on the facts of moral evolution:--

  "Tout bien considere, je te soutiens en somme,
     Que scelerat pour scelerat,
   Il vaut mieux etre un loup qu'un homme."

[combinator]

  It might well be! At all events, it did not enter into the
problem of Pteraspis,  for it was quite certain that no complete
proof of Natural Selection had occurred back to the time of
Pteraspis,  and that before Pteraspis was eternal void. No trace
of any vertebrate had been found there; only starfish,
shell-fish, polyps, or trilobites whose kindly descendants he had
often bathed with, as a child on the shores of Quincy Bay.

  That Pteraspis and shark were his cousins, great-uncles, or
grandfathers, in no way troubled him, but that either or both of
them should be older than evolution itself seemed to him
perplexing; nor could he at all simplify the problem by taking
the sudden back-somersault into Quincy Bay in search of the
fascinating creature he had called a horseshoe, whose huge dome
of shell and sharp spur of tail had so alarmed him as a child. In
Siluria, he understood, Sir Roderick Murchison called the
horseshoe a Limulus , which helped nothing. Neither in the
Limulus  nor in the Terebratula , nor in the Cestracion Philippi
,any more than in the Pteraspis,  could one conceive an ancestor,
but, if one must, the choice mattered little. Cousinship had
limits but no one knew enough to fix them. When the vertebrate
vanished in Siluria, it disappeared instantly and forever.
Neither vertebra nor scale nor print reappeared, nor any trace of
ascent or descent to a lower type. The vertebrate began in the
Ludlow shale, as complete as Adams himself -- in some respects
more so -- at the top of the column of organic evolution: and
geology offered no sort of proof that he had ever been anything
else. Ponder over it as he might, Adams could see nothing in the
theory of Sir Charles but pure inference, precisely like the
inference of Paley, that, if one found a watch, one inferred a
maker. He could detect no more evolution in life since the
Pteraspis than he could detect it in architecture since the
Abbey. All he could prove was change. Coal-power alone asserted
evolution -- of power -- and only by violence could be forced to
assert selection of type.

  All this seemed trivial to the true Darwinian, and to Sir
Charles it was mere defect in the geological record. Sir Charles
labored only to heap up the evidences of evolution; to cumulate
them till the mass became irresistible. With that purpose, Adams
gladly studied and tried to help Sir Charles, but, behind the
lesson of the day, he was conscious that, in geology as in
theology, he could prove only Evolution that did not evolve;
Uniformity that was not uniform; and Selection that did not
select. To other Darwinians -- except Darwin -- Natural Selection
seemed a dogma to be put in the place of the Athanasian creed; it
was a form of religious hope; a promise of ultimate perfection.
Adams wished no better; he warmly sympathized in the object; but
when he came to ask himself what he truly thought, he felt that
he had no Faith; that whenever the next new hobby should be
brought out, he should surely drop off from Darwinism like a
monkey from a perch; that the idea of one Form, Law, Order, or
Sequence had no more value for him than the idea of none; that
what he valued most was Motion, and that what attracted his mind
was Change.

  Psychology was to him a new study, and a dark corner of
education. As he lay on Wenlock Edge, with the sheep nibbling the
grass close about him as they or their betters had nibbled the
grass -- or whatever there was to nibble -- in the Silurian
kingdom of Pteraspis, he seemed to have fallen on an evolution
far more wonderful than that of fishes. He did not like it; he
could not account for it; and he determined to stop it. Never
since the days of his Limulus ancestry had any of his ascendants
thought thus. Their modes of thought might be many, but their
thought was one. Out of his millions of millions of ancestors,
back to the Cambrian mollusks, every one had probably lived and
died in the illusion of Truths which did not amuse him, and which
had never changed. Henry Adams was the first in an infinite
series to discover and admit to himself that he really did not
care whether truth was, or was not, true. He did not even care
that it should be proved true, unless the process were new and
amusing. He was a Darwinian for fun.

  From the beginning of history, this attitude had been branded
as criminal -- worse than crime -- sacrilege! Society punished it
ferociously and justly, in self-defence. Mr. Adams, the father,
looked on it as moral weakness; it annoyed him; but it did not
annoy him nearly so much as it annoyed his son, who had no need
to learn from Hamlet the fatal effect of the pale cast of thought
on enterprises great or small. He had no notion of letting the
currents of his action be turned awry by this form of conscience.
To him, the current of his time was to be his current, lead where
it might. He put psychology under lock and key; he insisted on
maintaining his absolute standards; on aiming at ultimate Unity.
The mania for handling all the sides of every question, looking
into every window, and opening every door, was, as Bluebeard
judiciously pointed out to his wives, fatal to their practical
usefulness in society. One could not stop to chase doubts as
though they were rabbits. One had no time to paint and putty the
surface of Law, even though it were cracked and rotten. For the
young men whose lives were cast in the generation between 1867
and 1900, Law should be Evolution from lower to higher,
aggregation of the atom in the mass, concentration of
multiplicity in unity, compulsion of anarchy in order; and he
would force himself to follow wherever it led, though he should
sacrifice five thousand millions more in money, and a million
more lives.

  As the path ultimately led, it sacrificed much more than this;
but at the time, he thought the price he named a high one, and he
could not foresee that science and society would desert him in
paying it. He, at least, took his education as a Darwinian in
good faith. The Church was gone, and Duty was dim, but Will
should take its place, founded deeply in interest and law. This
was the result of five or six years in England; a result so
British as to be almost the equivalent of an Oxford degree.

  Quite serious about it, he set to work at once. While confusing
his ideas about geology to the apparent satisfaction of Sir
Charles who left him his field-compass in token of it, Adams
turned resolutely to business, and attacked the burning question
of specie payments. His principles assured him that the honest
way to resume payments was to restrict currency. He thought he
might win a name among financiers and statesmen at home by
showing how this task had been done by England, after the
classical suspension of 1797-1821. Setting himself to the study
of this perplexed period, he waded as well as he could through a
morass of volumes, pamphlets, and debates, until he learned to
his confusion that the Bank of England itself and all the best
British financial writers held that restriction was a fatal
mistake, and that the best treatment of a debased currency was to
let it alone, as the Bank had in fact done. Time and patience
were the remedies.

  The shock of this discovery to his financial principles was
serious; much more serious than the shock of the Terebratula and
Pteraspis  to his principles of geology. A mistake about
Evolution was not fatal; a mistake about specie payments would
destroy forever the last hope of employment in State Street. Six
months of patient labor would be thrown away if he did not
publish, and with it his whole scheme of making himself a
position as a practical man-of-business. If he did publish, how
could he tell virtuous bankers in State Street that moral and
absolute principles of abstract truth, such as theirs, had
nothing to do with the matter, and that they had better let it
alone? Geologists, naturally a humble and helpless class, might
not revenge impertinences offered to their science; but
capitalists never forgot or forgave.

  With labor and caution he made one long article on British
Finance in 1816, and another on the Bank Restriction of
1797-1821, and, doing both up in one package, he sent it to the
North American for choice. He knew that two heavy, technical,
financial studies thus thrown at an editor's head, would probably
return to crush the author; but the audacity of youth is more
sympathetic -- when successful -- than his ignorance. The editor
accepted both.

  When the post brought his letter, Adams looked at it as though
he were a debtor who had begged for an extension. He read it with
as much relief as the debtor, if it had brought him the loan. The
letter gave the new writer literary rank. Henceforward he had the
freedom of the press. These articles, following those on
Pocahontas and Lyell, enrolled him on the permanent staff of the
North American Review . Precisely what this rank was worth, no
one could say; but, for fifty years the North American Review
had been the stage coach which carried literary Bostonians to
such distinction as they had achieved. Few writers had ideas
which warranted thirty pages of development, but for such as
thought they had, the Review alone offered space. An article was
a small volume which required at least three months' work, and
was paid, at best, five dollars a page. Not many men even in
England or France could write a good thirty-page article, and
practically no one in America read them; but a few score of
people, mostly in search of items to steal, ran over the pages to
extract an idea or a fact, which was a sort of wild game -- a
bluefish or a teal -- worth anywhere from fifty cents to five
dollars. Newspaper writers had their eye on quarterly pickings.
The circulation of the Review  had never exceeded three or four
hundred copies, and the Review  had never paid its reasonable
expenses. Yet it stood at the head of American literary
periodicals; it was a source of suggestion to cheaper workers; it
reached far into societies that never knew its existence; it was
an organ worth playing on; and, in the fancy of Henry Adams, it
led, in some indistinct future, to playing on a New York daily
newspaper.

  With the editor's letter under his eyes, Adams asked himself
what better he could have done. On the whole, considering his
helplessness, he thought he had done as well as his neighbors. No
one could yet guess which of his contemporaries was most likely
to play a part in the great world. A shrewd prophet in Wall
Street might perhaps have set a mark on Pierpont Morgan, but
hardly on the Rockefellers or William C. Whitney or Whitelaw
Reid. No one would have picked out William McKinley or John Hay
or Mark Hanna for great statesmen. Boston was ignorant of the
careers in store for Alexander Agassiz and Henry Higginson.
Phillips Brooks was unknown; Henry James was unheard; Howells was
new; Richardson and LaFarge were struggling for a start. Out of
any score of names and reputations that should reach beyond the
century, the thirty-years-old who were starting in the year 1867
could show none that was so far in advance as to warrant odds in
its favor. The army men had for the most part fallen to the
ranks. Had Adams foreseen the future exactly as it came, he would
have been no wiser, and could have chosen no better path.

  Thus it turned out that the last year in England was the
pleasantest. He was already old in society, and belonged to the
Silurian horizon. The Prince of Wales had come. Mr. Disraeli,
Lord Stanley, and the future Lord Salisbury had thrown into the
background the memories of Palmerston and Russell. Europe was
moving rapidly, and the conduct of England during the American
Civil War was the last thing that London liked to recall. The
revolution since 1861 was nearly complete, and, for the first
time in history, the American felt himself almost as strong as an
Englishman. He had thirty years to wait before he should feel
himself stronger. Meanwhile even a private secretary could afford
to be happy. His old education was finished; his new one was not
begun; he still loitered a year, feeling himself near the end of
a very long, anxious, tempestuous, successful voyage, with
another to follow, and a summer sea between.

  He made what use he could of it. In February, 1868, he was back
in Rome with his friend Milnes Gaskell. For another season he
wandered on horseback over the campagna or on foot through the
Rome of the middle ages, and sat once more on the steps of Ara
Coeli, as had become with him almost a superstition, like the
waters of the fountain of Trevi. Rome was still tragic and solemn
as ever, with its mediaeval society, artistic, literary, and
clerical, taking itself as seriously as in the days of Byron and
Shelley. The long ten years of accidental education had changed
nothing for him there. He knew no more in 1868 than in 1858. He
had learned nothing whatever that made Rome more intelligible to
him, or made life easier to handle. The case was no better when
he got back to London and went through his last season. London
had become his vice. He loved his haunts, his houses, his habits,
and even his hansom cabs. He loved growling like an Englishman,
and going into society where he knew not a face, and cared not a
straw. He lived deep into the lives and loves and disappointments
of his friends. When at last he found himself back again at
Liverpool, his heart wrenched by the act of parting, he moved
mechanically, unstrung, but he had no more acquired education
than when he first trod the steps of the Adelphi Hotel in
November, 1858. He could see only one great change, and this was
wholly in years. Eaton Hall no longer impressed his imagination;
even the architecture of Chester roused but a sleepy interest; he
felt no sensation whatever in the atmosphere of the British
peerage, but mainly an habitual dislike to most of the people who
frequented their country houses; he had become English to the
point of sharing their petty social divisions, their dislikes and
prejudices against each other; he took England no longer with the
awe of American youth, but with the habit of an old and rather
worn suit of clothes. As far as he knew, this was all that
Englishmen meant by social education, but in any case it was all
the education he had gained from seven years in London.

[combinator]

CHAPTER XVI

THE PRESS (1868)

  AT ten o'clock of a July night, in heat that made the tropical
rain-shower simmer, the Adams family and the Motley family
clambered down the side of their Cunard steamer into the
government tugboat, which set them ashore in black darkness at
the end of some North River pier. Had they been Tyrian traders of
the year B.C. 1000 landing from a galley fresh from Gibraltar,
they could hardly have been stranger on the shore of a world, so
changed from what it had been ten years before. The historian of
the Dutch, no longer historian but diplomatist, started up an
unknown street, in company with the private secretary who had
become private citizen, in search of carriages to convey the two
parties to the Brevoort House. The pursuit was arduous but
successful. Towards midnight they found shelter once more in
their native land.

  How much its character had changed or was changing, they could
not wholly know, and they could but partly feel. For that matter,
the land itself knew no more than they. Society in America was
always trying, almost as blindly as an earthworm, to realize and
understand itself; to catch up with its own head, and to twist
about in search of its tail. Society offered the profile of a
long, straggling caravan, stretching loosely towards the
prairies, its few score of leaders far in advance and its
millions of immigrants, negroes, and Indians far in the rear,
somewhere in archaic time. It enjoyed the vast advantage over
Europe that all seemed, for the moment, to move in one direction,
while Europe wasted most of its energy in trying several
contradictory movements at once; but whenever Europe or Asia
should be polarized or oriented towards the same point, America
might easily lose her lead. Meanwhile each newcomer needed to
slip into a place as near the head of the caravan as possible,
and needed most to know where the leaders could be found.
One could divine pretty nearly where the force lay, since the
last ten years had given to the great mechanical energies --
coal, iron, steam -- a distinct superiority in power over the old
industrial elements -- agriculture, handwork, and learning; but
the result of this revolution on a survivor from the fifties
resembled the action of the earthworm; he twisted about, in vain,
to recover his starting-point; he could no longer see his own
trail; he had become an estray; a flotsam or jetsam of wreckage;
a belated reveller, or a scholar-gipsy like Matthew Arnold's. His
world was dead. Not a Polish Jew fresh from Warsaw or Cracow --
not a furtive Yacoob or Ysaac still reeking of the Ghetto,
snarling a weird Yiddish to the officers of the customs -- but
had a keener instinct, an intenser energy, and a freer hand than
he -- American of Americans, with Heaven knew how many Puritans
and Patriots behind him, and an education that had cost a civil
war. He made no complaint and found no fault with his time; he
was no worse off than the Indians or the buffalo who had been
ejected from their heritage by his own people; but he vehemently
insisted that he was not himself at fault. The defeat was not due
to him, nor yet to any superiority of his rivals. He had been
unfairly forced out of the track, and must get back into it as
best he could.

  One comfort he could enjoy to the full. Little as he might be
fitted for the work that was before him, he had only to look at
his father and Motley to see figures less fitted for it than he.
All were equally survivals from the forties -- bric-a-brac from
the time of Louis Philippe; stylists; doctrinaires; ornaments
that had been more or less suited to the colonial architecture,
but which never had much value in Desbrosses Street or Fifth
Avenue. They could scarcely have earned five dollars a day in any
modern industry. The men who commanded high pay were as a rule
not ornamental. Even Commodore Vanderbilt and Jay Gould lacked
social charm. Doubtless the country needed ornament -- needed it
very badly indeed -- but it needed energy still more, and capital
most of all, for its supply was ridiculously out of proportion to
its wants. On the new scale of power, merely to make the
continent habitable for civilized people would require an
immediate outlay that would have bankrupted the world. As yet, no
portion of the world except a few narrow stretches of western
Europe had ever been tolerably provided with the essentials of
comfort and convenience; to fit out an entire continent with
roads and the decencies of life would exhaust the credit of the
entire planet. Such an estimate seemed outrageous to a Texan
member of Congress who loved the simplicity of nature's noblemen;
but the mere suggestion that a sun existed above him would
outrage the self-respect of a deep-sea fish that carried a
lantern on the end of its nose. From the moment that railways
were introduced, life took on extravagance.

  Thus the belated reveller who landed in the dark at the
Desbrosses Street ferry, found his energies exhausted in the
effort to see his own length. The new Americans, of whom he was
to be one, must, whether they were fit or unfit, create a world
of their own, a science, a society, a philosophy, a universe,
where they had not yet created a road or even learned to dig
their own iron. They had no time for thought; they saw, and could
see, nothing beyond their day's work; their attitude to the
universe outside them was that of the deep-sea fish. Above all,
they naturally and intensely disliked to be told what to do, and
how to do it, by men who took their ideas and their methods from
the abstract theories of history, philosophy, or theology. They
knew enough to know that their world was one of energies quite
new.

  All this, the newcomer understood and accepted, since he could
not help himself and saw that the American could help himself as
little as the newcomer; but the fact remained that the more he
knew, the less he was educated. Society knew as much as this, and
seemed rather inclined to boast of it, at least on the stump; but
the leaders of industry betrayed no sentiment, popular or other.
They used, without qualm, whatever instruments they found at
hand. They had been obliged, in 1861, to turn aside and waste
immense energy in settling what had been settled a thousand years
before, and should never have been revived. At prodigious
expense, by sheer force, they broke resistance down, leaving
everything but the mere fact of power untouched, since nothing
else had a solution. Race and thought were beyond reach. Having
cleared its path so far, society went back to its work, and threw
itself on that which stood first -- its roads. The field was
vast; altogether beyond its power to control offhand; and society
dropped every thought of dealing with anything more than the
single fraction called a railway system. This relatively small
part of its task was still so big as to need the energies of a
generation, for it required all the new machinery to be created
-- capital, banks, mines, furnaces, shops, power-houses,
technical knowledge, mechanical population, together with a
steady remodelling of social and political habits, ideas, and
institutions to fit the new scale and suit the new conditions.
The generation between 1865 and 1895 was already mortgaged to the
railways, and no one knew it better than the generation itself.

  Whether Henry Adams knew it or not, he knew enough to act as
though he did. He reached Quincy once more, ready for the new
start. His brother Charles had determined to strike for the
railroads; Henry was to strike for the press; and they hoped to
play into each other's hands. They had great need, for they found
no one else to play with. After discovering the worthlessness of
a so-called education, they had still to discover the
worthlessness of so-called social connection. No young man had a
larger acquaintance and relationship than Henry Adams, yet he
knew no one who could help him. He was for sale, in the open
market. So were many of his friends. All the world knew it, and
knew too that they were cheap; to be bought at the price of a
mechanic. There was no concealment, no delicacy, and no illusion
about it. Neither he nor his friends complained; but he felt
sometimes a little surprised that, as far as he knew, no one,
seeking in the labor market, ever so much as inquired about their
fitness. The want of solidarity between old and young seemed
American. The young man was required to impose himself, by the
usual business methods, as a necessity on his elders, in order to
compel them to buy him as an investment. As Adams felt it, he was
in a manner expected to blackmail. Many a young man complained to
him in after life of the same experience, which became a matter
of curious reflection as he grew old. The labor market of good
society was ill-organized.

  Boston seemed to offer no market for educated labor. A peculiar
and perplexing amalgam Boston always was, and although it had
changed much in ten years, it was not less perplexing. One no
longer dined at two o'clock; one could no longer skate on Back
Bay; one heard talk of Bostonians worth five millions or more as
something not incredible. Yet the place seemed still simple, and
less restless-minded than ever before. In the line that Adams had
chosen to follow, he needed more than all else the help of the
press, but any shadow of hope on that side vanished instantly.
The less one meddled with the Boston press, the better. All the
newspapermen were clear on that point. The same was true of
politics. Boston meant business. The Bostonians were building
railways. Adams would have liked to help in building railways,
but had no education. He was not fit.

  He passed three or four months thus, visiting relations,
renewing friendships, and studying the situation. At thirty years
old, the man who has not yet got further than to study the
situation, is lost, or near it. He could see nothing in the
situation that could be of use to him. His friends had won no
more from it than he. His brother Charles, after three years of
civil life, was no better off than himself, except for being
married and in greater need of income. His brother John had
become a brilliant political leader on the wrong side. No one had
yet regained the lost ground of the war.

  He went to Newport and tried to be fashionable, but even in the
simple life of 1868, he failed as fashion. All the style he had
learned so painfully in London was worse than useless in America
where every standard was different. Newport was charming, but it
asked for no education and gave none. What it gave was much gayer
and pleasanter, and one enjoyed it amazingly; but friendships in
that society were a kind of social partnership, like the classes
at college; not education but the subjects of education. All were
doing the same thing, and asking the same question of the future.
None could help. Society seemed founded on the law that all was
for the best New Yorkers in the best of Newports, and that all
young people were rich if they could waltz. It was a new version
of the Ant and Grasshopper.

  At the end of three months, the only person, among the hundreds
he had met, who had offered him a word of encouragement or had
shown a sign of acquaintance with his doings, was Edward
Atkinson. Boston was cool towards sons, whether prodigals or
other, and needed much time to make up its mind what to do for
them -- time which Adams, at thirty years old, could hardly
spare. He had not the courage or self-confidence to hire an
office in State Street, as so many of his friends did, and doze
there alone, vacuity within and a snowstorm outside, waiting for
Fortune to knock at the door, or hoping to find her asleep in the
elevator; or on the staircase, since elevators were not yet in
use. Whether this course would have offered his best chance he
never knew; it was one of the points in practical education which
most needed a clear understanding, and he could never reach it.
His father and mother would have been glad to see him stay with
them and begin reading Blackstone again, and he showed no very
filial tenderness by abruptly breaking the tie that had lasted so
long. After all, perhaps Beacon Street was as good as any other
street for his objects in life; possibly his easiest and surest
path was from Beacon Street to State Street and back again, all
the days of his years. Who could tell? Even after life was over,
the doubt could not be determined.

  In thus sacrificing his heritage, he only followed the path
that had led him from the beginning. Boston was full of his
brothers. He had reckoned from childhood on outlawry as his
peculiar birthright. The mere thought of beginning life again in
Mount Vernon Street lowered the pulsations of his heart. This is
a story of education -- not a mere lesson of life -- and, with
education, temperament has in strictness nothing to do, although
in practice they run close together. Neither by temperament nor
by education was he fitted for Boston. He had drifted far away
and behind his companions there; no one trusted his temperament
or education; he had to go.

  Since no other path seemed to offer itself, he stuck to his
plan of joining the press, and selected Washington as the
shortest road to New York, but, in 1868, Washington stood outside
the social pale. No Bostonian had ever gone there. One announced
one's self as an adventurer and an office-seeker, a person of
deplorably bad judgment, and the charges were true. The chances
of ending in the gutter were, at best, even. The risk was the
greater in Adams's case, because he had no very clear idea what
to do when he got there. That he must educate himself over again,
for objects quite new, in an air altogether hostile to his old
educations, was the only certainty; but how he was to do it --
how he was to convert the idler in Rotten Row into the lobbyist
of the Capital -- he had not an idea, and no one to teach him.
The question of money is rarely serious for a young American
unless he is married, and money never troubled Adams more than
others; not because he had it, but because he could do without
it, like most people in Washington who all lived on the income of
bricklayers; but with or without money he met the difficulty
that, after getting to Washington in order to go on the press, it
was necessary to seek a press to go on. For large work he could
count on the North American Review, but this was scarcely a
press. For current discussion and correspondence, he could depend
on the New York Nation; but what he needed was a New York daily,
and no New York daily needed him. He lost his one chance by the
death of Henry J. Raymond. The Tribune under Horace Greeley was
out of the question both for political and personal reasons, and
because Whitelaw Reid had already undertaken that singularly
venturesome position, amid difficulties that would have swamped
Adams in four-and-twenty hours. Charles A. Dana had made the Sun
a very successful as well as a very amusing paper, but had hurt
his own social position in doing it; and Adams knew himself well
enough to know that he could never please himself and Dana too;
with the best intentions, he must always fail as a blackguard,
and at that time a strong dash of blackguardism was life to the
Sun. As for the New York Herald,  it was a despotic empire
admitting no personality but that of Bennett. Thus, for the
moment, the New York daily press offered no field except the
free-trade Holy Land of the Evening Post  under William Cullen
Bryant, while beside it lay only the elevated plateau of the New
Jerusalem occupied by Godkin and the Nation. Much as Adams liked
Godkin, and glad as he was to creep under the shelter of the
Evening Post and the Nation, he was well aware that he should
find there only the same circle of readers that he reached in the
North American Review.

  The outlook was dim, but it was all he had, and at Washington,
except for the personal friendship of Mr. Evarts who was then
Attorney General and living there, he would stand in solitude
much like that of London in 1861. Evarts did what no one in
Boston seemed to care for doing; he held out a hand to the young
man. Whether Boston, like Salem, really shunned strangers, or
whether Evarts was an exception even in New York, he had the
social instinct which Boston had not. Generous by nature,
prodigal in hospitality, fond of young people, and a born
man-of-the-world, Evarts gave and took liberally, without
scruple, and accepted the world without fearing or abusing it.
His wit was the least part of his social attraction. His talk was
broad and free. He laughed where he could; he joked if a joke was
possible; he was true to his friends, and never lost his temper
or became ill-natured. Like all New Yorkers he was decidedly not
a Bostonian; but he was what one might call a transplanted New
Englander, like General Sherman; a variety, grown in ranker soil.
In the course of life, and in widely different countries, Adams
incurred heavy debts of gratitude to persons on whom he had no
claim and to whom he could seldom make return; perhaps
half-a-dozen such debts remained unpaid at last, although six is
a large number as lives go; but kindness seldom came more happily
than when Mr. Evarts took him to Washington in October, 1868.

[combinator]

  Adams accepted the hospitality of the sleeper, with deep
gratitude, the more because his first struggle with a
sleeping-car made him doubt the value -- to him -- of a Pullman
civilization; but he was even more grateful for the shelter of
Mr. Evarts's house in H Street at the corner of Fourteenth, where
he abode in safety and content till he found rooms in the
roomless village. To him the village seemed unchanged. Had he not
known that a great war and eight years of astonishing movement
had passed over it, he would have noticed nothing that betrayed
growth. As of old, houses were few; rooms fewer; even the men
were the same. No one seemed to miss the usual comforts of
civilization, and Adams was glad to get rid of them, for his best
chance lay in the eighteenth century.

  The first step, of course, was the making of acquaintance, and
the first acquaintance was naturally the President, to whom an
aspirant to the press officially paid respect. Evarts immediately
took him to the White House and presented him to President Andrew
Johnson. The interview was brief and consisted in the stock
remark common to monarchs and valets, that the young man looked
even younger than he was. The younger man felt even younger than
he looked. He never saw the President again, and never felt a
wish to see him, for Andrew Johnson was not the sort of man whom
a young reformer of thirty, with two or three foreign educations,
was likely to see with enthusiasm; yet, musing over the interview
as a matter of education, long years afterwards, he could not
help recalling the President's figure with a distinctness that
surprised him. The old-fashioned Southern Senator and statesman
sat in his chair at his desk with a look of self-esteem that had
its value. None doubted. All were great men; some, no doubt, were
greater than others; but all were statesmen and all were
supported, lifted, inspired by the moral certainty of rightness.
To them the universe was serious, even solemn, but it was their
universe, a Southern conception of right. Lamar used to say that
he never entertained a doubt of the soundness of the Southern
system until he found that slavery could not stand a war. Slavery
was only a part of the Southern system, and the life of it all --
the vigor -- the poetry -- was its moral certainty of self. The
Southerner could not doubt; and this self-assurance not only gave
Andrew Johnson the look of a true President, but actually made
him one. When Adams came to look back on it afterwards, he was
surprised to realize how strong the Executive was in 1868 --
perhaps the strongest he was ever to see. Certainly he never
again found himself so well satisfied, or so much at home.

  Seward was still Secretary of State. Hardly yet an old man,
though showing marks of time and violence, Mr. Seward seemed
little changed in these eight years. He was the same -- with a
difference. Perhaps he -- unlike Henry Adams -- had at last got
an education, and all he wanted. Perhaps he had resigned himself
to doing without it. Whatever the reason, although his manner was
as roughly kind as ever, and his talk as free, he appeared to
have closed his account with the public; he no longer seemed to
care; he asked nothing, gave nothing, and invited no support; he
talked little of himself or of others, and waited only for his
discharge. Adams was well pleased to be near him in these last
days of his power and fame, and went much to his house in the
evenings when he was sure to be at his whist. At last, as the end
drew near, wanting to feel that the great man -- the only chief
he ever served even as a volunteer -- recognized some personal
relation, he asked Mr. Seward to dine with him one evening in his
rooms, and play his game of whist there, as he did every night in
his own house. Mr. Seward came and had his whist, and Adams
remembered his rough parting speech: "A very sensible
entertainment!" It was the only favor he ever asked of Mr.
Seward, and the only one he ever accepted.

  Thus, as a teacher of wisdom, after twenty years of example,
Governor Seward passed out of one's life, and Adams lost what
should have been his firmest ally; but in truth the State
Department had ceased to be the centre of his interest, and the
Treasury had taken its place. The Secretary of the Treasury was a
man new to politics -- Hugh McCulloch -- not a person of much
importance in the eyes of practical politicians such as young
members of the press meant themselves to become, but they all
liked Mr. McCulloch, though they thought him a stop-gap rather
than a force. Had they known what sort of forces the Treasury was
to offer them for support in the generation to come, they might
have reflected a long while on their estimate of McCulloch. Adams
was fated to watch the flittings of many more Secretaries than he
ever cared to know, and he rather came back in the end to the
idea that McCulloch was the best of them, although he seemed to
represent everything that one liked least. He was no politician,
he had no party, and no power. He was not fashionable or
decorative. He was a banker, and towards bankers Adams felt the
narrow prejudice which the serf feels to his overerseer; for he
knew he must obey, and he knew that the helpless showed only
their helplessness when they tempered obedience by mockery. The
world, after 1865, became a bankers' world, and no banker would
ever trust one who had deserted State Street, and had gone to
Washington with purposes of doubtful credit, or of no credit at
all, for he could not have put up enough collateral to borrow
five thousand dollars of any bank in America. The banker never
would trust him, and he would never trust the banker. To him, the
banking mind was obnoxious; and this antipathy caused him the
more surprise at finding McCulloch the broadest, most liberal,
most genial, and most practical public man in Washington.

  There could be no doubt of it. The burden of the Treasury at
that time was very great. The whole financial system was in
chaos; every part of it required reform; the utmost experience,
tact, and skill could not make the machine work smoothly. No one
knew how well McCulloch did it until his successor took it in
charge, and tried to correct his methods. Adams did not know
enough to appreciate McCulloch's technical skill, but he was
struck at his open and generous treatment of young men. Of all
rare qualities, this was, in Adams's experience, the rarest. As a
rule, officials dread interference. The strongest often resent it
most. Any official who admits equality in discussion of his
official course, feels it to be an act of virtue; after a few
months or years he tires of the effort. Every friend in power is
a friend lost. This rule is so nearly absolute that it may be
taken in practice as admitting no exception. Apparent exceptions
exist, and McCulloch was one of them.

  McCulloch had been spared the gluttonous selfishness and
infantile jealousy which are the commoner results of early
political education. He had neither past nor future, and could
afford to be careless of his company. Adams found him surrounded
by all the active and intelligent young men in the country. Full
of faith, greedy for work, eager for reform, energetic,
confident, capable, quick of study, charmed with a fight, equally
ready to defend or attack, they were unselfish, and even -- as
young men went -- honest. They came mostly from the army, with
the spirit of the volunteers. Frank Walker, Frank Barlow, Frank
Bartlett were types of the generation. Most of the press, and
much of the public, especially in the West, shared their ideas.
No one denied the need for reform. The whole government, from top
to bottom, was rotten with the senility of what was antiquated
and the instability of what was improvised. The currency was only
one example; the tariff was another; but the whole fabric
required reconstruction as much as in 1789, for the Constitution
had become as antiquated as the Confederation. Sooner or later a
shock must come, the more dangerous the longer postponed. The
Civil War had made a new system in fact; the country would have
to reorganize the machinery in practice and theory.

  One might discuss indefinitely the question which branch of
government needed reform most urgently; all needed it enough, but
no one denied that the finances were a scandal, and a constant,
universal nuisance. The tariff was worse, though more interests
upheld it. McCulloch had the singular merit of facing reform with
large good-nature and willing sympathy -- outside of parties,
jobs, bargains, corporations or intrigues -- which Adams never
was to meet again.

  Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit. The Civil War
had bred life. The army bred courage. Young men of the volunteer
type were not always docile under control, but they were handy in
a fight. Adams was greatly pleased to be admitted as one of them.
He found himself much at home with them -- more at home than he
ever had been before, or was ever to be again -- in the
atmosphere of the Treasury. He had no strong party passion, and
he felt as though he and his friends owned this administration,
which, in its dying days, had neither friends nor future except
in them.

  These were not the only allies; the whole government in all its
branches was alive with them. Just at that moment the Supreme
Court was about to take up the Legal Tender cases where Judge
Curtis had been employed to argue against the constitutional
power of the Government to make an artificial standard of value
in time of peace. Evarts was anxious to fix on a line of argument
that should have a chance of standing up against that of Judge
Curtis, and was puzzled to do it. He did not know which foot to
put forward. About to deal with Judge Curtis, the last of the
strong jurists of Marshall's school, he could risk no chances. In
doubt, the quickest way to clear one's mind is to discuss, and
Evarts deliberately forced discussion. Day after day, driving,
dining, walking he provoked Adams to dispute his positions. He
needed an anvil, he said, to hammer his ideas on.

  Adams was flattered at being an anvil, which is, after all,
more solid than the hammer; and he did not feel called on to
treat Mr. Evarts's arguments with more respect than Mr. Evarts
himself expressed for them; so he contradicted with freedom. Like
most young men, he was much of a doctrinaire, and the question
was, in any event, rather historical or political than legal. He
could easily maintain, by way of argument, that the required
power had never been given, and that no sound constitutional
reason could possibly exist for authorizing the Government to
overthrow the standard of value without necessity, in time of
peace. The dispute itself had not much value for him, even as
education, but it led to his seeking light from the Chief Justice
himself. Following up the subject for his letters to the Nation
and his articles in the North American Review, Adams grew to be
intimate with the Chief Justice, who, as one of the oldest and
strongest leaders of the Free Soil Party, had claims to his
personal regard; for the old Free Soilers were becoming few. Like
all strong-willed and self-asserting men, Mr. Chase had the
faults of his qualities. He was never easy to drive in harness,
or light in hand. He saw vividly what was wrong, and did not
always allow for what was relatively right. He loved power as
though he were still a Senator. His position towards Legal Tender
was awkward. As Secretary of the Treasury he had been its author;
as Chief Justice he became its enemy. Legal Tender caused no
great pleasure or pain in the sum of life to a newspaper
correspondent, but it served as a subject for letters, and the
Chief Justice was very willing to win an ally in the press who
would tell his story as he wished it to be read. The intimacy in
Mr. Chase's house grew rapidly, and the alliance was no small
help to the comforts of a struggling newspaper adventurer in
Washington. No matter what one might think of his politics or
temper, Mr. Chase was a dramatic figure, of high senatorial rank,
if also of certain senatorial faults; a valuable ally.

  As was sure, sooner or later, to happen, Adams one day met
Charles Sumner on the street, and instantly stopped to greet him.
As though eight years of broken ties were the natural course of
friendship, Sumner at once, after an exclamation of surprise,
dropped back into the relation of hero to the school boy. Adams

enjoyed accepting it. He was then thirty years old and Sumner was
fifty-seven; he had seen more of the world than Sumner ever
dreamed of, and he felt a sort of amused curiosity to be treated
once more as a child. At best, the renewal of broken relations is
a nervous matter, and in this case it bristled with thorns, for
Sumner's quarrel with Mr. Adams had not been the most delicate of
his ruptured relations, and he was liable to be sensitive in many
ways that even Bostonians could hardly keep in constant mind; yet
it interested and fascinated Henry Adams as a new study of
political humanity. The younger man knew that the meeting would
have to come, and was ready for it, if only as a newspaper need;
but to Sumner it came as a surprise and a disagreeable one, as
Adams conceived. He learned something -- a piece of practical
education worth the effort -- by watching Sumner's behavior. He
could see that many thoughts -- mostly unpleasant -- were passing
through his mind, since he made no inquiry about any of Adams's
family, or allusion to any of his friends or his residence
abroad. He talked only of the present. To him, Adams in
Washington should have seemed more or less of a critic, perhaps a
spy, certainly an intriguer or adventurer, like scores of others;
a politician without party; a writer without principles; an
office-seeker certain to beg for support. All this was, for his
purposes, true. Adams could do him no good, and would be likely
to do him all the harm in his power. Adams accepted it all;
expected to be kept at arm's length; admitted that the reasons
were just. He was the more surprised to see that Sumner invited a
renewal of old relations. He found himself treated almost
confidentially. Not only was he asked to make a fourth at
Sumner's pleasant little dinners in the house on La Fayette
Square, but he found himself admitted to the Senator's study and
informed of his views, policy and purposes, which were sometimes
even more astounding than his curious gaps or lapses of
omniscience.

  On the whole, the relation was the queerest that Henry Adams
ever kept up. He liked and admired Sumner, but thought his mind a
pathological study. At times he inclined to think that Sumner
felt his solitude, and, in the political wilderness, craved
educated society; but this hardly told the whole story. Sumner's
mind had reached the calm of water which receives and reflects
images without absorbing them; it contained nothing but itself.
The images from without, the objects mechanically perceived by
the senses, existed by courtesy until the mental surface was
ruffled, but never became part of the thought. Henry Adams roused
no emotion; if he had roused a disagreeable one, he would have
ceased to exist. The mind would have mechanically rejected, as it
had mechanically admitted him. Not that Sumner was more
aggressively egoistic than other Senators -- Conkling, for
instance -- but that with him the disease had affected the whole
mind; it was chronic and absolute; while, with other Senators for
the most part, it was still acute.

  Perhaps for this very reason, Sumner was the more valuable
acquaintance for a newspaper-man. Adams found him most useful;
perhaps quite the most useful of all these great authorities who
were the stock-in-trade of the newspaper business; the
accumulated capital of a Silurian age. A few months or years
more, and they were gone. In 1868, they were like the town
itself, changing but not changed. La Fayette Square was society.
Within a few hundred yards of Mr. Clark Mills's nursery monument
to the equestrian seat of Andrew Jackson, one found all one's
acquaintance as well as hotels, banks, markets and national
government. Beyond the Square the country began. No rich or
fashionable stranger had yet discovered the town. No literary or
scientific man, no artist, no gentleman without office or
employment, had ever lived there. It was rural, and its society
was primitive. Scarcely a person in it had ever known life in a
great city. Mr. Evarts, Mr. Sam Hooper, of Boston, and perhaps
one or two of the diplomatists had alone mixed in that sort of
world. The happy village was innocent of a club. The one-horse
tram on F Street to the Capitol was ample for traffic. Every
pleasant spring morning at the Pennsylvania Station, society met
to bid good-bye to its friends going off on the single express.
The State Department was lodged in an infant asylum far out on
Fourteenth Street while Mr. Mullett was constructing his
architectural infant asylum next the White House. The value of
real estate had not increased since 1800, and the pavements were
more impassable than the mud. All this favored a young man who
had come to make a name. In four-and-twenty hours he could know
everybody; in two days everybody knew him.

  After seven years' arduous and unsuccessful effort to explore
the outskirts of London society, the Washington world offered an
easy and delightful repose. When he looked round him, from the
safe shelter of Mr. Evarts's roof, on the men he was to work with
-- or against -- he had to admit that nine-tenths of his acquired
education was useless, and the other tenth harmful. He would have
to begin again from the beginning. He must learn to talk to the
Western Congressman, and to hide his own antecedents. The task
was amusing. He could see nothing to prevent him from enjoying
it, with immoral unconcern for all that had gone before and for
anything that might follow. The lobby offered a spectacle almost
picturesque. Few figures on the Paris stage were more
entertaining and dramatic than old Sam Ward, who knew more of
life than all the departments of the Government together,
including the Senate and the Smithsonian. Society had not much to
give, but what it had, it gave with an open hand. For the moment,
politics had ceased to disturb social relations. All parties were
mixed up and jumbled together in a sort of tidal slack-water. The
Government resembled Adams himself in the matter of education.
All that had gone before was useless, and some of it was worse.

[combinator]

CHAPTER XVII

PRESIDENT GRANT (1869)

  THE first effect of this leap into the unknown was a fit of low
spirits new to the young man's education; due in part to the
overpowering beauty and sweetness of the Maryland autumn, almost
unendurable for its strain on one who had toned his life down to
the November grays and browns of northern Europe. Life could not
go on so beautiful and so sad. Luckily, no one else felt it or
knew it. He bore it as well as he could, and when he picked
himself up, winter had come, and he was settled in bachelor's
quarters, as modest as those of a clerk in the Departments, far
out on G Street, towards Georgetown, where an old Finn named
Dohna, who had come out with the Russian Minister Stoeckel long
before, had bought or built a new house. Congress had met. Two or
three months remained to the old administration, but all interest
centred in the new one. The town began to swarm with
office-seekers, among whom a young writer was lost. He drifted
among them, unnoticed, glad to learn his work under cover of the
confusion. He never aspired to become a regular reporter; he knew
he should fail in trying a career so ambitious and energetic; but
he picked up friends on the press -- Nordhoff, Murat Halstead,
Henry Watterson, Sam Bowles -- all reformers, and all mixed and
jumbled together in a tidal wave of expectation, waiting for
General Grant to give orders. No one seemed to know much about
it. Even Senators had nothing to say. One could only make notes
and study finance.

  In waiting, he amused himself as he could. In the amusements of
Washington, education had no part, but the simplicity of the
amusements proved the simplicity of everything else, ambitions,
interests, thoughts, and knowledge. Proverbially Washington was a
poor place for education, and of course young diplomats avoided
or disliked it, but, as a rule, diplomats disliked every place
except Paris, and the world contained only one Paris. They abused
London more violently than Washington; they praised no post under
the sun; and they were merely describing three-fourths of their
stations when they complained that there were no theatres, no
restaurants, no monde, no demi-monde, no drives, no splendor,
and, as Mme. de Struve used to say, no grandezza.  This was all
true; Washington was a mere political camp, as transient and
temporary as a camp-meeting for religious revival, but the
diplomats had least reason to complain, since they were more
sought for there than they would ever be elsewhere. For young men
Washington was in one way paradise, since they were few, and
greatly in demand. After watching the abject unimportance of the
young diplomat in London society, Adams found himself a young
duke in Washington. He had ten years of youth to make up, and a
ravenous appetite. Washington was the easiest society he had ever
seen, and even the Bostonian became simple, good-natured, almost
genial, in the softness of a Washington spring. Society went on
excellently well without houses, or carriages, or jewels, or
toilettes, or pavements, or shops, or grandezza of any sort; and
the market was excellent as well as cheap. One could not stay
there a month without loving the shabby town. Even the Washington
girl, who was neither rich nor well-dressed nor well-educated nor
clever, had singular charm, and used it. According to Mr. Adams
the father, this charm dated back as far as Monroe's
administration, to his personal knowledge.

  Therefore, behind all the processes of political or financial
or newspaper training, the social side of Washington was to be
taken for granted as three-fourths of existence. Its details
matter nothing. Life ceased to be strenuous, and the victim
thanked God for it. Politics and reform became the detail, and
waltzing the profession. Adams was not alone. Senator Sumner had
as private secretary a young man named Moorfield Storey, who
became a dangerous example of frivolity. The new
Attorney-General, E. R. Hoar, brought with him from Concord a
son, Sam Hoar, whose example rivalled that of Storey. Another
impenitent was named Dewey, a young naval officer. Adams came far
down in the list. He wished he had been higher. He could have
spared a world of superannuated history, science, or politics, to
have reversed better in waltzing.

  He had no adequate notion how little he knew, especially of
women, and Washington offered no standard of comparison. All were
profoundly ignorant together, and as indifferent as children to
education. No one needed knowledge. Washington was happier
without style. Certainly Adams was happier without it; happier
than he had ever been before; happier than any one in the harsh
world of strenuousness could dream of. This must be taken as
background for such little education as he gained; but the life
belonged to the eighteenth century, and in no way concerned
education for the twentieth.

  In such an atmosphere, one made no great presence of hard work.
If the world wants hard work, the world must pay for it; and, if
it will not pay, it has no fault to find with the worker. Thus
far, no one had made a suggestion of pay for any work that Adams
had done or could do; if he worked at all, it was for social
consideration, and social pleasure was his pay. For this he was
willing to go on working, as an artist goes on painting when no
one buys his pictures. Artists have done it from the beginning of
time, and will do it after time has expired, since they cannot
help themselves, and they find their return in the pride of their
social superiority as they feel it. Society commonly abets them
and encourages their attitude of contempt. The society of
Washington was too simple and Southern as yet, to feel
anarchistic longings, and it never read or saw what artists
produced elsewhere, but it good-naturedly abetted them when it
had the chance, and respected itself the more for the frailty.
Adams found even the Government at his service, and every one
willing to answer his questions. He worked, after a fashion; not
very hard, but as much as the Government would have required of
him for nine hundred dollars a year; and his work defied
frivolity. He got more pleasure from writing than the world ever
got from reading him, for his work was not amusing, nor was he.
One must not try to amuse moneylenders or investors, and this was
the class to which he began by appealing. He gave three months to
an article on the finances of the United States, just then a
subject greatly needing treatment; and when he had finished it,
he sent it to London to his friend Henry Reeve, the ponderous
editor of the Edinburgh Review. Reeve probably thought it good;
at all events, he said so; and he printed it in April. Of course
it was reprinted in America, but in England such articles were
still anonymous, and the author remained unknown.

  The author was not then asking for advertisement, and made no
claim for credit. His object was literary. He wanted to win a
place on the staff of the Edinburgh Review, under the vast shadow
of Lord Macaulay; and, to a young American in 1868, such rank
seemed colossal -- the highest in the literary world -- as it had
been only five-and-twenty years before. Time and tide had flowed
since then, but the position still flattered vanity, though it
brought no other flattery or reward except the regular thirty
pounds of pay -- fifty dollars a month, measured in time and
labor.

  The Edinburgh article finished, he set himself to work on a
scheme for the North American Review. In England, Lord Robert
Cecil had invented for the London Quarterly an annual review of
politics which he called the "Session." Adams stole the idea and
the name -- he thought he had been enough in Lord Robert's house,
in days of his struggle with adversity, to excuse the theft --
and began what he meant for a permanent series of annual
political reviews which he hoped to make, in time, a political
authority. With his sources of information, and his social
intimacies at Washington, he could not help saying something that
would command attention. He had the field to himself, and he
meant to give himself a free hand, as he went on. Whether the
newspapers liked it or not, they would have to reckon with him;
for such a power, once established, was more effective than all
the speeches in Congress or reports to the President that could
be crammed into the Government presses.

  The first of these "Sessions" appeared in April, but it could
not be condensed into a single article, and had to be
supplemented in October by another which bore the title of "Civil
Service Reform," and was really a part of the same review. A good
deal of authentic history slipped into these papers. Whether any
one except his press associates ever read them, he never knew and
never greatly cared. The difference is slight, to the influence
of an author, whether he is read by five hundred readers, or by
five hundred thousand; if he can select the five hundred, he
reaches the five hundred thousand. The fateful year 1870 was near
at hand, which was to mark the close of the literary epoch, when
quarterlies gave way to monthlies; letter-press to illustration;
volumes to pages. The outburst was brilliant. Bret Harte led, and
Robert Louis Stevenson followed. Guy de Maupassant and Rudyard
Kipling brought up the rear, and dazzled the world. As usual,
Adams found himself fifty years behind his time, but a number of
belated wanderers kept him company, and they produced on each
other the effect or illusion of a public opinion. They straggled
apart, at longer and longer intervals, through the procession,
but they were still within hearing distance of each other. The
drift was still superficially conservative. Just as the Church
spoke with apparent authority, of the quarterlies laid down an
apparent law, and no one could surely say where the real
authority, or the real law, lay. Science lid not know. Truths a
priori held their own against truths surely relative. According
to Lowell, Right was forever on the scaffold, Wrong was forever
on the Throne; and most people still thought they believed it.
Adams was not the only relic of the eighteenth century, and he
could still depend on a certain number of listeners -- mostly
respectable, and some rich.

  Want of audience did not trouble him; he was well enough off in
that respect, and would have succeeded in all his calculations if
this had been his only hazard. Where he broke down was at a point
where he always suffered wreck and where nine adventurers out of
ten make their errors. One may be more or less certain of
organized forces; one can never be certain of men. He belonged to
the eighteenth century, and the eighteenth century upset all his
plans. For the moment, America was more eighteenth century than
himself; it reverted to the stone age.

  As education -- of a certain sort -- the story had probably a
certain value, though he could never see it. One seldom can see
much education in the buck of a broncho; even less in the kick of
a mule. The lesson it teaches is only that of getting out of the
animal's way. This was the lesson that Henry Adams had learned
over and over again in politics since 1860.

  At least four-fifths of the American people -- Adams among the
rest -- had united in the election of General Grant to the
Presidency, and probably had been more or less affected in their
choice by the parallel they felt between Grant and Washington.
Nothing could be more obvious. Grant represented order. He was a
great soldier, and the soldier always represented order. He might
be as partisan as he pleased, but a general who had organized and
commanded half a million or a million men in the field, must know
how to administer. Even Washington, who was, in education and
experience, a mere cave-dweller, had known how to organize a
government, and had found Jeffersons and Hamiltons to organize
his departments. The task of bringing the Government back to
regular practices, and of restoring moral and mechanical order to
administration, was not very difficult; it was ready to do it
itself, with a little encouragement. No doubt the confusion,
especially in the old slave States and in the currency, was
considerable, but, the general disposition was good, and every
one had echoed that famous phrase: "Let us have peace."

  Adams was young and easily deceived, in spite of his diplomatic
adventures, but even at twice his age he could not see that this
reliance on Grant was unreasonable. Had Grant been a Congressman
one would have been on one's guard, for one knew the type. One
never expected from a Congressman more than good intentions and
public spirit. Newspaper-men as a rule had no great respect for
the lower House; Senators had less; and Cabinet officers had none
at all. Indeed, one day when Adams was pleading with a Cabinet
officer for patience and tact in dealing with Representatives,
the Secretary impatiently broke out: "You can't use tact with a
Congressman! A Congressman is a hog! You must take a stick and
hit him on the snout!" Adams knew far too little, compared with
the Secretary, to contradict him, though he thought the phrase
somewhat harsh even as applied to the average Congressman of 1869
-- he saw little or nothing of later ones -- but he knew a
shorter way of silencing criticism. He had but to ask: "If a
Congressman is a hog, what is a Senator?" This innocent question,
put in a candid spirit, petrified any executive officer that ever
sat a week in his office. Even Adams admitted that Senators
passed belief. The comic side of their egotism partly disguised
its extravagance, but faction had gone so far under Andrew
Johnson that at times the whole Senate seemed to catch hysterics
of nervous bucking without apparent reason. Great leaders, like
Sumner and Conkling, could not be burlesqued; they were more
grotesque than ridicule could make them; even Grant, who rarely
sparkled in epigram, became witty on their account; but their
egotism and factiousness were no laughing matter. They did
permanent and terrible mischief, as Garfield and Blaine, and even
McKinley and John Hay, were to feel. The most troublesome task of
a reform President was that of bringing the Senate back to
decency.

[combinator]

  Therefore no one, and Henry Adams less than most, felt hope
that any President chosen from the ranks of politics or
politicians would raise the character of government; and by
instinct if not by reason, all the world united on Grant. The
Senate understood what the world expected, and waited in silence
for a struggle with Grant more serious than that with Andrew
Johnson. Newspaper-men were alive with eagerness to support the
President against the Senate. The newspaper-man is, more than
most men, a double personality; and his person feels best
satisfied in its double instincts when writing in one sense and
thinking in another. All newspaper-men, whatever they wrote, felt
alike about the Senate. Adams floated with the stream. He was
eager to join in the fight which he foresaw as sooner or later
inevitable. He meant to support the Executive in attacking the
Senate and taking away its two-thirds vote and power of
confirmation, nor did he much care how it should be done, for he
thought it safer to effect the revolution in 1870 than to wait
till 1920..

  With this thought in his mind, he went to the Capitol to hear
the names announced which should reveal the carefully guarded
secret of Grant's Cabinet. To the end of his life, he wondered at
the suddenness of the revolution which actually, within five
minutes, changed his intended future into an absurdity so
laughable as to make him ashamed of it. He was to hear a long
list of Cabinet announcements not much weaker or more futile than
that of Grant, and none of them made him blush, while Grant's
nominations had the singular effect of making the hearer ashamed,
not so much of Grant, as of himself. He had made another total
misconception of life -- another inconceivable false start. Yet,
unlikely as it seemed, he had missed his motive narrowly, and his
intention had been more than sound, for the Senators made no
secret of saying with senatorial frankness that Grant's
nominations betrayed his intent as plainly as they betrayed his
incompetence. A great soldier might be a baby politician.

  Adams left the Capitol, much in the same misty mental condition
that he recalled as marking his railway journey to London on May
13, 1861; he felt in himself what Gladstone bewailed so sadly,
"the incapacity of viewing things all round." He knew, without
absolutely saying it, that Grant had cut short the life which
Adams had laid out for himself in the future. After such a
miscarriage, no thought of effectual reform could revive for at
least one generation, and he had no fancy for ineffectual
politics. What course could he sail next? He had tried so many,
and society had barred them all! For the moment, he saw no hope
but in following the stream on which he had launched himself. The
new Cabinet, as individuals, were not hostile. Subsequently Grant
made changes in the list which were mostly welcome to a Bostonian
-- or should have been -- although fatal to Adams. The name of
Hamilton Fish, as Secretary of State, suggested extreme
conservatism and probable deference to Sumner. The name of George
S. Boutwell, as Secretary of the Treasury, suggested only a
somewhat lugubrious joke; Mr. Boutwell could be described only as
the opposite of Mr. McCulloch, and meant inertia; or, in plain
words, total extinction for any one resembling Henry Adams. On
the other hand, the name of Jacob D. Cox, as Secretary of the
Interior, suggested help and comfort; while that of Judge Hoar,
as Attorney-General, promised friendship. On the whole, the
personal outlook, merely for literary purposes, seemed fairly
cheerful, and the political outlook, though hazy, still depended
on Grant himself. No one doubted that Grant's intention had been
one of reform; that his aim had been to place his administration
above politics; and until he should actually drive his supporters
away, one might hope to support him. One's little lantern must
therefore be turned on Grant. One seemed to know him so well, and
really knew so little.

  By chance it happened that Adam Badeau took the lower suite of
rooms at Dohna's, and, as it was convenient to have one table,
the two men dined together and became intimate. Badeau was
exceedingly social, though not in appearance imposing. He was
stout; his face was red, and his habits were regularly irregular;
but he was very intelligent, a good newspaper-man, and an
excellent military historian. His life of Grant was no ordinary
book. Unlike most newspaper-men, he was a friendly critic of
Grant, as suited an officer who had been on the General's staff.
As a rule, the newspaper correspondents in Washington were
unfriendly, and the lobby sceptical. From that side one heard
tales that made one's hair stand on end, and the old West Point
army officers were no more flattering. All described him as
vicious, narrow, dull, and vindictive. Badeau, who had come to
Washington for a consulate which was slow to reach him, resorted
more or less to whiskey for encouragement, and became irritable,
besides being loquacious. He talked much about Grant, and showed
a certain artistic feeling for analysis of character, as a true
literary critic would naturally do. Loyal to Grant, and still
more so to Mrs. Grant, who acted as his patroness, he said
nothing, even when far gone, that was offensive about either, but
he held that no one except himself and Rawlins understood the
General. To him, Grant appeared as an intermittent energy,
immensely powerful when awake, but passive and plastic in repose.
He said that neither he nor the rest of the staff knew why Grant
succeeded; they believed in him because of his success. For
stretches of time, his mind seemed torpid. Rawlins and the others
would systematically talk their ideas into it, for weeks, not
directly, but by discussion among themselves, in his presence. In
the end, he would announce the idea as his own, without seeming
conscious of the discussion; and would give the orders to carry
it out with all the energy that belonged to his nature. They
could never measure his character or be sure when he would act.
They could never follow a mental process in his thought. They
were not sure that he did think.

  In all this, Adams took deep interest, for although he was not,
like Badeau, waiting for Mrs. Grant's power of suggestion to act
on the General's mind in order to germinate in a consulate or a
legation, his portrait gallery of great men was becoming large,
and it amused him to add an authentic likeness of the greatest
general the world had seen since Napoleon. Badeau's analysis was
rather delicate; infinitely superior to that of Sam Ward or
Charles Nordhoff.

  Badeau took Adams to the White House one evening and introduced
him to the President and Mrs. Grant. First and last, he saw a
dozen Presidents at the White House, and the most famous were by
no means the most agreeable, but he found Grant the most curious
object of study among them all. About no one did opinions differ
so widely. Adams had no opinion, or occasion to make one. A
single word with Grant satisfied him that, for his own good, the
fewer words he risked, the better. Thus far in life he had met
with but one man of the same intellectual or unintellectual type
-- Garibaldi. Of the two, Garibaldi seemed to him a trifle the
more intellectual, but, in both, the intellect counted for
nothing; only the energy counted. The type was pre-intellectual,
archaic, and would have seemed so even to the cave-dwellers.
Adam, according to legend, was such a man.

  In time one came to recognize the type in other men, with
differences and variations, as normal; men whose energies were
the greater, the less they wasted on thought; men who sprang from
the soil to power; apt to be distrustful of themselves and of
others; shy; jealous; sometimes vindictive; more or less dull in
outward appearance; always needing stimulants, but for whom
action was the highest stimulant -- the instinct of fight. Such
men were forces of nature, energies of the prime, like the
Pteraspis , but they made short work of scholars. They had
commanded thousands of such and saw no more in them than in
others. The fact was certain; it crushed argument and intellect
at once.

  Adams did not feel Grant as a hostile force; like Badeau he saw
only an uncertain one. When in action he was superb and safe to
follow; only when torpid he was dangerous. To deal with him one
must stand near, like Rawlins, and practice more or less
sympathetic habits. Simple-minded beyond the experience of Wall
Street or State Street, he resorted, like most men of the same
intellectual calibre, to commonplaces when at a loss for
expression: "Let us have peace!" or, "The best way to treat a bad
law is to execute it"; or a score of such reversible sentences
generally to be gauged by their sententiousness; but sometimes he
made one doubt his good faith; as when he seriously remarked to a
particularly bright young woman that Venice would be a fine city
if it were drained. In Mark Twain, this suggestion would have
taken rank among his best witticisms; in Grant it was a measure
of simplicity not singular. Robert E. Lee betrayed the same
intellectual commonplace, in a Virginian form, not to the same
degree, but quite distinctly enough for one who knew the
American. What worried Adams was not the commonplace; it was, as
usual, his own education. Grant fretted and irritated him, like
the Terebratula, as a defiance of first principles. He had no
right to exist. He should have been extinct for ages. The idea
that, as society grew older, it grew one-sided, upset evolution,
and made of education a fraud. That, two thousand years after
Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, a man like Grant should be
called -- and should actually and truly be -- the highest product
of the most advanced evolution, made evolution ludicrous. One
must be as commonplace as Grant's own commonplaces to maintain
such an absurdity. The progress of evolution from President
Washington to President Grant, was alone evidence enough to upset
Darwin.

  Education became more perplexing at every phase. No theory was
worth the pen that wrote it. America had no use for Adams because
he was eighteenth-century, and yet it worshipped Grant because he
was archaic and should have lived in a cave and worn skins.
Darwinists ought to conclude that America was reverting to the
stone age, but the theory of reversion was more absurd than that
of evolution. Grant's administration reverted to nothing. One
could not catch a trait of the past, still less of the future. It
was not even sensibly American. Not an official in it, except
perhaps Rawlins whom Adams never met, and who died in September,
suggested an American idea.

  Yet this administration, which upset Adams's whole life, was
not unfriendly; it was made up largely of friends. Secretary Fish
was almost kind; he kept the tradition of New York social values;
he was human and took no pleasure in giving pain. Adams felt no
prejudice whatever in his favor, and he had nothing in mind or
person to attract regard; his social gifts were not remarkable;
he was not in the least magnetic; he was far from young; but he
won confidence from the start and remained a friend to the
finish. As far as concerned Mr. Fish, one felt rather happily
suited, and one was still better off in the Interior Department
with J. D. Cox. Indeed, if Cox had been in the Treasury and
Boutwell in the Interior, one would have been quite satisfied as
far as personal relations went, while, in the Attorney-General's
Office, Judge Hoar seemed to fill every possible ideal, both
personal and political.

  The difficulty was not the want of friends, and had the whole
government been filled with them, it would have helped little
without the President and the Treasury. Grant avowed from the
start a policy of drift; and a policy of drift attaches only
barnacles. At thirty, one has no interest in becoming a barnacle,
but even in that character Henry Adams would have been ill-seen.
His friends were reformers, critics, doubtful in party
allegiance, and he was himself an object of suspicion. Grant had
no objects, wanted no help, wished for no champions. The
Executive asked only to be let alone. This was his meaning when
he said: "Let us have peace! "

  No one wanted to go into opposition. As for Adams, all his
hopes of success in life turned on his finding an administration
to support. He knew well enough the rules of self-interest. He
was for sale. He wanted to be bought. His price was excessively
cheap, for he did not even ask an office, and had his eye, not on
the Government, but on New York. All he wanted was something to
support; something that would let itself be supported. Luck went
dead against him. For once, he was fifty years in advance of his
time.

[combinator]

CHAPTER XVIII

FREE FIGHT (1869-1870)

  THE old New Englander was apt to be a solitary animal, but the
young New Englander was sometimes human. Judge Hoar brought his
son Sam to Washington, and Sam Hoar loved largely and well. He
taught Adams the charm of Washington spring. Education for
education, none ever compared with the delight of this. The
Potomac and its tributaries squandered beauty. Rock Creek was as
wild as the Rocky Mountains. Here and there a negro log cabin
alone disturbed the dogwood and the judas-tree, the azalea and
the laurel. The tulip and the chestnut gave no sense of struggle
against a stingy nature. The soft, full outlines of the landscape
carried no hidden horror of glaciers in its bosom. The brooding
heat of the profligate vegetation; the cool charm of the running
water; the terrific splendor of the June thunder-gust in the deep
and solitary woods, were all sensual, animal, elemental. No
European spring had shown him the same intermixture of delicate
grace and passionate depravity that marked the Maryland May. He
loved it too much, as though it were Greek and half human. He
could not leave it, but loitered on into July, falling into the
Southern ways of the summer village about La Fayette Square, as
one whose rights of inheritance could not be questioned. Few
Americans were so poor as to question them.

  In spite of the fatal deception -- or undeception -- about
Grant's political character, Adams's first winter in Washington
had so much amused him that he had not a thought of change. He
loved it too much to question its value. What did he know about
its value, or what did any one know? His father knew more about
it than any one else in Boston, and he was amused to find that
his father, whose recollections went back to 1820, betrayed for
Washington much the same sentimental weakness, and described the
society about President Monroe much as his son felt the society
about President Johnson. He feared its effect on young men, with
some justice, since it had been fatal to two of his brothers; but
he understood the charm, and he knew that a life in Quincy or
Boston was not likely to deaden it.

  Henry was in a savage humor on the subject of Boston. He saw
Boutwells at every counter. He found a personal grief in every
tree. Fifteen or twenty years afterwards, Clarence King used to
amuse him by mourning over the narrow escape that nature had made
in attaining perfection. Except for two mistakes, the earth would
have been a success. One of these errors was the inclination of
the ecliptic; the other was the differentiation of the sexes, and
the saddest thought about the last was that it should have been
so modern. Adams, in his splenetic temper, held that both these
unnecessary evils had wreaked their worst on Boston. The climate
made eternal war on society, and sex was a species of crime. The
ecliptic had inclined itself beyond recovery till life was as
thin as the elm trees. Of course he was in the wrong. The
thinness was in himself, not in Boston; but this is a story of
education, and Adams was struggling to shape himself to his time.
Boston was trying to do the same thing. Everywhere, except in
Washington, Americans were toiling for the same object. Every one
complained of surroundings, except where, as at Washington, there
were no surroundings to complain of. Boston kept its head better
than its neighbors did, and very little time was needed to prove
it, even to Adams's confusion.

  Before he got back to Quincy, the summer was already half over,
and in another six weeks the effects of President Grant's
character showed themselves. They were startling -- astounding --
terrifying. The mystery that shrouded the famous, classical
attempt of Jay Gould to corner gold in September, 1869, has never
been cleared up -- at least so far as to make it intelligible to
Adams. Gould was led, by the change at Washington, into the
belief that he could safely corner gold without interference from
the Government. He took a number of precautions, which he
admitted; and he spent a large sum of money, as he also
testified, to obtain assurances which were not sufficient to have
satisfied so astute a gambler; yet he made the venture. Any
criminal lawyer must have begun investigation by insisting,
rigorously, that no such man, in such a position, could be
permitted to plead that he had taken, and pursued, such a course,
without assurances which did satisfy him. The plea was
professionally inadmissible.

  This meant that any criminal lawyer would have been bound to
start an investigation by insisting that Gould had assurances
from the White House or the Treasury, since none other could have
satisfied him. To young men wasting their summer at Quincy for
want of some one to hire their services at three dollars a day,
such a dramatic scandal was Heaven-sent. Charles and Henry Adams
jumped at it like salmon at a fly, with as much voracity as Jay
Gould, or his ame damnee Jim Fisk, had ever shown for Erie; and
with as little fear of consequences. They risked something; no
one could say what; but the people about the Erie office were not
regarded as lambs.

  The unravelling a skein so tangled as that of the Erie Railway
was a task that might have given months of labor to the most
efficient District Attorney, with all his official tools to work
with. Charles took the railway history; Henry took the so-called
Gold Conspiracy; and they went to New York to work it up. The
surface was in full view. They had no trouble in Wall Street, and
they paid their respects in person to the famous Jim Fisk in his
Opera-House Palace; but the New York side of the story helped
Henry little. He needed to penetrate the political mystery, and
for this purpose he had to wait for Congress to meet. At first he
feared that Congress would suppress the scandal, but the
Congressional Investigation was ordered and took place. He soon
knew all that was to be known; the material for his essay was
furnished by the Government.

  Material furnished by a government seldom satisfies critics or
historians, for it lies always under suspicion. Here was a
mystery, and as usual, the chief mystery was the means of making
sure that any mystery existed. All Adams's great friends -- Fish,
Cox, Hoar, Evarts, Sumner, and their surroundings -- were
precisely the persons most mystified. They knew less than Adams
did; they sought information, and frankly admitted that their
relations with the White House and the Treasury were not
confidential. No one volunteered advice. No one offered
suggestion. One got no light, even from the press, although press
agents expressed in private the most damning convictions with
their usual cynical frankness. The Congressional Committee took a
quantity of evidence which it dared not probe, and refused to
analyze. Although the fault lay somewhere on the Administration,
and could lie nowhere else, the trail always faded and died out
at the point where any member of the Administration became
visible. Every one dreaded to press inquiry. Adams himself feared
finding out too much. He found out too much already, when he saw
in evidence that Jay Gould had actually succeeded in stretching
his net over Grant's closest surroundings, and that Boutwell's
incompetence was the bottom of Gould's calculation. With the
conventional air of assumed confidence, every one in public
assured every one else that the President himself was the savior
of the situation, and in private assured each other that if the
President had not been caught this time, he was sure to be
trapped the next, for the ways of Wall Street were dark and
double. All this was wildly exciting to Adams. That Grant should
have fallen, within six months, into such a morass -- or should
have let Boutwell drop him into it -- rendered the outlook for
the next four years -- probably eight -- possibly twelve --
mysterious, or frankly opaque, to a young man who had hitched his
wagon, as Emerson told him, to the star of reform. The country
might outlive it, but not he. The worst scandals of the
eighteenth century were relatively harmless by the side of this,
which smirched executive, judiciary, banks, corporate systems,
professions, and people, all the great active forces of society,
in one dirty cesspool of vulgar corruption. Only six months
before, this innocent young man, fresh from the cynicism of
European diplomacy, had expected to enter an honorable career in
the press as the champion and confidant of a new Washington, and
already he foresaw a life of wasted energy, sweeping the stables
of American society clear of the endless corruption which his
second Washington was quite certain to breed.

  By vigorously shutting one's eyes, as though one were an
Assistant Secretary, a writer for the press might ignore the Erie
scandal, and still help his friends or allies in the Government
who were doing their best to give it an air of decency; but a few
weeks showed that the Erie scandal was a mere incident, a rather
vulgar Wall Street trap, into which, according to one's point of
view Grant had been drawn by Jay Gould, or Jay Gould had been
misled by Grant. One could hardly doubt that both of them were
astonished and disgusted by the result; but neither Jay Gould nor
any other astute American mind -- still less the complex Jew --
could ever have accustomed itself to the incredible and
inexplicable lapses of Grant's intelligence; and perhaps, on the
whole, Gould was the less mischievous victim, if victims they
both were. The same laxity that led Gould into a trap which might
easily have become the penitentiary, led the United States
Senate, the Executive departments and the Judiciary into
confusion, cross-purposes, and ill-temper that would have been
scandalous in a boarding-school of girls. For satirists or
comedians, the study was rich and endless, and they exploited its
corners with happy results, but a young man fresh from the rustic
simplicity of London noticed with horror that the grossest
satires on the American Senator and politician never failed to
excite the laughter and applause of every audience. Rich and poor
joined in throwing contempt on their own representatives. Society
laughed a vacant and meaningless derision over its own failure.
Nothing remained for a young man without position or power except
to laugh too.

  Yet the spectacle was no laughing matter to him, whatever it
might be to the public. Society is immoral and immortal; it can
afford to commit any kind of folly, and indulge in any sort of
vice; it cannot be killed, and the fragments that survive can
always laugh at the dead; but a young man has only one chance,
and brief time to seize it. Any one in power above him can
extinguish the chance. He is horribly at the mercy of fools and
cowards. One dull administration can rapidly drive out every
active subordinate. At Washington, in 1869-70, every intelligent
man about the Government prepared to go. The people would have
liked to go too, for they stood helpless before the chaos; some
laughed and some raved; all were disgusted; but they had to
content themselves by turning their backs and going to work
harder than ever on their railroads and foundries. They were
strong enough to carry even their politics. Only the helpless
remained stranded in Washington.

  The shrewdest statesman of all was Mr. Boutwell, who showed how
he understood the situation by turning out of the Treasury every
one who could interfere with his repose, and then locking himself
up in it, alone. What he did there, no one knew. His colleagues
asked him in vain. Not a word could they get from him, either in
the Cabinet or out of it, of suggestion or information on matters
even of vital interest. The Treasury as an active influence
ceased to exist. Mr. Boutwell waited with confidence for society
to drag his department out of the mire, as it was sure to do if
he waited long enough.

  Warned by his friends in the Cabinet as well as in the Treasury
that Mr. Boutwell meant to invite no support, and cared to
receive none, Adams had only the State and Interior Departments
left to serve. He wanted no better than to serve them. Opposition
was his horror; pure waste of energy; a union with Northern
Democrats and Southern rebels who never had much in common with
any Adams, and had never shown any warm interest about them
except to drive them from public life. If Mr. Boutwell turned him
out of the Treasury with the indifference or contempt that made
even a beetle helpless, Mr. Fish opened the State Department
freely, and seemed to talk with as much openness as any
newspaper-man could ask. At all events, Adams could cling to this
last plank of salvation, and make himself perhaps the recognized
champion of Mr. Fish in the New York press. He never once thought
of his disaster between Seward and Sumner in 1861. Such an
accident could not occur again. Fish and Sumner were inseparable,
and their policy was sure to be safe enough for support. No
mosquito could be so unlucky as to be caught a second time
between a Secretary and a Senator who were both his friends.

  This dream of security lasted hardly longer than that of 1861.
Adams saw Sumner take possession of the Department, and he
approved; he saw Sumner seize the British mission for Motley, and
he was delighted; but when he renewed his relations with Sumner
in the winter of 1869-70, he began slowly to grasp the idea that
Sumner had a foreign policy of his own which he proposed also to
force on the Department. This was not all. Secretary Fish seemed
to have vanished. Besides the Department of State over which he
nominally presided in the Infant Asylum on Fourteenth Street,
there had risen a Department of Foreign Relations over which
Senator Sumner ruled with a high hand at the Capitol; and,
finally, one clearly made out a third Foreign Office in the War
Department, with President Grant himself for chief, pressing a
policy of extension in the West Indies which no Northeastern man
ever approved. For his life, Adams could not learn where to place
himself among all these forces. Officially he would have followed
the responsible Secretary of State, but he could not find the
Secretary. Fish seemed to be friendly towards Sumner, and docile
towards Grant, but he asserted as yet no policy of his own. As
for Grant's policy, Adams never had a chance to know fully what
it was, but, as far as he did know, he was ready to give it
ardent support. The difficulty came only when he heard Sumner's
views, which, as he had reason to know, were always commands, to
be disregarded only by traitors.

  Little by little, Sumner unfolded his foreign policy, and Adams
gasped with fresh astonishment at every new article of the creed.
To his profound regret he heard Sumner begin by imposing his veto
on all extension within the tropics; which cost the island of St.
Thomas to the United States, besides the Bay of Samana as an
alternative, and ruined Grant's policy. Then he listened with
incredulous stupor while Sumner unfolded his plan for
concentrating and pressing every possible American claim against
England, with a view of compelling the cession of Canada to the
United States.

[combinator]

  Adams did not then know -- in fact, he never knew, or could
find any one to tell him -- what was going on behind the doors of
the White House. He doubted whether Mr. Fish or Bancroft Davis
knew much more than he. The game of cross-purposes was as
impenetrable in Foreign Affairs as in the Gold Conspiracy.
President Grant let every one go on, but whom he supported, Adams
could not be expected to divine. One point alone seemed clear to
a man -- no longer so very young -- who had lately come from a
seven years' residence in London. He thought he knew as much as
any one in Washington about England, and he listened with the
more perplexity to Mr. Sumner's talk, because it opened the
gravest doubts of Sumner's sanity. If war was his object, and
Canada were worth it, Sumner's scheme showed genius, and Adams
was ready to treat it seriously; but if he thought he could
obtain Canada from England as a voluntary set-off to the Alabama
Claims, he drivelled. On the point of fact, Adams was as
peremptory as Sumner on the point of policy, but he could only
wonder whether Mr. Fish would dare say it. When at last Mr. Fish
did say it, a year later, Sumner publicly cut his acquaintance.
Adams was the more puzzled because he could not believe Sumner so
mad as to quarrel both with Fish and with Grant. A quarrel with
Seward and Andrew Johnson was bad enough, and had profited no
one; but a quarrel with General Grant was lunacy. Grant might be
whatever one liked, as far as morals or temper or intellect were
concerned, but he was not a man whom a light-weight cared to
challenge for a fight; and Sumner, whether he knew it or not, was
a very light weight in the Republican Party, if separated from
his Committee of Foreign Relations. As a party manager he had not
the weight of half-a-dozen men whose very names were unknown to
him.

  Between these great forces, where was the Administration and
how was one to support it? One must first find it, and even then
it was not easily caught. Grant's simplicity was more
disconcerting than the complexity of a Talleyrand. Mr. Fish
afterwards told Adams, with the rather grim humor he sometimes
indulged in, that Grant took a dislike to Motley because he
parted his hair in the middle. Adams repeated the story to
Godkin, who made much play with it in the Nation, till it was
denied. Adams saw no reason why it should be denied. Grant had as
good a right to dislike the hair as the head, if the hair seemed
to him a part of it. Very shrewd men have formed very sound
judgments on less material than hair -- on clothes, for example,
according to Mr. Carlyle, or on a pen, according to Cardinal de
Retz -- and nine men in ten could hardly give as good a reason as
hair for their likes or dislikes. In truth, Grant disliked Motley
at sight, because they had nothing in common; and for the same
reason he disliked Sumner. For the same reason he would be sure
to dislike Adams if Adams gave him a chance. Even Fish could not
be quite sure of Grant, except for the powerful effect which
wealth had, or appeared to have, on Grant's imagination.

  The quarrel that lowered over the State Department did not
break in storm till July, 1870, after Adams had vanished, but
another quarrel, almost as fatal to Adams as that between Fish
and Sumner, worried him even more. Of all members of the Cabinet,
the one whom he had most personal interest in cultivating was
Attorney General Hoar. The Legal Tender decision, which had been
the first stumbling-block to Adams at Washington, grew in
interest till it threatened to become something more serious than
a block; it fell on one's head like a plaster ceiling, and could
not be escaped. The impending battle between Fish and Sumner was
nothing like so serious as the outbreak between Hoar and Chief
Justice Chase. Adams had come to Washington hoping to support the
Executive in a policy of breaking down the Senate, but he never
dreamed that he would be required to help in breaking down the
Supreme Court. Although, step by step, he had been driven, like
the rest of the world, to admit that American society had
outgrown most of its institutions, he still clung to the Supreme
Court, much as a churchman clings to his bishops, because they
are his only symbol of unity; his last rag of Right. Between the
Executive and the Legislature, citizens could have no Rights;
they were at the mercy of Power. They had created the Court to
protect them from unlimited Power, and it was little enough
protection at best. Adams wanted to save the independence of the
Court at least for his lifetime, and could not conceive that the
Executive should wish to overthrow it.

  Frank Walker shared this feeling, and, by way of helping the
Court, he had promised Adams for the North American Review an
article on the history of the Legal Tender Act, founded on a
volume just then published by Spaulding, the putative father of
the legal-tender clause in 1861. Secretary Jacob D. Cox, who
alone sympathized with reform, saved from Boutwell's decree of
banishment such reformers as he could find place for, and he
saved Walker for a time by giving him the Census of 1870. Walker
was obliged to abandon his article for the North American in
order to devote himself to the Census. He gave Adams his notes,
and Adams completed the article.

  He had not toiled in vain over the Bank of England Restriction.
He knew enough about Legal Tender to leave it alone. If the banks
and bankers wanted fiat money, fiat money was good enough for a
newspaper-man; and if they changed about and wanted "intrinsic"
value, gold and silver came equally welcome to a writer who was
paid half the wages of an ordinary mechanic. He had no notion of
attacking or defending Legal Tender; his object was to defend the
Chief Justice and the Court. Walker argued that, whatever might
afterwards have been the necessity for legal tender, there was no
necessity for it at the time the Act was passed. With the help of
the Chief Justice's recollections, Adams completed the article,
which appeared in the April number of the North American. Its
ferocity was Walker's, for Adams never cared to abandon the knife
for the hatchet, but Walker reeked of the army and the
Springfield Republican, and his energy ran away with Adams's
restraint. The unfortunate Spaulding complained loudly of this
treatment, not without justice, but the article itself had
serious historical value, for Walker demolished every shred of
Spaulding's contention that legal tender was necessary at the
time; and the Chief Justice told his part of the story with
conviction. The Chief Justice seemed to be pleased. The Attorney
General, pleased or not, made no sign. The article had enough
historical interest to induce Adams to reprint it in a volume of
Essays twenty years afterwards; but its historical value was not
its point in education. The point was that, in spite of the best
intentions, the plainest self-interest, and the strongest wish to
escape further trouble, the article threw Adams into opposition.
Judge Hoar, like Boutwell, was implacable.

  Hoar went on to demolish the Chief Justice; while Henry Adams
went on, drifting further and further from the Administration. He
did this in common with all the world, including Hoar himself.
Scarcely a newspaper in the country kept discipline. The New York
Tribune was one of the most criminal. Dissolution of ties in
every direction marked the dissolution of temper, and the Senate
Chamber became again a scene of irritated egotism that passed
ridicule. Senators quarrelled with each other, and no one
objected, but they picked quarrels also with the Executive and
threw every Department into confusion. Among others they
quarrelled with Hoar, and drove him from office.

  That Sumner and Hoar, the two New Englanders in great position
who happened to be the two persons most necessary for his success
at Washington, should be the first victims of Grant's lax rule,
must have had some meaning for Adams's education, if Adams could
only have understood what it was. He studied, but failed.
Sympathy with him was not their weakness. Directly, in the form
of help, he knew he could hope as little from them as from
Boutwell. So far from inviting attachment they, like other New
Englanders, blushed to own a friend. Not one of the whole
delegation would ever, of his own accord, try to help Adams or
any other young man who did not beg for it, although they would
always accept whatever services they had not to pay for. The
lesson of education was not there. The selfishness of politics
was the earliest of all political education, and Adams had
nothing to learn from its study; but the situation struck him as
curious -- so curious that he devoted years to reflecting upon
it. His four most powerful friends had matched themselves, two
and two, and were fighting in pairs to a finish; Sumner-Fish;
Chase-Hoar; with foreign affairs and the judiciary as prizes!
What value had the fight in education?

  Adams was puzzled, and was not the only puzzled bystander. The
stage-type of statesman was amusing, whether as Roscoe Conkling
or Colonel Mulberry Sellers, but what was his value? The
statesmen of the old type, whether Sumners or Conklings or Hoars
or Lamars, were personally as honest as human nature could
produce. They trod with lofty contempt on other people's jobs,
especially when there was good in them. Yet the public thought
that Sumner and Conkling cost the country a hundred times more
than all the jobs they ever trod on; just as Lamar and the old
Southern statesmen, who were also honest in money-matters, cost
the country a civil war. This painful moral doubt worried Adams
less than it worried his friends and the public, but it affected
the whole field of politics for twenty years. The newspapers
discussed little else than the alleged moral laxity of Grant,
Garfield, and Blaine. If the press were taken seriously, politics
turned on jobs, and some of Adams's best friends, like Godkin,
ruined their influence by their insistence on points of morals.
Society hesitated, wavered, oscillated between harshness and
laxity, pitilessly sacrificing the weak, and deferentially
following the strong. In spite of all such criticism, the public
nominated Grant, Garfield, and Blaine for the Presidency, and
voted for them afterwards, not seeming to care for the question;
until young men were forced to see that either some new standard
must be created, or none could be upheld. The moral law had
expired -- like the Constitution.

  Grant's administration outraged every rule of ordinary decency,
but scores of promising men, whom the country could not well
spare, were ruined in saying so. The world cared little for
decency. What it wanted, it did not know; probably a system that
would work, and men who could work it; but it found neither.
Adams had tried his own little hands on it, and had failed. His
friends had been driven out of Washington or had taken to
fisticuffs. He himself sat down and stared helplessly into the
future.

  The result was a review of the Session for the July North
American into which he crammed and condensed everything he
thought he had observed and all he had been told. He thought it
good history then, and he thought it better twenty years
afterwards; he thought it even good enough to reprint. As it
happened, in the process of his devious education, this "Session"
of 1869-70 proved to be his last study in current politics, and
his last dying testament as a humble member of the press. As
such, he stood by it. He could have said no more, had he gone on
reviewing every session in the rest of the century. The political
dilemma was as clear in 1870 as it was likely to be in 1970 The
system of 1789 had broken down, and with it the
eighteenth-century fabric of a priori, or moral, principles.
Politicians had tacitly given it up. Grant's administration
marked the avowal. Nine-tenths of men's political energies must
henceforth be wasted on expedients to piece out -- to patch --
or, in vulgar language, to tinker -- the political machine as
often as it broke down. Such a system, or want of system, might
last centuries, if tempered by an occasional revolution or civil
war; but as a machine, it was, or soon would be, the poorest in
the world -- the clumsiest -- the most inefficient

  Here again was an education, but what it was worth he could not
guess. Indeed, when he raised his eyes to the loftiest and most
triumphant results of politics -- to Mr. Boutwell, Mr. Conkling
or even Mr. Sumner -- he could not honestly say that such an
education, even when it carried one up to these unattainable
heights, was worth anything. There were men, as yet standing on
lower levels -- clever and amusing men like Garfield and Blaine
-- who took no little pleasure in making fun of the senatorial
demi-gods, and who used language about Grant himself which the
North American Review would not have admitted. One asked
doubtfully what was likely to become of these men in their turn.
What kind of political ambition was to result from this
destructive political education?

  Yet the sum of political life was, or should have been, the
attainment of a working political system. Society needed to reach
it. If moral standards broke down, and machinery stopped working,
new morals and machinery of some sort had to be invented. An
eternity of Grants, or even of Garfields or of Conklings or of
Jay Goulds, refused to be conceived as possible. Practical
Americans laughed, and went their way. Society paid them to be
practical. Whenever society cared to pay Adams, he too would be
practical, take his pay, and hold his tongue; but meanwhile he
was driven to associate with Democratic Congressmen and educate
them. He served David Wells as an active assistant professor of
revenue reform, and turned his rooms into a college. The
Administration drove him, and thousands of other young men, into
active enmity, not only to Grant, but to the system or want of
system, which took possession of the President. Every hope or
thought which had brought Adams to Washington proved to be
absurd. No one wanted him; no one wanted any of his friends in
reform; the blackmailer alone was the normal product of politics
as of business.

  All this was excessively amusing. Adams never had been so busy,
so interested, so much in the thick of the crowd. He knew
Congressmen by scores and newspaper-men by the dozen. He wrote
for his various organs all sorts of attacks and defences. He
enjoyed the life enormously, and found himself as happy as Sam
Ward or Sunset Cox; much happier than his friends Fish or J. D.
Cox, or Chief Justice Chase or Attorney General Hoar or Charles
Sumner. When spring came, he took to the woods, which were best
of all, for after the first of April, what Maurice de Guerin
called "the vast maternity" of nature showed charms more
voluptuous than the vast paternity of the United States Senate.
Senators were less ornamental than the dogwood or even the
judas-tree. They were, as a rule, less good company. Adams
astonished himself by remarking what a purified charm was lent to
the Capitol by the greatest possible distance, as one caught
glimpses of the dome over miles of forest foliage. At such
moments he pondered on the distant beauty of St. Peter's and the
steps of Ara Coeli.

  Yet he shortened his spring, for he needed to get back to
London for the season. He had finished his New York "Gold
Conspiracy," which he meant for his friend Henry Reeve and the
Edinburgh Review. It was the best piece of work he had done, but
this was not his reason for publishing it in England. The Erie
scandal had provoked a sort of revolt among respectable New
Yorkers, as well as among some who were not so respectable; and
the attack on Erie was beginning to promise success. London was a
sensitive spot for the Erie management, and it was thought well
to strike them there, where they were socially and financially
exposed. The tactics suited him in another way, for any
expression about America in an English review attracted ten times
the attention in America that the same article would attract in
the North American. Habitually the American dailies reprinted
such articles in full. Adams wanted to escape the terrors of
copyright, his highest ambition was to be pirated and advertised
free of charge, since in any case, his pay was nothing. Under the
excitement of chase he was becoming a pirate himself, and liked
it.

[combinator]

CHAPTER XIX

CHAOS (1870)

  ONE fine May afternoon in 1870 Adams drove again up St. James's
Street wondering more than ever at the marvels of life. Nine
years had passed since the historic entrance of May, 1861.
Outwardly London was the same. Outwardly Europe showed no great
change. Palmerston and Russell were forgotten; but Disraeli and
Gladstone were still much alive. One's friends were more than
ever prominent. John Bright was in the Cabinet; W. E. Forster was
about to enter it; reform ran riot. Never had the sun of progress
shone so fair. Evolution from lower to higher raged like an
epidemic. Darwin was the greatest of prophets in the most
evolutionary of worlds. Gladstone had overthrown the Irish
Church; was overthrowing the Irish landlords; was trying to pass
an Education Act. Improvement, prosperity, power, were leaping
and bounding over every country road. Even America, with her Erie
scandals and Alabama Claims, hardly made a discordant note.

  At the Legation, Motley ruled; the long Adams reign was
forgotten; the rebellion had passed into history. In society no
one cared to recall the years before the Prince of Wales. The
smart set had come to their own. Half the houses that Adams had
frequented, from 1861 to 1865, were closed or closing in 1870.
Death had ravaged one's circle of friends. Mrs. Milnes Gaskell
and her sister Miss Charlotte Wynn were both dead, and Mr. James
Milnes Gaskell was no longer in Parliament. That field of
education seemed closed too.

  One found one's self in a singular frame of mind -- more
eighteenth-century than ever -- almost rococo -- and unable to
catch anywhere the cog-wheels of evolution. Experience ceased to
educate. London taught less freely than of old. That one bad
style was leading to another -- that the older men were more
amusing than the younger -- that Lord Houghton's breakfast-table
showed gaps hard to fill -- that there were fewer men one wanted
to meet -- these, and a hundred more such remarks, helped little
towards a quicker and more intelligent activity. For English
reforms Adams cared nothing. The reforms were themselves
mediaeval. The Education Bill of his friend W. E. Forster seemed
to him a guaranty against all education he had use for. He
resented change. He would have kept the Pope in the Vatican and
the Queen at Windsor Castle as historical monuments. He did not
care to Americanize Europe. The Bastille or the Ghetto was a
curiosity worth a great deal of money, if preserved; and so was a
Bishop; so was Napoleon III. The tourist was the great
conservative who hated novelty and adored dirt. Adams came back
to London without a thought of revolution or restlessness or
reform. He wanted amusement, quiet, and gaiety.

  Had he not been born in 1838 under the shadow of Boston State
House, and been brought up in the Early Victorian epoch, he would
have cast off his old skin, and made his court to Marlborough
House, in partnership with the American woman and the Jew banker.
Common-sense dictated it; but Adams and his friends were
unfashionable by some law of Anglo-Saxon custom -- some innate
atrophy of mind. Figuring himself as already a man of action, and
rather far up towards the front, he had no idea of making a new
effort or catching up with a new world. He saw nothing ahead of
him. The world was never more calm. He wanted to talk with
Ministers about the Alabama Claims, because he looked on the
Claims as his own special creation, discussed between him and his
father long before they had been discussed by Government; he
wanted to make notes for his next year's articles; but he had not
a thought that, within three months, his world was to be upset,
and he under it. Frank Palgrave came one day, more contentious,
contemptuous, and paradoxical than ever, because Napoleon III
seemed to be threatening war with Germany. Palgrave said that
"Germany would beat France into scraps" if there was war. Adams
thought not. The chances were always against catastrophes. No one
else expected great changes in Europe. Palgrave was always
extreme; his language was incautious -- violent!

  In this year of all years, Adams lost sight of education.
Things began smoothly, and London glowed with the pleasant sense
of familiarity and dinners. He sniffed with voluptuous delight
the coal-smoke of Cheapside and revelled in the architecture of
Oxford Street. May Fair never shone so fair to Arthur Pendennis
as it did to the returned American. The country never smiled its
velvet smile of trained and easy hostess as it did when he was so
lucky as to be asked on a country visit. He loved it all --
everything -- had always loved it! He felt almost attached to the
Royal Exchange. He thought he owned the St. James's Club. He
patronized the Legation.

  The first shock came lightly, as though Nature were playing
tricks on her spoiled child, though she had thus far not exerted
herself to spoil him. Reeve refused the Gold Conspiracy. Adams
had become used to the idea that he was free of the Quarterlies,
and that his writing would be printed of course; but he was
stunned by the reason of refusal. Reeve said it would bring
half-a-dozen libel suits on him. One knew that the power of Erie
was almost as great in England as in America, but one was hardly
prepared to find it controlling the Quarterlies. The English
press professed to be shocked in 1870 by the Erie scandal, as it
had professed in 1860 to be shocked by the scandal of slavery,
but when invited to support those who were trying to abate these
scandals, the English press said it was afraid. To Adams, Reeve's
refusal seemed portentous. He and his brother and the North
American Review were running greater risks every day, and no one
thought of fear. That a notorious story, taken bodily from an
official document, should scare the Endinburgh Review into
silence for fear of Jay Gould and Jim Fisk, passed even Adams's
experience of English eccentricity, though it was large.

  He gladly set down Reeve's refusal of the Gold Conspiracy to
respectability and editorial law, but when he sent the manuscript
on to the Quarterly, the editor of the Quarterly also refused it.
The literary standard of the two Quarterlies was not so high as
to suggest that the article was illiterate beyond the power of an
active and willing editor to redeem it. Adams had no choice but
to realize that he had to deal in 1870 with the same old English
character of 1860, and the same inability in himself to
understand it. As usual, when an ally was needed, the American
was driven into the arms of the radicals. Respectability,
everywhere and always, turned its back the moment one asked to do
it a favor. Called suddenly away from England, he despatched the
article, at the last moment, to the Westminster Review and heard
no more about it for nearly six months.

  He had been some weeks in London when he received a telegram
from his brother-in-law at the Bagni di Lucca telling him that
his sister had been thrown from a cab and injured, and that he
had better come on. He started that night, and reached the Bagni
di Lucca on the second day. Tetanus had already set in.

  The last lesson -- the sum and term of education -- began then.
He had passed through thirty years of rather varied experience
without having once felt the shell of custom broken. He had never
seen Nature -- only her surface -- the sugar-coating that she
shows to youth. Flung suddenly in his face, with the harsh
brutality of chance, the terror of the blow stayed by him
thenceforth for life, until repetition made it more than the will
could struggle with; more than he could call on himself to bear.
He found his sister, a woman of forty, as gay and brilliant in
the terrors of lockjaw as she had been in the careless fun of
1859, lying in bed in consequence of a miserable cab-accident
that had bruised her foot. Hour by hour the muscles grew rigid,
while the mind remained bright, until after ten days of fiendish
torture she died in convulsion.

  One had heard and read a great deal about death, and even seen
a little of it, and knew by heart the thousand commonplaces of
religion and poetry which seemed to deaden one's senses and veil
the horror. Society being immortal, could put on immortality at
will. Adams being mortal, felt only the mortality. Death took
features altogether new to him, in these rich and sensuous
surroundings. Nature enjoyed it, played with it, the horror added
to her charm, she liked the torture, and smothered her victim
with caresses. Never had one seen her so winning. The hot Italian
summer brooded outside, over the market-place and the picturesque
peasants, and, in the singular color of the Tuscan atmosphere,
the hills and vineyards of the Apennines seemed bursting with
mid-summer blood. The sick-room itself glowed with the Italian
joy of life; friends filled it; no harsh northern lights pierced
the soft shadows; even the dying women shared the sense of the
Italian summer, the soft, velvet air, the humor, the courage, the
sensual fulness of Nature and man. She faced death, as women
mostly do, bravely and even gaily, racked slowly to
unconsciousness, but yielding only to violence, as a soldier
sabred in battle. For many thousands of years, on these hills and
plains, Nature had gone on sabring men and women with the same
air of sensual pleasure.

  Impressions like these are not reasoned or catalogued in the
mind; they are felt as part of violent emotion; and the mind that
feels them is a different one from that which reasons; it is
thought of a different power and a different person. The first
serious consciousness of Nature's gesture -- her attitude towards
life -- took form then as a phantasm, a nightmare, an insanity of
force. For the first time, the stage-scenery of the senses
collapsed; the human mind felt itself stripped naked, vibrating
in a void of shapeless energies, with resistless mass, colliding,
crushing, wasting, and destroying what these same energies had
created and labored from eternity to perfect. Society became
fantastic, a vision of pantomime with a mechanical motion; and
its so-called thought merged in the mere sense of life, and
pleasure in the sense. The usual anodynes of social medicine
became evident artifice. Stoicism was perhaps the best; religion
was the most human; but the idea that any personal deity could
find pleasure or profit in torturing a poor woman, by accident,
with a fiendish cruelty known to man only in perverted and insane
temperaments, could not be held for a moment. For pure blasphemy,
it made pure atheism a comfort. God might be, as the Church said,
a Substance, but He could not be a Person.

  With nerves strained for the first time beyond their power of
tension, he slowly travelled northwards with his friends, and
stopped for a few days at Ouchy to recover his balance in a new
world; for the fantastic mystery of coincidences had made the
world, which he thought real, mimic and reproduce the distorted
nightmare of his personal horror. He did not yet know it, and he
was twenty years in finding it out; but he had need of all the
beauty of the Lake below and of the Alps above, to restore the
finite to its place. For the first time in his life, Mont Blanc
for a moment looked to him what it was -- a chaos of anarchic and
purposeless forces -- and he needed days of repose to see it
clothe itself again with the illusions of his senses, the white
purity of its snows, the splendor of its light, and the infinity
of its heavenly peace. Nature was kind; Lake Geneva was beautiful
beyond itself, and the Alps put on charms real as terrors; but
man became chaotic, and before the illusions of Nature were
wholly restored, the illusions of Europe suddenly vanished,
leaving a new world to learn.

  On July 4, all Europe had been in peace; on July 14, Europe was
in full chaos of war. One felt helpless and ignorant, but one
might have been king or kaiser without feeling stronger to deal
with the chaos. Mr. Gladstone was as much astounded as Adams; the
Emperor Napoleon was nearly as stupefied as either, and Bismarck:
himself hardly knew how he did it. As education, the out-break of
the war was wholly lost on a man dealing with death hand-to-hand,
who could not throw it aside to look at it across the Rhine. Only
when he got up to Paris, he began to feel the approach of
catastrophe. Providence set up no affiches to announce the
tragedy. Under one's eyes France cut herself adrift, and floated
off, on an unknown stream, towards a less known ocean. Standing
on the curb of the Boulevard, one could see as much as though one
stood by the side of the Emperor or in command of an army corps.
The effect was lurid. The public seemed to look on the war, as it
had looked on the wars of Louis XIV and Francis I, as a branch of
decorative art. The French, like true artists, always regarded
war as one of the fine arts. Louis XIV practiced it; Napoleon I
perfected it; and Napoleon III had till then pursued it in the
same spirit with singular success. In Paris, in July, 1870, the
war was brought out like an opera of Meyerbeer. One felt one's
self a supernumerary hired to fill the scene. Every evening at
the theatre the comedy was interrupted by order, and one stood up
by order, to join in singing the Marseillaise to order. For
nearly twenty years one had been forbidden to sing the
Marseillaise under any circumstances, but at last regiment after
regiment marched through the streets shouting "Marchons!" while
the bystanders cared not enough to join. Patriotism seemed to
have been brought out of the Government stores, and distributed
by grammes per capita. One had seen one's own people dragged
unwillingly into a war, and had watched one's own regiments march
to the front without sign of enthusiasm; on the contrary, most
serious, anxious, and conscious of the whole weight of the
crisis; but in Paris every one conspired to ignore the crisis,
which every one felt at hand. Here was education for the million,
but the lesson was intricate. Superficially Napoleon and his
Ministers and marshals were playing a game against Thiers and
Gambetta. A bystander knew almost as little as they did about the
result. How could Adams prophesy that in another year or two,
when he spoke of his Paris and its tastes, people would smile at
his dotage?

  As soon as he could, he fled to England and once more took
refuge in the profound peace of Wenlock Abbey. Only the few
remaining monks, undisturbed by the brutalities of Henry VIII --
three or four young Englishmen -- survived there, with Milnes
Gaskell acting as Prior. The August sun was warm; the calm of the
Abbey was ten times secular; not a discordant sound -- hardly a
sound of any sort except the cawing of the ancient rookery at
sunset -- broke the stillness; and, after the excitement of the
last month, one felt a palpable haze of peace brooding over the
Edge and the Welsh Marches. Since the reign of Pterspis, nothing
had greatly changed; nothing except the monks. Lying on the turf
the ground littered with newspapers, the monks studied the war
correspondence. In one respect Adams had succeeded in educating
himself; he had learned to follow a campaign.

[combinator]

  While at Wenlock, he received a letter from President Eliot
inviting him to take an Assistant Professorship of History, to be
created shortly at Harvard College. After waiting ten or a dozen
years for some one to show consciousness of his existence, even a
Terabratula would be pleased and grateful for a compliment which
implied that the new President of Harvard College wanted his
help; but Adams knew nothing about history, and much less about
teaching, while he knew more than enough about Harvard College;
and wrote at once to thank President Eliot, with much regret that
the honor should be above his powers. His mind was full of other
matters. The summer, from which he had expected only amusement
and social relations with new people, had ended in the most
intimate personal tragedy, and the most terrific political
convulsion he had ever known or was likely to know. He had failed
in every object of his trip. The Quarterlies had refused his best
essay. He had made no acquaintances and hardly picked up the old
ones. He sailed from Liverpool, on September 1, to begin again
where he had started two years before, but with no longer a hope
of attaching himself to a President or a party or a press. He was
a free lance and no other career stood in sight or mind. To that
point education had brought him.

  Yet he found, on reaching home, that he had not done quite so
badly as he feared. His article on the Session in the July North
American had made a success. Though he could not quite see what
partisan object it served, he heard with flattered astonishment
that it had been reprinted by the Democratic National Committee
and circulated as a campaign document by the hundred thousand
copies. He was henceforth in opposition, do what he might; and a
Massachusetts Democrat, say what he pleased; while his only
reward or return for this partisan service consisted in being
formally answered by Senator Timothy Howe, of Wisconsin, in a
Republican campaign document, presumed to be also freely
circulated, in which the Senator, besides refuting his opinions,
did him the honor -- most unusual and picturesque in a Senator's
rhetoric -- of likening him to a begonia.

  The begonia is, or then was, a plant of such senatorial
qualities as to make the simile, in intention, most flattering.
Far from charming in its refinement, the begonia was remarkable
for curious and showy foliage; it was conspicuous; it seemed to
have no useful purpose; and it insisted on standing always in the
most prominent positions. Adams would have greatly liked to be a
begonia in Washington, for this was rather his ideal of the
successful statesman, and he thought about it still more when the
Westminster Review for October brought him his article on the
Gold Conspiracy, which was also instantly pirated on a great
scale. Piratical he was himself henceforth driven to be, and he
asked only to be pirated, for he was sure not to be paid; but the
honors of piracy resemble the colors of the begonia; they are
showy but not useful. Here was a tour de force he had never
dreamed himself equal to performing: two long, dry, quarterly,
thirty or forty page articles, appearing in quick succession, and
pirated for audiences running well into the hundred thousands;
and not one person, man or woman, offering him so much as a
congratulation, except to call him a begonia.

  Had this been all, life might have gone on very happily as
before, but the ways of America to a young person of literary and
political tastes were such as the so-called evolution of
civilized man had not before evolved. No sooner had Adams made at
Washington what he modestly hoped was a sufficient success, than
his whole family set on him to drag him away. For the first time
since 1861 his father interposed; his mother entreated; and his
brother Charles argued and urged that he should come to Harvard
College. Charles had views of further joint operations in a new
field. He said that Henry had done at Washington all he could
possibly do; that his position there wanted solidity; that he
was, after all, an adventurer; that a few years in Cambridge
would give him personal weight; that his chief function was not
to be that of teacher, but that of editing the North American
Review which was to be coupled with the professorship, and would
lead to the daily press. In short, that he needed the university
more than the university needed him.

  Henry knew the university well enough to know that the
department of history was controlled by one of the most astute
and ideal administrators in the world -- Professor Gurney -- and
that it was Gurney who had established the new professorship, and
had cast his net over Adams to carry the double load of mediaeval
history and the Review. He could see no relation whatever between
himself and a professorship. He sought education; he did not sell
it. He knew no history; he knew only a few historians; his
ignorance was mischievous because it was literary, accidental,
indifferent. On the other hand he knew Gurney, and felt much
influenced by his advice. One cannot take one's self quite
seriously in such matters; it could not much affect the sum of
solar energies whether one went on dancing with girls in
Washington, or began talking to boys at Cambridge. The good
people who thought it did matter had a sort of right to guide.
One could not reject their advice; still less disregard their
wishes.

  The sum of the matter was that Henry went out to Cambridge and
had a few words with President Eliot which seemed to him almost
as American as the talk about diplomacy with his father ten years
before. "But, Mr. President," urged Adams, "I know nothing about
Mediaeval History." With the courteous manner and bland smile so
familiar for the next generation of Americans Mr. Eliot mildly
but firmly replied, "If you will point out to me any one who
knows more, Mr. Adams, I will appoint him." The answer was
neither logical nor convincing, but Adams could not meet it
without overstepping his privileges. He could not say that, under
the circumstances, the appointment of any professor at all seemed
to him unnecessary.

  So, at twenty-four hours' notice, he broke his life in halves
again in order to begin a new education, on lines he had not
chosen, in subjects for which he cared less than nothing; in a
place he did not love, and before a future which repelled.
Thousands of men have to do the same thing, but his case was
peculiar because he had no need to do it. He did it because his
best and wisest friends urged it, and he never could make up his
mind whether they were right or not. To him this kind of
education was always false. For himself he had no doubts. He
thought it a mistake; but his opinion did not prove that it was
one, since, in all probability, whatever he did would be more or
less a mistake. He had reached cross-roads of education which all
led astray. What he could gain at Harvard College he did not
know, but in any case it was nothing he wanted. What he lost at
Washington he could partly see, but in any case it was not
fortune. Grant's administration wrecked men by thousands, but
profited few. Perhaps Mr. Fish was the solitary exception. One
might search the whole list of Congress, Judiciary, and Executive
during the twenty-five years 1870 to 1895, and find little but
damaged reputation. The period was poor in purpose and barren in
results.

  Henry Adams, if not the rose, lived as near it as any
politician, and knew, more or less, all the men in any way
prominent at Washington, or knew all about them. Among them, in
his opinion, the best equipped, the most active-minded, and most
industrious was Abram Hewitt, who sat in Congress for a dozen
years, between 1874 and 1886, sometimes leading the House and
always wielding influence second to none. With nobody did Adams
form closer or longer relations than with Mr. Hewitt, whom he
regarded as the most useful public man in Washington; and he was
the more struck by Hewitt's saying, at the end of his laborious
career as legislator, that he left behind him no permanent result
except the Act consolidating the Surveys. Adams knew no other man
who had done so much, unless Mr. Sherman's legislation is
accepted as an instance of success. Hewitt's nearest rival would
probably have been Senator Pendleton who stood father to civil
service reform in 1882, an attempt to correct a vice that should
never have been allowed to be born. These were the men who
succeeded.

  The press stood in much the same light. No editor, no political
writer, and no public administrator achieved enough good
reputation to preserve his memory for twenty years. A number of
them achieved bad reputations, or damaged good ones that had been

gained in the Civil War. On the whole, even for Senators,
diplomats, and Cabinet officers, the period was wearisome and
stale.

  None of Adams's generation profited by public activity unless
it were William C. Whitney, and even he could not be induced to
return to it. Such ambitions as these were out of one's reach,
but supposing one tried for what was feasible, attached one's
self closely to the Garfields, Arthurs, Frelinghuysens, Blaines,
Bayards, or Whitneys, who happened to hold office; and supposing
one asked for the mission to Belgium or Portugal, and obtained
it; supposing one served a term as Assistant Secretary or Chief
of Bureau; or, finally, supposing one had gone as sub-editor on
the New York Tribune or Times -- how much more education would
one have gained than by going to Harvard College? These questions
seemed better worth an answer than most of the questions on
examination papers at college or in the civil service; all the
more because one never found an answer to them, then or
afterwards, and because, to his mind, the value of American
society altogether was mixed up with the value of Washington.

  At first, the simple beginner, struggling with principles,
wanted throw off responsibility on the American people, whose
bare and toiling shoulders had to carry the load of every social
or political stupidity; but the American people had no more to do
with it than with the customs of Peking. American character might
perhaps account for it, but what accounted for American
character? All Boston, all New England, and all respectable New
York, including Charles Francis Adams the father and Charles
Francis Adams the son, agreed that Washington was no place for a
respectable young man. All Washington, including Presidents,
Cabinet officers, Judiciary, Senators, Congressmen, and clerks,
expressed the same opinion, and conspired to drive away every
young man who happened to be there or tried to approach. Not one
young man of promise remained in the Government service. All
drifted into opposition. The Government did not want them in
Washington. Adams's case was perhaps the strongest because he
thought he had done well. He was forced to guess it, since he
knew no one who would have risked so extravagant a step as that
of encouraging a young man in a literary career, or even in a
political one; society forbade it, as well as residence in a
political capital; but Harvard College must have seen some hope
for him, since it made him professor against his will; even the
publishers and editors of the North American Review must have
felt a certain amount of confidence in him, since they put the
Review in his hands. After all, the Review was the first literary
power in America, even though it paid almost as little in gold as
the United States Treasury. The degree of Harvard College might
bear a value as ephemeral as the commission of a President of the
United States; but the government of the college, measured by
money alone, and patronage, was a matter of more importance than
that of some branches of the national service. In social
position, the college was the superior of them all put together.
In knowledge, she could assert no superiority, since the
Government made no claims, and prided itself on ignorance. The
service of Harvard College was distinctly honorable; perhaps the
most honorable in America; and if Harvard College thought Henry
Adams worth employing at four dollars a day, why should
Washington decline his services when he asked nothing? Why should
he be dragged from a career he liked in a place he loved, into a
career he detested, in a place and climate he shunned? Was it
enough to satisfy him, that all America should call Washington
barren and dangerous? What made Washington more dangerous than
New York?

  The American character showed singular limitations which
sometimes drove the student of civilized man to despair. Crushed
by his own ignorance -- lost in the darkness of his own gropings
-- the scholar finds himself jostled of a sudden by a crowd of
men who seem to him ignorant that there is a thing called
ignorance; who have forgotten how to amuse themselves; who cannot
even understand that they are bored. The American thought of
himself as a restless, pushing, energetic, ingenious person,
always awake and trying to get ahead of his neighbors. Perhaps
this idea of the national character might be correct for New York
or Chicago; it was not correct for Washington. There the American
showed himself, four times in five, as a quiet, peaceful, shy
figure, rather in the mould of Abraham Lincoln, somewhat sad,
sometimes pathetic, once tragic; or like Grant, inarticulate,
uncertain, distrustful of himself, still more distrustful of
others, and awed by money. That the American, by temperament,
worked to excess, was true; work and whiskey were his stimulants;
work was a form of vice; but he never cared much for money or
power after he earned them. The amusement of the pursuit was all
the amusement he got from it; he had no use for wealth. Jim Fisk
alone seemed to know what he wanted; Jay Gould never did. At
Washington one met mostly such true Americans, but if one wanted
to know them better, one went to study them in Europe. Bored,
patient, helpless; pathetically dependent on his wife and
daughters; indulgent to excess; mostly a modest, decent,
excellent, valuable citizen; the American was to be met at every
railway station in Europe, carefully explaining to every listener
that the happiest day of his life would be the day he should land
on the pier at New York. He was ashamed to be amused; his mind no
longer answered to the stimulus of variety; he could not face a
new thought. All his immense strength his intense nervous energy,
his keen analytic perceptions, were oriented in one direction,
and he could not change it. Congress was full of such men; in the
Senate, Sumner was almost the only exception; in the Executive,
Grant and Boutwell were varieties of the type -- political
specimens -- pathetic in their helplessness to do anything with
power when it came to them. They knew not how to amuse
themselves; they could not conceive how other people were amused.
Work, whiskey, and cards were life. The atmosphere of political
Washington was theirs -- or was supposed by the outside world to
be in their control -- and this was the reason why the outside
world judged that Washington was fatal even for a young man of
thirty-two, who had passed through the whole variety of
temptations, in every capital of Europe, for a dozen years; who
never played cards, and who loathed whiskey.

[combinator]

CHAPTER XX

FAILURE (1871)

FAR back in childhood, among its earliest memories, Henry Adams
could recall his first visit to Harvard College. He must have
been nine years old when on one of the singularly gloomy winter
afternoons which beguiled Cambridgeport, his mother drove him out
to visit his aunt, Mrs. Everett. Edward Everett was then
President of the college and lived in the old President's House
on Harvard Square. The boy remembered the drawing-room, on the
left of the hall door, in which Mrs. Everett received them. He
remembered a marble greyhound in the corner. The house had an air
of colonial self-respect that impressed even a nine-year-old
child.

  When Adams closed his interview with President Eliot, he asked
the Bursar about his aunt's old drawing-room, for the house had
been turned to base uses. The room and the deserted kitchen
adjacent to it were to let. He took them. Above him, his brother
Brooks, then a law student, had rooms, with a private staircase.
Opposite was J. R. Dennett, a young instructor almost as literary
as Adams himself, and more rebellious to conventions. Inquiry
revealed a boarding-table, somewhere in the neighborhood, also
supposed to be superior in its class. Chauncey Wright, Francis
Wharton, Dennett, John Fiske, or their equivalents in learning
and lecture, were seen there, among three or four law students
like Brooks Adams. With these primitive arrangements, all of them
had to be satisfied. The standard was below that of Washington,
but it was, for the moment, the best.

  For the next nine months the Assistant Professor had no time to
waste on comforts or amusements. He exhausted all his strength in
trying to keep one day ahead of his duties. Often the stint ran
on, till night and sleep ran short. He could not stop to think
whether he were doing the work rightly. He could not get it done
to please him, rightly or wrongly, for he never could satisfy
himself what to do.

  The fault he had found with Harvard College as an undergraduate
must have been more or less just, for the college was making a
great effort to meet these self-criticisms, and had elected
President Eliot in 1869 to carry out its reforms. Professor
Gurney was one of the leading reformers, and had tried his hand
on his own department of History. The two full Professors of
History -- Torrey and Gurney, charming men both -- could not
cover the ground. Between Gurney's classical courses and Torrey's
modern ones, lay a gap of a thousand years, which Adams was
expected to fill. The students had already elected courses
numbered 1, 2, and 3, without knowing what was to be taught or
who was to teach. If their new professor had asked what idea was
in their minds, they must have replied that nothing at all was in
their minds, since their professor had nothing in his, and down
to the moment he took his chair and looked his scholars in the
face, he had given, as far as he could remember, an hour, more or
less, to the Middle Ages.

  Not that his ignorance troubled him! He knew enough to be
ignorant. His course had led him through oceans of ignorance; he
had tumbled from one ocean into another till he had learned to
swim; but even to him education was a serious thing. A parent
gives life, but as parent, gives no more. A murderer takes life,
but his deed stops there. A teacher affects eternity; he can
never tell where his influence stops. A teacher is expected to
teach truth, and may perhaps flatter himself that he does so, if
he stops with the alphabet or the multiplication table, as a
mother teaches truth by making her child eat with a spoon; but
morals are quite another truth and philosophy is more complex
still. A teacher must either treat history as a catalogue, a
record, a romance, or as an evolution; and whether he affirms or
denies evolution, he falls into all the burning faggots of the
pit. He makes of his scholars either priests or atheists,
plutocrats or socialists, judges or anarchists, almost in spite
of himself. In essence incoherent and immoral, history had either
to be taught as such -- or falsified.

  Adams wanted to do neither. He had no theory of evolution to
teach, and could not make the facts fit one. He had no fancy for
telling agreeable tales to amuse sluggish-minded boys, in order
to publish them afterwards as lectures. He could still less
compel his students to learn the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and the
Venerable Bede by heart. He saw no relation whatever between his
students and the Middle Ages unless it were the Church, and there
the ground was particularly dangerous. He knew better than though
he were a professional historian that the man who should solve
the riddle of the Middle Ages and bring them into the line of
evolution from past to present, would be a greater man than
Lamarck or Linnaeus; but history had nowhere broken down so
pitiably, or avowed itself so hopelessly bankrupt, as there.
Since Gibbon, the spectacle was almost a scandal. History had
lost even the sense of shame. It was a hundred years behind the
experimental sciences. For all serious purpose, it was less
instructive than Walter Scott and Alexandre Dumas.

  All this was without offence to Sir Henry Maine, Tyler,
McLennan, Buckle, Auguste Comte, and the various philosophers
who, from time to time, stirred the scandal, and made it more
scandalous. No doubt, a teacher might make some use of these
writers or their theories; but Adams could fit them into no
theory of his own. The college expected him to pass at least half
his time teaching the boys a few elementary dates and relations,
that they might not be a disgrace to the university. This was
formal; and he could frankly tell the boys that, provided they
passed their examinations, they might get their facts where they
liked, and use the teacher only for questions. The only privilege
a student had that was worth his claiming, was that of talking to
the professor, and the professor was bound to encourage it. His
only difficulty on that side was to get them to talk at all. He
had to devise schemes to find what they were thinking about, and
induce them to risk criticism from their fellows. Any large body
of students stifles the student. No man can instruct more than
half-a-dozen students at once. The whole problem of education is
one of its cost in money.

  The lecture system to classes of hundreds, which was very much
that of the twelfth century, suited Adams not at all. Barred from
philosophy and bored by facts, he wanted to teach his students
something not wholly useless. The number of students whose minds
were of an order above the average was, in his experience, barely
one in ten; the rest could not be much stimulated by any
inducements a teacher could suggest. All were respectable, and in
seven years of contact, Adams never had cause to complain of one;
but nine minds in ten take polish passively, like a hard surface;
only the tenth sensibly reacts.

  Adams thought that, as no one seemed to care what he did, he
would try to cultivate this tenth mind, though necessarily at the
expense of the other nine. He frankly acted on the rule that a
teacher, who knew nothing of his subject, should not pretend to
teach his scholars what he did not know, but should join them in
trying to find the best way of learning it. The rather
pretentious name of historical method was sometimes given to this
process of instruction, but the name smacked of German pedagogy,
and a young professor who respected neither history nor method,
and whose sole object of interest was his students' minds, fell
into trouble enough without adding to it a German parentage.

  The task was doomed to failure for a reason which he could not
control. Nothing is easier than to teach historical method, but,
when learned, it has little use. History is a tangled skein that
one may take up at any point, and break when one has unravelled
enough; but complexity precedes evolution. The Pteraspis grins
horribly from the closed entrance. One may not begin at the
beginning, and one has but the loosest relative truths to follow
up. Adams found himself obliged to force his material into some
shape to which a method could be applied. He could think only of
law as subject; the Law School as end; and he took, as victims of
his experiment, half-a-dozen highly intelligent young men who
seemed willing to work. The course began with the beginning, as
far as the books showed a beginning in primitive man, and came
down through the Salic Franks to the Norman English. Since no
textbooks existed, the professor refused to profess, knowing no
more than his students, and the students read what they pleased
and compared their results. As pedagogy, nothing could be more
triumphant. The boys worked like rabbits, and dug holes all over
the field of archaic society; no difficulty stopped them; unknown
languages yielded before their attack, and customary law became
familiar as the police court; undoubtedly they learned, after a
fashion, to chase an idea, like a hare, through as dense a
thicket of obscure facts as they were likely to meet at the bar;
but their teacher knew from his own experience that his wonderful
method led nowhere, and they would have to exert themselves to
get rid of it in the Law School even more than they exerted
themselves to acquire it in the college. Their science had no
system, and could have none, since its subject was merely
antiquarian. Try as hard as he might, the professor could not
make it actual.

  What was the use of training an active mind to waste its
energy? The experiments might in time train Adams as a professor,
but this result was still less to his taste. He wanted to help
the boys to a career, but not one of his many devices to
stimulate the intellectual reaction of the student's mind
satisfied either him or the students. For himself he was clear
that the fault lay in the system, which could lead only to
inertia. Such little knowledge of himself as he possessed
warranted him in affirming that his mind required conflict,
competition, contradiction even more than that of the student. He
too wanted a rank-list to set his name upon. His reform of the
system would have begun in the lecture-room at his own desk. He
would have seated a rival assistant professor opposite him, whose
business should be strictly limited to expressing opposite views.
Nothing short of this would ever interest either the professor or
the student; but of all university freaks, no irregularity
shocked the intellectual atmosphere so much as contradiction or
competition between teachers. In that respect the
thirteenth-century university system was worth the whole teaching
of the modern school.

  All his pretty efforts to create conflicts of thought among his
students failed for want of system. None met the needs of
instruction. In spite of President Eliot's reforms and his
steady, generous, liberal support, the system remained costly,
clumsy and futile. The university -- as far as it was represented
by Henry Adams -- produced at great waste of time and money
results not worth reaching.

  He made use of his lost two years of German schooling to
inflict their results on his students, and by a happy chance he
was in the full tide of fashion. The Germans were crowning their
new emperor at Versailles, and surrounding his head with a halo
of Pepins and Merwigs, Othos and Barbarossas. James Bryce had
even discovered the Holy Roman Empire. Germany was never so
powerful, and the Assistant Professor of History had nothing else
as his stock in trade. He imposed Germany on his scholars with a
heavy hand. He was rejoiced; but he sometimes doubted whether
they should be grateful. On the whole, he was content neither
with what he had taught nor with the way he had taught it. The
seven years he passed in teaching seemed to him lost.

  The uses of adversity are beyond measure strange. As a
professor, he regarded himself as a failure. Without false
modesty he thought he knew what he meant. He had tried a great
many experiments, and wholly succeeded in none. He had succumbed
to the weight of the system. He had accomplished nothing that he
tried to do. He regarded the system as wrong; more mischievous to
the teachers than to the students; fallacious from the beginning
to end. He quitted the university at last, in 1877, with a
feeling. that, if it had not been for the invariable courtesy and
kindness shown by every one in it, from the President to the
injured students, he should be sore at his failure.

  These were his own feelings, but they seemed not to be felt in
the college. With the same perplexing impartiality that had so
much disconcerted him in his undergraduate days, the college
insisted on expressing an opposite view. John Fiske went so far
in his notice of the family in "Appleton's Cyclopedia," as to say
that Henry had left a great reputation at Harvard College; which
was a proof of John Fiske's personal regard that Adams heartily
returned; and set the kind expression down to camaraderie. The
case was different when President Eliot himself hinted that
Adams's services merited recognition. Adams could have wept on
his shoulder in hysterics, so grateful was he for the rare
good-will that inspired the compliment; but he could not allow
the college to think that he esteemed himself entitled to
distinction. He knew better, and his was among the failures which
were respectable enough to deserve self-respect. Yet nothing in
the vanity of life struck him as more humiliating than that
Harvard College, which he had persistently criticised, abused,
abandoned, and neglected, should alone have offered him a dollar,
an office, an encouragement, or a kindness. Harvard College might
have its faults, but at least it redeemed America, since it was
true to its own.

  The only part of education that the professor thought a success
was the students. He found them excellent company. Cast more or
less in the same mould, without violent emotions or sentiment,
and, except for the veneer of American habits, ignorant of all
that man had ever thought or hoped, their minds burst open like
flowers at the sunlight of a suggestion. They were quick to
respond; plastic to a mould; and incapable of fatigue. Their
faith in education was so full of pathos that one dared not ask
them what they thought they could do with education when they got
it. Adams did put the question to one of them, and was surprised
at the answer: "The degree of Harvard College is worth money to
me in Chicago." This reply upset his experience; for the degree
of Harvard College had been rather a drawback to a young man in
Boston and Washington. So far as it went, the answer was good,
and settled one's doubts. Adams knew no better, although he had
given twenty years to pursuing the same education, and was no
nearer a result than they. He still had to take for granted many
things that they need not -- among the rest, that his teaching
did them more good than harm. In his own opinion the greatest
good he could do them was to hold his tongue. They needed much
faith then; they were likely to need more if they lived long.

  He never knew whether his colleagues shared his doubts about
their own utility. Unlike himself, they knew more or less their
business. He could not tell his scholars that history glowed with
social virtue; the Professor of Chemistry cared not a chemical
atom whether society was virtuous or not. Adams could not pretend
that mediaeval society proved evolution; the Professor of Physics
smiled at evolution. Adams was glad to dwell on the virtues of
the Church and the triumphs of its art: the Professor of
Political Economy had to treat them as waste of force. They knew
what they had to teach; he did not. They might perhaps be frauds
without knowing it; but he knew certainly nothing else of
himself. He could teach his students nothing; he was only
educating himself at their cost.

[combinator]

  Education, like politics, is a rough affair, and every
instructor has to shut his eyes and hold his tongue as though he
were a priest. The students alone satisfied. They thought they
gained something. Perhaps they did, for even in America and in
the twentieth century, life could not be wholly industrial. Adams
fervently hoped that they might remain content; but supposing
twenty years more to pass, and they should turn on him as
fiercely as he had turned on his old instructors -- what answer
could he make? The college had pleaded guilty, and tried to
reform. He had pleaded guilty from the start, and his reforms had
failed before those of the college.

  The lecture-room was futile enough, but the faculty-room was
worse. American society feared total wreck in the maelstrom of
political and corporate administration, but it could not look for
help to college dons. Adams knew, in that capacity, both
Congressmen and professors, and he preferred Congressmen. The
same failure marked the society of a college. Several score of
the best- educated, most agreeable, and personally the most
sociable people in America united in Cambridge to make a social
desert that would have starved a polar bear. The liveliest and
most agreeable of men -- James Russell Lowell, Francis J. Child,
Louis Agassiz, his son Alexander, Gurney, John Fiske, William
James and a dozen others, who would have made the joy of London
or Paris -- tried their best to break out and be like other men
in Cambridge and Boston, but society called them professors, and
professors they had to be. While all these brilliant men were
greedy for companionship, all were famished for want of it.
Society was a faculty-meeting without business. The elements were
there; but society cannot be made up of elements -- people who
are expected to be silent unless they have observations to make
-- and all the elements are bound to remain apart if required to
make observations.

  Thus it turned out that of all his many educations, Adams
thought that of school-teacher the thinnest. Yet he was forced to
admit that the education of an editor, in some ways, was thinner
still. The editor had barely time to edit; he had none to write.
If copy fell short, he was obliged to scribble a book-review on
the virtues of the Anglo-Saxons or the vices of the Popes; for he
knew more about Edward the Confessor or Boniface VIII than he did
about President Grant. For seven years he wrote nothing; the
Review lived on his brother Charles's railway articles. The
editor could help others, but could do nothing for himself. As a
writer, he was totally forgotten by the time he had been an
editor for twelve months. As editor he could find no writer to
take his place for politics and affairs of current concern. The
Review became chiefly historical. Russell Lowell and Frank
Palgrave helped him to keep it literary. The editor was a
helpless drudge whose successes, if he made any, belonged to his
writers; but whose failures might easily bankrupt himself. Such a
Review may be made a sink of money with captivating ease. The
secrets of success as an editor were easily learned; the highest
was that of getting advertisements. Ten pages of advertising made
an editor a success; five marked him as a failure. The merits or
demerits of his literature had little to do with his results
except when they led to adversity.

  A year or two of education as editor satiated most of his
appetite for that career as a profession. After a very slight
experience, he said no more on the subject. He felt willing to
let any one edit, if he himself might write. Vulgarly speaking,
it was a dog's life when it did not succeed, and little better
when it did. A professor had at least the pleasure of associating
with his students; an editor lived the life of an owl. A
professor commonly became a pedagogue or a pedant; an editor
became an authority on advertising. On the whole, Adams preferred
his attic in Washington. He was educated enough. Ignorance paid
better, for at least it earned fifty dollars a month.

  With this result Henry Adams's education, at his entry into
life, stopped, and his life began. He had to take that life as he
best could, with such accidental education as luck had given him;
but he held that it was wrong, and that, if he were to begin
again, he would do it on a better system. He thought he knew
nearly what system to pursue. At that time Alexander Agassiz had
not yet got his head above water so far as to serve for a model,
as he did twenty or thirty years afterwards; but the editorship
of the North American Review had one solitary merit; it made the
editor acquainted at a distance with almost every one in the
country who could write or who could be the cause of writing.
Adams was vastly pleased to be received among these clever people
as one of themselves, and felt always a little surprised at their
treating him as an equal, for they all had education; but among
them, only one stood out in extraordinary prominence as the type
and model of what Adams would have liked to be, and of what the
American, as he conceived, should have been and was not.

  Thanks to the article on Sir Charles Lyell, Adams passed for a
friend of geologists, and the extent of his knowledge mattered
much less to them than the extent of his friendship, for
geologists were as a class not much better off than himself, and
friends were sorely few. One of his friends from earliest
childhood, and nearest neighbor in Quincy, Frank Emmons, had
become a geologist and joined the Fortieth Parallel Survey under
Government. At Washington in the winter of 1869-70, Emmons had
invited Adams to go out with him on one of the field-parties in
summer. Of course when Adams took the Review he put it at the
service of the Survey, and regretted only that he could not do
more. When the first year of professing and editing was at last
over, and his July North American appeared, he drew a long breath
of relief, and took the next train for the West. Of his year's
work he was no judge. He had become a small spring in a large
mechanism, and his work counted only in the sum; but he had been
treated civilly by everybody, and he felt at home even in Boston.
Putting in his pocket the July number of the North American, with
a notice of the Fortieth Parallel Survey by Professor J. D.
Whitney, he started for the plains and the Rocky Mountains.

  In the year 1871, the West was still fresh, and the Union
Pacific was young. Beyond the Missouri River, one felt the
atmosphere of Indians and buffaloes. One saw the last vestiges of
an old education, worth studying if one would; but it was not
that which Adams sought; rather, he came out to spy upon the land
of the future. The Survey occasionally borrowed troopers from the
nearest station in case of happening on hostile Indians, but
otherwise the topographers and geologists thought more about
minerals than about Sioux. They held under their hammers a
thousand miles of mineral country with all its riddles to solve,
and its stores of possible wealth to mark. They felt the future
in their hands.

  Emmons's party was out of reach in the Uintahs, but Arnold
Hague's had come in to Laramie for supplies, and they took charge
of Adams for a time. Their wanderings or adventures matter
nothing to the story of education. They were all hardened
mountaineers and surveyors who took everything for granted, and
spared each other the most wearisome bore of English and Scotch
life, the stories of the big game they killed. A bear was an
occasional amusement; a wapiti was a constant necessity; but the
only wild animal dangerous to man was a rattlesnake or a skunk.
One shot for amusement, but one had other matters to talk about.

  Adams enjoyed killing big game, but loathed the labor of
cutting it up; so that he rarely unslung the little carbine he
was in a manner required to carry. On the other hand, he liked to
wander off alone on his mule, and pass the day fishing a mountain
stream or exploring a valley. One morning when the party was
camped high above Estes Park, on the flank of Long's Peak, he
borrowed a rod, and rode down over a rough trail into Estes Park,
for some trout. The day was fine, and hazy with the smoke of
forest fires a thousand miles away; the park stretched its
English beauties off to the base of its bordering mountains in
natural landscape and archaic peace; the stream was just fishy
enough to tempt lingering along its banks. Hour after hour the
sun moved westward and the fish moved eastward, or disappeared
altogether, until at last when the fisherman cinched his mule,
sunset was nearer than he thought. Darkness caught him before he
could catch his trail. Not caring to tumble into some fifty-foot
hole, he "allowed" he was lost, and turned back. In half-an-hour
he was out of the hills, and under the stars of Estes Park, but
he saw no prospect of supper or of bed.

  Estes Park was large enough to serve for a bed on a summer
night for an army of professors, but the supper question offered
difficulties. There was but one cabin in the Park, near its
entrance, and he felt no great confidence in finding it, but he
thought his mule cleverer than himself, and the dim lines of
mountain crest against the stars fenced his range of error. The
patient mule plodded on without other road than the gentle slope
of the ground, and some two hours must have passed before a light
showed in the distance. As the mule came up to the cabin door,
two or three men came out to see the stranger.

  One of these men was Clarence King on his way up to the camp.
Adams fell into his arms. As with most friendships, it was never
a matter of growth or doubt. Friends are born in archaic
horizons; they were shaped with the Pteraspis in Siluria; they
have nothing to do with the accident of space. King had come up
that day from Greeley in a light four-wheeled buggy, over a trail
hardly fit for a commissariat mule, as Adams had reason to know
since he went back in the buggy. In the cabin, luxury provided a
room and one bed for guests. They shared the room and the bed,
and talked till far towards dawn.

  King had everything to interest and delight Adams. He knew more
than Adams did of art and poetry; he knew America, especially
west of the hundredth meridian, better than any one; he knew the
professor by heart, and he knew the Congressman better than he
did the professor. He knew even women; even the American woman;
even the New York woman, which is saying much. Incidentally he
knew more practical geology than was good for him, and saw ahead
at least one generation further than the text-books. That he saw
right was a different matter. Since the beginning of time no man
has lived who is known to have seen right; the charm of King was
that he saw what others did and a great deal more. His wit and
humor; his bubbling energy which swept every one into the current
of his interest; his personal charm of youth and manners; his
faculty of giving and taking, profusely, lavishly, whether in
thought or in money as though he were Nature herself, marked him
almost alone among Americans. He had in him something of the
Greek -- a touch of Alcibiades or Alexander. One Clarence King
only existed in the world.

  A new friend is always a miracle, but at thirty-three years
old, such a bird of paradise rising in the sage-brush was an
avatar. One friend in a lifetime is much; two are many; three are
hardly possible. Friendship needs a certain parallelism of life,
a community of thought, a rivalry of aim. King, like Adams, and
all their generation, was at that moment passing the critical
point of his career. The one, coming from the west, saturated
with the sunshine of the Sierras, met the other, drifting from
the east, drenched in the fogs of London, and both had the same
problems to handle -- the same stock of implements -- the same
field to work in; above all, the same obstacles to overcome.

As a companion, King's charm was great, but this was not the
quality that so much attracted Adams, nor could he affect even
distant rivalry on this ground. Adams could never tell a story,
chiefly because he always forgot it; and he was never guilty of a
witticism, unless by accident. King and the Fortieth Parallel
influenced him in a way far more vital. The lines of their lives
converged, but King had moulded and directed his life logically,
scientifically, as Adams thought American life should be
directed. He had given himself education all of a piece, yet
broad. Standing in the middle of his career, where their paths at
last came together, he could look back and look forward on a
straight line, with scientific knowledge for its base. Adams's
life, past or future, was a succession of violent breaks or
waves, with no base at all. King's abnormal energy had already
won him great success. None of his contemporaries had done so
much, single-handed, or were likely to leave so deep a trail. He
had managed to induce Congress to adopt almost its first modern
act of legislation. He had organized, as a civil -- not military
-- measure, a Government Survey. He had paralleled the
Continental Railway in Geology; a feat as yet unequalled by other
governments which had as a rule no continents to survey. He was
creating one of the classic scientific works of the century. The
chances were great that he could, whenever he chose to quit the
Government service, take the pick of the gold and silver, copper
or coal, and build up his fortune as he pleased. Whatever prize
he wanted lay ready for him -- scientific social, literary,
political -- and he knew how to take them in turn. With ordinary
luck he would die at eighty the richest and most many-sided
genius of his day.

  So little egoistic he was that none of his friends felt envy of
his extraordinary superiority, but rather grovelled before it, so
that women were jealous of the power he had over men; but women
were many and Kings were one. The men worshipped not so much
their friend, as the ideal American they all wanted to be. The
women were jealous because, at heart, King had no faith in the
American woman; he loved types more robust.

  The young men of the Fortieth Parallel had Californian
instincts; they were brothers of Bret Harte. They felt no
leanings towards the simple uniformities of Lyell and Darwin;
they saw little proof of slight and imperceptible changes; to
them, catastrophe was the law of change; they cared little for
simplicity and much for complexity; but it was the complexity of
Nature, not of New York or even of the Mississippi Valley. King
loved paradox; he started them like rabbits, and cared for them
no longer, when caught or lost; but they delighted Adams, for
they helped, among other things, to persuade him that history was
more amusing than science. The only question left open to doubt
was their relative money value.

  In Emmons's camp, far up in the Uintahs, these talks were
continued till the frosts became sharp in the mountains. History
and science spread out in personal horizons towards goals no
longer far away. No more education was possible for either man.
Such as they were, they had got to stand the chances of the world
they lived in; and when Adams started back to Cambridge, to take
up again the humble tasks of schoolmaster and editor he was
harnessed to his cart. Education, systematic or accidental, had
done its worst. Henceforth, he went on, submissive.