Henry Adams and the Adams Family—John Hay and Frank Mason—The Three
_Mousquetaires_ of Culture—Paris—“The Frenchman”—The South of France
I
I have been of late reading The Education of Henry Adams, and it
recalls many persons and incidents belonging to the period about which
I am now writing. I knew Henry Adams well; first in London, then in
Boston and finally throughout his prolonged residence in Washington
City. He was an Adams; very definitely an Adams, but, though his ghost
may revisit the glimpses of the moon and chide me for saying so, with
an English “cut to his jib.”
No three brothers could be more unlike than Charles Francis, John
Quincy and Henry Adams. Brooks Adams I did not know. They represented
the fourth generation of the brainiest pedigree—that is in continuous
line—known to our family history. Henry thought he was a philosopher
and tried to be one. He thought he was a man of the world and wanted to
be one. He was, in spite of himself, a provincial.
Provincialism is not necessarily rustic, even suburban. There is no
provincial quite so provincial as he who has passed his life in great
cities. The Parisian boulevardier taken away from the asphalt, the
cockney a little off Clapham Common and the Strand, is lost. Henry
Adams knew his London and his Paris, his Boston and his Quincy—we must
not forget Quincy—well. But he had been born, and had grown up, between
the lids of history, and for all his learning and travel he never got
very far outside them.
In manner and manners, tone and cast of thought he was
English—delightfully English—though he cultivated the cosmopolite. His
house in the national capital, facing the Executive Mansion across
Lafayette Square—especially during the life of his wife, an adorable
woman, who made up in sweetness and tact for some of the qualities
lacking in her husband—was an intellectual and high-bred center, a
rendezvous for the best ton and the most accepted people. The Adamses
may be said to have succeeded the Eameses as leaders in semi-social,
semi-literary and semi-political society.
There was a trio—I used to call them the Three Musketeers of
Culture—John Hay, Henry Cabot Lodge and Henry Adams. They made an
interesting and inseparable trinity—Caleb Cushing, Robert J. Walker and
Charles Sumner not more so—and it was worth while to let them have the
floor and to hear them talk; Lodge, cool and wary as a politician
should be; Hay, helterskelter, the real man of the world crossed on a
Western stock; and Adams, something of a litératteur, a statesman and a
cynic.
John Randolph Tucker, who when he was in Congress often met Henry at
dinners and the like, said to him on the appearance of the early
volumes of his History of the United States: “I am not disappointed,
for how could an Adams be expected to do justice to a Randolph?”
While he was writing this history Adams said to me: “There is an old
villain—next to Andrew Jackson the greatest villain of his time—a
Kentuckian—don’t say he was a kinsman of yours!—whose papers, if he
left any, I want to see.”
“To whom are you referring?” I asked with mock dignity.
“To John Adair,” he answered.
“Well,” said I, “John Adair married my grandmother’s sister and I can
put you in the way of getting whatever you require.”
I have spoken of John Hay as Master of the Revels in the old
Sutherland-Delmonico days. Even earlier than that—in London and
Paris—an intimacy had been established between us. He married in
Cleveland, Ohio, and many years passed before I came up with him again.
One day in Whitelaw Reid’s den in the Tribune Building he reappeared,
strangely changed—no longer the rosy-cheeked, buoyant boy—an
overserious, prematurely old man. I was shocked, and when he had gone
Reid, observing this, said: “Oh, Hay will come round all right. He is
just now in one of his moods. I picked him up in Piccadilly the other
day and by sheer force brought him over.”
When we recall the story of Hay’s life—one weird tragedy after another,
from the murder of Lincoln to the murder of McKinley, including the
tragic end of two members of his immediate family—there rises in spite
of the grandeur that pursued him a single exclamation: “The pity of
it!”
This is accentuated by Henry Adams’ Education. Yet the silent courage
with which Hay met disaster after disaster must increase both the
sympathy and the respect of those who peruse the melancholy pages of
that vivid narrative. Toward the end, meeting him on a public occasion,
I said: “You work too hard—you are not looking well.”
“I am dying,” said he.
“Yes,” I replied in the way of banter, “you are dying of fame and
fortune.”
But I went no further. He was in no mood for the old verbal horseplay.
He looked wan and wizened. Yet there were still several years before
him. When he came from Mannheim to Paris it was clear that the end was
nigh. I did not see him—he was too ill to see any one—but Frank Mason
kept me advised from day to day, and when, a month or two later, having
reached home, the news came to us that he was dead we were nowise
surprised, and almost consoled by the thought that rest had come at
last.
Frank Mason and his wife—“the Masons,” they were commonly called, for
Mrs. Mason made a wondrous second to her husband—were from Cleveland,
Ohio, she a daughter of Judge Birchard—Jennie Birchard—he a rising
young journalist caught in the late seventies by the glitter of a
foreign appointment. They ran the gamut of the consular service,
beginning with Basel and Marseilles and ending with Frankfurt, Berlin
and Paris. Wherever they were their house was a very home—a kind of
Yankee shrine—of visiting Americans and militant Americanism.
Years before he was made consul general—in point of fact when he was
plain consul at Marseilles—he ran over to Paris for a lark. One day he
said to me, “A rich old hayseed uncle of mine has come to town. He has
money to burn and he wants to meet you. I have arranged for us to dine
with him at the Anglaise to-night and we are to order the dinner—carte
blanche.” The rich old uncle to whom I was presented did not have the
appearance of a hayseed. On the contrary he was a most
distinguished-looking old gentleman. The dinner we ordered was
“stunning”—especially the wines. When the bill was presented our host
scanned it carefully, scrutinizing each item and making his own
addition, altogether “like a thoroughbred.” Frank and I watched him not
without a bit of anxiety mixed with contrition. When he had paid the
score he said with a smile: “That was rather a steep bill, but we have
had rather a good dinner, and now, if you boys know of as good a dance
hall we’ll go there and I’ll buy the outfit.”