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."