[Footnote 16: _The Education of Henry Adams: an Autobiography._ Houghton
Mifflin Co., 1918. The selection is a part of an admirable critique in the
April, 1919, number of the _American Historical Review_. By permission of
the author and of the editors of the magazine. The article should be read
as a whole for a complete understanding of the critic's analysis.]
In 1771, Thomas Hutchinson wrote to one of his friends, "We have not been
so quiet here these five years ... if it were not for two or three Adamses,
we should do well enough." From that day to this many people have agreed
with the fastidious governor. But so far, an Adams or two we have always
had with us; and on the whole, although they have sometimes been
exasperating, they have always been salutary. During four generations the
men of this family have loved and served America as much as they have
scolded her. More cannot be said, except that they have commonly given, on
both counts, more than they have received. Theirs is therefore the
blessing, and ours the benefit.
Among other things, we have to thank them for some diaries and
autobiographies which have been notable for frank self-revelation. Henry
Adams would of course have stoutly denied that any such impertinence as
self-revelation was either intended or achieved in the _Education_. There
is no evidence that he ever kept a diary (all things considered, the burden
of proof is not on us!); but it is not to be supposed that he would have
published it in any case. A man who regarded himself as of no more
significance than a chance deposit on the surface of the world might indeed
write down an intimate record of his soul's doings as an exercise in cosmic
irony; but the idea of publishing it could hardly have lived for a moment
in the lambent flame of his own sardonic humor. He could be perverse, but
perversity could not well go the length of perpetrating so pointless a joke
as that would come to.
No, Henry Adams would not reveal himself to the curious inspection of an
unsympathetic world; but he would write a book for the purpose of exposing
a dynamic theory of history, than which nothing could well be more
impersonal or unrevealing. With a philosophy of history the Puritan has
always been preoccupied; and it was the major interest of Henry Adams
throughout the better part of his life. He never gained more than a faint
idea of any intelligible philosophy, as he would himself have readily
admitted; but after a lifetime of hard study and close thinking, the matter
struck him thus:
Between the dynamo in the gallery of machines and the engine-house
outside, the break of continuity amounted to abysmal fracture for a
historian's objects. No more relation could he discover between the
steam and the electric current than between the Cross and the
cathedral. The forces were interchangeable if not reversible, but he
could see only an absolute _fiat_ in electricity as in faith.
In these two forces the secret must lie, since for centuries faith had
ruled inexorably, only to be replaced by electricity which promised to rule
quite as inexorably. To find the secret was difficult enough; but
any schoolboy could see that man as a force must be measured by
motion, from a fixed point. Psychology helped here by suggesting a
unit--the point of history when man held the highest idea of himself
as a unit in a unified universe. Eight or ten years of study had led
Adams to think he might use the century 1150-1250, expressed in Amiens
Cathedral and the Works of Thomas Aquinas, as the unit from which he
might measure motion down to his own time, without assuming anything
as true or untrue except relation.... Setting himself to the task, he
began a volume which he mentally knew as "Mont-Saint-Michel and
Chartres: a Study in Thirteenth-Century Unity." From that point he
proposed to fix a position for himself, which he could label: "The
Education of Henry Adams: a Study in Twentieth-Century Multiplicity."
With the help of these two points of relation, he hoped to project his
lines forward and backward indefinitely, subject to correction from
anyone who should know better. Thereupon, he sailed for home.
You are to understand, therefore, that the _Education of Henry Adams_ has
nothing to do really with the person Henry Adams. Since the time of
Rousseau,
the Ego has steadily tended to efface itself, and, for purposes of
model, to become a manikin, on which the toilet of education is to be
draped in order to show the fit or misfit of the clothes. The object
of study is the garment, not the figure.... The manikin, therefore,
has the same value as any other geometrical figure of three or four
dimensions, which is used for the study of relation. For that purpose
it cannot be spared; it is the only measure of motion, of proportion,
of human condition; it must have the air of reality; it must be taken
for real; it must be treated as though it had life. Who knows? Perhaps
it had.
Whether it had life or not is, however, of no importance. The manikin is to
be treated impersonally; and will be indicated throughout in the third
person, not as the author's ego, but as a kind of projected and animated
geometrical point upon which cosmic lines of force impinge!
It turns out that the manikin had life after all--a good deal of it; with
the effect that as you go on you become more concerned with the manikin
than with the clothes, and at last find yourself wholly absorbed with an
ego more subtle and complex, at times more exasperating, yet upon the whole
more engaging, and above all more pervasive, than you are likely to come
upon in any autobiography of modern times. It is really wonderful how the
clothes fall away from the manikin, how with the best effort at draping
they in fact refuse to be put on at all. The reason is simple; for the
constant refrain of the study is that no clothes were ever found. The
manikin is therefore always in evidence for lack of covering, and ends by
having to apologize for its very existence. "To the tired student, the idea
that he must give it up [the search for philosophy-clothes] seemed sheer
senility. As long as he could whisper, he would go on as he had begun,
bluntly refusing to meet his creator with the admission that the creation
had taught him nothing except that the square of the hypothenuse of a
right-angled triangle might for convenience be taken as equal to something
else." On his own premises, the assumption that the manikin would ever meet
his creator (if he indeed had one), or that his creator would be concerned
with his opinion of the creation, is gratuitous. On his own premises, there
is something too much of the ego here. The _Education of Henry Adams_,
conceived as a study in the philosophy of history, turns out in fact to be
an _Apologia pro vitâ suâ_, one of the most self-centered and
self-revealing books in the language.
The revelation is not indeed of the direct sort that springs from frank and
insouciant spontaneity. Since the revelation was not intended, the process
is tortuous in the extreme. It is a revelation that comes by the way, made
manifest in the effort to conceal it, overlaid by all sorts of cryptic
sentences and self-deprecatory phrases, half hidden by the protective
coloring taken on by a sensitive mind commonly employing paradox and
delighting in perverse and teasing mystification. One can never be sure
what the book means; but taken at its face value the _Education_ seems to
be the story of a man who regarded life from the outside, as a spectator at
the play, a play in which his own part as spectator was taken by a minor
character. The play was amusing in its absurdity, but it touched not the
spectator, Henry Adams, who was content to sit in his protected stall and
laugh in his sleeve at the play and the players--and most of all at himself
for laughing. Such is the implication; but I think it was not so. In the
_Mont-Saint-Michel_[17] Adams speaks of those young people who rarely like
the Romanesque. "They prefer the Gothic.... No doubt, they are right, since
they are young: but men and women who have lived long and are tired--who
want rest--who have done with aspirations and ambitions--_whose life has
been a broken arch_--feel this repose and self-restraint as they feel
nothing else." The _Education_ is in fact the record, tragic and pathetic
underneath its genial irony, of the defeat of fine aspirations and laudable
ambitions. It is the story of a life which the man himself, in his old age,
looked back upon as a broken arch.
[Footnote 17: _Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres_, p. 7. [Author's note.]]
One is not surprised that a man of Henry Adams's antecedents should take
life seriously; but no sane man, looking upon his career from the outside,
would call it a failure. Born into a family whose traditions were in
themselves a liberal education, Henry Adams enjoyed advantages in youth
such as few boys have. It was at least an unusual experience to be able, as
a lad, to sit every Sunday "behind a President grandfather, and to read
over his head the tablet in memory of a President great-grandfather, who
had 'pledged his life, his fortune, and his sacred honor' to secure the
independence of his country." This to be sure might not have been an
advantage if it led the lad to regard the presidency as a heritable office
in the family; but it was certainly a great deal to be able to listen
daily, at his father's table, to talk as good as he was "ever likely to
hear again." This was doubtless one of the reasons why he got (or was it
only that it seemed so to him in his old age?) so little from Harvard
College; but at any rate he graduated with honors, and afterwards enjoyed
the blessed boon of two care-free years of idling and study in Germany and
Italy. For six years, as private secretary to his father on one of the most
difficult and successful diplomatic missions in the history of his country,
he watched history in the making, and gained an inside knowledge of English
politics and society such as comes to one young man in ten thousand.
Returning to America, he served for a time as editor of the _North
American_, and was for seven years a professor of history in Harvard
College. During the last thirty-five years of his life, he lived
alternately in Washington and Paris. Relieved of official or other
responsibility, he travelled all over the world, met the most interesting
people of his generation, devoted himself at leisure to the study of art
and literature, philosophy and science, and wrote, as an incident in a long
life of serious endeavor, twelve or fifteen volumes of history which by
common consent rank with the best work done in that field by American
scholars.
By no common standard does such a record measure failure. Most men would
have been satisfied with the life he lived apart from the books he wrote,
or with the books he wrote apart from the life he lived. Henry Adams is
commonly counted with the historians; but he scarcely thought of himself as
one, except in so far as he sought and failed to find a philosophy of
history. It is characteristic that in the _Education_ he barely mentions
the _History of the United States_. The enterprise, which he undertook for
lack of something better, he always regarded as negligible--an episode in
his life to be chronicled like any other. But it is safe to say that most
of us who call ourselves historians, with far less justification, would be
well content if we could count, as the result of a lifetime of effort, such
a shelfful of volumes to our credit. The average professor of history might
well expect, on less showing, to be chosen president of the Historical
Association; in which case the prospect of having to deliver a presidential
address might lead him to speculate idly in idle moments upon the meaning
of history; but the riddle of existence would not greatly trouble his
sleep, nor could it be said of him, as Henry Adams said of himself, that "a
historical formula that should satisfy the conditions of the stellar
universe weighed heavily upon his mind." He would live out the remnant of
his days, an admired and a fêted leader in the scholar's world, wholly
unaware that his life had been a cosmic failure.
* * * * *
It is not likely that many readers will see the tragedy of a failure that
looks like success, or miss the philosophy-clothes that were never found.
And indeed we may all be well content with the doings of this manikin that
turns out to be so lively an ego. Henry Adams was worth a wilderness of
philosophies. Perhaps we should have liked the book better if he could have
taken himself more frankly, as a matter of course, for what he was--a man
of wide experience, of altogether uncommon attainments, of extraordinarily
incisive mental power; and if, resting on this assumption, he had told us
more directly, as something we should like to know, what he had done, what
people he had met and known, what events he had shared in or observed, and
what he thought about it all. This he does do of course, in his own
enigmatic way, in the process of explaining where and how he sought
education and failed to find it; and fortunately, in the course of the
leisurely journey, he takes us into many by-paths and shows us, by the easy
play of his illuminating intelligence, much strange country, and many
people whom we have never known, or have never known so intimately. When
this happens, when the manikin forgets itself and its education-clothes,
and merely describes people or types of mind or social customs, the result
is wholly admirable. There are inimitable passages, and the number is
large, which one cannot forget. One will not soon forget the young men of
the Harvard class of '58, who were "_negative to a degree that in the end
became positive and triumphant_"; or the exquisitely drawn portrait of
"Madame President," all things considered the finest passage in the book;
or the picture of old John Quincy Adams coming slowly down-stairs one hot
summer morning and with massive and silent solemnity leading the rebellious
little Henry to school against his will; or yet the reflections of the
little Henry himself (or was it the reflection of an older Henry?), who
recognized on this occasion "that the President, though a tool of tyranny,
had done his disreputable work with a certain intelligence. He had shown no
temper, no irritation, no personal feeling, and had made no display of
force. Above all, he had held his tongue."...
The number of passages one would wish to quote is legion; but one must be
content to say that the book is fascinating throughout--particularly
perhaps in those parts which are not concerned with the education of Henry
Adams. Where this recondite and cosmic problem is touched upon, there are
often qualifications to be made. The perpetual profession of ignorance and
incapacity seems at times a bit disingenuous; and we have to do for the
most part, not with the way things struck Adams at the time, but with the
way it seemed to him, as an old man looking back upon the "broken arch,"
they should have struck him. Besides, in the later chapters, in which he
deals with the dynamic theory of history, the problem was so vague, even to
himself, that we too often do not know what he wishes to convey. Apropos of
the Chicago Fair, which like everything else in his later years linked
itself to the business of the dynamo and the Virgin, he says: "Did he
himself quite know what he meant? Certainly not! If he had known enough to
state his problem, his education would have been completed at once." Is
this the statement of a fact, or only the reflection of a perversity? We do
not know. Most readers, at all events, having reached page 343, will not be
inclined to dispute the assertion. Yet we must after all be grateful for
this meaningless philosophy of history (the more so perhaps since it is
meaningless); for without it we should never have had either the
_Mont-Saint-Michel_ or _The Education of Henry Adams_--"books which no
gentleman's library" need contain, but which will long be read by the
curious inquirer into the nature of the human heart.
Henry Adams lies buried in Rock Creek Cemetery, in Washington. The casual
visitor might perhaps notice, on a slight elevation, a group of shrubs and
small trees making a circular enclosure. If he should step up into this
concealed spot, he would see on the opposite side a polished marble seat;
and placing himself there he would find himself facing a seated figure,
done in bronze, loosely wrapped in a mantle which, covering the body and
the head, throws into strong relief a face of singular fascination. Whether
man or woman, it would puzzle the observer to say. The eyes are half
closed, in reverie rather than in sleep. The figure seems not to convey the
sense either of life or death, of joy or sorrow, of hope or despair. It has
lived, but life is done; it has experienced all things, but is now
oblivious of all; it has questioned, but questions no more. The casual
visitor will perhaps approach the figure, looking for a symbol, a name, a
date--some revelation. There is none. The level ground, carpeted with dead
leaves, gives no indication of a grave beneath. It may be that the puzzled
visitor will step outside, walk around the enclosure, examine the marble
shaft against which the figure is placed; and, finding nothing there,
return to the seat and look long at the strange face. What does he make of
it--this level spot, these shrubs, this figure that speaks and yet is
silent? Nothing--or what he will. Such was life to Henry Adams, who lived
long, and questioned seriously, and would not be content with the dishonest
or the facile answer.