Produced by Richard Fane
The Education of Henry Adams
by Henry Adams
THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
CONTENTS
EDITOR'S PREFACE
PREFACE
I. QUINCY (1838-1848)
II. BOSTON (1848-1854)
III. WASHINGTON (1850-1854)
IV. HARVARD COLLEGE (1854-1858)
V. BERLIN (1858-1859)
VI. ROME (1859-1860)
VII. TREASON (1860-1861)
VIII. DIPLOMACY (1861)
IX. FOES OR FRIENDS (1862)
X. POLITICAL MORALITY (1862)
XI. THE BATTLE OF THE RAMS (1863)
XII. ECCENTRICITY (1863)
XIII. THE PERFECTION OF HUMAN SOCIETY (1864)
XIV. DILETTANTISM (1865-1866)
XV. DARWINISM (1867-1868)
XVI. THE PRESS (1868)
XVII. PRESIDENT GRANT (1869)
XVIII. FREE FIGHT (1869-1870)
XIX. CHAOS (1870)
XX. FAILURE (1871)
XXI. TWENTY YEARS AFTER (1892)
XXII. CHICAGO (1893)
XXIII. SILENCE (1894-1898)
XXIV. INDIAN SUMMER (1898-1899)
XXV. THE DYNAMO AND THE VIRGIN (1900)
XXVI. TWILIGHT (1901)
XXVII. TEUFELSDROCKH (1901)
XXVIII. THE HEIGHT OF KNOWLEDGE (1902)
XXIX. THE ABYSS OF IGNORANCE (1902)
XXX. VIS INERTIAE (1903)
XXXI. THE GRAMMAR OF SCIENCE (1903)
XXXII. VIS NOVA (1903-1904)
XXXIII. A DYNAMIC THEORY OF HISTORY (1904)
XXXIV. A LAW OF ACCELERATION (1904)
XXXV. NUNC AGE (1905)
EDITOR'S PREFACE
THIS volume, written in 1905 as a sequel to the same author's
"Mont Saint Michel and Chartres," was privately printed, to the number
of one hundred copies, in 1906, and sent to the persons interested, for
their assent, correction, or suggestion. The idea of the two books was
thus explained at the end of Chapter XXIX: --
"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. The movement might be studied at once
in philosophy and mechanics. Setting himself to the task, he began a
volume which he mentally knew as 'Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres: a
Study of 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 of 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 any one who should
know better."
The "Chartres" was finished and privately printed in 1904. The
"Education" proved to be more difficult. The point on which the author
failed to please himself, and could get no light from readers or
friends, was the usual one of literary form. Probably he saw it in
advance, for he used to say, half in jest, that his great ambition was
to complete St. Augustine's "Confessions," but that St. Augustine, like
a great artist, had worked from multiplicity to unity, while he, like a
small one, had to reverse the method and work back from unity to
multiplicity. The scheme became unmanageable as he approached his end.
Probably he was, in fact, trying only to work into it his
favorite theory of history, which now fills the last three or four
chapters of the "Education," and he could not satisfy himself with his
workmanship. At all events, he was still pondering over the problem in
1910, when he tried to deal with it in another way which might be more
intelligible to students. He printed a small volume called "A Letter to
American Teachers," which he sent to his associates in the American
Historical Association, hoping to provoke some response. Before he
could satisfy himself even on this minor point, a severe illness in the
spring of 1912 put an end to his literary activity forever.
The matter soon passed beyond his control. In 1913 the
Institute of Architects published the "Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres."
Already the "Education" had become almost as well known as the
"Chartres," and was freely quoted by every book whose author requested
it. The author could no longer withdraw either volume; he could no
longer rewrite either, and he could not publish that which he thought
unprepared and unfinished, although in his opinion the other was
historically purposeless without its sequel. In the end, he preferred
to leave the "Education" unpublished, avowedly incomplete, trusting
that it might quietly fade from memory. According to his theory of
history as explained in Chapters XXXIII and XXXIV, the teacher was at
best helpless, and, in the immediate future, silence next to
good-temper was the mark of sense. After midsummer, 1914, the rule was
made absolute.
The Massachusetts Historical Society now publishes the
"Education" as it was printed in 1907, with only such marginal
corrections as the author made, and it does this, not in opposition to
the author's judgment, but only to put both volumes equally within
reach of students who have occasion to consult them.
HENRY CABOT LODGE
September, 1918
PREFACE
JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU began his famous Confessions by a
vehement appeal to the Deity: "I have shown myself as I was;
contemptible and vile when I was so; good, generous, sublime when I was
so; I have unveiled my interior such as Thou thyself hast seen it,
Eternal Father! Collect about me the innumerable swarm of my fellows;
let them hear my confessions; let them groan at my unworthiness; let
them blush at my meannesses! Let each of them discover his heart in his
turn at the foot of thy throne with the same sincerity; and then let
any one of them tell thee if he dares: 'I was a better man!'"
Jean Jacques was a very great educator in the manner of the
eighteenth century, and has been commonly thought to have had more
influence than any other teacher of his time; but his peculiar method
of improving human nature has not been universally admired. Most
educators of the nineteenth century have declined to show themselves
before their scholars as objects more vile or contemptible than
necessary, and even the humblest teacher hides, if possible, the faults
with which nature has generously embellished us all, as it did Jean
Jacques, thinking, as most religious minds are apt to do, that the
Eternal Father himself may not feel unmixed pleasure at our thrusting
under his eyes chiefly the least agreeable details of his creation.
As an unfortunate result the twentieth century finds few recent
guides to avoid, or to follow. American literature offers scarcely one
working model for high education. The student must go back, beyond Jean
Jacques, to Benjamin Franklin, to find a model even of self-teaching.
Except in the abandoned sphere of the dead languages, no one has
discussed what part of education has, in his personal experience,
turned out to be useful, and what not. This volume attempts to discuss
it.
As educator, Jean Jacques was, in one respect, easily first; he
erected a monument of warning against the Ego. Since his time, and
largely thanks to him, 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 tailor
adapts the manikin as well as the clothes to his patron's wants. The
tailor's object, in this volume, is to fit young men, in universities
or elsewhere, to be men of the world, equipped for any emergency; and
the garment offered to them is meant to show the faults of the
patchwork fitted on their fathers.
At the utmost, the active-minded young man should ask of his
teacher only mastery of his tools. The young man himself, the subject
of education, is a certain form of energy; the object to be gained is
economy of his force; the training is partly the clearing away of
obstacles, partly the direct application of effort. Once acquired, the
tools and models may be thrown away.
The manikin, therefore, has the same value as any other
geometrical figure of three or more 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; must be taken for real; must be treated as though it
had life. Who knows? Possibly it had!
February 16, 1907
THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
CHAPTER I
QUINCY (1838-1848)
UNDER the shadow of Boston State House, turning its back on the
house of John Hancock, the little passage called Hancock Avenue runs,
or ran, from Beacon Street, skirting the State House grounds, to Mount
Vernon Street, on the summit of Beacon Hill; and there, in the third
house below Mount Vernon Place, February 16, 1838, a child was born,
and christened later by his uncle, the minister of the First Church
after the tenets of Boston Unitarianism, as Henry Brooks Adams.
Had he been born in Jerusalem under the shadow of the Temple
and circumcised in the Synagogue by his uncle the high priest, under
the name of Israel Cohen, he would scarcely have been more distinctly
branded, and not much more heavily handicapped in the races of the
coming century, in running for such stakes as the century was to offer;
but, on the other hand, the ordinary traveller, who does not enter the
field of racing, finds advantage in being, so to speak, ticketed
through life, with the safeguards of an old, established traffic.
Safeguards are often irksome, but sometimes convenient, and if one
needs them at all, one is apt to need them badly. A hundred years
earlier, such safeguards as his would have secured any young man's
success; and although in 1838 their value was not very great compared
with what they would have had in 1738, yet the mere accident of
starting a twentieth-century career from a nest of associations so
colonial,--so troglodytic--as the First Church, the Boston State House,
Beacon Hill, John Hancock and John Adams, Mount Vernon Street and
Quincy, all crowding on ten pounds of unconscious babyhood, was so
queer as to offer a subject of curious speculation to the baby long
after he had witnessed the solution. What could become of such a child
of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when he should wake up to
find himself required to play the game of the twentieth? Had he been
consulted, would he have cared to play the game at all, holding such
cards as he held, and suspecting that the game was to be one of which
neither he nor any one else back to the beginning of time knew the
rules or the risks or the stakes? He was not consulted and was not
responsible, but had he been taken into the confidence of his parents,
he would certainly have told them to change nothing as far as concerned
him. He would have been astounded by his own luck. Probably no child,
born in the year, held better cards than he. Whether life was an honest
game of chance, or whether the cards were marked and forced, he could
not refuse to play his excellent hand. He could never make the usual
plea of irresponsibility. He accepted the situation as though he had
been a party to it, and under the same circumstances would do it again,
the more readily for knowing the exact values. To his life as a whole
he was a consenting, contracting party and partner from the moment he
was born to the moment he died. Only with that understanding--as a
consciously assenting member in full partnership with the society of
his age--had his education an interest to himself or to others.
As it happened, he never got to the point of playing the game
at all; he lost himself in the study of it, watching the errors of the
players; but this is the only interest in the story, which otherwise
has no moral and little incident. A story of education--seventy years
of it--the practical value remains to the end in doubt, like other
values about which men have disputed since the birth of Cain and Abel;
but the practical value of the universe has never been stated in
dollars. Although every one cannot be a Gargantua-Napoleon-Bismarck and
walk off with the great bells of Notre Dame, every one must bear his
own universe, and most persons are moderately interested in learning
how their neighbors have managed to carry theirs.
This problem of education, started in 1838, went on for three
years, while the baby grew, like other babies, unconsciously, as a
vegetable, the outside world working as it never had worked before, to
get his new universe ready for him. Often in old age he puzzled over
the question whether, on the doctrine of chances, he was at liberty to
accept himself or his world as an accident. No such accident had ever
happened before in human experience. For him, alone, the old universe
was thrown into the ash-heap and a new one created. He and his
eighteenth-century, troglodytic Boston were suddenly cut
apart--separated forever--in act if not in sentiment, by the opening of
the Boston and Albany Railroad; the appearance of the first Cunard
steamers in the bay; and the telegraphic messages which carried from
Baltimore to Washington the news that Henry Clay and James K. Polk were
nominated for the Presidency. This was in May, 1844; he was six years
old; his new world was ready for use, and only fragments of the old met
his eyes.
Of all this that was being done to complicate his education, he
knew only the color of yellow. He first found himself sitting on a
yellow kitchen floor in strong sunlight. He was three years old when he
took this earliest step in education; a lesson of color. The second
followed soon; a lesson of taste. On December 3, 1841, he developed
scarlet fever. For several days he was as good as dead, reviving only
under the careful nursing of his family. When he began to recover
strength, about January 1, 1842, his hunger must have been stronger
than any other pleasure or pain, for while in after life he retained
not the faintest recollection of his illness, he remembered quite
clearly his aunt entering the sickroom bearing in her hand a saucer
with a baked apple.
The order of impressions retained by memory might naturally be
that of color and taste, although one would rather suppose that the
sense of pain would be first to educate. In fact, the third
recollection of the child was that of discomfort. The moment he could
be removed, he was bundled up in blankets and carried from the little
house in Hancock Avenue to a larger one which his parents were to
occupy for the rest of their lives in the neighboring Mount Vernon
Street. The season was midwinter, January 10, 1842, and he never forgot
his acute distress for want of air under his blankets, or the noises of
moving furniture.
As a means of variation from a normal type, sickness in
childhood ought to have a certain value not to be classed under any
fitness or unfitness of natural selection; and especially scarlet fever
affected boys seriously, both physically and in character, though they
might through life puzzle themselves to decide whether it had fitted or
unfitted them for success; but this fever of Henry Adams took greater
and greater importance in his eyes, from the point of view of
education, the longer he lived. At first, the effect was physical. He
fell behind his brothers two or three inches in height, and
proportionally in bone and weight. His character and processes of mind
seemed to share in this fining-down process of scale. He was not good
in a fight, and his nerves were more delicate than boys' nerves ought
to be. He exaggerated these weaknesses as he grew older. The habit of
doubt; of distrusting his own judgment and of totally rejecting the
judgment of the world; the tendency to regard every question as open;
the hesitation to act except as a choice of evils; the shirking of
responsibility; the love of line, form, quality; the horror of ennui;
the passion for companionship and the antipathy to society--all these
are well-known qualities of New England character in no way peculiar to
individuals but in this instance they seemed to be stimulated by the
fever, and Henry Adams could never make up his mind whether, on the
whole, the change of character was morbid or healthy, good or bad for
his purpose. His brothers were the type; he was the variation.
As far as the boy knew, the sickness did not affect him at all,
and he grew up in excellent health, bodily and mental, taking life as
it was given; accepting its local standards without a difficulty, and
enjoying much of it as keenly as any other boy of his age. He seemed to
himself quite normal, and his companions seemed always to think him so.
Whatever was peculiar about him was education, not character, and came
to him, directly and indirectly, as the result of that
eighteenth-century inheritance which he took with his name.
The atmosphere of education in which he lived was colonial,
revolutionary, almost Cromwellian, as though he were steeped, from his
greatest grandmother's birth, in the odor of political crime.
Resistance to something was the law of New England nature; the boy
looked out on the world with the instinct of resistance; for numberless
generations his predecessors had viewed the world chiefly as a thing to
be reformed, filled with evil forces to be abolished, and they saw no
reason to suppose that they had wholly succeeded in the abolition; the
duty was unchanged. That duty implied not only resistance to evil, but
hatred of it. Boys naturally look on all force as an enemy, and
generally find it so, but the New Englander, whether boy or man, in his
long struggle with a stingy or hostile universe, had learned also to
love the pleasure of hating; his joys were few.
Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, had always
been the systematic organization of hatreds, and Massachusetts politics
had been as harsh as the climate. The chief charm of New England was
harshness of contrasts and extremes of sensibility--a cold that froze
the blood, and a heat that boiled it--so that the pleasure of
hating--one's self if no better victim offered--was not its rarest
amusement; but the charm was a true and natural child of the soil, not
a cultivated weed of the ancients. The violence of the contrast was
real and made the strongest motive of education. The double exterior
nature gave life its relative values. Winter and summer, cold and heat,
town and country, force and freedom, marked two modes of life and
thought, balanced like lobes of the brain. Town was winter confinement,
school, rule, discipline; straight, gloomy streets, piled with six feet
of snow in the middle; frosts that made the snow sing under wheels or
runners; thaws when the streets became dangerous to cross; society of
uncles, aunts, and cousins who expected children to behave themselves,
and who were not always gratified; above all else, winter represented
the desire to escape and go free. Town was restraint, law, unity.
Country, only seven miles away, was liberty, diversity, outlawry, the
endless delight of mere sense impressions given by nature for nothing,
and breathed by boys without knowing it.
Boys are wild animals, rich in the treasures of sense, but the
New England boy had a wider range of emotions than boys of more equable
climates. He felt his nature crudely, as it was meant. To the boy Henry
Adams, summer was drunken. Among senses, smell was the strongest--smell
of hot pine-woods and sweet-fern in the scorching summer noon; of
new-mown hay; of ploughed earth; of box hedges; of peaches, lilacs,
syringas; of stables, barns, cow-yards; of salt water and low tide on
the marshes; nothing came amiss. Next to smell came taste, and the
children knew the taste of everything they saw or touched, from
pennyroyal and flagroot to the shell of a pignut and the letters of a
spelling-book--the taste of A-B, AB, suddenly revived on the boy's
tongue sixty years afterwards. Light, line, and color as sensual
pleasures, came later and were as crude as the rest. The New England
light is glare, and the atmosphere harshens color. The boy was a full
man before he ever knew what was meant by atmosphere; his idea of
pleasure in light was the blaze of a New England sun. His idea of color
was a peony, with the dew of early morning on its petals. The intense
blue of the sea, as he saw it a mile or two away, from the Quincy
hills; the cumuli in a June afternoon sky; the strong reds and greens
and purples of colored prints and children's picture-books, as the
American colors then ran; these were ideals. The opposites or
antipathies, were the cold grays of November evenings, and the thick,
muddy thaws of Boston winter. With such standards, the Bostonian could
not but develop a double nature. Life was a double thing. After a
January blizzard, the boy who could look with pleasure into the violent
snow-glare of the cold white sunshine, with its intense light and
shade, scarcely knew what was meant by tone. He could reach it only by
education.
Winter and summer, then, were two hostile lives, and bred two
separate natures. Winter was always the effort to live; summer was
tropical license. Whether the children rolled in the grass, or waded in
the brook, or swam in the salt ocean, or sailed in the bay, or fished
for smelts in the creeks, or netted minnows in the salt-marshes, or
took to the pine-woods and the granite quarries, or chased muskrats and
hunted snapping-turtles in the swamps, or mushrooms or nuts on the
autumn hills, summer and country were always sensual living, while
winter was always compulsory learning. Summer was the multiplicity of
nature; winter was school.
The bearing of the two seasons on the education of Henry Adams
was no fancy; it was the most decisive force he ever knew; it ran
though life, and made the division between its perplexing, warring,
irreconcilable problems, irreducible opposites, with growing emphasis
to the last year of study. From earliest childhood the boy was
accustomed to feel that, for him, life was double. Winter and summer,
town and country, law and liberty, were hostile, and the man who
pretended they were not, was in his eyes a schoolmaster--that is, a man
employed to tell lies to little boys. Though Quincy was but two hours'
walk from Beacon Hill, it belonged in a different world. For two
hundred years, every Adams, from father to son, had lived within sight
of State Street, and sometimes had lived in it, yet none had ever taken
kindly to the town, or been taken kindly by it. The boy inherited his
double nature. He knew as yet nothing about his great-grandfather, who
had died a dozen years before his own birth: he took for granted that
any great-grandfather of his must have always been good, and his
enemies wicked; but he divined his great-grandfather's character from
his own. Never for a moment did he connect the two ideas of Boston and
John Adams; they were separate and antagonistic; the idea of John Adams
went with Quincy. He knew his grandfather John Quincy Adams only as an
old man of seventy-five or eighty who was friendly and gentle with him,
but except that he heard his grandfather always called "the President,"
and his grandmother "the Madam," he had no reason to suppose that his
Adams grandfather differed in character from his Brooks grandfather who
was equally kind and benevolent. He liked the Adams side best, but for
no other reason than that it reminded him of the country, the summer,
and the absence of restraint. Yet he felt also that Quincy was in a way
inferior to Boston, and that socially Boston looked down on Quincy. The
reason was clear enough even to a five-year old child. Quincy had no
Boston style. Little enough style had either; a simpler manner of life
and thought could hardly exist, short of cave-dwelling. The
flint-and-steel with which his grandfather Adams used to light his own
fires in the early morning was still on the mantelpiece of his study.
The idea of a livery or even a dress for servants, or of an evening
toilette, was next to blasphemy. Bathrooms, water-supplies, lighting,
heating, and the whole array of domestic comforts, were unknown at
Quincy. Boston had already a bathroom, a water-supply, a furnace, and
gas. The superiority of Boston was evident, but a child liked it no
better for that.
The magnificence of his grandfather Brooks's house in Pearl
Street or South Street has long ago disappeared, but perhaps his
country house at Medford may still remain to show what impressed the
mind of a boy in 1845 with the idea of city splendor. The President's
place at Quincy was the larger and older and far the more interesting
of the two; but a boy felt at once its inferiority in fashion. It
showed plainly enough its want of wealth. It smacked of colonial age,
but not of Boston style or plush curtains. To the end of his life he
never quite overcame the prejudice thus drawn in with his childish
breath. He never could compel himself to care for nineteenth-century
style. He was never able to adopt it, any more than his father or
grandfather or great-grandfather had done. Not that he felt it as
particularly hostile, for he reconciled himself to much that was worse;
but because, for some remote reason, he was born an eighteenth-century
child. The old house at Quincy was eighteenth century. What style it
had was in its Queen Anne mahogany panels and its Louis Seize chairs
and sofas. The panels belonged to an old colonial Vassall who built the
house; the furniture had been brought back from Paris in 1789 or 1801
or 1817, along with porcelain and books and much else of old diplomatic
remnants; and neither of the two eighteenth-century styles--neither
English Queen Anne nor French Louis Seize--was comfortable for a boy,
or for any one else. The dark mahogany had been painted white to suit
daily life in winter gloom. Nothing seemed to favor, for a child's
objects, the older forms. On the contrary, most boys, as well as
grown-up people, preferred the new, with good reason, and the child
felt himself distinctly at a disadvantage for the taste.
Nor had personal preference any share in his bias. The Brooks
grandfather was as amiable and as sympathetic as the Adams grandfather.
Both were born in 1767, and both died in 1848. Both were kind to
children, and both belonged rather to the eighteenth than to the
nineteenth centuries. The child knew no difference between them except
that one was associated with winter and the other with summer; one with
Boston, the other with Quincy. Even with Medford, the association was
hardly easier. Once as a very young boy he was taken to pass a few days
with his grandfather Brooks under charge of his aunt, but became so
violently homesick that within twenty-four hours he was brought back in
disgrace. Yet he could not remember ever being seriously homesick again.
The attachment to Quincy was not altogether sentimental or
wholly sympathetic. Quincy was not a bed of thornless roses. Even there
the curse of Cain set its mark. There as elsewhere a cruel universe
combined to crush a child. As though three or four vigorous brothers
and sisters, with the best will, were not enough to crush any child,
every one else conspired towards an education which he hated. From
cradle to grave this problem of running order through chaos, direction
through space, discipline through freedom, unity through multiplicity,
has always been, and must always be, the task of education, as it is
the moral of religion, philosophy, science, art, politics, and economy;
but a boy's will is his life, and he dies when it is broken, as the
colt dies in harness, taking a new nature in becoming tame. Rarely has
the boy felt kindly towards his tamers. Between him and his master has
always been war. Henry Adams never knew a boy of his generation to like
a master, and the task of remaining on friendly terms with one's own
family, in such a relation, was never easy.
All the more singular it seemed afterwards to him that his
first serious contact with the President should have been a struggle of
will, in which the old man almost necessarily defeated the boy, but
instead of leaving, as usual in such defeats, a lifelong sting, left
rather an impression of as fair treatment as could be expected from a
natural enemy. The boy met seldom with such restraint. He could not
have been much more than six years old at the time--seven at the
utmost--and his mother had taken him to Quincy for a long stay with the
President during the summer. What became of the rest of the family he
quite forgot; but he distinctly remembered standing at the house door
one summer morning in a passionate outburst of rebellion against going
to school. Naturally his mother was the immediate victim of his rage;
that is what mothers are for, and boys also; but in this case the boy
had his mother at unfair disadvantage, for she was a guest, and had no
means of enforcing obedience. Henry showed a certain tactical ability
by refusing to start, and he met all efforts at compulsion by
successful, though too vehement protest. He was in fair way to win, and
was holding his own, with sufficient energy, at the bottom of the long
staircase which led up to the door of the President's library, when the
door opened, and the old man slowly came down. Putting on his hat, he
took the boy's hand without a word, and walked with him, paralyzed by
awe, up the road to the town. After the first moments of consternation
at this interference in a domestic dispute, the boy reflected that an
old gentleman close on eighty would never trouble himself to walk near
a mile on a hot summer morning over a shadeless road to take a boy to
school, and that it would be strange if a lad imbued with the passion
of freedom could not find a corner to dodge around, somewhere before
reaching the school door. Then and always, the boy insisted that this
reasoning justified his apparent submission; but the old man did not
stop, and the boy saw all his strategical points turned, one after
another, until he found himself seated inside the school, and obviously
the centre of curious if not malevolent criticism. Not till then did
the President release his hand and depart.
The point was that this act, contrary to the inalienable rights
of boys, and nullifying the social compact, ought to have made him
dislike his grandfather for life. He could not recall that it had this
effect even for a moment. With a certain maturity of mind, the child
must have recognized 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. During their long walk he had
said nothing; he had uttered no syllable of revolting cant about the
duty of obedience and the wickedness of resistance to law; he had shown
no concern in the matter; hardly even a consciousness of the boy's
existence. Probably his mind at that moment was actually troubling
itself little about his grandson's iniquities, and much about the
iniquities of President Polk, but the boy could scarcely at that age
feel the whole satisfaction of thinking that President Polk was to be
the vicarious victim of his own sins, and he gave his grandfather
credit for intelligent silence. For this forbearance he felt
instinctive respect. He admitted force as a form of right; he admitted
even temper, under protest; but the seeds of a moral education would at
that moment have fallen on the stoniest soil in Quincy, which is, as
every one knows, the stoniest glacial and tidal drift known in any
Puritan land.
Neither party to this momentary disagreement can have felt
rancor, for during these three or four summers the old President's
relations with the boy were friendly and almost intimate. Whether his
older brothers and sisters were still more favored he failed to
remember, but he was himself admitted to a sort of familiarity which,
when in his turn he had reached old age, rather shocked him, for it
must have sometimes tried the President's patience. He hung about the
library; handled the books; deranged the papers; ransacked the drawers;
searched the old purses and pocket-books for foreign coins; drew the
sword-cane; snapped the travelling-pistols; upset everything in the
corners, and penetrated the President's dressing-closet where a row of
tumblers, inverted on the shelf, covered caterpillars which were
supposed to become moths or butterflies, but never did. The Madam bore
with fortitude the loss of the tumblers which her husband purloined for
these hatcheries; but she made protest when he carried off her best
cut-glass bowls to plant with acorns or peachstones that he might see
the roots grow, but which, she said, he commonly forgot like the
caterpillars.
At that time the President rode the hobby of tree-culture, and
some fine old trees should still remain to witness it, unless they have
been improved off the ground; but his was a restless mind, and although
he took his hobbies seriously and would have been annoyed had his
grandchild asked whether he was bored like an English duke, he probably
cared more for the processes than for the results, so that his grandson
was saddened by the sight and smell of peaches and pears, the best of
their kind, which he brought up from the garden to rot on his shelves
for seed. With the inherited virtues of his Puritan ancestors, the
little boy Henry conscientiously brought up to him in his study the
finest peaches he found in the garden, and ate only the less perfect.
Naturally he ate more by way of compensation, but the act showed that
he bore no grudge. As for his grandfather, it is even possible that he
may have felt a certain self-reproach for his temporary role of
schoolmaster--seeing that his own career did not offer proof of the
worldly advantages of docile obedience--for there still exists
somewhere a little volume of critically edited Nursery Rhymes with the
boy's name in full written in the President's trembling hand on the
fly-leaf. Of course there was also the Bible, given to each child at
birth, with the proper inscription in the President's hand on the
fly-leaf; while their grandfather Brooks supplied the silver mugs.
So many Bibles and silver mugs had to be supplied, that a new
house, or cottage, was built to hold them. It was "on the hill," five
minutes' walk above "the old house," with a far view eastward over
Quincy Bay, and northward over Boston. Till his twelfth year, the child
passed his summers there, and his pleasures of childhood mostly centred
in it. Of education he had as yet little to complain. Country schools
were not very serious. Nothing stuck to the mind except home
impressions, and the sharpest were those of kindred children; but as
influences that warped a mind, none compared with the mere effect of
the back of the President's bald head, as he sat in his pew on Sundays,
in line with that of President Quincy, who, though some ten years
younger, seemed to children about the same age. Before railways entered
the New England town, every parish church showed half-a-dozen of these
leading citizens, with gray hair, who sat on the main aisle in the best
pews, and had sat there, or in some equivalent dignity, since the time
of St. Augustine, if not since the glacial epoch. It was unusual for
boys to sit 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 and so forth; but boys naturally supposed, without much
reasoning, that other boys had the equivalent of President
grandfathers, and that churches would always go on, with the
bald-headed leading citizens on the main aisle, and Presidents or their
equivalents on the walls. The Irish gardener once said to the child:
"You'll be thinkin' you'll be President too!" The casuality of the
remark made so strong an impression on his mind that he never forgot
it. He could not remember ever to have thought on the subject; to him,
that there should be a doubt of his being President was a new idea.
What had been would continue to be. He doubted neither about Presidents
nor about Churches, and no one suggested at that time a doubt whether a
system of society which had lasted since Adam would outlast one Adams
more.
The Madam was a little more remote than the President, but more
decorative. She stayed much in her own room with the Dutch tiles,
looking out on her garden with the box walks, and seemed a fragile
creature to a boy who sometimes brought her a note or a message, and
took distinct pleasure in looking at her delicate face under what
seemed to him very becoming caps. He liked her refined figure; her
gentle voice and manner; her vague effect of not belonging there, but
to Washington or to Europe, like her furniture, and writing-desk with
little glass doors above and little eighteenth-century volumes in old
binding, labelled "Peregrine Pickle" or "Tom Jones" or "Hannah More."
Try as she might, the Madam could never be Bostonian, and it was her
cross in life, but to the boy it was her charm. Even at that age, he
felt drawn to it. The Madam's life had been in truth far from Boston.
She was born in London in 1775, daughter of Joshua Johnson, an American
merchant, brother of Governor Thomas Johnson of Maryland; and Catherine
Nuth, of an English family in London. Driven from England by the
Revolutionary War, Joshua Johnson took his family to Nantes, where they
remained till the peace. The girl Louisa Catherine was nearly ten years
old when brought back to London, and her sense of nationality must have
been confused; but the influence of the Johnsons and the services of
Joshua obtained for him from President Washington the appointment of
Consul in London on the organization of the Government in 1790. In 1794
President Washington appointed John Quincy Adams Minister to The Hague.
He was twenty-seven years old when he returned to London, and found the
Consul's house a very agreeable haunt. Louisa was then twenty.
At that time, and long afterwards, the Consul's house, far more
than the Minister's, was the centre of contact for travelling
Americans, either official or other. The Legation was a shifting point,
between 1785 and 1815; but the Consulate, far down in the City, near
the Tower, was convenient and inviting; so inviting that it proved
fatal to young Adams. Louisa was charming, like a Romney portrait, but
among her many charms that of being a New England woman was not one.
The defect was serious. Her future mother-in-law, Abigail, a famous New
England woman whose authority over her turbulent husband, the second
President, was hardly so great as that which she exercised over her
son, the sixth to be, was troubled by the fear that Louisa might not be
made of stuff stern enough, or brought up in conditions severe enough,
to suit a New England climate, or to make an efficient wife for her
paragon son, and Abigail was right on that point, as on most others
where sound judgment was involved; but sound judgment is sometimes a
source of weakness rather than of force, and John Quincy already had
reason to think that his mother held sound judgments on the subject of
daughters-in-law which human nature, since the fall of Eve, made Adams
helpless to realize. Being three thousand miles away from his mother,
and equally far in love, he married Louisa in London, July 26, 1797,
and took her to Berlin to be the head of the United States Legation.
During three or four exciting years, the young bride lived in Berlin;
whether she was happy or not, whether she was content or not, whether
she was socially successful or not, her descendants did not surely
know; but in any case she could by no chance have become educated there
for a life in Quincy or Boston. In 1801 the overthrow of the Federalist
Party drove her and her husband to America, and she became at last a
member of the Quincy household, but by that time her children needed
all her attention, and she remained there with occasional winters in
Boston and Washington, till 1809. Her husband was made Senator in 1803,
and in 1809 was appointed Minister to Russia. She went with him to St.
Petersburg, taking her baby, Charles Francis, born in 1807; but
broken-hearted at having to leave her two older boys behind. The life
at St. Petersburg was hardly gay for her; they were far too poor to
shine in that extravagant society; but she survived it, though her
little girl baby did not, and in the winter of 1814-15, alone with the
boy of seven years old, crossed Europe from St. Petersburg to Paris, in
her travelling-carriage, passing through the armies, and reaching Paris
in the Cent Jours after Napoleon's return from Elba. Her husband next
went to England as Minister, and she was for two years at the Court of
the Regent. In 1817 her husband came home to be Secretary of State, and
she lived for eight years in F Street, doing her work of entertainer
for President Monroe's administration. Next she lived four miserable
years in the White House. When that chapter was closed in 1829, she had
earned the right to be tired and delicate, but she still had fifteen
years to serve as wife of a Member of the House, after her husband went
back to Congress in 1833. Then it was that the little Henry, her
grandson, first remembered her, from 1843 to 1848, sitting in her
panelled room, at breakfast, with her heavy silver teapot and
sugar-bowl and cream-jug, which still exist somewhere as an heirloom of
the modern safety-vault. By that time she was seventy years old or
more, and thoroughly weary of being beaten about a stormy world. To the
boy she seemed singularly peaceful, a vision of silver gray, presiding
over her old President and her Queen Anne mahogany; an exotic, like her
Sevres china; an object of deference to every one, and of great
affection to her son Charles; but hardly more Bostonian than she had
been fifty years before, on her wedding-day, in the shadow of the Tower
of London.
Such a figure was even less fitted than that of her old
husband, the President, to impress on a boy's mind, the standards of
the coming century. She was Louis Seize, like the furniture. The boy
knew nothing of her interior life, which had been, as the venerable
Abigail, long since at peace, foresaw, one of severe stress and little
pure satisfaction. He never dreamed that from her might come some of
those doubts and self-questionings, those hesitations, those rebellions
against law and discipline, which marked more than one of her
descendants; but he might even then have felt some vague instinctive
suspicion that he was to inherit from her the seeds of the primal sin,
the fall from grace, the curse of Abel, that he was not of pure New
England stock, but half exotic. As a child of Quincy he was not a true
Bostonian, but even as a child of Quincy he inherited a quarter taint
of Maryland blood. Charles Francis, half Marylander by birth, had
hardly seen Boston till he was ten years old, when his parents left him
there at school in 1817, and he never forgot the experience. He was to
be nearly as old as his mother had been in 1845, before he quite
accepted Boston, or Boston quite accepted him.
A boy who began his education in these surroundings, with
physical strength inferior to that of his brothers, and with a certain
delicacy of mind and bone, ought rightly to have felt at home in the
eighteenth century and should, in proper self-respect, have rebelled
against the standards of the nineteenth. The atmosphere of his first
ten years must have been very like that of his grandfather at the same
age, from 1767 till 1776, barring the battle of Bunker Hill, and even
as late as 1846, the battle of Bunker Hill remained actual. The tone of
Boston society was colonial. The true Bostonian always knelt in
self-abasement before the majesty of English standards; far from
concealing it as a weakness, he was proud of it as his strength. The
eighteenth century ruled society long after 1850. Perhaps the boy began
to shake it off rather earlier than most of his mates.
Indeed this prehistoric stage of education ended rather
abruptly with his tenth year. One winter morning he was conscious of a
certain confusion in the house in Mount Vernon Street, and gathered,
from such words as he could catch, that the President, who happened to
be then staying there, on his way to Washington, had fallen and hurt
himself. Then he heard the word paralysis. After that day he came to
associate the word with the figure of his grandfather, in a
tall-backed, invalid armchair, on one side of the spare bedroom
fireplace, and one of his old friends, Dr. Parkman or P. P. F. Degrand,
on the other side, both dozing.
The end of this first, or ancestral and Revolutionary, chapter
came on February 21, 1848--and the month of February brought life and
death as a family habit--when the eighteenth century, as an actual and
living companion, vanished. If the scene on the floor of the House,
when the old President fell, struck the still simple-minded American
public with a sensation unusually dramatic, its effect on a
ten-year-old boy, whose boy-life was fading away with the life of his
grandfather, could not be slight. One had to pay for Revolutionary
patriots; grandfathers and grandmothers; Presidents; diplomats; Queen
Anne mahogany and Louis Seize chairs, as well as for Stuart portraits.
Such things warp young life. Americans commonly believed that they
ruined it, and perhaps the practical common-sense of the American mind
judged right. Many a boy might be ruined by much less than the emotions
of the funeral service in the Quincy church, with its surroundings of
national respect and family pride. By another dramatic chance it
happened that the clergyman of the parish, Dr. Lunt, was an unusual
pulpit orator, the ideal of a somewhat austere intellectual type, such
as the school of Buckminster and Channing inherited from the old
Congregational clergy. His extraordinarily refined appearance, his
dignity of manner, his deeply cadenced voice, his remarkable English
and his fine appreciation, gave to the funeral service a character that
left an overwhelming impression on the boy's mind. He was to see many
great functions--funerals and festival--in after-life, till his only
thought was to see no more, but he never again witnessed anything
nearly so impressive to him as the last services at Quincy over the
body of one President and the ashes of another.
The effect of the Quincy service was deepened by the official
ceremony which afterwards took place in Faneuil Hall, when the boy was
taken to hear his uncle, Edward Everett, deliver a Eulogy. Like all Mr.
Everett's orations, it was an admirable piece of oratory, such as only
an admirable orator and scholar could create; too good for a
ten-year-old boy to appreciate at its value; but already the boy knew
that the dead President could not be in it, and had even learned why he
would have been out of place there; for knowledge was beginning to come
fast. The shadow of the War of 1812 still hung over State Street; the
shadow of the Civil War to come had already begun to darken Faneuil
Hall. No rhetoric could have reconciled Mr. Everett's audience to his
subject. How could he say there, to an assemblage of Bostonians in the
heart of mercantile Boston, that the only distinctive mark of all the
Adamses, since old Sam Adams's father a hundred and fifty years before,
had been their inherited quarrel with State Street, which had again and
again broken out into riot, bloodshed, personal feuds, foreign and
civil war, wholesale banishments and confiscations, until the history
of Florence was hardly more turbulent than that of Boston? How could he
whisper the word Hartford Convention before the men who had made it?
What would have been said had he suggested the chance of Secession and
Civil War?
Thus already, at ten years old, the boy found himself standing
face to face with a dilemma that might have puzzled an early Christian.
What was he?--where was he going? Even then he felt that something was
wrong, but he concluded that it must be Boston. Quincy had always been
right, for Quincy represented a moral principle--the principle of
resistance to Boston. His Adams ancestors must have been right, since
they were always hostile to State Street. If State Street was wrong,
Quincy must be right! Turn the dilemma as he pleased, he still came
back on the eighteenth century and the law of Resistance; of Truth; of
Duty, and of Freedom. He was a ten-year-old priest and politician. He
could under no circumstances have guessed what the next fifty years had
in store, and no one could teach him; but sometimes, in his old age, he
wondered--and could never decide--whether the most clear and certain
knowledge would have helped him. Supposing he had seen a New York
stock-list of 1900, and had studied the statistics of railways,
telegraphs, coal, and steel--would he have quitted his
eighteenth-century, his ancestral prejudices, his abstract ideals, his
semi-clerical training, and the rest, in order to perform an expiatory
pilgrimage to State Street, and ask for the fatted calf of his
grandfather Brooks and a clerkship in the Suffolk Bank?
Sixty years afterwards he was still unable to make up his mind.
Each course had its advantages, but the material advantages, looking
back, seemed to lie wholly in State Street.