BOSTON (1848-1854)
PETER CHARDON BROOKS, the other grandfather, died January 1,
1849, bequeathing what was supposed to be the largest estate in Boston,
about two million dollars, to his seven surviving children: four
sons--Edward, Peter Chardon, Gorham, and Sydney; three
daughters--Charlotte, married to Edward Everett; Ann, married to
Nathaniel Frothingham, minister of the First Church; and Abigail Brown,
born April 25, 1808, married September 3, 1829, to Charles Francis
Adams, hardly a year older than herself. Their first child, born in
1830, was a daughter, named Louisa Catherine, after her Johnson
grandmother; the second was a son, named John Quincy, after his
President grandfather; the third took his father's name, Charles
Francis; while the fourth, being of less account, was in a way given to
his mother, who named him Henry Brooks, after a favorite brother just
lost. More followed, but these, being younger, had nothing to do with
the arduous process of educating.
The Adams connection was singularly small in Boston, but the
family of Brooks was singularly large and even brilliant, and almost
wholly of clerical New England stock. One might have sought long in
much larger and older societies for three brothers-in-law more
distinguished or more scholarly than Edward Everett, Dr. Frothingham,
and Mr. Adams. One might have sought equally long for seven
brothers-in-law more unlike. No doubt they all bore more or less the
stamp of Boston, or at least of Massachusetts Bay, but the shades of
difference amounted to contrasts. Mr. Everett belonged to Boston hardly
more than Mr. Adams. One of the most ambitious of Bostonians, he had
broken bounds early in life by leaving the Unitarian pulpit to take a
seat in Congress where he had given valuable support to J. Q. Adams's
administration; support which, as a social consequence, led to the
marriage of the President's son, Charles Francis, with Mr. Everett's
youngest sister-in-law, Abigail Brooks. The wreck of parties which
marked the reign of Andrew Jackson had interfered with many promising
careers, that of Edward Everett among the rest, but he had risen with
the Whig Party to power, had gone as Minister to England, and had
returned to America with the halo of a European reputation, and
undisputed rank second only to Daniel Webster as the orator and
representative figure of Boston. The other brother-in-law, Dr.
Frothingham, belonged to the same clerical school, though in manner
rather the less clerical of the two. Neither of them had much in common
with Mr. Adams, who was a younger man, greatly biassed by his father,
and by the inherited feud between Quincy and State Street; but personal
relations were friendly as far as a boy could see, and the innumerable
cousins went regularly to the First Church every Sunday in winter, and
slept through their uncle's sermons, without once thinking to ask what
the sermons were supposed to mean for them. For two hundred years the
First Church had seen the same little boys, sleeping more or less
soundly under the same or similar conditions, and dimly conscious of
the same feuds; but the feuds had never ceased, and the boys had always
grown up to inherit them. Those of the generation of 1812 had mostly
disappeared in 1850; death had cleared that score; the quarrels of John
Adams, and those of John Quincy Adams were no longer acutely personal;
the game was considered as drawn; and Charles Francis Adams might then
have taken his inherited rights of political leadership in succession
to Mr. Webster and Mr. Everett, his seniors. Between him and State
Street the relation was more natural than between Edward Everett and
State Street; but instead of doing so, Charles Francis Adams drew
himself aloof and renewed the old war which had already lasted since
1700. He could not help it. With the record of J. Q. Adams fresh in the
popular memory, his son and his only representative could not make
terms with the slave-power, and the slave-power overshadowed all the
great Boston interests. No doubt Mr. Adams had principles of his own,
as well as inherited, but even his children, who as yet had no
principles, could equally little follow the lead of Mr. Webster or even
of Mr. Seward. They would have lost in consideration more than they
would have gained in patronage. They were anti-slavery by birth, as
their name was Adams and their home was Quincy. No matter how much they
had wished to enter State Street, they felt that State Street never
would trust them, or they it. Had State Street been Paradise, they must
hunger for it in vain, and it hardly needed Daniel Webster to act as
archangel with the flaming sword, to order them away from the door.
Time and experience, which alter all perspectives, altered this
among the rest, and taught the boy gentler judgment, but even when only
ten years old, his face was already fixed, and his heart was stone,
against State Street; his education was warped beyond recovery in the
direction of Puritan politics. Between him and his patriot grandfather
at the same age, the conditions had changed little. The year 1848 was
like enough to the year 1776 to make a fair parallel. The parallel, as
concerned bias of education, was complete when, a few months after the
death of John Quincy Adams, a convention of anti-slavery delegates met
at Buffalo to organize a new party and named candidates for the general
election in November: for President, Martin Van Buren; for
Vice-President, Charles Francis Adams.
For any American boy the fact that his father was running for
office would have dwarfed for the time every other excitement, but even
apart from personal bias, the year 1848, for a boy's road through life,
was decisive for twenty years to come. There was never a side-path of
escape. The stamp of 1848 was almost as indelible as the stamp of 1776,
but in the eighteenth or any earlier century, the stamp mattered less
because it was standard, and every one bore it; while men whose lives
were to fall in the generation between 1865 and 1900 had, first of all,
to get rid of it, and take the stamp that belonged to their time. This
was their education. To outsiders, immigrants, adventurers, it was
easy, but the old Puritan nature rebelled against change. The reason it
gave was forcible. The Puritan thought his thought higher and his moral
standards better than those of his successors. So they were. He could
not be convinced that moral standards had nothing to do with it, and
that utilitarian morality was good enough for him, as it was for the
graceless. Nature had given to the boy Henry a character that, in any
previous century, would have led him into the Church; he inherited
dogma and a priori thought from the beginning of time; and he scarcely
needed a violent reaction like anti-slavery politics to sweep him back
into Puritanism with a violence as great as that of a religious war.
Thus far he had nothing to do with it; his education was
chiefly inheritance, and during the next five or six years, his father
alone counted for much. If he were to worry successfully through life's
quicksands, he must depend chiefly on his father's pilotage; but, for
his father, the channel lay clear, while for himself an unknown ocean
lay beyond. His father's business in life was to get past the dangers
of the slave-power, or to fix its bounds at least. The task done, he
might be content to let his sons pay for the pilotage; and it mattered
little to his success whether they paid it with their lives wasted on
battle-fields or in misdirected energies and lost opportunity. The
generation that lived from 1840 to 1870 could do very well with the old
forms of education; that which had its work to do between 1870 and 1900
needed something quite new.
His father's character was therefore the larger part of his
education, as far as any single person affected it, and for that
reason, if for no other, the son was always a much interested critic of
his father's mind and temper. Long after his death as an old man of
eighty, his sons continued to discuss this subject with a good deal of
difference in their points of view. To his son Henry, the quality that
distinguished his father from all the other figures in the family
group, was that, in his opinion, Charles Francis Adams possessed the
only perfectly balanced mind that ever existed in the name. For a
hundred years, every newspaper scribbler had, with more or less obvious
excuse, derided or abused the older Adamses for want of judgment. They
abused Charles Francis for his judgment. Naturally they never attempted
to assign values to either; that was the children's affair; but the
traits were real. Charles Francis Adams was singular for mental
poise--absence of self-assertion or self-consciousness--the faculty of
standing apart without seeming aware that he was alone--a balance of
mind and temper that neither challenged nor avoided notice, nor
admitted question of superiority or inferiority, of jealousy, of
personal motives, from any source, even under great pressure. This
unusual poise of judgment and temper, ripened by age, became the more
striking to his son Henry as he learned to measure the mental faculties
themselves, which were in no way exceptional either for depth or range.
Charles Francis Adams's memory was hardly above the average; his mind
was not bold like his grandfather's or restless like his father's, or
imaginative or oratorical--still less mathematical; but it worked with
singular perfection, admirable self-restraint, and instinctive mastery
of form. Within its range it was a model.
The standards of Boston were high, much affected by the old
clerical self-respect which gave the Unitarian clergy unusual social
charm. Dr. Channing, Mr. Everett, Dr. Frothingham. Dr. Palfrey,
President Walker, R. W. Emerson, and other Boston ministers of the same
school, would have commanded distinction in any society; but the
Adamses had little or no affinity with the pulpit, and still less with
its eccentric offshoots, like Theodore Parker, or Brook Farm, or the
philosophy of Concord. Besides its clergy, Boston showed a literary
group, led by Ticknor, Prescott, Longfellow, Motley, O. W. Holmes; but
Mr. Adams was not one of them; as a rule they were much too Websterian.
Even in science Boston could claim a certain eminence, especially in
medicine, but Mr. Adams cared very little for science. He stood alone.
He had no master--hardly even his father. He had no scholars--hardly
even his sons.
Almost alone among his Boston contemporaries, he was not
English in feeling or in sympathies. Perhaps a hundred years of acute
hostility to England had something to do with this family trait; but in
his case it went further and became indifference to social distinction.
Never once in forty years of intimacy did his son notice in him a trace
of snobbishness. He was one of the exceedingly small number of
Americans to whom an English duke or duchess seemed to be indifferent,
and royalty itself nothing more than a slightly inconvenient presence.
This was, it is true, rather the tone of English society in his time,
but Americans were largely responsible for changing it, and Mr. Adams
had every possible reason for affecting the manner of a courtier even
if he did not feel the sentiment. Never did his son see him flatter or
vilify, or show a sign of envy or jealousy; never a shade of vanity or
self-conceit. Never a tone of arrogance! Never a gesture of pride!
The same thing might perhaps have been said of John Quincy
Adams, but in him his associates averred that it was accompanied by
mental restlessness and often by lamentable want of judgment. No one
ever charged Charles Francis Adams with this fault. The critics charged
him with just the opposite defect. They called him cold. No doubt, such
perfect poise--such intuitive self-adjustment--was not maintained by
nature without a sacrifice of the qualities which would have upset it.
No doubt, too, that even his restless-minded, introspective,
self-conscious children who knew him best were much too ignorant of the
world and of human nature to suspect how rare and complete was the
model before their eyes. A coarser instrument would have impressed them
more. Average human nature is very coarse, and its ideals must
necessarily be average. The world never loved perfect poise. What the
world does love is commonly absence of poise, for it has to be amused.
Napoleons and Andrew Jacksons amuse it, but it is not amused by perfect
balance. Had Mr. Adams's nature been cold, he would have followed Mr.
Webster, Mr. Everett, Mr. Seward, and Mr. Winthrop in the lines of
party discipline and self-interest. Had it been less balanced than it
was, he would have gone with Mr. Garrison, Mr. Wendell Phillips, Mr.
Edmund Quincy, and Theodore Parker, into secession. Between the two
paths he found an intermediate one, distinctive and characteristic--he
set up a party of his own.
This political party became a chief influence in the education
of the boy Henry in the six years 1848 to 1854, and violently affected
his character at the moment when character is plastic. The group of men
with whom Mr. Adams associated himself, and whose social centre was the
house in Mount Vernon Street, numbered only three: Dr. John G. Palfrey,
Richard H. Dana, and Charles Sumner. Dr. Palfrey was the oldest, and in
spite of his clerical education, was to a boy often the most agreeable,
for his talk was lighter and his range wider than that of the others;
he had wit, or humor, and the give-and-take of dinner-table exchange.
Born to be a man of the world, he forced himself to be clergyman,
professor, or statesman, while, like every other true Bostonian, he
yearned for the ease of the Athenaeum Club in Pall Mall or the
Combination Room at Trinity. Dana at first suggested the opposite; he
affected to be still before the mast, a direct, rather bluff, vigorous
seaman, and only as one got to know him better one found the man of
rather excessive refinement trying with success to work like a
day-laborer, deliberately hardening his skin to the burden, as though
he were still carrying hides at Monterey. Undoubtedly he succeeded, for
his mind and will were robust, but he might have said what his lifelong
friend William M. Evarts used to say: "I pride myself on my success in
doing not the things I like to do, but the things I don't like to do."
Dana's ideal of life was to be a great Englishman, with a seat on the
front benches of the House of Commons until he should be promoted to
the woolsack; beyond all, with a social status that should place him
above the scuffle of provincial and unprofessional annoyances; but he
forced himself to take life as it came, and he suffocated his longings
with grim self-discipline, by mere force of will. Of the four men, Dana
was the most marked. Without dogmatism or self-assertion, he seemed
always to be fully in sight, a figure that completely filled a
well-defined space. He, too, talked well, and his mind worked close to
its subject, as a lawyer's should; but disguise and silence it as he
liked, it was aristocratic to the tenth generation.
In that respect, and in that only, Charles Sumner was like him,
but Sumner, in almost every other quality, was quite different from his
three associates--altogether out of line. He, too, adored English
standards, but his ambition led him to rival the career of Edmund
Burke. No young Bostonian of his time had made so brilliant a start,
but rather in the steps of Edward Everett than of Daniel Webster. As an
orator he had achieved a triumph by his oration against war; but Boston
admired him chiefly for his social success in England and on the
Continent; success that gave to every Bostonian who enjoyed it a halo
never acquired by domestic sanctity. Mr. Sumner, both by interest and
instinct, felt the value of his English connection, and cultivated it
the more as he became socially an outcast from Boston society by the
passions of politics. He was rarely without a pocket-full of letters
from duchesses or noblemen in England. Having sacrificed to principle
his social position in America, he clung the more closely to his
foreign attachments. The Free Soil Party fared ill in Beacon Street.
The social arbiters of Boston--George Ticknor and the rest--had to
admit, however unwillingly, that the Free Soil leaders could not mingle
with the friends and followers of Mr. Webster. Sumner was socially
ostracized, and so, for that matter, were Palfrey, Dana, Russell,
Adams, and all the other avowed anti-slavery leaders, but for them it
mattered less, because they had houses and families of their own; while
Sumner had neither wife nor household, and, though the most socially
ambitious of all, and the most hungry for what used to be called polite
society, he could enter hardly half-a-dozen houses in Boston.
Longfellow stood by him in Cambridge, and even in Beacon Street he
could always take refuge in the house of Mr. Lodge, but few days passed
when he did not pass some time in Mount Vernon Street. Even with that,
his solitude was glacial, and reacted on his character. He had nothing
but himself to think about. His superiority was, indeed, real and
incontestable; he was the classical ornament of the anti-slavery party;
their pride in him was unbounded, and their admiration outspoken.
The boy Henry worshipped him, and if he ever regarded any older
man as a personal friend, it was Mr. Sumner. The relation of Mr. Sumner
in the household was far closer than any relation of blood. None of the
uncles approached such intimacy. Sumner was the boy's ideal of
greatness; the highest product of nature and art. The only fault of
such a model was its superiority which defied imitation. To the
twelve-year-old boy, his father, Dr. Palfrey, Mr. Dana, were men, more
or less like what he himself might become; but Mr. Sumner was a
different order--heroic.
As the boy grew up to be ten or twelve years old, his father
gave him a writing-table in one of the alcoves of his Boston library,
and there, winter after winter, Henry worked over his Latin Grammar and
listened to these four gentlemen discussing the course of anti-slavery
politics. The discussions were always serious; the Free Soil Party took
itself quite seriously; and they were habitual because Mr. Adams had
undertaken to edit a newspaper as the organ of these gentlemen, who
came to discuss its policy and expression. At the same time Mr. Adams
was editing the "Works" of his grandfather John Adams, and made the boy
read texts for proof-correction. In after years his father sometimes
complained that, as a reader of Novanglus and Massachusettensis, Henry
had shown very little consciousness of punctuation; but the boy
regarded this part of school life only as a warning, if he ever grew up
to write dull discussions in the newspapers, to try to be dull in some
different way from that of his great-grandfather. Yet the discussions
in the Boston Whig were carried on in much the same style as those of
John Adams and his opponent, and appealed to much the same society and
the same habit of mind. The boy got as little education, fitting him
for his own time, from the one as from the other, and he got no more
from his contact with the gentlemen themselves who were all types of
the past.
Down to 1850, and even later, New England society was still
directed by the professions. Lawyers, physicians, professors, merchants
were classes, and acted not as individuals, but as though they were
clergymen and each profession were a church. In politics the system
required competent expression; it was the old Ciceronian idea of
government by the best that produced the long line of New England
statesmen. They chose men to represent them because they wanted to be
well represented, and they chose the best they had. Thus Boston chose
Daniel Webster, and Webster took, not as pay, but as honorarium, the
cheques raised for him by Peter Harvey from the Appletons, Perkinses,
Amorys, Searses, Brookses, Lawrences, and so on, who begged him to
represent them. Edward Everett held the rank in regular succession to
Webster. Robert C. Winthrop claimed succession to Everett. Charles
Sumner aspired to break the succession, but not the system. The Adamses
had never been, for any length of time, a part of this State
succession; they had preferred the national service, and had won all
their distinction outside the State, but they too had required State
support and had commonly received it. The little group of men in Mount
Vernon Street were an offshoot of this system; they were statesmen, not
politicians; they guided public opinion, but were little guided by it.
The boy naturally learned only one lesson from his saturation
in such air. He took for granted that this sort of world, more or less
the same that had always existed in Boston and Massachusetts Bay, was
the world which he was to fit. Had he known Europe he would have
learned no better. The Paris of Louis Philippe, Guizot, and de
Tocqueville, as well as the London of Robert Peel, Macaulay, and John
Stuart Mill, were but varieties of the same upper-class bourgeoisie
that felt instinctive cousinship with the Boston of Ticknor, Prescott,
and Motley. Even the typical grumbler Carlyle, who cast doubts on the
real capacity of the middle class, and who at times thought himself
eccentric, found friendship and alliances in Boston--still more in
Concord. The system had proved so successful that even Germany wanted
to try it, and Italy yearned for it. England's middle-class government
was the ideal of human progress.
Even the violent reaction after 1848, and the return of all
Europe to military practices, never for a moment shook the true faith.
No one, except Karl Marx, foresaw radical change. What announced it?
The world was producing sixty or seventy million tons of coal, and
might be using nearly a million steam-horsepower, just beginning to
make itself felt. All experience since the creation of man, all divine
revelation or human science, conspired to deceive and betray a
twelve-year-old boy who took for granted that his ideas, which were
alone respectable, would be alone respected.
Viewed from Mount Vernon Street, the problem of life was as
simple as it was classic. Politics offered no difficulties, for there
the moral law was a sure guide. Social perfection was also sure,
because human nature worked for Good, and three instruments were all
she asked--Suffrage, Common Schools, and Press. On these points doubt
was forbidden. Education was divine, and man needed only a correct
knowledge of facts to reach perfection:
"Were half the power that fills the world with terror,
Were half the wealth bestowed on camps and courts,
Given to redeem the human mind from error,
There were no need of arsenals nor forts."
Nothing quieted doubt so completely as the mental calm of the Unitarian
clergy. In uniform excellence of life and character, moral and
intellectual, the score of Unitarian clergymen about Boston, who
controlled society and Harvard College, were never excelled. They
proclaimed as their merit that they insisted on no doctrine, but
taught, or tried to teach, the means of leading a virtuous, useful,
unselfish life, which they held to be sufficient for salvation. For
them, difficulties might be ignored; doubts were waste of thought;
nothing exacted solution. Boston had solved the universe; or had
offered and realized the best solution yet tried. The problem was
worked out.
Of all the conditions of his youth which afterwards puzzled the
grown-up man, this disappearance of religion puzzled him most. The boy
went to church twice every Sunday; he was taught to read his Bible, and
he learned religious poetry by heart; he believed in a mild deism; he
prayed; he went through all the forms; but neither to him nor to his
brothers or sisters was religion real. Even the mild discipline of the
Unitarian Church was so irksome that they all threw it off at the first
possible moment, and never afterwards entered a church. The religious
instinct had vanished, and could not be revived, although one made in
later life many efforts to recover it. That the most powerful emotion
of man, next to the sexual, should disappear, might be a personal
defect of his own; but that the most intelligent society, led by the
most intelligent clergy, in the most moral conditions he ever knew,
should have solved all the problems of the universe so thoroughly as to
have quite ceased making itself anxious about past or future, and
should have persuaded itself that all the problems which had convulsed
human thought from earliest recorded time, were not worth discussing,
seemed to him the most curious social phenomenon he had to account for
in a long life. The faculty of turning away one's eyes as one
approaches a chasm is not unusual, and Boston showed, under the lead of
Mr. Webster, how successfully it could be done in politics; but in
politics a certain number of men did at least protest. In religion and
philosophy no one protested. Such protest as was made took forms more
simple than the silence, like the deism of Theodore Parker, and of the
boy's own cousin Octavius Frothingham, who distressed his father and
scandalized Beacon Street by avowing scepticism that seemed to solve no
old problems, and to raise many new ones. The less aggressive protest
of Ralph Waldo Emerson, was, from an old-world point of view, less
serious. It was naif.
The children reached manhood without knowing religion, and with
the certainty that dogma, metaphysics, and abstract philosophy were not
worth knowing. So one-sided an education could have been possible in no
other country or time, but it became, almost of necessity, the more
literary and political. As the children grew up, they exaggerated the
literary and the political interests. They joined in the dinner-table
discussions and from childhood the boys were accustomed to hear, almost
every day, table-talk as good as they were ever likely to hear again.
The eldest child, Louisa, was one of the most sparkling creatures her
brother met in a long and varied experience of bright women. The oldest
son, John, was afterwards regarded as one of the best talkers in Boston
society, and perhaps the most popular man in the State, though apt to
be on the unpopular side. Palfrey and Dana could be entertaining when
they pleased, and though Charles Sumner could hardly be called light in
hand, he was willing to be amused, and smiled grandly from time to
time; while Mr. Adams, who talked relatively little, was always a good
listener, and laughed over a witticism till he choked.
By way of educating and amusing the children, Mr. Adams read
much aloud, and was sure to read political literature, especially when
it was satirical, like the speeches of Horace Mann and the "Epistles"
of "Hosea Biglow," with great delight to the youth. So he read
Longfellow and Tennyson as their poems appeared, but the children took
possession of Dickens and Thackeray for themselves. Both were too
modern for tastes founded on Pope and Dr. Johnson. The boy Henry soon
became a desultory reader of every book he found readable, but these
were commonly eighteenth-century historians because his father's
library was full of them. In the want of positive instincts, he drifted
into the mental indolence of history. So too, he read shelves of
eighteenth-century poetry, but when his father offered his own set of
Wordsworth as a gift on condition of reading it through, he declined.
Pope and Gray called for no mental effort; they were easy reading; but
the boy was thirty years old before his education reached Wordsworth.
This is the story of an education, and the person or persons
who figure in it are supposed to have values only as educators or
educated. The surroundings concern it only so far as they affect
education. Sumner, Dana, Palfrey, had values of their own, like Hume,
Pope, and Wordsworth, which any one may study in their works; here all
appear only as influences on the mind of a boy very nearly the average
of most boys in physical and mental stature. The influence was wholly
political and literary. His father made no effort to force his mind,
but left him free play, and this was perhaps best. Only in one way his
father rendered him a great service by trying to teach him French and
giving him some idea of a French accent. Otherwise the family was
rather an atmosphere than an influence. The boy had a large and
overpowering set of brothers and sisters, who were modes or replicas of
the same type, getting the same education, struggling with the same
problems, and solving the question, or leaving it unsolved much in the
same way. They knew no more than he what they wanted or what to do for
it, but all were conscious that they would like to control power in
some form; and the same thing could be said of an ant or an elephant.
Their form was tied to politics or literature. They amounted to one
individual with half-a-dozen sides or facets; their temperaments
reacted on each other and made each child more like the other. This was
also education, but in the type, and the Boston or New England type was
well enough known. What no one knew was whether the individual who
thought himself a representative of this type, was fit to deal with
life.
As far as outward bearing went, such a family of turbulent
children, given free rein by their parents, or indifferent to check,
should have come to more or less grief. Certainly no one was strong
enough to control them, least of all their mother, the queen-bee of the
hive, on whom nine-tenths of the burden fell, on whose strength they
all depended, but whose children were much too self-willed and
self-confident to take guidance from her, or from any one else, unless
in the direction they fancied. Father and mother were about equally
helpless. Almost every large family in those days produced at least one
black sheep, and if this generation of Adamses escaped, it was as much
a matter of surprise to them as to their neighbors. By some happy
chance they grew up to be decent citizens, but Henry Adams, as a brand
escaped from the burning, always looked back with astonishment at their
luck. The fact seemed to prove that they were born, like birds, with a
certain innate balance. Home influences alone never saved the New
England boy from ruin, though sometimes they may have helped to ruin
him; and the influences outside of home were negative. If school
helped, it was only by reaction. The dislike of school was so strong as
to be a positive gain. The passionate hatred of school methods was
almost a method in itself. Yet the day-school of that time was
respectable, and the boy had nothing to complain of. In fact, he never
complained. He hated it because he was here with a crowd of other boys
and compelled to learn by memory a quantity of things that did not
amuse him. His memory was slow, and the effort painful. For him to
conceive that his memory could compete for school prizes with machines
of two or three times its power, was to prove himself wanting not only
in memory, but flagrantly in mind. He thought his mind a good enough
machine, if it were given time to act, but it acted wrong if hurried.
Schoolmasters never gave time.
In any and all its forms, the boy detested school, and the
prejudice became deeper with years. He always reckoned his school-days,
from ten to sixteen years old, as time thrown away. Perhaps his needs
turned out to be exceptional, but his existence was exceptional.
Between 1850 and 1900 nearly every one's existence was exceptional. For
success in the life imposed on him he needed, as afterwards appeared,
the facile use of only four tools: Mathematics, French, German, and
Spanish. With these, he could master in very short time any special
branch of inquiry, and feel at home in any society. Latin and Greek, he
could, with the help of the modern languages, learn more completely by
the intelligent work of six weeks than in the six years he spent on
them at school. These four tools were necessary to his success in life,
but he never controlled any one of them.
Thus, at the outset, he was condemned to failure more or less
complete in the life awaiting him, but not more so than his companions.
Indeed, had his father kept the boy at home, and given him half an
hour's direction every day, he would have done more for him than school
ever could do for them. Of course, school-taught men and boys looked
down on home-bred boys, and rather prided themselves on their own
ignorance, but the man of sixty can generally see what he needed in
life, and in Henry Adams's opinion it was not school.
Most school experience was bad. Boy associations at fifteen
were worse than none. Boston at that time offered few healthy resources
for boys or men. The bar-room and billiard-room were more familiar than
parents knew. As a rule boys could skate and swim and were sent to
dancing-school; they played a rudimentary game of baseball, football,
and hockey; a few could sail a boat; still fewer had been out with a
gun to shoot yellow-legs or a stray wild duck; one or two may have
learned something of natural history if they came from the neighborhood
of Concord; none could ride across country, or knew what shooting with
dogs meant. Sport as a pursuit was unknown. Boat-racing came after
1850. For horse-racing, only the trotting-course existed. Of all
pleasures, winter sleighing was still the gayest and most popular. From
none of these amusements could the boy learn anything likely to be of
use to him in the world. Books remained as in the eighteenth century,
the source of life, and as they came out--Thackeray, Dickens, Bulwer,
Tennyson, Macaulay, Carlyle, and the rest--they were devoured; but as
far as happiness went, the happiest hours of the boy's education were
passed in summer lying on a musty heap of Congressional Documents in
the old farmhouse at Quincy, reading "Quentin Durward," "Ivanhoe," and
"The Talisman," and raiding the garden at intervals for peaches and
pears. On the whole he learned most then.