BERLIN (1858-1859)
A FOURTH child has the strength of his weakness. Being of no
great value, he may throw himself away if he likes, and never be
missed. Charles Francis Adams, the father, felt no love for Europe,
which, as he and all the world agreed, unfitted Americans for America.
A captious critic might have replied that all the success he or his
father or his grandfather achieved was chiefly due to the field that
Europe gave them, and it was more than likely that without the help of
Europe they would have all remained local politicians or lawyers, like
their neighbors, to the end. Strictly followed, the rule would have
obliged them never to quit Quincy; and, in fact, so much more timid are
parents for their children than for themselves, that Mr. and Mrs. Adams
would have been content to see their children remain forever in Mount
Vernon Street, unexposed to the temptations of Europe, could they have
relied on the moral influences of Boston itself. Although the parents
little knew what took place under their eyes, even the mothers saw
enough to make them uneasy. Perhaps their dread of vice, haunting past
and present, worried them less than their dread of daughters-in-law or
sons-in-law who might not fit into the somewhat narrow quarters of
home. On all sides were risks. Every year some young person alarmed the
parental heart even in Boston, and although the temptations of Europe
were irresistible, removal from the temptations of Boston might be
imperative. The boy Henry wanted to go to Europe; he seemed well
behaved, when any one was looking at him; he observed conventions, when
he could not escape them; he was never quarrelsome, towards a superior;
his morals were apparently good, and his moral principles, if he had
any, were not known to be bad. Above all, he was timid and showed a
certain sense of self-respect, when in public view. What he was at
heart, no one could say; least of all himself; but he was probably
human, and no worse than some others. Therefore, when he presented to
an exceedingly indulgent father and mother his request to begin at a
German university the study of the Civil Law--although neither he nor
they knew what the Civil Law was, or any reason for his studying
it--the parents dutifully consented, and walked with him down to the
railway-station at Quincy to bid him good-bye, with a smile which he
almost thought a tear.
Whether the boy deserved such indulgence, or was worth it, he
knew no more than they, or than a professor at Harvard College; but
whether worthy or not, he began his third or fourth attempt at
education in November, 1858, by sailing on the steamer Persia, the
pride of Captain Judkins and the Cunard Line; the newest, largest and
fastest steamship afloat. He was not alone. Several of his college
companions sailed with him, and the world looked cheerful enough until,
on the third day, the world--as far as concerned the young man--ran
into a heavy storm. He learned then a lesson that stood by him better
than any university teaching ever did--the meaning of a November gale
on the mid-Atlantic--which, for mere physical misery, passed endurance.
The subject offered him material for none but serious treatment; he
could never see the humor of sea-sickness; but it united itself with a
great variety of other impressions which made the first month of travel
altogether the rapidest school of education he had yet found. The
stride in knowledge seemed gigantic. One began at last to see that a great
many impressions were needed to make very little education, but how
many could be crowded into one day without making any education at all,
became the pons asinorum of tourist mathematics. How many would turn
out to be wrong whether any could turn out right, was ultimate wisdom.
The ocean, the Persia, Captain Judkins, and Mr. G. P. R. James,
the most distinguished passenger, vanished one Sunday morning in a
furious gale in the Mersey, to make place for the drearier picture of a
Liverpool street as seen from the Adelphi coffee-room in November murk,
followed instantly by the passionate delights of Chester and the
romance of red-sandstone architecture. Millions of Americans have felt
this succession of emotions. Possibly very young and ingenuous tourists
feel them still, but in days before tourists, when the romance was a
reality, not a picture, they were overwhelming. When the boys went out
to Eaton Hall, they were awed, as Thackeray or Dickens would have felt
in the presence of a Duke. The very name of Grosvenor struck a note of
grandeur. The long suite of lofty, gilded rooms with their gilded
furniture; the portraits; the terraces; the gardens, the landscape; the
sense of superiority in the England of the fifties, actually set the
rich nobleman apart, above Americans and shopkeepers. Aristocracy was
real. So was the England of Dickens. Oliver Twist and Little Nell
lurked in every churchyard shadow, not as shadow but alive. Even
Charles the First was not very shadowy, standing on the tower to see
his army defeated. Nothing thereabouts had very much changed since he
lost his battle and his head. An eighteenth-century American boy fresh
from Boston naturally took it all for education, and was amused at this
sort of lesson. At least he thought he felt it.
Then came the journey up to London through Birmingham and the
Black District, another lesson, which needed much more to be rightly
felt. The plunge into darkness lurid with flames; the sense of unknown
horror in this weird gloom which then existed nowhere else, and never
had existed before, except in volcanic craters; the violent contrast
between this dense, smoky, impenetrable darkness, and the soft green
charm that one glided into, as one emerged--the revelation of an
unknown society of the pit--made a boy uncomfortable, though he had no
idea that Karl Marx was standing there waiting for him, and that sooner
or later the process of education would have to deal with Karl Marx
much more than with Professor Bowen of Harvard College or his Satanic
free-trade majesty John Stuart Mill. The Black District was a practical
education, but it was infinitely far in the distance. The boy ran away
from it, as he ran away from everything he disliked.
Had he known enough to know where to begin he would have seen
something to study, more vital than the Civil Law, in the long, muddy,
dirty, sordid, gas-lit dreariness of Oxford Street as his dingy
four-wheeler dragged its weary way to Charing Cross. He did notice one
peculiarity about it worth remembering. London was still London. A
certain style dignified its grime; heavy, clumsy, arrogant,
purse-proud, but not cheap; insular but large; barely tolerant of an
outside world, and absolutely self-confident. The boys in the streets
made such free comments on the American clothes and figures, that the
travellers hurried to put on tall hats and long overcoats to escape
criticism. No stranger had rights even in the Strand. The eighteenth
century held its own. History muttered down Fleet Street, like Dr.
Johnson, in Adams's ear; Vanity Fair was alive on Piccadilly in yellow
chariots with coachmen in wigs, on hammer-cloths; footmen with canes,
on the footboard, and a shrivelled old woman inside; half the great
houses, black with London smoke, bore large funereal hatchments; every
one seemed insolent, and the most insolent structures in the world were
the Royal Exchange and the Bank of England. In November, 1858, London
was still vast, but it was the London of the eighteenth century that an
American felt and hated.
Education went backward. Adams, still a boy, could not guess
how intensely intimate this London grime was to become to him as a man,
but he could still less conceive himself returning to it fifty years
afterwards, noting at each turn how the great city grew smaller as it
doubled in size; cheaper as it quadrupled its wealth; less imperial as
its empire widened; less dignified as it tried to be civil. He liked it
best when he hated it. Education began at the end, or perhaps would end
at the beginning. Thus far it had remained in the eighteenth century,
and the next step took it back to the sixteenth. He crossed to Antwerp.
As the Baron Osy steamed up the Scheldt in the morning mists, a
travelling band on deck began to play, and groups of peasants, working
along the fields, dropped their tools to join in dancing. Ostade and
Teniers were as much alive as they ever were, and even the Duke of Alva
was still at home. The thirteenth-century cathedral towered above a
sixteenth-century mass of tiled roofs, ending abruptly in walls and a
landscape that had not changed. The taste of the town was thick, rich,
ripe, like a sweet wine; it was mediaeval, so that Rubens seemed
modern; it was one of the strongest and fullest flavors that ever
touched the young man's palate; but he might as well have drunk out his
excitement in old Malmsey, for all the education he got from it. Even
in art, one can hardly begin with Antwerp Cathedral and the Descent
from the Cross. He merely got drunk on his emotions, and had then to
get sober as he best could. He was terribly sober when he saw Antwerp
half a century afterwards. One lesson he did learn without suspecting
that he must immediately lose it. He felt his middle ages and the
sixteenth century alive. He was young enough, and the towns were dirty
enough--unimproved, unrestored, untouristed--to retain the sense of
reality. As a taste or a smell, it was education, especially because it
lasted barely ten years longer; but it was education only sensual. He
never dreamed of trying to educate himself to the Descent from the
Cross. He was only too happy to feel himself kneeling at the foot of
the Cross; he learned only to loathe the sordid necessity of getting up
again, and going about his stupid business.
This was one of the foreseen dangers of Europe, but it vanished
rapidly enough to reassure the most anxious of parents. Dropped into
Berlin one morning without guide or direction, the young man in search
of education floundered in a mere mess of misunderstandings. He could
never recall what he expected to find, but whatever he expected, it had
no relation with what it turned out to be. A student at twenty takes
easily to anything, even to Berlin, and he would have accepted the
thirteenth century pure and simple since his guides assured him that
this was his right path; but a week's experience left him dazed and
dull. Faith held out, but the paths grew dim. Berlin astonished him,
but he had no lack of friends to show him all the amusement it had to
offer. Within a day or two he was running about with the rest to
beer-cellars and music-halls and dance-rooms, smoking bad tobacco,
drinking poor beer, and eating sauerkraut and sausages as though he
knew no better. This was easy. One can always descend the social
ladder. The trouble came when he asked for the education he was
promised. His friends took him to be registered as a student of the
university; they selected his professors and courses; they showed him
where to buy the Institutes of Gaius and several German works on the
Civil Law in numerous volumes; and they led him to his first lecture.
His first lecture was his last. The young man was not very
quick, and he had almost religious respect for his guides and advisers;
but he needed no more than one hour to satisfy him that he had made
another failure in education, and this time a fatal one. That the
language would require at least three months' hard work before he could
touch the Law was an annoying discovery; but the shock that upset him
was the discovery of the university itself. He had thought Harvard
College a torpid school, but it was instinct with life compared with
all that he could see of the University of Berlin. The German students
were strange animals, but their professors were beyond pay. The mental
attitude of the university was not of an American world. What sort of
instruction prevailed in other branches, or in science, Adams had no
occasion to ask, but in the Civil Law he found only the lecture system
in its deadliest form as it flourished in the thirteenth century. The
professor mumbled his comments; the students made, or seemed to make,
notes; they could have learned from books or discussion in a day more
than they could learn from him in a month, but they must pay his fees,
follow his course, and be his scholars, if they wanted a degree. To an
American the result was worthless. He could make no use of the Civil
Law without some previous notion of the Common Law; but the student who
knew enough of the Common Law to understand what he wanted, had only to
read the Pandects or the commentators at his ease in America, and be
his own professor. Neither the method nor the matter nor the manner
could profit an American education.
This discovery seemed to shock none of the students. They went
to the lectures, made notes, and read textbooks, but never pretended to
take their professor seriously. They were much more serious in reading
Heine. They knew no more than Heine what good they were getting, beyond
the Berlin accent--which was bad; and the beer--which was not to
compare with Munich; and the dancing--which was better at Vienna. They
enjoyed the beer and music, but they refused to be responsible for the
education. Anyway, as they defended themselves, they were learning the
language.
So the young man fell back on the language, and being slow at
languages, he found himself falling behind all his friends, which
depressed his spirits, the more because the gloom of a Berlin winter
and of Berlin architecture seemed to him a particular sort of gloom
never attained elsewhere. One day on the Linden he caught sight of
Charles Sumner in a cab, and ran after him. Sumner was then recovering
from the blows of the South Carolinian cane or club, and he was pleased
to find a young worshipper in the remote Prussian wilderness. They
dined together and went to hear "William Tell" at the Opera. Sumner
tried to encourage his friend about his difficulties of language: "I
came to Berlin," or Rome, or whatever place it was, as he said with his
grand air of mastery, "I came to Berlin, unable to say a word in the
language; and three months later when I went away, I talked it to my
cabman." Adams felt himself quite unable to attain in so short a time
such social advantages, and one day complained of his trials to Mr.
Robert Apthorp, of Boston, who was passing the winter in Berlin for the
sake of its music. Mr. Apthorp told of his own similar struggle, and
how he had entered a public school and sat for months with
ten-year-old-boys, reciting their lessons and catching their phrases.
The idea suited Adams's desperate frame of mind. At least it ridded him
of the university and the Civil Law and American associations in
beer-cellars. Mr. Apthorp took the trouble to negotiate with the
head-master of the Friedrichs-Wilhelm-Werdersches Gymnasium for
permission to Henry Adams to attend the school as a member of the
Ober-tertia, a class of boys twelve or thirteen years old, and there
Adams went for three months as though he had not always avoided high
schools with singular antipathy. He never did anything else so foolish
but he was given a bit of education which served him some purpose in
life.
It was not merely the language, though three months passed in
such fashion would teach a poodle enough to talk with a cabman, and
this was all that foreign students could expect to do, for they never
by any chance would come in contact with German society, if German
society existed, about which they knew nothing. Adams never learned to
talk German well, but the same might be said of his English, if he
could believe Englishmen. He learned not to annoy himself on this
account. His difficulties with the language gradually ceased. He
thought himself quite Germanized in 1859. He even deluded himself with
the idea that he read it as though it were English, which proved that
he knew little about it; but whatever success he had in his own
experiment interested him less than his contact with German education.
He had revolted at the American school and university; he had
instantly rejected the German university; and as his last experience of
education he tried the German high school. The experiment was
hazardous. In 1858 Berlin was a poor, keen-witted, provincial town,
simple, dirty, uncivilized, and in most respects disgusting. Life was
primitive beyond what an American boy could have imagined. Overridden
by military methods and bureaucratic pettiness, Prussia was only
beginning to free her hands from internal bonds. Apart from discipline,
activity scarcely existed. The future Kaiser Wilhelm I, regent for his
insane brother King Friedrich Wilhelm IV, seemed to pass his time
looking at the passers-by from the window of his modest palace on the
Linden. German manners, even at Court, were sometimes brutal, and
German thoroughness at school was apt to be routine. Bismarck himself
was then struggling to begin a career against the inertia of the German
system. The condition of Germany was a scandal and nuisance to every
earnest German, all whose energies were turned to reforming it from top
to bottom; and Adams walked into a great public school to get educated,
at precisely the time when the Germans wanted most to get rid of the
education they were forced to follow. As an episode in the search for
education, this adventure smacked of Heine.
The school system has doubtless changed, and at all events the
schoolmasters are probably long ago dead; the story has no longer a
practical value, and had very little even at the time; one could at
least say in defence of the German school that it was neither very
brutal nor very immoral. The head-master was excellent in his Prussian
way, and the other instructors were not worse than in other schools; it
was their system that struck the systemless American with horror. The
arbitrary training given to the memory was stupefying; the strain that
the memory endured was a form of torture; and the feats that the boys
performed, without complaint, were pitiable. No other faculty than the
memory seemed to be recognized. Least of all was any use made of
reason, either analytic, synthetic, or dogmatic. The German government
did not encourage reasoning.
All State education is a sort of dynamo machine for polarizing
the popular mind; for turning and holding its lines of force in the
direction supposed to be most effective for State purposes. The German
machine was terribly efficient. Its effect on the children was
pathetic. The Friedrichs-Wilhelm-Werdersches Gymnasium was an old
building in the heart of Berlin which served the educational needs of
the small tradesmen or bourgeoisie of the neighborhood; the children
were Berliner-kinder if ever there were such, and of a class suspected
of sympathy and concern in the troubles of 1848. None was noble or
connected with good society. Personally they were rather sympathetic
than not, but as the objects of education they were proofs of nearly
all the evils that a bad system could give. Apparently Adams, in his
rigidly illogical pursuit, had at last reached his ideal of a viciously
logical education. The boys' physique showed it first, but their
physique could not be wholly charged to the school. German food was bad
at best, and a diet of sauerkraut, sausage, and beer could never be
good; but it was not the food alone that made their faces white and
their flesh flabby. They never breathed fresh air; they had never heard
of a playground; in all Berlin not a cubic inch of oxygen was admitted
in winter into an inhabited building; in the school every room was
tightly closed and had no ventilation; the air was foul beyond all
decency; but when the American opened a window in the five minutes
between hours, he violated the rules and was invariably rebuked. As
long as cold weather lasted, the windows were shut. If the boys had a
holiday, they were apt to be taken on long tramps in the Thiergarten or
elsewhere, always ending in over-fatigue, tobacco-smoke, sausages, and
beer. With this, they were required to prepare daily lessons that would
have quickly broken down strong men of a healthy habit, and which they
could learn only because their minds were morbid. The German university
had seemed a failure, but the German high school was something very
near an indictable nuisance.
Before the month of April arrived, the experiment of German
education had reached this point. Nothing was left of it except the
ghost of the Civil Law shut up in the darkest of closets, never to
gibber again before any one who could repeat the story. The derisive
Jew laughter of Heine ran through the university and everything else in
Berlin. Of course, when one is twenty years old, life is bound to be
full, if only of Berlin beer, although German student life was on the
whole the thinnest of beer, as an American looked on it, but though
nothing except small fragments remained of the education that had been
so promising--or promised--this is only what most often happens in
life, when by-products turn out to be more valuable than staples. The
German university and German law were failures; German society, in an
American sense, did not exist, or if it existed, never showed itself to
an American; the German theatre, on the other hand, was excellent, and
German opera, with the ballet, was almost worth a journey to Berlin;
but the curious and perplexing result of the total failure of German
education was that the student's only clear gain--his single step to a
higher life--came from time wasted; studies neglected; vices indulged;
education reversed;--it came from the despised beer-garden and
music-hall; and it was accidental, unintended, unforeseen.
When his companions insisted on passing two or three afternoons
in the week at music-halls, drinking beer, smoking German tobacco, and
looking at fat German women knitting, while an orchestra played dull
music, Adams went with them for the sake of the company, but with no
pretence of enjoyment; and when Mr. Apthorp gently protested that he
exaggerated his indifference, for of course he enjoyed Beethoven, Adams
replied simply that he loathed Beethoven; and felt a slight surprise
when Mr. Apthorp and the others laughed as though they thought it
humor. He saw no humor in it. He supposed that, except musicians, every
one thought Beethoven a bore, as every one except mathematicians
thought mathematics a bore. Sitting thus at his beer-table, mentally
impassive, he was one day surprised to notice that his mind followed
the movement of a Sinfonie. He could not have been more astonished had
he suddenly read a new language. Among the marvels of education, this
was the most marvellous. A prison-wall that barred his senses on one
great side of life, suddenly fell, of its own accord, without so much
as his knowing when it happened. Amid the fumes of coarse tobacco and
poor beer, surrounded by the commonest of German Haus-frauen, a new
sense burst out like a flower in his life, so superior to the old
senses, so bewildering, so astonished at its own existence, that he
could not credit it, and watched it as something apart, accidental, and
not to be trusted. He slowly came to admit that Beethoven had partly
become intelligible to him, but he was the more inclined to think that
Beethoven must be much overrated as a musician, to be so easily
followed. This could not be called education, for he had never so much
as listened to the music. He had been thinking of other things. Mere
mechanical repetition of certain sounds had stuck to his unconscious
mind. Beethoven might have this power, but not Wagner, or at all events
not the Wagner later than "Tannhauser." Near forty years passed before
he reached the "Gotterdammerung."
One might talk of the revival of an atrophied sense--the
mechanical reaction of a sleeping consciousness--but no other sense
awoke. His sense of line and color remained as dull as ever, and as far
as ever below the level of an artist. His metaphysical sense did not
spring into life, so that his mind could leap the bars of German
expression into sympathy with the idealities of Kant and Hegel.
Although he insisted that his faith in German thought and literature
was exalted, he failed to approach German thought, and he shed never a
tear of emotion over the pages of Goethe and Schiller. When his father
rashly ventured from time to time to write him a word of common sense,
the young man would listen to no sense at all, but insisted that Berlin
was the best of educations in the best of Germanies; yet, when, at
last, April came, and some genius suggested a tramp in Thuringen, his
heart sang like a bird; he realized what a nightmare he had suffered,
and he made up his mind that, wherever else he might, in the infinities
of space and time, seek for education, it should not be again in Berlin.