FAILURE (1871)
FAR back in childhood, among its earliest memories, Henry Adams could
recall his first visit to Harvard College. He must have been nine years
old when on one of the singularly gloomy winter afternoons which
beguiled Cambridgeport, his mother drove him out to visit his aunt,
Mrs. Everett. Edward Everett was then President of the college and
lived in the old President's House on Harvard Square. The boy
remembered the drawing-room, on the left of the hall door, in which
Mrs. Everett received them. He remembered a marble greyhound in the
corner. The house had an air of colonial self-respect that impressed
even a nine-year-old child.
When Adams closed his interview with President Eliot, he asked
the Bursar about his aunt's old drawing-room, for the house had been
turned to base uses. The room and the deserted kitchen adjacent to it
were to let. He took them. Above him, his brother Brooks, then a law
student, had rooms, with a private staircase. Opposite was J. R.
Dennett, a young instructor almost as literary as Adams himself, and
more rebellious to conventions. Inquiry revealed a boarding-table,
somewhere in the neighborhood, also supposed to be superior in its
class. Chauncey Wright, Francis Wharton, Dennett, John Fiske, or their
equivalents in learning and lecture, were seen there, among three or
four law students like Brooks Adams. With these primitive arrangements,
all of them had to be satisfied. The standard was below that of
Washington, but it was, for the moment, the best.
For the next nine months the Assistant Professor had no time to
waste on comforts or amusements. He exhausted all his strength in
trying to keep one day ahead of his duties. Often the stint ran on,
till night and sleep ran short. He could not stop to think whether he
were doing the work rightly. He could not get it done to please him,
rightly or wrongly, for he never could satisfy himself what to do.
The fault he had found with Harvard College as an undergraduate
must have been more or less just, for the college was making a great
effort to meet these self-criticisms, and had elected President Eliot
in 1869 to carry out its reforms. Professor Gurney was one of the
leading reformers, and had tried his hand on his own department of
History. The two full Professors of History--Torrey and Gurney,
charming men both--could not cover the ground. Between Gurney's
classical courses and Torrey's modern ones, lay a gap of a thousand
years, which Adams was expected to fill. The students had already
elected courses numbered 1, 2, and 3, without knowing what was to be
taught or who was to teach. If their new professor had asked what idea
was in their minds, they must have replied that nothing at all was in
their minds, since their professor had nothing in his, and down to the
moment he took his chair and looked his scholars in the face, he had
given, as far as he could remember, an hour, more or less, to the
Middle Ages.
Not that his ignorance troubled him! He knew enough to be
ignorant. His course had led him through oceans of ignorance; he had
tumbled from one ocean into another till he had learned to swim; but
even to him education was a serious thing. A parent gives life, but as
parent, gives no more. A murderer takes life, but his deed stops there.
A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence
stops. A teacher is expected to teach truth, and may perhaps flatter
himself that he does so, if he stops with the alphabet or the
multiplication table, as a mother teaches truth by making her child eat
with a spoon; but morals are quite another truth and philosophy is more
complex still. A teacher must either treat history as a catalogue, a
record, a romance, or as an evolution; and whether he affirms or denies
evolution, he falls into all the burning faggots of the pit. He makes
of his scholars either priests or atheists, plutocrats or socialists,
judges or anarchists, almost in spite of himself. In essence incoherent
and immoral, history had either to be taught as such--or falsified.
Adams wanted to do neither. He had no theory of evolution to
teach, and could not make the facts fit one. He had no fancy for
telling agreeable tales to amuse sluggish-minded boys, in order to
publish them afterwards as lectures. He could still less compel his
students to learn the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and the Venerable Bede by
heart. He saw no relation whatever between his students and the Middle
Ages unless it were the Church, and there the ground was particularly
dangerous. He knew better than though he were a professional historian
that the man who should solve the riddle of the Middle Ages and bring
them into the line of evolution from past to present, would be a
greater man than Lamarck or Linnaeus; but history had nowhere broken
down so pitiably, or avowed itself so hopelessly bankrupt, as there.
Since Gibbon, the spectacle was almost a scandal. History had lost even
the sense of shame. It was a hundred years behind the experimental
sciences. For all serious purpose, it was less instructive than Walter
Scott and Alexandre Dumas.
All this was without offence to Sir Henry Maine, Tyler,
McLennan, Buckle, Auguste Comte, and the various philosophers who, from
time to time, stirred the scandal, and made it more scandalous. No
doubt, a teacher might make some use of these writers or their
theories; but Adams could fit them into no theory of his own. The
college expected him to pass at least half his time teaching the boys a
few elementary dates and relations, that they might not be a disgrace
to the university. This was formal; and he could frankly tell the boys
that, provided they passed their examinations, they might get their
facts where they liked, and use the teacher only for questions. The
only privilege a student had that was worth his claiming, was that of
talking to the professor, and the professor was bound to encourage it.
His only difficulty on that side was to get them to talk at all. He had
to devise schemes to find what they were thinking about, and induce
them to risk criticism from their fellows. Any large body of students
stifles the student. No man can instruct more than half-a-dozen
students at once. The whole problem of education is one of its cost in
money.
The lecture system to classes of hundreds, which was very much
that of the twelfth century, suited Adams not at all. Barred from
philosophy and bored by facts, he wanted to teach his students
something not wholly useless. The number of students whose minds were
of an order above the average was, in his experience, barely one in
ten; the rest could not be much stimulated by any inducements a teacher
could suggest. All were respectable, and in seven years of contact,
Adams never had cause to complain of one; but nine minds in ten take
polish passively, like a hard surface; only the tenth sensibly reacts.
Adams thought that, as no one seemed to care what he did, he
would try to cultivate this tenth mind, though necessarily at the
expense of the other nine. He frankly acted on the rule that a teacher,
who knew nothing of his subject, should not pretend to teach his
scholars what he did not know, but should join them in trying to find
the best way of learning it. The rather pretentious name of historical
method was sometimes given to this process of instruction, but the name
smacked of German pedagogy, and a young professor who respected neither
history nor method, and whose sole object of interest was his students'
minds, fell into trouble enough without adding to it a German parentage.
The task was doomed to failure for a reason which he could not
control. Nothing is easier than to teach historical method, but, when
learned, it has little use. History is a tangled skein that one may
take up at any point, and break when one has unravelled enough; but
complexity precedes evolution. The Pteraspis grins horribly from the
closed entrance. One may not begin at the beginning, and one has but
the loosest relative truths to follow up. Adams found himself obliged
to force his material into some shape to which a method could be
applied. He could think only of law as subject; the Law School as end;
and he took, as victims of his experiment, half-a-dozen highly
intelligent young men who seemed willing to work. The course began with
the beginning, as far as the books showed a beginning in primitive man,
and came down through the Salic Franks to the Norman English. Since no
textbooks existed, the professor refused to profess, knowing no more
than his students, and the students read what they pleased and compared
their results. As pedagogy, nothing could be more triumphant. The boys
worked like rabbits, and dug holes all over the field of archaic
society; no difficulty stopped them; unknown languages yielded before
their attack, and customary law became familiar as the police court;
undoubtedly they learned, after a fashion, to chase an idea, like a
hare, through as dense a thicket of obscure facts as they were likely
to meet at the bar; but their teacher knew from his own experience that
his wonderful method led nowhere, and they would have to exert
themselves to get rid of it in the Law School even more than they
exerted themselves to acquire it in the college. Their science had no
system, and could have none, since its subject was merely antiquarian.
Try as hard as he might, the professor could not make it actual.
What was the use of training an active mind to waste its
energy? The experiments might in time train Adams as a professor, but
this result was still less to his taste. He wanted to help the boys to
a career, but not one of his many devices to stimulate the intellectual
reaction of the student's mind satisfied either him or the students.
For himself he was clear that the fault lay in the system, which could
lead only to inertia. Such little knowledge of himself as he possessed
warranted him in affirming that his mind required conflict,
competition, contradiction even more than that of the student. He too
wanted a rank-list to set his name upon. His reform of the system would
have begun in the lecture-room at his own desk. He would have seated a
rival assistant professor opposite him, whose business should be
strictly limited to expressing opposite views. Nothing short of this
would ever interest either the professor or the student; but of all
university freaks, no irregularity shocked the intellectual atmosphere
so much as contradiction or competition between teachers. In that
respect the thirteenth-century university system was worth the whole
teaching of the modern school.
All his pretty efforts to create conflicts of thought among his
students failed for want of system. None met the needs of instruction.
In spite of President Eliot's reforms and his steady, generous, liberal
support, the system remained costly, clumsy and futile. The
university--as far as it was represented by Henry Adams--produced at
great waste of time and money results not worth reaching.
He made use of his lost two years of German schooling to
inflict their results on his students, and by a happy chance he was in
the full tide of fashion. The Germans were crowning their new emperor
at Versailles, and surrounding his head with a halo of Pepins and
Merwigs, Othos and Barbarossas. James Bryce had even discovered the
Holy Roman Empire. Germany was never so powerful, and the Assistant
Professor of History had nothing else as his stock in trade. He imposed
Germany on his scholars with a heavy hand. He was rejoiced; but he
sometimes doubted whether they should be grateful. On the whole, he was
content neither with what he had taught nor with the way he had taught
it. The seven years he passed in teaching seemed to him lost.
The uses of adversity are beyond measure strange. As a
professor, he regarded himself as a failure. Without false modesty he
thought he knew what he meant. He had tried a great many experiments,
and wholly succeeded in none. He had succumbed to the weight of the
system. He had accomplished nothing that he tried to do. He regarded
the system as wrong; more mischievous to the teachers than to the
students; fallacious from the beginning to end. He quitted the
university at last, in 1877, with a feeling, that, if it had not been
for the invariable courtesy and kindness shown by every one in it, from
the President to the injured students, he should be sore at his failure.
These were his own feelings, but they seemed not to be felt in
the college. With the same perplexing impartiality that had so much
disconcerted him in his undergraduate days, the college insisted on
expressing an opposite view. John Fiske went so far in his notice of
the family in "Appleton's Cyclopedia," as to say that Henry had left a
great reputation at Harvard College; which was a proof of John Fiske's
personal regard that Adams heartily returned; and set the kind
expression down to camaraderie. The case was different when President
Eliot himself hinted that Adams's services merited recognition. Adams
could have wept on his shoulder in hysterics, so grateful was he for
the rare good-will that inspired the compliment; but he could not allow
the college to think that he esteemed himself entitled to distinction.
He knew better, and his was among the failures which were respectable
enough to deserve self-respect. Yet nothing in the vanity of life
struck him as more humiliating than that Harvard College, which he had
persistently criticised, abused, abandoned, and neglected, should alone
have offered him a dollar, an office, an encouragement, or a kindness.
Harvard College might have its faults, but at least it redeemed
America, since it was true to its own.
The only part of education that the professor thought a success
was the students. He found them excellent company. Cast more or less in
the same mould, without violent emotions or sentiment, and, except for
the veneer of American habits, ignorant of all that man had ever
thought or hoped, their minds burst open like flowers at the sunlight
of a suggestion. They were quick to respond; plastic to a mould; and
incapable of fatigue. Their faith in education was so full of pathos
that one dared not ask them what they thought they could do with
education when they got it. Adams did put the question to one of them,
and was surprised at the answer: "The degree of Harvard College is
worth money to me in Chicago." This reply upset his experience; for the
degree of Harvard College had been rather a drawback to a young man in
Boston and Washington. So far as it went, the answer was good, and
settled one's doubts. Adams knew no better, although he had given
twenty years to pursuing the same education, and was no nearer a result
than they. He still had to take for granted many things that they need
not--among the rest, that his teaching did them more good than harm. In
his own opinion the greatest good he could do them was to hold his
tongue. They needed much faith then; they were likely to need more if
they lived long.
He never knew whether his colleagues shared his doubts about
their own utility. Unlike himself, they knew more or less their
business. He could not tell his scholars that history glowed with
social virtue; the Professor of Chemistry cared not a chemical atom
whether society was virtuous or not. Adams could not pretend that
mediaeval society proved evolution; the Professor of Physics smiled at
evolution. Adams was glad to dwell on the virtues of the Church and the
triumphs of its art: the Professor of Political Economy had to treat
them as waste of force. They knew what they had to teach; he did not.
They might perhaps be frauds without knowing it; but he knew certainly
nothing else of himself. He could teach his students nothing; he was
only educating himself at their cost.
Education, like politics, is a rough affair, and every
instructor has to shut his eyes and hold his tongue as though he were a
priest. The students alone satisfied. They thought they gained
something. Perhaps they did, for even in America and in the twentieth
century, life could not be wholly industrial. Adams fervently hoped
that they might remain content; but supposing twenty years more to
pass, and they should turn on him as fiercely as he had turned on his
old instructors--what answer could he make? The college had pleaded
guilty, and tried to reform. He had pleaded guilty from the start, and
his reforms had failed before those of the college.
The lecture-room was futile enough, but the faculty-room was
worse. American society feared total wreck in the maelstrom of
political and corporate administration, but it could not look for help
to college dons. Adams knew, in that capacity, both Congressmen and
professors, and he preferred Congressmen. The same failure marked the
society of a college. Several score of the best-educated, most
agreeable, and personally the most sociable people in America united in
Cambridge to make a social desert that would have starved a polar bear.
The liveliest and most agreeable of men--James Russell Lowell, Francis
J. Child, Louis Agassiz, his son Alexander, Gurney, John Fiske, William
James and a dozen others, who would have made the joy of London or
Paris--tried their best to break out and be like other men in Cambridge
and Boston, but society called them professors, and professors they had
to be. While all these brilliant men were greedy for companionship, all
were famished for want of it. Society was a faculty-meeting without
business. The elements were there; but society cannot be made up of
elements--people who are expected to be silent unless they have
observations to make--and all the elements are bound to remain apart if
required to make observations.
Thus it turned out that of all his many educations, Adams
thought that of school-teacher the thinnest. Yet he was forced to admit
that the education of an editor, in some ways, was thinner still. The
editor had barely time to edit; he had none to write. If copy fell
short, he was obliged to scribble a book-review on the virtues of the
Anglo-Saxons or the vices of the Popes; for he knew more about Edward
the Confessor or Boniface VIII than he did about President Grant. For
seven years he wrote nothing; the Review lived on his brother Charles's
railway articles. The editor could help others, but could do nothing
for himself. As a writer, he was totally forgotten by the time he had
been an editor for twelve months. As editor he could find no writer to
take his place for politics and affairs of current concern. The Review
became chiefly historical. Russell Lowell and Frank Palgrave helped him
to keep it literary. The editor was a helpless drudge whose successes,
if he made any, belonged to his writers; but whose failures might
easily bankrupt himself. Such a Review may be made a sink of money with
captivating ease. The secrets of success as an editor were easily
learned; the highest was that of getting advertisements. Ten pages of
advertising made an editor a success; five marked him as a failure. The
merits or demerits of his literature had little to do with his results
except when they led to adversity.
A year or two of education as editor satiated most of his
appetite for that career as a profession. After a very slight
experience, he said no more on the subject. He felt willing to let any
one edit, if he himself might write. Vulgarly speaking, it was a dog's
life when it did not succeed, and little better when it did. A
professor had at least the pleasure of associating with his students;
an editor lived the life of an owl. A professor commonly became a
pedagogue or a pedant; an editor became an authority on advertising. On
the whole, Adams preferred his attic in Washington. He was educated
enough. Ignorance paid better, for at least it earned fifty dollars a
month.
With this result Henry Adams's education, at his entry into
life, stopped, and his life began. He had to take that life as he best
could, with such accidental education as luck had given him; but he
held that it was wrong, and that, if he were to begin again, he would
do it on a better system. He thought he knew nearly what system to
pursue. At that time Alexander Agassiz had not yet got his head above
water so far as to serve for a model, as he did twenty or thirty years
afterwards; but the editorship of the North American Review had one
solitary merit; it made the editor acquainted at a distance with almost
every one in the country who could write or who could be the cause of
writing. Adams was vastly pleased to be received among these clever
people as one of themselves, and felt always a little surprised at
their treating him as an equal, for they all had education; but among
them, only one stood out in extraordinary prominence as the type and
model of what Adams would have liked to be, and of what the American,
as he conceived, should have been and was not.
Thanks to the article on Sir Charles Lyell, Adams passed for a
friend of geologists, and the extent of his knowledge mattered much
less to them than the extent of his friendship, for geologists were as
a class not much better off than himself, and friends were sorely few.
One of his friends from earliest childhood, and nearest neighbor in
Quincy, Frank Emmons, had become a geologist and joined the Fortieth
Parallel Survey under Government. At Washington in the winter of
1869-70, Emmons had invited Adams to go out with him on one of the
field-parties in summer. Of course when Adams took the Review he put it
at the service of the Survey, and regretted only that he could not do
more. When the first year of professing and editing was at last over,
and his July North American appeared, he drew a long breath of relief,
and took the next train for the West. Of his year's work he was no
judge. He had become a small spring in a large mechanism, and his work
counted only in the sum; but he had been treated civilly by everybody,
and he felt at home even in Boston. Putting in his pocket the July
number of the North American, with a notice of the Fortieth Parallel
Survey by Professor J. D. Whitney, he started for the plains and the
Rocky Mountains.
In the year 1871, the West was still fresh, and the Union
Pacific was young. Beyond the Missouri River, one felt the atmosphere
of Indians and buffaloes. One saw the last vestiges of an old
education, worth studying if one would; but it was not that which Adams
sought; rather, he came out to spy upon the land of the future. The
Survey occasionally borrowed troopers from the nearest station in case
of happening on hostile Indians, but otherwise the topographers and
geologists thought more about minerals than about Sioux. They held
under their hammers a thousand miles of mineral country with all its
riddles to solve, and its stores of possible wealth to mark. They felt
the future in their hands.
Emmons's party was out of reach in the Uintahs, but Arnold
Hague's had come in to Laramie for supplies, and they took charge of
Adams for a time. Their wanderings or adventures matter nothing to the
story of education. They were all hardened mountaineers and surveyors
who took everything for granted, and spared each other the most
wearisome bore of English and Scotch life, the stories of the big game
they killed. A bear was an occasional amusement; a wapiti was a
constant necessity; but the only wild animal dangerous to man was a
rattlesnake or a skunk. One shot for amusement, but one had other
matters to talk about.
Adams enjoyed killing big game, but loathed the labor of
cutting it up; so that he rarely unslung the little carbine he was in a
manner required to carry. On the other hand, he liked to wander off
alone on his mule, and pass the day fishing a mountain stream or
exploring a valley. One morning when the party was camped high above
Estes Park, on the flank of Long's Peak, he borrowed a rod, and rode
down over a rough trail into Estes Park, for some trout. The day was
fine, and hazy with the smoke of forest fires a thousand miles away;
the park stretched its English beauties off to the base of its
bordering mountains in natural landscape and archaic peace; the stream
was just fishy enough to tempt lingering along its banks. Hour after
hour the sun moved westward and the fish moved eastward, or disappeared
altogether, until at last when the fisherman cinched his mule, sunset
was nearer than he thought. Darkness caught him before he could catch
his trail. Not caring to tumble into some fifty-foot hole, he "allowed"
he was lost, and turned back. In half-an-hour he was out of the hills,
and under the stars of Estes Park, but he saw no prospect of supper or
of bed.
Estes Park was large enough to serve for a bed on a summer
night for an army of professors, but the supper question offered
difficulties. There was but one cabin in the Park, near its entrance,
and he felt no great confidence in finding it, but he thought his mule
cleverer than himself, and the dim lines of mountain crest against the
stars fenced his range of error. The patient mule plodded on without
other road than the gentle slope of the ground, and some two hours must
have passed before a light showed in the distance. As the mule came up
to the cabin door, two or three men came out to see the stranger.
One of these men was Clarence King on his way up to the camp.
Adams fell into his arms. As with most friendships, it was never a
matter of growth or doubt. Friends are born in archaic horizons; they
were shaped with the Pteraspis in Siluria; they have nothing to do with
the accident of space. King had come up that day from Greeley in a
light four-wheeled buggy, over a trail hardly fit for a commissariat
mule, as Adams had reason to know since he went back in the buggy. In
the cabin, luxury provided a room and one bed for guests. They shared
the room and the bed, and talked till far towards dawn.
King had everything to interest and delight Adams. He knew more
than Adams did of art and poetry; he knew America, especially west of
the hundredth meridian, better than any one; he knew the professor by
heart, and he knew the Congressman better than he did the professor. He
knew even women; even the American woman; even the New York woman,
which is saying much. Incidentally he knew more practical geology than
was good for him, and saw ahead at least one generation further than
the text-books. That he saw right was a different matter. Since the
beginning of time no man has lived who is known to have seen right; the
charm of King was that he saw what others did and a great deal more.
His wit and humor; his bubbling energy which swept every one into the
current of his interest; his personal charm of youth and manners; his
faculty of giving and taking, profusely, lavishly, whether in thought
or in money as though he were Nature herself, marked him almost alone
among Americans. He had in him something of the Greek--a touch of
Alcibiades or Alexander. One Clarence King only existed in the world.
A new friend is always a miracle, but at thirty-three years
old, such a bird of paradise rising in the sage-brush was an avatar.
One friend in a lifetime is much; two are many; three are hardly
possible. Friendship needs a certain parallelism of life, a community
of thought, a rivalry of aim. King, like Adams, and all their
generation, was at that moment passing the critical point of his
career. The one, coming from the west, saturated with the sunshine of
the Sierras, met the other, drifting from the east, drenched in the
fogs of London, and both had the same problems to handle--the same
stock of implements--the same field to work in; above all, the same
obstacles to overcome.
As a companion, King's charm was great, but this was not the quality
that so much attracted Adams, nor could he affect even distant rivalry
on this ground. Adams could never tell a story, chiefly because he
always forgot it; and he was never guilty of a witticism, unless by
accident. King and the Fortieth Parallel influenced him in a way far
more vital. The lines of their lives converged, but King had moulded
and directed his life logically, scientifically, as Adams thought
American life should be directed. He had given himself education all of
a piece, yet broad. Standing in the middle of his career, where their
paths at last came together, he could look back and look forward on a
straight line, with scientific knowledge for its base. Adams's life,
past or future, was a succession of violent breaks or waves, with no
base at all. King's abnormal energy had already won him great success.
None of his contemporaries had done so much, single-handed, or were
likely to leave so deep a trail. He had managed to induce Congress to
adopt almost its first modern act of legislation. He had organized, as
a civil--not military--measure, a Government Survey. He had paralleled
the Continental Railway in Geology; a feat as yet unequalled by other
governments which had as a rule no continents to survey. He was
creating one of the classic scientific works of the century. The
chances were great that he could, whenever he chose to quit the
Government service, take the pick of the gold and silver, copper or
coal, and build up his fortune as he pleased. Whatever prize he wanted
lay ready for him--scientific social, literary, political--and he knew
how to take them in turn. With ordinary luck he would die at eighty the
richest and most many-sided genius of his day.
So little egoistic he was that none of his friends felt envy of
his extraordinary superiority, but rather grovelled before it, so that
women were jealous of the power he had over men; but women were many
and Kings were one. The men worshipped not so much their friend, as the
ideal American they all wanted to be. The women were jealous because,
at heart, King had no faith in the American woman; he loved types more
robust.
The young men of the Fortieth Parallel had Californian
instincts; they were brothers of Bret Harte. They felt no leanings
towards the simple uniformities of Lyell and Darwin; they saw little
proof of slight and imperceptible changes; to them, catastrophe was the
law of change; they cared little for simplicity and much for
complexity; but it was the complexity of Nature, not of New York or
even of the Mississippi Valley. King loved paradox; he started them
like rabbits, and cared for them no longer, when caught or lost; but
they delighted Adams, for they helped, among other things, to persuade
him that history was more amusing than science. The only question left
open to doubt was their relative money value.
In Emmons's camp, far up in the Uintahs, these talks were
continued till the frosts became sharp in the mountains. History and
science spread out in personal horizons towards goals no longer far
away. No more education was possible for either man. Such as they were,
they had got to stand the chances of the world they lived in; and when
Adams started back to Cambridge, to take up again the humble tasks of
schoolmaster and editor he was harnessed to his cart. Education,
systematic or accidental, had done its worst. Henceforth, he went on,
submissive.