WASHINGTON (1850-1854)

  EXCEPT for politics, Mount Vernon Street had the merit of
leaving the boy-mind supple, free to turn with the world, and if one
learned next to nothing, the little one did learn needed not to be
unlearned. The surface was ready to take any form that education should
cut into it, though Boston, with singular foresight, rejected the old
designs. What sort of education was stamped elsewhere, a Bostonian had
no idea, but he escaped the evils of other standards by having no
standard at all; and what was true of school was true of society.
Boston offered none that could help outside. Every one now smiles at
the bad taste of Queen Victoria and Louis Philippe--the society of the
forties--but the taste was only a reflection of the social slack-water
between a tide passed, and a tide to come. Boston belonged to neither,
and hardly even to America. Neither aristocratic nor industrial nor
social, Boston girls and boys were not nearly as unformed as English
boys and girls, but had less means of acquiring form as they grew
older. Women counted for little as models. Every boy, from the age of
seven, fell in love at frequent intervals with some girl--always more
or less the same little girl--who had nothing to teach him, or he to
teach her, except rather familiar and provincial manners, until they
married and bore children to repeat the habit. The idea of attaching
one's self to a married woman, or of polishing one's manners to suit
the standards of women of thirty, could hardly have entered the mind of
a young Bostonian, and would have scandalized his parents. From women
the boy got the domestic virtues and nothing else. He might not even
catch the idea that women had more to give. The garden of Eden was
hardly more primitive.

  To balance this virtue, the Puritan city had always hidden a
darker side. Blackguard Boston was only too educational, and to most
boys much the more interesting. A successful blackguard must enjoy
great physical advantages besides a true vocation, and Henry Adams had
neither; but no boy escaped some contact with vice of a very low form.
Blackguardism came constantly under boys' eyes, and had the charm of
force and freedom and superiority to culture or decency. One might fear
it, but no one honestly despised it. Now and then it asserted itself as
education more roughly than school ever did. One of the commonest
boy-games of winter, inherited directly from the eighteenth-century,
was a game of war on Boston Common. In old days the two hostile forces
were called North-Enders and South-Enders. In 1850 the North-Enders
still survived as a legend, but in practice it was a battle of the
Latin School against all comers, and the Latin School, for snowball,
included all the boys of the West End. Whenever, on a half-holiday, the
weather was soft enough to soften the snow, the Common was apt to be
the scene of a fight, which began in daylight with the Latin School in
force, rushing their opponents down to Tremont Street, and which
generally ended at dark by the Latin School dwindling in numbers and
disappearing. As the Latin School grew weak, the roughs and young
blackguards grew strong. As long as snowballs were the only weapon, no
one was much hurt, but a stone may be put in a snowball, and in the
dark a stick or a slungshot in the hands of a boy is as effective as a
knife. One afternoon the fight had been long and exhausting. The boy
Henry, following, as his habit was, his bigger brother Charles, had
taken part in the battle, and had felt his courage much depressed by
seeing one of his trustiest leaders, Henry Higginson--"Bully Hig," his
school name--struck by a stone over the eye, and led off the field
bleeding in rather a ghastly manner. As night came on, the Latin School
was steadily forced back to the Beacon Street Mall where they could
retreat no further without disbanding, and by that time only a small
band was left, headed by two heroes, Savage and Marvin. A dark mass of
figures could be seen below, making ready for the last rush, and rumor
said that a swarm of blackguards from the slums, led by a grisly terror
called Conky Daniels, with a club and a hideous reputation, was going
to put an end to the Beacon Street cowards forever. Henry wanted to run
away with the others, but his brother was too big to run away, so they
stood still and waited immolation. The dark mass set up a shout, and
rushed forward. The Beacon Street boys turned and fled up the steps,
except Savage and Marvin and the few champions who would not run. The
terrible Conky Daniels swaggered up, stopped a moment with his
body-guard to swear a few oaths at Marvin, and then swept on and chased
the flyers, leaving the few boys untouched who stood their ground. The
obvious moral taught that blackguards were not so black as they were
painted; but the boy Henry had passed through as much terror as though
he were Turenne or Henri IV, and ten or twelve years afterwards when
these same boys were fighting and falling on all the battle-fields of
Virginia and Maryland, he wondered whether their education on Boston
Common had taught Savage and Marvin how to die.

  If violence were a part of complete education, Boston was not
incomplete. The idea of violence was familiar to the anti-slavery
leaders as well as to their followers. Most of them suffered from it.
Mobs were always possible. Henry never happened to be actually
concerned in a mob, but he, like every other boy, was sure to be on
hand wherever a mob was expected, and whenever he heard Garrison or
Wendell Phillips speak, he looked for trouble. Wendell Phillips on a
platform was a model dangerous for youth. Theodore Parker in his pulpit
was not much safer. Worst of all, the execution of the Fugitive Slave
Law in Boston--the sight of Court Square packed with bayonets, and his
own friends obliged to line the streets under arms as State militia, in
order to return a negro to slavery--wrought frenzy in the brain of a
fifteen-year-old, eighteenth-century boy from Quincy, who wanted to
miss no reasonable chance of mischief.

  One lived in the atmosphere of the Stamp Act, the Tea Tax, and
the Boston Massacre. Within Boston, a boy was first an
eighteenth-century politician, and afterwards only a possibility;
beyond Boston the first step led only further into politics. After
February, 1848, but one slight tie remained of all those that, since
1776, had connected Quincy with the outer world. The Madam stayed in
Washington, after her husband's death, and in her turn was struck by
paralysis and bedridden. From time to time her son Charles, whose
affection and sympathy for his mother in her many tribulations were
always pronounced, went on to see her, and in May, 1850, he took with
him his twelve-year-old son. The journey was meant as education, and as
education it served the purpose of fixing in memory the stage of a
boy's thought in 1850. He could not remember taking special interest in
the railroad journey or in New York; with railways and cities he was
familiar enough. His first impression was the novelty of crossing New
York Bay and finding an English railway carriage on the Camden and
Amboy Railroad. This was a new world; a suggestion of corruption in the
simple habits of American life; a step to exclusiveness never
approached in Boston; but it was amusing. The boy rather liked it. At
Trenton the train set him on board a steamer which took him to
Philadelphia where he smelt other varieties of town life; then again by
boat to Chester, and by train to Havre de Grace; by boat to Baltimore
and thence by rail to Washington. This was the journey he remembered.
The actual journey may have been quite different, but the actual
journey has no interest for education. The memory was all that
mattered; and what struck him most, to remain fresh in his mind all his
lifetime, was the sudden change that came over the world on entering a
slave State. He took education politically. The mere raggedness of
outline could not have seemed wholly new, for even Boston had its
ragged edges, and the town of Quincy was far from being a vision of
neatness or good-repair; in truth, he had never seen a finished
landscape; but Maryland was raggedness of a new kind. The railway,
about the size and character of a modern tram, rambled through unfenced
fields and woods, or through village streets, among a haphazard variety
of pigs, cows, and negro babies, who might all have used the cabins for
pens and styes, had the Southern pig required styes, but who never
showed a sign of care. This was the boy's impression of what slavery
caused, and, for him, was all it taught. Coming down in the early
morning from his bedroom in his grandmother's house--still called the
Adams Building in--F Street and venturing outside into the air reeking
with the thick odor of the catalpa trees, he found himself on an
earth-road, or village street, with wheel-tracks meandering from the
colonnade of the Treasury hard by, to the white marble columns and
fronts of the Post Office and Patent Office which faced each other in
the distance, like white Greek temples in the abandoned gravel-pits of
a deserted Syrian city. Here and there low wooden houses were scattered
along the streets, as in other Southern villages, but he was chiefly
attracted by an unfinished square marble shaft, half-a-mile below, and
he walked down to inspect it before breakfast. His aunt drily remarked
that, at this rate, he would soon get through all the sights; but she
could not guess--having lived always in Washington--how little the
sights of Washington had to do with its interest.

  The boy could not have told her; he was nowhere near an
understanding of himself. The more he was educated, the less he
understood. Slavery struck him in the face; it was a nightmare; a
horror; a crime; the sum of all wickedness! Contact made it only more
repulsive. He wanted to escape, like the negroes, to free soil. Slave
States were dirty, unkempt, poverty-stricken, ignorant, vicious! He had
not a thought but repulsion for it; and yet the picture had another
side. The May sunshine and shadow had something to do with it; the
thickness of foliage and the heavy smells had more; the sense of
atmosphere, almost new, had perhaps as much again; and the brooding
indolence of a warm climate and a negro population hung in the
atmosphere heavier than the catalpas. The impression was not simple,
but the boy liked it: distinctly it remained on his mind as an
attraction, almost obscuring Quincy itself. The want of barriers, of
pavements, of forms; the looseness, the laziness; the indolent Southern
drawl; the pigs in the streets; the negro babies and their mothers with
bandanas; the freedom, openness, swagger, of nature and man, soothed
his Johnson blood. Most boys would have felt it in the same way, but
with him the feeling caught on to an inheritance. The softness of his
gentle old grandmother as she lay in bed and chatted with him, did not
come from Boston. His aunt was anything rather than Bostonian. He did
not wholly come from Boston himself. Though Washington belonged to a
different world, and the two worlds could not live together, he was not
sure that he enjoyed the Boston world most. Even at twelve years old he
could see his own nature no more clearly than he would at twelve
hundred, if by accident he should happen to live so long.

  His father took him to the Capitol and on the floor of the
Senate, which then, and long afterwards, until the era of tourists, was
freely open to visitors. The old Senate Chamber resembled a pleasant
political club. Standing behind the Vice-President's chair, which is
now the Chief Justice's, the boy was presented to some of the men whose
names were great in their day, and as familiar to him as his own. Clay
and Webster and Calhoun were there still, but with them a Free Soil
candidate for the Vice-Presidency had little to do; what struck boys
most was their type. Senators were a species; they all wore an air, as
they wore a blue dress coat or brass buttons; they were Roman. The type
of Senator in 1850 was rather charming at its best, and the Senate,
when in good temper, was an agreeable body, numbering only some sixty
members, and affecting the airs of courtesy. Its vice was not so much a
vice of manners or temper as of attitude. The statesman of all periods
was apt to be pompous, but even pomposity was less offensive than
familiarity--on the platform as in the pulpit--and Southern pomposity,
when not arrogant, was genial and sympathetic, almost quaint and
childlike in its simple-mindedness; quite a different thing from the
Websterian or Conklinian pomposity of the North. The boy felt at ease
there, more at home than he had ever felt in Boston State House, though
his acquaintance with the codfish in the House of Representatives went
back beyond distinct recollection. Senators spoke kindly to him, and
seemed to feel so, for they had known his family socially; and, in
spite of slavery, even J. Q. Adams in his later years, after he ceased
to stand in the way of rivals, had few personal enemies. Decidedly the
Senate, pro-slavery though it were, seemed a friendly world.

  This first step in national politics was a little like the walk
before breakfast; an easy, careless, genial, enlarging stride into a
fresh and amusing world, where nothing was finished, but where even the
weeds grew rank. The second step was like the first, except that it led
to the White House. He was taken to see President Taylor. Outside, in a
paddock in front, "Old Whitey," the President's charger, was grazing,
as they entered; and inside, the President was receiving callers as
simply as if he were in the paddock too. The President was friendly,
and the boy felt no sense of strangeness that he could ever recall. In
fact, what strangeness should he feel? The families were intimate; so
intimate that their friendliness outlived generations, civil war, and
all sorts of rupture. President Taylor owed his election to Martin Van
Buren and the Free Soil Party. To him, the Adamses might still be of
use. As for the White House, all the boy's family had lived there, and,
barring the eight years of Andrew Jackson's reign, had been more or
less at home there ever since it was built. The boy half thought he
owned it, and took for granted that he should some day live in it. He
felt no sensation whatever before Presidents. A President was a matter
of course in every respectable family; he had two in his own; three, if
he counted old Nathaniel Gorham, who, was the oldest and first in
distinction. Revolutionary patriots, or perhaps a Colonial Governor,
might be worth talking about, but any one could be President, and some
very shady characters were likely to be. Presidents, Senators,
Congressmen, and such things were swarming in every street.

  Every one thought alike whether they had ancestors or not. No
sort of glory hedged Presidents as such, and, in the whole country, one
could hardly have met with an admission of respect for any office or
name, unless it were George Washington. That was--to all appearance
sincerely--respected. People made pilgrimages to Mount Vernon and made
even an effort to build Washington a monument. The effort had failed,
but one still went to Mount Vernon, although it was no easy trip. Mr.
Adams took the boy there in a carriage and pair, over a road that gave
him a complete Virginia education for use ten years afterwards. To the
New England mind, roads, schools, clothes, and a clean face were
connected as part of the law of order or divine system. Bad roads meant
bad morals. The moral of this Virginia road was clear, and the boy
fully learned it. Slavery was wicked, and slavery was the cause of this
road's badness which amounted to social crime--and yet, at the end of
the road and product of the crime stood Mount Vernon and George
Washington.

  Luckily boys accept contradictions as readily as their elders
do, or this boy might have become prematurely wise. He had only to
repeat what he was told--that George Washington stood alone. Otherwise
this third step in his Washington education would have been his last.
On that line, the problem of progress was not soluble, whatever the
optimists and orators might say--or, for that matter, whatever they
might think. George Washington could not be reached on Boston lines.
George Washington was a primary, or, if Virginians liked it better, an
ultimate relation, like the Pole Star, and amid the endless restless
motion of every other visible point in space, he alone remained steady,
in the mind of Henry Adams, to the end. All the other points shifted
their bearings; John Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, even John
Marshall, took varied lights, and assumed new relations, but Mount
Vernon always remained where it was, with no practicable road to reach
it; and yet, when he got there, Mount Vernon was only Quincy in a
Southern setting. No doubt it was much more charming, but it was the
same eighteenth-century, the same old furniture, the same old patriot,
and the same old President.

  The boy took to it instinctively. The broad Potomac and the
coons in the trees, the bandanas and the box-hedges, the bedrooms
upstairs and the porch outside, even Martha Washington herself in
memory, were as natural as the tides and the May sunshine; he had only
enlarged his horizon a little; but he never thought to ask himself or
his father how to deal with the moral problem that deduced George
Washington from the sum of all wickedness. In practice, such trifles as
contradictions in principle are easily set aside; the faculty of
ignoring them makes the practical man; but any attempt to deal with
them seriously as education is fatal. Luckily Charles Francis Adams
never preached and was singularly free from cant. He may have had views
of his own, but he let his son Henry satisfy himself with the simple
elementary fact that George Washington stood alone.

  Life was not yet complicated. Every problem had a solution,
even the negro. The boy went back to Boston more political than ever,
and his politics were no longer so modern as the eighteenth century,
but took a strong tone of the seventeenth. Slavery drove the whole
Puritan community back on its Puritanism. The boy thought as
dogmatically as though he were one of his own ancestors. The Slave
power took the place of Stuart kings and Roman popes. Education could
go no further in that course, and ran off into emotion; but, as the boy
gradually found his surroundings change, and felt himself no longer an
isolated atom in a hostile universe, but a sort of herring-fry in a
shoal of moving fish, he began to learn the first and easier lessons of
practical politics. Thus far he had seen nothing but eighteenth-century
statesmanship. America and he began, at the same time, to become aware
of a new force under the innocent surface of party machinery. Even at
that early moment, a rather slow boy felt dimly conscious that he might
meet some personal difficulties in trying to reconcile
sixteenth-century principles and eighteenth-century statesmanship with
late nineteenth-century party organization. The first vague sense of
feeling an unknown living obstacle in the dark came in 185l.

  The Free Soil conclave in Mount Vernon Street belonged, as
already said, to the statesman class, and, like Daniel Webster, had
nothing to do with machinery. Websters or Sewards depended on others
for machine work and money--on Peter Harveys and Thurlow Weeds, who
spent their lives in it, took most of the abuse, and asked no reward.
Almost without knowing it, the subordinates ousted their employers and
created a machine which no one but themselves could run. In 1850 things
had not quite reached that point. The men who ran the small Free Soil
machine were still modest, though they became famous enough in their
own right. Henry Wilson, John B. Alley, Anson Burlingame, and the other
managers, negotiated a bargain with the Massachusetts Democrats giving
the State to the Democrats and a seat in the Senate to the Free
Soilers. With this bargain Mr. Adams and his statesman friends would
have nothing to do, for such a coalition was in their eyes much like
jockeys selling a race. They did not care to take office as pay for
votes sold to pro-slavery Democrats. Theirs was a correct, not to say
noble, position; but, as a matter of fact, they took the benefit of the
sale, for the coalition chose Charles Sumner as its candidate for the
Senate, while George S. Boutwell was made Governor for the Democrats.
This was the boy's first lesson in practical politics, and a sharp one;
not that he troubled himself with moral doubts, but that he learned the
nature of a flagrantly corrupt political bargain in which he was too
good to take part, but not too good to take profit. Charles Sumner
happened to be the partner to receive these stolen goods, but between
his friend and his father the boy felt no distinction, and, for him,
there was none. He entered into no casuistry on the matter. His friend
was right because his friend, and the boy shared the glory. The
question of education did not rise while the conflict lasted. Yet every
one saw as clearly then as afterwards that a lesson of some sort must
be learned and understood, once for all. The boy might ignore, as a
mere historical puzzle, the question how to deduce George Washington
from the sum of all wickedness, but he had himself helped to deduce
Charles Sumner from the sum of political corruption. On that line, too,
education could go no further. Tammany Hall stood at the end of the
vista.

  Mr. Alley, one of the strictest of moralists, held that his
object in making the bargain was to convert the Democratic Party to
anti-slavery principles, and that he did it. Henry Adams could rise to
no such moral elevation. He was only a boy, and his object in
supporting the coalition was that of making his friend a Senator. It
was as personal as though he had helped to make his friend a
millionaire. He could never find a way of escaping immoral conclusions,
except by admitting that he and his father and Sumner were wrong, and
this he was never willing to do, for the consequences of this admission
were worse than those of the other. Thus, before he was fifteen years
old, he had managed to get himself into a state of moral confusion from
which he never escaped. As a politician, he was already corrupt, and he
never could see how any practical politician could be less corrupt than
himself.

  Apology, as he understood himself, was cant or cowardice. At
the time he never even dreamed that he needed to apologize, though the
press shouted it at him from every corner, and though the Mount Vernon
Street conclave agreed with the press; yet he could not plead
ignorance, and even in the heat of the conflict, he never cared to
defend the coalition. Boy as he was, he knew enough to know that
something was wrong, but his only interest was the election. Day after
day, the General Court balloted; and the boy haunted the gallery,
following the roll-call, and wondered what Caleb Cushing meant by
calling Mr. Sumner a "one-eyed abolitionist." Truly the difference in
meaning with the phrase "one-ideaed abolitionist," which was Mr.
Cushing's actual expression, is not very great, but neither the one nor
the other seemed to describe Mr. Sumner to the boy, who never could
have made the error of classing Garrison and Sumner together, or
mistaking Caleb Cushing's relation to either. Temper ran high at that
moment, while Sumner every day missed his election by only one or two
votes. At last, April 24, 1851, standing among the silent crowd in the
gallery, Henry heard the vote announced which gave Sumner the needed
number. Slipping under the arms of the bystanders, he ran home as hard
as he could, and burst into the dining-room where Mr. Sumner was seated
at table with the family. He enjoyed the glory of telling Sumner that
he was elected; it was probably the proudest moment in the life of
either.

  The next day, when the boy went to school, he noticed numbers
of boys and men in the streets wearing black crepe on their arm. He
knew few Free Soil boys in Boston; his acquaintances were what he
called pro-slavery; so he thought proper to tie a bit of white silk
ribbon round his own arm by way of showing that his friend Mr. Sumner
was not wholly alone. This little piece of bravado passed unnoticed; no
one even cuffed his ears; but in later life he was a little puzzled to
decide which symbol was the more correct. No one then dreamed of four
years' war, but every one dreamed of secession. The symbol for either
might well be matter of doubt.

  This triumph of the Mount Vernon Street conclave capped the
political climax. The boy, like a million other American boys, was a
politician, and what was worse, fit as yet to be nothing else. He
should have been, like his grandfather, a protege of George Washington,
a statesman designated by destiny, with nothing to do but look directly
ahead, follow orders, and march. On the contrary, he was not even a
Bostonian; he felt himself shut out of Boston as though he were an
exile; he never thought of himself as a Bostonian; he never looked
about him in Boston, as boys commonly do wherever they are, to select
the street they like best, the house they want to live in, the
profession they mean to practise. Always he felt himself somewhere
else; perhaps in Washington with its social ease; perhaps in Europe;
and he watched with vague unrest from the Quincy hills the smoke of the
Cunard steamers stretching in a long line to the horizon, and
disappearing every other Saturday or whatever the day might be, as
though the steamers were offering to take him away, which was precisely
what they were doing.

  Had these ideas been unreasonable, influences enough were at
hand to correct them; but the point of the whole story, when Henry
Adams came to look back on it, seemed to be that the ideas were more
than reasonable; they were the logical, necessary, mathematical result
of conditions old as history and fixed as fate--invariable sequence in
man's experience. The only idea which would have been quite
unreasonable scarcely entered his mind. This was the thought of going
westward and growing up with the country. That he was not in the least
fitted for going West made no objection whatever, since he was much
better fitted than most of the persons that went. The convincing reason
for staying in the East was that he had there every advantage over the
West. He could not go wrong. The West must inevitably pay an enormous
tribute to Boston and New York. One's position in the East was the best
in the world for every purpose that could offer an object for going
westward. If ever in history men had been able to calculate on a
certainty for a lifetime in advance, the citizens of the great Eastern
seaports could do it in 1850 when their railway systems were already
laid out. Neither to a politician nor to a business-man nor to any of
the learned professions did the West promise any certain advantage,
while it offered uncertainties in plenty.

  At any other moment in human history, this education, including
its political and literary bias, would have been not only good, but
quite the best. Society had always welcomed and flattered men so
endowed. Henry Adams had every reason to be well pleased with it, and
not ill-pleased with himself. He had all he wanted. He saw no reason
for thinking that any one else had more. He finished with school, not
very brilliantly, but without finding fault with the sum of his
knowledge. Probably he knew more than his father, or his grandfather,
or his great-grandfather had known at sixteen years old. Only on
looking back, fifty years later, at his own figure in 1854, and
pondering on the needs of the twentieth century, he wondered whether,
on the whole the boy of 1854 stood nearer to the thought of 1904, or to
that of the year 1. He found himself unable to give a sure answer. The
calculation was clouded by the undetermined values of twentieth-century
thought, but the story will show his reasons for thinking that, in
essentials like religion, ethics, philosophy; in history, literature,
art; in the concepts of all science, except perhaps mathematics, the
American boy of 1854 stood nearer the year 1 than to the year 1900. The
education he had received bore little relation to the education he
needed. Speaking as an American of 1900, he had as yet no education at
all. He knew not even where or how to begin.

As Henry enters adolescence, he begins to notice the complications of life. The stereotypes of class distinction are less acceptable. A trip to Washington, D. C., alerts him to some of the realities of a slave culture. During a visit to George Washington's home at Mount Vernon, in the slave state of Virginia, he becomes aware of the fact that great men can sometimes be associated with wicked practices. He is further disillusioned by a political deal struck by the Free Soilers but is relieved that his father has nothing to do with it. Despite all of these experiences, he writes that, at the age of sixteen, Henry has "had as yet no education at all."

The narrator presents a series of experiences that cause young Henry to question the life of privilege that he has taken for granted. The first is a traditional snowball fight in Boston in which the rich West End kids, mostly students at the Latin School, take on the "blackguards from the slums led by a grisly terror called Conky Daniels." At the age of twelve, it has not yet occurred to Henry that his group may not be superior in every way. Not only did his paternal ancestors found the country, but his maternal grandfather  died the wealthiest man in Boston. In the snowball fight, Henry's side prevails initially; but as the day wears on and the ranks thin, the slum kids attack. Outnumbered, the West Enders make a stand; a few flee. Henry is small and weak but stays because his older brother Charles stays. To their surprise, the "terrible" Conky Daniels honors their courage, salutes them with an oath, and sweeps on to chase the flyers. The "moral taught that blackguards were not so black as they were painted." It occurs to the older narrator that boys from both sides would die equally on the battle fields of Virginia and Maryland in the Civil War a dozen years later. The narrator again employs contrast effectively as Henry's father takes him to visit  Henry's paternal grandmother, widowed and living in Washington. The trip, by rail and boat, takes Henry through his first slave state, Maryland, and later to another, Virginia, to see George Washington's home at Mount Vernon. The boy is struck by the opposing images of freedom and slavery. In the slave states, the countryside is lush and beautiful. There is an impression, even in the city, of an absence of barriers, a relaxed indolence, an open spirit. This contrasts shockingly with the reality of slavery: "it was a nightmare; a horror; a crime; the sum of all wickedness! Contact made it only more repulsive." He wants to escape, along with the blacks, to free soil. While Mount Vernon itself is lovely, it represents the Virginia white owners' profits from slavery. Henry can't fathom the contradiction. How could the father of his country be associated with such evil? He respectfully tries to fall back on the "simple elementary fact that George Washington stood alone." His education has not prepared him to go beyond that. A political deal struck by some of the Free Soil Party leaders further disillusions the boy. They negotiate a bargain to support a pro-slavery democrat for the office of Governor of Massachusetts in exchange for democratic support of the Free Soil candidate for United States Senator. This is Henry's "first lesson in practical politics" and a shocking one. His one consolation is that his father will have no part of it. Despite all of these experiences, the narrator ends the chapter by telling the reader that Henry has not yet received any real education at all. In fact, he says, Henry does not even know where or how to begin to look for one. He will next try formal education at one of the most respected colleges in the land -- with dubious results. Glossary blackguard scoundrel, villain. immolation sacrifice, destruction. John Marshall  Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court , developing the court's role as interpreter of the Constitution. cant special words or phrases used by those in a particular occupation. casuistry the application of general principles of ethics to specific issues. conclave a private or secret meeting.


HARVARD COLLEGE (1854-1858)

  ONE day in June, 1854, young Adams walked for the last time
down the steps of Mr. Dixwell's school in Boylston Place, and felt no
sensation but one of unqualified joy that this experience was ended.
Never before or afterwards in his life did he close a period so long as
four years without some sensation of loss--some sentiment of habit--but
school was what in after life he commonly heard his friends denounce as
an intolerable bore. He was born too old for it. The same thing could
be said of most New England boys. Mentally they never were boys. Their
education as men should have begun at ten years old. They were fully
five years more mature than the English or European boy for whom
schools were made. For the purposes of future advancement, as
afterwards appeared, these first six years of a possible education were
wasted in doing imperfectly what might have been done perfectly in one,
and in any case would have had small value. The next regular step was
Harvard College. He was more than glad to go. For generation after
generation, Adamses and Brookses and Boylstons and Gorhams had gone to
Harvard College, and although none of them, as far as known, had ever
done any good there, or thought himself the better for it, custom,
social ties, convenience, and, above all, economy, kept each generation
in the track. Any other education would have required a serious effort,
but no one took Harvard College seriously. All went there because their
friends went there, and the College was their ideal of social
self-respect.

  Harvard College, as far as it educated at all, was a mild and
liberal school, which sent young men into the world with all they
needed to make respectable citizens, and something of what they wanted
to make useful ones. Leaders of men it never tried to make. Its ideals
were altogether different. The Unitarian clergy had given to the
College a character of moderation, balance, judgment, restraint, what
the French called mesure; excellent traits, which the College attained
with singular success, so that its graduates could commonly be
recognized by the stamp, but such a type of character rarely lent
itself to autobiography. In effect, the school created a type but not a
will. Four years of Harvard College, if successful, resulted in an
autobiographical blank, a mind on which only a water-mark had been
stamped.

  The stamp, as such things went, was a good one. The chief
wonder of education is that it does not ruin everybody concerned in it,
teachers and taught. Sometimes in after life, Adams debated whether in
fact it had not ruined him and most of his companions, but,
disappointment apart, Harvard College was probably less hurtful than
any other university then in existence. It taught little, and that
little ill, but it left the mind open, free from bias, ignorant of
facts, but docile. The graduate had few strong prejudices. He knew
little, but his mind remained supple, ready to receive knowledge.

  What caused the boy most disappointment was the little he got
from his mates. Speaking exactly, he got less than nothing, a result
common enough in education. Yet the College Catalogue for the years
1854 to 1861 shows a list of names rather distinguished in their time.
Alexander Agassiz and Phillips Brooks led it; H. H. Richardson and O.
W. Holmes helped to close it. As a rule the most promising of all die
early, and never get their names into a Dictionary of Contemporaries,
which seems to be the only popular standard of success. Many died in
the war. Adams knew them all, more or less; he felt as much regard, and
quite as much respect for them then, as he did after they won great
names and were objects of a vastly wider respect; but, as help towards
education, he got nothing whatever from them or they from him until
long after they had left college. Possibly the fault was his, but one
would like to know how many others shared it. Accident counts for much
in companionship as in marriage. Life offers perhaps only a score of
possible companions, and it is mere chance whether they meet as early
as school or college, but it is more than a chance that boys brought up
together under like conditions have nothing to give each other. The
Class of 1858, to which Henry Adams belonged, was a typical collection
of young New Englanders, quietly penetrating and aggressively
commonplace; free from meannesses, jealousies, intrigues, enthusiasms,
and passions; not exceptionally quick; not consciously skeptical;
singularly indifferent to display, artifice, florid expression, but not
hostile to it when it amused them; distrustful of themselves, but
little disposed to trust any one else; with not much humor of their
own, but full of readiness to enjoy the humor of others; negative to a
degree that in the long run became positive and triumphant. Not harsh
in manners or judgment, rather liberal and open-minded, they were still
as a body the most formidable critics one would care to meet, in a long
life exposed to criticism. They never flattered, seldom praised; free
from vanity, they were not intolerant of it; but they were
objectiveness itself; their attitude was a law of nature; their
judgment beyond appeal, not an act either of intellect or emotion or of
will, but a sort of gravitation.

  This was Harvard College incarnate, but even for Harvard
College, the Class of 1858 was somewhat extreme. Of unity this band of
nearly one hundred young men had no keen sense, but they had equally
little energy of repulsion. They were pleasant to live with, and above
the average of students--German, French, English, or what not--but
chiefly because each individual appeared satisfied to stand alone. It
seemed a sign of force; yet to stand alone is quite natural when one
has no passions; still easier when one has no pains.

  Into this unusually dissolvent medium, chance insisted on
enlarging Henry Adams's education by tossing a trio of Virginians as
little fitted for it as Sioux Indians to a treadmill. By some further
affinity, these three outsiders fell into relation with the Bostonians
among whom Adams as a schoolboy belonged, and in the end with Adams
himself, although they and he knew well how thin an edge of friendship
separated them in 1856 from mortal enmity. One of the Virginians was
the son of Colonel Robert E. Lee, of the Second United States Cavalry;
the two others who seemed instinctively to form a staff for Lee, were
town-Virginians from Petersburg. A fourth outsider came from Cincinnati
and was half Kentuckian, N. L. Anderson, Longworth on the mother's
side. For the first time Adams's education brought him in contact with
new types and taught him their values. He saw the New England type
measure itself with another, and he was part of the process.

  Lee, known through life as "Roony," was a Virginian of the
eighteenth century, much as Henry Adams was a Bostonian of the same
age. Roony Lee had changed little from the type of his grandfather,
Light Horse Harry. Tall, largely built, handsome, genial, with liberal
Virginian openness towards all he liked, he had also the Virginian
habit of command and took leadership as his natural habit. No one cared
to contest it. None of the New Englanders wanted command. For a year,
at least, Lee was the most popular and prominent young man in his
class, but then seemed slowly to drop into the background. The habit of
command was not enough, and the Virginian had little else. He was
simple beyond analysis; so simple that even the simple New England
student could not realize him. No one knew enough to know how ignorant
he was; how childlike; how helpless before the relative complexity of a
school. As an animal, the Southerner seemed to have every advantage,
but even as an animal he steadily lost ground.

  The lesson in education was vital to these young men, who,
within ten years, killed each other by scores in the act of testing
their college conclusions. Strictly, the Southerner had no mind; he had
temperament. He was not a scholar; he had no intellectual training; he
could not analyze an idea, and he could not even conceive of admitting
two; but in life one could get along very well without ideas, if one
had only the social instinct. Dozens of eminent statesmen were men of
Lee's type, and maintained themselves well enough in the legislature,
but college was a sharper test. The Virginian was weak in vice itself,
though the Bostonian was hardly a master of crime. The habits of
neither were good; both were apt to drink hard and to live low lives;
but the Bostonian suffered less than the Virginian. Commonly the
Bostonian could take some care of himself even in his worst stages,
while the Virginian became quarrelsome and dangerous. When a Virginian
had brooded a few days over an imaginary grief and substantial whiskey,
none of his Northern friends could be sure that he might not be
waiting, round the corner, with a knife or pistol, to revenge insult by
the dry light of delirium tremens; and when things reached this
condition, Lee had to exhaust his authority over his own staff. Lee was
a gentleman of the old school, and, as every one knows, gentlemen of
the old school drank almost as much as gentlemen of the new school; but
this was not his trouble. He was sober even in the excessive violence
of political feeling in those years; he kept his temper and his friends
under control.

  Adams liked the Virginians. No one was more obnoxious to them,
by name and prejudice; yet their friendship was unbroken and even warm.
At a moment when the immediate future posed no problem in education so
vital as the relative energy and endurance of North and South, this
momentary contact with Southern character was a sort of education for
its own sake; but this was not all. No doubt the self-esteem of the
Yankee, which tended naturally to self-distrust, was flattered by
gaining the slow conviction that the Southerner, with his slave-owning
limitations, was as little fit to succeed in the struggle of modern
life as though he were still a maker of stone axes, living in caves,
and hunting the bos primigenius, and that every quality in which he was
strong, made him weaker; but Adams had begun to fear that even in this
respect one eighteenth-century type might not differ deeply from
another. Roony Lee had changed little from the Virginian of a century
before; but Adams was himself a good deal nearer the type of his
great-grandfather than to that of a railway superintendent. He was
little more fit than the Virginians to deal with a future America which
showed no fancy for the past. Already Northern society betrayed a
preference for economists over diplomats or soldiers--one might even
call it a jealousy--against which two eighteenth-century types had
little chance to live, and which they had in common to fear.

  Nothing short of this curious sympathy could have brought into
close relations two young men so hostile as Roony Lee and Henry Adams,
but the chief difference between them as collegians consisted only in
their difference of scholarship: Lee was a total failure; Adams a
partial one. Both failed, but Lee felt his failure more sensibly, so
that he gladly seized the chance of escape by accepting a commission
offered him by General Winfield Scott in the force then being organized
against the Mormons. He asked Adams to write his letter of acceptance,
which flattered Adams's vanity more than any Northern compliment could
do, because, in days of violent political bitterness, it showed a
certain amount of good temper. The diplomat felt his profession.

  If the student got little from his mates, he got little more
from his masters. The four years passed at college were, for his
purposes, wasted. Harvard College was a good school, but at bottom what
the boy disliked most was any school at all. He did not want to be one
in a hundred--one per cent of an education. He regarded himself as the
only person for whom his education had value, and he wanted the whole
of it. He got barely half of an average. Long afterwards, when the
devious path of life led him back to teach in his turn what no student
naturally cared or needed to know, he diverted some dreary hours of
faculty-meetings by looking up his record in the class-lists, and found
himself graded precisely in the middle. In the one branch he most
needed--mathematics--barring the few first scholars, failure was so
nearly universal that no attempt at grading could have had value, and
whether he stood fortieth or ninetieth must have been an accident or
the personal favor of the professor. Here his education failed
lamentably. At best he could never have been a mathematician; at worst
he would never have cared to be one; but he needed to read mathematics,
like any other universal language, and he never reached the alphabet.

  Beyond two or three Greek plays, the student got nothing from
the ancient languages. Beyond some incoherent theories of free-trade
and protection, he got little from Political Economy. He could not
afterwards remember to have heard the name of Karl Marx mentioned, or
the title of "Capital." He was equally ignorant of Auguste Comte. These
were the two writers of his time who most influenced its thought. The
bit of practical teaching he afterwards reviewed with most curiosity
was the course in Chemistry, which taught him a number of theories that
befogged his mind for a lifetime. The only teaching that appealed to
his imagination was a course of lectures by Louis Agassiz on the
Glacial Period and Paleontology, which had more influence on his
curiosity than the rest of the college instruction altogether. The
entire work of the four years could have been easily put into the work
of any four months in after life.

  Harvard College was a negative force, and negative forces have
value. Slowly it weakened the violent political bias of childhood, not
by putting interests in its place, but by mental habits which had no
bias at all. It would also have weakened the literary bias, if Adams
had been capable of finding other amusement, but the climate kept him
steady to desultory and useless reading, till he had run through
libraries of volumes which he forgot even to their title-pages. Rather
by instinct than by guidance, he turned to writing, and his professors
or tutors occasionally gave his English composition a hesitating
approval; but in that branch, as in all the rest, even when he made a
long struggle for recognition, he never convinced his teachers that his
abilities, at their best, warranted placing him on the rank-list, among
the first third of his class. Instructors generally reach a fairly
accurate gauge of their scholars' powers. Henry Adams himself held the
opinion that his instructors were very nearly right, and when he became
a professor in his turn, and made mortifying mistakes in ranking his
scholars, he still obstinately insisted that on the whole, he was not
far wrong. Student or professor, he accepted the negative standard
because it was the standard of the school.

  He never knew what other students thought of it, or what they
thought they gained from it; nor would their opinion have much affected
his. From the first, he wanted to be done with it, and stood watching
vaguely for a path and a direction. The world outside seemed large, but
the paths that led into it were not many and lay mostly through Boston,
where he did not want to go. As it happened, by pure chance, the first
door of escape that seemed to offer a hope led into Germany, and James
Russell Lowell opened it.

  Lowell, on succeeding Longfellow as Professor of
Belles-Lettres, had duly gone to Germany, and had brought back whatever
he found to bring. The literary world then agreed that truth survived
in Germany alone, and Carlyle, Matthew Arnold, Renan, Emerson, with
scores of popular followers, taught the German faith. The literary
world had revolted against the yoke of coming capitalism--its
money-lenders, its bank directors, and its railway magnates. Thackeray
and Dickens followed Balzac in scratching and biting the unfortunate
middle class with savage ill-temper, much as the middle class had
scratched and bitten the Church and Court for a hundred years before.
The middle class had the power, and held its coal and iron well in
hand, but the satirists and idealists seized the press, and as they
were agreed that the Second Empire was a disgrace to France and a
danger to England, they turned to Germany because at that moment
Germany was neither economical nor military, and a hundred years behind
western Europe in the simplicity of its standard. German thought,
method, honesty, and even taste, became the standards of scholarship.
Goethe was raised to the rank of Shakespeare--Kant ranked as a
law-giver above Plato. All serious scholars were obliged to become
German, for German thought was revolutionizing criticism. Lowell had
followed the rest, not very enthusiastically, but with sufficient
conviction, and invited his scholars to join him. Adams was glad to
accept the invitation, rather for the sake of cultivating Lowell than
Germany, but still in perfect good faith. It was the first serious
attempt he had made to direct his own education, and he was sure of
getting some education out of it; not perhaps anything that he
expected, but at least a path.

  Singularly circuitous and excessively wasteful of energy the
path proved to be, but the student could never see what other was open
to him. He could have done no better had he foreseen every stage of his
coming life, and he would probably have done worse. The preliminary
step was pure gain. James Russell Lowell had brought back from Germany
the only new and valuable part of its universities, the habit of
allowing students to read with him privately in his study. Adams asked
the privilege, and used it to read a little, and to talk a great deal,
for the personal contact pleased and flattered him, as that of older
men ought to flatter and please the young even when they altogether
exaggerate its value. Lowell was a new element in the boy's life. As
practical a New Englander as any, he leaned towards the Concord faith
rather than towards Boston where he properly belonged; for Concord, in
the dark days of 1856, glowed with pure light. Adams approached it in
much the same spirit as he would have entered a Gothic Cathedral, for
he well knew that the priests regarded him as only a worm. To the
Concord Church all Adamses were minds of dust and emptiness, devoid of
feeling, poetry or imagination; little higher than the common scourings
of State Street; politicians of doubtful honesty; natures of narrow
scope; and already, at eighteen years old, Henry had begun to feel
uncertainty about so many matters more important than Adamses that his
mind rebelled against no discipline merely personal, and he was ready
to admit his unworthiness if only he might penetrate the shrine. The
influence of Harvard College was beginning to have its effect. He was
slipping away from fixed principles; from Mount Vernon Street; from
Quincy; from the eighteenth century; and his first steps led toward
Concord.

  He never reached Concord, and to Concord Church he, like the
rest of mankind who accepted a material universe, remained always an
insect, or something much lower--a man. It was surely no fault of his
that the universe seemed to him real; perhaps--as Mr. Emerson justly
said--it was so; in spite of the long-continued effort of a lifetime,
he perpetually fell back into the heresy that if anything universal was
unreal, it was himself and not the appearances; it was the poet and not
the banker; it was his own thought, not the thing that moved it. He did
not lack the wish to be transcendental. Concord seemed to him, at one
time, more real than Quincy; yet in truth Russell Lowell was as little
transcendental as Beacon Street. From him the boy got no revolutionary
thought whatever--objective or subjective as they used to call it--but
he got good-humored encouragement to do what amused him, which
consisted in passing two years in Europe after finishing the four years
of Cambridge.

  The result seemed small in proportion to the effort, but it was
the only positive result he could ever trace to the influence of
Harvard College, and he had grave doubts whether Harvard College
influenced even that. Negative results in plenty he could trace, but he
tended towards negation on his own account, as one side of the New
England mind had always done, and even there he could never feel sure
that Harvard College had more than reflected a weakness. In his opinion
the education was not serious, but in truth hardly any Boston student
took it seriously, and none of them seemed sure that President Walker
himself, or President Felton after him, took it more seriously than the
students. For them all, the college offered chiefly advantages vulgarly
called social, rather than mental.

  Unluckily for this particular boy, social advantages were his
only capital in life. Of money he had not much, of mind not more, but
he could be quite certain that, barring his own faults, his social
position would never be questioned. What he needed was a career in
which social position had value. Never in his life would he have to
explain who he was; never would he have need of acquaintance to
strengthen his social standing; but he needed greatly some one to show
him how to use the acquaintance he cared to make. He made no
acquaintance in college which proved to have the smallest use in after
life. All his Boston friends he knew before, or would have known in any
case, and contact of Bostonian with Bostonian was the last education
these young men needed. Cordial and intimate as their college relations
were, they all flew off in different directions the moment they took
their degrees. Harvard College remained a tie, indeed, but a tie little
stronger than Beacon Street and not so strong as State Street.
Strangers might perhaps gain something from the college if they were
hard pressed for social connections. A student like H. H. Richardson,
who came from far away New Orleans, and had his career before him to
chase rather than to guide, might make valuable friendships at college.
Certainly Adams made no acquaintance there that he valued in after life
so much as Richardson, but still more certainly the college relation
had little to do with the later friendship. Life is a narrow valley,
and the roads run close together. Adams would have attached himself to
Richardson in any case, as he attached himself to John LaFarge or
Augustus St. Gaudens or Clarence King or John Hay, none of whom were at
Harvard College. The valley of life grew more and more narrow with
years, and certain men with common tastes were bound to come together.
Adams knew only that he would have felt himself on a more equal footing
with them had he been less ignorant, and had he not thrown away ten
years of early life in acquiring what he might have acquired in one.

  Socially or intellectually, the college was for him negative
and in some ways mischievous. The most tolerant man of the world could
not see good in the lower habits of the students, but the vices were
less harmful than the virtues. The habit of drinking--though the mere
recollection of it made him doubt his own veracity, so fantastic it
seemed in later life--may have done no great or permanent harm; but the
habit of looking at life as a social relation--an affair of
society--did no good. It cultivated a weakness which needed no
cultivation. If it had helped to make men of the world, or give the
manners and instincts of any profession--such as temper, patience,
courtesy, or a faculty of profiting by the social defects of
opponents--it would have been education better worth having than
mathematics or languages; but so far as it helped to make anything, it
helped only to make the college standard permanent through life. The
Bostonian educated at Harvard College remained a collegian, if he stuck
only to what the college gave him. If parents went on generation after
generation, sending their children to Harvard College for the sake of
its social advantages, they perpetuated an inferior social type, quite
as ill-fitted as the Oxford type for success in the next generation.

  Luckily the old social standard of the college, as President
Walker or James Russell Lowell still showed it, was admirable, and if
it had little practical value or personal influence on the mass of
students, at least it preserved the tradition for those who liked it.
The Harvard graduate was neither American nor European, nor even wholly
Yankee; his admirers were few, and critics his many; perhaps his worst
weakness was his self-criticism and self-consciousness; but his ambitions,
social or intellectual, were necessarily cheap even though they might
be negative. Afraid of such serious risks, and still more afraid of
personal ridicule, he seldom made a great failure of life, and nearly
always led a life more or less worth living. So Henry Adams, well aware
that he could not succeed as a scholar, and finding his social position
beyond improvement or need of effort, betook himself to the single
ambition which otherwise would scarcely have seemed a true outcome of
the college, though it was the last remnant of the old Unitarian
supremacy. He took to the pen. He wrote.

  The College Magazine printed his work, and the College
Societies listened to his addresses. Lavish of praise the readers were
not; the audiences, too, listened in silence; but this was all the
encouragement any Harvard collegian had a reasonable hope to receive;
grave silence was a form of patience that meant possible future
acceptance; and Henry Adams went on writing. No one cared enough to
criticise, except himself who soon began to suffer from reaching his
own limits. He found that he could not be this--or that--or the other;
always precisely the things he wanted to be. He had not wit or scope or
force. Judges always ranked him beneath a rival, if he had any; and he
believed the judges were right. His work seemed to him thin,
commonplace, feeble. At times he felt his own weakness so fatally that
he could not go on; when he had nothing to say, he could not say it,
and he found that he had very little to say at best. Much that he then
wrote must be still in existence in print or manuscript, though he
never cared to see it again, for he felt no doubt that it was in
reality just what he thought it. At best it showed only a feeling for
form; an instinct of exclusion. Nothing shocked--not even its weakness.

  Inevitably an effort leads to an ambition--creates it--and
at that time the ambition of the literary student, which almost took
place of the regular prizes of scholarship, was that of being chosen as
the representative of his class--Class Orator--at the close of their
course. This was political as well as literary success, and precisely
the sort of eighteenth-century combination that fascinated an
eighteenth century boy. The idea lurked in his mind, at first as a
dream, in no way serious or even possible, for he stood outside the
number of what were known as popular men. Year by year, his position
seemed to improve, or perhaps his rivals disappeared, until at last, to
his own great astonishment, he found himself a candidate. The habits of
the college permitted no active candidacy; he and his rivals had not a
word to say for or against themselves, and he was never even consulted
on the subject; he was not present at any of the proceedings, and how
it happened he never could quite divine, but it did happen, that one
evening on returning from Boston he received notice of his election,
after a very close contest, as Class Orator over the head of the first
scholar, who was undoubtedly a better orator and a more popular man. In
politics the success of the poorer candidate is common enough, and
Henry Adams was a fairly trained politician, but he never understood
how he managed to defeat not only a more capable but a more popular
rival.

  To him the election seemed a miracle. This was no mock-modesty;
his head was as clear as ever it was in an indifferent canvass, and he
knew his rivals and their following as well as he knew himself. What he
did not know, even after four years of education, was Harvard College.
What he could never measure was the bewildering impersonality of the
men, who, at twenty years old, seemed to set no value either on
official or personal standards. Here were nearly a hundred young men
who had lived together intimately during four of the most
impressionable years of life, and who, not only once but again and
again, in different ways, deliberately, seriously, dispassionately,
chose as their representatives precisely those of their companions who
seemed least to represent them. As far as these Orators and Marshals
had any position at all in a collegiate sense, it was that of
indifference to the college. Henry Adams never professed the smallest
faith in universities of any kind, either as boy or man, nor had he the
faintest admiration for the university graduate, either in Europe or in
America; as a collegian he was only known apart from his fellows by his
habit of standing outside the college; and yet the singular fact
remained that this commonplace body of young men chose him repeatedly
to express his and their commonplaces. Secretly, of course, the
successful candidate flattered himself--and them--with the hope that
they might perhaps not be so commonplace as they thought themselves;
but this was only another proof that all were identical. They saw in
him a representative--the kind of representative they wanted--and he
saw in them the most formidable array of judges he could ever meet,
like so many mirrors of himself, an infinite reflection of his own
shortcomings.

  All the same, the choice was flattering; so flattering that it
actually shocked his vanity; and would have shocked it more, if
possible, had he known that it was to be the only flattery of the sort
he was ever to receive. The function of Class Day was, in the eyes of
nine-tenths of the students, altogether the most important of the
college, and the figure of the Orator was the most conspicuous in the
function. Unlike the Orators at regular Commencements, the Class Day
Orator stood alone, or had only the Poet for rival. Crowded into the
large church, the students, their families, friends, aunts, uncles and
chaperones, attended all the girls of sixteen or twenty who wanted to
show their summer dresses or fresh complexions, and there, for an hour
or two, in a heat that might have melted bronze, they listened to an
Orator and a Poet in clergyman's gowns, reciting such platitudes as
their own experience and their mild censors permitted them to utter.
What Henry Adams said in his Class Oration of 1858 he soon forgot to
the last word, nor had it the least value for education; but he
naturally remembered what was said of it. He remembered especially one
of his eminent uncles or relations remarking that, as the work of so
young a man, the oration was singularly wanting in enthusiasm. The
young man--always in search of education--asked himself whether,
setting rhetoric aside, this absence of enthusiasm was a defect or a
merit, since, in either case, it was all that Harvard College taught,
and all that the hundred young men, whom he was trying to represent,
expressed. Another comment threw more light on the effect of the
college education. One of the elderly gentlemen noticed the orator's
"perfect self-possession." Self-possession indeed! If Harvard College
gave nothing else, it gave calm. For four years each student had been
obliged to figure daily before dozens of young men who knew each other
to the last fibre. One had done little but read papers to Societies, or
act comedy in the Hasty Pudding, not to speak of regular exercises, and
no audience in future life would ever be so intimately and terribly
intelligent as these. Three-fourths of the graduates would rather have
addressed the Council of Trent or the British Parliament than have
acted Sir Anthony Absolute or Dr. Ollapod before a gala audience of the
Hasty Pudding. Self-possession was the strongest part of Harvard
College, which certainly taught men to stand alone, so that nothing
seemed stranger to its graduates than the paroxysms of terror before
the public which often overcame the graduates of European universities.
Whether this was, or was not, education, Henry Adams never knew. He was
ready to stand up before any audience in America or Europe, with nerves
rather steadier for the excitement, but whether he should ever have
anything to say, remained to be proved. As yet he knew nothing.
Education had not begun.

Henry completes the preparatory course of study at the private Latin School of E. S. Dixwell, Boston, in June of 1854 and begins collegiate studies at Harvard on August 31. The narrator has very little good to say of either experience. Henry becomes acquainted with several Virginians at Harvard, including the son of Robert E. Lee, and claims to like them; but his descriptions of the students reveal a deep prejudice against all Southerners. Henry condemns the course of study at Harvard but blames himself, as well, for his failure to advance in intellect or maturity. Despite efforts at self-effacement, he does seem pleased to be elected Class Orator in a close contest against the class's top scholar who is, Adams insists, the more popular fellow. Again, Adams tells his readers that education has not yet commenced.

The narrator's evaluation of formal education is negative beyond reason. He concludes that Henry's prep school experience was a complete waste of time, an "intolerable bore," and completed with "unqualified joy." Even at his birth, he says, he was too mature for this curriculum! Six years of such study could be surpassed in one; even then, it would have little merit. Harvard, he claims, is no better. No one takes the school seriously, he reports; it teaches very little and that, poorly. Here, four years could be completed in four months. Harvard College is a "negative force" because it primarily teaches an "ideal of social self-respect." He explains that the wealthy and privileged attend the school only to meet other students from similar backgrounds with whom they will associate the rest of their lives. In even this social sense, Adams claims to miss out: "He made no acquaintance in College which proved to have the smallest use in after life." His association with several Virginians results in an angry, highly prejudiced rant against Southerners: "Strictly, the Southerner had no mind; he had temperament. He was not a scholar; he had no intellectual training; he could not analyze an idea, and he could not even conceive of admitting two." The bias, partly learned from family and partly resulting from a hatred of slavery, would persist throughout Adams's life. The criticism of Harvard might be easier to dismiss if it came from the openly defiant twenty-year-old Henry who was accumulating an impressive number of disciplinary violations at the college. But the narrator is nearly seventy years old. In the first book of his authoritative three-volume biography , Ernest Samuels discusses Adams's collegiate years. True, Harvard was not at its best when Henry attended. It's somewhat accurate to say that the privileged attended in order to be with each other. Nevertheless, excellent instruction was available. Adams complains of inadequate education in mathematics, for example; but the truth is that he was not very good at math. He was unable to qualify for instruction offered to the top third of the class, and his courses included the basic stuff of algebra, geometry, and trigonometry. Adams further complains that Harvard offered him no introduction to Karl Marx's Das Kapital. This is not surprising, however, because the first volume of the work was not published until 1867, nine years after Henry's graduation from Harvard. Henry does excel at writing and speaking, even at Harvard. He writes several articles for school publications on such topics as appropriate reading lists for college students and the negative aspects of Greek letter societies. His triumph, however, is the Class Oration, delivered on June 25, 1858. It best represents the idealism of the later Adams as he warns of the dangers of capitalism and the vanity of human wishes. Even the older narrator recalls the moment fondly. Still, he claims that Henry as yet knows nothing. After graduating from Harvard, his education has not yet begun. Glossary mesure  moderation, decorum. florid flowery, ornate, showy. delirium tremens a violent reaction to alcohol or alcoholic withdrawal, characterized by sweating, trembling, anxiety, and frightening hallucinations. desultory disconnected, random, lacking direct relevance. singular unique, one of a kind.


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.

Having completed his studies at Harvard, Henry sails for Europe on September 29, 1858 with the intent of studying civil law at a university in Berlin. Adams soon discovers that his knowledge of the German language is inadequate; he abandons the course of law and enrolls at the Friedrichs-Wilhelm-Werdersches Gymnasium where he spends three months attending classes with boys who are about thirteen years old. Formal education in Germany is even worse than in the United States, Adams tells us; but his problems with the language gradually diminish. Berlin is generally a disappointment as a place to live; however, he does enjoy the theater, opera, ballet, and classical music.

It was not unusual for a Harvard graduate in the 1850s to take the "Grand Tour" of Europe, indulging in a broadening experience of travel and perhaps some schooling for a year or two. Henry's plans to study Civil Law, which descended from Roman Law and, as Henry knows, was an interest of his great-grandfather, John Adams. Attending his first and, the narrator claims, last lecture, Henry discovers that his German is not nearly up to the task. In a victory of practicality over embarrassment, he enrolls at a local Gymnasium  and spends three months becoming at ease with the language. By now, it should not surprise the reader that Adams condemns formal education in Germany. He has just cause. The university features "the lecture system in its deadliest form," a professor mumbling from musty outlines as students dutifully take notes. Always eager to suggest an effective digest of course study, Adams avers that more could be learned through books and discussion in one day than the lecture system offers in a month. This is especially significant because it foreshadows Henry's introduction of the seminar system when he later teaches at Harvard. Although he actually learns something at the Gymnasium, the conditions there are even worse than at the university. The system fills Henry with horror. Training seems arbitrary and stupefying, calling for engagement of only one faculty: memory. Rote drills replace any attempt at thought, let alone reason. In the German mind set, it seems to him, individual thought is subservient to the will of any authority, especially the State. In addition, the living conditions are horrid. There is no fresh air in the building; children rarely exercise; the food consists of sauerkraut, sausage, and beer. The fact is that Berlin was notorious for its poor sanitation at the time. Open sewers and slum dwellings promoted poor health. As Adams points out, it is one of the least impressive small cities in Europe in the late 1850s. Even the beer is bad, not nearly the quality of Munich's. Only the arts offer Adams respite. Above all, he learns an appreciation for Beethoven. Still, he is more than ready to move on. A note on Adams's style: He is quick to find fault, tends to exaggerate, loves to startle the reader, and does not always bother with details. But he can write with masterful control. Consistently, he exploits a talent for the facile phrase and parallel structure, especially when he examines paradox, as when he describes a brief stop in London en route to Berlin. Adams comments that, throughout his life, each return to the city will confirm that it "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." Glossary captious fond of catching others in mistakes; quick to find fault. ingenuous naive, without guile. torpid dormant, sluggish. bourgeoisie  the middle class, often regarded as having conventional beliefs, attitudes, and so on. kinder  children. Haus-frauen  housewives.