CHAOS (1870)

  ONE fine May afternoon in 1870 Adams drove again up St. James's
Street wondering more than ever at the marvels of life. Nine years had
passed since the historic entrance of May, 1861. Outwardly London was
the same. Outwardly Europe showed no great change. Palmerston and
Russell were forgotten; but Disraeli and Gladstone were still much
alive. One's friends were more than ever prominent. John Bright was in
the Cabinet; W. E. Forster was about to enter it; reform ran riot.
Never had the sun of progress shone so fair. Evolution from lower to
higher raged like an epidemic. Darwin was the greatest of prophets in
the most evolutionary of worlds. Gladstone had overthrown the Irish
Church; was overthrowing the Irish landlords; was trying to pass an
Education Act. Improvement, prosperity, power, were leaping and
bounding over every country road. Even America, with her Erie scandals
and Alabama Claims, hardly made a discordant note.

  At the Legation, Motley ruled; the long Adams reign was
forgotten; the rebellion had passed into history. In society no one
cared to recall the years before the Prince of Wales. The smart set had
come to their own. Half the houses that Adams had frequented, from 1861
to 1865, were closed or closing in 1870. Death had ravaged one's circle
of friends. Mrs. Milnes Gaskell and her sister Miss Charlotte Wynn were
both dead, and Mr. James Milnes Gaskell was no longer in Parliament.
That field of education seemed closed too.

  One found one's self in a singular frame of mind--more
eighteenth-century than ever--almost rococo--and unable to catch
anywhere the cog-wheels of evolution. Experience ceased to educate.
London taught less freely than of old. That one bad style was leading
to another--that the older men were more amusing than the younger--that
Lord Houghton's breakfast-table showed gaps hard to fill--that there
were fewer men one wanted to meet--these, and a hundred more such
remarks, helped little towards a quicker and more intelligent activity.
For English reforms Adams cared nothing. The reforms were themselves
mediaeval. The Education Bill of his friend W. E. Forster seemed to him
a guaranty against all education he had use for. He resented change. He
would have kept the Pope in the Vatican and the Queen at Windsor Castle
as historical monuments. He did not care to Americanize Europe. The
Bastille or the Ghetto was a curiosity worth a great deal of money, if
preserved; and so was a Bishop; so was Napoleon III. The tourist was
the great conservative who hated novelty and adored dirt. Adams came
back to London without a thought of revolution or restlessness or
reform. He wanted amusement, quiet, and gaiety.

  Had he not been born in 1838 under the shadow of Boston State
House, and been brought up in the Early Victorian epoch, he would have
cast off his old skin, and made his court to Marlborough House, in
partnership with the American woman and the Jew banker. Common-sense
dictated it; but Adams and his friends were unfashionable by some law
of Anglo-Saxon custom--some innate atrophy of mind. Figuring himself as
already a man of action, and rather far up towards the front, he had no
idea of making a new effort or catching up with a new world. He saw
nothing ahead of him. The world was never more calm. He wanted to talk
with Ministers about the Alabama Claims, because he looked on the
Claims as his own special creation, discussed between him and his
father long before they had been discussed by Government; he wanted to
make notes for his next year's articles; but he had not a thought that,
within three months, his world was to be upset, and he under it. Frank
Palgrave came one day, more contentious, contemptuous, and paradoxical
than ever, because Napoleon III seemed to be threatening war with
Germany. Palgrave said that "Germany would beat France into scraps" if
there was war. Adams thought not. The chances were always against
catastrophes. No one else expected great changes in Europe. Palgrave
was always extreme; his language was incautious--violent!

  In this year of all years, Adams lost sight of education.
Things began smoothly, and London glowed with the pleasant sense of
familiarity and dinners. He sniffed with voluptuous delight the
coal-smoke of Cheapside and revelled in the architecture of Oxford
Street. May Fair never shone so fair to Arthur Pendennis as it did to
the returned American. The country never smiled its velvet smile of
trained and easy hostess as it did when he was so lucky as to be asked
on a country visit. He loved it all--everything--had always loved it!
He felt almost attached to the Royal Exchange. He thought he owned the
St. James's Club. He patronized the Legation.

  The first shock came lightly, as though Nature were playing
tricks on her spoiled child, though she had thus far not exerted
herself to spoil him. Reeve refused the Gold Conspiracy. Adams had
become used to the idea that he was free of the Quarterlies, and that
his writing would be printed of course; but he was stunned by the
reason of refusal. Reeve said it would bring half-a-dozen libel suits
on him. One knew that the power of Erie was almost as great in England
as in America, but one was hardly prepared to find it controlling the
Quarterlies. The English press professed to be shocked in 1870 by the
Erie scandal, as it had professed in 1860 to be shocked by the scandal
of slavery, but when invited to support those who were trying to abate
these scandals, the English press said it was afraid. To Adams, Reeve's
refusal seemed portentous. He and his brother and the North American
Review were running greater risks every day, and no one thought of
fear. That a notorious story, taken bodily from an official document,
should scare the Edinburgh Review into silence for fear of Jay Gould
and Jim Fisk, passed even Adams's experience of English eccentricity,
though it was large.

  He gladly set down Reeve's refusal of the Gold Conspiracy to
respectability and editorial law, but when he sent the manuscript on to
the Quarterly, the editor of the Quarterly also refused it. The
literary standard of the two Quarterlies was not so high as to suggest
that the article was illiterate beyond the power of an active and
willing editor to redeem it. Adams had no choice but to realize that he
had to deal in 1870 with the same old English character of 1860, and
the same inability in himself to understand it. As usual, when an ally
was needed, the American was driven into the arms of the radicals.
Respectability, everywhere and always, turned its back the moment one
asked to do it a favor. Called suddenly away from England, he
despatched the article, at the last moment, to the Westminster Review
and heard no more about it for nearly six months.

  He had been some weeks in London when he received a telegram
from his brother-in-law at the Bagni di Lucca telling him that his
sister had been thrown from a cab and injured, and that he had better
come on. He started that night, and reached the Bagni di Lucca on the
second day. Tetanus had already set in.

  The last lesson--the sum and term of education--began then.
He had passed through thirty years of rather varied experience without
having once felt the shell of custom broken. He had never seen
Nature--only her surface--the sugar-coating that she shows to youth.
Flung suddenly in his face, with the harsh brutality of chance, the
terror of the blow stayed by him thenceforth for life, until repetition
made it more than the will could struggle with; more than he could call
on himself to bear. He found his sister, a woman of forty, as gay and
brilliant in the terrors of lockjaw as she had been in the careless fun
of 1859, lying in bed in consequence of a miserable cab-accident that
had bruised her foot. Hour by hour the muscles grew rigid, while the
mind remained bright, until after ten days of fiendish torture she died
in convulsion.

  One had heard and read a great deal about death, and even seen
a little of it, and knew by heart the thousand commonplaces of religion
and poetry which seemed to deaden one's senses and veil the horror.
Society being immortal, could put on immortality at will. Adams being
mortal, felt only the mortality. Death took features altogether new to
him, in these rich and sensuous surroundings. Nature enjoyed it, played
with it, the horror added to her charm, she liked the torture, and
smothered her victim with caresses. Never had one seen her so winning.
The hot Italian summer brooded outside, over the market-place and the
picturesque peasants, and, in the singular color of the Tuscan
atmosphere, the hills and vineyards of the Apennines seemed bursting
with mid-summer blood. The sick-room itself glowed with the Italian joy
of life; friends filled it; no harsh northern lights pierced the soft
shadows; even the dying women shared the sense of the Italian summer,
the soft, velvet air, the humor, the courage, the sensual fulness of
Nature and man. She faced death, as women mostly do, bravely and even
gaily, racked slowly to unconsciousness, but yielding only to violence,
as a soldier sabred in battle. For many thousands of years, on these
hills and plains, Nature had gone on sabring men and women with the
same air of sensual pleasure.

  Impressions like these are not reasoned or catalogued in the
mind; they are felt as part of violent emotion; and the mind that feels
them is a different one from that which reasons; it is thought of a
different power and a different person. The first serious consciousness
of Nature's gesture--her attitude towards life--took form then as a
phantasm, a nightmare, an insanity of force. For the first time, the
stage-scenery of the senses collapsed; the human mind felt itself
stripped naked, vibrating in a void of shapeless energies, with
resistless mass, colliding, crushing, wasting, and destroying what
these same energies had created and labored from eternity to perfect.
Society became fantastic, a vision of pantomime with a mechanical
motion; and its so-called thought merged in the mere sense of life, and
pleasure in the sense. The usual anodynes of social medicine became
evident artifice. Stoicism was perhaps the best; religion was the most
human; but the idea that any personal deity could find pleasure or
profit in torturing a poor woman, by accident, with a fiendish cruelty
known to man only in perverted and insane temperaments, could not be
held for a moment. For pure blasphemy, it made pure atheism a comfort.
God might be, as the Church said, a Substance, but He could not be a
Person.

  With nerves strained for the first time beyond their power of
tension, he slowly travelled northwards with his friends, and stopped
for a few days at Ouchy to recover his balance in a new world; for the
fantastic mystery of coincidences had made the world, which he thought
real, mimic and reproduce the distorted nightmare of his personal
horror. He did not yet know it, and he was twenty years in finding it
out; but he had need of all the beauty of the Lake below and of the
Alps above, to restore the finite to its place. For the first time in
his life, Mont Blanc for a moment looked to him what it was--a chaos of
anarchic and purposeless forces--and he needed days of repose to see it
clothe itself again with the illusions of his senses, the white purity
of its snows, the splendor of its light, and the infinity of its
heavenly peace. Nature was kind; Lake Geneva was beautiful beyond
itself, and the Alps put on charms real as terrors; but man became
chaotic, and before the illusions of Nature were wholly restored, the
illusions of Europe suddenly vanished, leaving a new world to learn.

  On July 4, all Europe had been in peace; on July 14, Europe was
in full chaos of war. One felt helpless and ignorant, but one might
have been king or kaiser without feeling stronger to deal with the
chaos. Mr. Gladstone was as much astounded as Adams; the Emperor
Napoleon was nearly as stupefied as either, and Bismarck: himself
hardly knew how he did it. As education, the out-break of the war was
wholly lost on a man dealing with death hand-to-hand, who could not
throw it aside to look at it across the Rhine. Only when he got up to
Paris, he began to feel the approach of catastrophe. Providence set up
no affiches to announce the tragedy. Under one's eyes France cut
herself adrift, and floated off, on an unknown stream, towards a less
known ocean. Standing on the curb of the Boulevard, one could see as
much as though one stood by the side of the Emperor or in command of an
army corps. The effect was lurid. The public seemed to look on the war,
as it had looked on the wars of Louis XIV and Francis I, as a branch of
decorative art. The French, like true artists, always regarded war as
one of the fine arts. Louis XIV practiced it; Napoleon I perfected it;
and Napoleon III had till then pursued it in the same spirit with
singular success. In Paris, in July, 1870, the war was brought out like
an opera of Meyerbeer. One felt one's self a supernumerary hired to
fill the scene. Every evening at the theatre the comedy was interrupted
by order, and one stood up by order, to join in singing the
Marseillaise to order. For nearly twenty years one had been forbidden
to sing the Marseillaise under any circumstances, but at last regiment
after regiment marched through the streets shouting "Marchons!" while
the bystanders cared not enough to join. Patriotism seemed to have been
brought out of the Government stores, and distributed by grammes per
capita. One had seen one's own people dragged unwillingly into a war,
and had watched one's own regiments march to the front without sign of
enthusiasm; on the contrary, most serious, anxious, and conscious of
the whole weight of the crisis; but in Paris every one conspired to
ignore the crisis, which every one felt at hand. Here was education for
the million, but the lesson was intricate. Superficially Napoleon and
his Ministers and marshals were playing a game against Thiers and
Gambetta. A bystander knew almost as little as they did about the
result. How could Adams prophesy that in another year or two, when he
spoke of his Paris and its tastes, people would smile at his dotage?

  As soon as he could, he fled to England and once more took
refuge in the profound peace of Wenlock Abbey. Only the few remaining
monks, undisturbed by the brutalities of Henry VIII--three or four
young Englishmen--survived there, with Milnes Gaskell acting as Prior.
The August sun was warm; the calm of the Abbey was ten times secular;
not a discordant sound--hardly a sound of any sort except the cawing of
the ancient rookery at sunset--broke the stillness; and, after the
excitement of the last month, one felt a palpable haze of peace
brooding over the Edge and the Welsh Marches. Since the reign of
Pteraspis, nothing had greatly changed; nothing except the monks. Lying
on the turf the ground littered with newspapers, the monks studied the
war correspondence. In one respect Adams had succeeded in educating
himself; he had learned to follow a campaign.

  While at Wenlock, he received a letter from President Eliot
inviting him to take an Assistant Professorship of History, to be
created shortly at Harvard College. After waiting ten or a dozen years
for some one to show consciousness of his existence, even a Terebratula
would be pleased and grateful for a compliment which implied that the
new President of Harvard College wanted his help; but Adams knew
nothing about history, and much less about teaching, while he knew more
than enough about Harvard College; and wrote at once to thank President
Eliot, with much regret that the honor should be above his powers. His
mind was full of other matters. The summer, from which he had expected
only amusement and social relations with new people, had ended in the
most intimate personal tragedy, and the most terrific political
convulsion he had ever known or was likely to know. He had failed in
every object of his trip. The Quarterlies had refused his best essay.
He had made no acquaintances and hardly picked up the old ones. He
sailed from Liverpool, on September 1, to begin again where he had
started two years before, but with no longer a hope of attaching
himself to a President or a party or a press. He was a free lance and
no other career stood in sight or mind. To that point education had
brought him.

  Yet he found, on reaching home, that he had not done quite so
badly as he feared. His article on the Session in the July North
American had made a success. Though he could not quite see what
partisan object it served, he heard with flattered astonishment that it
had been reprinted by the Democratic National Committee and circulated
as a campaign document by the hundred thousand copies. He was
henceforth in opposition, do what he might; and a Massachusetts
Democrat, say what he pleased; while his only reward or return for this
partisan service consisted in being formally answered by Senator
Timothy Howe, of Wisconsin, in a Republican campaign document, presumed
to be also freely circulated, in which the Senator, besides refuting
his opinions, did him the honor--most unusual and picturesque in a
Senator's rhetoric--of likening him to a begonia.

  The begonia is, or then was, a plant of such senatorial
qualities as to make the simile, in intention, most flattering. Far
from charming in its refinement, the begonia was remarkable for curious
and showy foliage; it was conspicuous; it seemed to have no useful
purpose; and it insisted on standing always in the most prominent
positions. Adams would have greatly liked to be a begonia in
Washington, for this was rather his ideal of the successful statesman,
and he thought about it still more when the Westminster Review for
October brought him his article on the Gold Conspiracy, which was also
instantly pirated on a great scale. Piratical he was himself henceforth
driven to be, and he asked only to be pirated, for he was sure not to
be paid; but the honors of piracy resemble the colors of the begonia;
they are showy but not useful. Here was a tour de force he had never
dreamed himself equal to performing: two long, dry, quarterly, thirty
or forty page articles, appearing in quick succession, and pirated for
audiences running well into the hundred thousands; and not one person,
man or woman, offering him so much as a congratulation, except to call
him a begonia.

  Had this been all, life might have gone on very happily as
before, but the ways of America to a young person of literary and
political tastes were such as the so-called evolution of civilized man
had not before evolved. No sooner had Adams made at Washington what he
modestly hoped was a sufficient success, than his whole family set on
him to drag him away. For the first time since 1861 his father
interposed; his mother entreated; and his brother Charles argued and
urged that he should come to Harvard College. Charles had views of
further joint operations in a new field. He said that Henry had done at
Washington all he could possibly do; that his position there wanted
solidity; that he was, after all, an adventurer; that a few years in
Cambridge would give him personal weight; that his chief function was
not to be that of teacher, but that of editing the North American
Review which was to be coupled with the professorship, and would lead
to the daily press. In short, that he needed the university more than
the university needed him.

  Henry knew the university well enough to know that the
department of history was controlled by one of the most astute and
ideal administrators in the world--Professor Gurney--and that it was
Gurney who had established the new professorship, and had cast his net
over Adams to carry the double load of mediaeval history and the
Review. He could see no relation whatever between himself and a
professorship. He sought education; he did not sell it. He knew no
history; he knew only a few historians; his ignorance was mischievous
because it was literary, accidental, indifferent. On the other hand he
knew Gurney, and felt much influenced by his advice. One cannot take
one's self quite seriously in such matters; it could not much affect
the sum of solar energies whether one went on dancing with girls in
Washington, or began talking to boys at Cambridge. The good people who
thought it did matter had a sort of right to guide. One could not
reject their advice; still less disregard their wishes.

  The sum of the matter was that Henry went out to Cambridge and
had a few words with President Eliot which seemed to him almost as
American as the talk about diplomacy with his father ten years before.
"But, Mr. President," urged Adams, "I know nothing about Mediaeval
History." With the courteous manner and bland smile so familiar for the
next generation of Americans Mr. Eliot mildly but firmly replied, "If
you will point out to me any one who knows more, Mr. Adams, I will
appoint him." The answer was neither logical nor convincing, but Adams
could not meet it without overstepping his privileges. He could not say
that, under the circumstances, the appointment of any professor at all
seemed to him unnecessary.

  So, at twenty-four hours' notice, he broke his life in halves
again in order to begin a new education, on lines he had not chosen, in
subjects for which he cared less than nothing; in a place he did not
love, and before a future which repelled. Thousands of men have to do
the same thing, but his case was peculiar because he had no need to do
it. He did it because his best and wisest friends urged it, and he
never could make up his mind whether they were right or not. To him
this kind of education was always false. For himself he had no doubts.
He thought it a mistake; but his opinion did not prove that it was one,
since, in all probability, whatever he did would be more or less a
mistake. He had reached cross-roads of education which all led astray.
What he could gain at Harvard College he did not know, but in any case
it was nothing he wanted. What he lost at Washington he could partly
see, but in any case it was not fortune. Grant's administration wrecked
men by thousands, but profited few. Perhaps Mr. Fish was the solitary
exception. One might search the whole list of Congress, Judiciary, and
Executive during the twenty-five years 1870 to 1895, and find little
but damaged reputation. The period was poor in purpose and barren in
results.

  Henry Adams, if not the rose, lived as near it as any
politician, and knew, more or less, all the men in any way prominent at
Washington, or knew all about them. Among them, in his opinion, the
best equipped, the most active-minded, and most industrious was Abram
Hewitt, who sat in Congress for a dozen years, between 1874 and 1886,
sometimes leading the House and always wielding influence second to
none. With nobody did Adams form closer or longer relations than with
Mr. Hewitt, whom he regarded as the most useful public man in
Washington; and he was the more struck by Hewitt's saying, at the end
of his laborious career as legislator, that he left behind him no
permanent result except the Act consolidating the Surveys. Adams knew
no other man who had done so much, unless Mr. Sherman's legislation is
accepted as an instance of success. Hewitt's nearest rival would
probably have been Senator Pendleton who stood father to civil service
reform in 1882, an attempt to correct a vice that should never have
been allowed to be born. These were the men who succeeded.

  The press stood in much the same light. No editor, no political
writer, and no public administrator achieved enough good reputation to
preserve his memory for twenty years. A number of them achieved bad
reputations, or damaged good ones that had been gained in the Civil
War. On the whole, even for Senators, diplomats, and Cabinet officers,
the period was wearisome and stale.

  None of Adams's generation profited by public activity unless
it were William C. Whitney, and even he could not be induced to return
to it. Such ambitions as these were out of one's reach, but supposing
one tried for what was feasible, attached one's self closely to the
Garfields, Arthurs, Frelinghuysens, Blaines, Bayards, or Whitneys, who
happened to hold office; and supposing one asked for the mission to
Belgium or Portugal, and obtained it; supposing one served a term as
Assistant Secretary or Chief of Bureau; or, finally, supposing one had
gone as sub-editor on the New York Tribune or Times--how much more
education would one have gained than by going to Harvard College? These
questions seemed better worth an answer than most of the questions on
examination papers at college or in the civil service; all the more
because one never found an answer to them, then or afterwards, and
because, to his mind, the value of American society altogether was
mixed up with the value of Washington.

  At first, the simple beginner, struggling with principles,
wanted to throw off responsibility on the American people, whose bare and
toiling shoulders had to carry the load of every social or political
stupidity; but the American people had no more to do with it than with
the customs of Peking. American character might perhaps account for it,
but what accounted for American character? All Boston, all New England,
and all respectable New York, including Charles Francis Adams the
father and Charles Francis Adams the son, agreed that Washington was no
place for a respectable young man. All Washington, including
Presidents, Cabinet officers, Judiciary, Senators, Congressmen, and
clerks, expressed the same opinion, and conspired to drive away every
young man who happened to be there or tried to approach. Not one young
man of promise remained in the Government service. All drifted into
opposition. The Government did not want them in Washington. Adams's
case was perhaps the strongest because he thought he had done well. He
was forced to guess it, since he knew no one who would have risked so
extravagant a step as that of encouraging a young man in a literary
career, or even in a political one; society forbade it, as well as
residence in a political capital; but Harvard College must have seen
some hope for him, since it made him professor against his will; even
the publishers and editors of the North American Review must have felt
a certain amount of confidence in him, since they put the Review in his
hands. After all, the Review was the first literary power in America,
even though it paid almost as little in gold as the United States
Treasury. The degree of Harvard College might bear a value as ephemeral
as the commission of a President of the United States; but the
government of the college, measured by money alone, and patronage, was
a matter of more importance than that of some branches of the national
service. In social position, the college was the superior of them all
put together. In knowledge, she could assert no superiority, since the
Government made no claims, and prided itself on ignorance. The service
of Harvard College was distinctly honorable; perhaps the most honorable
in America; and if Harvard College thought Henry Adams worth employing
at four dollars a day, why should Washington decline his services when
he asked nothing? Why should he be dragged from a career he liked in a
place he loved, into a career he detested, in a place and climate he
shunned? Was it enough to satisfy him, that all America should call
Washington barren and dangerous? What made Washington more dangerous
than New York?

  The American character showed singular limitations which
sometimes drove the student of civilized man to despair. Crushed by his
own ignorance--lost in the darkness of his own gropings--the scholar
finds himself jostled of a sudden by a crowd of men who seem to him
ignorant that there is a thing called ignorance; who have forgotten how
to amuse themselves; who cannot even understand that they are bored.
The American thought of himself as a restless, pushing, energetic,
ingenious person, always awake and trying to get ahead of his
neighbors. Perhaps this idea of the national character might be correct
for New York or Chicago; it was not correct for Washington. There the
American showed himself, four times in five, as a quiet, peaceful, shy
figure, rather in the mould of Abraham Lincoln, somewhat sad, sometimes
pathetic, once tragic; or like Grant, inarticulate, uncertain,
distrustful of himself, still more distrustful of others, and awed by
money. That the American, by temperament, worked to excess, was true;
work and whiskey were his stimulants; work was a form of vice; but he
never cared much for money or power after he earned them. The amusement
of the pursuit was all the amusement he got from it; he had no use for
wealth. Jim Fisk alone seemed to know what he wanted; Jay Gould never
did. At Washington one met mostly such true Americans, but if one
wanted to know them better, one went to study them in Europe. Bored,
patient, helpless; pathetically dependent on his wife and daughters;
indulgent to excess; mostly a modest, decent, excellent, valuable
citizen; the American was to be met at every railway station in Europe,
carefully explaining to every listener that the happiest day of his
life would be the day he should land on the pier at New York. He was
ashamed to be amused; his mind no longer answered to the stimulus of
variety; he could not face a new thought. All his immense strength, his
intense nervous energy, his keen analytic perceptions, were oriented in
one direction, and he could not change it. Congress was full of such
men; in the Senate, Sumner was almost the only exception; in the
Executive, Grant and Boutwell were varieties of the type--political
specimens--pathetic in their helplessness to do anything with power
when it came to them. They knew not how to amuse themselves; they could
not conceive how other people were amused. Work, whiskey, and cards
were life. The atmosphere of political Washington was theirs--or was
supposed by the outside world to be in their control--and this was the
reason why the outside world judged that Washington was fatal even for
a young man of thirty-two, who had passed through the whole variety of
temptations, in every capital of Europe, for a dozen years; who never
played cards, and who loathed whiskey.

Henry returns to London in May of 1870 expecting a relaxing vacation after submitting his key essays for publication. The peaceful order of his life is turned to chaos when he receives a telegram informing him that his sister Louisa Catherine Kuhn has been thrown from a cab and injured. Tetanus has already set in when he arrives at her home in Italy. After ten days, she dies in convulsions. Having spent the Civil War years in London, Henry has not seen a great deal of death; he is profoundly affected by it. The Franco-Prussian War , beginning that summer, seems to echo the terrible turbulence in his soul.

Adams is reluctant to write about his personal life in the Education and rarely shows emotion. An exception is the section of this chapter concerning the death his beloved sister, the oldest of the siblings. Allowing the reader into his troubled heart, Adams produces some of the finest writing in the book. He says that his "last lesson -- the sum and term of education -- began" when he learned of his sister's accident. Henry immediately travels to her home in Italy, a trip of two days; she is already dying of tetanus, an acute infectious disease that can easily be avoided today by way of inoculation. The narrator poignantly observes: "He had passed through thirty years of rather varied experience without having once felt the shell of custom broken. He had never seen nature -- only her surface -- the sugar-coating that she shows to youth." This is a different Henry Adams, as a man and a writer. With deep feeling, he contrasts his sister's tragic situation with her strong spirit, which still is as it was during the "careless fun of 1859" when he had visited her: "Hour by hour the muscles grew rigid, while the mind remained bright, until after ten days of fiendish torture she died in convulsions." Entering the body through even a minor wound, tetanus typically causes spasmodic contractions; rigidity of voluntary muscles, especially in the jaw, face and neck; and, if unabated, death. Adams faces the usual cliches regarding death, the "thousand commonplaces of religion and poetry" intended to "veil the horror." None suffices. He observes that death "took features altogether new to him. . . . Nature enjoyed it, played with it, the horror added to her charm, she liked the torture, and smothered her victim with caresses." He is overwhelmed by the contrast between death and the joy of life surrounding the scene, the vitality of friends, the "soft, velvet air, the humor, the courage, the sensual fullness of nature and man." He finds no spiritual ease, concluding, "God might be, as the Church said, a Substance, but he could not be a Person." Henry seeks stability with friends in the Alps but sees in nature only chaos, anarchy, and purposeless force. The Franco-Prussian War soon imposes a further sense of disorder and ruin. Henry flees to Wenlock Abbey in England, taking refuge in the profound peace of contemplation with the few monks who live there. He then receives a letter from Charles William Eliot, president of Harvard University, inviting him to accept a position as assistant professor of history, coupled with editorship of the North American Review. With distinct personal reservations, but the overwhelming encouragement of family and friends, he accepts. Glossary rococo a style of music, architecture or decorative art characterized by profuse and delicate ornamentation, reduced scale, lightness, and grace. atrophy a wasting away, especially of body tissue, due to disuse or lack of nutrition. abate to make less in amount or degree. affiches  posters, placards. tour de force  feat of strength; an unusually skilled creation or performance.


FAILURE (1871)

FAR back in childhood, among its earliest memories, Henry Adams could
recall his first visit to Harvard College. He must have been nine years
old when on one of the singularly gloomy winter afternoons which
beguiled Cambridgeport, his mother drove him out to visit his aunt,
Mrs. Everett. Edward Everett was then President of the college and
lived in the old President's House on Harvard Square. The boy
remembered the drawing-room, on the left of the hall door, in which
Mrs. Everett received them. He remembered a marble greyhound in the
corner. The house had an air of colonial self-respect that impressed
even a nine-year-old child.

  When Adams closed his interview with President Eliot, he asked
the Bursar about his aunt's old drawing-room, for the house had been
turned to base uses. The room and the deserted kitchen adjacent to it
were to let. He took them. Above him, his brother Brooks, then a law
student, had rooms, with a private staircase. Opposite was J. R.
Dennett, a young instructor almost as literary as Adams himself, and
more rebellious to conventions. Inquiry revealed a boarding-table,
somewhere in the neighborhood, also supposed to be superior in its
class. Chauncey Wright, Francis Wharton, Dennett, John Fiske, or their
equivalents in learning and lecture, were seen there, among three or
four law students like Brooks Adams. With these primitive arrangements,
all of them had to be satisfied. The standard was below that of
Washington, but it was, for the moment, the best.

  For the next nine months the Assistant Professor had no time to
waste on comforts or amusements. He exhausted all his strength in
trying to keep one day ahead of his duties. Often the stint ran on,
till night and sleep ran short. He could not stop to think whether he
were doing the work rightly. He could not get it done to please him,
rightly or wrongly, for he never could satisfy himself what to do.

  The fault he had found with Harvard College as an undergraduate
must have been more or less just, for the college was making a great
effort to meet these self-criticisms, and had elected President Eliot
in 1869 to carry out its reforms. Professor Gurney was one of the
leading reformers, and had tried his hand on his own department of
History. The two full Professors of History--Torrey and Gurney,
charming men both--could not cover the ground. Between Gurney's
classical courses and Torrey's modern ones, lay a gap of a thousand
years, which Adams was expected to fill. The students had already
elected courses numbered 1, 2, and 3, without knowing what was to be
taught or who was to teach. If their new professor had asked what idea
was in their minds, they must have replied that nothing at all was in
their minds, since their professor had nothing in his, and down to the
moment he took his chair and looked his scholars in the face, he had
given, as far as he could remember, an hour, more or less, to the
Middle Ages.

  Not that his ignorance troubled him! He knew enough to be
ignorant. His course had led him through oceans of ignorance; he had
tumbled from one ocean into another till he had learned to swim; but
even to him education was a serious thing. A parent gives life, but as
parent, gives no more. A murderer takes life, but his deed stops there.
A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence
stops. A teacher is expected to teach truth, and may perhaps flatter
himself that he does so, if he stops with the alphabet or the
multiplication table, as a mother teaches truth by making her child eat
with a spoon; but morals are quite another truth and philosophy is more
complex still. A teacher must either treat history as a catalogue, a
record, a romance, or as an evolution; and whether he affirms or denies
evolution, he falls into all the burning faggots of the pit. He makes
of his scholars either priests or atheists, plutocrats or socialists,
judges or anarchists, almost in spite of himself. In essence incoherent
and immoral, history had either to be taught as such--or falsified.

  Adams wanted to do neither. He had no theory of evolution to
teach, and could not make the facts fit one. He had no fancy for
telling agreeable tales to amuse sluggish-minded boys, in order to
publish them afterwards as lectures. He could still less compel his
students to learn the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and the Venerable Bede by
heart. He saw no relation whatever between his students and the Middle
Ages unless it were the Church, and there the ground was particularly
dangerous. He knew better than though he were a professional historian
that the man who should solve the riddle of the Middle Ages and bring
them into the line of evolution from past to present, would be a
greater man than Lamarck or Linnaeus; but history had nowhere broken
down so pitiably, or avowed itself so hopelessly bankrupt, as there.
Since Gibbon, the spectacle was almost a scandal. History had lost even
the sense of shame. It was a hundred years behind the experimental
sciences. For all serious purpose, it was less instructive than Walter
Scott and Alexandre Dumas.

  All this was without offence to Sir Henry Maine, Tyler,
McLennan, Buckle, Auguste Comte, and the various philosophers who, from
time to time, stirred the scandal, and made it more scandalous. No
doubt, a teacher might make some use of these writers or their
theories; but Adams could fit them into no theory of his own. The
college expected him to pass at least half his time teaching the boys a
few elementary dates and relations, that they might not be a disgrace
to the university. This was formal; and he could frankly tell the boys
that, provided they passed their examinations, they might get their
facts where they liked, and use the teacher only for questions. The
only privilege a student had that was worth his claiming, was that of
talking to the professor, and the professor was bound to encourage it.
His only difficulty on that side was to get them to talk at all. He had
to devise schemes to find what they were thinking about, and induce
them to risk criticism from their fellows. Any large body of students
stifles the student. No man can instruct more than half-a-dozen
students at once. The whole problem of education is one of its cost in
money.

  The lecture system to classes of hundreds, which was very much
that of the twelfth century, suited Adams not at all. Barred from
philosophy and bored by facts, he wanted to teach his students
something not wholly useless. The number of students whose minds were
of an order above the average was, in his experience, barely one in
ten; the rest could not be much stimulated by any inducements a teacher
could suggest. All were respectable, and in seven years of contact,
Adams never had cause to complain of one; but nine minds in ten take
polish passively, like a hard surface; only the tenth sensibly reacts.

  Adams thought that, as no one seemed to care what he did, he
would try to cultivate this tenth mind, though necessarily at the
expense of the other nine. He frankly acted on the rule that a teacher,
who knew nothing of his subject, should not pretend to teach his
scholars what he did not know, but should join them in trying to find
the best way of learning it. The rather pretentious name of historical
method was sometimes given to this process of instruction, but the name
smacked of German pedagogy, and a young professor who respected neither
history nor method, and whose sole object of interest was his students'
minds, fell into trouble enough without adding to it a German parentage.

  The task was doomed to failure for a reason which he could not
control. Nothing is easier than to teach historical method, but, when
learned, it has little use. History is a tangled skein that one may
take up at any point, and break when one has unravelled enough; but
complexity precedes evolution. The Pteraspis grins horribly from the
closed entrance. One may not begin at the beginning, and one has but
the loosest relative truths to follow up. Adams found himself obliged
to force his material into some shape to which a method could be
applied. He could think only of law as subject; the Law School as end;
and he took, as victims of his experiment, half-a-dozen highly
intelligent young men who seemed willing to work. The course began with
the beginning, as far as the books showed a beginning in primitive man,
and came down through the Salic Franks to the Norman English. Since no
textbooks existed, the professor refused to profess, knowing no more
than his students, and the students read what they pleased and compared
their results. As pedagogy, nothing could be more triumphant. The boys
worked like rabbits, and dug holes all over the field of archaic
society; no difficulty stopped them; unknown languages yielded before
their attack, and customary law became familiar as the police court;
undoubtedly they learned, after a fashion, to chase an idea, like a
hare, through as dense a thicket of obscure facts as they were likely
to meet at the bar; but their teacher knew from his own experience that
his wonderful method led nowhere, and they would have to exert
themselves to get rid of it in the Law School even more than they
exerted themselves to acquire it in the college. Their science had no
system, and could have none, since its subject was merely antiquarian.
Try as hard as he might, the professor could not make it actual.

  What was the use of training an active mind to waste its
energy? The experiments might in time train Adams as a professor, but
this result was still less to his taste. He wanted to help the boys to
a career, but not one of his many devices to stimulate the intellectual
reaction of the student's mind satisfied either him or the students.
For himself he was clear that the fault lay in the system, which could
lead only to inertia. Such little knowledge of himself as he possessed
warranted him in affirming that his mind required conflict,
competition, contradiction even more than that of the student. He too
wanted a rank-list to set his name upon. His reform of the system would
have begun in the lecture-room at his own desk. He would have seated a
rival assistant professor opposite him, whose business should be
strictly limited to expressing opposite views. Nothing short of this
would ever interest either the professor or the student; but of all
university freaks, no irregularity shocked the intellectual atmosphere
so much as contradiction or competition between teachers. In that
respect the thirteenth-century university system was worth the whole
teaching of the modern school.

  All his pretty efforts to create conflicts of thought among his
students failed for want of system. None met the needs of instruction.
In spite of President Eliot's reforms and his steady, generous, liberal
support, the system remained costly, clumsy and futile. The
university--as far as it was represented by Henry Adams--produced at
great waste of time and money results not worth reaching.

  He made use of his lost two years of German schooling to
inflict their results on his students, and by a happy chance he was in
the full tide of fashion. The Germans were crowning their new emperor
at Versailles, and surrounding his head with a halo of Pepins and
Merwigs, Othos and Barbarossas. James Bryce had even discovered the
Holy Roman Empire. Germany was never so powerful, and the Assistant
Professor of History had nothing else as his stock in trade. He imposed
Germany on his scholars with a heavy hand. He was rejoiced; but he
sometimes doubted whether they should be grateful. On the whole, he was
content neither with what he had taught nor with the way he had taught
it. The seven years he passed in teaching seemed to him lost.

  The uses of adversity are beyond measure strange. As a
professor, he regarded himself as a failure. Without false modesty he
thought he knew what he meant. He had tried a great many experiments,
and wholly succeeded in none. He had succumbed to the weight of the
system. He had accomplished nothing that he tried to do. He regarded
the system as wrong; more mischievous to the teachers than to the
students; fallacious from the beginning to end. He quitted the
university at last, in 1877, with a feeling, that, if it had not been
for the invariable courtesy and kindness shown by every one in it, from
the President to the injured students, he should be sore at his failure.

  These were his own feelings, but they seemed not to be felt in
the college. With the same perplexing impartiality that had so much
disconcerted him in his undergraduate days, the college insisted on
expressing an opposite view. John Fiske went so far in his notice of
the family in "Appleton's Cyclopedia," as to say that Henry had left a
great reputation at Harvard College; which was a proof of John Fiske's
personal regard that Adams heartily returned; and set the kind
expression down to camaraderie. The case was different when President
Eliot himself hinted that Adams's services merited recognition. Adams
could have wept on his shoulder in hysterics, so grateful was he for
the rare good-will that inspired the compliment; but he could not allow
the college to think that he esteemed himself entitled to distinction.
He knew better, and his was among the failures which were respectable
enough to deserve self-respect. Yet nothing in the vanity of life
struck him as more humiliating than that Harvard College, which he had
persistently criticised, abused, abandoned, and neglected, should alone
have offered him a dollar, an office, an encouragement, or a kindness.
Harvard College might have its faults, but at least it redeemed
America, since it was true to its own.

  The only part of education that the professor thought a success
was the students. He found them excellent company. Cast more or less in
the same mould, without violent emotions or sentiment, and, except for
the veneer of American habits, ignorant of all that man had ever
thought or hoped, their minds burst open like flowers at the sunlight
of a suggestion. They were quick to respond; plastic to a mould; and
incapable of fatigue. Their faith in education was so full of pathos
that one dared not ask them what they thought they could do with
education when they got it. Adams did put the question to one of them,
and was surprised at the answer: "The degree of Harvard College is
worth money to me in Chicago." This reply upset his experience; for the
degree of Harvard College had been rather a drawback to a young man in
Boston and Washington. So far as it went, the answer was good, and
settled one's doubts. Adams knew no better, although he had given
twenty years to pursuing the same education, and was no nearer a result
than they. He still had to take for granted many things that they need
not--among the rest, that his teaching did them more good than harm. In
his own opinion the greatest good he could do them was to hold his
tongue. They needed much faith then; they were likely to need more if
they lived long.

  He never knew whether his colleagues shared his doubts about
their own utility. Unlike himself, they knew more or less their
business. He could not tell his scholars that history glowed with
social virtue; the Professor of Chemistry cared not a chemical atom
whether society was virtuous or not. Adams could not pretend that
mediaeval society proved evolution; the Professor of Physics smiled at
evolution. Adams was glad to dwell on the virtues of the Church and the
triumphs of its art: the Professor of Political Economy had to treat
them as waste of force. They knew what they had to teach; he did not.
They might perhaps be frauds without knowing it; but he knew certainly
nothing else of himself. He could teach his students nothing; he was
only educating himself at their cost.

  Education, like politics, is a rough affair, and every
instructor has to shut his eyes and hold his tongue as though he were a
priest. The students alone satisfied. They thought they gained
something. Perhaps they did, for even in America and in the twentieth
century, life could not be wholly industrial. Adams fervently hoped
that they might remain content; but supposing twenty years more to
pass, and they should turn on him as fiercely as he had turned on his
old instructors--what answer could he make? The college had pleaded
guilty, and tried to reform. He had pleaded guilty from the start, and
his reforms had failed before those of the college.

  The lecture-room was futile enough, but the faculty-room was
worse. American society feared total wreck in the maelstrom of
political and corporate administration, but it could not look for help
to college dons. Adams knew, in that capacity, both Congressmen and
professors, and he preferred Congressmen. The same failure marked the
society of a college. Several score of the best-educated, most
agreeable, and personally the most sociable people in America united in
Cambridge to make a social desert that would have starved a polar bear.
The liveliest and most agreeable of men--James Russell Lowell, Francis
J. Child, Louis Agassiz, his son Alexander, Gurney, John Fiske, William
James and a dozen others, who would have made the joy of London or
Paris--tried their best to break out and be like other men in Cambridge
and Boston, but society called them professors, and professors they had
to be. While all these brilliant men were greedy for companionship, all
were famished for want of it. Society was a faculty-meeting without
business. The elements were there; but society cannot be made up of
elements--people who are expected to be silent unless they have
observations to make--and all the elements are bound to remain apart if
required to make observations.

  Thus it turned out that of all his many educations, Adams
thought that of school-teacher the thinnest. Yet he was forced to admit
that the education of an editor, in some ways, was thinner still. The
editor had barely time to edit; he had none to write. If copy fell
short, he was obliged to scribble a book-review on the virtues of the
Anglo-Saxons or the vices of the Popes; for he knew more about Edward
the Confessor or Boniface VIII than he did about President Grant. For
seven years he wrote nothing; the Review lived on his brother Charles's
railway articles. The editor could help others, but could do nothing
for himself. As a writer, he was totally forgotten by the time he had
been an editor for twelve months. As editor he could find no writer to
take his place for politics and affairs of current concern. The Review
became chiefly historical. Russell Lowell and Frank Palgrave helped him
to keep it literary. The editor was a helpless drudge whose successes,
if he made any, belonged to his writers; but whose failures might
easily bankrupt himself. Such a Review may be made a sink of money with
captivating ease. The secrets of success as an editor were easily
learned; the highest was that of getting advertisements. Ten pages of
advertising made an editor a success; five marked him as a failure. The
merits or demerits of his literature had little to do with his results
except when they led to adversity.

  A year or two of education as editor satiated most of his
appetite for that career as a profession. After a very slight
experience, he said no more on the subject. He felt willing to let any
one edit, if he himself might write. Vulgarly speaking, it was a dog's
life when it did not succeed, and little better when it did. A
professor had at least the pleasure of associating with his students;
an editor lived the life of an owl. A professor commonly became a
pedagogue or a pedant; an editor became an authority on advertising. On
the whole, Adams preferred his attic in Washington. He was educated
enough. Ignorance paid better, for at least it earned fifty dollars a
month.

  With this result Henry Adams's education, at his entry into
life, stopped, and his life began. He had to take that life as he best
could, with such accidental education as luck had given him; but he
held that it was wrong, and that, if he were to begin again, he would
do it on a better system. He thought he knew nearly what system to
pursue. At that time Alexander Agassiz had not yet got his head above
water so far as to serve for a model, as he did twenty or thirty years
afterwards; but the editorship of the North American Review had one
solitary merit; it made the editor acquainted at a distance with almost
every one in the country who could write or who could be the cause of
writing. Adams was vastly pleased to be received among these clever
people as one of themselves, and felt always a little surprised at
their treating him as an equal, for they all had education; but among
them, only one stood out in extraordinary prominence as the type and
model of what Adams would have liked to be, and of what the American,
as he conceived, should have been and was not.

  Thanks to the article on Sir Charles Lyell, Adams passed for a
friend of geologists, and the extent of his knowledge mattered much
less to them than the extent of his friendship, for geologists were as
a class not much better off than himself, and friends were sorely few.
One of his friends from earliest childhood, and nearest neighbor in
Quincy, Frank Emmons, had become a geologist and joined the Fortieth
Parallel Survey under Government. At Washington in the winter of
1869-70, Emmons had invited Adams to go out with him on one of the
field-parties in summer. Of course when Adams took the Review he put it
at the service of the Survey, and regretted only that he could not do
more. When the first year of professing and editing was at last over,
and his July North American appeared, he drew a long breath of relief,
and took the next train for the West. Of his year's work he was no
judge. He had become a small spring in a large mechanism, and his work
counted only in the sum; but he had been treated civilly by everybody,
and he felt at home even in Boston. Putting in his pocket the July
number of the North American, with a notice of the Fortieth Parallel
Survey by Professor J. D. Whitney, he started for the plains and the
Rocky Mountains.

  In the year 1871, the West was still fresh, and the Union
Pacific was young. Beyond the Missouri River, one felt the atmosphere
of Indians and buffaloes. One saw the last vestiges of an old
education, worth studying if one would; but it was not that which Adams
sought; rather, he came out to spy upon the land of the future. The
Survey occasionally borrowed troopers from the nearest station in case
of happening on hostile Indians, but otherwise the topographers and
geologists thought more about minerals than about Sioux. They held
under their hammers a thousand miles of mineral country with all its
riddles to solve, and its stores of possible wealth to mark. They felt
the future in their hands.

  Emmons's party was out of reach in the Uintahs, but Arnold
Hague's had come in to Laramie for supplies, and they took charge of
Adams for a time. Their wanderings or adventures matter nothing to the
story of education. They were all hardened mountaineers and surveyors
who took everything for granted, and spared each other the most
wearisome bore of English and Scotch life, the stories of the big game
they killed. A bear was an occasional amusement; a wapiti was a
constant necessity; but the only wild animal dangerous to man was a
rattlesnake or a skunk. One shot for amusement, but one had other
matters to talk about.

  Adams enjoyed killing big game, but loathed the labor of
cutting it up; so that he rarely unslung the little carbine he was in a
manner required to carry. On the other hand, he liked to wander off
alone on his mule, and pass the day fishing a mountain stream or
exploring a valley. One morning when the party was camped high above
Estes Park, on the flank of Long's Peak, he borrowed a rod, and rode
down over a rough trail into Estes Park, for some trout. The day was
fine, and hazy with the smoke of forest fires a thousand miles away;
the park stretched its English beauties off to the base of its
bordering mountains in natural landscape and archaic peace; the stream
was just fishy enough to tempt lingering along its banks. Hour after
hour the sun moved westward and the fish moved eastward, or disappeared
altogether, until at last when the fisherman cinched his mule, sunset
was nearer than he thought. Darkness caught him before he could catch
his trail. Not caring to tumble into some fifty-foot hole, he "allowed"
he was lost, and turned back. In half-an-hour he was out of the hills,
and under the stars of Estes Park, but he saw no prospect of supper or
of bed.

  Estes Park was large enough to serve for a bed on a summer
night for an army of professors, but the supper question offered
difficulties. There was but one cabin in the Park, near its entrance,
and he felt no great confidence in finding it, but he thought his mule
cleverer than himself, and the dim lines of mountain crest against the
stars fenced his range of error. The patient mule plodded on without
other road than the gentle slope of the ground, and some two hours must
have passed before a light showed in the distance. As the mule came up
to the cabin door, two or three men came out to see the stranger.

  One of these men was Clarence King on his way up to the camp.
Adams fell into his arms. As with most friendships, it was never a
matter of growth or doubt. Friends are born in archaic horizons; they
were shaped with the Pteraspis in Siluria; they have nothing to do with
the accident of space. King had come up that day from Greeley in a
light four-wheeled buggy, over a trail hardly fit for a commissariat
mule, as Adams had reason to know since he went back in the buggy. In
the cabin, luxury provided a room and one bed for guests. They shared
the room and the bed, and talked till far towards dawn.

  King had everything to interest and delight Adams. He knew more
than Adams did of art and poetry; he knew America, especially west of
the hundredth meridian, better than any one; he knew the professor by
heart, and he knew the Congressman better than he did the professor. He
knew even women; even the American woman; even the New York woman,
which is saying much. Incidentally he knew more practical geology than
was good for him, and saw ahead at least one generation further than
the text-books. That he saw right was a different matter. Since the
beginning of time no man has lived who is known to have seen right; the
charm of King was that he saw what others did and a great deal more.
His wit and humor; his bubbling energy which swept every one into the
current of his interest; his personal charm of youth and manners; his
faculty of giving and taking, profusely, lavishly, whether in thought
or in money as though he were Nature herself, marked him almost alone
among Americans. He had in him something of the Greek--a touch of
Alcibiades or Alexander. One Clarence King only existed in the world.

  A new friend is always a miracle, but at thirty-three years
old, such a bird of paradise rising in the sage-brush was an avatar.
One friend in a lifetime is much; two are many; three are hardly
possible. Friendship needs a certain parallelism of life, a community
of thought, a rivalry of aim. King, like Adams, and all their
generation, was at that moment passing the critical point of his
career. The one, coming from the west, saturated with the sunshine of
the Sierras, met the other, drifting from the east, drenched in the
fogs of London, and both had the same problems to handle--the same
stock of implements--the same field to work in; above all, the same
obstacles to overcome.

As a companion, King's charm was great, but this was not the quality
that so much attracted Adams, nor could he affect even distant rivalry
on this ground. Adams could never tell a story, chiefly because he
always forgot it; and he was never guilty of a witticism, unless by
accident. King and the Fortieth Parallel influenced him in a way far
more vital. The lines of their lives converged, but King had moulded
and directed his life logically, scientifically, as Adams thought
American life should be directed. He had given himself education all of
a piece, yet broad. Standing in the middle of his career, where their
paths at last came together, he could look back and look forward on a
straight line, with scientific knowledge for its base. Adams's life,
past or future, was a succession of violent breaks or waves, with no
base at all. King's abnormal energy had already won him great success.
None of his contemporaries had done so much, single-handed, or were
likely to leave so deep a trail. He had managed to induce Congress to
adopt almost its first modern act of legislation. He had organized, as
a civil--not military--measure, a Government Survey. He had paralleled
the Continental Railway in Geology; a feat as yet unequalled by other
governments which had as a rule no continents to survey. He was
creating one of the classic scientific works of the century. The
chances were great that he could, whenever he chose to quit the
Government service, take the pick of the gold and silver, copper or
coal, and build up his fortune as he pleased. Whatever prize he wanted
lay ready for him--scientific social, literary, political--and he knew
how to take them in turn. With ordinary luck he would die at eighty the
richest and most many-sided genius of his day.

  So little egoistic he was that none of his friends felt envy of
his extraordinary superiority, but rather grovelled before it, so that
women were jealous of the power he had over men; but women were many
and Kings were one. The men worshipped not so much their friend, as the
ideal American they all wanted to be. The women were jealous because,
at heart, King had no faith in the American woman; he loved types more
robust.

  The young men of the Fortieth Parallel had Californian
instincts; they were brothers of Bret Harte. They felt no leanings
towards the simple uniformities of Lyell and Darwin; they saw little
proof of slight and imperceptible changes; to them, catastrophe was the
law of change; they cared little for simplicity and much for
complexity; but it was the complexity of Nature, not of New York or
even of the Mississippi Valley. King loved paradox; he started them
like rabbits, and cared for them no longer, when caught or lost; but
they delighted Adams, for they helped, among other things, to persuade
him that history was more amusing than science. The only question left
open to doubt was their relative money value.

  In Emmons's camp, far up in the Uintahs, these talks were
continued till the frosts became sharp in the mountains. History and
science spread out in personal horizons towards goals no longer far
away. No more education was possible for either man. Such as they were,
they had got to stand the chances of the world they lived in; and when
Adams started back to Cambridge, to take up again the humble tasks of
schoolmaster and editor he was harnessed to his cart. Education,
systematic or accidental, had done its worst. Henceforth, he went on,
submissive.

Henry Adams serves Harvard as a history professor and editor of the prestigious North American Review from 1870 to 1877, taking a leave of absence during the 1872-1873 academic year to travel Europe with his new bride. Only the first year is discussed in the Education. He initially lectures to three classes per week but is free to address any topic he wishes within the years 800 to 1649. Henry immediately feels that he is in over his head. He tells a friend that he has returned to college not so much to teach as to learn. He claims that he is barely able to stay a day ahead of his students; he is not an expert in the field, although he does have specific pockets of expertise such as medieval architecture. Partly out of desperation, Henry experiments with various approaches to teaching. Editing also takes a good deal of his time, and he welcomes a vacation to Wyoming and Colorado when his duties end for the summer of 1871.

Adams appears to be overly self-effacing, even disingenuous, about his "failure" as a Harvard professor. In fact, he is quite successful; but it is a success born of necessity and limited by what he sees as an inept system. Henry is exaggerating, but just a little, when he says that he is completely unqualified for the job: Adams is not a trained teacher nor a medieval scholar. He is only barely kidding when he writes to a friend in January 1871 that his students will never be able to check his facts and theories later because he has invented most of them! Nevertheless, he does have a deep interest in his subjects and even more in his students. For all his grousing, he deeply loves interaction with the young scholars. One of Adams's best known statements refers not to politics but to teaching: "A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops. Henry soon decides, however, that he is going to have to affect eternity in some revolutionary ways. Henry Adams is not the first professor to advocate use of the seminar, graduate studies in history, or student journals. He has seen seminars in Germany and probably discussed the technique with an acquaintance and distant relative, Professor Charles Kendall Adams, who inaugurated a seminar in history at the University of Michigan in 1869 and visited Henry early in 1871. But Adams is a pioneer in their application to American, and especially Harvard, education. Henry is fortunate to have one small honors class , "half a dozen highly intelligent young men," with which to experiment. Saying that he knows no more than his students, and lacking a proper textbook, he drops the lecture format, challenging the students to read what they please within the broad spectrum of this course  and then compare results. The experiment works; the scholars learn to "chase an idea, like a hare." In class, they discuss and debate. Henry meets students in his own rooms rather than the lecture hall. He wishes that he could attend the meetings of the class with another professor, each of them taking contradictory positions on issues. But he also sees value in simply holding his tongue and allowing the class to come to its own conclusions. He wants student evaluations of courses, professors, and the students' collegiate experience. He recommends that the students keep diaries or journals. He complains that most classes are too large and financial interests given inordinate weight: "No man can instruct more than half a dozen students at once. The whole problem of education is one of its cost in money," Eventually, Henry applies his seminar approach to a graduate program in history at Harvard. If some of this sounds familiar to contemporary American students or educators, they can thank Henry Adams. Although he claims to have no time for writing, Henry publishes at least twenty-two reviews and articles  in the North American Review during his tenure as editor. To no one's surprise, he is a rebel and iconoclast as an editor, promising twenty pounds to one writer "if you are abusive enough" and instructing another, "Stand on your head and spit at someone." He thinks of himself as an active collaborator with full powers of revision; others sometimes complain that he is too "dictatorial," as early suffragette Lucretia Mott put it. At the end of the school year, Henry is exhausted and welcomes an invitation to join the Fortieth Parallel Expedition in a geological survey near Estes Park. There he meets Clarence King, an extraordinary scientist and man who will be one of Henry's closest friends for life. Glossary pedagogy the art or science of teaching; teaching methods. pedant here, a narrow-minded teacher who insists on exact adherence to arbitrary rules. avatar incarnation of a god or of some quality in a person.