ROME (1859-1860)

  THE tramp in Thuringen lasted four-and-twenty hours. By the end
of the first walk, his three companions--John Bancroft, James J.
Higginson, and B. W. Crowninshield, all Boston and Harvard College like
himself--were satisfied with what they had seen, and when they sat down
to rest on the spot where Goethe had written--

                "Warte nur! balde
          Rubest du auch!"--

the profoundness of the thought and the wisdom of the advice affected
them so strongly that they hired a wagon and drove to Weimar the same
night. They were all quite happy and lighthearted in the first fresh
breath of leafless spring, and the beer was better than at Berlin, but
they were all equally in doubt why they had come to Germany, and not
one of them could say why they stayed. Adams stayed because he did not
want to go home, and he had fears that his father's patience might be
exhausted if he asked to waste time elsewhere.

  They could not think that their education required a return to
Berlin. A few days at Dresden in the spring weather satisfied them that
Dresden was a better spot for general education than Berlin, and
equally good for reading Civil Law. They were possibly right. There was
nothing to study in Dresden, and no education to be gained, but the
Sistine Madonna and the Correggios were famous; the theatre and opera
were sometimes excellent, and the Elbe was prettier than the Spree.
They could always fall back on the language. So he took a room in the
household of the usual small government clerk with the usual plain
daughters, and continued the study of the language. Possibly one might
learn something more by accident, as one had learned something of
Beethoven. For the next eighteen months the young man pursued
accidental education, since he could pursue no other; and by great good
fortune, Europe and America were too busy with their own affairs to
give much attention to his. Accidental education had every chance in
its favor, especially because nothing came amiss.

  Perhaps the chief obstacle to the youth's education, now that
he had come of age, was his honesty; his simple-minded faith in his
intentions. Even after Berlin had become a nightmare, he still
persuaded himself that his German education was a success. He loved, or
thought he loved the people, but the Germany he loved was the
eighteenth-century which the Germans were ashamed of, and were
destroying as fast as they could. Of the Germany to come, he knew
nothing. Military Germany was his abhorrence. What he liked was the
simple character; the good-natured sentiment; the musical and
metaphysical abstraction; the blundering incapacity of the German for
practical affairs. At that time everyone looked on Germany as incapable
of competing with France, England or America in any sort of organized
energy. Germany had no confidence in herself, and no reason to feel it.
She had no unity, and no reason to want it. She never had unity. Her
religious and social history, her economical interests, her military
geography, her political convenience, had always tended to eccentric
rather than concentric motion. Until coal-power and railways were
created, she was mediaeval by nature and geography, and this was what
Adams, under the teachings of Carlyle and Lowell, liked.

  He was in a fair way to do himself lasting harm, floundering
between worlds passed and worlds coming, which had a habit of crushing
men who stayed too long at the points of contact. Suddenly the Emperor
Napoleon declared war on Austria and raised a confused point of morals
in the mind of Europe. France was the nightmare of Germany, and even at
Dresden one looked on the return of Napoleon to Leipsic as the most
likely thing in the world. One morning the government clerk, in whose
family Adams was staying, rushed into his room to consult a map in
order that he might measure the distance from Milan to Dresden. The
third Napoleon had reached Lombardy, and only fifty or sixty years had
passed since the first Napoleon had begun his military successes from
an Italian base.

  An enlightened young American, with eighteenth-century tastes
capped by fragments of a German education and the most excellent
intentions, had to make up his mind about the moral value of these
conflicting forces. France was the wicked spirit of moral politics, and
whatever helped France must be so far evil. At that time Austria was
another evil spirit. Italy was the prize they disputed, and for at
least fifteen hundred years had been the chief object of their greed.
The question of sympathy had disturbed a number of persons during that
period. The question of morals had been put in a number of
cross-lights. Should one be Guelph or Ghibelline? No doubt, one was
wiser than one's neighbors who had found no way of settling this
question since the days of the cave-dwellers, but ignorance did better
to discard the attempt to be wise, for wisdom had been singularly
baffled by the problem. Better take sides first, and reason about it
for the rest of life.

  Not that Adams felt any real doubt about his sympathies or
wishes. He had not been German long enough for befogging his mind to
that point, but the moment was decisive for much to come, especially
for political morals. His morals were the highest, and he clung to them
to preserve his self-respect; but steam and electricity had brought
about new political and social concentrations, or were making them
necessary in the line of his moral principles--freedom, education,
economic development and so forth--which required association with
allies as doubtful as Napoleon III, and robberies with violence on a
very extensive scale. As long as he could argue that his opponents were
wicked, he could join in robbing and killing them without a qualm; but
it might happen that the good were robbed. Education insisted on
finding a moral foundation for robbery. He could hope to begin life in
the character of no animal more moral than a monkey unless he could
satisfy himself when and why robbery and murder were a virtue and duty.
Education founded on mere self-interest was merely Guelph and
Ghibelline over again--Machiavelli translated into American.

Luckily for him he had a sister much brighter than he ever was--though
he thought himself a rather superior person--who after marrying Charles
Kuhn, of Philadelphia, had come to Italy, and, like all good Americans
and English, was hotly Italian. In July, 1859, she was at Thun in
Switzerland, and there Henry Adams joined them. Women have, commonly, a
very positive moral sense; that which they will, is right; that which
they reject, is wrong; and their will, in most cases, ends by settling
the moral. Mrs. Kuhn had a double superiority. She not only adored
Italy, but she cordially disliked Germany in all its varieties. She saw
no gain in helping her brother to be Germanized, and she wanted him
much to be civilized. She was the first young woman he was ever
intimate with--quick, sensitive, wilful, or full of will, energetic,
sympathetic and intelligent enough to supply a score of men with
ideas--and he was delighted to give her the reins--to let her drive him
where she would. It was his first experiment in giving the reins to a
woman, and he was so much pleased with the results that he never wanted
to take them back. In after life he made a general law of
experience--no woman had ever driven him wrong; no man had ever driven
him right.

  Nothing would satisfy Mrs. Kuhn but to go to the seat of war as
soon as the armistice was declared. Wild as the idea seemed, nothing
was easier. The party crossed the St. Gothard and reached Milan,
picturesque with every sort of uniform and every sign of war. To young
Adams this first plunge into Italy passed Beethoven as a piece of
accidental education. Like music, it differed from other education in
being, not a means of pursuing life, but one of the ends attained.
Further, on these lines, one could not go. It had but one defect--that
of attainment. Life had no richer impression to give; it offers barely
half-a-dozen such, and the intervals seem long. Exactly what they teach
would puzzle a Berlin jurist; yet they seem to have an economic value,
since most people would decline to part with even their faded memories
except at a valuation ridiculously extravagant. They were also what men
pay most for; but one's ideas become hopelessly mixed in trying to
reduce such forms of education to a standard of exchangeable value,
and, as in political economy, one had best disregard altogether what
cannot be stated in equivalents. The proper equivalent of pleasure is
pain, which is also a form of education.

  Not satisfied with Milan, Mrs. Kuhn insisted on invading the
enemy's country, and the carriage was chartered for Innsbruck by way of
the Stelvio Pass. The Valtellina, as the carriage drove up it, showed
war. Garibaldi's Cacciatori were the only visible inhabitants. No one
could say whether the pass was open, but in any case no carriage had
yet crossed. At the inns the handsome young officers in command of the
detachments were delighted to accept invitations to dinner and to talk
all the evening of their battles to the charming patriot who sparkled
with interest and flattery, but not one of them knew whether their
enemies, the abhorred Austrian Jagers, would let the travellers through
their lines. As a rule, gaiety was not the character failing in any
party that Mrs. Kuhn belonged to, but when at last, after climbing what
was said to be the finest carriage-pass in Europe, the carriage turned
the last shoulder, where the glacier of the Ortler Spitze tumbled its
huge mass down upon the road, even Mrs. Kuhn gasped when she was driven
directly up to the barricade and stopped by the double line of sentries
stretching on either side up the mountains, till the flash of the gun
barrels was lost in the flash of the snow. For accidental education the
picture had its value. The earliest of these pictures count for most,
as first impressions must, and Adams never afterwards cared much for
landscape education, except perhaps in the tropics for the sake of the
contrast. As education, that chapter, too, was read, and set aside.

  The handsome blond officers of the Jagers were not to be beaten
in courtesy by the handsome young olive-toned officers of the
Cacciatori. The eternal woman as usual, when she is young, pretty, and
engaging, had her way, and the barricade offered no resistance. In
fifteen minutes the carriage was rolling down to Mals, swarming with
German soldiers and German fleas, worse than the Italian; and German
language, thought, and atmosphere, of which young Adams, thanks to his
glimpse of Italy, never again felt quite the old confident charm.

  Yet he could talk to his cabman and conscientiously did his
cathedrals, his Rhine, and whatever his companions suggested. Faithful
to his self-contracted scheme of passing two winters in study of the
Civil Law, he went back to Dresden with a letter to the Frau Hofrathin
von Reichenbach, in whose house Lowell and other Americans had pursued
studies more or less serious. In those days, "The Initials" was a new
book. The charm which its clever author had laboriously woven over
Munich gave also a certain reflected light to Dresden. Young Adams had
nothing to do but take fencing-lessons, visit the galleries and go to
the theatre; but his social failure in the line of "The Initials," was
humiliating and he succumbed to it. The Frau Hofrathin herself was
sometimes roused to huge laughter at the total discomfiture and
helplessness of the young American in the face of her society. Possibly
an education may be the wider and the richer for a large experience of
the world; Raphael Pumpelly and Clarence King, at about the same time,
were enriching their education by a picturesque intimacy with the
manners of the Apaches and Digger Indians. All experience is an arch,
to build upon. Yet Adams admitted himself unable to guess what use his
second winter in Germany was to him, or what he expected it to be. Even
the doctrine of accidental education broke down. There were no
accidents in Dresden. As soon as the winter was over, he closed and
locked the German door with a long breath of relief, and took the road
to Italy. He had then pursued his education, as it pleased him, for
eighteen months, and in spite of the infinite variety of new
impressions which had packed themselves into his mind, he knew no more,
for his practical purposes, than the day he graduated. He had made no
step towards a profession. He was as ignorant as a schoolboy of
society. He was unfit for any career in Europe, and unfitted for any
career in America, and he had not natural intelligence enough to see
what a mess he had thus far made of his education.

  By twisting life to follow accidental and devious paths, one
might perhaps find some use for accidental and devious knowledge, but
this had been no part of Henry Adams's plan when he chose the path most
admired by the best judges, and followed it till he found it led
nowhere. Nothing had been further from his mind when he started in
November, 1858, than to become a tourist, but a mere tourist, and
nothing else, he had become in April, 1860, when he joined his sister
in Florence. His father had been in the right. The young man felt a
little sore about it. Supposing his father asked him, on his return,
what equivalent he had brought back for the time and money put into his
experiment! The only possible answer would be: "Sir, I am a tourist!"

  The answer was not what he had meant it to be, and he was not
likely to better it by asking his father, in turn, what equivalent his
brothers or cousins or friends at home had got out of the same time and
money spent in Boston. All they had put into the law was certainly
thrown away, but were they happier in science? In theory one might say,
with some show of proof, that a pure, scientific education was alone
correct; yet many of his friends who took it, found reason to complain
that it was anything but a pure, scientific world in which they lived.

  Meanwhile his father had quite enough perplexities of his own,
without seeking more in his son's errors. His Quincy district had sent
him to Congress, and in the spring of 1860 he was in the full confusion
of nominating candidates for the Presidential election in November. He
supported Mr. Seward. The Republican Party was an unknown force, and
the Democratic Party was torn to pieces. No one could see far into the
future. Fathers could blunder as well as sons, and, in 1860, every one
was conscious of being dragged along paths much less secure than those
of the European tourist. For the time, the young man was safe from
interference, and went on his way with a light heart to take whatever
chance fragments of education God or the devil was pleased to give him,
for he knew no longer the good from the bad.

  He had of both sorts more than he knew how to use. Perhaps the
most useful purpose he set himself to serve was that of his pen, for he
wrote long letters, during the next three months, to his brother
Charles, which his brother caused to be printed in the Boston Courier;
and the exercise was good for him. He had little to say, and said it
not very well, but that mattered less. The habit of expression leads to
the search for something to express. Something remains as a residuum of
the commonplace itself, if one strikes out every commonplace in the
expression. Young men as a rule saw little in Italy, or anywhere else,
and in after life when Adams began to learn what some men could see, he
shrank into corners of shame at the thought that he should have
betrayed his own inferiority as though it were his pride, while he
invited his neighbors to measure and admire; but it was still the
nearest approach he had yet made to an intelligent act.

  For the rest, Italy was mostly an emotion and the emotion
naturally centred in Rome. The American parent, curiously enough, while
bitterly hostile to Paris, seemed rather disposed to accept Rome as
legitimate education, though abused; but to young men seeking education
in a serious spirit, taking for granted that everything had a cause,
and that nature tended to an end, Rome was altogether the most violent
vice in the world, and Rome before 1870 was seductive beyond
resistance. The month of May, 1860, was divine. No doubt other young
men, and occasionally young women, have passed the month of May in Rome
since then, and conceive that the charm continues to exist. Possibly it
does--in them--but in 1860 the lights and shadows were still mediaeval,
and mediaeval Rome was alive; the shadows breathed and glowed, full of
soft forms felt by lost senses. No sand-blast of science had yet
skinned off the epidermis of history, thought, and feeling. The
pictures were uncleaned, the churches unrestored, the ruins
unexcavated. Mediaeval Rome was sorcery. Rome was the worst spot on
earth to teach nineteenth-century youth what to do with a
twentieth-century world. One's emotions in Rome were one's private
affair, like one's glass of absinthe before dinner in the Palais Royal;
they must be hurtful, else they could not have been so intense; and
they were surely immoral, for no one, priest or politician, could
honestly read in the ruins of Rome any other certain lesson than that
they were evidence of the just judgments of an outraged God against all
the doings of man. This moral unfitted young men for every sort of
useful activity; it made Rome a gospel of anarchy and vice; the last
place under the sun for educating the young; yet it was, by common
consent, the only spot that the young--of either sex and every
race--passionately, perversely, wickedly loved.

  Boys never see a conclusion; only on the edge of the grave can
man conclude anything; but the first impulse given to the boy is apt to
lead or drive him for the rest of his life into conclusion after
conclusion that he never dreamed of reaching. One looked idly enough at
the Forum or at St. Peter's, but one never forgot the look, and it
never ceased reacting. To a young Bostonian, fresh from Germany, Rome
seemed a pure emotion, quite free from economic or actual values, and
he could not in reason or common sense foresee that it was mechanically
piling up conundrum after conundrum in his educational path, which
seemed unconnected but that he had got to connect; that seemed
insoluble but had got to be somehow solved. Rome was not a beetle to be
dissected and dropped; not a bad French novel to be read in a railway
train and thrown out of the window after other bad French novels, the
morals of which could never approach the immorality of Roman history.
Rome was actual; it was England; it was going to be America. Rome could
not be fitted into an orderly, middle-class, Bostonian, systematic
scheme of evolution. No law of progress applied to it. Not even
time-sequences--the last refuge of helpless historians--had value for
it. The Forum no more led to the Vatican than the Vatican to the Forum.
Rienzi, Garibaldi, Tiberius Gracchus, Aurelian might be mixed up in any
relation of time, along with a thousand more, and never lead to a
sequence. The great word Evolution had not yet, in 1860, made a new
religion of history, but the old religion had preached the same
doctrine for a thousand years without finding in the entire history of
Rome anything but flat contradiction.

  Of course both priests and evolutionists bitterly denied this
heresy, but what they affirmed or denied in 1860 had very little
importance indeed for 1960. Anarchy lost no ground meanwhile. The
problem became only the more fascinating. Probably it was more vital in
May, 1860, than it had been in October, 1764, when the idea of writing
the Decline and Fall of the city first started to the mind of Gibbon,
"in the close of the evening, as I sat musing in the Church of the
Zoccolanti or Franciscan Friars, while they were singing Vespers in the
Temple of Jupiter, on the ruins of the Capitol." Murray's Handbook had
the grace to quote this passage from Gibbon's "Autobiography," which
led Adams more than once to sit at sunset on the steps of the Church of
Santa Maria di Ara Coeli, curiously wondering that not an inch had been
gained by Gibbon--or all the historians since--towards explaining the
Fall. The mystery remained unsolved; the charm remained intact. Two
great experiments of Western civilization had left there the chief
monuments of their failure, and nothing proved that the city might not
still survive to express the failure of a third.

  The young man had no idea what he was doing. The thought of
posing for a Gibbon never entered his mind. He was a tourist, even to
the depths of his sub-consciousness, and it was well for him that he
should be nothing else, for even the greatest of men cannot sit with
dignity, "in the close of evening, among the ruins of the Capitol,"
unless they have something quite original to say about it. Tacitus
could do it; so could Michael Angelo; and so, at a pinch, could Gibbon,
though in figure hardly heroic; but, in sum, none of them could say
very much more than the tourist, who went on repeating to himself the
eternal question:--Why! Why!! Why!!!--as his neighbor, the blind
beggar, might do, sitting next him, on the church steps. No one ever
had answered the question to the satisfaction of any one else; yet
every one who had either head or heart, felt that sooner or later he
must make up his mind what answer to accept. Substitute the word
America for the word Rome, and the question became personal.

  Perhaps Henry learned something in Rome, though he never knew
it, and never sought it. Rome dwarfs teachers. The greatest men of the
age scarcely bore the test of posing with Rome for a background.
Perhaps Garibaldi--possibly even Cavour--could have sat "in the close
of the evening, among the ruins of the Capitol," but one hardly saw
Napoleon III there, or Palmerston or Tennyson or Longfellow. One
morning, Adams happened to be chatting in the studio of Hamilton Wilde,
when a middle-aged Englishman came in, evidently excited, and told of
the shock he had just received, when riding near the Circus Maximus, at
coming unexpectedly on the guillotine, where some criminal had been put
to death an hour or two before. The sudden surprise had quite overcome
him; and Adams, who seldom saw the point of a story till time had
blunted it, listened sympathetically to learn what new form of grim
horror had for the moment wiped out the memory of two thousand years of
Roman bloodshed, or the consolation, derived from history and
statistics, that most citizens of Rome seemed to be the better for
guillotining. Only by slow degrees, he grappled the conviction that the
victim of the shock was Robert Browning; and, on the background of the
Circus Maximus, the Christian martyrs flaming as torches, and the
morning's murderer on the block, Browning seemed rather in place, as a
middle-aged gentlemanly English Pippa Passes; while afterwards, in the
light of Belgravia dinner-tables, he never made part of his background
except by effacement. Browning might have sat with Gibbon, among the
ruins, and few Romans would have smiled.

  Yet Browning never revealed the poetic depths of Saint Francis;
William Story could not touch the secret of Michael Angelo, and Mommsen
hardly said all that one felt by instinct in the lives of Cicero and
Caesar. They taught what, as a rule, needed no teaching, the lessons of
a rather cheap imagination and cheaper politics. Rome was a bewildering
complex of ideas, experiments, ambitions, energies; without her, the
Western world was pointless and fragmentary; she gave heart and unity
to it all; yet Gibbon might have gone on for the whole century, sitting
among the ruins of the Capitol, and no one would have passed, capable
of telling him what it meant. Perhaps it meant nothing.

  So it ended; the happiest month of May that life had yet
offered, fading behind the present, and probably beyond the past,
somewhere into abstract time, grotesquely out of place with the Berlin
scheme or a Boston future. Adams explained to himself that he was
absorbing knowledge. He would have put it better had he said that
knowledge was absorbing him. He was passive. In spite of swarming
impressions he knew no more when he left Rome than he did when he
entered it. As a marketable object, his value was less. His next step
went far to convince him that accidental education, whatever its
economical return might be, was prodigiously successful as an object in
itself. Everything conspired to ruin his sound scheme of life, and to
make him a vagrant as well as pauper. He went on to Naples, and there,
in the hot June, heard rumors that Garibaldi and his thousand were
about to attack Palermo. Calling on the American Minister, Chandler of
Pennsylvania, he was kindly treated, not for his merit, but for his
name, and Mr. Chandler amiably consented to send him to the seat of war
as bearer of despatches to Captain Palmer of the American sloop of war
Iroquois. Young Adams seized the chance, and went to Palermo in a
government transport filled with fleas, commanded by a charming Prince
Caracciolo.

  He told all about it to the Boston Courier; where the narrative
probably exists to this day, unless the files of the Courier have
wholly perished; but of its bearing on education the Courier did not
speak. He himself would have much liked to know whether it had any
bearing whatever, and what was its value as a post-graduate course.
Quite apart from its value as life attained, realized, capitalized, it
had also a certain value as a lesson in something, though Adams could
never classify the branch of study. Loosely, the tourist called it
knowledge of men, but it was just the reverse; it was knowledge of
one's ignorance of men. Captain Palmer of the Iroquois, who was a
friend of the young man's uncle, Sydney Brooks, took him with the
officers of the ship to make an evening call on Garibaldi, whom they
found in the Senate House towards sunset, at supper with his
picturesque and piratic staff, in the full noise and color of the
Palermo revolution. As a spectacle, it belonged to Rossini and the
Italian opera, or to Alexandre Dumas at the least, but the spectacle
was not its educational side. Garibaldi left the table, and, sitting
down at the window, had a few words of talk with Captain Palmer and
young Adams. At that moment, in the summer of 1860, Garibaldi was
certainly the most serious of the doubtful energies in the world; the
most essential to gauge rightly. Even then society was dividing between
banker and anarchist. One or the other, Garibaldi must serve. Himself a
typical anarchist, sure to overshadow Europe and alarm empires bigger
than Naples, his success depended on his mind; his energy was beyond
doubt.

  Adams had the chance to look this sphinx in the eyes, and, for
five minutes, to watch him like a wild animal, at the moment of his
greatest achievement and most splendid action. One saw a
quiet-featured, quiet-voiced man in a red flannel shirt; absolutely
impervious; a type of which Adams knew nothing. Sympathetic it was, and
one felt that it was simple; one suspected even that it might be
childlike, but could form no guess of its intelligence. In his own eyes
Garibaldi might be a Napoleon or a Spartacus; in the hands of Cavour he
might become a Condottiere; in the eyes of history he might, like the
rest of the world, be only the vigorous player in the game he did not
understand. The student was none the wiser.

  This compound nature of patriot and pirate had illumined
Italian history from the beginning, and was no more intelligible to
itself than to a young American who had no experience in double
natures. In the end, if the "Autobiography" tells truth, Garibaldi saw
and said that he had not understood his own acts; that he had been an
instrument; that he had served the purposes of the class he least
wanted to help; yet in 1860 he thought himself the revolution anarchic,
Napoleonic, and his ambition was unbounded. What should a young
Bostonian have made of a character like this, internally alive with
childlike fancies, and externally quiet, simple, almost innocent;
uttering with apparent conviction the usual commonplaces of popular
politics that all politicians use as the small change of their
intercourse with the public; but never betraying a thought?

  Precisely this class of mind was to be the toughest problem of
Adams's practical life, but he could never make anything of it. The
lesson of Garibaldi, as education, seemed to teach the extreme
complexity of extreme simplicity; but one could have learned this from
a glow-worm. One did not need the vivid recollection of the low-voiced,
simple-mannered, seafaring captain of Genoese adventurers and Sicilian
brigands, supping in the July heat and Sicilian dirt and revolutionary
clamor, among the barricaded streets of insurgent Palermo, merely in
order to remember that simplicity is complex.

  Adams left the problem as he found it, and came north to
stumble over others, less picturesque but nearer. He squandered two or
three months on Paris. From the first he had avoided Paris, and had
wanted no French influence in his education. He disapproved of France
in the lump. A certain knowledge of the language one must have; enough
to order dinner and buy a theatre ticket; but more he did not seek. He
disliked the Empire and the Emperor particularly, but this was a
trifle; he disliked most the French mind. To save himself the trouble
of drawing up a long list of all that he disliked, he disapproved of
the whole, once for all, and shut them figuratively out of his life.
France was not serious, and he was not serious in going there.

  He did this in good faith, obeying the lessons his teachers had
taught him; but the curious result followed that, being in no way
responsible for the French and sincerely disapproving them, he felt
quite at liberty to enjoy to the full everything he disapproved. Stated
thus crudely, the idea sounds derisive; but, as a matter of fact,
several thousand Americans passed much of their time there on this
understanding. They sought to take share in every function that was
open to approach, as they sought tickets to the opera, because they
were not a part of it. Adams did like the rest. All thought of serious
education had long vanished. He tried to acquire a few French idioms,
without even aspiring to master a subjunctive, but he succeeded better
in acquiring a modest taste for Bordeaux and Burgundy and one or two
sauces; for the Trois Freres Provencaux and Voisin's and Philippe's and
the Cafe Anglais; for the Palais Royal Theatre, and the Varietes and
the Gymnase; for the Brohans and Bressant, Rose Cheri and Gil Perez,
and other lights of the stage. His friends were good to him. Life was
amusing. Paris rapidly became familiar. In a month or six weeks he
forgot even to disapprove of it; but he studied nothing, entered no
society, and made no acquaintance. Accidental education went far in
Paris, and one picked up a deal of knowledge that might become useful;
perhaps, after all, the three months passed there might serve better
purpose than the twenty-one months passed elsewhere; but he did not
intend it--did not think it--and looked at it as a momentary and
frivolous vacation before going home to fit himself for life.
Therewith, after staying as long as he could and spending all the money
he dared, he started with mixed emotions but no education, for home.

On April 12, 1859, the semester at the Gymnasium ends; Henry happily leaves Berlin with three friends from Harvard. For the next eighteen months, Henry will pursue "accidental education" traveling through Europe. Although his German continues to improve, an attempt at studying law in Dresden is short-lived. At the end of June, the young men begin a tour of Bavaria, Switzerland, and the Rhine country. Another winter in Berlin seems unbearable. Italy beckons. Early in 1860, Henry begins a "pleasant series of letters," as he calls them in a letter to his brother Charles; they are published in the Boston Daily Courier. In April, Henry visits his older sister, Louisa Catherine, who lives in Florence with her husband, Charles Kuhn. Adams ultimately concedes that he has become "a tourist, but a mere tourist, and nothing else."

Regarding Henry's education, two important decisions occur between April 1859 and October 1860. The first is that he finally surrenders any pretense of studying law in Germany. Even in Dresden, a city that he much prefers to Berlin, his mind is occupied more with the arts and further improvement of his German. He reads history and novels in German and agrees to engage in conversation in German with his Harvard chum Benjamin Crowninshield. He travels more, eventually arriving in Rome in May 1860. Henry is the first of his family to be granted the luxury of the Grand Tour, and he is concerned that his father may conclude that he is wasting his time. Letters from his brother Charles do scold Henry but encourage him to pursue his talents as a writer. The second decision follows Charles's advice. Henry begins a series of letters to his brother with the intent that they be published if Charles deems them worthy and can find a newspaper that is interested. The Boston Daily Courier of April 30, 1860, carries the first of six letters, all signed "H.B.A.," which will run through July 13. It is not the most prestigious or most widely read newspaper in New England, but it is a start. The letters offer a casual view of current events and stories of human interest from a tourist whose prejudices suggest that he is a child of privilege. When he sees mobs rioting in Sicily, for example, Henry is less concerned with their causes than with their heritage, observing that it is "not good stock" that behaves so crudely. As Ernest Samuels points out in The Young Henry Adams, "If these opinions seem painfully superficial, we should remember that they are the complacent insights of a very young man." By the fall of 1860, it is time to return home. Henry has extended his stay in Europe as long as he can and spent "all the money he dared." With the vague intent of studying law in Massachusetts, he sails for the States. Glossary Elbe and Spree rivers in Germany. Warte nur! . . . du auch!  from Goethe's "Wanderer's Nightsong" : "Only wait! before long / You too will rest." conundrum a puzzling question or problem. impervious incapable of being passed through or penetrated. derisive showing or provoking contempt or ridicule


TREASON (1860-1861)

  WHEN, forty years afterwards, Henry Adams looked back over his
adventures in search of knowledge, he asked himself whether fortune or
fate had ever dealt its cards quite so wildly to any of his known
antecessors as when it led him to begin the study of law and to vote
for Abraham Lincoln on the same day.

  He dropped back on Quincy like a lump of lead; he rebounded
like a football, tossed into space by an unknown energy which played
with all his generation as a cat plays with mice. The simile is none
too strong. Not one man in America wanted the Civil War, or expected or
intended it. A small minority wanted secession. The vast majority
wanted to go on with their occupations in peace. Not one, however
clever or learned, guessed what happened. Possibly a few Southern
loyalists in despair might dream it as an impossible chance; but none
planned it.

  As for Henry Adams, fresh from Europe and chaos of another
sort, he plunged at once into a lurid atmosphere of politics, quite
heedless of any education or forethought. His past melted away. The
prodigal was welcomed home, but not even his father asked a malicious
question about the Pandects. At the utmost, he hinted at some shade of
prodigality by quietly inviting his son to act as private secretary
during the winter in Washington, as though any young man who could
afford to throw away two winters on the Civil Law could afford to read
Blackstone for another winter without a master. The young man was
beyond satire, and asked only a pretext for throwing all education to
the east wind. November at best is sad, and November at Quincy had been
from earliest childhood the least gay of seasons. Nowhere else does the
uncharitable autumn wreak its spite so harshly on the frail wreck of
the grasshopper summer; yet even a Quincy November seemed temperate
before the chill of a Boston January.

  This was saying much, for the November of 1860 at Quincy stood
apart from other memories as lurid beyond description. Although no one
believed in civil war, the air reeked of it, and the Republicans
organized their clubs and parades as Wide-Awakes in a form military in
all things except weapons. Henry reached home in time to see the last
of these processions, stretching in ranks of torches along the
hillside, file down through the November night; to the Old House, where
Mr. Adams, their Member of Congress, received them, and, let them
pretend what they liked, their air was not that of innocence.

  Profoundly ignorant, anxious, and curious, the young man packed
his modest trunk again, which had not yet time to be unpacked, and
started for Washington with his family. Ten years had passed since his
last visit, but very little had changed. As in 1800 and 1850, so in
1860, the same rude colony was camped in the same forest, with the same
unfinished Greek temples for work rooms, and sloughs for roads. The
Government had an air of social instability and incompleteness that
went far to support the right of secession in theory as in fact; but
right or wrong, secession was likely to be easy where there was so
little to secede from. The Union was a sentiment, but not much more,
and in December, 1860, the sentiment about the Capitol was chiefly
hostile, so far as it made itself felt. John Adams was better off in
Philadelphia in 1776 than his great-grandson Henry in 1860 in
Washington.

  Patriotism ended by throwing a halo over the Continental
Congress, but over the close of the Thirty-sixth Congress in 1860-61,
no halo could be thrown by any one who saw it. Of all the crowd
swarming in Washington that winter, young Adams was surely among the
most ignorant and helpless, but he saw plainly that the knowledge
possessed by everybody about him was hardly greater than his own. Never
in a long life did he seek to master a lesson so obscure. Mr. Sumner
was given to saying after Oxenstiern: "Quantula sapientia mundus
regitur!" Oxenstiern talked of a world that wanted wisdom; but Adams
found himself seeking education in a world that seemed to him both
unwise and ignorant. The Southern secessionists were certainly
unbalanced in mind--fit for medical treatment, like other victims of
hallucination--haunted by suspicion, by idees fixes, by violent morbid
excitement; but this was not all. They were stupendously ignorant of
the world. As a class, the cotton-planters were mentally one-sided,
ill-balanced, and provincial to a degree rarely known. They were a
close society on whom the new fountains of power had poured a stream of
wealth and slaves that acted like oil on flame. They showed a young
student his first object-lesson of the way in which excess of power
worked when held by inadequate hands.

  This might be a commonplace of 1900, but in 1860 it was
paradox. The Southern statesmen were regarded as standards of
statesmanship, and such standards barred education. Charles Sumner's
chief offence was his insistence on Southern ignorance, and he stood a
living proof of it. To this school, Henry Adams had come for a new
education, and the school was seriously, honestly, taken by most of the
world, including Europe, as proper for the purpose, although the Sioux
Indians would have taught less mischief. From such contradictions among
intelligent people, what was a young man to learn?

  He could learn nothing but cross-purpose. The old and typical
Southern gentleman developed as cotton-planter had nothing to teach or
to give, except warning. Even as example to be avoided, he was too
glaring in his defiance of reason, to help the education of a
reasonable being. No one learned a useful lesson from the Confederate
school except to keep away from it. Thus, at one sweep, the whole field
of instruction south of the Potomac was shut off; it was overshadowed
by the cotton planters, from whom one could learn nothing but bad
temper, bad manners, poker, and treason.

  Perforce, the student was thrown back on Northern precept and
example; first of all, on his New England surroundings. Republican
houses were few in Washington, and Mr. and Mrs. Adams aimed to create a
social centre for New Englanders. They took a house on I Street,
looking over Pennsylvania Avenue, well out towards Georgetown--the
Markoe house--and there the private secretary began to learn his social
duties, for the political were confined to committee-rooms and lobbies
of the Capitol. He had little to do, and knew not how to do it rightly,
but he knew of no one who knew more.

  The Southern type was one to be avoided; the New England type
was one's self. It had nothing to show except one's own features.
Setting aside Charles Sumner, who stood quite alone and was the boy's
oldest friend, all the New Englanders were sane and steady men,
well-balanced, educated, and free from meanness or intrigue--men whom
one liked to act with, and who, whether graduates or not, bore the
stamp of Harvard College. Anson Burlingame was one exception, and
perhaps Israel Washburn another; but as a rule the New Englander's
strength was his poise which almost amounted to a defect. He offered no
more target for love than for hate; he attracted as little as he
repelled; even as a machine, his motion seemed never accelerated. The
character, with its force or feebleness, was familiar; one knew it to
the core; one was it--had been run in the same mould.

  There remained the Central and Western States, but there the
choice of teachers was not large and in the end narrowed itself to
Preston King, Henry Winter Davis, Owen Lovejoy, and a few other men
born with social faculty. Adams took most kindly to Henry J. Raymond,
who came to view the field for the New York Times, and who was a man of
the world. The average Congressman was civil enough, but had nothing to
ask except offices, and nothing to offer but the views of his district.
The average Senator was more reserved, but had not much more to say,
being always excepting one or two genial natures, handicapped by his
own importance.

  Study it as one might, the hope of education, till the arrival
of the President-elect, narrowed itself to the possible influence of
only two men--Sumner and Seward.

  Sumner was then fifty years old. Since his election as Senator
in 1851 he had passed beyond the reach of his boy friend, and, after
his Brooks injuries, his nervous system never quite recovered its tone;
but perhaps eight or ten years of solitary existence as Senator had
most to do with his development. No man, however strong, can serve ten
years as schoolmaster, priest, or Senator, and remain fit for anything
else. All the dogmatic stations in life have the effect of fixing a
certain stiffness of attitude forever, as though they mesmerized the
subject. Yet even among Senators there were degrees in dogmatism, from
the frank South Carolinian brutality, to that of Webster, Benton, Clay,
or Sumner himself, until in extreme cases, like Conkling, it became
Shakespearian and bouffe--as Godkin used to call it--like Malvolio.
Sumner had become dogmatic like the rest, but he had at least the merit
of qualities that warranted dogmatism. He justly thought, as Webster
had thought before him, that his great services and sacrifices, his
superiority in education, his oratorical power, his political
experience, his representative character at the head of the whole New
England contingent, and, above all, his knowledge of the world, made
him the most important member of the Senate; and no Senator had ever
saturated himself more thoroughly with the spirit and temper of the
body.

  Although the Senate is much given to admiring in its members a
superiority less obvious or quite invisible to outsiders, one Senator
seldom proclaims his own inferiority to another, and still more seldom
likes to be told of it. Even the greatest Senators seemed to inspire
little personal affection in each other, and betrayed none at all.
Sumner had a number of rivals who held his judgment in no high esteem,
and one of these was Senator Seward. The two men would have disliked
each other by instinct had they lived in different planets. Each was
created only for exasperating the other; the virtues of one were the
faults of his rival, until no good quality seemed to remain of either.
That the public service must suffer was certain, but what were the
sufferings of the public service compared with the risks run by a young
mosquito--a private secretary--trying to buzz admiration in the ears of
each, and unaware that each would impatiently slap at him for belonging
to the other? Innocent and unsuspicious beyond what was permitted even
in a nursery, the private secretary courted both.

  Private secretaries are servants of a rather low order, whose
business is to serve sources of power. The first news of a professional
kind, imparted to private secretary Adams on reaching Washington, was
that the President-elect, Abraham Lincoln, had selected Mr. Seward for
his Secretary of State, and that Seward was to be the medium for
communicating his wishes to his followers. Every young man naturally
accepted the wishes of Mr. Lincoln as orders, the more because he could
see that the new President was likely to need all the help that several
million young men would be able to give, if they counted on having any
President at all to serve. Naturally one waited impatiently for the
first meeting with the new Secretary of State.

  Governor Seward was an old friend of the family. He professed
to be a disciple and follower of John Quincy Adams. He had been Senator
since 1849, when his responsibilities as leader had separated him from
the Free Soil contingent, for, in the dry light of the first Free Soil
faith, the ways of New York politics Thurlow Weed had not won favor;
but the fierce heat which welded the Republican Party in 1856 melted
many such barriers, and when Mr. Adams came to Congress in December,
1859, Governor Seward instantly renewed his attitude of family friend,
became a daily intimate in the household, and lost no chance of forcing
his fresh ally to the front.

  A few days after their arrival in December, 1860, the Governor,
as he was always called, came to dinner, alone, as one of the family,
and the private secretary had the chance he wanted to watch him as
carefully as one generally watches men who dispose of one's future. A
slouching, slender figure; a head like a wise macaw; a beaked nose;
shaggy eyebrows; unorderly hair and clothes; hoarse voice; offhand
manner; free talk, and perpetual cigar, offered a new type--of western
New York--to fathom; a type in one way simple because it was only
double--political and personal; but complex because the political had
become nature, and no one could tell which was the mask and which the
features. At table, among friends, Mr. Seward threw off restraint, or
seemed to throw it off, in reality, while in the world he threw it off,
like a politician, for effect. In both cases he chose to appear as a
free talker, who loathed pomposity and enjoyed a joke; but how much was
nature and how much was mask, he was himself too simple a nature to
know. Underneath the surface he was conventional after the conventions
of western New York and Albany. Politicians thought it
unconventionality. Bostonians thought it provincial. Henry Adams
thought it charming. From the first sight, he loved the Governor, who,
though sixty years old, had the youth of his sympathies. He noticed
that Mr. Seward was never petty or personal; his talk was large; he
generalized; he never seemed to pose for statesmanship; he did not
require an attitude of prayer. What was more unusual--almost singular
and quite eccentric--he had some means, unknown to other Senators, of
producing the effect of unselfishness.

  Superficially Mr. Seward and Mr. Adams were contrasts;
essentially they were much alike. Mr. Adams was taken to be rigid, but
the Puritan character in all its forms could be supple enough when it
chose; and in Massachusetts all the Adamses had been attacked in
succession as no better than political mercenaries. Mr. Hildreth, in
his standard history, went so far as to echo with approval the charge
that treachery was hereditary in the family. Any Adams had at least to
be thick-skinned, hardened to every contradictory epithet that virtue
could supply, and, on the whole, armed to return such attentions; but
all must have admitted that they had invariably subordinated local to
national interests, and would continue to do so, whenever forced to
choose. C. F. Adams was sure to do what his father had done, as his
father had followed the steps of John Adams, and no doubt thereby
earned his epithets.

  The inevitable followed, as a child fresh from the nursery
should have had the instinct to foresee, but the young man on the edge
of life never dreamed. What motives or emotions drove his masters on
their various paths he made no pretence of guessing; even at that age
he preferred to admit his dislike for guessing motives; he knew only
his own infantile ignorance, before which he stood amazed, and his
innocent good-faith, always matter of simple-minded surprise. Critics
who know ultimate truth will pronounce judgment on history; all that
Henry Adams ever saw in man was a reflection of his own ignorance, and
he never saw quite so much of it as in the winter of 1860-61. Every one
knows the story; every one draws what conclusion suits his temper, and
the conclusion matters now less than though it concerned the merits of
Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden; but in 1861 the conclusion made the
sharpest lesson of life; it was condensed and concentrated education.

  Rightly or wrongly the new President and his chief advisers in
Washington decided that, before they could administer the Government,
they must make sure of a government to administer, and that this chance
depended on the action of Virginia. The whole ascendancy of the winter
wavered between the effort of the cotton States to drag Virginia out,
and the effort of the new President to keep Virginia in. Governor
Seward representing the Administration in the Senate took the lead; Mr.
Adams took the lead in the House; and as far as a private secretary
knew, the party united on its tactics. In offering concessions to the
border States, they had to run the risk, or incur the certainty, of
dividing their own party, and they took this risk with open eyes. As
Seward himself, in his gruff way, said at dinner, after Mr. Adams and
he had made their speeches: "If there's no secession now, you and I are
ruined."

  They won their game; this was their affair and the affair of
the historians who tell their story; their private secretaries had
nothing to do with it except to follow their orders. On that side a
secretary learned nothing and had nothing to learn. The sudden arrival
of Mr. Lincoln in Washington on February 23, and the language of his
inaugural address, were the final term of the winter's tactics, and
closed the private secretary's interest in the matter forever. Perhaps
he felt, even then, a good deal more interest in the appearance of
another private secretary, of his own age, a young man named John Hay,
who lighted on LaFayette Square at the same moment. Friends are born,
not made, and Henry never mistook a friend except when in power. From
the first slight meeting in February and March, 1861, he recognized Hay
as a friend, and never lost sight of him at the future crossing of
their paths; but, for the moment, his own task ended on March 4 when
Hay's began. The winter's anxieties were shifted upon new shoulders,
and Henry gladly turned back to Blackstone. He had tried to make
himself useful, and had exerted energy that seemed to him portentous,
acting in secret as newspaper correspondent, cultivating a large
acquaintance and even haunting ballrooms where the simple,
old-fashioned, Southern tone was pleasant even in the atmosphere of
conspiracy and treason. The sum was next to nothing for education,
because no one could teach; all were as ignorant as himself; none knew
what should be done, or how to do it; all were trying to learn and were
more bent on asking than on answering questions. The mass of ignorance
in Washington was lighted up by no ray of knowledge. Society, from top
to bottom, broke down.

  From this law there was no exception, unless, perhaps, that of
old General Winfield Scott, who happened to be the only military figure
that looked equal to the crisis. No one else either looked it, or was
it, or could be it, by nature or training. Had young Adams been told
that his life was to hang on the correctness of his estimate of the new
President, he would have lost. He saw Mr. Lincoln but once; at the
melancholy function called an Inaugural Ball. Of course he looked
anxiously for a sign of character. He saw a long, awkward figure; a
plain, ploughed face; a mind, absent in part, and in part evidently
worried by white kid gloves; features that expressed neither
self-satisfaction nor any other familiar Americanism, but rather the
same painful sense of becoming educated and of needing education that
tormented a private secretary; above all a lack of apparent force. Any
private secretary in the least fit for his business would have thought,
as Adams did, that no man living needed so much education as the new
President but that all the education he could get would not be enough.

  As far as a young man of anxious temperament could see, no one
in Washington was fitted for his duties; or rather, no duties in March
were fitted for the duties in April. The few people who thought they
knew something were more in error than those who knew nothing.
Education was matter of life and death, but all the education in the
world would have helped nothing. Only one man in Adams's reach seemed
to him supremely fitted by knowledge and experience to be an adviser
and friend. This was Senator Sumner; and there, in fact, the young
man's education began; there it ended.

  Going over the experience again, long after all the great
actors were dead, he struggled to see where he had blundered. In the
effort to make acquaintances, he lost friends, but he would have liked
much to know whether he could have helped it. He had necessarily
followed Seward and his father; he took for granted that his business
was obedience, discipline, and silence; he supposed the party to
require it, and that the crisis overruled all personal doubts. He was
thunderstruck to learn that Senator Sumner privately denounced the
course, regarded Mr. Adams as betraying the principles of his life, and
broke off relations with his family.

  Many a shock was Henry Adams to meet in the course of a long
life passed chiefly near politics and politicians, but the profoundest
lessons are not the lessons of reason; they are sudden strains that
permanently warp the mind. He cared little or nothing about the point
in discussion; he was even willing to admit that Sumner might be right,
though in all great emergencies he commonly found that every one was
more or less wrong; he liked lofty moral principle and cared little for
political tactics; he felt a profound respect for Sumner himself; but
the shock opened a chasm in life that never closed, and as long as life
lasted, he found himself invariably taking for granted, as a political
instinct, with out waiting further experiment--as he took for granted
that arsenic poisoned--the rule that a friend in power is a friend lost.

  On his own score, he never admitted the rupture, and never
exchanged a word with Mr. Sumner on the subject, then or afterwards,
but his education--for good or bad--made an enormous stride. One has to
deal with all sorts of unexpected morals in life, and, at this moment,
he was looking at hundreds of Southern gentlemen who believed
themselves singularly honest, but who seemed to him engaged in the
plainest breach of faith and the blackest secret conspiracy, yet they
did not disturb his education. History told of little else; and not one
rebel defection--not even Robert E. Lee's--cost young Adams a personal
pang; but Sumner's struck home.

  This, then, was the result of the new attempt at education,
down to March 4, 1861; this was all; and frankly, it seemed to him
hardly what he wanted. The picture of Washington in March, 1861,
offered education, but not the kind of education that led to good. The
process that Matthew Arnold described as wandering between two worlds,
one dead, the other powerless to be born, helps nothing. Washington was
a dismal school. Even before the traitors had flown, the vultures
descended on it in swarms that darkened the ground, and tore the
carrion of political patronage into fragments and gobbets of fat and
lean, on the very steps of the White House. Not a man there knew what
his task was to be, or was fitted for it; every one without exception,
Northern or Southern, was to learn his business at the cost of the
public. Lincoln, Seward, Sumner, and the rest, could give no help to
the young man seeking education; they knew less than he; within six
weeks they were all to be taught their duties by the uprising of such
as he, and their education was to cost a million lives and ten thousand
million dollars, more or less, North and South, before the country
could recover its balance and movement. Henry was a helpless victim,
and, like all the rest, he could only wait for he knew not what, to
send him he knew not where.

  With the close of the session, his own functions ended. Ceasing
to be private secretary he knew not what else to do but return with his
father and mother to Boston in the middle of March, and, with childlike
docility, sit down at a desk in the law-office of Horace Gray in Court
Street, to begin again: "My Lords and Gentlemen"; dozing after a two
o'clock dinner, or waking to discuss politics with the future Justice.
There, in ordinary times, he would have remained for life, his attempt
at education in treason having, like all the rest, disastrously failed.

Henry returns to Quincy in October 1860. On November 6, he casts his vote for the Republican candidate for President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln; that same day, Henry begins the study of law at the office of Judge Horace A. Gray. Again, the effort is short-lived. By the beginning of December, young Adams is in Washington, D. C., where he assumes duties as private secretary to his father, a member of the House of Representatives. Henry will also serve anonymously as the Washington correspondent for the Boston Daily Advertiser. The major political issue that winter is the possible secession of the Southern, pro-slavery states, made more likely by the election of Lincoln. On March 20, 1861, the new Secretary of State, William Henry Seward, commissions Henry's father, Charles Francis Adams, Minister to England. Henry is to serve there as the minister's private secretary.

The historical setting of what Adams calls "the great secession winter"  is paramount. The Adamses have aligned themselves with the new Republican Party, which took a stand in 1856 to oppose the extension of slavery into the territories or new states. As a moderate Republican, Charles Francis Adams backs William H. Seward in an attempt to preserve the Union and the Constitution through compromise. Above all, Henry's father does not want the North to force Civil War. His position is that the war, if it comes, must be precipitated by the slave-owning states and become their act of treason. South Carolina has already announced that it would secede if Lincoln were elected. Senator Charles Sumner leads the radical "Ultras," Republicans who wish to force the issue with the South. Although Sumner has been a longtime friend of the Adams family, dining with them weekly, the friendship ends over this political breach. Lincoln is sworn in on March 4, 1861. On April 12, Confederate troops fire on Fort Sumter in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina, the first shots of the Civil War. Although his brother Charles will serve in the war, Henry will be a private secretary to his father, in England, for the duration. Henry's oldest brother, John, will stay home to tend to family business. Henry's career as a writer develops further as he is appointed Washington correspondent for the Republican Boston Daily Advertiser. From December 7, 1860, through February 11, 1861, he publishes a series of unsigned letters supporting Seward's and his father's moderate approach to what he privately recognizes as inevitable secession. The series ends when the newspaper's editor, Charles Hale, appoints himself Washington correspondent. The editor does praise Henry's work, which is noticeably more mature and perceptive than were his letters from Europe. On the delicate issue of secession, for example, Henry's second letter  attempts to calm his father's constituents by suggesting that "mere temporary secession" would not necessarily mean disunion. The moderate Republicans hope to buy time until Lincoln's inaugural, and Henry's "Letters from Washington" do help. In the end, the moderates achieve their goal: If war must come, let the Confederates start it. Glossary prodigal exceedingly or recklessly wasteful; generous to a fault. lurid vivid in a harsh or shocking way. Quantula . . . regitur!  With how little wisdom the world is regulated! paradox a statement or situation that seems contradictory but may be true. portentous ominous. bouffee  puff, gust, bombast.