Henry Adams

“ It was the triumph of Henry Adams’s detachment that no escalator could move him forward anywhere because he was not bound anywhere in particular. Such a man, of course, could speak of his life as perpetually educational. ”

“ Of the year 1862 Henry Adams could never think without a shudder. The war alone did not greatly distress him; already in his short life he was used to seeing people wade in blood, and he could plainly discern in history, that man from the beginning had found his chief amusement in bloodshed; but the ferocious joy of destruction at its best requires that one should kill what one hates, and young Adams neither hated nor wanted to kill his friends the rebels, while he wanted nothing so much as to wipe England off the earth. ”

“ 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? ”

“ To Henry Adams. Bad-Nauheim, June 17, 1910.
Dear Henry Adams,—I have been so "slim" since seeing you, and the baths here have so weakened my brain, that I have been unable to do any reading except trash, and have only just got round to finishing your "letter," which I had but half-read when I was with you at Paris. To tell the truth, it doesn't impress me at all, save by its wit and erudition; and I ask you whether an old man soon about to meet his Maker can hope to save himself from the consequences of his life by pointing to the wit and learning he has shown in treating a tragic subject. ”

“ Henry Adams is the third son of Charles Francis Adams, Sr.,--the able Minister to England during the Civil War,--and grandson of John Quincy Adams. He was born in Boston, February 16th, 1838, graduated from Harvard in 1858, and served as private secretary to his father in England. In 1870 he became editor of the North American Review and Professor of History at Harvard, in which place he won wide repute for originality and power of inspiring enthusiasm for research in his pupils. ”

“ Henry Adams's lesson, however, is not taught in the same way at all. There is no preaching; it is a series of pictures, painted by a gentleman, with a sure hand, who looks on the phenomena of life as no other American has ever looked on them, or, at least, as no other American has ever expressed them. The judicious and the sensitive and the nicely discerning may shrink with horror from me when I say that I put at once "The Education of Henry Adams," for my delectation, beside the "Apologia pro Vita Sua" of Cardinal Newman! ”

“ KNOWLEDGE of human nature is the beginning and end of political education, but several years of arduous study in the neighborhood of Westminster led Henry Adams to think that knowledge of English human nature had little or no value outside of England. ”

“ The British nation was sometimes slow-witted, and often narrow-minded, but was not insane.
For a thousand years every step in the progress of England had been gained by sheer force of hand and will. In the struggle for existence the English people, favored by situation, had grown into a new human type,—which might be brutal, but was not weak; which had little regard for theory, but an immense and just respect for facts. America considered herself to be a serious fact, and expected England to take her at her own estimate of her own value ”

“ The Class of 1858, to which Henry Adams belonged, was a typical collection of young New Englanders, quietly penetrating and aggressively commonplace; free from meannesses, jealousies, intrigues, enthusiasms, and passions; not exceptionally quick; not consciously skeptical; singularly indifferent to display, artifice, florid expression, but not hostile to it when it amused them; distrustful of themselves, but little disposed to trust any one else; with not much humor of their own, but full of readiness to enjoy the humor of others; ”

“ Neither to a politician nor to a business-man nor to any of the learned professions did the West promise any certain advantage, while it offered uncertainties in plenty.
At any other moment in human history, this education, including its political and literary bias, would have been not only good, but quite the best. Society had always welcomed and flattered men so endowed. Henry Adams had every reason to be well pleased with it, and not ill-pleased with himself. ”

“ A fair number of the men who were born in the thirties had won names--Phillips Brooks; Bret Harte; Henry James; H. H. Richardson; John La Farge; and the list might be made fairly long if it were worth while; but from their school had sprung others, like Augustus St. Gaudens, McKim, Stanford White, and scores born in the forties, who counted as force even in the mental inertia of sixty or eighty million people. Among all these Clarence King, John Hay, and Henry Adams had led modest existences, trying to fill in the social gaps of a class which, as yet, showed but thin ranks and little cohesion. ”

“ It seemed a sign of force; yet to stand alone is quite natural when one has no passions; still easier when one has no pains.
Into this unusually dissolvent medium, chance insisted on enlarging Henry Adams's education by tossing a trio of Virginians as little fitted for it as Sioux Indians to a treadmill. By some further affinity, these three outsiders fell into relation with the Bostonians among whom Adams as a schoolboy belonged, and in the end with Adams himself, although they and he knew well how thin an edge of friendship separated them in 1856 from mortal enmity. ”

“ One seldom can see much education in the buck of a broncho; even less in the kick of a mule. The lesson it teaches is only that of getting out of the animal's way. This was the lesson that Henry Adams had learned over and over again in politics since 1860.
At least four-fifths of the American people--Adams among the rest--had united in the election of General Grant to the Presidency, and probably had been more or less affected in their choice by the parallel they felt between Grant and Washington. Nothing could be more obvious. ”

“ After the usual manner of public servants who had acquired the habit of office and lost the faculty of will, the members of the Legation in London continued the daily routine of English society, which, after becoming a habit, threatened to become a vice. Had Henry Adams shared a single taste with the young Englishmen of his time, he would have been lost; but the custom of pounding up and down Rotten Row every day, on a hack, was not a taste, and yet was all the sport he shared. Evidently he must set to work; he must get a new education; he must begin a career of his own. ”

“ So Henry Adams, well aware that he could not succeed as a scholar, and finding his social position beyond improvement or need of effort, betook himself to the single ambition which otherwise would scarcely have seemed a true outcome of the college, though it was the last remnant of the old Unitarian supremacy. He took to the pen. ”

“ As Henry Adams felt no responsibility for English art, and had no American art to offer for sacrifice, he listened with enjoyment to language much like Carlyle's, and accepted it without a qualm. On the other hand, as a third member of this critical group, he fell in with Stopford Brooke whose tastes lay in the same direction, and whose expression was modified by clerical propriety. Among these men, one wandered off into paths of education much too devious and slippery for an American foot to follow. He would have done better to go on the race-track, as far as concerned a career. ”

“ Henry Adams was a singularly sane individual, free from ancestor-worship; neither beholden to convention nor enslaved by tradition and environment; a potential antinomian of artistic temperament who devoted his life studiously to self-education from which he deduced a dynamic theory of history and an amorphous one of education. ”

“ In 1787 John Adams, like Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison, Jay, and other constitution-makers, might, without losing the interest of readers, indulge in speculations more or less visionary in regard to the future character of a nation yet in its cradle; but in 1814 the character of people and government was formed; the lines of their activity were fixed. A people which had in 1787 been indifferent or hostile to roads, banks, funded debt, and nationality, had become in 1815 habituated to ideas and machinery of the sort on a great scale. ”

“ Life was not yet complicated. Every problem had a solution, even the negro. The boy went back to Boston more political than ever, and his politics were no longer so modern as the eighteenth century, but took a strong tone of the seventeenth. Slavery drove the whole Puritan community back on its Puritanism. The boy thought as dogmatically as though he were one of his own ancestors. The Slave Power took the place of Stuart kings and Roman popes. Education could go no further in that course, and ran off into emotion ”

“ And we have no means, power or hope of combined action for any unselfish end.” That is what America has no power to create. But can it be said that any nation has ever created a school? Here we have the perfect illustration of that mass fatalism of which I have spoken, and Henry Adams himself, in his passivity, is the type of it. Secure as he was, uniquely secure, why did he refuse to accept the responsibility of those novels in which he expressed the contempt of a powerful and cultivated mind for the meanness, the baseness, the vulgarity of the guiding element in American society? ”

“ Indeed, had his father kept the boy at home, and given him half an hour's direction every day, he would have done more for him than school ever could do for them. Of course, school-taught men and boys looked down on home-bred boys, and rather prided themselves on their own ignorance, but the man of sixty can generally see what he needed in life, and in Henry Adams's opinion it was not school. ”

“ Even over his liberal mind history cast a spell so strong, that he thought the solitary American experiment of political confederation “not very important” beyond the Alleghanies.
The task of overcoming popular inertia in a democratic society was new, and seemed to offer peculiar difficulties. Without a scientific class to lead the way, and without a wealthy class to provide the means of experiment, the people of the United States were still required, by the nature of their problems, to become a speculating and scientific nation. ”

“ With all these movements Samuel Adams was in sympathy. He went even further, for at this time he was almost or quite alone in his desire for independence, and he has well been called the “Father of the Revolution.” Perhaps we think of him especially in connection with the Boston Tea Party, but his influence for the good of his country lasted far beyond that time.
Till the close of his life he was an earnest and sincere patriot. He died in 1803, at the age of eighty-one years. Not an orator like Patrick Henry, but a man of action like Washington, he had great power in dealing with men. ”

“ Most men would have been satisfied with the life he lived apart from the books he wrote, or with the books he wrote apart from the life he lived. Henry Adams is commonly counted with the historians; but he scarcely thought of himself as one, except in so far as he sought and failed to find a philosophy of history. It is characteristic that in the Education he barely mentions the History of the United States. The enterprise, which he undertook for lack of something better, he always regarded as negligible--an episode in his life to be chronicled like any other. ”

“ Adams was a plain man; low in stature, not graceful in his movements, and was sometimes abrupt and repulsive. His manners were rather austere and unbending in public, but in the social circle, with his relatives and friends, he was familiar, pleasing and entertaining. He was not partial to ceremonious etiquette, and was averse to pedantry. Plain strong common sense he practised and admired. He spoke his sentiments freely, and could never have been transformed into a technical politican, even had he enjoyed the magic advantages of modern schools. ”

“ He had time also to go down the harbor to see his brother Charles quartered in Fort Independence before being thrown, with a hundred thousand more, into the furnace of the Army of the Potomac to get educated in a fury of fire. Few things were for the moment so trivial in importance as the solitary private secretary crawling down to the wretched old Cunard steamer Niagara at East Boston to start again for Liverpool. This time the pitcher of education had gone to the fountain once too often; it was fairly broken; and the young man had got to meet a hostile world without defence--or arms. ”

“ One thing may be said of him: if he has been estranged from life, his lot has been cast amid conditions that are the least calculated to win him back again. . . . "The generation between 1865 and 1894," as Henry Adams remarks, "was already mortgaged, and no one knew it better than the generation itself." . . . Henry James knows it, knows it in advance: has he failed to catch the signs of the times, to foresee the chaos of the new age, the decline of the social life of his countrymen, the drop of the American barometer? Far from reassuring is the spectacle that lies before him. ”