Henry Adams
I
IN one of the most brilliant, subtle, and suggestive autobiographies ever written, Henry Adams informs us that he was never educated, and endeavors to explain why his varied attempts at education were abortive. He flings a trumpet challenge to the universe: Here am I, Henry Adams. I defy you to educate me. You cannot do it. Apparently, by his own reiterated and triumphant declaration, the universe, after most humiliating efforts, could not.
We should perhaps sympathize with the universe more perfectly, since Adams asks no sympathy, if, at the beginning of his narrative, or even in the middle of it, he told us what he means by education. This he never does with any completeness, though the word occurs more times than there are pages in the book. When he has advanced more than half-way through the story, he remarks casually that, for a mind worth educating, the object of education ‘should be the teaching itself how to react with vigor and economy.’ This is excellent, so far as it goes; but it is rather vague, it hardly seems to bear upon many of the attempted methods of education, and it does not reappear in any proportion to the demands upon it. I cannot help thinking that if, in the beginning, the brilliant autobiographer had set himself sincerely and soberly to reflect upon the word he was to use so often, he would have saved himself much repetition and the universe some anxiety, though he would have
deprived his readers of a vast deal of entertainment. As it is, he pursues an illusory phantom through a world of interesting experiences. Probably a dozen times in the course of the book he tells us that Adams’s education was ended. But a few pages later the delightful task is taken up again, until one comes to see that to have been educated, really and finally, would have been the tragedy of his life.
At any rate, nobody could furnish a prettier keynote for a psychograph than the motto, ‘Always in search of an education.’ Let us follow the search through all its meanders of intellectual and spiritual experience. From birth in Boston in 1838 to death in Washington in 1918, through America, Europe, and the rest of the world, through teaching and authorship and politics and diplomacy, through love and friendship and the widest social contact, the curious and subtle soul, with or without the afterthought of education, pursued its complicated course, scattering showers of brilliancy about it, leaving memories of affection behind it, and however difficult to grasp in its passage and elusive in its product, always and everywhere unfailingly interesting.
It is hardly necessary to say that, with this restless and unsatisfied spirit, the period which sees education finished for most men did not even see it begun. The infant who starts with the definition of a teacher as ‘a man employed to tell lies to little boys’ is not very likely to get definitive results from early schooling. The juvenile Adams surveyed Boston and Quincy and found them distinctly wanting, in his eyes, though not in their own. ‘Boston had solved the universe; or had offered and realized the best solution yet tried. The problem was worked out.’ But not for him.
With Harvard College the results were little better. He fully understood that, if social position counted, he ought to get all there was to be got. ’Of money he [Adams, for the autobiography is sustained throughout in the third person] had not much, of mind not more, but he could be quite certain that, barring his own faults, his social position would never be questioned.’ He was ready to admit also that failure, so far as there was failure, was owing precisely to faults of his own. ‘ Harvard College was a good school, but at bottom what the boy disliked most was any school at all. He did not want to be one in a hundred — one per cent of an education.’ Furthermore, with the readiness we all have to acknowledge weaknesses we should not wish others to find in us, he declares that ‘he had not wit or scope or force. Judges always ranked him beneath a rival, if he had any; and he believed the judges were right.’ But, at any rate, Harvard did not educate him. There was no coöperation, no coördination. Everybody stood alone, if not apart. ‘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.’ And the total outcome was forlornly inadequate. ‘Socially or intellectually, the college was for him negative and in some ways mischievous. The most tolerant man of the world could not see good in the lower habits of the students, but the vices were less harmful than the virtues.’
Nobody nowadays would anticipate that Germany could do what Harvard could not. But some persons then cherished amiable delusions. Young Adams hoped vaguely that Germany might educate him. With turns of phrase that recall Mark Twain he recognizes his happy moral fitness for education — if he could get it. ‘He seemed well behaved, when any one was looking at him; he observed conventions, when he could not escape them; he was never quarrelsome, towards a superior; his morals were apparently good, and his moral principles, if he had any, were not known to be bad.’
On this admirable substructure even Germany, however, could not erect the desired edifice. Acting on the pompous encouragement of Sumner, who said to him, ‘I came to Berlin, unable to say a word in the language; and three months later, when I went away, I talked it to my cabman,’ Adams struggled with the difficulties of the German tongue and overcame them by methods of which he says that ‘three months passed in such fashion would teach a poodle enough to talk with a cabman.’
But to one so exacting the mere learning of a language was not education, though it seems so to some people. The question was what you did with the language after you had learned it. And here Germany failed as egregiously as Boston. From careful personal contact, Adams concluded that the education in the public schools was hopeless. The memory was made sodden and soggy by enormous burdens. ‘No other faculty than the memory seemed to be recognized. Least of all was any use made of reason, either analytic, synthetic, or dogmatic. The German government did not encourage reasoning.’ The boys’ bodies were disordered by bad air and ill-adjusted exercise, and then ‘they were required to prepare daily lessons that would have quickly broken down strong men of a healthy habit, and which they could learn only because their minds were morbid.’
It was hardly likely that the university teaching would produce a more favorable impression. It did not. ‘The professor mumbled his comments; the students made, or seemed to make, notes; they could have learned from books or discussion in a day more than they could learn from him in a month, but they must pay his fees, follow his course, and be his scholars, if they wanted a degree. To an American the result was worthless.’ When the time came for leaving Germany, our student departed with a light heart and a firm resolution that, ‘ wherever else he might, in the infinities of space or time, seek for education, it should not be again in Berlin.’
Many earnest persons, who have found direct education for themselves fruitless and unprofitable, declare that they first began to learn when they began to teach, and that in the education of others they discovered the secret of their own. After a number of years of varied activity, Adams returned to Harvard as a teacher, and had an opportunity to test the truth of this principle. Viewed objectively, his work in instructing others seems universally commended. His pupils praised him, admired him, cherished a warm personal affection for him. He did not try to burden their memories, or to fill them with any theories or doctrines of his own. He made them think, he put life into them, intellectual life, spiritual life. ‘In what way Mr. Adams aroused my slumbering faculties, I am at a loss to say,’writes Mr. Lodge; ‘but there can be no doubt of the fact.’ What greater function or service can a teacher perform than this?
But for the educator himself teaching was no more profitable than learning. He had a keen sense of the responsibilities of his task. ‘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.’ He knew his own vast ignorance, as his pupils did not know theirs. ‘His course had led him through oceans of ignorance; he had tumbled from one ocean into another.’ But the diffusion of ignorance, even conscientious, did not seem to him an object worth toiling for. Education as administered at Harvard and at similar institutions appeared to lead nowhere. The methods were wrong, the aims wrong, if there were any aims. That it educated scholars was very doubtful; that it did not educate teachers was certain. ‘Thus it turned out that, of all his many educations, Adams thought that of school-teacher the thinnest.’
And how was it with society, with the wide and varied contact with men and women? If ever man had the chance to be educated by this means, Henry Adams was the man. He met all sorts of people in all sorts of places; met them intimately, not only at balls and dinners, but in unguarded hours around the domestic hearth. As with the teaching, others’ impression of him is enthusiastic. He was not perhaps the best of ‘mixers’ in the American sense; but he was kindly, gracious, sympathetic, full of response, full of stimulation, full of sparkling and not domineering wit. When he and Mrs. Adams kept open house in Washington, it was well said of them, ‘Nowhere in the United States was there then, or has there since been, such a salon as theirs. Sooner or later, everybody who possessed real quality crossed the threshold of 1603 H Street.’ And again, ‘To his intimates — and these included women of wit and charm and distinction — the hours spent in his study or at his table were the best that Washington could give.’ But, as with the teaching, the man’s own view of his general human relations is less satisfactory. The play of motives is interesting, certainly; but what can he learn from it, what can it do for his education? ‘All that Henry Adams ever saw in man was a reflection of his own ignorance.’ The great obstacle for sensitive natures to all social pleasure, the immense intrusion of one’s self, was always present to him, never entirely got rid of. ‘His little mistakes in etiquette or address made him writhe with torture.’ And of one concrete, tormenting incident, ‘This might seem humorous to some, but to him the world turned ashes.’ Theannoyances were great and the compensations trifling. Though he touched many hands, heard many voices, looked deep into many eyes, he drifted through the world in a dream solitude. When he was in Cambridge, he bewailed the isolation of professors. ‘All these brilliant men were greedy for companionship, all were famished for want of it.’ But the greed and the want haunted him everywhere. I do not see that they were ever satisfied.
With women he fared somewhat better than with men, and few men have been more frank about acknowledging their debt to the other sex. ‘ In after life he made a general law of experience — no woman had ever driven him wrong; no man had ever driven him right.’ And at all times and on all occasions he paid his debt with abundance of praise, tempered, of course, with such reserve as was to be expected from one who had all his life been seeking education and had not found it. To be sure, he readily admits entire ignorance as to the character, motives, and purposes of womankind. ‘The study of history is useful to the historian by teaching him his ignorance of women; and the mass of this ignorance crushes one who is familiar enough with what are called historical sources to realize how few women have ever been known.’ But such admission of ignorance, especially for one who triumphed in ignorance on all subjects, only made it easier to recognize and celebrate the charm. One could trifle with the ignorance perpetually, elaborate it, and complicate it, till it took the form of the most exquisite comprehension. ‘The proper study of mankind is woman and, by common agreement since the time of Adam, it is the most complex and arduous.’
Was it a question of the woman of America? One could write novels, like Esther and Democracy, in which the woman of America is made a miracle of cleverness and is at any rate more real than anything else. Or, in intimate table-talk with great statesmen and their wives, one could calmly insist that ‘the American man is a failure. You are all failures. . . . Would n’t we all elect Mrs. Lodge Senator against Cabot? Would the President have a ghost of a chance if Mrs. Roosevelt ran against him ? ’ But unquestionably one treads safer ground and is less exposed to the temptation of irony, if one goes back five hundred years and adores the Virgin of Chartres. With her, as Mark Twain found with Joan of Arc, one can elevate the feminine ideal to a Gothic sublimity, without too inconvenient intrusion of harsh daylight.
When we reduce these abstract personal contacts to concrete individuality, we find, or divine, Adams at his best, at his most human. ‘Friends are born, not made, and Henry never mistook a friend.’ For all his vast acquaintance, these friendships were not many, and they seem to have been deep and true and lasting. To be sure, he complains that politics is a dangerous dissolvent here as elsewhere. ‘A friend in power is a friend lost.’ But his love for Hay and for Clarence King, not to speak of others, was evidently an immense element in his emotional life, and if they did not give him education, they did what was even more difficult and vastly better, made him forget it. Moreover, as is indicated in Mrs. LaFarge’s charming study of her uncle, there was a peculiar tenderness in Adams’s intimate personal relations, very subtle, very elusive, very delicate, but very pervading. As is the case with many shy and self-contained natures, the tenderness showed most in his contact with children. But he had, further, a peculiar gift, by his imaginative sympathy, of eliciting affectionate confidences from young and old.
To what we may assume to have been the deepest love of all Adams himself makes not the faintest reference. His wooing and marriage are not once mentioned in the Education, but are lost in the shadowy twenty years which he passes over with a word. Some dream-attachments of early childhood are touched with delicate sarcasm. Beyond this, love as a personal matter does not enter into his wide analysis. From the comments of others we infer that, although he had no children, his marriage gave him as much as any human relation can and more than most marriages do, while his wife’s death brought him deep and abiding sorrow. But we may safely conclude that marriage did not give him that mysterious will-o’-the wisp, education, since, after Mrs. Adams’s death, we find him seeking it as restlessly and as unprofitably as ever.
So, having traced his search through the complicated phases of the more personal side of life, let us follow it in the even more complicated development of the intelligence.
II
It would seem as if few human callings could afford a wider basis for education in the broadest sense than diplomacy, and Adams had the advantage of all that diplomacy could offer. His father cared for the interests of the Union in London all through the fierce strain of the Civil War, and Henry, as his father’s secretary, saw the inside working of mens’ hearts and passions which that strain carried with it. He watched everything curiously, gained a fascinating insight into the peculiarities of English statesmanship, drew and left to posterity profound and delicate studies of Palmerston, Russell, Gladstone, and other figures, some of whom are not soon to be forgotten and some are forgotten already. He sketched with a sure and vivid touch scenes of historic or human significance. Saint-Simon could not have done them better.
But as to education for himself, the private secretary got nothing. In fact, these repeated, progressive, futile efforts seemed only to be carrying him beyond zero into the forlorn region of negative quantity. He found out that he was incurably shy, reserved, unfitted for the obtrusive conflicts of life. He tells us somewhere that he never had an enemy or a quarrel. But without quarrels one does not win many victories, even in the courteous atmosphere of diplomacy. The result of his English experience tended to little but ‘the total derision and despair of the lifelong effort for education.’
With practical politics at home in America it was the same. Only here Adams, warned by varied observation of others, made no attempt himself at even indirect personal action. It became obvious to him at a very early age that the sharp and clear decision on matters that cannot be decided, which is the first thing required of all politicians, was quite impossible for him, let alone the lightning facility in changing such decisions which gives the fine finish to a successful politician’s career.
He had the true conservative’s dislike of innovation, not because he was satisfied with things as they are, but because he had a vast dread of things as they might be. ‘The risk of error in changing a long-established course seems always greater to me than the chance of correction, unless the elements are known more exactly than is possible in human affairs.’
But if he did not seek education — where some think it is most surely to be found — in intense personal action, at least he was never tired of observing the complexities and perplexities of American political life. And if these did not give him education, they gave him amusement, as they give it to his readers in his interpretation of them. His own conclusion as to the workings of American government was not enthusiastic. Cabinets were timid, congresses were helter-skelter, presidents were inefficient —or over-efficient — even when well-intentioned, and one could not be sure that they were always well-intentioned. What wonder that the outcome of observation so dispassionate was hardly educative for the observer. It certainly is not for his readers, except in the sense of disillusionment.
From the hard, harsh, clear-cut doings of practical America the inquiring, acquiring spirit naturally turned at times to vaguer portions of the world; set itself to discover whether education might not come from travel and pure receptivity, since it absolutely refused to emanate from the strenuous action of common life. The results, if hardly more satisfactory, were always diverting. Rome? Oh, the charm of Rome! But it could not well be a profitable charm. ‘One’s personal emotions in Rome . . . must be hurtful, else they could not have been so intense.’ And again, Rome was ‘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.’
It might be supposed that at least travel would break up conservatism, abolish fixed habits of thought and life, supple the soul as well as the limbs, and make it more quickly receptive of innovation and experiment. Not with this soul, which found itself even more distrustful of change abroad than at home. ‘The tourist was the great conservative who hated novelty and adored dirt.’
Such a result might perhaps be expected from wandering in the Far East, where the flavor of dreamy repose, whether in man or nature, infected everything. But one would have thought that the bright , crystal, sparkling atmosphere of the American West might animate, enliven, induce a brisker courage and a more adventurous effort at existence. Taken beyond middle age, however, it did not induce effort, but only restlessness. ‘Only a certain intense cerebral restlessness survived, which no longer responded to sensual stimulants; one was driven from beauty to beauty as though art were a trotting-match.’
And if the sunshine of the western plains could not inspire ardor, it was not to be imagined that the gloomy silences of the Arctic Circle would do it. They did not; they merely fed farreaching, profound, and futile reflection on the battle of modern practical science with the old, dead, dumb, withering forces of nature. ‘An installation of electric lighting and telephones led tourists close up to the polar ice-cap, beyond the level of the magnetic pole; and there the newer Teufelsdröckh sat dumb with surprise and glared at the permanent electric lights of Hammerfest.’
From all this vast peregrination the conclusion is ’that the planet offers hardly a dozen places where an elderly man can pass a week alone without ennui, and none at all where he can pass a year.’
Was it better with the wanderings of the spirit than with those of the flesh? Let us see. How was it with art, the world’s wide, infinitely varied, inexhaustible human product of beauty? Surely no man ever had better opportunity to absorb and assimilate all that art has power to give to any one. Yet Adams’s references to the influence of art in general are vague and obscure. He can indeed multiply paradox on that, as on any subject, indefinitely. ‘For him, only the Greek, the Italian or the French standards had claims to respect, and the barbarism of Shakespeare was as flagrant as to Voltaire; but his theory never affected his practice ... he read his Shakespeare as the Evangel of conservative Christian anarchy, neither very conservative nor very Christian, but stupendously anarchistic.’ But tried by the one final, ever-repeated test, all that art offers is about as unsatisfactory as American politics or tropical dreams. ‘Art was a superb field for education, but at every turn he met the same old figure, like a battered and illegible signpost that ought to direct him to the next station but never did.’
One phase only of the vast outpouring of artistic beauty did engage the curious student, did for the time distract him wholly, involve and entangle his restless spirit in its fascinating spell — the mediæval art which he has analyzed so fully in Mont St. Michel and Chartres. The strange glamour, the puzzling and elusive suggestion and intimation of Gothic architecture, the complex subleties of Christian thought and feeling, as illustrated and illuminated by that architecture, seem to have held him with an almost inexplicable charm; and the insinuating, absorbing, dominating figure of the Blessed Virgin, lit at once and shadowed by the glimmering glory of old, unmatchable stained windows, gave him something — at least offered him the tantalizing image of something — that modern thought and modern wit and modern companionship could never supply.
Yet even here the final impression is that of remoteness and unreality. What can a living soul get from a dead religion? ‘The religion is as dead as Demeter, and its art alone survives as, on the whole, the highest expression of man’s thought or emotion.’ Even to feel the art, you have to make yourself other than you are; and modern nerves, unstrung by the wide pursuit of education, cannot stand this pressure long. ‘Any one can feel it who will only consent to feel like a child. . . . Any one willing to try could feel it like the child, reading new thought without end into the art he has studied a hundred times; but, what is still more convincing, he could at will, in an instant, shatter the whole art by calling into it a single motive of his own.’
So we must infer that the charm of this mediæval interlude was largely owing to its remoteness, to the very fact that it was a world of dream and only dream, requiring of the visitor none of the vulgar positive action demanded by twentieth-century Washington. And the very remoteness that made the charm look it away; for souls of the twentieth century must live in the twentieth century, after all.
No one lived in it more energetically than Adams, so far as mere thinking was concerned. To turn from his intimate acquaintance with mediæval learning to his equally intimate contact with the most recent movement of science is indeed astonishing. His curious youth seized upon the theories of Darwin, twisted them, teased them, tormented them, to make them furnish the vanishing specific which he believed himself to be eternally seeking. They did not satisfy him. As time went on, he found that they did not satisfy others, and he plunged more deeply and more widely into others’ dissatisfaction in order to confirm his own. The patient erudition of Germany, the logical vivacity of France, the persistent experimenting of England, all interested him, and from all he turned away as rich — and as poor — as he set out.
No one has more gift than he at making scientific speculations attractive, alive, at giving them almost objective existence, so that you seem to be moving, not among quaint abstractions of thought, but among necessary realities — perverse, persistent creatures that may make life worth living or not. He embodies theory till it tramps the earth. He treats the pterodactyl and the ichthyosaurus with the same intimate insolence as a banker in State Street or an Adams in Quincy, and analyzes the weaknesses of terebratula with as much pride as those of his grandfather.
Yet, when you reflect, you think yourself at liberty to feel a little discontent with him, since he admits so much with others. His exposition of all these scientific questions is brilliant, paradoxical, immensely entertaining. But no one makes you perceive more clearly the difference between brilliancy and lucidity. In mild, steady sunlight you can work out your way with plodding confidence; but a succession of dazzling flashes only makes darkness more intolerable. Adams can double the weight of unsolved problems upon you. He cannot, at least he rarely does, even state a problem with consistent, clear, orderly method, much less follow out the long solution of one. His most instructive effort in this line is the Letter to American Teachers of History. Here are two hundred pages of glittering pyrotechnic. You read it, and are charmed and excited and shocked, and left breathless at the end. What is the tangible result? That the investigations of modern science make it extremely doubtful whether mankind has progressed within the limits of recorded history, or ever will progress or do anything but retrograde, and that this famous discovery makes the teaching of history extremely difficult. Well, it is another difficulty, certainly, if the discovery is correct, which Adams would be the last to affirm with positiveness. But it might have been stated in a few words, instead of being amplified and complicated with endless repetition, all the more puzzling for its brilliancy. And among the manifold serious troubles of a teacher of history this one almost disappears, from its very remoteness. Of the far more pressing difficulties, of treatment, of method, of practical interest, Adams discusses not a single one. I doubt if any teacher of history ever laid down the Letter with the feeling that he had been helped in any possible way.
Of the more abstract metaphysical thinking that fills the latter portions of the Education and of Mont St. Michel, the same may be said as of the science. Its breadth is astonishing and its brilliancy extreme. Every typical intelligence from Aristotle to Spencer is touched upon, with an especially long stop at Saint Thomas Aquinas, to sum up and crystallize the whole. At first one is humbly impressed, then one is bewildered, then one becomes slightly skeptical. The result of it all seems too fluid, evanescent. Take the mysterious theory of acceleration. Through various preparatory chapters we are apparently led up to this. Suddenly we find that we have passed it, and we rub our eyes. The truth is, when analyzed, that the theory of acceleration means that the nineteenth century moved rather faster than the thirteenth. But surely there needs no ghost from the Middle Ages to tell us that. Nor does Adams’s latest philosophical work, The Rule of Phase Applied to History, improve matters much, though the idea of acceleration is further developed in it. The argument here is condensed after a fashion that would seem naturally to interfere with its lucidity. But when one reflects upon such a tangle of misleading analogies, one is inclined to suspect that fuller elaboration would only have made the lack of lucidity more apparent.
And we are forced to conclude, with the metaphysics, as with the science, that the thinking is more stimulating than satisfying, more brilliant than profound. There is an acute, curious, farreaching, unfailing interest. There is not systematic, patient, logical, clarifying order and method.
Also, with the lack of method, there is another spiritual defect, perhaps even more serious. The exposition of all these high philosophical ideas is more paradoxical than passionate; and the reason is that the thinker himself had not passion, had not the intense, overpowering earnestness which alone gives metaphysical speculations value, if not for their truth, at any rate for their influence. No doubt, something of the impression of dillettantism is due to the inheritance of New England reserve which Adams never entirely shook off. But the defect goes deeper; and, in spite of his brother’s assurance to the contrary, one cannot help feeling that Henry usually approaches the profoundest questions of life and death in an attitude of amused curiosity. One must not take passages like the following too seriously, — and one must realize that years and suffering somewhat modified the flippancy of youth, — but one must take them seriously enough. ‘Henry Adams was the first in an infinite series to discover and admit to himself that he really did not care whether truth was, or was not, true. He did not even care that it should be proved true, unless the process were new and amusing. He was a Darwinian for fun.’
As to the last and most practical of all these varied spiritual attempts at education, the attempt — and the achievement — of authorship, one’s conclusion is much as with the others. The novels, the biographies, above all the History of the United States, are among the most brilliant productions of their time. They glitter with epigrams and dazzle with paradoxes and puzzle with new interpretations, and make one think as one has rarely thought about the problems of American life and character. Of them all the History is the most important and the most enduring. It is fascinating in parts, almost abnormally entertaining in parts, yet even in the History, as a whole, there is a lack of broad, structural conception, a tendency to obscure large movement by detail, sometimes diverting and sometimes tedious.
Moreover, I cannot help feeling the defect in Adams’s authorship that I feel in his general thinking, although authorship was the most serious interest of his life. He spent days in dusty muniment rooms, fortified his pages with vast labor and consistent effort, tried his best to make himself and others think that he was an earnest student of history. Yet, after all his labor and all his effort, I at least cannot escape the impression that he was an author ‘for fun.’
III
It is precisely in this lack of seriousness that I find the clue to the failure of Adams’s whole colossal search for education, so far as the education was anything tangible and even the search was in any way serious. I must repeat my ample allowance for the dignified and commendable reserve with which he tells his story. Both his brother and his niece insist upon his extreme shyness and reluctance to intrude his own experiences. But, after all, reserve is rather out of place in confessions so free and intimate as those of the Education; and through all reserve the exposure of the inner, the inmost, life is sufficiently complete to show that the perpetual demand for education was at all times fatal to any absorbing ecstasy. When he was a boy in college, his elders remarked that one of his compositions was notable for lack of enthusiasm. ‘The young man — always in search of education — asked himself whether, setting rhetoric aside, this absence of enthusiasm was a defect or a merit. ’ Whichever it was, it accompanied him always and is the main key to his vast, absorbing work. What shall be said of a man who, in recounting his own life up to thirty, makes no single mention of having his pulses stirred, of being hurled out of himself, by nature, or love, or poetry, or God? What can any education be that is not built on some tumultuous experience of one or all of these?
Take nature. In Adams’s later life there are touches that show that nature must always have had its hold on him. When he returns from Europe in the late sixties, he finds ‘the overpowering beauty and sweetness of the Maryland autumn almost unendurable for its strain on one who had toned his life down to the November grays and browns of northern Europe.’ Yet note even here that it is the unendurable side of passion and ecstasy that clings. And tire same sense of superiority and willful indifference peers through his wonderful rendering of later natural experiences. ‘In the long summer days one found a sort of saturated green pleasure in the forests, and gray infinity of rest in the little twelfth-century churches that lined them.’
So with art. We have seen that he was entranced with the Middle Ages, and we have guessed that this was precisely because of their unreality to a man of the modern spirit. At any rate, there is no evidence anywhere that he was wrapt or carried away by any other art whatever, either the sculpture of Greece, or the painting of the fifteenth century or the nineteenth. ‘All styles are good which amuse,’ he says. The Gothic and the Virgin amused him. When the sense of Beethoven’s music first overwhelms him, he describes this sense in a fashion intensely characteristic, as ‘so astonished at its own existence, that he could not credit it, and watched it as something apart, accidental, and not to be trusted.' (Italics mine.) With poetry it is the same. His niece tells us that he was ‘ passionately fond of poetry.’ I should have taken ‘curiously fond ’ to be nearer the mark. In any event, the fondness does not appear in his writings. He enlarges at huge length upon the epic and lyric productions of the Middle Ages. Except for some elaborate analyses of Petrarch — and this again is curiously characteristic — in Esther and The Life of George Cabot Lodge, the poetry of the world might never have existed, for all the account his education takes of it.
I have before recognized that his utter failure to deal with the educative power of human love may be owing to a delicacy that we are bound to respect. But surely the love of God might be handled without kid gloves. Adams hardly handles it with or without them. Of course, in such an extensive syllabus of non-education God has his place, with pteraspis and terebratula, and is treated with the same familiarity as those distant ancestors, and the same remoteness. Adams also insists that ‘ Religion is, or ought to be, a feeling’ (italics mine), and in many pages of Mont St. Michel he shows an extraordinary power of entering into that feeling by intellectual analysis. But when he seeks for the feeling in himself, the result is much what he describes when he seeks it in the religious press of the world about him. ‘He very gravely doubted, from his aching consciousness of religious void, whether any large fraction of society cared for a future life, or even for the present one, thirty years hence. Not an act, or an expression, or an image, showed depth of faith or hope.’ As a factor in education, God counted for little more than terebratula.
The truth is, that in this infinitely reiterated demand for education there is something too much of the egotism which Henry Adams inherited from his distinguished great-grandfather and which had not been altogether dissipated by the intermixture of two generations of differing blood; it being always understood, as has been often illustrated, that egotism is perfectly compatible with shyness, reserve, and even self-effacement. In the preface to his autobiography Adams points out that the great lesson of Rousseau to the autobiographer is to beware of the Ego. In consequence Adams himself conscientiously avoids the pronoun ‘I,’ and writes of his efforts and failures in the third person. As a result, it appears to me that the impression of egotism is much increased. We are all accustomed to the harmless habit of the ‘I’; but to have Henry Adams constantly obtruding Henry Adams produces a singular and in the end singularly exasperating effect. One cannot help asking, what does it matter to the universe if even an Adams is not educated? What does it matter if fifty years of curious experience leave him to conclude that ‘He seemed to know nothing — to be groping in darkness — to be falling forever in space; and the worst depth consisted in the assurance, incredible as it seemed, that no one knew more’?
Not that one does not sympathize fully with the admission of ignorance. The best and the wisest, the most earnest and the most thoughtful, admit it likewise. The vast acceleration in knowledge of which Adams complained is the distinguishing feature of the twentieth century. We are swamped, buried, atrophied in the accumulation of our own learning. The specialist is the only relic of old wisdom that survives, and the specialist is but a pale and flickering torch to illuminate the general desolation of ignorance.
But even here it is Adams’s attitude that is unsatisfactory, not his conclusions. He proclaims that his life is spent in an effort to seek education; but one cannot escape an impression that he is not very eager to find it. He bewails the overwhelming burden of ignorance that descends upon him — appears to bewail it; but one cannot help feeling that his grief is largely rhetorical, and that, so long as ignorance enables him to gild a phrase or turn an epigram, he can forgive it. He ‘mixed himself up in the tangle of ideas until he achieved a sort of Paradise of ignorance vastly consoling to his fatigued senses.’ ‘True ignorance approaches the infinite more nearly than any amount of knowledge can do.’ When a student so much enjoys trifling with the difficulties of his education, he is not likely to make very rapid progress in overcoming them.
Simple and quiet as Adams himself was in his daily life, the thing he most mistrusted, intellectually and spiritually, was simplicity. ‘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.’ Again: ‘This seemed simple as running water; but simplicity is the most deceitful mistress that ever betrayed man.’ And he disliked simplicity because it was the key to all his difficulties, as he himself perfectly well knew. He spent his life tramping the world for education; but what he really needed was to be de-educated, and this also he was quite well aware of. He needed not to think, but to live. But he did not want to live. It was easier to sit back and proclaim life unworthy of Henry Adams than it was to lean forward with the whole soul in a passionate, if inadequate, effort to make Henry Adams worthy of life.
Mary Lyon would have seemed to this wide seeker for education very humble and very benighted; but all Mary Lyon cared to teach her pupils was that they should live for God and do something. If she could have communicated some such recipe to Henry Adams, she might have simplified his problem, though she would have robbed the world of many incomparable phrases. An even higher — and humbler — authority than Mary Lyon declared that we must become as little children if we would enter the kingdom of heaven. Perhaps the end of the twentieth century will take this as the last word of education, after all.