 CHAPTER IV of THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS One day in June, 1854, young Adams walked for the last time down the steps of Mr. Dixwell's school in Boylston Place, and felt no sensation but one of unqualified joy that this experience was ended. Never before or afterwards in his life did he close a period so long as four years without some sensation of loss, some sentiment of habit. But school was what in afterlife he commonly heard his friends denounce as an intolerable bore. He was born too old for it. The same thing could be said of most New England boys. Mentally, they were never boys. Their education as men should have begun at ten years old. They were fully five years more mature than the English or European boy for whom schools were made. For the purposes of future advancement, as afterwards appeared, these first six years of a possible education were wasted in doing imperfectly what might have been done perfectly in one, and in any case would have had small value. The next regular step was Harvard College. He was more than glad to go. The generation after generation, Adams' and Brooks' and Boylston's and Gorham's had gone to Harvard College, and although none of them, as far as known, had ever done any good there, or thought himself the better for it, custom, social ties, convenience, and above all economy kept each generation in the track. Any other education would have required a serious effort, but no one took Harvard College seriously. All went there because their friends went there, and the college was their ideal of social self-respect. Harvard College, as far as it educated at all, was a mild and liberal school which sent young men into the world with all they needed to make respectable citizens, and something of what they wanted to make useful ones. Leaders of men it never tried to make. Its ideals were altogether different. The Unitarian clergy had given to the college a character of moderation, balance, judgment, restraint, what the French called misure, excellent traits which the college attained with singular success, so that its graduates could commonly be recognized by the stamp, but such a type of character rarely lent itself to autobiography. In effect the school created a type, but not a will. Four years of Harvard College, if successful, resulted in an autobiographical blank, a mind on which only a watermark had been stamped. The stamp, as such things went, was a good one. The chief wonder of education is that it does not ruin everybody concerned in it, teachers and taught. Sometimes in afterlife Adams debated whether in fact it had not ruined him and most of his companions, but, disappointment apart, Harvard College was probably less hurtful than any other university then in existence. It taught little and that little ill, but it left the mind open, free from bias, ignorant of facts, but docile. The graduate had few strong prejudices. He knew little, but his mind remained supple, ready to receive knowledge. What caused the boy most disappointment was the little he got from his mates. Speaking exactly he got less than nothing, a result common enough in education. Yet the college catalog for the years 1854 to 1861 shows a list of names rather distinguished in their time. Alexander Agassiz and Phillips Brooks led it. H. H. Richardson and O. W. Holmes helped to close it. As a rule the most promising of all die early and never get their names into a dictionary of contemporaries, which seems to be the only popular standard of success. Many died in the war. Adams knew them all, more or less. He felt as much regard and quite as much respect for them then as he did after they won great names and were objects of a vastly wider respect. But as helped towards education he got nothing whatever from them, or they from him until long after they had left college. Possibly the fault was his, but one would like to know how many others shared it. Accident counts for much in companionship as in marriage. Life offers perhaps only a score of possible companions, and it is mere chance whether they meet as early as school or college. But it is more than a chance that boys brought up together under light conditions have nothing to give each other. The class of 1858, to which Henry Adams belonged, was a typical collection of young New Englanders, quietly penetrating and aggressively commonplace, free from meannesses, jealousies, intrigues, enthousiasms 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 anyone else, with not much humor of their own but full of readiness to enjoy the humor of others, negative to a degree that in the long run became positive and triumphant, not harsh in manners or judgment, rather liberal and open-minded, they were still as a body the most formidable critics one would care to meet in a long life exposed to criticism. They never flattered, seldom praised, free from vanity they were not intolerant of it, but they were objectiveness itself, their attitude was a law of nature, their judgment beyond appeal, not an act either of intellect or emotion or of will, but a sort of gravitation. This was Harvard College incarnate, but even for Harvard College the class of 1858 was somewhat extreme. Of unity this band of nearly one hundred young men had no keen sense, but they had equally little energy of repulsion. They were pleasant to live with and above the average of students, German, French, English, or what not, but chiefly because each individual appeared satisfied to stand alone. It seemed a sign of force, yet to stand alone is quite natural when one has no passions, still easier when one has no pains. Into this unusually dissolvent medium Chance insisted on enlarging Henry Adams's education by tossing a trio of Virginians as little fitted for it as Sue Indians to a treadmill. By some further affinity these three outsiders fell into relation with the Bostonians among whom Adams as a schoolboy belonged, and in the end with Adams himself, although they and he knew well how thin an edge of friendship separated them in 1856 from mortal enmity. One of these Virginians was the son of Colonel Robert E. Lee of the Second United States Cavalry. The two others, who seemed instinctively to form a staff for Lee, were town Virginians from Petersburg. A fourth outsider came from Cincinnati and was half-Kentuckian, N. L. Anderson, longworth on the mother's side. For the first time Adams's education brought him into contact with new types and taught him their values. He saw the New England type measure itself with another, and he was part of the process. Lee, known through life as Rooney, was a Virginian of the 18th century, much as Henry Adams was a Bostonian of the same age. Rooney Lee had changed little from the type of his grandfather, Light Horse Harry. Tall, largely built, handsome, genial, with liberal Virginian openness toward all he liked. He had also the Virginian habit of command and took leadership as his natural habit. No one cared to contest it. None of the New Englanders wanted command. For a year at least, Lee was the most popular and prominent young man in his class, but then seemed slowly to drop into the background. The habit of command was not enough and the Virginian had little else. He was simple beyond analysis, so simple that even the simple New England student could not realize him. No one knew enough to know how ignorant he was, how childlike, how helpless before the relative complexity of a school. As an animal the Southerner seemed to have every advantage, but even as an animal he steadily lost ground. The lesson in education was vital to these young men who, within ten years, killed each other by scores in the act of testing their college conclusions. Strictly the Southerner had no mind. He had temperament. He was not a scholar. He had no intellectual training. He could not analyze an idea, and he could not even conceive of admitting to. But in life one could get along very well without ideas if one had only the social instinct. Dozens of eminent statesmen were men of Lee's type and maintained themselves well enough in the legislature, but college was a sharper test. The Virginian was weak in vice itself, though the Bostonian was hardly a master of crime. The habits of neither were good. Both were apt to drink hard and to live low lives, but the Bostonian suffered less than the Virginian. Commonly the Bostonian could take some care of himself even in his worst stages, while the Virginian became quarrelsome and dangerous. When a Virginian had brooded a few days over an imaginary grief and substantial whisky, none of his northern friends could be sure that he might not be waiting round the corner with a knife or pistol to revenge insult by the dry light of delirium tremens. And when things reached this condition, Lee had to exhaust his authority over his own staff. Lee was a gentleman of the old school, and as everyone knows, gentlemen of the old school drank almost as much as gentlemen of the new school. But this was not his trouble. He was sober even in the excessive violence of political feeling in those years. He kept his temper and his friends under control. Adams liked the Virginians. No one was more obnoxious to them by name and prejudice, yet their friendship was unbroken and even warm. At a moment when the immediate future posed no problem in education so vital as the relative energy and endurance of north and south, this momentary contact with southern character was a sort of education for its own sake. But this was not all. No doubt the self-esteem of the Yankee, which tended naturally to self-distrust, was flattered by gaining the slow conviction that the Southerner, with his slave-owning limitations, was as little fit to succeed in the struggle of modern life as though he were still a maker of stone axes living in caves and hunting the boss Primigenius, and that every quality in which he was strong made him weaker. But Adams had begun to fear that even in this respect one 18th-century type might not differ deeply from another. Rooney Lee had changed little from the Virginian of a century before, but Adams was himself a good deal nearer the type of his great-grandfather than to that of a railway superintendent. He was little more fit than the Virginians to deal with a future America which showed no fancy for the past. Already northern society betrayed a preference for economists over diplomats or soldiers. One might even call it jealousy, against which two 18th-century types had little chance to live and which they had in common to fear. Being short of this curious sympathy could have brought into close relations two young men so hostile as Rooney Lee and Henry Adams. But the chief difference between them as collegians consisted only in their difference of scholarship. Lee was a total failure. Adams a partial one. Both failed, but Lee felt his failure more sensibly so that he gladly seized the chance of escape by accepting a commission offered him by General Winfield Scott in the force then being organized against the Mormons. He asked Adams to write his letter of acceptance, which flattered Adams's vanity more than any northern complement could do, because in days of violent political bitterness it showed a certain amount of good temper. The diplomat felt his profession. If the student got little from his mates, he got little more from his masters. The four years passed at college were for his purposes wasted. Harvard College was a good school, but at bottom what the boy disliked most was any school at all. He did not want to be one in a hundred, one percent of an education. He regarded himself as the only person for whom his education had value, and he wanted the whole of it. He got barely half of an average. Long afterwards when the devious path of life led him back to teach in his turn what no student naturally cared or needed to know, he diverted some dreary hours of faculty meetings by looking up his record in the class lists, and found himself graded precisely in the middle. In the one branch he most needed, mathematics, barring the first few scholars, failure was so nearly universal that no attempt at grading could have had value, and whether he stood fortieth or ninetieth must have been an accident or the personal favor of the professor. Here his education failed lamentably. At best he could never have been a mathematician. At worst he would never have cared to be one, but he needed to read mathematics like any other universal language, and he never reached the alphabet. Beyond two or three Greek plays the student got nothing from the ancient languages. Beyond some incoherent theories of free trade and protection he got little from political economy. He could not afterward remember to have heard the name of Karl Marx mentioned, or the title of Capitale. He was equally ignorant of Auguste Comte. These were the two writers of his time who most influenced its thought. The bit of practical teaching he afterward reviewed, with most curiosity, was the course in chemistry, which taught him a number of theories that befogged his mind for a lifetime. The only teaching that appealed to his imagination was a course of lectures by Louis Agassiz on the glacial period and paleontology, which had more influence on his curiosity than the rest of the college instruction altogether. The entire work of the four years could have been easily put into the work of any four months in afterlife. Harvard College was a negative force, and negative forces have value. Slowly it weakened the violent political bias of childhood, not by putting interests in its place, but by mental habits which had no bias at all. It would also have weakened the literary bias if Adams had been capable of finding other amusement, but the climate kept him steady to desultory and useless reading till he had run through the libraries of volumes which he forgot even to their title pages. Rather by instinct than by guidance he turned to writing, and his professors or tutors occasionally gave his English composition a hesitating approval. But in that branch, as in all the rest, even when he made a long struggle for recognition, he never convinced his teachers that his abilities, at their best, warranted placing him on the rank list, among the first third of his class. Instructors generally reach a fairly accurate gauge of their scholars' powers. Henry Adams himself held the opinion that his instructors were very nearly right, and when he became a professor in his turn and made mortifying mistakes in ranking his scholars, he still obstinately insisted that on the whole he was not far wrong. Student or professor, he accepted the negative standard because it was the standard of the school. He never knew what other students thought of it or what they thought or gained from it, nor would their opinion have much affected his. From the first he wanted to be done with it, and stood watching vaguely for a path and a direction. The world outside seemed large, but the paths that led into it were not many, and lay mostly through Boston where he did not want to go. As it happened, by pure chance, the first door of escape that seemed to offer a hope led into Germany, and James Russell Lowell opened it. Lowell, on succeeding longfellow as professor of bell-letters, had duly gone to Germany, and had brought back whatever he found to bring. The literary world then agreed that truth survived in Germany alone, and Carlisle, Matthew Arnold, Renan, Emerson, with scores of popular followers, taught the German faith. The literary world had revolted against the yoke of coming capitalism, its moneylenders, its bank directors, and its railway magnates. Thackeray and Dickens followed Balzac in scratching and biting the unfortunate middle class with savage ill temper, much as the middle class had scratched and bitten the church and court for a hundred years before. The middle class had the power, and held its coal and iron well in hand. But the satirists and idealists seized the press, and as they were agreed that the Second Empire was a disgrace to France and a danger to England, they turned to Germany, because at that moment Germany was neither economical nor military, and a hundred years behind Western Europe in the simplicity of its standards. German thought, method, honesty, and even taste, became the standards of scholarship. Goethe was raised to the rank of Shakespeare, Kant ranked as a law-giver above Plato. All serious scholars were obliged to become German, for German thought was revolutionizing criticism. Lowell had followed the rest, not very enthusiastically, but with sufficient conviction, and invited his scholars to join him. Holmes was glad to accept the invitation, rather for the sake of cultivating Lowell than Germany, but still in perfect good faith. It was the first serious attempt he had made to direct his own education, and he was sure of getting some education out of it, not perhaps anything that he expected, but at least a path. Singularly circuitous and excessively wasteful of energy the path proved to be, but the student could never see what other was open to him. He could have done no better had he foreseen every stage of his coming life, and he would probably have done far worse. The preliminary step was pure gain. James Russell Lowell had brought back from Germany the only new and valuable part of its universities, the habit of allowing students to read with him privately in his study. Adams asked the privilege, and used it to read a little, and to talk a great deal, for the personal contact pleased and flattered him, as that of older men ought to flatter and please the young, even when they altogether exaggerate its value. Lowell was a new element in the boy's life. As practical a New Englander as any, he leaned toward the conquered faith rather than toward Boston where he properly belonged. For conquered in the dark days of 1856 glowed with pure light. Adams approached it in much the same spirit as he would have entered a Gothic cathedral, for he well knew that the priests regarded him as only a worm. To the conquered church all Adams's were minds of dust and emptiness devoid of feeling, poetry or imagination, little higher than the common scourings of State Street, politicians of doubtful honesty, natures of narrow scope, and already at eighteen years old Henry had begun to feel uncertainty about so many matters more important than Adams's that his mind rebelled against no discipline merely personal, and he was ready to admit his unworthiness if only he might penetrate the shrine. The influence of Harvard College was beginning to have its effect. He was slipping away from fixed principles, from Mount Vernon Street, from Quincy, from the eighteenth century, and his first steps led toward conquered. He never reached conquered, and to conquered church he, like the rest of mankind who accepted a material universe, remained always an insect or something much lower, a man. It was surely no fault of his that the universe seemed to him real. Perhaps, as Mr. Emerson justly said, it was so. In spite of the long continued effort of a lifetime he perpetually fell back into the heresy that if anything universal was unreal it was himself and not the appearances. It was the poet and not the banker. It was his own thought, not the thing that moved it. He did not lack the wish to be transcendental. Conquered seemed to him at one time more real than Quincy. Yet in truth Russell Lowell was as little transcendental as Beacon Street. From him the boy got no revolutionary thought whatever, objective or subjective as they used to call it. But he got good-humoured encouragement to do what amused him, which consisted in passing two years in Europe after finishing the four years of Cambridge. The result seemed small in proportion to the effort, but it was the only positive result he could ever trace to the influence of Harvard College, and he had grave doubts whether Harvard College influenced even that. He gave results in plenty he could trace, but he tended toward negation on his own account, as one side of the New England mine had always done, and even there he could never feel sure that Harvard College had more than reflected a weakness. In his opinion the education was not serious, but in truth hardly any Boston student took it seriously, and none of them seemed sure that President Walker himself or President Felton after him took it more seriously than the students. For them all the college offered chiefly advantages vulgarly called social rather than mental. Unluckily for this particular boy social advantages were his only capital in life. Of money he had not much, of mind not more, but he could be quite certain that barring his own faults his social position would never be questioned. What he needed was a career in which social position had value. Never in his life would he have to explain who he was, never would he have need of acquaintance to strengthen his social standing. But he needed greatly someone to show him how to use the acquaintance he cared to make. He made no acquaintance in college which proved to have the smallest use in afterlife. All his Boston friends he knew before, or would have known in any case, and contact of Bostonian with Bostonian was the last education these young men needed. Cordial and intimate as their college relations were, they all flew off in different directions the moment they took their degrees. Harvard College remained a tie indeed, but a tie little stronger than Beacon Street, and not so strong as State Street. Strangers might perhaps gain something from the college if they were hard pressed for social connections. A student like H. H. Richardson, who came from far away New Orleans, and had his career before him to chase rather than to guide, might make valuable friendships at college. Certainly Adams made no acquaintance there that he valued in afterlife so much as Richardson. But still more certainly the college relation had little to do with the later friendship. Life is a narrow valley, and the roads rung close together. Adams would have attached himself to Richardson in any case, as he attached himself to John LaFarge, or Augustus St. Gaudens, or Clarence King, or John Hay. None of whom were at Harvard College. The valley of life grew more and more narrow with years, and certain men with common tastes were bound to come together. Adams knew only that he would have felt himself on a more equal footing with them had he been less ignorant, and had he not thrown away ten years of early life in acquiring what he might have acquired in one. Socially or intellectually the college was for him negative, and in some ways mischievous. The most tolerant man of the world could not see good in the lower habits of the students, but the vices were less harmful than the virtues. The habit of drinking, though the mere recollection of it made him doubt his own veracity so fantastic it seemed in later life, may have done no great or permanent harm. But the habit of looking at life as a social relation and a fair of society did no good. It cultivated a weakness which needed no cultivation. If it had helped to make men of the world or give the manners and instincts of any profession, such as temper, patience, courtesy, or a faculty of profiting by the social defects of opponents, it would have been education better worth having than mathematics or languages. But so far as it helped to make anything, it helped only to make the college standard permanent through life. The Bostonian educated at Harvard College remained a collegian if he stuck only to what the college gave him. If parents went on, generation after generation, sending their children to Harvard College for the sake of its social advantages, they perpetuated an inferior social type, quite as ill-fitted as the Oxford type for success in the next generation. Luckily the old social standard of the college, as President Walker or James Russell Lowell still showed it, was admirable, and if it had little practical value or personal influence on the mass of students, at least it preserved the tradition for those who liked it. The Harvard graduate was neither American nor European nor even wholly Yankee. His admirers were few and his critics many. Perhaps his worst weakness was his self-criticism and self-consciousness, but his ambitions, social or intellectual, were not necessarily cheap even though they might be negative. Afraid of serious risks and still more afraid of personal ridicule, he seldom made a great failure of life, and nearly always led a life more or less worth living. So Henry Adams, well aware that he could not succeed as a scholar and finding his social position beyond improvement or need of effort, but took himself to the single ambition which otherwise would scarcely have seemed a true outcome of the college, though it was the last remnant of the old Unitarian supremacy. He took to the pen, he wrote. The college magazine printed his work, and the college societies listened to his addresses. Lavish of praise the readers were not. The audiences, too, listened in silence, but this was all the encouragement any Harvard collegian had a reasonable hope to receive. Grave silence was a form of patience that meant possible future acceptance, and Henry Adams went on writing. No one cared enough to criticize except himself, who soon began to suffer from reaching his own limits. He found that he could not be this or that or the other, always precisely the things he wanted to be. He had not wit or scope or force. Judges always ranked him beneath a rival if he had any, and he believed the judges were right. His work seemed to him thin, commonplace, feeble. At times he felt his own weakness so fatally that he could not go on. When he had nothing to say he could not say it, and he found that he had very little to say at best. Much that he then wrote must be still in existence in print or manuscript, though he never cared to see it again, for he felt no doubt that it was in reality just what he thought it. At best it showed only a feeling for form, an instinct of exclusion. Nothing shocked, not even its weakness. Inevitably an effort leads to an ambition, creates it, and at that time the ambition of the literary student, which almost took place of the regular prizes of scholarship, was that of being chosen as the representative of his class, the class orator, at the close of their course. This was political as well as literary success, and precisely the sort of eighteenth-century combination that fascinated an eighteenth-century boy. The idea lurked in his mind, at first as a dream, in no way serious or even possible, for he stood outside the number of what were known as popular men. Near by year his position seemed to improve, or perhaps his rivals disappeared, until at last, to his own great astonishment, he found himself a candidate. The habits of the college permitted no active candidacy. He and his rivals had not a word to say for or against themselves, and he was never even consulted on the subject. He was not present at any of the proceedings, and how it happened he never could quite divine, but it did happen that one evening, on returning from Boston, he received notice of his election, after a very close contest, as class orator over the head of the first scholar, who was undoubtedly a better orator and a more popular man. In politics the success of the poorer candidate is common enough, and Henry Adams was a fairly trained politician, but he never understood how he managed to defeat not only a more capable but a more popular rival. To him the election seemed a miracle. This was no mock modesty, his head was as clear as ever it was in an indifferent canvas, and he knew his rivals and their following as well as he knew himself. What he did not know, even after four years of education, was Harvard College. What he could never measure was the bewildering impersonality of the men, who at twenty years old seemed to set no value either on official or personal standards. Here were nearly a hundred young men who had lived together intimately during four of the most impressionable years of life, and who not only once, but again and again in different ways, deliberately, seriously, dispassionately, chose as their representatives, precisely those of their companions who seemed least to represent them. As far as these orators and marshals had any position at all in a collegiate sense, it was that of indifference to the college. Henry Adams never professed the smallest faith in universities of any kind, either as boy or man, nor had he the faintest admiration for the university graduate, either in Europe or in America. As a collegian, he was only known apart from his fellows by his habit of standing outside the college. And yet the singular fact remained that this commonplace body of young men chose him repeatedly to express his and their commonplaces. Secretly, of course, the successful candidate flattered himself and them with the hope that they might perhaps not be so commonplace as they thought themselves. But this was only another proof that all were identical. They saw in him a representative, the kind of representative they wanted, and he saw in them the most formidable array of judges he could ever meet, like so many mirrors of himself, an infinite reflection of his own shortcomings. All the same the choice was flattering, so flattering that it actually shocked his vanity, and would have shocked it more, if possible, had he known that it was to be the only flattery of the sort that he was ever to receive. The function of class day was, in the eyes of nine tenths of the students, altogether the most important of the college, and the figure of the orator was the most conspicuous in the function. Unlike the orators at regular commencements, the class day orator stood alone, or had only the poet for rival. Crowded into the large church, the students, their families, friends, aunts, uncles, and chaperones attended all the girls of sixteen or twenty who wanted to show their summer dresses or fresh complexions, and there for an hour or two, in the heat that might have melted bronze, they listened to an orator, and a poet, in clergyman's gowns, reciting such platitudes as their own experience and their mild senses permitted them to utter. What Henry Adams said in his class oration of 1858, he soon forgot to the last word, nor had it the least value for education, but he naturally remembered what was said of it. He remembered especially one of his eminent uncles or relations remarking that, as the work of so young a man, the oration was singularly wanting an enthusiasm. The young man, always in search of education, asked himself whether, setting rhetoric aside, this absence of enthusiasm was a defect or a merit, since in either case it was all that Harvard College taught, and all that the hundred young men whom he was trying to represent expressed. Another comment threw more light on the effect of the college's education. One of the elderly gentlemen noticed the orator's perfect self-possession. Self-possession indeed. If Harvard College gave nothing else, it gave calm. For four years each student had been obliged to figure daily before dozens of young men who knew each other to the last fiber. One had done little but read papers to societies or act comedy in the hasty pudding, not to speak of all sorts of regular exercises, and no audience in future life would ever be so intimately and terribly intelligent as these. Three-fourths of the graduates would rather have addressed the Council of Trent or the British Parliament than have acted Sir Anthony Absolute or Dr. Ollipod before a gala audience of the hasty pudding. Self-possession was the strongest part of Harvard College, which certainly taught men to stand alone, so that nothing seemed stranger to its graduates than the paroxysms of terror before the public which often overcame the graduates of European universities. Whether this was or was not education, Henry Adams never knew. He was ready to stand up before any audience in America or Europe, with nerves rather steadier for the excitement. But whether he should ever have anything to say remained to be proved. As yet he knew nothing. Education had not begun. CHAPTER V. BERLIN. 1858-1859. A fourth child has the strength of his weakness. Being of no great value, he may throw himself away if he likes, and never be missed. Charles Francis Adams, the father, felt no love for Europe, which as he and all the world agreed, unfitted Americans for America. A captious critic might have replied that all the success he or his father or his grandfather ever achieved was chiefly due to the field that Europe gave them, and it was more than likely that without the help of Europe they would have all remained local politicians or lawyers, like their neighbors, to the end. Strictly followed the rule would have obliged them never to quit Quincy, and in fact so much more timid are parents for their children than for themselves, that Mr. and Mrs. Adams would have been content to see their children remain forever in Mount Vernon Street, unexposed to the temptations of Europe, could they have relied on the moral influences of Boston itself. Although the parents little knew what took place under their eyes, even the mothers saw enough to make them uneasy. Perhaps their dread of vice, haunting past and present, worried them less than their dread of daughters-in-law or sons-in-law who might not fit into their somewhat narrow quarters of home. On all sides were risks. Every year some young person alarmed the parental heart even in Boston, and although the temptations of Europe were irresistible, removal from the temptations of Boston might be imperative. The boy Henry wanted to go to Europe. He seemed well-behaved when anyone was looking at him. He observed conventions when he could not escape them. He was never quarrelsome toward a superior. His morals were apparently good, and his moral principles, if he had any, were not known to be bad. Above all he was timid and showed a certain sense of self-respect when in public view. What he was at heart no one could say, least of all himself, but he was probably human and no worse than some others. Therefore, when he presented to an exceedingly indulgent father and mother his request to begin at a German university the study of the civil law, although neither he nor they knew what civil law was or any reason for his studying it, the parents dutifully consented, and walked with him down to the railway station at Quincy to bid him good-bye, with a smile which he almost thought a tear. Whether the boy deserved such indulgence or was worth it, he knew no more than they, or than a professor at Harvard College. But whether worthy or not he began his third or fourth attempt at education in November 1858 by sailing on the steamer Persia, the pride of Captain Judkins and the Cunard Line, the newest, largest, and fastest steamship afloat. He was not alone. Several of his college companions sailed with him, and the world looked cheerful enough until, on the third day, the world, as far as concerned the young man, ran into a heavy storm. He learned then a lesson that stood by him better than any university teaching ever did, the meaning of a November gale on the Mid-Atlantic, which, for mere physical misery, passed endurance. The subject offered him material for none but serious treatment. He could never see the humor of seasickness, but it united itself with a great variety of other impressions which made the first month of travel altogether the rapidest school of education he had yet found. The stride and knowledge seemed gigantic. One began to see at last that a great many impressions were needed to make very little education. But how many could be crowded into one day without making any education at all became the pawn's asinorum of tourist mathematics. How many would turn out to be wrong, or whether any would turn out to be right, was ultimate wisdom. The ocean, the Persia, Captain Judkins, and Mr. G. P. R. James, the most distinguished passenger, vanished one Sunday morning in a furious gale in the Mersey, to make place for the drearier picture of a Liverpool street as seen from the Adelphi coffee room in November Merck, followed instantly by the passionate delights of Chester and the romance of red sandstone architecture. Millions of Americans have felt this succession of emotions. Possibly very young and ingenuous tourists feel them still, but in days before tourists, when the romance was a reality, not a picture, they were overwhelming. When the boys went out to Eaton Hall, they were odd, as Thackeray or Dickens would have felt in the presence of a duke. The very name of Gravenor struck a note of grandeur. The long suite of lofty, gilded rooms with their gilded furniture, the portraits, the terraces, the gardens, the landscape, the sense of superiority in the England of the fifties, actually set the rich nobleman apart above Americans and shopkeepers. Aristocracy was real. So was the England of Dickens. Oliver Twist and Little Nell lurked in every churchyard shadow, not his shadow, but alive. Even Charles I was not very shadowy, standing on the tower to see his army defeated. Nothing thereabouts had very much changed since he lost his battle and his head. An 18th-century American boy, fresh from Boston, naturally took it all for education, and was amused at this sort of lesson. At least he thought he felt it. Then came the journey up to London through Birmingham and the Black District, another lesson which needed much more to be rightly felt. The plunge into darkness lurid with flames, the sense of unknown horror in this weird gloom which then existed nowhere else and never had existed before except in volcanic craters. The violent contrast between this dense, smoky, impenetrable darkness and the soft green charm that one glided into as one emerged, the revelation of an unknown society of the pit, made a boy uncomfortable, though he had no idea that Carl Marx was standing there waiting for him, and that sooner or later the process of education would have to deal with Carl Marx much more than with Professor Bowen of Harvard College, or his satanic free trade majesty, John Stuart Mill. The Black District was a practical education, but it was infinitely far in the distance. The boy ran away from it, as he ran away from everything he disliked. Had he known enough to know where to begin, he would have seen something to study, more vital than the civil law, in the long, muddy, dirty, sordid, gas-lit dreariness of Oxford Street, as his dingy four-wheeler dragged its weary way to Charing Cross. He did notice one peculiarity about it worth remembering. London was still London. A certain style dignified its grime, heavy, clumsy, arrogant, purse-proud but not cheap, insular but large, barely tolerant of an outside world, and absolutely self-confident. The boys in the streets made such free comments on the American clothes and figures that the travellers hurried to put on tall hats and long overcoats to escape criticism. No stranger had rights even in the Strand. The eighteenth century held its own. History muttered down Fleet Street, like Dr. Johnson in Adams' ear. Vanity Fair was alive on Piccadilly, in yellow chariots with coachmen and wigs on hammer-cloths, footmen with canes on footboard, and a shriveled old woman inside. Half the great houses, black with London smoke, bore large funerial hatchments. London seemed insolent, and the most insolent structures in the world were the Royal Exchange and the Bank of England. In November 1858 London was still vast, but it was the London of the eighteenth century that an American felt and hated. Education went backward. Adams, still a boy, could not guess how intensely intimate this London grime was to become to him as a man, but he could still less conceive himself returning to it fifty years afterwards, noting at each return how the great city grew smaller as it doubled in size, cheaper as it quadrupled its wealth, less imperial as its empire widened, less dignified as it tried to be civil. He liked it best when he hated it. Education began at the end, or perhaps would end at the beginning. Thus far it had remained in the eighteenth century, and the next step took it back to the sixteenth. He crossed to Antwerp. As the Baron Ozy steamed up the shelt in the morning mists, a travelling band on deck began to play, and groups of peasants working along the fields dropped their tools to join in dancing. Ostide and Teniers were as much alive as they ever were, and even the Duke of Alva was still at home. The thirteenth century cathedral towered above a sixteenth century mass of tiled roofs, ending abruptly in walls and a landscape that had not changed. The taste of the town was thick, rich, ripe, like a sweet wine. It was medieval so that Rubens seemed modern. It was one of the strongest and fullest flavors that ever touched the young man's palate, but he might as well have drunk out his excitement and old malmsey for all the education he got from it. Even in art one can hardly begin with Antwerp Cathedral and the descent from the cross. He merely got drunk on his emotions, and then had to get sober as best he could. He was terribly sober when he saw Antwerp half a century afterwards. One lesson he did learn without suspecting that he must immediately lose it. He felt his middle ages and the sixteenth century alive. He was young enough, and the towns were dirty enough, unimproved, unrestored, untorrested, to retain the sense of reality. As a taste or a smell it was education, especially because it lasted barely ten years longer, but it was education only sensual. He never dreamed of trying to educate himself to the descent from the cross. He was only too happy to feel himself kneeling at the foot of the cross. He learned only to loathe the sordid necessity of getting up again and going about his stupid business. This was one of the foreseen dangers of Europe, but it vanished rapidly enough to reassure the most anxious of parents. According to Berlin one morning, without guide or direction, the young man in search of education floundered in a mere mess of misunderstandings. He could never recall what he expected to find, but whatever he expected it had no relation to what it turned out to be. A student at twenty takes easily to anything, even to Berlin, and he would have accepted the thirteenth century pure and simple since his guides assured him that this was his right path, but a week's experience left him dazed and dull. Both held out, but the paths grew dim. Berlin astonished him, but he had no lack of friends to show him all the amusement it had to offer. Within a day or two he was running about with the rest to beer cellars and music halls and dance rooms, smoking bad tobacco, drinking poor beer, and eating sauerkraut and sausages as though he knew no better. This was easy. One can always descend the social ladder. The trouble came when he asked for the education he was promised. His friends took him to be registered as a student of the university. They selected his professors and courses. They showed him where to buy the institutes of Gaius and several German works on the civil law in numerous volumes, and they led him to his first lecture. His first lecture was his last. The young man was not very quick, and he had almost religious respect for his guides and advisors, but he needed no more than one hour to satisfy him that he had made another failure in education and this time a fatal one. That the language would require at least three months' hard work before he could touch the law was an annoying discovery, but the shock that upset him was the discovery of the university itself. He had thought Harvard College a torpid school, but it was instinct with life compared with all that he could see of the University of Berlin. The German students were strange animals, but their professors were beyond pay. The mental attitude of the university was not of an American world. What sort of instruction prevailed in other branches or in science Adams had no occasion to ask, but in the civil law he found only the lecture system in its deadliest form as it flourished in the thirteenth century. The professor mumbled his comments, the students made or seemed to make notes. They could have learned from books or discussion in a day more than they could learn from him in a month, but they must pay his fees, follow his course, and be his scholars if they wanted a degree. To an American the result was worthless. He could make no use of the civil law without some previous notion of the common law, but the student who knew enough of the common law to understand what he wanted had only to read the pandex or the commentators at his ease in America and be his own professor. Neither the method nor the matter nor the manner could profit an American education. This discovery seemed to shock none of the students. They went to the lectures, made notes, and read textbooks, but never pretended to take their professor seriously. They were much more serious in reading Hein. They knew no more than Hein what good they were getting beyond the Berlin accent, which was bad, and the beer, which was not to compare with Munich, and the dancing, which was better at Vienna. They enjoyed the beer and music, but they refused to be responsible for their education. Anyway, as they defended themselves, they were learning the language. So the young man fell back on the language, and being slow at languages, he found himself falling behind all his friends, which depressed his spirits. The more because the gloom of a Berlin winter and of Berlin architecture seemed to him a particular sort of gloom never retained elsewhere. One day on the Linden, he caught sight of Charles Sumner in a cab and ran after him. Sumner was then recovering from the blows of the Southern Carolinian cane, or club, and he was pleased to find a young worshipper in the remote Prussian wilderness. They dined together and went to hear William tell at the opera. Sumner tried to encourage his friend about his difficulties of language. I came to Berlin, or Rome, or whatever place it was, as he said with his grand air of mastery. I came to Berlin unable to say a word in the language, and three months later, when I went away, I talked it to my cab man. Adams felt himself quite unable to attain, in so shorter time, such social advantages, and one day complained of his trials to Mr. Robert Apthorpe of Boston, who was passing the winter in Berlin for the sake of its music. Mr. Apthorpe told of his own similar struggle, and how he had entered a public school and sat for months with ten-year-old boys reciting their lessons and catching their phrases. The idea suited Adams's desperate frame of mind. At least it ridded him of the university and the civil law and American associations in beer cellars. Mr. Apthorpe took the trouble to negotiate with the headmaster of the Friedrichs-Vilhelm Verdisches Gymnasium, for permission to Henry Adams to attend the school as a member of the Oberterzia, a class of boys 12 or 13 years old. And there Adams went for three months, as though he had not always avoided high schools with singular antipathy. He never did anything else so foolish, but he was given a bit of education, which served him some purpose in life. It was not merely the language, though three months past in such fashion would teach a poodle enough to talk with a cabman. And this was all that foreign students could expect to do, for they never by any chance would come into contact with German society, if German society existed, about which they knew nothing. Adams never learned to talk German well, but the same might be said of his English, if he could believe Englishmen. He learned not to annoy himself on this account. His difficulties with the language gradually ceased. He thought himself quite Germanized in 1859. He even deluded himself with the idea that he read it as though it were English, which proved that he knew little about it. But whatever success he had in his own experiment interested him less than his contact with German education. He had revolted at the American school and university. He had instantly rejected the German university. And as his last experience of education, he tried the German high school. The experiment was hazardous. In 1858 Berlin was a poor, keen-witted provincial town, simple, dirty, uncivilized, and in most respects, disgusting. Life was primitive beyond what an American boy could have imagined. Overridden by military methods and bureaucratic pettiness, Prussia was only beginning to free her hands from internal bonds. Apart from discipline, activity scarcely existed. The future Kaiser Wilhelm I, regent for his insane brother, King Friedrich Wilhelm IV, seemed to pass his time looking out at the passes by from the window of his modest palace on the Linden. German manners, even at court, were sometimes brutal. And German thoroughness at school was apt to be routine. Bismarck himself was then struggling to begin a career against the inertia of the German system. The condition of Germany was a scandal and nuisance to every earnest German, all whose energies were turned to reforming it from top to bottom. And Adams walked into a great public school to get educated at precisely the time when the Germans most wanted to get rid of the education they were forced to follow. As an episode in the search for education, this adventurous smacked of Heine. The school system has doubtless changed. And at all events, the school masters are probably long dead. The story has no longer a practical value and had very little even at the time. One could at least say, in defense of the German school, that it was neither very brutal nor very immoral. The headmaster was excellent in his Prussian way. And the other instructors were not worse than in any other schools. It was their system that struck the systemless American with horror. The arbitrary training given to the memory was stupefying. The strain that the memory endured was a form of torture. And the feats that the boys performed without complaint were pitiable. No other faculty than the memory seemed to be recognized. Least of all was any use made of reason, either analytic, synthetic, or dogmatic. The German government did not encourage reasoning. All state education is a sort of dynamo machine for polarizing the popular mind, for turning and holding its lines of force in the direction supposed to be most effective for state purposes. The German machine was terribly efficient. Its effect on the children was pathetic. The Friedrichs-Vilhelm-Virdische's gymnasium was an old building in the heart of Berlin, which served the educational needs of the small tradesmen or bourgeoisie of the neighborhood. The children were Berliner kinder, if ever there were such. And of a class suspected of sympathy and concern in the troubles of 1848. None was noble or connected with good society. Personally, they were rather sympathetic than not. But as the objects of education, they were proofs of nearly all the evils that a bad system could give. Apparently Adams, in his rigidly illogical pursuit, had at last reached his ideal of a viciously logical education. The boys' physique showed at first, but their physique could not be wholly charged to the school. German food was bad at best, and a diet of sauerkraut, sausage, and beer could never be good. But it was not the food alone that made their faces white and their flesh flabby. They never breathed fresh air. They had never heard of a playground. In all Berlin, not a cubic inch of oxygen was admitted in winter into an inhabited building. In the school, every room was tightly closed and had no ventilation. The air was foul beyond all decency. But when the American opened a window in the five minutes between hours, he violated the rules and was invariably rebuked. As long as cold weather lasted, the windows were shut. If the boys had a holiday, they were apt to be taken on long tramps in the Thergarten or elsewhere, always ending in over-fatigue, tobacco smoke, sausages, and beer. With this, they were required to prepare daily lessons that would have quickly broken down strong men of a healthy habit, in which they could learn only because their minds were morbid. The German university had seemed a failure, but the German high school was something very near and indictable nuisance. Before the month of April arrived, the experiment of German education had reached this point. Nothing was left of it, except the ghost of the civil law, shut up in the darkest of closets, never to gibber again before anyone who could repeat the story. The derisive Jew laughter of Heine ran through the university and everything else in Berlin. Of course, when one is 20 years old, life is bound to be full if only of Berlin beer, although German student life was on the whole the thinnest of beer as an American looked on it. But though nothing except small fragments remained of the education that had been so promising or promised, this is only what most often happens in life when byproducts turn out to be more valuable than staples. The German university and German law were failures. German society in an American sense did not exist, or if it existed, never showed itself to an American. The German theater, on the other hand, was excellent, and German opera with the ballet was almost worth a journey to Berlin. But the curious and perplexing result of the total failure of German education was that the student's only clear gain, his single step to a higher life, came from time wasted, studies neglected, vices indulged, education reversed. It came from the despised beer garden and music hall, and it was accidental, unintended, unforeseen. When his companions insisted on passing two or three afternoons in the week at music halls, drinking beer, smoking German tobacco, and looking at fat German women knitting while an orchestra played dull music, Adams went with them for the sake of the company, but with no pretense of enjoyment. And when Mr. Apthorpe gently protested that he exaggerated his indifference, for of course he enjoyed Beethoven, Adams replied simply that he loathed Beethoven, and felt a slight surprise when Mr. Apthorpe and the others laughed as though they thought it humor. He saw no humor in it. He supposed that except for musicians, everyone thought Beethoven a bore, as everyone except mathematicians thought mathematics a bore. Sitting thus at his beer table, mentally impassive, he was one day surprised to notice that his mind followed the movement of a symphony. He could not have been more astonished had he suddenly read a new language. Among the marvels of education, this was the most marvellous. A prison wall that barred his senses on one great side of life suddenly fell of its own accord, without so much as his knowing when it happened. Amid the fumes of coarse tobacco and poor beer, surrounded by the commonest of German house frown, a new sense burst out like a flower in his life. So superior to the old senses, so bewildering, so astonished at its own existence that he could not credit it and watched it as something apart, accidental and not to be trusted. He slowly came to admit that Beethoven had partly become intelligible to him. But he was the more inclined to think that Beethoven must be much overrated as a musician to be so easily followed. This could not be called education, for he had never so much as listened to the music. He had been thinking of other things. Mere mechanical repetition of certain sounds had stuck to his unconscious mind. Beethoven might have this power, but not Wagner, or at all events not the Wagner later than Tannhauser, near 40 years passed before he reached the Gattadammerung. One might talk of the revival of an atrophied sense, the mechanical reaction of a sleeping consciousness, but no other sense awoke. His sense of line and color remained as dull as ever and as far as ever below the level of an artist. His metaphysical sense did not spring into life so that his mind could leap the bars of German expression into sympathy with the idealities of Kant and Hegel. Although he insisted that his faith in German thought and literature was exalted, he failed to approach German thought and he shed never a tear of emotion over the pages of Goethe and Schiller. When his father rashly ventured from time to time to write him a word of common sense, the young man would listen to no sense at all, but insisted that Berlin was the best of educations and the best of Germanies. Yet when at last April came and some genius suggested a tramp in Thuringen, his heart sang like a bird, he realized what a nightmare he had suffered and he made up his mind that wherever else he might in the infinities of space and time seek for education, it should not be again in Berlin. End of chapter five. Chapter six of The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Chapter six, Rome, 1859 to 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. Crowninchield, 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, Voteneur, Balderu, Hest du Auche, 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 light-hearted 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. Adam 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 Corregios 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 learns something of Beethoven. For the next 18 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 favour 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 18th 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 organised 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 medieval by nature and geography and this was what Adams, under the teachings of Carlisle and Lowell, liked. He was in a fair way to do himself lasting harm, floundering between worlds past 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 Leipzig 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 Lombardi and only 50 or 60 years had passed since the first Napoleon had begun his military successes from an Italian base. An enlightened young American with 18th 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 1500 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 crosslights. Should one be Guelph or Ghibeline? 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 gibleen 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 Coon 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. Coon 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, willful 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 afterlife 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. Coon 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. Goddard 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 cacciatore 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 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 Yeagers, 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 Spitz 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 two was read and set aside. The handsome blonde officers of the Yeagers were not to be beaten in courtesy by the handsome young olive-toned officers of the Cacciatore. 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 Mal, 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 cab man, and conscientiously did his cathedrals, his rine, 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 Hoffrithin 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 Hoffrithin herself was sometimes roused to huge laughter at the total discomforture 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 Pompelli 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 be built 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 toward 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 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 man as a rule saw little of Italy or anywhere else, and in afterlife, 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, which 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 centered in Rome. The American parent curiously enough, while bitterly hostile to Paris, seems 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 conceived that the charm continues to exist. Possibly it does, in them. But in 1860 the lights and shadows were still medieval, and medieval 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. Medieval Rome was sorcery. Rome was the worst spot on earth to teach 19th century youth what to do with the 20th 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 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 clothes of the evening as I sat musing in the church of the Zoccalanti or Franciscan friars, while they were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter on the ruins of the capital. 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 da Aracoeli, curiously wondering that not an inch had been gained by Gibbon, or all the historians since, toward 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 subconsciousness, and it was well for him that he should be nothing else, for even the greatest of men cannot sit with dignity in the clothes of the evening among the ruins of the capital, unless they have something quite original to say about it. Tacitus could do it, so could Michelangelo, and so at a pinch could Gibbon, though in figure hardly heroic. But in some 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 to him on the church steps. No one had ever answered the question to the satisfaction of anyone else, yet everyone who would 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 clothes of the evening among the ruins of the capital. 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 his 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 St. Francis, William's story could not touch the secret of Michelangelo, and Momson 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 capital, 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 a pauper. He went on to Naples, and there in the hot June heard rumours 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 amably 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 Caracchiello. He told all about it in 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 postgraduate 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, Sidney Brookes, took him with the officers of the ship to make an evening call on Garibaldi, whom they found in the Senate House toward Sunset, at supper with his picturesque and perratic staff, in the full noise and color of the Palermo Revolution. As a spectacle it belonged to Rossini and the Italian opera, or to Alexander 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 overthrow 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 Condatier. 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 common places 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 glowworm. 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 clamour 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 on 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-Frais-Provençois, and Voisins and Philippes, and the Café Anglais, for the Paris Royal Theatre, and the Varietés, and the Gymnas, for the Brohans and Bressantes, Rose Chérie, and Gilles 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 in spending all the money he dared, he started with mixed emotions, but no education, for home. 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 antacessors, 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 pandex. At the utmost he hinted at some shade of prodigality by quietly inviting his son to act as a 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 reek 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 at military in all things except weapons. Henry reached home in time to see the last of these processions, stretching in ranks of tortures along the hillside, filed 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 workrooms 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 capital 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 36th Congress in 1860 to 61 no halo could be thrown by anyone who saw it. Of all the crowds 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 say after Auksonstein, Quantula sapientia mundus reggitur. Auksonstein 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 id fixe, 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 a 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 Sue 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 banners, poker, and treason. Perforce the student was thrown back on Northern precept an 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 toward Georgetown, the Marco House, and there the private secretary began to learn his social duties, for the political were confined to committee rooms and lobbies of the capital. 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 oneself. 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 Englanders' 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, accepting 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 boyfriend, 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 school master, 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 Shakespearean and boof, as God can use 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 a private secretary Adams on reaching Washington, was that 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 and of Thurlow Weed had not one 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, horse voice, offhand manner, free talk and perpetual cigar offered a new type of Western New York defathom, 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 and 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 pretense 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 knew 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 to 61. Everyone knows the story. Everyone 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 advisors 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 23rd, 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 4th when Hayes 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 portentious, 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 plowed face, a mind absent in part, and in part evidently worried by white-kit 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 advisor 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, past chiefly near politics and politicians. But the profoundest lessons are not the lessons of reason. They are sudden strains that permanently warped 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 everyone 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 his life that never closed. And as long as life lasted, he found himself invariably taking for granted as a political instinct without waiting for 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 attempted 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 traders 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. Everyone, 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. Seizing 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 facility 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 attempted education in treason having, like all the rest, disastrously failed. End of chapter seven.