University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER XIX
CHAOS (1870)

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

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

One found one's self in a singular frame of mind—more eighteenth-century
than ever—almost rococo—and unable to catch
anywhere the cog-wheels of evolution. Experience ceased to
educate. London taught less freely than of old. That one bad

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

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

said that "Germany would beat France into scraps" if there
was war. Adams thought not. The chances were always against
catastrophes. No one else expected great changes in Europe. Palgrave
was always extreme; his language was incautious—violent!

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

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

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

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

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

One had heard and read a great deal about death, and even seen

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

Impressions like these are not reasoned or catalogued in the
mind; they are felt as part of violent emotion; and the mind that
feels them is a different one from that which reasons; it is thought
of a different power and a different person. The first serious consciousness
of Nature's gesture—her attitude towards life—took
form then as a phantasm, a nightmare, an insanity of force. For the
first time, the stage-scenery of the senses collapsed; the human
mind felt itself stripped naked, vibrating in a void of shapeless
energies, with resistless mass, colliding, crushing, wasting, and
destroying what these same energies had created and labored
from eternity to perfect. Society became fantastic, a vision of
pantomime with a mechanical motion; and its so-called thought
merged in the mere sense of life, and pleasure in the sense. The usual

anodynes of social medicine became evident artifice. Stoicism was
perhaps the best; religion was the most human; but the idea that
any personal deity could find pleasure or profit in torturing a
poor woman, by accident, with a fiendish cruelty known to man
only in perverted and insane temperaments, could not be held for
a moment. For pure blasphemy, it made pure atheism a comfort.
God might be, as the Church said, a Substance, but He could not
be a Person.

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

On July 4, all Europe had been in peace; on July 14, Europe was
in full chaos of war. One felt helpless and ignorant, but one
might have been king or kaiser without feeling stronger to deal
with the chaos. Mr. Gladstone was as much astounded as Adams;
the Emperor Napoleon was nearly as stupefied as either, and Bismarck
himself hardly knew how he did it. As education, the outbreak
of the war was wholly lost on a man dealing with death
hand-to-hand, who could not throw it aside to look at it across the
Rhine. Only when he got up to Paris, he began to feel the approach

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

As soon as he could, he fled to England and once more took
refuge in the profound peace of Wenlock Abbey. Only the few remaining
monks, undisturbed by the brutalities of Henry VIII—

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

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

Yet he found, on reaching home, that he had not done quite so
badly as he feared. His article on the Session in the July North

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

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

Had this been all, life might have gone on very happily as before,
but the ways of America to a young person of literary and political
tastes were such as the so-called evolution of civilized man had
not before evolved. No sooner had Adams made at Washington

what he modestly hoped was a sufficient success, than his whole
family set on him to drag him away. For the first time since 1861
his father interposed; his mother entreated; and his brother Charles
argued and urged that he should come to Harvard College. Charles
had views of further joint operations in a new field. He said that
Henry had done at Washington all he could possibly do; that his
position there wanted solidity; that he was, after all, an adven
turer; that a few years in Cambridge would give him personal
weight; that his chief function was not to be that of teacher, but
that of editing the North American Review which was to be coupled
with the professorship, and would lead to the daily press. In short,
that he needed the university more than the university needed
him.

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

The sum of the matter was that Henry went out to Cambridge
and had a few words with President Eliot which seemed to him
almost as American as the talk about diplomacy with his father
ten years before. "But, Mr. President," urged Adams, "I know
nothing about Mediæval History." With the courteous manner

and bland smile so familiar for the next generation of Americans,
Mr. Eliot mildly but firmly replied, "If you will point out to
me any one who knows more, Mr. Adams, I will appoint him."
The answer was neither logical nor convincing, but Adams could
not meet it without overstepping his privileges. He could not
say that, under the circumstances, the appointment of any professor
at all seemed to him unnecessary.

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

Henry Adams, if not the rose, lived as near it as any politician,
and knew, more or less, all the men in any way prominent at
Washington, or knew all about them. Among them, in his opinion,
the best equipped, the most active-minded, and most industrious
was Abram Hewitt, who sat in Congress for a dozen years,
between 1874 and 1886, sometimes leading the House and always
wielding Influence second to none. With nobody did Adams

form closer or longer relations than with Mr. Hewitt, whom he
regarded as the most useful public man in Washington; and he
was the more struck by Hewitt's saying, at the end of his laborious
career as legislator, that he left behind him no permanent result except
the Act consolidating the Surveys. Adams knew no other man
who had done so much, unless Mr. Sherman's legislation is accepted
as an instance of success. Hewitt's nearest rival would probably
have been Senator Pendleton who stood father to civil service
reform in 1882, an attempt to correct a vice that should never
have been allowed to be born. These were the men who succeeded.

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

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

At first, the simple beginner, struggling with principles, wanted
to throw off responsibility on the American people, whose bare

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

The American character showed singular limitations which sometimes
drove the student of civilized man to despair. Crushed by
his own ignorance—lost in the darkness of his own gropings—
the scholar finds himself jostled of a sudden by a crowd of men
who seem to him ignorant that there is a thing called ignorance;
who have forgotten how to amuse themselves; who cannot even
understand that they are bored. The American thought of himself
as a restless, pushing, energetic, ingenious person, always
awake and trying to get ahead of his neighbors. Perhaps this idea
of the national character might be correct for New York or Chicago;
it was not correct for Washington. There the American showed
himself, four times in five, as a quiet, peaceful, shy figure, rather in
the mould of Abraham Lincoln, somewhat sad, sometimes pathetic,
once tragic; or like Grant, inarticulate, uncertain, distrustful
of himself, still more distrustful of others, and awed by money.
That the American, by temperament, worked to excess, was true;
work and whiskey were his stimulants; work was a form of vice;
but he never cared much for money or power after he earned them.
The amusement of the pursuit was all the amusement he got from
it; he had no use for wealth. Jim Fisk alone seemed to know what
he wanted; Jay Gould never did. At Washington one met mostly
such true Americans, but if one wanted to know them better, one
went to study them in Europe. Bored, patient, helpless; pathetically
dependent on his wife and daughters; indulgent to excess;
mostly a modest, decent, excellent, valuable citizen; the American
was to be met at every railway station in Europe, carefully explaining
to every listener that the happiest day of his life would be
the day he should land on the pier at New York. He was ashamed

to be amused; his mind no longer answered to the stimulus of variety;
he could not face a new thought. All his immense strength,
his intense nervous energy, his keen analytic perceptions, were
oriented in one direction, and he could not change it. Congress
was full of such men; in the Senate, Sumner was almost the only
exception; in the Executive, Grant and Boutwell were varieties of
the type—political specimens—pathetic in their helplessness to
do anything with power when it came to them. They knew not
how to amuse themselves; they could not conceive how other
people were amused. Work, whiskey, and cards were life. The atmosphere
of political Washington was theirs—or was supposed
by the outside world to be in their control—and this was the
reason why the outside world judged that Washington was fatal
even for a young man of thirty-two, who had passed through the
whole variety of temptations, in every capital of Europe, for a
dozen years; who never played cards, and who loathed whiskey.