University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER XX
FAILURE (1871)

FAR back in childhood, among its earliest memories, Henry
Adams could recall his first visit to Harvard College. He
must have been nine years old when on one of the singularly
gloomy winter afternoons which beguiled Cambridgeport, his
mother drove him out to visit his aunt, Mrs. Everett. Edward
Everett was then President of the college and lived in the old
President's House on Harvard Square. The boy remembered the
drawing-room, on the left of the hall door, in which Mrs. Everett
received them. He remembered a marble greyhound in the corner.
The house had an air of colonial self-respect that impressed even
a nine-year-old child.

When Adams closed his interview with President Eliot, he asked
the Bursar about his aunt's old drawing-room, for the house had
been turned to base uses. The room and the deserted kitchen adjacent
to it were to let. He took them. Above him, his brother
Brooks, then a law student, had rooms, with a private staircase.
Opposite was J. R. Dennett, a young instructor almost as literary
as Adams himself, and more rebellious to conventions. Inquiry
revealed a boarding-table, somewhere in the neighborhood, also
supposed to be superior in its class. Chauncey Wright, Francis
Wharton, Dennett, John Fiske, or their equivalents in learning
and lecture, were seen there, among three or four law students
like Brooks Adams. With these primitive arrangements, all of
them had to be satisfied. The standard was below that of Washington,
but it was, for the moment, the best.

For the next nine months the Assistant Professor had no time to
waste on comforts or amusements. He exhausted all his strength in
trying to keep one day ahead of his duties. Often the stint ran on,
till night and sleep ran short. He could not stop to think whether

he were doing the work rightly. He could not get it done to please
him, rightly or wrongly, for he never could satisfy himself what
to do.

The fault he had found with Harvard College as an undergraduate
must have been more or less just, for the college was
making a great effort to meet these self-criticisms, and had elected
President Eliot in 1869 to carry out its reforms. Professor Gurney
was one of the leading reformers, and had tried his hand on his
own department of History. The two full Professors of History
—Torrey and Gurney, charming men both—could not cover
the ground. Between Gurney's classical courses and Torrey's
modern ones, lay a gap of a thousand years, which Adams was
expected to fill. The students had already elected courses numbered
I, 2, and 3, without knowing what was to be taught or who
was to teach. If their new professor had asked what idea was in
their minds, they must have replied that nothing at all was in
their minds, since their professor had nothing in his, and down to
the moment he took his chair and looked his scholars in the face,
he had given, as far as he could remember, an hour, more or less,
to the Middle Ages.

Not that his ignorance troubled him! He knew enough to be
ignorant His course had led him through oceans of ignorance;
he had tumbled from one ocean into another till he had learned
to swim; but even to him education was a serious thing. A parent
gives life, but as parent, gives no more. A murderer takes life,
but his deed stops there. A teacher affects eternity; he can never
tell where his influence stops. A teacher is expected to teach truth,
and may perhaps flatter himself that he does so, if he stops with
the alphabet or the multiplication table, as a mother teaches
truth by making her child eat with a spoon; but morals are quite
another truth and philosophy is more complex still. A teacher
must either treat history as a catalogue, a record, a romance, or as
an evolution; and whether he affirms or denies evolution, he falls
into all the burning faggots of the pit. He makes of his scholars

either priests or atheists, plutocrats or socialists, judges or anarchists,
almost in spite of himself. In essence incoherent and immoral,
history had either to be taught as such—or falsified.

Adams wanted to do neither. He had no theory of evolution
to teach, and could not make the facts fit one. He had no fancy
for telling agreeable tales to amuse sluggish-minded boys, in order
to publish them afterwards as lectures. He could still less compel
his students to learn the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and the Venerable
Bede by heart. He saw no relation whatever between his
students and the Middle Ages unless it were the Church, and there
the ground was particularly dangerous. He knew better than
though he were a professional historian that the man who should
solve the riddle of the Middle Ages and bring them into the line
of evolution from past to present, would be a greater man than
Lamarck or Linnæus; but history had nowhere broken down so
pitiably, or avowed itself so hopelessly bankrupt, as there. Since
Gibbon, the spectacle was almost a scandal. History had lost
even the sense of shame. It was a hundred years behind the experimental
sciences. For all serious purpose, it was less instructive
than Walter Scott and Alexandre Dumas.

All this was without offence to Sir Henry Maine, Tyler, McLennan,
Buckle, Auguste Comte, and the various philosophers
who, from time to time, stirred the scandal, and made it more
scandalous. No doubt, a teacher might make some use of these
writers or their theories; but Adams could fit them into no theory
of his own. The college expected him to pass at least half his time
in teaching the boys a few elementary dates and relations, that
they might not be a disgrace to the university. This was formal;
and he could frankly tell the boys that, provided they passed their
examinations, they might get their facts where they liked, and
use the teacher only for questions. The only privilege a student
had that was worth his claiming, was that of talking to the professor,
and the professor was bound to encourage it. His only
difficulty on that side was to get them to talk at all. He had to

devise schemes to find what they were thinking about, and induce
them to risk criticism from their fellows. Any large body of
students stifles the student. No man can instruct more than half-a-dozen
students at once. The whole problem of education is one
of its cost in money.

The lecture system to classes of hundreds, which was very much
that of the twelfth century, suited Adams not at all. Barred from
philosophy and bored by facts, he wanted to teach his students
something not wholly useless. The number of students whose
minds were of an order above the average was, in his experience,
barely one in ten; the rest could not be much stimulated by any
inducements a teacher could suggest. All were respectable, and
in seven years of contact, Adams never had cause to complain of
one; but nine minds in ten take polish passively, like a hard surface;
only the tenth sensibly reacts.

Adams thought that, as no one seemed to care what he did, he
would try to cultivate this tenth mind, though necessarily at the
expense of the other nine. He frankly acted on the rule that a
teacher, who knew nothing of his subject, should not pretend to
teach his scholars what he did not know, but should join them in
trying to find the best way of learning it. The rather pretentious
name of historical method was sometimes given to this process of
instruction, but the name smacked of German pedagogy, and a
young professor who respected neither history nor method, and
whose sole object of interest was his students' minds, fell into
trouble enough without adding to it a German parentage.

The task was doomed to failure for a reason which he could
not control. Nothing is easier than to teach historical method,
but, when learned, it has little use. History is a tangled skein
that one may take up at any point, and break when one has unravelled
enough; but complexity precedes evolution. The Pteraspis
grins horribly from the closed entrance. One may not begin
at the beginning, and one has but the loosest relative truths to
follow up. Adams found himself obliged to force his material into

some shape to which a method could be applied. He could think
only of law as subject; the Law School as end; and he took, as
victims of his experiment, half-a-dozen highly intelligent young
men who seemed willing to work. The course began with the
beginning, as far as the books showed a beginning in primitive
man, and came down through the Salic Franks to the Norman
English. Since no textbooks existed, the professor refused to
profess, knowing no more than his students, and the students read
what they pleased and compared their results. As pedagogy, nothing
could be more triumphant. The boys worked like rabbits,
and dug holes all over the field of archaic society; no difficulty
stopped them; unknown languages yielded before their attack,
and customary law became familiar as the police court; undoubtedly
they learned, after a fashion, to chase an idea, like a hare,
through as dense a thicket of obscure facts as they were likely to
meet at the bar; but their teacher knew from his own experience
that his wonderful method led nowhere, and they would have to
exert themselves to get rid of it in the Law School even more than
they exerted themselves to acquire it in the college. Their science
had no system, and could have none, since its subject was merely
antiquarian. Try as hard as he might, the professor could not make
it actual.

What was the use of training an active mind to waste its energy?
The experiments might in time train Adams as a professor,
but this result was still less to his taste. He wanted to help the
boys to a career, but not one of his many devices to stimulate the
intellectual reaction of the student's mind satisfied either him or
the students. For himself he was clear that the fault lay in the
system, which could lead only to inertia. Such little knowledge
of himself as he possessed warranted him in affirming that his
mind required conflict, competition, contradiction even more than
that of the student. He too wanted a rank-list to set his name upon.
His reform of the system would have begun in the lecture-room at
his own desk. He would have seated a rival assistant professor

opposite him, whose business should be strictly limited to expressing
opposite views. Nothing short of this would ever interest
either the professor or the student; but of all university freaks,
no irregularity shocked the intellectual atmosphere so much as
contradiction or competition between teachers. In that respect
the thirteenth-century university system was worth the whole
teaching of the modern school.

All his pretty efforts to create conflicts of thought among his
students failed for want of system. None met the needs of instruction.
In spite of President Eliot's reforms and his steady,
generous, liberal support, the system remained costly, clumsy and
futile. The university—as far as it was represented by Henry
Adams—produced at great waste of time and money results not
worth reaching.

He made use of his lost two years of German schooling to inflict
their results on his students, and by a happy chance he was
in the full tide of fashion. The Germans were crowning their new
emperor at Versailles, and surrounding his head with a halo of
Pepins and Merwigs, Othos and Barbarossas. James Bryce had
even discovered the Holy Roman Empire. Germany was never
so powerful, and the Assistant Professor of History had nothing
else as his stock in trade. He imposed Germany on his scholars
with a heavy hand. He was rejoiced; but he sometimes doubted
whether they should be grateful. On the whole, he was content
neither with what he had taught nor with the way he had taught
it. The seven years he passed in teaching seemed to him lost.

The uses of adversity are beyond measure strange. As a professor,
he regarded himself as a failure. Without false modesty he
thought he knew what he meant. He had tried a great many experiments,
and wholly succeeded in none. He had succumbed to
the weight of the system. He had accomplished nothing that he
tried to do. He regarded the system as wrong; more mischievous
to the teachers than to the students; fallacious from the beginning
to end. He quitted the university at last, in 1877, with a feeling,

that, if it had not been for the invariable courtesy and kindness
shown by every one in it, from the President to the injured students,
he should be sore at his failure.

These were his own feelings, but they seemed not to be felt in
the college. With the same perplexing impartiality that had so
much disconcerted him in his undergraduate days, the college insisted
on expressing an opposite view. John Fiske went so far in
his notice of the family in "Appleton's Cyclopedia," as to say that
Henry had left a great reputation at Harvard College; which was
a proof of John Fiske's personal regard that Adams heartily returned;
and set the kind expression down to camaraderie. The
case was different when President Eliot himself hinted that Adams's
services merited recognition. Adams could have wept on his
shoulder in hysterics, so grateful was he for the rare good-will that
inspired the compliment; but he could not allow the college to
think that he esteemed himself entitled to distinction. He knew
better, and his was among the failures which were respectable
enough to deserve self-respect. Yet nothing in the vanity of life
struck him as more humiliating than that Harvard College, which
he had persistently criticised, abused, abandoned, and neglected,
should alone have offered him a dollar, an office, an encouragement,
or a kindness. Harvard College might have its faults, but
at least it redeemed America, since it was true to its own.

The only part of education that the professor thought a success
was the students. He found them excellent company. Cast more
or less in the same mould, without violent emotions or sentiment,
and, except for the veneer of American habits, ignorant of all that
man had ever thought or hoped, their minds burst open like flowers
at the sunlight of a suggestion. They were quick to respond;
plastic to a mould; and incapable of fatigue. Their faith in education
was so full of pathos that one dared not ask them what
they thought they could do with education when they got it.
Adams did put the question to one of them, and was surprised at
the answer: "The degree of Harvard College is worth money to

me in Chicago." This reply upset his experience; for the degree
of Harvard College had been rather a drawback to a young
man in Boston and Washington. So far as it went, the answer was
good, and settled one's doubts. Adams knew no better, although
he had given twenty years to pursuing the same education, and
was no nearer a result than they. He still had to take for granted
many things that they need not—among the rest, that his teaching
did them more good than harm. In his own opinion the greatest
good he could do them was to hold his tongue. They needed
much faith then; they were likely to need more if they lived long.

He never knew whether his colleagues shared his doubts about
their own utility. Unlike himself, they knew more or less their
business. He could not tell his scholars that history glowed with
social virtue; the Professor of Chemistry cared not a chemical
atom whether society was virtuous or not. Adams could not pretend
that mediæval society proved evolution; the Professor of
Physics smiled at evolution. Adams was glad to dwell on the
virtues of the Church and the triumphs of its art: the Professor
of Political Economy had to treat them as waste of force.
They knew what they had to teach; he did not. They might perhaps
be frauds without knowing it; but he knew certainly nothing
else of himself. He could teach his students nothing; he was
only educating himself at their cost.

Education, like politics, is a rough affair, and every instructor
has "to shut his eyes and hold his tongue as though he were a priest.
The students alone satisfied. They thought they gained something.
Perhaps they did, for even in America and in the twentieth
century, life could not be wholly industrial. Adams fervently
hoped that they might remain content; but supposing
twenty years more to pass, and they should turn on him as fiercely
as he had turned on his old instructors—what answer could he
make? The college had pleaded guilty, and tried to reform. He
had pleaded guilty from the start, and his reforms had failed before
those of the college.

The lecture-room was futile enough, but the faculty-room was
worse. American society feared total wreck in the maelstrom of
political and corporate administration, but it could not look for
help to college dons. Adams knew, in that capacity, both Congressmen
and professors, and he preferred Congressmen. The same
failure marked the society of a college. Several score of the best-educated,
most agreeable, and personally the most sociable people
in America united in Cambridge to make a social desert that would
have starved a polar bear. The liveliest and most agreeable of
men—James Russell Lowell, Francis J. Child, Louis Agassiz,
his son Alexander, Gurney, John Fiske, William James and a
dozen others, who would have made the joy of London or Paris—
tried their best to break out and be like other men in Cambridge
and Boston, but society called them professors, and professors
they had to be. While all these brilliant men were greedy for
companionship, all were famished for want of it. Society was a
faculty-meeting without business. The elements were there; but
society cannot be made up of elements—people who are expected
to be silent unless they have observations to make—and all the
elements are bound to remain apart if required to make observations.

Thus it turned out that of all his many educations, Adams
thought that of school-teacher the thinnest. Yet he was forced to
admit that the education of an editor, in some ways, was thinner
still. The editor had barely time to edit; he had none to write.
If copy fell short, he was obliged to scribble a book-review on the
virtues of the Anglo-Saxons or the vices of the Popes; for he knew
more about Edward the Confessor or Boniface VIII than he did
about President Grant. For seven years he wrote nothing; the
Review lived on his brother Charles's railway articles. The editor
could help others, but could do nothing for himself. As a writer,
he was totally forgotten by the time he had been an editor for
twelve months. As editor he could find no writer to take his place
for politics and affairs of current concern. The Review became

chiefly historical. Russell Lowell and Frank Palgrave helped him
to keep it literary. The editor was a helpless drudge whose successes,
if he made any, belonged to his writers; but whose failures
might easily bankrupt himself. Such a Review may be made a sink
of money with captivating ease. The secrets of success as an editor
were easily learned; the highest was that of getting advertisements.
Ten pages of advertising made an editor a success; five
marked him as a failure. The merits or demerits of his literature
had little to do with his results except when they led to adversity.

A year or two of education as editor satiated most of his appetite
for that career as a profession. After a very slight experience,
he said no more on the subject. He felt willing to let any one edit,
if he himself might write. Vulgarly speaking, it was a dog's life
when it did not succeed, and little better when it did. A professor
had at least the pleasure of associating with his students; an editor
lived the life of an owl. A professor commonly became a pedagogue
or a pedant; an editor became an authority on advertising.
On the whole, Adams preferred his attic in Washington. He was
educated enough. Ignorance paid better, for at least it earned fifty
dollars a month.

With this result Henry Adams's education, at his entry into life,
stopped, and his life began. He had to take that life as he best
could, with such accidental education as luck had given him;
but he held that it was wrong, and that, if he were to begin again,
he would do it on a better system. He thought he knew nearly
what system to pursue. At that time Alexander Agassiz had not
yet got his head above water so far as to serve for a model, as
he did twenty or thirty years afterwards; but the editorship of
the North American Review had one solitary merit; it made the
editor acquainted at a distance with almost every one in the country
who could write or who could be the cause of writing. Adams
was vastly pleased to be received among these clever people as one
of themselves, and felt always a little surprised at their treating
him as an equal, for they all had education; but among them, only

one stood out in extraordinary prominence as the type and model
of what Adams would have liked to be, and of what the American,
as he conceived, should have been and was not.

Thanks to the article on Sir Charles Lyell, Adams passed for a
friend of geologists, and the extent of his knowledge mattered much
less to them than the extent of his friendship, for geologists were as
a class not much better off than himself, and friends were sorely
few. One of his friends from earliest childhood, and nearest neighbor
in Quincy, Frank Emmons, had become a geologist and joined
the Fortieth Parallel Survey under Government. At Washington
in the winter of 1869–70, Emmons had invited Adams to go out
with him on one of the field-parties in summer. Of course when
Adams took the Review he put it at the service of the Survey, and
regretted only that he could not do more. When the first year of
professing and editing was at last over, and his July North American
appeared, he drew a long breath of relief, and took the next
train for the West. Of his year's work he was no judge. He had
become a small spring in a large mechanism, and his work counted
only in the sum; but he had been treated civilly by everybody, and
he felt at home even in Boston. Putting in his pocket the July
number of the North American, with a notice of the Fortieth Parallel
Survey by Professor J. D. Whitney, he started for the plains
and the Rocky Mountains.

In the year 1871, the West was still fresh, and the Union Pacific
was young. Beyond the Missouri River, one felt the atmosphere of
Indians and buffaloes. One saw the last vestiges of an old education,
worth studying if one would; but it was not that which Adams
sought; rather, he came out to spy upon the land of the future. The
Survey occasionally borrowed troopers from the nearest station in
case of happening on hostile Indians, but otherwise the topographers
and geologists thought more about minerals than about
Sioux. They held under their hammers a thousand miles of mineral
country with all its riddles to solve, and its stores of possible wealth
to mark. They felt the future in their hands.

Emmons's party was out of reach in the Uintahs, but Arnold
Hague's had come in to Laramie for supplies, and they took charge
of Adams for a time. Their wanderings or adventures matter
nothing to the story of education. They were all hardened mountaineers
and surveyors who took everything for granted, and spared
each other the most wearisome bore of English and Scotch life,
the stories of the big game they killed. A bear was an occasional
amusement; a wapiti was a constant necessity; but the only wild
animal dangerous to man was a rattlesnake or a skunk. One shot
for amusement, but one had other matters to talk about.

Adams enjoyed killing big game, but loathed the labor of cutting
it up; so that he rarely unslung the little carbine he was in a manner
required to carry. On the other hand, he liked to wander off
alone on his mule, and pass the day fishing a mountain stream or
exploring a valley. One morning when the party was camped
high above Estes Park, on the flank of Long's Peak, he borrowed
a rod, and rode down over a rough trail into Estes Park, for some
trout. The day was fine, and hazy with the smoke of forest fires
a thousand miles away; the park stretched its English beauties
off to the base of its bordering mountains in natural landscape
and archaic peace; the stream was just fishy enough to tempt
lingering along its banks. Hour after hour the sun moved westward
and the fish moved eastward, or disappeared altogether,
until at last when the fisherman cinched his mule, sunset was
nearer than he thought. Darkness caught him before he could
catch his trail. Not caring to tumble into some fifty-foot hole,
he "allowed" he was lost, and turned back. In half-an-hour he
was out of the hills, and under the stars of Estes Park, but he saw
no prospect of supper or of bed.

Estes Park was large enough to serve for a bed on a summer
night for an army of professors, but the supper question offered
difficulties. There was but one cabin in the Park, near its entrance,
and he felt no great confidence in finding it, but he thought his mule
cleverer than himself, and the dim lines of mountain crest against

the stars fenced his range of error. The patient mule plodded on
without other road than the gentle slope of the ground, and some
two hours must have passed before a light showed in the distance.
As the mule came up to the cabin door, two or three men came
out to see the stranger.

One of these men was Clarence King on his way up to the camp.
Adams fell into his arms. As with most friendships, it was never a
matter of growth or doubt. Friends are born in archaic horizons;
they were shaped with the Pteraspis in Siluria; they have nothing
to do with the accident of space. King had come up that day from
Greeley in a light four-wheeled buggy, over a trail hardly fit for
a commissariat mule, as Adams had reason to know since he went
back in the buggy. In the cabin, luxury provided a room and one
bed for guests. They shared the room and the bed, and talked till
far towards dawn.

King had everything to interest and delight Adams. He knew
more than Adams did of art and poetry; he knew America, especially
west of the hundredth meridian, better than any one; he
knew the professor by heart, and he knew the Congressman better
than he did the professor. He knew even women; even the American
woman; even the New York woman, which is saying much,
Incidentally he knew more practical geology than was good for
him, and saw ahead at least one generation further than the textbooks.
That he saw right was a different matter. Since the beginning
of time no man has lived who is known to have seen right;
the charm of King was that he saw what others did and a great
deal more. His wit and humor; his bubbling energy which swept
every one into the current of his interest; his personal charm of
youth and manners; his faculty of giving and taking, profusely,
lavishly, whether in thought or in money as though he were Nature
herself, marked him almost alone among Americans. He had in
him something of the Greek—a touch of Alcibiades or Alexander.
One Clarence King only existed in the world.

A new friend is always a miracle, but at thirty-three years old,

such a bird of paradise rising in the sage-brush was an avatar. One
friend in a lifetime is much; two are many; three are hardly possible.
Friendship needs a certain parallelism of life, a community
of thought, a rivalry of aim. King, like Adams, and all their generation,
was at that moment passing the critical point of his career.
The one, coming from the west, saturated with the sunshine of
the Sierras, met the other, drifting from the east, drenched in the
fogs of London, and both had the same problems to handle—
the same stock of implements—the same field to work in; above
all, the same obstacles to overcome.

As a companion, King's charm was great, but this was not the
quality that so much attracted Adams, nor could he affect even
distant rivalry on this ground. Adams could never tell a story,
chiefly because he always forgot it; and he was never guilty of
a witticism, unless by accident. King and the Fortieth Parallel
influenced him in a way far more vital. The lines of their lives converged,
but King had moulded and directed his life logically, scientifically,
as Adams thought American life should be directed.
He had given himself education all of a piece, yet broad. Standing
in the middle of his career, where their paths at last came together,
he could look back and look forward on a straight line,
with scientific knowledge for its base. Adams's life, past or future,
was a succession of violent breaks or waves, with no base at all.
King's abnormal energy had already won him great success. None
of his contemporaries had done so much, single-handed, or were
likely to leave so deep a trail. He had managed to induce Congress
to adopt almost its first modern act of legislation. He had organized,
as a civil—not military—measure, a Government Survey.
He had paralleled the Continental Railway in Geology; a feat as
yet unequalled by other governments which had as a rule no continents
to survey. He was creating one of the classic scientific
works of the century. The chances were great that he could,
whenever he chose to quit the Government service, take the pick
of the gold and silver, copper or coal, and build up his fortune

as he pleased. Whatever prize he wanted lay ready for him—
scientific, social, literary, political—and he knew how to take
them in turn. With ordinary luck he would die at eighty the richest
and most many-sided genius of his day.

So little egoistic he was that none of his friends felt envy of his
extraordinary superiority, but rather grovelled before it, so that
women were jealous of the power he had over men; but women
were many and Kings were one. The men worshipped not so
much their friend, as the ideal American they all wanted to be.
The women were jealous because, at heart, King had no faith in
the American woman; he loved types more robust.

The young men of the Fortieth Parallel had Californian instincts;
they were brothers of Bret Harte. They felt no leanings towards
the simple uniformities of Lyell and Darwin; they saw little proof of
slight and imperceptible changes; to them, catastrophe was the law
of change; they cared little for simplicity and much for complexity;
but it was the complexity of Nature, not of New York or even of
the Mississippi Valley. King loved paradox; he started them like
rabbits, and cared for them no longer, when caught or lost; but
they delighted Adams, for they helped, among other things, to
persuade him that history was more amusing than science. The
only question left open to doubt was their relative money value.

In Emmons's camp, far up in the Uintahs, these talks were continued
till the frosts became sharp in the mountains. History and
science spread out in personal horizons towards goals no longer
far away. No more education was possible for either man. Such
as they were, they had got to stand the chances of the world they
lived in; and when Adams started back to Cambridge, to take
up again the humble tasks of schoolmaster and editor he was harnessed
to his cart. Education, systematic or accidental, had done
its worst. Henceforth, he went on, submissive.