The education of Henry Adams; an autobiography. |
| I. | CHAPTER I
QUINCY (1838–1848) |
| II. |
| III. |
| IV. |
| V. |
| VI. |
| VII. |
| VIII. |
| IX. |
| X. |
| XI. |
| XII. |
| XIII. |
| XIV. |
| XV. |
| XVI. |
| XVII. |
| XVIII. |
| XIX. |
| XX. |
| XXI. |
| XXII. |
| XXIII. |
| XXIV. |
| XXV. |
| XXVI. |
| XXVII. |
| XXVIII. |
| XXIX. |
| XXX. |
| XXXI. |
| XXXII. |
| XXXIII. |
| XXXIV. |
| XXXV. |
 | THE EDUCATION
OF HENRY ADAMS The education of Henry Adams; |  |
THE EDUCATION
OF HENRY ADAMS
CHAPTER I
QUINCY (1838–1848)
UNDER the shadow of Boston State House, turning its
back on the house of John Hancock, the little passage
called Hancock Avenue runs, or ran, from Beacon
Street, skirting the State House grounds, to Mount Vernon Street,
on the summit of Beacon Hill; and there, in the third house below
Mount Vernon Place, February 16, 1838, a child was born, and
christened later by his uncle, the minister of the First Church after
the tenets of Boston Unitarianism, as Henry Brooks Adams.
Had he been born in Jerusalem under the shadow of the Temple
and circumcised in the Synagogue by his uncle the high priest,
under the name of Israel Cohen, he would scarcely have been
more distinctly branded, and not much more heavily handicapped
in the races of the coming century, in running for such stakes as
the century was to offer; but, on the other hand, the ordinary
traveller, who does not enter the field of racing, finds advantage in
being, so to speak, ticketed through life, with the safeguards of
an old, established traffic. Safeguards are often irksome, but sometimes
convenient, and if one needs them at all, one is apt to need
them badly. A hundred years earlier, such safeguards as his would
have secured any young man's success; and although in 1838 their
value was not very great compared with what they would have
had in 1738, yet the mere accident of starting a twentieth-century
career from a nest of associations so colonial—so troglodytic—
as the First Church, the Boston State House, Beacon Hill, John
Hancock and John Adams, Mount Vernon Street and Quincy, all
as to offer a subject of curious speculation to the baby long after
he had witnessed the solution. What could become of such a
child of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when he should
wake up to find himself required to play the game of the twentieth?
Had he been consulted, would he have cared to play the game at
all, holding such cards as he held, and suspecting that the game
was to be one of which neither he nor any one else back to the
beginning of time knew the rules or the risks or the stakes? He
was not consulted and was not responsible, but had he been taken
into the confidence of his parents, he would certainly have told
them to change nothing as far as concerned him. He would have
been astounded by his own luck. Probably no child, born in the
year, held better cards than he. Whether life was an honest game
of chance, or whether the cards were marked and forced, he could
not refuse to play his excellent hand. He could never make the
usual plea of irresponsibility. He accepted the situation as though
he had been a party to it, and under the same circumstances would
do it again, the more readily for knowing the exact values. To his
life as a whole he was a consenting, contracting party and partner
from the moment he was born to the moment he died. Only with
that understanding—as a consciously assenting member in full
partnership with the society of his age—had his education an
interest to himself or to others.
As it happened, he never got to the point of playing the game
at all; he lost himself in the study of it, watching the errors of the
players; but this is the only interest in the story, which otherwise
has no moral and little incident. A story of education—seventy
years of it—the practical value remains to the end in doubt,
like other values about which men have disputed since the birth
of Cain and Abel; but the practical value of the universe has never
been stated in dollars. Although every one cannot be a Gargantua-Napoleon-Bismarck
and walk off with the great bells of Notre
Dame, every one must bear his own universe, and most persons are
to carry theirs.
This problem of education, started in 1838, went on for three
years, while the baby grew, like other babies, unconsciously, as
a vegetable, the outside world working as it never had worked
before, to get his new universe ready for him. Often in old age
he puzzled over the question whether, on the doctrine of chances,
he was at liberty to accept himself or his world as an accident.
No such accident had ever happened before in human experience.
For him, alone, the old universe was thrown into the ash-heap and
a new one created. He and his eighteenth-century, troglodytic
Boston were suddenly cut apart—separated forever—in act
if not in sentiment, by the opening of the Boston and Albany
Railroad; the appearance of the first Cunard steamers in the bay;
and the telegraphic messages which carried from Baltimore to
Washington the news that Henry Clay and James K. Polk were
nominated for the Presidency. This was in May, 1844; he was
six years old; his new world was ready for use, and only fragments
of the old met his eyes.
Of all this that was being done to complicate his education, he
knew only the color of yellow. He first found himself sitting on a
yellow kitchen floor in strong sunlight. He was three years old
when he took this earliest step in education; a lesson of color.
The second followed soon; a lesson of taste. On December 3,
1841, he developed scarlet fever. For several days he was as good
as dead, reviving only under the careful nursing of his family.
When he began to recover strength, about January 1, 1842, his
hunger must have been stronger than any other pleasure or pain,
for while in after life he retained not the faintest recollection of
his illness, he remembered quite clearly his aunt entering the sickroom
bearing in her hand a saucer with a baked apple.
The order of impressions retained by memory might naturally
be that of color and taste, although one would rather suppose that
the sense of pain would be first to educate. In fact, the third
could be removed, he was bundled up in blankets and carried from
the little house in Hancock Avenue to a larger one which his parents
were to occupy for the rest of their lives in the neighboring Mount
Vernon Street. The season was midwinter, January 10, 1842, and
he never forgot his acute distress for want of air under his blankets,
or the noises of moving furniture.
As a means of variation from a normal type, sickness in childhood
ought to have a certain value not to be classed under any
fitness or unfitness of natural selection; and especially scarlet
fever affected boys seriously, both physically and in character,
though they might through life puzzle themselves to decide
whether it had fitted or unfitted them for success; but this fever
of Henry Adams took greater and greater importance in his eyes,
from the point of view of education, the longer he lived. At first,
the effect was physical. He fell behind his brothers two or three
inches in height, and proportionally in bone and weight. His
character and processes of mind seemed to share in this fining-down
process of scale. He was not good in a fight, and his nerves
were more delicate than boys' nerves ought to be. He exaggerated
these weaknesses as he grew older. The habit of doubt; of
distrusting his own judgment and of totally rejecting the judgment
of the world; the tendency to regard every question as open; the
hesitation to act except as a choice of evils; the shirking of responsibility;
the love of line, form, quality; the horror of ennui;
the passion for companionship and the antipathy to society—
all these are well-known qualities of New England character in
no way peculiar to individuals but in this instance they seemed
to be stimulated by the fever, and Henry Adams could never
make up his mind whether, on the whole, the change of character
was morbid or healthy, good or bad for his purpose. His brothers
were the type; he was the variation.
As far as the boy knew, the sickness did not affect him at all,
and he grew up in excellent health, bodily and mental, taking
and enjoying much of it as keenly as any other boy of his
age. He seemed to himself quite normal, and his companions
seemed always to think him so. Whatever was peculiar about
him was education, not character, and came to him, directly and
indirectly, as the result of that eighteenth-century inheritance
which he took with his name.
The atmosphere of education in which he lived was colonial,
revolutionary, almost Cromwellian, as though he were steeped,
from his greatest grandmother's birth, in the odor of political
crime. Resistance to something was the law of New England nature;
the boy looked out on the world with the instinct of resistance;
for numberless generations his predecessors had viewed the
world chiefly as a thing to be reformed, filled with evil forces to
be abolished, and they saw no reason to suppose that they had
wholly succeeded in the abolition; the duty was unchanged. That
duty implied not only resistance to evil, but hatred of it. Boys
naturally look on all force as an enemy, and generally find it so, but
the New Englander, whether boy or man, in his long struggle with
a stingy or hostile universe, had learned also to love the pleasure
of hating; his joys were few.
Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, had always
been the systematic organization of hatreds, and Massachusetts
politics had been as harsh as the climate. The chief charm of
New England was harshness of contrasts and extremes of sensibility
—a cold that froze the blood, and a heat that boiled it
—so that the pleasure of hating—one's self if no better victim
offered—was not its rarest amusement; but the charm was a
true and natural child of the soil, not a cultivated weed of the
ancients. The violence of the contrast was real and made the
strongest motive of education. The double exterior nature gave
life its relative values. Winter and summer, cold and heat, town
and country, force and freedom, marked two modes of life and
thought, balanced like lobes of the brain. Town was winter
piled with six feet of snow in the middle; frosts that made the
snow sing under wheels or runners; thaws when the streets became
dangerous to cross; society of uncles, aunts, and cousins
who expected children to behave themselves, and who were not
always gratified; above all else, winter represented the desire to
escape and go free. Town was restraint, law, unity. Country,
only seven miles away, was liberty, diversity, outlawry, the endless
delight of mere sense impressions given by nature for nothing,
and breathed by boys without knowing it.
Boys are wild animals, rich in the treasures of sense, but the
New England boy had a wider range of emotions than boys of
more equable climates. He felt his nature crudely, as it was
meant. To the boy Henry Adams, summer was drunken. Among
senses, smell was the strongest—smell of hot pine-woods and
sweet-fern in the scorching summer noon; of new-mown hay; of
ploughed earth; of box hedges; of peaches, lilacs, syringas; of
stables, barns, cow-yards; of salt water and low tide on the
marshes; nothing came amiss. Next to smell came taste, and the
children knew the taste of everything they saw or touched, from
pennyroyal and flagroot to the shell of a pignut and the letters
of a spelling-book—the taste of A-B, AB, suddenly revived on
the boy's tongue sixty years afterwards. Light, line, and color
as sensual pleasures, came later and were as crude as the rest.
The New England light is glare, and the atmosphere harshens
color. The boy was a full man before he ever knew what was
meant by atmosphere; his idea of pleasure in light was the blaze
of a New England sun. His idea of color was a peony, with the
dew of early morning on its petals. The intense blue of the sea,
as he saw it a mile or two away, from the Quincy hills; the cumuli
in a June afternoon sky; the strong reds and greens and purples
of colored prints and children's picture-books, as the American
colors then ran; these were ideals. The opposites or antipathies,
were the cold grays of November evenings, and the thick, muddy
could not but develop a double nature. Life was a double thing.
After a January blizzard, the boy who could look with pleasure
into the violent snow-glare of the cold white sunshine, with its
intense light and shade, scarcely knew what was meant by tone.
He could reach it only by education.
Winter and summer, then, were two hostile lives, and bred two
separate natures. Winter was always the effort to live; summer was
tropical license. Whether the children rolled in the grass, or
waded in the brook, or swam in the salt ocean, or sailed in the
bay, or fished for smelts in the creeks, or netted minnows in the
salt-marshes, or took to the pine-woods and the granite quarries,
or chased muskrats and hunted snapping-turtles in the swamps,
or mushrooms or nuts on the autumn hills, summer and country
were always sensual living, while winter was always compulsory
learning. Summer was the multiplicity of nature; winter was
school.
The bearing of the two seasons on the education of Henry
Adams was no fancy; it was the most decisive force he ever knew;
it ran though life, and made the division between its perplexing,
warring, irreconcilable problems, irreducible opposites, with growing
emphasis to the last year of study. From earliest childhood the
boy was accustomed to feel that, for him, life was double. Winter
and summer, town and country, law and liberty, were hostile,
and the man who pretended they were not, was in his eyes a
schoolmaster—that is, a man employed to tell lies to little boys.
Though Quincy was but two hours' walk from Beacon Hill, it
belonged in a different world. For two hundred years, every
Adams, from father to son, had lived within sight of State Street,
and sometimes had lived in it, yet none had ever taken kindly to
the town, or been taken kindly by it. The boy inherited his
double nature. He knew as yet nothing about his great-grandfather,
who had died a dozen years before his own birth: he took
for granted that any great-grandfather of his must have always
character from his own. Never for a moment did he connect
the two ideas of Boston and John Adams; they were separate
and antagonistic; the idea of John Adams went with Quincy. He
knew his grandfather John Quincy Adams only as an old man of
seventy-five or eighty who was friendly and gentle with him, but
except that he heard his grandfather always called "the President,"
and his grandmother "the Madam," he had no reason to
suppose that his Adams grandfather differed in character from his
Brooks grandfather who was equally kind and benevolent. He
liked the Adams side best, but for no other reason than that it
reminded him of the country, the summer, and the absence of restraint.
Yet he felt also that Quincy was in away inferior to Boston,
and that socially Boston looked down on Quincy. The reason was
clear enough even to a five-year old child. Quincy had no Boston
style. Little enough style had either; a simpler manner of life
and thought could hardly exist, short of cave-dwelling. The
flint-and-steel with which his grandfather Adams used to light
his own fires in the early morning was still on the mantelpiece of
his study. The idea of a livery or even a dress for servants, or
of an evening toilette, was next to blasphemy. Bathrooms, water-supplies,
lighting, heating, and the whole array of domestic comforts,
were unknown at Quincy. Boston had already a bathroom,
a water-supply, a furnace, and gas. The superiority of Boston
was evident, but a child liked it no better for that.
The magnificence of his grandfather Brooks's house in Pearl
Street or South Street has long ago disappeared, but perhaps his
country house at Medford may still remain to show what impressed
the mind of a boy in 1845 with the idea of city splendor. The President's
place at Quincy was the larger and older and far the more
interesting of the two; but a boy felt at once its inferiority in
fashion. It showed plainly enough its want of wealth. It smacked
of colonial age, but not of Boston style or plush curtains. To the
end of his life he never quite overcame the prejudice thus drawn
care for nineteenth-century style. He was never able to adopt
it, any more than his father or grandfather or great-grandfather
had done. Not that he felt it as particularly hostile, for he reconciled
himself to much that was worse; but because, for some remote
reason, he was born an eighteenth-century child. The old house
at Quincy was eighteenth century. What style it had was in its
Queen Anne mahogany panels and its Louis Seize chairs and sofas.
The panels belonged to an old colonial Vassall who built the house;
the furniture had been brought back from Paris in 1789 or 1801
or 1817, along with porcelain and books and much else of old diplomatic
remnants; and neither of the two eighteenth-century styles
—neither English Queen Anne nor French Louis Seize—was comfortable
for a boy, or for any one else. The dark mahogany had
been painted white to suit daily life in winter gloom. Nothing
seemed to favor, for a child's objects, the older forms. On the
contrary, most boys, as well as grown-up people, preferred the
new, with good reason, and the child felt himself distinctly at a
disadvantage for the taste.
Nor had personal preference any share in his bias. The Brooks
grandfather was as amiable and as sympathetic as the Adams
grandfather. Both were born in 1767, and both died in 1848.
Both were kind to children, and both belonged rather to the
eighteenth than to the nineteenth centuries. The child knew no
difference between them except that one was associated with
winter and the other with summer; one with Boston, the other
with Quincy. Even with Medford, the association was hardly
easier. Once as a very young boy he was taken to pass a few days
with his grandfather Brooks under charge of his aunt, but became
so violently homesick that within twenty-four hours he was brought
back in disgrace. Yet he could not remember ever being seriously
homesick again.
The attachment to Quincy was not altogether sentimental or
wholly sympathetic. Quincy was not a bed of thornless roses.
a cruel universe combined to crush a child. As though three or
four vigorous brothers and sisters, with the best will, were not
enough to crush any child, every one else conspired towards an
education which he hated. From cradle to grave this problem of
running order through chaos, direction through space, discipline
through freedom, unity through multiplicity, has always been,
and must always be, the task of education, as it is the moral of
religion, philosophy, science, art, politics, and economy; but a
boy's will is his life, and he dies when it is broken, as the colt dies
in harness, taking a new nature in becoming tame. Rarely has
the boy felt kindly towards his tamers. Between him and his master
has always been war. Henry Adams never knew a boy of his
generation to like a master, and the task of remaining on friendly
terms with one's own family, in such a relation, was never easy.
All the more singular it seemed afterwards to him that his first
serious contact with the President should have been a struggle of
will, in which the old man almost necessarily defeated the boy,
but instead of leaving, as usual in such defeats, a lifelong sting,
left rather an impression of as fair treatment as could be expected
from a natural enemy. The boy met seldom with such restraint.
He could not have been much more than six years old at the time
—seven at the utmost—and his mother had taken him to Quincy
for a long stay with the President during the summer. What
became of the rest of the family he quite forgot; but he distinctly
remembered standing at the house door one summer morning in
a passionate outburst of rebellion against going to school. Naturally
his mother was the immediate victim of his rage; that is what
mothers are for, and boys also; but in this case the boy had his
mother at unfair disadvantage, for she was a guest, and had no
means of enforcing obedience. Henry showed a certain tactical
ability by refusing to start, and he met all efforts at compulsion
by successful, though too vehement protest. He was in fair way
to win, and was holding his own, with sufficient energy, at the
library, when the door opened, and the old man slowly
came down. Putting on his hat, he took the boy's hand without
a word, and walked with him, paralyzed by awe, up the road to
the town. After the first moments of consternation at this interference
in a domestic dispute, the boy reflected that an old gentleman
close on eighty would never trouble himself to walk near a
mile on a hot summer morning over a shadeless road to take a
boy to school, and that it would be strange if a lad imbued with the
passion of freedom could not find a corner to dodge around, somewhere
before reaching the school door. Then and always, the
boy insisted that this reasoning justified his apparent submission;
but the old man did not stop, and the boy saw all his strategical
points turned, one after another, until he found himself seated
inside the school, and obviously the centre of curious if not malevolent
criticism. Not till then did the President release his hand
and depart.
The point was that this act, contrary to the inalienable rights of
boys, and nullifying the social compact, ought to have made him
dislike his grandfather for life. He could not recall that it had
this effect even for a moment. With a certain maturity of mind,
the child must have recognized that the President, though a tool
of tyranny, had done his disreputable work with a certain intelligence.
He had shown no temper, no irritation, no personal feeling,
and had made no display of force. Above all, he had held his
tongue. During their long walk he had said nothing; he had
uttered no syllable of revolting cant about the duty of obedience
and the wickedness of resistance to law; he had shown no concern
in the matter; hardly even a consciousness of the boy's existence.
Probably his mind at that moment was actually troubling itself
little about his grandson's iniquities, and much about the iniquities
of President Polk, but the boy could scarcely at that age feel the
whole satisfaction of thinking that President Polk was to be the
vicarious victim of his own sins, and he gave his grandfather credit
He admitted force as a form of right; he admitted even
temper, under protest; but the seeds of a moral education would
at that moment have fallen on the stoniest soil in Quincy, which
is, as every one knows, the stoniest glacial and tidal drift known
in any Puritan land.
Neither party to this momentary disagreement can have felt
rancor, for during these three or four summers the old President's
relations with the boy were friendly and almost intimate. Whether
his older brothers and sisters were still more favored he failed to
remember, but he was himself admitted to a sort of familiarity
which, when in his turn he had reached old age, rather shocked
him, for it must have sometimes tried the President's patience.
He hung about the library; handled the books; deranged the papers;
ransacked the drawers; searched the old purses and pocket-books
for foreign coins; drew the sword-cane; snapped the travelling-pistols;
upset everything in the corners, and penetrated the
President's dressing-closet where a row of tumblers, inverted on the
shelf, covered caterpillars which were supposed to become moths
or butterflies, but never did. The Madam bore with fortitude the
loss of the tumblers which her husband purloined for these hatcheries;
but she made protest when he carried off her best cut-glass
bowls to plant with acorns or peachstones that he might see the
roots grow, but which, she said, he commonly forgot like the
caterpillars.
At that time the President rode the hobby of tree-culture, and
some fine old trees should still remain to witness it, unless they
have been improved off the ground; but his was a restless mind,
and although he took his hobbies seriously and would have been
annoyed had his grandchild asked whether he was bored like an
English duke, he probably cared more for the processes than for
the results, so that his grandson was saddened by the sight and
smell of peaches and pears, the best of their kind, which he brought
up from the garden to rot on his shelves for seed. With the inherited
brought up to him in his study the finest peaches
he found in the garden, and ate only the less perfect. Naturally
he ate more by way of compensation, but the act showed that he
bore no grudge. As for his grandfather, it is even possible that
he may have felt a certain self-reproach for his temporary rôle of
schoolmaster—seeing that his own career did not offer proof of
the worldly advantages of docile obedience—for there still exists
somewhere a little volume of critically edited Nursery Rhymes
with the boy's name in full written in the President's trembling
hand on the fly-leaf. Of course there was also the Bible, given to
each child at birth, with the proper inscription in the President's
hand on the fly-leaf; while their grandfather Brooks supplied the
silver mugs.
So many Bibles and, silver mugs had to be supplied, that a new
house, or cottage, was built to hold them. It was "on the hill,"
five minutes' walk above "the old house," with a far view eastward
over Quincy Bay, and northward over Boston. Till his
twelfth year, the child passed his summers there, and his pleasures
of childhood mostly centred in it. Of education he had as yet
little to complain. Country schools were not very serious. Nothing
stuck to the mind except home impressions, and the sharpest
were those of kindred children; but as influences that warped a
mind, none compared with the mere effect of the back of the
President's bald head, as he sat in his pew on Sundays, in line with
that of President Quincy, who, though some ten years younger,
seemed to children about the same age. Before railways entered
the New England town, every parish church showed half-a-dozen
of these leading citizens, with gray hair, who sat on the main aisle
in the best pews, and had sat there, or in some equivalent dignity,
since the time of St. Augustine, if not since the glacial epoch. It
was unusual for boys to sit behind a President grandfather, and
to read over his head the tablet in memory of a President great-grandfather,
who had "pledged his life, his fortune, and his sacred
but boys naturally supposed, without much reasoning, that other
boys had the equivalent of President grandfathers, and that
churches would always go on, with the bald-headed leading citizens
on the main aisle, and Presidents or their equivalents on
the walls. The Irish gardener once said to the child: "You'll be
thinkin' you'll be President too!" The casuality of the remark
made so strong an impression on his mind that he never forgot it.
He could not remember ever to have thought on the subject; to
him, that there should be a doubt of his being President was a
new idea. What had been would continue to be. He doubted
neither about Presidents nor about Churches, and no one suggested
at that time a doubt whether a system of society which
had lasted since Adam would outlast one Adams more.
The Madam was a little more remote than the President, but
more decorative. She stayed much in her own room with the
Dutch tiles, looking out on her garden with the box walks, and
seemed a fragile creature to a boy who sometimes brought her a
note or a message, and took distinct pleasure in looking at her
delicate face under what seemed to him very becoming caps. He
liked her refined figure; her gentle voice and manner; her vague
effect of not belonging there, but to Washington or to Europe,
like her furniture, and writing-desk with little glass doors above
and little eighteenth-century volumes in old binding, labelled
"Peregrine Pickle" or "Tom Jones" or "Hannah More." Try
as she might, the Madam could never be Bostonian, and it was
her cross in life, but to the boy it was her charm. Even at that
age, he felt drawn to it. The Madam's life had been in truth far
from Boston. She was born in London in 1775, daughter of Joshua
Johnson, an American merchant, brother of Governor Thomas
Johnson of Maryland; and Catherine Nuth, of an English family
in London. Driven from England by the Revolutionary War,
Joshua Johnson took his family to Nantes, where they remained
tall the peace. The girl Louisa Catherine was nearly ten years
must have been confused; but the influence of the Johnsons and
the services of Joshua obtained for him from President Washington
the appointment of Consul in London on the organization of
the Government in 1790. In 1794 President Washington appointed
John Quincy Adams Minister to The Hague. He was twenty-seven
years old when he returned to London, and found the Consul's
house a very agreeable haunt. Louisa was then twenty.
At that time, and long afterwards, the Consul's house, far more
than the Minister's, was the centre of contact for travelling Americans,
either official or other. The Legation was a shifting point,
between 1785 and 1815; but the Consulate, far down in the City,
near the Tower, was convenient and inviting; so inviting that it
proved fatal to young Adams. Louisa was charming, like a Romney
portrait, but among her many charms that of being a New
England woman was not one. The defect was serious. Her future
mother-in-law, Abigail, a famous New England woman whose
authority over her turbulent husband, the second President, was
hardly so great as that which she exercised over her son, the sixth
to be, was troubled by the fear that Louisa might not be made of
stuff stern enough, or brought up in conditions severe enough,
to suit a New England climate, or to make an efficient wife for
her paragon son, and Abigail was right on that point, as on most
others where sound judgment was involved; but sound judgment
is sometimes a source of weakness rather than of force, and
John Quincy already had reason to think that his mother held
sound judgments on the subject of daughters-in-law which human
nature, since the fall of Eve, made Adams helpless to realize.
Being three thousand miles away from his mother, and equally
far in love, he married Louisa in London, July 26, 1797, and took
her to Berlin to be the head of the United States Legation.
During three or four exciting years, the young bride lived in
Berlin; whether she was happy or not, whether she was content
or not, whether she was socially successful or not, her descendants
have become educated there for a life in Quincy or Boston. In
1801 the overthrow of the Federalist Party drove her and her
husband to America, and she became at last a member of the
Quincy household, but by that time her children needed all her
attention, and she remained there with occasional winters in
Boston and Washington, till 1809. Her husband was made Senator
in 1803, and in 1809 was appointed Minister to Russia. She
went with him to St. Petersburg, taking her baby, Charles Francis,
born in 1807; but broken-hearted at having to leave her two older
boys behind. The life at St. Petersburg was hardly gay for her;
they were far too poor to shine in that extravagant society; but she
survived it, though her little girl baby did not, and in the winter
of 1814–15, alone with the boy of seven years old, crossed Europe
from St. Petersburg to Paris, in her travelling-carriage, passing
through the armies, and reaching Paris in the Cent Jours after
Napoleon's return from Elba. Her husband next went to England
as Minister, and she was for two years at the Court of the Regent.
In 1817 her husband came home to be Secretary of State, and she
lived for eight years in F Street, doing her work of entertainer for
President Monroe's administration. Next she lived four miserable
years in the White House. When that chapter was closed in
1829, she had earned the right to be tired and delicate, but she
still had fifteen years to serve as wife of a Member of the House,
after her husband went back to Congress in 1833. Then it was
that the little Henry, her grandson, first remembered her, from
1843 to 1848, sitting in her panelled room, at breakfast, with her
heavy silver teapot and sugar-bowl and cream-jug, which still
exist somewhere as an heirloom of the modern safety-vault. By
that time she was seventy years old or more, and thoroughly weary
of being beaten about a stormy world. To the boy she seemed
singularly peaceful, a vision of silver gray, presiding over her old
President and her Queen Anne mahogany; an exotic, like her
Sevres china; an object of deference to every one, and of great
had been fifty years before, on her wedding-day, in the shadow
of the Tower of London.
Such a figure was even less fitted than that of her old husband,
the President, to impress on a boy's mind, the standards of the
coming century. She was Louis Seize, like the furniture. The
boy knew nothing of her interior life, which had been, as the venerable
Abigail, long since at peace, foresaw, one of severe stress and
little pure satisfaction. He never dreamed that from her might
come some of those doubts and self-questionings, those hesitations,
those rebellions against law and discipline, which marked more
than one of her descendants; but he might even then have felt
some vague instinctive suspicion that he was to inherit from her
the seeds of the primal sin, the fall from grace, the curse of Abel,
that he was not of pure New England stock, but half exotic. As
a child of Quincy he was not a true Bostonian, but even as a
child of Quincy he inherited a quarter taint of Maryland blood.
Charles Francis, half Marylander by birth, had hardly seen Boston
till he was ten years old, when his parents left him there at
school in 1817, and he never forgot the experience. He was to be
nearly as old as his mother had been in 1845, before he quite accepted
Boston, or Boston quite accepted him.
A boy who began his education in these surroundings, with
physical strength inferior to that of his brothers, and with a certain
delicacy of mind and bone, ought rightly to have felt at home in
the eighteenth century and should, in proper self-respect, have
rebelled against the standards of the nineteenth. The atmosphere
of his first ten years must have been very like that of his
grandfather at the same age, from 1767 till 1776, barring the battle
of Bunker Hill, and even as late as 1846, the battle of Bunker Hill
remained actual. The tone of Boston society was colonial. The
true Bostonian always knelt in self-abasement before the majesty
of English standards; far from concealing it as a weakness, he
was proud of it as his strength. The eighteenth century ruled
rather earlier than most of his mates.
Indeed this prehistoric stage of education ended rather abruptly
with his tenth year. One winter morning he was conscious of a
certain confusion in the house in Mount Vernon Street, and
gathered, from such words as he could catch, that the President,
who happened to be then staying there, on his way to Washington,
had fallen and hurt himself. Then he heard the word paralysis.
After that day he came to associate the word with the figure of
his grandfather, in a tall-backed, invalid armchair, on one side
of the spare bedroom fireplace, and one of his old friends, Dr.
Parkman or P. P. F. Degrand, on the other side, both dozing.
The end of this first, or ancestral and Revolutionary, chapter
came on February 21, 1848—and the month of February brought
life and death as a family habit—when the eighteenth century,
as an actual and living companion, vanished. If the scene on the
floor of the House, when the old President fell, struck the still
simple-minded American public with a sensation unusually dramatic,
its effect on a ten-year-old boy, whose boy-life was fading away
with the life of his grandfather, could not be slight. One had to
pay for Revolutionary patriots; grandfathers and grandmothers;
Presidents; diplomats; Queen Anne mahogany and Louis Seize
chairs, as well as for Stuart portraits. Such things warp young life.
Americans commonly believed that they ruined it, and perhaps the
practical common-sense of the American mind judged right.
Many a boy might be ruined by much less than the emotions of
the funeral service in the Quincy church, with its surroundings of
national respect and family pride. By another dramatic chance
it happened that the clergyman of the parish, Dr. Lunt, was an
unusual pulpit orator, the ideal of a somewhat austere intellectual
type, such as the school of Buckminster and Channing inherited
from the old Congregational clergy. His extraordinarily refined
appearance, his dignity of manner, his deeply cadenced voice, his
remarkable English and his fine appreciation, gave to the funeral
boy's mind. He was to see many great functions—funerals and
festivals—in after-life, till his only thought was to see no more,
but he never again witnessed anything nearly so impressive to
him as the last services at Quincy over the body of one President
and the ashes of another.
The effect of the Quincy service was deepened by the official
ceremony which afterwards took place in Faneuil Hall, when the
boy was taken to hear his uncle, Edward Everett, deliver a Eulogy.
Like all Mr. Everett's orations, it was an admirable piece of oratory,
such as only an admirable orator and scholar could create;
too good for a ten-year-old boy to appreciate at its value; but already
the boy knew that the dead President could not be in it, and
had even learned why he would have been out of place there; for
knowledge was beginning to come fast. The shadow of the War of
1812 still hung over State Street; the shadow of the Civil War to
come had already begun to darken Faneuil Hall. No rhetoric
could have reconciled Mr. Everett's audience to his subject. How
could he say there, to an assemblage of Bostonians in the heart of
mercantile Boston, that the only distinctive mark of all the
Adamses, since old Sam Adams's father a hundred and fifty years
before, had been their inherited quarrel with State Street, which
had again and again broken out into riot, bloodshed, personal feuds,
foreign and civil war, wholesale banishments and confiscations,
until the history of Florence was hardly more turbulent than that of
Boston? How could he whisper the word Hartford Convention
before the men who had made it? What would have been said had
he suggested the chance of Secession and Civil War?
Thus already, at ten years old, the boy found himself standing
face to face with a dilemma that might have puzzled an early
Christian. What was he?—where was he going? Even then he felt
that something was wrong, but he concluded that it must be Boston.
Quincy had always been right, for Quincy represented a
moral principle—the principle of resistance to Boston. His
hostile to State Street. If State Street was wrong, Quincy must be
right! Turn the dilemma as he pleased, he still came back on the
eighteenth century and the law of Resistance; of Truth; of Duty,
and of Freedom.) He was a ten-year-old priest and politician. He
could under no circumstances have guessed what the next fifty
years had in store, and no one could teach him; but sometimes, in
his old age, he wondered—and could never decide—whether
the most clear and certain knowledge would have helped him.
Supposing he had seen a New York stock-list of 1900, and had
studied the statistics of railways, telegraphs, coal, and steel—
would he have quitted his eighteenth-century, his ancestral prejudices,
his abstract ideals, his semi-clerical training, and the rest,
in order to perform an expiatory pilgrimage to State Street, and
ask for the fatted calf of his grandfather Brooks and a clerkship
in the Suffolk Bank?
Sixty years afterwards he was still unable to make up his mind.
Each course had its advantages, but the material advantages,
looking back, seemed to lie wholly in State Street.
| THE EDUCATION
OF HENRY ADAMS The education of Henry Adams; | |