University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER II
BOSTON (1848–1854)

PETER CHARDON BROOKS, the other grandfather, died
January 1, 1849, bequeathing what was supposed to be
the largest estate in Boston, about two million dollars,
to his seven surviving children: four sons—Edward, Peter
Chardon, Gorham, and Sydney; three daughters—Charlotte,
married to Edward Everett; Ann, married to Nathaniel Frothingham,
minister of the First Church; and Abigail Brown, born April
25, 1808, married September 3, 1829, to Charles Francis Adams,
hardly a year older than herself. Their first child, born in 1830,
was a daughter, named Louisa Catherine, after her Johnson grandmother;
the second was a son, named John Quincy, after his
President grandfather; the third took his father's name, Charles
Francis; while the fourth, being of less account, was in a way given
to his mother, who named him Henry Brooks, after a favorite
brother just lost. More followed, but these, being younger, had
nothing to do with the arduous process of educating.

The Adams connection was singularly small in Boston, but
the family of Brooks was singularly large and even brilliant, and
almost wholly of clerical New England stock. One might have
sought long in much larger and older societies for three brothers-in-law
more distinguished or more scholarly than Edward Everett,
Dr. Frothingham, and Mr. Adams. One might have sought equally
long for seven brothers-in-law more unlike. No doubt they all
bore more or less the stamp of Boston, or at least of Massachusetts
Bay, but the shades of difference amounted to contrasts. Mr.
Everett belonged to Boston hardly more than Mr. Adams. One
of the most ambitious of Bostonians, he had broken bounds early
in life by leaving the Unitarian pulpit to take a seat in Congress
where he had given valuable support to J. Q. Adams's administration;

support which, as a social consequence, led to the marriage
of the President's son, Charles Francis, with Mr. Everett's
youngest sister-in-law, Abigail Brooks. The wreck of parties which
marked the reign of Andrew Jackson had interfered with many
promising careers, that of Edward Everett among the rest, but
he had risen with the Whig Party to power, had gone as Minister
to England, and had returned to America with the halo of a European
reputation, and undisputed rank second only to Daniel
Webster as the orator and representative figure of Boston. The
other brother-in-law, Dr. Frothingham, belonged to the same
clerical school, though in manner rather the less clerical of the
two. Neither of them had much in common with Mr. Adams, who
was a younger man, greatly biassed by his father, and by the inherited
feud between Quincy and State Street; but personal relations
were friendly as far as a boy could see, and the innumerable
cousins went regularly to the First Church every Sunday in winter,
and slept through their uncle's sermons, without once thinking
to ask what the sermons were supposed to mean for them.
For two hundred years the First Church had seen the same little
boys, sleeping more or less soundly under the same or similar conditions,
and dimly conscious of the same feuds; but the feuds had
never ceased, and the boys had always grown up to inherit them.
Those of the generation of 1812 had mostly disappeared in 1850;
death had cleared that score; the quarrels of John Adams, and
those of John Quincy Adams were no longer acutely personal;
the game was considered as drawn; and Charles Francis Adams
might then have taken his inherited rights of political leadership
in succession to Mr. Webster and Mr. Everett, his seniors. Between
him and State Street the relation was more natural than
between Edward Everett and State Street; but instead of doing
so, Charles Francis Adams drew himself aloof and renewed the
old war which had already lasted since 1700. He could not help
it. With the record of J. Q. Adams fresh in the popular memory,
his son and his only representative could not make terms with
the slave-power, and the slave-power overshadowed all the great
Boston interests. No doubt Mr. Adams had principles of his
own, as well as inherited, but even his children, who as yet had
no principles, could equally little follow the lead of Mr. Webster
or even of Mr. Seward. They would have lost in consideration
more than they would have gained in patronage. They were
anti-slavery by birth, as their name was Adams and their home
was Quincy. No matter how much they had wished to enter State
Street, they felt that State Street never would trust them, or they
it. Had State Street been Paradise, they must hunger for it in
vain, and it hardly needed Daniel Webster to act as archangel
with the flaming sword, to order them away from the door.

Time and experience, which alter all perspectives, altered this
among the rest, and taught the boy gentler judgment, but even
when only ten years old, his face was already fixed, and his heart
was stone, against State Street; his education was warped beyond
recovery in the direction of Puritan politics. Between him and
his patriot grandfather at the same age, the conditions had changed
little. The year 1848 was like enough to the year 1776 to make a
fair parallel. The parallel, as concerned bias of education, was complete
when, a few months after the death of John Quincy Adams,
a convention of anti-slavery delegates met at Buffalo to organize
a new party and named candidates for the general election in
November: for President, Martin Van Buren; for Vice-President,
Charles Francis Adams.

For any American boy the fact that his father was running for
office would have dwarfed for the time every other excitement,
but even apart from personal bias, the year 1848, for a boy's road
through life, was decisive for twenty years to come. There was
never a side-path of escape. The stamp of 1848 was almost as
indelible as the stamp of 1776, but in the eighteenth or any earlier
century, the stamp mattered less because it was standard, and
every one bore it; while men whose lives were to fall in the generation
between 1865 and 1900 had, first of all, to get rid of it, and

take the stamp that belonged to their time. This was their education.
To outsiders, immigrants, adventurers, it was easy, but the
old Puritan nature rebelled against change. The reason it gave was
forcible. The Puritan thought his thought higher and his moral
standards better than those of his successors. So they were. He
could not be convinced that moral standards had nothing to do
with it, and that utilitarian morality was good enough for him,
as it was for the graceless. Nature had given to the boy Henry a
character that, in any previous century, would have led him into
the Church; he inherited dogma and a priori thought from the
beginning of time; and he scarcely needed a violent reaction like
anti-slavery politics to sweep him back into Puritanism with a
violence as great as that of a religious war.

Thus far he had nothing to do with it; his education was chiefly
inheritance, and during the next five or six years, his father alone
counted for much. If he were to worry successfully through life's
quicksands, he must depend chiefly on his father's pilotage; but,
for his father, the channel lay clear, while for himself an unknown
ocean lay beyond. His father's business in life was to get past the
dangers of the slave-power, or to fix its bounds at least. The task
done, he might be content to let his sons pay for the pilotage; and
it mattered little to his success whether they paid it with their
lives wasted on battle-fields or in misdirected energies and lost
opportunity. The generation that lived from 1840 to 1870 could
do very well with the old forms of education; that which had its
work to do between 1870 and 1900 needed something quite new.

His father's character was therefore the larger part of his education,
as far as any single person affected it, and for that reason, if
for no other, the son was always a much interested critic of his
father's mind and temper. Long after his death as an old man of
eighty, his sons continued to discuss this subject with a good
deal of difference in their points of view. To his son Henry, the
quality that distinguished his father from all the other figures
in the family group, was that, in his opinion, Charles Francis

Adams possessed the only perfectly balanced mind that ever
existed in the name. For a hundred years, every newspaper
scribbler had, with more or less obvious excuse, derided or abused
the older Adamses for want of judgment. They abused Charles
Francis for his judgment. Naturally they never attempted to
assign values to either; that was the children's affair; but the
traits were real. Charles Francis Adams was singular for mental
poise—absence of self-assertion or self-consciousness—the
faculty of standing apart without seeming aware that he was
alone—a balance of mind and temper that neither challenged
nor avoided notice, nor admitted question of superiority or inferiority,
of jealousy, of personal motives, from any source, even
under great pressure. This unusual poise of judgment and temper,
ripened by age, became the more striking to his son Henry as he
learned to measure the mental faculties themselves, which were
in no way exceptional either for depth or range. Charles Francis
Adams's memory was hardly above the average; his mind was not
bold like his grandfather's or restless like his father's, or imaginative
or oratorical—still less mathematical; but it worked with
singular perfection, admirable self-restraint, and instinctive mastery
of form. Within its range it was a model.

The standards of Boston were high, much affected by the
old clerical self-respect which gave the Unitarian clergy unusual
social charm. Dr. Channing, Mr. Everett, Dr. Frothingham,
Dr. Palfrey, President Walker, R. W. Emerson, and other Boston
ministers of the same school, would have commanded distinction
in any society; but the Adamses had little or no affinity
with the pulpit, and still less with its eccentric offshoots, like
Theodore Parker, or Brook Farm, or the philosophy of Concord.
Besides its clergy, Boston showed a literary group, led by Ticknor,
Prescott, Longfellow, Motley, O. W. Holmes; but Mr.
Adams was not one of them; as a rule they were much too Websterian.
Even in science Boston could claim a certain eminence,
especially in medicine, but Mr. Adams cared very little for science.

He stood alone. He had no master—hardly even his father. He
had no scholars—hardly even his sons.

Almost alone among his Boston contemporaries, he was not
English in feeling or in sympathies. Perhaps a hundred years of
acute hostility to England had something to do with this family
trait; but in his case it went further and became indifference to
social distinction. Never once in forty years of intimacy did his
son notice in him a trace of snobbishness. He was one of the
exceedingly small number of Americans to whom an English duke
or duchess seemed to be indifferent, and royalty itself nothing
more than a slightly inconvenient presence. This was, it is true,
rather the tone of English society in his time, but Americans were
largely responsible for changing it, and Mr. Adams had every
possible reason for affecting the manner of a courtier even if he
did not feel the sentiment. Never did his son see him flatter or
vilify, or show a sign of envy or jealousy; never a shade of vanity
or self-conceit. Never a tone of arrogance! Never a gesture of
pride!

The same thing might perhaps have been said of John Quincy
Adams, but in him his associates averred that it was accompanied
by mental restlessness and often by lamentable want of judgment.
No one ever charged Charles Francis Adams with this fault. The
critics charged him with just the opposite defect. They called him
cold. No doubt, such perfect poise—such intuitive self-adjustment
—was not maintained by nature without a sacrifice of the
qualities which would have upset it. No doubt, too, that even
his restless-minded, introspective, self-conscious children who
knew him best were much too ignorant of the world and of human
nature to suspect how rare and complete was the model before
their eyes. A coarser instrument would have impressed them more.
Average human nature is very coarse, and its ideals must necessarily
be average. The world never loved perfect poise. What
the world does love is commonly absence of poise, for it has to be
amused. Napoleons and Andrew Jacksons amuse it, but it is not

amused by perfect balance. Had Mr. Adams's nature been cold,
he would have followed Mr. Webster, Mr. Everett, Mr. Seward,
and Mr. Winthrop in the lines of party discipline and self-interest.
Had it been less balanced than it was, he would have gone with
Mr. Garrison, Mr. Wendell Phillips, Mr. Edmund Quincy, and
Theodore Parker, into secession. Between the two paths he found
an intermediate one, distinctive and characteristic—he set up
a party of his own.

This political party became a chief influence in the education
of the boy Henry in the six years 1848 to 1854, and violently
affected his character at the moment when character is plastic.
The group of men with whom Mr. Adams associated himself, and
whose social centre was the house in Mount Vernon Street, numbered
only three: Dr. John G. Palfrey, Richard H. Dana, and
Charles Sumner. Dr. Palfrey was the oldest, and in spite of his
clerical education, was to a boy often the most agreeable, for his
talk was lighter and his range wider than that of the others; he
had wit, or humor, and the give-and-take of dinner-table exchange.
Born to be a man of the world, he forced himself to be clergyman,
professor, or statesman, while, like every other true Bostonian,
he yearned for the ease of the Athenæum Club in Pall Mall or the
Combination Room at Trinity. Dana at first suggested the oppoaite;
he affected to be still before the mast, a direct, rather bluff,
vigorous seaman, and only as one got to know him better one
found the man of rather excessive refinement trying with success
to work like a day-laborer, deliberately hardening his skin to the
burden, as though he were still carrying hides at Monterey. Undoubtedly
he succeeded, for his mind and will were robust, but
he might have said what his lifelong friend William M. Evarts
used to say: "I pride myself on my success in doing not the things
I like to do, but the things I don't like to do." Dana's ideal of
life was to be a great Englishman, with a seat on the front benches
of the House of Commons until he should be promoted to the
woolsack; beyond all, with a social status that should place him

above the scuffle of provincial and unprofessional annoyances; but
he forced himself to take life as it came, and he suffocated his
longings with grim self-discipline, by mere force of will. Of the
four men, Dana was the most marked. Without dogmatism or
self-assertion, he seemed always to be fully in sight, a figure that
completely filled a well-defined space. He, too, talked well, and
his mind worked close to its subject, as a lawyer's should; but
disguise and silence it as he liked, it was aristocratic to the tenth
generation.

In that respect, and in that only, Charles Sumner was like
him, but Sumner, in almost every other quality, was quite different
from his-three associates—altogether out of line. He, too,
adored English standards, but his ambition led him to rival the
career of Edmund Burke. No young Bostonian of his time had
made so brilliant a start, but rather in the steps of Edward Everett
than of Daniel Webster. As an orator he had achieved a
triumph by his oration against war; but Boston admired him
chiefly for his social success in England and on the Continent;
success that gave to every Bostonian who enjoyed it a halo never
acquired by domestic sanctity. Mr. Sumner, both by interest and
instinct, felt the value of his English connection, and cultivated
it the more as he became socially an outcast from Boston on society
by the passions of politics. He was rarely without a pocket-full
of letters from duchesses or noblemen in England. Having: sacrificed
to principle his social position in America, he Clung the
more closely to his foreign attachments. The Free Soil Party
fared ill in Beacon Street. The social arbiters of Boston—George
Ticknor and the rest—had to admit, however unwillingly, that
the Free Soil leaders could not mingle with the friends and followers
of Mr. Webster. Sumner was socially ostracized, and so,
for that matter, were Palfrey, Dana, Russell, Adams, and all the
other avowed anti-slavery leaders, but for them it mattered less,
because they had houses and families of their own; while Sumner
had neither wife nor household, and, though the most socially

ambitious of all, and the most hungry for what used to be called
polite society, he could enter hardly half-a-dozen houses in Boston.
Longfellow stood by him in Cambridge, and even in Beacon
Street he could always take refuge in the house of Mr. Lodge, but
few days passed when he did not pass some time in Mount Vernon
Street. Even with that, his solitude was glacial, and reacted
on his character. He had nothing but himself to think about.
His superiority was, indeed, real and incontestable; he was the
classical ornament of the anti-slavery party; their pride in him
was unbounded, and their admiration outspoken.

The boy Henry worshipped him, and if he ever regarded any
older man as a personal friend, it was Mr. Sumner. The relation
of Mr. Sumner in the household was far closer than any relation
of blood. None of the uncles approached such intimacy. (Sumner
was the boy's ideal of greatness; the highest product of nature
and art. The only fault of such a model was its superiority
which defied imitation. To the twelve-year-old boy, his father,
Dr. Palfrey, Mr. Dana, were men, more or less like what he himself
might become; but Mr. Sumner was a different order—
heroic.

As the boy grew up to be ten or twelve years old, his father gave
him a writing-table in one of the alcoves of his Boston library,
and there, winter after winter, Henry worked over his Latin
Grammar and listened to these four gentlemen discussing the
course of anti-slavery politics. The discussions were always serious;
the Free Soil Party took itself quite seriously; and they were
habitual because Mr. Adams had undertaken to edit a newspaper
as the organ of these gentlemen, who came to discuss its
policy and expression. At the same time Mr. Adams was editing
the "Works" of his grandfather John Adams, and made the
boy read texts for proof-correction. In after years his father
sometimes complained that, as a reader of Novanglus and Massachusettensis,
Henry had shown very little consciousness of punctuation;
but the boy regarded this part of school life only as a

warning, if he ever grew up to write dull discussions in the newspapers,
to try to be dull in some different way from that of his
great-grandfather. Yet the discussions in the Boston Whig were
carried on in much the same style as those of John Adams and
his opponent, and appealed to much the same society and the
same habit of mind. The boy got as little education, fitting him
for his own time, from the one as from the other, and he got no
more from his contact with the gentlemen themselves who were
all types of the past.

Down to 1850, and even later, New England society was still
directed by the professions. Lawyers, physicians, professors,
merchants were classes, and acted not as individuals, but as
though they were clergymen and each profession were a church.
In politics the system required competent expression; it was the
old Ciceronian idea of government by the best that produced the
long line of New England statesmen. They chose men to represent
them because they wanted to be well represented, and they
chose the best they had. Thus Boston chose Daniel Webster, and
Webster took, not as pay, but as honorarium, the cheques raised
for him by Peter Harvey from the Appletons, Perkinses, Amorys,
Searses, Brookses, Lawrences, and so on, who begged him to
represent them. Edward Everett held the rank in regular succession
to Webster. Robert C. Winthrop claimed succession to
Everett. Charles Sumner aspired to break the succession, but
not the system. The Adamses had never been, for any length of
time, a part of this State succession; they had preferred the
national service, and had won all their distinction outside the
State, but they too had required State support and had commonly
received it. The little group of men in Mount Vernon
Street were an offshoot of this system; they were statesmen, not
politicians; they guided public opinion, but were little guided by
it.

The boy naturally learned only one lesson from his saturation
in such air. He took for granted that this sort of world, more or

less the same that had always existed in Boston and Massachusetts
Bay, was the world which he was to fit. Had he known
Europe he would have learned no better. The Paris of Louis Philippe,
Guizot, and de Tocqueville, as well as the London of Robert
Peel, Macaulay, and John Stuart Mill, were but varieties of
the same upper-class bourgeoisie that felt instinctive cousinship
with the Boston of Ticknor, Prescott, and Motley. Even the
typical grumbler Carlyle, who cast doubts on the real capacity
of the middle class, and who at times thought himself eccentric,
found friendship and alliances in Boston—still more in Concord.
The system had proved so successful that even Germany
wanted to try it, and Italy yearned for it. England's middle-class
government was the ideal of human progress.

Even the violent reaction after 1848, and the return of all
Europe to military practices, never for a moment shook the true
faith. No one, except Karl Marx, foresaw radical change. What
announced it? The world was producing sixty or seventy million
tons of coal, and might be using nearly a million steam-horse-power,
just beginning to make itself felt. All experience since the
creation of man, all divine revelation or human science, conspired
to deceive and betray a twelve-year-old boy who took for
granted that his ideas, which were alone respectable, would be
alone respected.

Viewed from Mount Vernon Street, the problem of life was as
simple as it was classic. (Politics offered no difficulties, for there
the moral law was a sure guide. Social perfection was also sure,
because human nature worked for Good, and three instruments
were all she asked—Suffrage, Common Schools, and Press. On
these points doubt was forbidden. Education was divine, and
man needed only a correct knowledge of facts to reach perfection:

Nothing quieted doubt so completely as the mental calm of the
Unitarian clergy. In uniform excellence of life and character,
moral and intellectual, the score of Unitarian clergymen about
Boston, who controlled society and Harvard College, were never
excelled. (They proclaimed as their merit that they insisted on
no doctrine, but taught, or tried to teach, the means of leading
a virtuous, useful, unselfish life, which they held to be sufficient
for salvation.) For them, difficulties might be ignored; doubts
were waste of thought; nothing exacted solution. Boston had
solved the universe; or had offered and realized the best solution
yet tried. The problem was worked out.

Of all the conditions of his youth which afterwards puzzled
the grown-up man, this disappearance of religion puzzled him
most. The boy went to church twice every Sunday; he was taught
to read his Bible, and he learned religious poetry by heart; he
believed in a mild deism; he prayed; he went through all the
forms; but neither to him nor to his brothers or sisters was religion
real. Even the mild discipline of the Unitarian Church was
so irksome that they all threw it off at the first possible moment,
and never afterwards entered a church. The religious instinct
had vanished, and could not be revived, although one made in
later life many efforts to recover it. That the most powerful
emotion of man, next to the sexual, should disappear, might
be a personal defect of his own; but that the most intelligent
society, led by the most intelligent clergy, in the most moral conditions
he ever knew, should have solved all the problems of the
universe so thoroughly as to have quite ceased making itself
anxious about past or future, and should have persuaded itself
that all the problems which had convulsed human thought from
earliest recorded time, were not worth discussing, seemed to
him the most curious social phenomenon he had to account for
in a long life. The faculty of turning away one's eyes as one
approaches a chasm is not unusual, and Boston showed, under
the lead of Mr. Webster, how successfully it could be done in

politics; but in politics a certain number of men did at least protest.
In religion and philosophy no one protested. Such protest
as was made took forms more simple than the silence, like the
deism of Theodore Parker, and of the boy's own cousin Octavius
Frothingham, who distressed his father and scandalized Beacon
Street by avowing scepticism that seemed to solve no old problems,
and to raise many new ones. The less aggressive protest of
Ralph Waldo Emerson, was, from an old-world point of view,
less serious. It was naïf.

The children reached manhood without knowing religion, and
with the certainty that dogma, metaphysics, and abstract philosophy
were not worth knowing. So one-sided an education could
have been possible in no other country or time, but it became,
almost of necessity, the more literary and political. As the children
grew up, they exaggerated the literary and the political
interests. They joined in the dinner-table discussions and from
childhood the boys were accustomed to hear, almost every day,
table-talk as good as they were ever likely to hear again. The
eldest child, Louisa, was one of the most sparkling creatures her
brother met in a long and varied experience of bright women.
The oldest son, John, was afterwards regarded as one of the best
talkers in Boston society, and perhaps the most popular man in
the State, though apt to be on the unpopular side. Palfrey and
Dana could be entertaining when they pleased, and though
Charles Sumner could hardly be called light in hand, he was willing
to be amused, and smiled grandly from time to time; while
Mr. Adams, who talked relatively little, was always a good listener,
and laughed over a witticism till he choked.

By way of educating and amusing the children, Mr. Adams
read much aloud, and was sure to read political literature, especially
when it was satirical, like the speeches of Horace Mann and
the "Epistles" of "Hosea Biglow," with great delight to the
youth. So he read Longfellow and Tennyson as their poems appeared,
but the children took possession of Dickens and Thackeray

for themselves. Both were too modern for tastes founded on
Pope and Dr. Johnson.(The boy Henry soon became a desultory
reader of every book he found readable, but these were commonly
eighteenth-century historians because his father's library was full
of them. In the want of positive instincts, he drifted into the
mental indolence of history. So, too, he read shelves of eighteenth-century
poetry, but when his father offered his own set of Wordsworth
as a gift on condition of reading it through, he declined.
Pope and Gray called for no mental effort; they were easy reading;
but the boy was thirty years old before his education reached
Wordsworth.

This is the story of an education, and the person or persons who
figure in it are supposed to have values only as educators or educated.
The surroundings concern it only so far as they affect
education. Sumner, Dana, Palfrey, had values of their own, like
Hume, Pope, and Wordsworth, which any one may study in their
works; here all appear only as influences on the mind of a boy very
nearly the average of most boys in physical and mental stature.
The influence was wholly political and literary. His father made
no effort to force his mind, but left him free play, and this was
perhaps best. Only in one way his father rendered him a great
service by trying to teach him French and giving him some idea
of a French accent. Otherwise the family was rather an atmosphere
than an influence. The boy had a large and overpowering
set of brothers and sisters, who were modes or replicas of the
same type, getting the same education, struggling with the same
problems, and solving the question, or leaving it unsolved much
in the same way. They knew no more than he what they wanted
or what to do for it, but all were conscious that they would like
to control power in some form; and the same thing could be said
of an ant or an elephant. Their form was tied to politics or literature.
They amounted to one individual with half-a-dozen sides
or facets; their temperaments reacted on each other and made
each child more like the other. This was also education, but in the

type, and the Boston or New England type was well enough known.
What no one knew was whether the individual who thought himself
a representative of this type, was fit to deal with life.

As far as outward bearing went, such a family of turbulent children,
given free rein by their parents, or indifferent to check,
should have come to more or less grief. Certainly no one was strong
enough to control them, least of all their mother, the queen-bee
of the hive, on whom nine-tenths of the burden fell, on whose
strength they all depended, but whose children were much too
self-willed and self-confident to take guidance from her, or from
any one else, unless in the direction they fancied. Father and
mother were about equally helpless. Almost every large family
in those days produced at least one black sheep, and if this generation
of Adamses escaped, it was as much a matter of surprise to
them as to their neighbors. By some happy chance they grew up
to be decent citizens, but Henry Adams, as a brand escaped from
the burning, always looked back with astonishment at their luck.
The fact seemed to prove that they were born, like birds, with a
certain innate balance. Home influences alone never saved the
New England boy from ruin, though sometimes they may have
helped to ruin him; and the influences outside of home were negative.
If school helped, it was only by reaction. The dislike of
school was so strong as to be a positive gain. The passionate hatred
of school methods was almost a method in itself. Yet the dayschool
of that time was respectable, and the boy had nothing to
complain of. In fact, he never complained. He hated it because
he was here with a crowd of other boys and compelled to learn
by memory a quantity of things that did not amuse him. His
memory was slow, and the effort painful. For him to conceive that
his memory could compete for school prizes with machines of
two or three times its power, was to prove himself wanting not
only in memory, but flagrantly in mind. He thought his mind a
good enough machine, if it were given time to act, but it acted
wrong if hurried. Schoolmasters never gave time.

In any and all its forms, the boy detested school, and the prejudice
became deeper with years. He always reckoned his school-days,
from ten to sixteen years old, as time thrown away. Perhaps
his needs turned out to be exceptional, but his existence was
exceptional. Between 1850 and 1900 nearly every one's existence
was exceptional. For success in the life imposed on him he needed,
as afterwards appeared, the facile use of only four tools: Mathematics,
French, German, and Spanish. With these, he could
master in very short time any special branch of inquiry, and feel
at home in any society. Latin and Greek, he could, with the help
of the modern languages, learn more completely by the intelligent
work of six weeks than in the six years he spent on them at school.
These four tools were necessary to his success in life, but he never
controlled any one of them.

(Thus, at the outset, he was condemned to failure more or less
complete in the life awaiting him, but not more so than his companions.)
Indeed, had his father kept the boy at home, and given
him half an hour's direction every day, he would have done more
for him than school ever could do for them. Of course, school-taught
men and boys looked down on home-bred boys, and rather
prided themselves on their own ignorance, but the man of sixty
can generally see what he needed in life, and in Henry Adams's
opinion it was not school.

Most school experience was bad. Boy associations at fifteen
were worse than none. Boston at that time offered few healthy
resources for boys or men. The bar-room and billiard-room were
more familiar than parents knew. As a rule boys could skate and
swim and were sent to dancing-school; they played a rudimentary
game of baseball, football, and hockey; a few could sail a boat;
still fewer had been out with a gun to shoot yellow-legs or a stray
wild duck; one or two may have learned something of natural history
if they came from the neighborhood of Concord; none could
ride across country, or knew what shooting with dogs meant.
Sport as a pursuit was unknown. Boat-racing came after 1850.

For horse-racing, only the trotting-course existed. Of all pleasures,
winter sleighing was still the gayest and most popular. From none
of these amusements could the boy learn anything likely to be of
use to him in the world. Books remained as in the eighteenth
century, the source of life, and as they came out—Thackeray,
Dickens, Bulwer, Tennyson, Macaulay, Carlyle, and the rest—
they were devoured; but as far as happiness went, the happiest
hours of the boy's education were passed in summer lying on a
musty heap of Congressional Documents in the old farmhouse
at Quincy, reading "Quentin Durward," "Ivanhoe," and "The
Talisman," and raiding the garden at intervals for peaches and
pears. On the whole he learned most then.