Chapter II. Boston (1848-1854)

The Education of Henry Adams

by Henry Adams

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 Athenaeum Club in Pall Mall or the Combination Room at Trinity.
Dana at first suggested the opposite; 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 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-horsepower, 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:

"Were half the power that fills the world with terror,
Were half the wealth bestowed on camps and courts, Given to redeem
the human mind from error, There were no need of arsenals nor
forts." 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 naif.

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
day-school 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.