Chapter IV. Harvard College (1854-1858)

The Education of Henry Adams

by Henry Adams

ONE day in June, 1854, young Adams walked for the last time down
the steps of Mr. Dixwell's school in Boylston Place, and felt no
sensation but one of unqualified joy that this experience was ended.
Never before or afterwards in his life did he close a period so long
as four years without some sensation of loss -- some sentiment of
habit -- but school was what in after life he commonly heard his
friends denounce as an intolerable bore. He was born too old for it.
The same thing could be said of most New England boys. Mentally they
never were boys. Their education as men should have begun at ten
years old. They were fully five years more mature than the English or
European boy for whom schools were made. For the purposes of future
advancement, as afterwards appeared, these first six years of a
possible education were wasted in doing imperfectly what might have
been done perfectly in one, and in any case would have had small
value. The next regular step was Harvard College. He was more than
glad to go. For generation after generation, Adamses and Brookses and
Boylstons and Gorhams had gone to Harvard College, and although none
of them, as far as known, had ever done any good there, or thought
himself the better for it, custom, social ties, convenience, and,
above all, economy, kept each generation in the track. Any other
education would have required a serious effort, but no one took
Harvard College seriously. All went there because their friends went
there, and the College was their ideal of social self-respect.

Harvard College, as far as it educated at all, was a mild and
liberal school, which sent young men into the world with all they
needed to make respectable citizens, and something of what they
wanted to make useful ones. Leaders of men it never tried to make.
Its ideals were altogether different. The Unitarian clergy had given
to the College a character of moderation, balance, judgment,
restraint, what the French called mesure; excellent traits, which the
College attained with singular success, so that its graduates could
commonly be recognized by the stamp, but such a type of character
rarely lent itself to autobiography. In effect, the school created a
type but not a will. Four years of Harvard College, if successful,
resulted in an autobiographical blank, a mind on which only a
water-mark had been stamped.

The stamp, as such things went, was a good one. The chief wonder
of education is that it does not ruin everybody concerned in it,
teachers and taught. Sometimes in after life, Adams debated whether
in fact it had not ruined him and most of his companions, but,
disappointment apart, Harvard College was probably less hurtful than
any other university then in existence. It taught little, and that
little ill, but it left the mind open, free from bias, ignorant of
facts, but docile. The graduate had few strong prejudices. He knew
little, but his mind remained supple, ready to receive knowledge.

What caused the boy most disappointment was the little he got
from his mates. Speaking exactly, he got less than nothing, a result
common enough in education. Yet the College Catalogue for the years
1854 to 1861 shows a list of names rather distinguished in their
time. Alexander Agassiz and Phillips Brooks led it; H. H. Richardson
and O. W. Holmes helped to close it. As a rule the most promising of
all die early, and never get their names into a Dictionary of
Contemporaries, which seems to be the only popular standard of
success. Many died in the war. Adams knew them all, more or less; he
felt as much regard, and quite as much respect for them then, as he
did after they won great names and were objects of a vastly wider
respect; but, as help towards education, he got nothing whatever from
them or they from him until long after they had left college.
Possibly the fault was his, but one would like to know how many
others shared it. Accident counts for much in companionship as in
marriage. Life offers perhaps only a score of possible companions,
and it is mere chance whether they meet as early as school or
college, but it is more than a chance that boys brought up together
under like conditions have nothing to give each other. The Class of
1858, to which Henry Adams belonged, was a typical collection of
young New Englanders, quietly penetrating and aggressively
commonplace; free from meannesses, jealousies, intrigues,
enthusiasms, and passions; not exceptionally quick; not consciously
skeptical; singularly indifferent to display, artifice, florid
expression, but not hostile to it when it amused them; distrustful of
themselves, but little disposed to trust any one else; with not much
humor of their own, but full of readiness to enjoy the humor of
others; negative to a degree that in the long run became positive and
triumphant. Not harsh in manners or judgment, rather liberal and
open-minded, they were still as a body the most formidable critics
one would care to meet, in a long life exposed to criticism. They
never flattered, seldom praised; free from vanity, they were not
intolerant of it; but they were objectiveness itself; their attitude
was a law of nature; their judgment beyond appeal, not an act either
of intellect or emotion or of will, but a sort of gravitation.

This was Harvard College incarnate, but even for Harvard
College, the Class of 1858 was somewhat extreme. Of unity this band
of nearly one hundred young men had no keen sense, but they had
equally little energy of repulsion. They were pleasant to live with,
and above the average of students -- German, French, English, or what
not -- but chiefly because each individual appeared satisfied to
stand alone. It seemed a sign of force; yet to stand alone is quite
natural when one has no passions; still easier when one has no
pains.

Into this unusually dissolvent medium, chance insisted on
enlarging Henry Adams's education by tossing a trio of Virginians as
little fitted for it as Sioux Indians to a treadmill. By some further
affinity, these three outsiders fell into relation with the
Bostonians among whom Adams as a schoolboy belonged, and in the end
with Adams himself, although they and he knew well how thin an edge
of friendship separated them in 1856 from mortal enmity. One of the
Virginians was the son of Colonel Robert E. Lee, of the Second United
States Cavalry; the two others who seemed instinctively to form a
staff for Lee, were town-Virginians from Petersburg. A fourth
outsider came from Cincinnati and was half Kentuckian, N. L.
Anderson, Longworth on the mother's side. For the first time Adams's
education brought him in contact with new types and taught him their
values. He saw the New England type measure itself with another, and
he was part of the process.

Lee, known through life as "Roony," was a Virginian of the
eighteenth century, much as Henry Adams was a Bostonian of the same
age. Roony Lee had changed little from the type of his grandfather,
Light Horse Harry. Tall, largely built, handsome, genial, with
liberal Virginian openness towards all he liked, he had also the
Virginian habit of command and took leadership as his natural habit.
No one cared to contest it. None of the New Englanders wanted
command. For a year, at least, Lee was the most popular and prominent
young man in his class, but then seemed slowly to drop into the
background. The habit of command was not enough, and the Virginian
had little else. He was simple beyond analysis; so simple that even
the simple New England student could not realize him. No one knew
enough to know how ignorant he was; how childlike; how helpless
before the relative complexity of a school. As an animal, the
Southerner seemed to have every advantage, but even as an animal he
steadily lost ground.

The lesson in education was vital to these young men, who,
within ten years, killed each other by scores in the act of testing
their college conclusions. Strictly, the Southerner had no mind; he
had temperament He was not a scholar; he had no intellectual
training; he could not analyze an idea, and he could not even
conceive of admitting two; but in life one could get along very well
without ideas, if one had only the social instinct. Dozens of eminent
statesmen were men of Lee's type, and maintained themselves well
enough in the legislature, but college was a sharper test. The
Virginian was weak in vice itself, though the Bostonian was hardly a
master of crime. The habits of neither were good; both were apt to
drink hard and to live low lives; but the Bostonian suffered less
than the Virginian. Commonly the Bostonian could take some care of
himself even in his worst stages, while the Virginian became
quarrelsome and dangerous. When a Virginian had brooded a few days
over an imaginary grief and substantial whiskey, none of his Northern
friends could be sure that he might not be waiting, round the corner,
with a knife or pistol, to revenge insult by the dry light of
delirium tremens; and when things reached this condition, Lee had to
exhaust his authority over his own staff. Lee was a gentleman of the
old school, and, as every one knows, gentlemen of the old school
drank almost as much as gentlemen of the new school; but this was not
his trouble. He was sober even in the excessive violence of political
feeling in those years; he kept his temper and his friends under
control.

Adams liked the Virginians. No one was more obnoxious to them,
by name and prejudice; yet their friendship was unbroken and even
warm. At a moment when the immediate future posed no problem in
education so vital as the relative energy and endurance of North and
South, this momentary contact with Southern character was a sort of
education for its own sake; but this was not all. No doubt the
self-esteem of the Yankee, which tended naturally to self-distrust,
was flattered by gaining the slow conviction that the Southerner,
with his slave-owning limitations, was as little fit to succeed in
the struggle of modern life as though he were still a maker of stone
axes, living in caves, and hunting the bos primigenius, and that
every quality in which he was strong, made him weaker; but Adams had
begun to fear that even in this respect one eighteenth-century type
might not differ deeply from another. Roony Lee had changed little
from the Virginian of a century before; but Adams was himself a good
deal nearer the type of his great-grandfather than to that of a
railway superintendent. He was little more fit than the Virginians to
deal with a future America which showed no fancy for the past.
Already Northern society betrayed a preference for economists over
diplomats or soldiers -- one might even call it a jealousy -- against
which two eighteenth-century types had little chance to live, and
which they had in common to fear.

Nothing short of this curious sympathy could have brought into
close relations two young men so hostile as Roony Lee and Henry
Adams, but the chief difference between them as collegians consisted
only in their difference of scholarship: Lee was a total failure;
Adams a partial one. Both failed, but Lee felt his failure more
sensibly, so that he gladly seized the chance of escape by accepting
a commission offered him by General Winfield Scott in the force then
being organized against the Mormons. He asked Adams to write his
letter of acceptance, which flattered Adams's vanity more than any
Northern compliment could do, because, in days of violent political
bitterness, it showed a certain amount of good temper. The diplomat
felt his profession.

If the student got little from his mates, he got little more
from his masters. The four years passed at college were, for his
purposes, wasted. Harvard College was a good school, but at bottom
what the boy disliked most was any school at all. He did not want to
be one in a hundred -- one per cent of an education. He regarded
himself as the only person for whom his education had value, and he
wanted the whole of it. He got barely half of an average. Long
afterwards, when the devious path of life led him back to teach in
his turn what no student naturally cared or needed to know, he
diverted some dreary hours of faculty-meetings by looking up his
record in the class-lists, and found himself graded precisely in the
middle. In the one branch he most needed -- mathematics -- barring
the few first scholars, failure was so nearly universal that no
attempt at grading could have had value, and whether he stood
fortieth or ninetieth must have been an accident or the personal
favor of the professor. Here his education failed lamentably. At best
he could never have been a mathematician; at worst he would never
have cared to be one; but he needed to read mathematics, like any
other universal language, and he never reached the alphabet.

Beyond two or three Greek plays, the student got nothing from
the ancient languages. Beyond some incoherent theories of free-trade
and protection, he got little from Political Economy. He could not
afterwards remember to have heard the name of Karl Marx mentioned, or
the title of "Capital." He was equally ignorant of Auguste Comte.
These were the two writers of his time who most influenced its
thought. The bit of practical teaching he afterwards reviewed with
most curiosity was the course in Chemistry, which taught him a number
of theories that befogged his mind for a lifetime. The only teaching
that appealed to his imagination was a course of lectures by Louis
Agassiz on the Glacial Period and Paleontology, which had more
influence on his curiosity than the rest of the college instruction
altogether. The entire work of the four years could have been easily
put into the work of any four months in after life.

Harvard College was a negative force, and negative forces have
value. Slowly it weakened the violent political bias of childhood,
not by putting interests in its place, but by mental habits which had
no bias at all. It would also have weakened the literary bias, if
Adams had been capable of finding other amusement, but the climate
kept him steady to desultory and useless reading, till he had run
through libraries of volumes which he forgot even to their
title-pages. Rather by instinct than by guidance, he turned to
writing, and his professors or tutors occasionally gave his English
composition a hesitating approval; but in that branch, as in all the
rest, even when he made a long struggle for recognition, he never
convinced his teachers that his abilities, at their best, warranted
placing him on the rank-list, among the first third of his class.
Instructors generally reach a fairly accurate gauge of their
scholars' powers. Henry Adams himself held the opinion that his
instructors were very nearly right, and when he became a professor in
his turn, and made mortifying mistakes in ranking his scholars, he
still obstinately insisted that on the whole, he was not far wrong.
Student or professor, he accepted the negative standard because it
was the standard of the school.

He never knew what other students thought of it, or what they
thought they gained from it; nor would their opinion have much
affected his. From the first, he wanted to be done with it, and stood
watching vaguely for a path and a direction. The world outside seemed
large, but the paths that led into it were not many and lay mostly
through Boston, where he did not want to go. As it happened, by pure
chance, the first door of escape that seemed to offer a hope led into
Germany, and James Russell Lowell opened it.

Lowell, on succeeding Longfellow as Professor of Belles-Lettres,
had duly gone to Germany, and had brought back whatever he found to
bring. The literary world then agreed that truth survived in Germany
alone, and Carlyle, Matthew Arnold, Renan, Emerson, with scores of
popular followers, taught the German faith. The literary world had
revolted against the yoke of coming capitalism -- its money-lenders,
its bank directors, and its railway magnates. Thackeray and Dickens
followed Balzac in scratching and biting the unfortunate middle class
with savage ill-temper, much as the middle class had scratched and
bitten the Church and Court for a hundred years before. The middle
class had the power, and held its coal and iron well in hand, but the
satirists and idealists seized the press, and as they were agreed
that the Second Empire was a disgrace to France and a danger to
England, they turned to Germany because at that moment Germany was
neither economical nor military, and a hundred years behind western
Europe in the simplicity of its standard. German thought, method,
honesty, and even taste, became the standards of scholarship. Goethe
was raised to the rank of Shakespeare -- Kant ranked as a law-giver
above Plato. All serious scholars were obliged to become German, for
German thought was revolutionizing criticism. Lowell had followed the
rest, not very enthusiastically, but with sufficient conviction, and
invited his scholars to join him. Adams was glad to accept the
invitation, rather for the sake of cultivating Lowell than Germany,
but still in perfect good faith. It was the first serious attempt he
had made to direct his own education, and he was sure of getting some
education out of it; not perhaps anything that he expected, but at
least a path.

Singularly circuitous and excessively wasteful of energy the
path proved to be, but the student could never see what other was
open to him. He could have done no better had he foreseen every stage
of his coming life, and he would probably have done worse. The
preliminary step was pure gain. James Russell Lowell had brought back
from Germany the only new and valuable part of its universities, the
habit of allowing students to read with him privately in his study.
Adams asked the privilege, and used it to read a little, and to talk
a great deal, for the personal contact pleased and flattered him, as
that of older men ought to flatter and please the young even when
they altogether exaggerate its value. Lowell was a new element in the
boy's life. As practical a New Englander as any, he leaned towards
the Concord faith rather than towards Boston where he properly
belonged; for Concord, in the dark days of 1856, glowed with pure
light. Adams approached it in much the same spirit as he would have
entered a Gothic Cathedral, for he well knew that the priests
regarded him as only a worm. To the Concord Church all Adamses were
minds of dust and emptiness, devoid of feeling, poetry or
imagination; little higher than the common scourings of State Street;
politicians of doubtful honesty; natures of narrow scope; and
already, at eighteen years old, Henry had begun to feel uncertainty
about so many matters more important than Adamses that his mind
rebelled against no discipline merely personal, and he was ready to
admit his unworthiness if only he might penetrate the shrine. The
influence of Harvard College was beginning to have its effect. He was
slipping away from fixed principles; from Mount Vernon Street; from
Quincy; from the eighteenth century; and his first steps led toward
Concord.

He never reached Concord, and to Concord Church he, like the
rest of mankind who accepted a material universe, remained always an
insect, or something much lower -- a man. It was surely no fault of
his that the universe seemed to him real; perhaps -- as Mr. Emerson
justly said -- it was so; in spite of the long-continued effort of a
lifetime, he perpetually fell back into the heresy that if anything
universal was unreal, it was himself and not the appearances; it was
the poet and not the banker; it was his own thought, not the thing
that moved it. He did not lack the wish to be transcendental. Concord
seemed to him, at one time, more real than Quincy; yet in truth
Russell Lowell was as little transcendental as Beacon Street. From
him the boy got no revolutionary thought whatever -- objective or
subjective as they used to call it -- but he got good-humored
encouragement to do what amused him, which consisted in passing two
years in Europe after finishing the four years of Cambridge

The result seemed small in proportion to the effort, but it was
the only positive result he could ever trace to the influence of
Harvard College, and he had grave doubts whether Harvard College
influenced even that. Negative results in plenty he could trace, but
he tended towards negation on his own account, as one side of the New
England mind had always done, and even there he could never feel sure
that Harvard College had more than reflected a weakness. In his
opinion the education was not serious, but in truth hardly any Boston
student took it seriously, and none of them seemed sure that
President Walker himself, or President Felton after him, took it more
seriously than the students. For them all, the college offered
chiefly advantages vulgarly called social, rather than mental.

Unluckily for this particular boy, social advantages were his
only capital in life. Of money he had not much, of mind not more, but
he could be quite certain that, barring his own faults, his social
position would never be questioned. What he needed was a career in
which social position had value. Never in his life would he have to
explain who he was; never would he have need of acquaintance to
strengthen his social standing; but he needed greatly some one to
show him how to use the acquaintance he cared to make. He made no
acquaintance in college which proved to have the smallest use in
after life. All his Boston friends he knew before, or would have
known in any case, and contact of Bostonian with Bostonian was the
last education these young men needed. Cordial and intimate as their
college relations were, they all flew off in different directions the
moment they took their degrees. Harvard College remained a tie,
indeed, but a tie little stronger than Beacon Street and not so
strong as State Street. Strangers might perhaps gain something from
the college if they were hard pressed for social connections. A
student like H. H. Richardson, who came from far away New Orleans,
and had his career before him to chase rather than to guide, might
make valuable friendships at college. Certainly Adams made no
acquaintance there that he valued in after life so much as
Richardson, but still more certainly the college relation had little
to do with the later friendship. Life is a narrow valley, and the
roads run close together. Adams would have attached himself to
Richardson in any case, as he attached himself to John LaFarge or
Augustus St. Gaudens or Clarence King or John Hay, none of whom were
at Harvard College. The valley of life grew more and more narrow with
years, and certain men with common tastes were bound to come
together. Adams knew only that he would have felt himself on a more
equal footing with them had he been less ignorant, and had he not
thrown away ten years of early life in acquiring what he might have
acquired in one.

Socially or intellectually, the college was for him negative and
in some ways mischievous. The most tolerant man of the world could
not see good in the lower habits of the students, but the vices were
less harmful than the virtues. The habit of drinking -- though the
mere recollection of it made him doubt his own veracity, so fantastic
it seemed in later life -- may have done no great or permanent harm;
but the habit of looking at life as a social relation -- an affair of
society -- did no good. It cultivated a weakness which needed no
cultivation. If it had helped to make men of the world, or give the
manners and instincts of any profession -- such as temper, patience,
courtesy, or a faculty of profiting by the social defects of
opponents -- it would have been education better worth having than
mathematics or languages; but so far as it helped to make anything,
it helped only to make the college standard permanent through life.
The Bostonian educated at Harvard College remained a collegian, if he
stuck only to what the college gave him. If parents went on
generation after generation, sending their children to Harvard
College for the sake of its social advantages, they perpetuated an
inferior social type, quite as ill-fitted as the Oxford type for
success in the next generation.

Luckily the old social standard of the college, as President
Walker or James Russell Lowell still showed it, was admirable, and if
it had little practical value or personal influence on the mass of
students, at least it preserved the tradition for those who liked it.
The Harvard graduate was neither American nor European, nor even
wholly Yankee; his admirers were few, and his many; perhaps his worst
weakness was his self-criticism and self-consciousness; but his
ambitions, social or intellectual, were necessarily cheap even though
they might be negative. Afraid of such serious risks, and still more
afraid of personal ridicule, he seldom made a great failure of life,
and nearly always led a life more or less worth living. So Henry
Adams, well aware that he could not succeed as a scholar, and finding
his social position beyond improvement or need of effort, betook
himself to the single ambition which otherwise would scarcely have
seemed a true outcome of the college, though it was the last remnant
of the old Unitarian supremacy. He took to the pen. He wrote.

The College Magazine printed his work, and the College Societies
listened to his addresses. Lavish of praise the readers were not; the
audiences, too, listened in silence; but this was all the
encouragement any Harvard collegian had a reasonable hope to receive;
grave silence was a form of patience that meant possible future
acceptance; and Henry Adams went on writing. No one cared enough to
criticise, except himself who soon began to suffer from reaching his
own limits. He found that he could not be this -- or that -- or the
other; always precisely the things he wanted to be. He had not wit or
scope or force. Judges always ranked him beneath a rival, if he had
any; and he believed the judges were right. His work seemed to him
thin, commonplace, feeble. At times he felt his own weakness so
fatally that he could not go on; when he had nothing to say, he could
not say it, and he found that he had very little to say at best. Much
that he then wrote must be still in existence in print or manuscript,
though he never cared to see it again, for he felt no doubt that it
was in reality just what he thought it. At best it showed only a
feeling for form; an instinct of exclusion. Nothing shocked--not even
its weakness.

Inevitably an effort leads to an ambition -- creates it -- and
at that time the ambition of the literary student, which almost took
place of the regular prizes of scholarship, was that of being chosen
as the representative of his class -- Class Orator -- at the close of
their course. This was political as well as literary success, and
precisely the sort of eighteenth-century combination that fascinated
an eighteenth century boy. The idea lurked in his mind, at first as a
dream, in no way serious or even possible, for he stood outside the
number of what were known as popular men. Year by year, his position
seemed to improve, or perhaps his rivals disappeared, until at last,
to his own great astonishment, he found himself a candidate. The
habits of the college permitted no active candidacy; he and his
rivals had not a word to say for or against themselves, and he was
never even consulted on the subject; he was not present at any of the
proceedings, and how it happened he never could quite divine, but it
did happen, that one evening on returning from Boston he received
notice of his election, after a very close contest, as Class Orator
over the head of the first scholar, who was undoubtedly a better
orator and a more popular man. In politics the success of the poorer
candidate is common enough, and Henry Adams was a fairly trained
politician, but he never understood how he managed to defeat not only
a more capable but a more popular rival.

To him the election seemed a miracle. This was no mock-modesty;
his head was as clear as ever it was in an indifferent canvass, and
he knew his rivals and their following as well as he knew himself.
What he did not know, even after four years of education, was Harvard
College. What he could never measure was the bewildering
impersonality of the men, who, at twenty years old, seemed to set no
value either on official or personal standards. Here were nearly a
hundred young men who had lived together intimately during four of
the most impressionable years of life, and who, not only once but
again and again, in different ways, deliberately, seriously,
dispassionately, chose as their representatives precisely those of
their companions who seemed least to represent them. As far as these
Orators and Marshals had any position at all in a collegiate sense,
it was that of indifference to the college. Henry Adams never
professed the smallest faith in universities of any kind, either as
boy or man, nor had he the faintest admiration for the university
graduate, either in Europe or in America; as a collegian he was only
known apart from his fellows by his habit of standing outside the
college; and yet the singular fact remained that this commonplace
body of young men chose him repeatedly to express his and their
commonplaces. Secretly, of course, the successful candidate flattered
himself -- and them -- with the hope that they might perhaps not be
so commonplace as they thought themselves; but this was only another
proof that all were identical. They saw in him a representative --
the kind of representative they wanted -- and he saw in them the most
formidable array of judges he could ever meet, like so many mirrors
of himself, an infinite reflection of his own shortcomings.

All the same, the choice was flattering; so flattering that it
actually shocked his vanity; and would have shocked it more, if
possible, had he known that it was to be the only flattery of the
sort he was ever to receive. The function of Class Day was, in the
eyes of nine-tenths of the students, altogether the most important of
the college, and the figure of the Orator was the most conspicuous in
the function. Unlike the Orators at regular Commencements, the Class
Day Orator stood alone, or had only the Poet for rival. Crowded into
the large church, the students, their families, friends, aunts,
uncles and chaperones, attended all the girls of sixteen or twenty
who wanted to show their summer dresses or fresh complexions, and
there, for an hour or two, in a heat that might have melted bronze,
they listened to an Orator and a Poet in clergyman's gowns, reciting
such platitudes as their own experience and their mild censors
permitted them to utter. What Henry Adams said in his Class Oration
of 1858 he soon forgot to the last word, nor had it the least value
for education; but he naturally remembered what was said of it. He
remembered especially one of his eminent uncles or relations
remarking that, as the work of so young a man, the oration was
singularly wanting in enthusiasm. The young man -- always in search
of education -- asked himself whether, setting rhetoric aside, this
absence of enthusiasm was a defect or a merit, since, in either case,
it was all that Harvard College taught, and all that the hundred
young men, whom he was trying to represent, expressed. Another
comment threw more light on the effect of the college education. One
of the elderly gentlemen noticed the orator's "perfect
self-possession." Self-possession indeed! If Harvard College gave
nothing else, it gave calm. For four years each student had been
obliged to figure daily before dozens of young men who knew each
other to the last fibre. One had done little but read papers to
Societies, or act comedy in the Hasty Pudding, not to speak of
regular exercises, and no audience in future life would ever be so
intimately and terribly intelligent as these. Three-fourths of the
graduates would rather have addressed the Council of Trent or the
British Parliament than have acted Sir Anthony Absolute or Dr.
Ollapod before a gala audience of the Hasty Pudding. Self-possession
was the strongest part of Harvard College, which certainly taught men
to stand alone, so that nothing seemed stranger to its graduates than
the paroxysms of terror before the public which often overcame the
graduates of European universities. Whether this was, or was not,
education, Henry Adams never knew. He was ready to stand up before
any audience in America or Europe, with nerves rather steadier for
the excitement, but whether he should ever have anything to say,
remained to be proved. As yet he knew nothing Education had not
begun.