Chapter XIX. Chaos (1870)

The Education of Henry Adams

by Henry Adams

ONE fine May afternoon in 1870 Adams drove again up St. James's
Street wondering more than ever at the marvels of life. Nine years
had passed since the historic entrance of May, 1861. Outwardly London
was the same. Outwardly Europe showed no great change. Palmerston and
Russell were forgotten; but Disraeli and Gladstone were still much
alive. One's friends were more than ever prominent. John Bright was
in the Cabinet; W. E. Forster was about to enter it; reform ran riot.
Never had the sun of progress shone so fair. Evolution from lower to
higher raged like an epidemic. Darwin was the greatest of prophets in
the most evolutionary of worlds. Gladstone had overthrown the Irish
Church; was overthrowing the Irish landlords; was trying to pass an
Education Act. Improvement, prosperity, power, were leaping and
bounding over every country road. Even America, with her Erie
scandals and Alabama Claims, hardly made a discordant note.

At the Legation, Motley ruled; the long Adams reign was
forgotten; the rebellion had passed into history. In society no one
cared to recall the years before the Prince of Wales. The smart set
had come to their own. Half the houses that Adams had frequented,
from 1861 to 1865, were closed or closing in 1870. Death had ravaged
one's circle of friends. Mrs. Milnes Gaskell and her sister Miss
Charlotte Wynn were both dead, and Mr. James Milnes Gaskell was no
longer in Parliament. That field of education seemed closed too.

One found one's self in a singular frame of mind -- more
eighteenth-century than ever -- almost rococo -- and unable to catch
anywhere the cog-wheels of evolution. Experience ceased to educate.
London taught less freely than of old. That one bad style was leading
to another -- that the older men were more amusing than the younger
-- that Lord Houghton's breakfast-table showed gaps hard to fill --
that there were fewer men one wanted to meet -- these, and a hundred
more such remarks, helped little towards a quicker and more
intelligent activity. For English reforms Adams cared nothing. The
reforms were themselves mediaeval. The Education Bill of his friend
W. E. Forster seemed to him a guaranty against all education he had
use for. He resented change. He would have kept the Pope in the
Vatican and the Queen at Windsor Castle as historical monuments. He
did not care to Americanize Europe. The Bastille or the Ghetto was a
curiosity worth a great deal of money, if preserved; and so was a
Bishop; so was Napoleon III. The tourist was the great conservative
who hated novelty and adored dirt. Adams came back to London without
a thought of revolution or restlessness or reform. He wanted
amusement, quiet, and gaiety.

Had he not been born in 1838 under the shadow of Boston State
House, and been brought up in the Early Victorian epoch, he would
have cast off his old skin, and made his court to Marlborough House,
in partnership with the American woman and the Jew banker.
Common-sense dictated it; but Adams and his friends were
unfashionable by some law of Anglo-Saxon custom -- some innate
atrophy of mind. Figuring himself as already a man of action, and
rather far up towards the front, he had no idea of making a new
effort or catching up with a new world. He saw nothing ahead of him.
The world was never more calm. He wanted to talk with Ministers about
the Alabama Claims, because he looked on the Claims as his own
special creation, discussed between him and his father long before
they had been discussed by Government; he wanted to make notes for
his next year's articles; but he had not a thought that, within three
months, his world was to be upset, and he under it. Frank Palgrave
came one day, more contentious, contemptuous, and paradoxical than
ever, because Napoleon III seemed to be threatening war with Germany.
Palgrave said that "Germany would beat France into scraps" if there
was war. Adams thought not. The chances were always against
catastrophes. No one else expected great changes in Europe. Palgrave
was always extreme; his language was incautious -- violent!

In this year of all years, Adams lost sight of education. Things
began smoothly, and London glowed with the pleasant sense of
familiarity and dinners. He sniffed with voluptuous delight the
coal-smoke of Cheapside and revelled in the architecture of Oxford
Street. May Fair never shone so fair to Arthur Pendennis as it did to
the returned American. The country never smiled its velvet smile of
trained and easy hostess as it did when he was so lucky as to be
asked on a country visit. He loved it all -- everything -- had always
loved it! He felt almost attached to the Royal Exchange. He thought
he owned the St. James's Club. He patronized the Legation.

The first shock came lightly, as though Nature were playing
tricks on her spoiled child, though she had thus far not exerted
herself to spoil him. Reeve refused the Gold Conspiracy. Adams had
become used to the idea that he was free of the Quarterlies, and that
his writing would be printed of course; but he was stunned by the
reason of refusal. Reeve said it would bring half-a-dozen libel suits
on him. One knew that the power of Erie was almost as great in
England as in America, but one was hardly prepared to find it
controlling the Quarterlies. The English press professed to be
shocked in 1870 by the Erie scandal, as it had professed in 1860 to
be shocked by the scandal of slavery, but when invited to support
those who were trying to abate these scandals, the English press said
it was afraid. To Adams, Reeve's refusal seemed portentous. He and
his brother and the North American Review were running greater risks
every day, and no one thought of fear. That a notorious story, taken
bodily from an official document, should scare the Endinburgh Review
into silence for fear of Jay Gould and Jim Fisk, passed even Adams's
experience of English eccentricity, though it was large.

He gladly set down Reeve's refusal of the Gold Conspiracy to
respectability and editorial law, but when he sent the manuscript on
to the Quarterly, the editor of the Quarterly also refused it. The
literary standard of the two Quarterlies was not so high as to
suggest that the article was illiterate beyond the power of an active
and willing editor to redeem it. Adams had no choice but to realize
that he had to deal in 1870 with the same old English character of
1860, and the same inability in himself to understand it. As usual,
when an ally was needed, the American was driven into the arms of the
radicals. Respectability, everywhere and always, turned its back the
moment one asked to do it a favor. Called suddenly away from England,
he despatched the article, at the last moment, to the Westminster
Review and heard no more about it for nearly six months.

He had been some weeks in London when he received a telegram
from his brother-in-law at the Bagni di Lucca telling him that his
sister had been thrown from a cab and injured, and that he had better
come on. He started that night, and reached the Bagni di Lucca on the
second day. Tetanus had already set in.

The last lesson -- the sum and term of education -- began then.
He had passed through thirty years of rather varied experience
without having once felt the shell of custom broken. He had never
seen Nature -- only her surface -- the sugar-coating that she shows
to youth. Flung suddenly in his face, with the harsh brutality of
chance, the terror of the blow stayed by him thenceforth for life,
until repetition made it more than the will could struggle with; more
than he could call on himself to bear. He found his sister, a woman
of forty, as gay and brilliant in the terrors of lockjaw as she had
been in the careless fun of 1859, lying in bed in consequence of a
miserable cab-accident that had bruised her foot. Hour by hour the
muscles grew rigid, while the mind remained bright, until after ten
days of fiendish torture she died in convulsion.

One had heard and read a great deal about death, and even seen a
little of it, and knew by heart the thousand commonplaces of religion
and poetry which seemed to deaden one's senses and veil the horror.
Society being immortal, could put on immortality at will. Adams being
mortal, felt only the mortality. Death took features altogether new
to him, in these rich and sensuous surroundings. Nature enjoyed it,
played with it, the horror added to her charm, she liked the torture,
and smothered her victim with caresses. Never had one seen her so
winning. The hot Italian summer brooded outside, over the
market-place and the picturesque peasants, and, in the singular color
of the Tuscan atmosphere, the hills and vineyards of the Apennines
seemed bursting with mid-summer blood. The sick-room itself glowed
with the Italian joy of life; friends filled it; no harsh northern
lights pierced the soft shadows; even the dying women shared the
sense of the Italian summer, the soft, velvet air, the humor, the
courage, the sensual fulness of Nature and man. She faced death, as
women mostly do, bravely and even gaily, racked slowly to
unconsciousness, but yielding only to violence, as a soldier sabred
in battle. For many thousands of years, on these hills and plains,
Nature had gone on sabring men and women with the same air of sensual
pleasure.

Impressions like these are not reasoned or catalogued in the
mind; they are felt as part of violent emotion; and the mind that
feels them is a different one from that which reasons; it is thought
of a different power and a different person. The first serious
consciousness of Nature's gesture -- her attitude towards life --
took form then as a phantasm, a nightmare, an insanity of force. For
the first time, the stage-scenery of the senses collapsed; the human
mind felt itself stripped naked, vibrating in a void of shapeless
energies, with resistless mass, colliding, crushing, wasting, and
destroying what these same energies had created and labored from
eternity to perfect. Society became fantastic, a vision of pantomime
with a mechanical motion; and its so-called thought merged in the
mere sense of life, and pleasure in the sense. The usual anodynes of
social medicine became evident artifice. Stoicism was perhaps the
best; religion was the most human; but the idea that any personal
deity could find pleasure or profit in torturing a poor woman, by
accident, with a fiendish cruelty known to man only in perverted and
insane temperaments, could not be held for a moment. For pure
blasphemy, it made pure atheism a comfort. God might be, as the
Church said, a Substance, but He could not be a Person.

With nerves strained for the first time beyond their power of
tension, he slowly travelled northwards with his friends, and stopped
for a few days at Ouchy to recover his balance in a new world; for
the fantastic mystery of coincidences had made the world, which he
thought real, mimic and reproduce the distorted nightmare of his
personal horror. He did not yet know it, and he was twenty years in
finding it out; but he had need of all the beauty of the Lake below
and of the Alps above, to restore the finite to its place. For the
first time in his life, Mont Blanc for a moment looked to him what it
was -- a chaos of anarchic and purposeless forces -- and he needed
days of repose to see it clothe itself again with the illusions of
his senses, the white purity of its snows, the splendor of its light,
and the infinity of its heavenly peace. Nature was kind; Lake Geneva
was beautiful beyond itself, and the Alps put on charms real as
terrors; but man became chaotic, and before the illusions of Nature
were wholly restored, the illusions of Europe suddenly vanished,
leaving a new world to learn.

On July 4, all Europe had been in peace; on July 14, Europe was
in full chaos of war. One felt helpless and ignorant, but one might
have been king or kaiser without feeling stronger to deal with the
chaos. Mr. Gladstone was as much astounded as Adams; the Emperor
Napoleon was nearly as stupefied as either, and Bismarck: himself
hardly knew how he did it. As education, the out-break of the war was
wholly lost on a man dealing with death hand-to-hand, who could not
throw it aside to look at it across the Rhine. Only when he got up to
Paris, he began to feel the approach of catastrophe. Providence set
up no affiches to announce the tragedy. Under one's eyes France cut
herself adrift, and floated off, on an unknown stream, towards a less
known ocean. Standing on the curb of the Boulevard, one could see as
much as though one stood by the side of the Emperor or in command of
an army corps. The effect was lurid. The public seemed to look on the
war, as it had looked on the wars of Louis XIV and Francis I, as a
branch of decorative art. The French, like true artists, always
regarded war as one of the fine arts. Louis XIV practiced it;
Napoleon I perfected it; and Napoleon III had till then pursued it in
the same spirit with singular success. In Paris, in July, 1870, the
war was brought out like an opera of Meyerbeer. One felt one's self a
supernumerary hired to fill the scene. Every evening at the theatre
the comedy was interrupted by order, and one stood up by order, to
join in singing the Marseillaise to order. For nearly twenty years
one had been forbidden to sing the Marseillaise under any
circumstances, but at last regiment after regiment marched through
the streets shouting "Marchons!" while the bystanders cared not
enough to join. Patriotism seemed to have been brought out of the
Government stores, and distributed by grammes per capita. One had
seen one's own people dragged unwillingly into a war, and had watched
one's own regiments march to the front without sign of enthusiasm; on
the contrary, most serious, anxious, and conscious of the whole
weight of the crisis; but in Paris every one conspired to ignore the
crisis, which every one felt at hand. Here was education for the
million, but the lesson was intricate. Superficially Napoleon and his
Ministers and marshals were playing a game against Thiers and
Gambetta. A bystander knew almost as little as they did about the
result. How could Adams prophesy that in another year or two, when he
spoke of his Paris and its tastes, people would smile at his
dotage?

As soon as he could, he fled to England and once more took
refuge in the profound peace of Wenlock Abbey. Only the few remaining
monks, undisturbed by the brutalities of Henry VIII -- three or four
young Englishmen -- survived there, with Milnes Gaskell acting as
Prior. The August sun was warm; the calm of the Abbey was ten times
secular; not a discordant sound -- hardly a sound of any sort except
the cawing of the ancient rookery at sunset -- broke the stillness;
and, after the excitement of the last month, one felt a palpable haze
of peace brooding over the Edge and the Welsh Marches. Since the
reign of Pterspis, nothing had greatly changed; nothing except the
monks. Lying on the turf the ground littered with newspapers, the
monks studied the war correspondence. In one respect Adams had
succeeded in educating himself; he had learned to follow a
campaign.

While at Wenlock, he received a letter from President Eliot
inviting him to take an Assistant Professorship of History, to be
created shortly at Harvard College. After waiting ten or a dozen
years for some one to show consciousness of his existence, even a
Terabratula would be pleased and grateful for a compliment which
implied that the new President of Harvard College wanted his help;
but Adams knew nothing about history, and much less about teaching,
while he knew more than enough about Harvard College; and wrote at
once to thank President Eliot, with much regret that the honor should
be above his powers. His mind was full of other matters. The summer,
from which he had expected only amusement and social relations with
new people, had ended in the most intimate personal tragedy, and the
most terrific political convulsion he had ever known or was likely to
know. He had failed in every object of his trip. The Quarterlies had
refused his best essay. He had made no acquaintances and hardly
picked up the old ones. He sailed from Liverpool, on September 1, to
begin again where he had started two years before, but with no longer
a hope of attaching himself to a President or a party or a press. He
was a free lance and no other career stood in sight or mind. To that
point education had brought him.

Yet he found, on reaching home, that he had not done quite so
badly as he feared. His article on the Session in the July North
American had made a success. Though he could not quite see what
partisan object it served, he heard with flattered astonishment that
it had been reprinted by the Democratic National Committee and
circulated as a campaign document by the hundred thousand copies. He
was henceforth in opposition, do what he might; and a Massachusetts
Democrat, say what he pleased; while his only reward or return for
this partisan service consisted in being formally answered by Senator
Timothy Howe, of Wisconsin, in a Republican campaign document,
presumed to be also freely circulated, in which the Senator, besides
refuting his opinions, did him the honor -- most unusual and
picturesque in a Senator's rhetoric -- of likening him to a
begonia.

The begonia is, or then was, a plant of such senatorial
qualities as to make the simile, in intention, most flattering. Far
from charming in its refinement, the begonia was remarkable for
curious and showy foliage; it was conspicuous; it seemed to have no
useful purpose; and it insisted on standing always in the most
prominent positions. Adams would have greatly liked to be a begonia
in Washington, for this was rather his ideal of the successful
statesman, and he thought about it still more when the Westminster
Review for October brought him his article on the Gold Conspiracy,
which was also instantly pirated on a great scale. Piratical he was
himself henceforth driven to be, and he asked only to be pirated, for
he was sure not to be paid; but the honors of piracy resemble the
colors of the begonia; they are showy but not useful. Here was a tour
de force he had never dreamed himself equal to performing: two long,
dry, quarterly, thirty or forty page articles, appearing in quick
succession, and pirated for audiences running well into the hundred
thousands; and not one person, man or woman, offering him so much as
a congratulation, except to call him a begonia.

Had this been all, life might have gone on very happily as
before, but the ways of America to a young person of literary and
political tastes were such as the so-called evolution of civilized
man had not before evolved. No sooner had Adams made at Washington
what he modestly hoped was a sufficient success, than his whole
family set on him to drag him away. For the first time since 1861 his
father interposed; his mother entreated; and his brother Charles
argued and urged that he should come to Harvard College. Charles had
views of further joint operations in a new field. He said that Henry
had done at Washington all he could possibly do; that his position
there wanted solidity; that he was, after all, an adventurer; that a
few years in Cambridge would give him personal weight; that his chief
function was not to be that of teacher, but that of editing the North
American Review which was to be coupled with the professorship, and
would lead to the daily press. In short, that he needed the
university more than the university needed him.

Henry knew the university well enough to know that the
department of history was controlled by one of the most astute and
ideal administrators in the world -- Professor Gurney -- and that it
was Gurney who had established the new professorship, and had cast
his net over Adams to carry the double load of mediaeval history and
the Review. He could see no relation whatever between himself and a
professorship. He sought education; he did not sell it. He knew no
history; he knew only a few historians; his ignorance was mischievous
because it was literary, accidental, indifferent. On the other hand
he knew Gurney, and felt much influenced by his advice. One cannot
take one's self quite seriously in such matters; it could not much
affect the sum of solar energies whether one went on dancing with
girls in Washington, or began talking to boys at Cambridge. The good
people who thought it did matter had a sort of right to guide. One
could not reject their advice; still less disregard their wishes.

The sum of the matter was that Henry went out to Cambridge and
had a few words with President Eliot which seemed to him almost as
American as the talk about diplomacy with his father ten years
before. "But, Mr. President," urged Adams, "I know nothing about
Mediaeval History." With the courteous manner and bland smile so
familiar for the next generation of Americans Mr. Eliot mildly but
firmly replied, "If you will point out to me any one who knows more,
Mr. Adams, I will appoint him." The answer was neither logical nor
convincing, but Adams could not meet it without overstepping his
privileges. He could not say that, under the circumstances, the
appointment of any professor at all seemed to him unnecessary.

So, at twenty-four hours' notice, he broke his life in halves
again in order to begin a new education, on lines he had not chosen,
in subjects for which he cared less than nothing; in a place he did
not love, and before a future which repelled. Thousands of men have
to do the same thing, but his case was peculiar because he had no
need to do it. He did it because his best and wisest friends urged
it, and he never could make up his mind whether they were right or
not. To him this kind of education was always false. For himself he
had no doubts. He thought it a mistake; but his opinion did not prove
that it was one, since, in all probability, whatever he did would be
more or less a mistake. He had reached cross-roads of education which
all led astray. What he could gain at Harvard College he did not
know, but in any case it was nothing he wanted. What he lost at
Washington he could partly see, but in any case it was not fortune.
Grant's administration wrecked men by thousands, but profited few.
Perhaps Mr. Fish was the solitary exception. One might search the
whole list of Congress, Judiciary, and Executive during the
twenty-five years 1870 to 1895, and find little but damaged
reputation. The period was poor in purpose and barren in results.

Henry Adams, if not the rose, lived as near it as any
politician, and knew, more or less, all the men in any way prominent
at Washington, or knew all about them. Among them, in his opinion,
the best equipped, the most active-minded, and most industrious was
Abram Hewitt, who sat in Congress for a dozen years, between 1874 and
1886, sometimes leading the House and always wielding influence
second to none. With nobody did Adams form closer or longer relations
than with Mr. Hewitt, whom he regarded as the most useful public man
in Washington; and he was the more struck by Hewitt's saying, at the
end of his laborious career as legislator, that he left behind him no
permanent result except the Act consolidating the Surveys. Adams knew
no other man who had done so much, unless Mr. Sherman's legislation
is accepted as an instance of success. Hewitt's nearest rival would
probably have been Senator Pendleton who stood father to civil
service reform in 1882, an attempt to correct a vice that should
never have been allowed to be born. These were the men who
succeeded.

The press stood in much the same light. No editor, no political
writer, and no public administrator achieved enough good reputation
to preserve his memory for twenty years. A number of them achieved
bad reputations, or damaged good ones that had been gained in the
Civil War. On the whole, even for Senators, diplomats, and Cabinet
officers, the period was wearisome and stale.

None of Adams's generation profited by public activity unless it
were William C. Whitney, and even he could not be induced to return
to it. Such ambitions as these were out of one's reach, but supposing
one tried for what was feasible, attached one's self closely to the
Garfields, Arthurs, Frelinghuysens, Blaines, Bayards, or Whitneys,
who happened to hold office; and supposing one asked for the mission
to Belgium or Portugal, and obtained it; supposing one served a term
as Assistant Secretary or Chief of Bureau; or, finally, supposing one
had gone as sub-editor on the New York Tribune or Times -- how much
more education would one have gained than by going to Harvard
College? These questions seemed better worth an answer than most of
the questions on examination papers at college or in the civil
service; all the more because one never found an answer to them, then
or afterwards, and because, to his mind, the value of American
society altogether was mixed up with the value of Washington.

At first, the simple beginner, struggling with principles,
wanted throw off responsibility on the American people, whose bare
and toiling shoulders had to carry the load of every social or
political stupidity; but the American people had no more to do with
it than with the customs of Peking. American character might perhaps
account for it, but what accounted for American character? All
Boston, all New England, and all respectable New York, including
Charles Francis Adams the father and Charles Francis Adams the son,
agreed that Washington was no place for a respectable young man. All
Washington, including Presidents, Cabinet officers, Judiciary,
Senators, Congressmen, and clerks, expressed the same opinion, and
conspired to drive away every young man who happened to be there or
tried to approach. Not one young man of promise remained in the
Government service. All drifted into opposition. The Government did
not want them in Washington. Adams's case was perhaps the strongest
because he thought he had done well. He was forced to guess it, since
he knew no one who would have risked so extravagant a step as that of
encouraging a young man in a literary career, or even in a political
one; society forbade it, as well as residence in a political capital;
but Harvard College must have seen some hope for him, since it made
him professor against his will; even the publishers and editors of
the North American Review must have felt a certain amount of
confidence in him, since they put the Review in his hands. After all,
the Review was the first literary power in America, even though it
paid almost as little in gold as the United States Treasury. The
degree of Harvard College might bear a value as ephemeral as the
commission of a President of the United States; but the government of
the college, measured by money alone, and patronage, was a matter of
more importance than that of some branches of the national service.
In social position, the college was the superior of them all put
together. In knowledge, she could assert no superiority, since the
Government made no claims, and prided itself on ignorance. The
service of Harvard College was distinctly honorable; perhaps the most
honorable in America; and if Harvard College thought Henry Adams
worth employing at four dollars a day, why should Washington decline
his services when he asked nothing? Why should he be dragged from a
career he liked in a place he loved, into a career he detested, in a
place and climate he shunned? Was it enough to satisfy him, that all
America should call Washington barren and dangerous? What made
Washington more dangerous than New York?

The American character showed singular limitations which
sometimes drove the student of civilized man to despair. Crushed by
his own ignorance -- lost in the darkness of his own gropings -- the
scholar finds himself jostled of a sudden by a crowd of men who seem
to him ignorant that there is a thing called ignorance; who have
forgotten how to amuse themselves; who cannot even understand that
they are bored. The American thought of himself as a restless,
pushing, energetic, ingenious person, always awake and trying to get
ahead of his neighbors. Perhaps this idea of the national character
might be correct for New York or Chicago; it was not correct for
Washington. There the American showed himself, four times in five, as
a quiet, peaceful, shy figure, rather in the mould of Abraham
Lincoln, somewhat sad, sometimes pathetic, once tragic; or like
Grant, inarticulate, uncertain, distrustful of himself, still more
distrustful of others, and awed by money. That the American, by
temperament, worked to excess, was true; work and whiskey were his
stimulants; work was a form of vice; but he never cared much for
money or power after he earned them. The amusement of the pursuit was
all the amusement he got from it; he had no use for wealth. Jim Fisk
alone seemed to know what he wanted; Jay Gould never did. At
Washington one met mostly such true Americans, but if one wanted to
know them better, one went to study them in Europe. Bored, patient,
helpless; pathetically dependent on his wife and daughters; indulgent
to excess; mostly a modest, decent, excellent, valuable citizen; the
American was to be met at every railway station in Europe, carefully
explaining to every listener that the happiest day of his life would
be the day he should land on the pier at New York. He was ashamed to
be amused; his mind no longer answered to the stimulus of variety; he
could not face a new thought. All his immense strength his intense
nervous energy, his keen analytic perceptions, were oriented in one
direction, and he could not change it. Congress was full of such men;
in the Senate, Sumner was almost the only exception; in the
Executive, Grant and Boutwell were varieties of the type -- political
specimens -- pathetic in their helplessness to do anything with power
when it came to them. They knew not how to amuse themselves; they
could not conceive how other people were amused. Work, whiskey, and
cards were life. The atmosphere of political Washington was theirs --
or was supposed by the outside world to be in their control -- and
this was the reason why the outside world judged that Washington was
fatal even for a young man of thirty-two, who had passed through the
whole variety of temptations, in every capital of Europe, for a dozen
years; who never played cards, and who loathed whiskey.