Chapter XX. Failure (1871)

The Education of Henry Adams

by Henry Adams

FAR back in childhood, among its earliest memories, Henry Adams
could recall his first visit to Harvard College. He must have been
nine years old when on one of the singularly gloomy winter afternoons
which beguiled Cambridgeport, his mother drove him out to visit his
aunt, Mrs. Everett. Edward Everett was then President of the college
and lived in the old President's House on Harvard Square. The boy
remembered the drawing-room, on the left of the hall door, in which
Mrs. Everett received them. He remembered a marble greyhound in the
corner. The house had an air of colonial self-respect that impressed
even a nine-year-old child.

When Adams closed his interview with President Eliot, he asked
the Bursar about his aunt's old drawing-room, for the house had been
turned to base uses. The room and the deserted kitchen adjacent to it
were to let. He took them. Above him, his brother Brooks, then a law
student, had rooms, with a private staircase. Opposite was J. R.
Dennett, a young instructor almost as literary as Adams himself, and
more rebellious to conventions. Inquiry revealed a boarding-table,
somewhere in the neighborhood, also supposed to be superior in its
class. Chauncey Wright, Francis Wharton, Dennett, John Fiske, or
their equivalents in learning and lecture, were seen there, among
three or four law students like Brooks Adams. With these primitive
arrangements, all of them had to be satisfied. The standard was below
that of Washington, but it was, for the moment, the best.

For the next nine months the Assistant Professor had no time to
waste on comforts or amusements. He exhausted all his strength in
trying to keep one day ahead of his duties. Often the stint ran on,
till night and sleep ran short. He could not stop to think whether he
were doing the work rightly. He could not get it done to please him,
rightly or wrongly, for he never could satisfy himself what to do.

The fault he had found with Harvard College as an undergraduate
must have been more or less just, for the college was making a great
effort to meet these self-criticisms, and had elected President Eliot
in 1869 to carry out its reforms. Professor Gurney was one of the
leading reformers, and had tried his hand on his own department of
History. The two full Professors of History -- Torrey and Gurney,
charming men both -- could not cover the ground. Between Gurney's
classical courses and Torrey's modern ones, lay a gap of a thousand
years, which Adams was expected to fill. The students had already
elected courses numbered 1, 2, and 3, without knowing what was to be
taught or who was to teach. If their new professor had asked what
idea was in their minds, they must have replied that nothing at all
was in their minds, since their professor had nothing in his, and
down to the moment he took his chair and looked his scholars in the
face, he had given, as far as he could remember, an hour, more or
less, to the Middle Ages.

Not that his ignorance troubled him! He knew enough to be
ignorant. His course had led him through oceans of ignorance; he had
tumbled from one ocean into another till he had learned to swim; but
even to him education was a serious thing. A parent gives life, but
as parent, gives no more. A murderer takes life, but his deed stops
there. A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his
influence stops. A teacher is expected to teach truth, and may
perhaps flatter himself that he does so, if he stops with the
alphabet or the multiplication table, as a mother teaches truth by
making her child eat with a spoon; but morals are quite another truth
and philosophy is more complex still. A teacher must either treat
history as a catalogue, a record, a romance, or as an evolution; and
whether he affirms or denies evolution, he falls into all the burning
faggots of the pit. He makes of his scholars either priests or
atheists, plutocrats or socialists, judges or anarchists, almost in
spite of himself. In essence incoherent and immoral, history had
either to be taught as such -- or falsified.

Adams wanted to do neither. He had no theory of evolution to
teach, and could not make the facts fit one. He had no fancy for
telling agreeable tales to amuse sluggish-minded boys, in order to
publish them afterwards as lectures. He could still less compel his
students to learn the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and the Venerable Bede by
heart. He saw no relation whatever between his students and the
Middle Ages unless it were the Church, and there the ground was
particularly dangerous. He knew better than though he were a
professional historian that the man who should solve the riddle of
the Middle Ages and bring them into the line of evolution from past
to present, would be a greater man than Lamarck or Linnaeus; but
history had nowhere broken down so pitiably, or avowed itself so
hopelessly bankrupt, as there. Since Gibbon, the spectacle was almost
a scandal. History had lost even the sense of shame. It was a hundred
years behind the experimental sciences. For all serious purpose, it
was less instructive than Walter Scott and Alexandre Dumas.

All this was without offence to Sir Henry Maine, Tyler,
McLennan, Buckle, Auguste Comte, and the various philosophers who,
from time to time, stirred the scandal, and made it more scandalous.
No doubt, a teacher might make some use of these writers or their
theories; but Adams could fit them into no theory of his own. The
college expected him to pass at least half his time teaching the boys
a few elementary dates and relations, that they might not be a
disgrace to the university. This was formal; and he could frankly
tell the boys that, provided they passed their examinations, they
might get their facts where they liked, and use the teacher only for
questions. The only privilege a student had that was worth his
claiming, was that of talking to the professor, and the professor was
bound to encourage it. His only difficulty on that side was to get
them to talk at all. He had to devise schemes to find what they were
thinking about, and induce them to risk criticism from their fellows.
Any large body of students stifles the student. No man can instruct
more than half-a-dozen students at once. The whole problem of
education is one of its cost in money.

The lecture system to classes of hundreds, which was very much
that of the twelfth century, suited Adams not at all. Barred from
philosophy and bored by facts, he wanted to teach his students
something not wholly useless. The number of students whose minds were
of an order above the average was, in his experience, barely one in
ten; the rest could not be much stimulated by any inducements a
teacher could suggest. All were respectable, and in seven years of
contact, Adams never had cause to complain of one; but nine minds in
ten take polish passively, like a hard surface; only the tenth
sensibly reacts.

Adams thought that, as no one seemed to care what he did, he
would try to cultivate this tenth mind, though necessarily at the
expense of the other nine. He frankly acted on the rule that a
teacher, who knew nothing of his subject, should not pretend to teach
his scholars what he did not know, but should join them in trying to
find the best way of learning it. The rather pretentious name of
historical method was sometimes given to this process of instruction,
but the name smacked of German pedagogy, and a young professor who
respected neither history nor method, and whose sole object of
interest was his students' minds, fell into trouble enough without
adding to it a German parentage.

The task was doomed to failure for a reason which he could not
control. Nothing is easier than to teach historical method, but, when
learned, it has little use. History is a tangled skein that one may
take up at any point, and break when one has unravelled enough; but
complexity precedes evolution. The Pteraspis grins horribly from the
closed entrance. One may not begin at the beginning, and one has but
the loosest relative truths to follow up. Adams found himself obliged
to force his material into some shape to which a method could be
applied. He could think only of law as subject; the Law School as
end; and he took, as victims of his experiment, half-a-dozen highly
intelligent young men who seemed willing to work. The course began
with the beginning, as far as the books showed a beginning in
primitive man, and came down through the Salic Franks to the Norman
English. Since no textbooks existed, the professor refused to
profess, knowing no more than his students, and the students read
what they pleased and compared their results. As pedagogy, nothing
could be more triumphant. The boys worked like rabbits, and dug holes
all over the field of archaic society; no difficulty stopped them;
unknown languages yielded before their attack, and customary law
became familiar as the police court; undoubtedly they learned, after
a fashion, to chase an idea, like a hare, through as dense a thicket
of obscure facts as they were likely to meet at the bar; but their
teacher knew from his own experience that his wonderful method led
nowhere, and they would have to exert themselves to get rid of it in
the Law School even more than they exerted themselves to acquire it
in the college. Their science had no system, and could have none,
since its subject was merely antiquarian. Try as hard as he might,
the professor could not make it actual.

What was the use of training an active mind to waste its energy?
The experiments might in time train Adams as a professor, but this
result was still less to his taste. He wanted to help the boys to a
career, but not one of his many devices to stimulate the intellectual
reaction of the student's mind satisfied either him or the students.
For himself he was clear that the fault lay in the system, which
could lead only to inertia. Such little knowledge of himself as he
possessed warranted him in affirming that his mind required conflict,
competition, contradiction even more than that of the student. He too
wanted a rank-list to set his name upon. His reform of the system
would have begun in the lecture-room at his own desk. He would have
seated a rival assistant professor opposite him, whose business
should be strictly limited to expressing opposite views. Nothing
short of this would ever interest either the professor or the
student; but of all university freaks, no irregularity shocked the
intellectual atmosphere so much as contradiction or competition
between teachers. In that respect the thirteenth-century university
system was worth the whole teaching of the modern school.

All his pretty efforts to create conflicts of thought among his
students failed for want of system. None met the needs of
instruction. In spite of President Eliot's reforms and his steady,
generous, liberal support, the system remained costly, clumsy and
futile. The university -- as far as it was represented by Henry Adams
-- produced at great waste of time and money results not worth
reaching.

He made use of his lost two years of German schooling to inflict
their results on his students, and by a happy chance he was in the
full tide of fashion. The Germans were crowning their new emperor at
Versailles, and surrounding his head with a halo of Pepins and
Merwigs, Othos and Barbarossas. James Bryce had even discovered the
Holy Roman Empire. Germany was never so powerful, and the Assistant
Professor of History had nothing else as his stock in trade. He
imposed Germany on his scholars with a heavy hand. He was rejoiced;
but he sometimes doubted whether they should be grateful. On the
whole, he was content neither with what he had taught nor with the
way he had taught it. The seven years he passed in teaching seemed to
him lost.

The uses of adversity are beyond measure strange. As a
professor, he regarded himself as a failure. Without false modesty he
thought he knew what he meant. He had tried a great many experiments,
and wholly succeeded in none. He had succumbed to the weight of the
system. He had accomplished nothing that he tried to do. He regarded
the system as wrong; more mischievous to the teachers than to the
students; fallacious from the beginning to end. He quitted the
university at last, in 1877, with a feeling. that, if it had not been
for the invariable courtesy and kindness shown by every one in it,
from the President to the injured students, he should be sore at his
failure.

These were his own feelings, but they seemed not to be felt in
the college. With the same perplexing impartiality that had so much
disconcerted him in his undergraduate days, the college insisted on
expressing an opposite view. John Fiske went so far in his notice of
the family in "Appleton's Cyclopedia," as to say that Henry had left
a great reputation at Harvard College; which was a proof of John
Fiske's personal regard that Adams heartily returned; and set the
kind expression down to camaraderie. The case was different when
President Eliot himself hinted that Adams's services merited
recognition. Adams could have wept on his shoulder in hysterics, so
grateful was he for the rare good-will that inspired the compliment;
but he could not allow the college to think that he esteemed himself
entitled to distinction. He knew better, and his was among the
failures which were respectable enough to deserve self-respect. Yet
nothing in the vanity of life struck him as more humiliating than
that Harvard College, which he had persistently criticised, abused,
abandoned, and neglected, should alone have offered him a dollar, an
office, an encouragement, or a kindness. Harvard College might have
its faults, but at least it redeemed America, since it was true to
its own.

The only part of education that the professor thought a success
was the students. He found them excellent company. Cast more or less
in the same mould, without violent emotions or sentiment, and, except
for the veneer of American habits, ignorant of all that man had ever
thought or hoped, their minds burst open like flowers at the sunlight
of a suggestion. They were quick to respond; plastic to a mould; and
incapable of fatigue. Their faith in education was so full of pathos
that one dared not ask them what they thought they could do with
education when they got it. Adams did put the question to one of
them, and was surprised at the answer: "The degree of Harvard College
is worth money to me in Chicago." This reply upset his experience;
for the degree of Harvard College had been rather a drawback to a
young man in Boston and Washington. So far as it went, the answer was
good, and settled one's doubts. Adams knew no better, although he had
given twenty years to pursuing the same education, and was no nearer
a result than they. He still had to take for granted many things that
they need not -- among the rest, that his teaching did them more good
than harm. In his own opinion the greatest good he could do them was
to hold his tongue. They needed much faith then; they were likely to
need more if they lived long.

He never knew whether his colleagues shared his doubts about
their own utility. Unlike himself, they knew more or less their
business. He could not tell his scholars that history glowed with
social virtue; the Professor of Chemistry cared not a chemical atom
whether society was virtuous or not. Adams could not pretend that
mediaeval society proved evolution; the Professor of Physics smiled
at evolution. Adams was glad to dwell on the virtues of the Church
and the triumphs of its art: the Professor of Political Economy had
to treat them as waste of force. They knew what they had to teach; he
did not. They might perhaps be frauds without knowing it; but he knew
certainly nothing else of himself. He could teach his students
nothing; he was only educating himself at their cost.

Education, like politics, is a rough affair, and every
instructor has to shut his eyes and hold his tongue as though he were
a priest. The students alone satisfied. They thought they gained
something. Perhaps they did, for even in America and in the twentieth
century, life could not be wholly industrial. Adams fervently hoped
that they might remain content; but supposing twenty years more to
pass, and they should turn on him as fiercely as he had turned on his
old instructors -- what answer could he make? The college had pleaded
guilty, and tried to reform. He had pleaded guilty from the start,
and his reforms had failed before those of the college.

The lecture-room was futile enough, but the faculty-room was
worse. American society feared total wreck in the maelstrom of
political and corporate administration, but it could not look for
help to college dons. Adams knew, in that capacity, both Congressmen
and professors, and he preferred Congressmen. The same failure marked
the society of a college. Several score of the best- educated, most
agreeable, and personally the most sociable people in America united
in Cambridge to make a social desert that would have starved a polar
bear. The liveliest and most agreeable of men -- James Russell
Lowell, Francis J. Child, Louis Agassiz, his son Alexander, Gurney,
John Fiske, William James and a dozen others, who would have made the
joy of London or Paris -- tried their best to break out and be like
other men in Cambridge and Boston, but society called them
professors, and professors they had to be. While all these brilliant
men were greedy for companionship, all were famished for want of it.
Society was a faculty-meeting without business. The elements were
there; but society cannot be made up of elements -- people who are
expected to be silent unless they have observations to make -- and
all the elements are bound to remain apart if required to make
observations.

Thus it turned out that of all his many educations, Adams
thought that of school-teacher the thinnest. Yet he was forced to
admit that the education of an editor, in some ways, was thinner
still. The editor had barely time to edit; he had none to write. If
copy fell short, he was obliged to scribble a book-review on the
virtues of the Anglo-Saxons or the vices of the Popes; for he knew
more about Edward the Confessor or Boniface VIII than he did about
President Grant. For seven years he wrote nothing; the Review lived
on his brother Charles's railway articles. The editor could help
others, but could do nothing for himself. As a writer, he was totally
forgotten by the time he had been an editor for twelve months. As
editor he could find no writer to take his place for politics and
affairs of current concern. The Review became chiefly historical.
Russell Lowell and Frank Palgrave helped him to keep it literary. The
editor was a helpless drudge whose successes, if he made any,
belonged to his writers; but whose failures might easily bankrupt
himself. Such a Review may be made a sink of money with captivating
ease. The secrets of success as an editor were easily learned; the
highest was that of getting advertisements. Ten pages of advertising
made an editor a success; five marked him as a failure. The merits or
demerits of his literature had little to do with his results except
when they led to adversity.

A year or two of education as editor satiated most of his
appetite for that career as a profession. After a very slight
experience, he said no more on the subject. He felt willing to let
any one edit, if he himself might write. Vulgarly speaking, it was a
dog's life when it did not succeed, and little better when it did. A
professor had at least the pleasure of associating with his students;
an editor lived the life of an owl. A professor commonly became a
pedagogue or a pedant; an editor became an authority on advertising.
On the whole, Adams preferred his attic in Washington. He was
educated enough. Ignorance paid better, for at least it earned fifty
dollars a month.

With this result Henry Adams's education, at his entry into
life, stopped, and his life began. He had to take that life as he
best could, with such accidental education as luck had given him; but
he held that it was wrong, and that, if he were to begin again, he
would do it on a better system. He thought he knew nearly what system
to pursue. At that time Alexander Agassiz had not yet got his head
above water so far as to serve for a model, as he did twenty or
thirty years afterwards; but the editorship of the North American
Review had one solitary merit; it made the editor acquainted at a
distance with almost every one in the country who could write or who
could be the cause of writing. Adams was vastly pleased to be
received among these clever people as one of themselves, and felt
always a little surprised at their treating him as an equal, for they
all had education; but among them, only one stood out in
extraordinary prominence as the type and model of what Adams would
have liked to be, and of what the American, as he conceived, should
have been and was not.

Thanks to the article on Sir Charles Lyell, Adams passed for a
friend of geologists, and the extent of his knowledge mattered much
less to them than the extent of his friendship, for geologists were
as a class not much better off than himself, and friends were sorely
few. One of his friends from earliest childhood, and nearest neighbor
in Quincy, Frank Emmons, had become a geologist and joined the
Fortieth Parallel Survey under Government. At Washington in the
winter of 1869-70, Emmons had invited Adams to go out with him on one
of the field-parties in summer. Of course when Adams took the Review
he put it at the service of the Survey, and regretted only that he
could not do more. When the first year of professing and editing was
at last over, and his July North American appeared, he drew a long
breath of relief, and took the next train for the West. Of his year's
work he was no judge. He had become a small spring in a large
mechanism, and his work counted only in the sum; but he had been
treated civilly by everybody, and he felt at home even in Boston.
Putting in his pocket the July number of the North American, with a
notice of the Fortieth Parallel Survey by Professor J. D. Whitney, he
started for the plains and the Rocky Mountains.

In the year 1871, the West was still fresh, and the Union
Pacific was young. Beyond the Missouri River, one felt the atmosphere
of Indians and buffaloes. One saw the last vestiges of an old
education, worth studying if one would; but it was not that which
Adams sought; rather, he came out to spy upon the land of the future.
The Survey occasionally borrowed troopers from the nearest station in
case of happening on hostile Indians, but otherwise the topographers
and geologists thought more about minerals than about Sioux. They
held under their hammers a thousand miles of mineral country with all
its riddles to solve, and its stores of possible wealth to mark. They
felt the future in their hands.

Emmons's party was out of reach in the Uintahs, but Arnold
Hague's had come in to Laramie for supplies, and they took charge of
Adams for a time. Their wanderings or adventures matter nothing to
the story of education. They were all hardened mountaineers and
surveyors who took everything for granted, and spared each other the
most wearisome bore of English and Scotch life, the stories of the
big game they killed. A bear was an occasional amusement; a wapiti
was a constant necessity; but the only wild animal dangerous to man
was a rattlesnake or a skunk. One shot for amusement, but one had
other matters to talk about.

Adams enjoyed killing big game, but loathed the labor of cutting
it up; so that he rarely unslung the little carbine he was in a
manner required to carry. On the other hand, he liked to wander off
alone on his mule, and pass the day fishing a mountain stream or
exploring a valley. One morning when the party was camped high above
Estes Park, on the flank of Long's Peak, he borrowed a rod, and rode
down over a rough trail into Estes Park, for some trout. The day was
fine, and hazy with the smoke of forest fires a thousand miles away;
the park stretched its English beauties off to the base of its
bordering mountains in natural landscape and archaic peace; the
stream was just fishy enough to tempt lingering along its banks. Hour
after hour the sun moved westward and the fish moved eastward, or
disappeared altogether, until at last when the fisherman cinched his
mule, sunset was nearer than he thought. Darkness caught him before
he could catch his trail. Not caring to tumble into some fifty-foot
hole, he "allowed" he was lost, and turned back. In half-an-hour he
was out of the hills, and under the stars of Estes Park, but he saw
no prospect of supper or of bed.

Estes Park was large enough to serve for a bed on a summer night
for an army of professors, but the supper question offered
difficulties. There was but one cabin in the Park, near its entrance,
and he felt no great confidence in finding it, but he thought his
mule cleverer than himself, and the dim lines of mountain crest
against the stars fenced his range of error. The patient mule plodded
on without other road than the gentle slope of the ground, and some
two hours must have passed before a light showed in the distance. As
the mule came up to the cabin door, two or three men came out to see
the stranger.

One of these men was Clarence King on his way up to the camp.
Adams fell into his arms. As with most friendships, it was never a
matter of growth or doubt. Friends are born in archaic horizons; they
were shaped with the Pteraspis in Siluria; they have nothing to do
with the accident of space. King had come up that day from Greeley in
a light four-wheeled buggy, over a trail hardly fit for a
commissariat mule, as Adams had reason to know since he went back in
the buggy. In the cabin, luxury provided a room and one bed for
guests. They shared the room and the bed, and talked till far towards
dawn.

King had everything to interest and delight Adams. He knew more
than Adams did of art and poetry; he knew America, especially west of
the hundredth meridian, better than any one; he knew the professor by
heart, and he knew the Congressman better than he did the professor.
He knew even women; even the American woman; even the New York woman,
which is saying much. Incidentally he knew more practical geology
than was good for him, and saw ahead at least one generation further
than the text-books. That he saw right was a different matter. Since
the beginning of time no man has lived who is known to have seen
right; the charm of King was that he saw what others did and a great
deal more. His wit and humor; his bubbling energy which swept every
one into the current of his interest; his personal charm of youth and
manners; his faculty of giving and taking, profusely, lavishly,
whether in thought or in money as though he were Nature herself,
marked him almost alone among Americans. He had in him something of
the Greek -- a touch of Alcibiades or Alexander. One Clarence King
only existed in the world.

A new friend is always a miracle, but at thirty-three years old,
such a bird of paradise rising in the sage-brush was an avatar. One
friend in a lifetime is much; two are many; three are hardly
possible. Friendship needs a certain parallelism of life, a community
of thought, a rivalry of aim. King, like Adams, and all their
generation, was at that moment passing the critical point of his
career. The one, coming from the west, saturated with the sunshine of
the Sierras, met the other, drifting from the east, drenched in the
fogs of London, and both had the same problems to handle -- the same
stock of implements -- the same field to work in; above all, the same
obstacles to overcome.

As a companion, King's charm was great, but this was not the
quality that so much attracted Adams, nor could he affect even
distant rivalry on this ground. Adams could never tell a story,
chiefly because he always forgot it; and he was never guilty of a
witticism, unless by accident. King and the Fortieth Parallel
influenced him in a way far more vital. The lines of their lives
converged, but King had moulded and directed his life logically,
scientifically, as Adams thought American life should be directed. He
had given himself education all of a piece, yet broad. Standing in
the middle of his career, where their paths at last came together, he
could look back and look forward on a straight line, with scientific
knowledge for its base. Adams's life, past or future, was a
succession of violent breaks or waves, with no base at all. King's
abnormal energy had already won him great success. None of his
contemporaries had done so much, single-handed, or were likely to
leave so deep a trail. He had managed to induce Congress to adopt
almost its first modern act of legislation. He had organized, as a
civil -- not military -- measure, a Government Survey. He had
paralleled the Continental Railway in Geology; a feat as yet
unequalled by other governments which had as a rule no continents to
survey. He was creating one of the classic scientific works of the
century. The chances were great that he could, whenever he chose to
quit the Government service, take the pick of the gold and silver,
copper or coal, and build up his fortune as he pleased. Whatever
prize he wanted lay ready for him -- scientific social, literary,
political -- and he knew how to take them in turn. With ordinary luck
he would die at eighty the richest and most many-sided genius of his
day.

So little egoistic he was that none of his friends felt envy of
his extraordinary superiority, but rather grovelled before it, so
that women were jealous of the power he had over men; but women were
many and Kings were one. The men worshipped not so much their friend,
as the ideal American they all wanted to be. The women were jealous
because, at heart, King had no faith in the American woman; he loved
types more robust.

The young men of the Fortieth Parallel had Californian
instincts; they were brothers of Bret Harte. They felt no leanings
towards the simple uniformities of Lyell and Darwin; they saw little
proof of slight and imperceptible changes; to them, catastrophe was
the law of change; they cared little for simplicity and much for
complexity; but it was the complexity of Nature, not of New York or
even of the Mississippi Valley. King loved paradox; he started them
like rabbits, and cared for them no longer, when caught or lost; but
they delighted Adams, for they helped, among other things, to
persuade him that history was more amusing than science. The only
question left open to doubt was their relative money value.

In Emmons's camp, far up in the Uintahs, these talks were
continued till the frosts became sharp in the mountains. History and
science spread out in personal horizons towards goals no longer far
away. No more education was possible for either man. Such as they
were, they had got to stand the chances of the world they lived in;
and when Adams started back to Cambridge, to take up again the humble
tasks of schoolmaster and editor he was harnessed to his cart.
Education, systematic or accidental, had done its worst. Henceforth,
he went on, submissive.