The Education of Henry Adams

BERLIN (1858-1859)

A fourth child has the strength of his weakness.  Being of no great value, he may throw himself away if he likes, and never be missed.  Charles Francis Adams, the father, felt no love for Europe, which, as he and all the world agreed, unfitted Americans for America.  A captious critic might have replied that all the success he or his father or his grandfather achieved was chiefly due to the field that Europe gave them, and it was more than likely that without the help of Europe they would have all remained local politicians or lawyers, like their neighbors, to the end.  Strictly followed, the rule would have obliged them never to quit Quincy; and, in fact, so much more timid are parents for their children than for themselves, that Mr. and Mrs. Adams would have been content to see their children remain forever in Mount Vernon Street, unexposed to the temptations of Europe, could they have relied on the moral influences of Boston itself.  Although the parents little knew what took place under their eyes, even the mothers saw enough to make them uneasy.  Perhaps their dread of vice, haunting past and present, worried them less than their dread of daughters-in-law or sons-in-law who might not fit into the somewhat narrow quarters of home.  On all sides were risks.  Every year some young person alarmed the parental heart even in Boston, and although the temptations of Europe were irresistible, removal from the temptations of Boston might be imperative.  The boy Henry wanted to go to Europe; he seemed well behaved, when any one was looking at him; he observed conventions, when he could not escape them; he was never quarrelsome, towards a superior; his morals were apparently good, and his moral principles, if he had any, were not known to be bad.  Above all, he was timid and showed a certain sense of self-respect, when in public view.  What he was at heart, no one could say; least of all himself; but he was probably human, and no worse than some others.  Therefore, when he presented to an exceedingly indulgent father and mother his request to begin at a German university the study of the Civil Law —­ although neither he nor they knew what the Civil Law was, or any reason for his studying it —­ the parents dutifully consented, and walked with him down to the railway-station at Quincy to bid him good-bye, with a smile which he almost thought a tear.

Whether the boy deserved such indulgence, or was worth it, he knew no more than they, or than a professor at Harvard College; but whether worthy or not, he began his third or fourth attempt at education in November, 1858, by sailing on the steamer Persia, the pride of Captain Judkins and the Cunard Line; the newest, largest and fastest steamship afloat.  He was not alone.  Several of his college companions sailed with him, and the world looked cheerful enough until, on the third day, the world —­ as far as concerned the young man —­ ran into a heavy storm.  He learned then a lesson that stood by him better than any university teaching ever did —­ the meaning of a November gale on the mid-Atlantic —­ which, for mere physical misery, passed endurance.  The subject offered him material for none but serious treatment; he could never see the humor of sea-sickness; but it united itself with a great variety of other impressions which made the first month of travel altogether the rapidest school of education he had yet found.  The stride in knowledge seemed gigantic.  One began a to see that a great many impressions were needed to make very little education, but how many could be crowded into one day without making any education at all, became the pons asinorum of tourist mathematics.  How many would turn out to be wrong whether any could turn out right, was ultimate wisdom.

The ocean, the Persia, Captain Judkins, and Mr. G. P. R. James, the most distinguished passenger, vanished one Sunday morning in a furious gale in the Mersey, to make place for the drearier picture of a Liverpool street as seen from the Adelphi coffee-room in November murk, followed instantly by the passionate delights of Chester and the romance of red-sandstone architecture.  Millions of Americans have felt this succession of emotions.  Possibly very young and ingenuous tourists feel them still, but in days before tourists, when the romance was a reality, not a picture, they were overwhelming.  When the boys went out to Eaton Hall, they were awed, as Thackeray or Dickens would have felt in the presence of a Duke.  The very name of Grosvenor struck a note of grandeur.  The long suite of lofty, gilded rooms with their gilded furniture; the portraits; the terraces; the gardens, the landscape; the sense of superiority in the England of the fifties, actually set the rich nobleman apart, above Americans and shopkeepers.  Aristocracy was real.  So was the England of Dickens.  Oliver Twist and Little Nell lurked in every churchyard shadow, not as shadow but alive.  Even Charles the First was not very shadowy, standing on the tower to see his army defeated.  Nothing thereabouts had very much changed since he lost his battle and his head.  An eighteenth-century American boy fresh from Boston naturally took it all for education, and was amused at this sort of lesson.  At least he thought he felt it.

Then came the journey up to London through Birmingham and the Black District, another lesson, which needed much more to be rightly felt.  The plunge into darkness lurid with flames; the sense of unknown horror in this weird gloom which then existed nowhere else, and never had existed before, except in volcanic craters; the violent contrast between this dense, smoky, impenetrable darkness, and the soft green charm that one glided into, as one emerged —­ the revelation of an unknown society of the pit —­ made a boy uncomfortable, though he had no idea that Karl Marx was standing there waiting for him, and that sooner or later the process of education would have to deal with Karl Marx much more than with Professor Bowen of Harvard College or his Satanic free-trade majesty John Stuart Mill.  The Black District was a practical education, but it was infinitely far in the distance.  The boy ran away from it, as he ran away from everything he disliked.

Had he known enough to know where to begin he would have seen something to study, more vital than the Civil Law, in the long, muddy, dirty, sordid, gas-lit dreariness of Oxford Street as his dingy four-wheeler dragged its weary way to Charing Cross.  He did notice one peculiarity about it worth remembering.  London was still London.  A certain style dignified its grime; heavy, clumsy, arrogant, purse-proud, but not cheap; insular but large; barely tolerant of an outside world, and absolutely self-confident.  The boys in the streets made such free comments on the American clothes and figures, that the travellers hurried to put on tall hats and long overcoats to escape criticism.  No stranger had rights even in the Strand.  The eighteenth century held its own.  History muttered down Fleet Street, like Dr. Johnson, in Adams’s ear; Vanity Fair was alive on Piccadilly in yellow chariots with coachmen in wigs, on hammer-cloths; footmen with canes, on the footboard, and a shrivelled old woman inside; half the great houses, black with London smoke, bore large funereal hatchments; every one seemed insolent, and the most insolent structures in the world were the Royal Exchange and the Bank of England.  In November, 1858, London was still vast, but it was the London of the eighteenth century that an American felt and hated.

Education went backward.  Adams, still a boy, could not guess how intensely intimate this London grime was to become to him as a man, but he could still less conceive himself returning to it fifty years afterwards, noting at each turn how the great city grew smaller as it doubled in size; cheaper as it quadrupled its wealth; less imperial as its empire widened; less dignified as it tried to be civil.  He liked it best when he hated it.  Education began at the end, or perhaps would end at the beginning.  Thus far it had remained in the eighteenth century, and the next step took it back to the sixteenth.  He crossed to Antwerp.  As the Baron Osy steamed up the Scheldt in the morning mists, a travelling band on deck began to play, and groups of peasants, working along the fields, dropped their tools to join in dancing.  Ostade and Teniers were as much alive as they ever were, and even the Duke of Alva was still at home.  The thirteenth-century cathedral towered above a sixteenth-century mass of tiled roofs, ending abruptly in walls and a landscape that had not changed.  The taste of the town was thick, rich, ripe, like a sweet wine; it was mediaeval, so that Rubens seemed modern; it was one of the strongest and fullest flavors that ever touched the young man’s palate; but he might as well have drunk out his excitement in old Malmsey, for all the education he got from it.  Even in art, one can hardly begin with Antwerp Cathedral and the Descent from the Cross.  He merely got drunk on his emotions, and had then to get sober as he best could.  He was terribly sober when he saw Antwerp half a century afterwards.  One lesson he did learn without suspecting that he must immediately lose it.  He felt his middle ages and the sixteenth century alive.  He was young enough, and the towns were dirty enough —­ unimproved, unrestored, untouristed —­ to retain the sense of reality.  As a taste or a smell, it was education, especially because it lasted barely ten years longer; but it was education only sensual.  He never dreamed of trying to educate himself to the Descent from the Cross.  He was only too happy to feel himself kneeling at the foot of the Cross; he learned only to loathe the sordid necessity of getting up again, and going about his stupid business.

This was one of the foreseen dangers of Europe, but it vanished rapidly enough to reassure the most anxious of parents.  Dropped into Berlin one morning without guide or direction, the young man in search of education floundered in a mere mess of misunderstandings.  He could never recall what he expected to find, but whatever he expected, it had no relation with what it turned out to be.  A student at twenty takes easily to anything, even to Berlin, and he would have accepted the thirteenth century pure and simple since his guides assured him that this was his right path; but a week’s experience left him dazed and dull.  Faith held out, but the paths grew dim.  Berlin astonished him, but he had no lack of friends to show him all the amusement it had to offer.  Within a day or two he was running about with the rest to beer-cellars and music-halls and dance-rooms, smoking bad tobacco, drinking poor beer, and eating sauerkraut and sausages as though he knew no better.  This was easy.  One can always descend the social ladder.  The trouble came when he asked for the education he was promised.  His friends took him to be registered as a student of the university; they selected his professors and courses; they showed him where to buy the Institutes of Gaius and several German works on the Civil Law in numerous volumes; and they led him to his first lecture.

His first lecture was his last.  The young man was not very quick, and he had almost religious respect for his guides and advisers; but he needed no more than one hour to satisfy him that he had made another failure in education, and this time a fatal one.  That the language would require at least three months’ hard work before he could touch the Law was an annoying discovery; but the shock that upset him was the discovery of the university itself.  He had thought Harvard College a torpid school, but it was instinct with life compared with all that he could see of the University of Berlin.  The German students were strange animals, but their professors were beyond pay.  The mental attitude of the university was not of an American world.  What sort of instruction prevailed in other branches, or in science, Adams had no occasion to ask, but in the Civil Law he found only the lecture system in its deadliest form as it flourished in the thirteenth century.  The professor mumbled his comments; the students made, or seemed to make, notes; they could have learned from books or discussion in a day more than they could learn from him in a month, but they must pay his fees, follow his course, and be his scholars, if they wanted a degree.  To an American the result was worthless.  He could make no use of the Civil Law without some previous notion of the Common Law; but the student who knew enough of the Common Law to understand what he wanted, had only to read the Pandects or the commentators at his ease in America, and be his own professor.  Neither the method nor the matter nor the manner could profit an American education.

This discovery seemed to shock none of the students.  They went to the lectures, made notes, and read textbooks, but never pretended to take their professor seriously.  They were much more serious in reading Heine.  They knew no more than Heine what good they were getting, beyond the Berlin accent —­ which was bad; and the beer —­ which was not to compare with Munich; and the dancing —­ which was better at Vienna.  They enjoyed the beer and music, but they refused to be responsible for the education.  Anyway, as they defended themselves, they were learning the language.

So the young man fell back on the language, and being slow at languages, he found himself falling behind all his friends, which depressed his spirits, the more because the gloom of a Berlin winter and of Berlin architecture seemed to him a particular sort of gloom never attained elsewhere.  One day on the Linden he caught sight of Charles Sumner in a cab, and ran after him.  Sumner was then recovering from the blows of the South Carolinian cane or club, and he was pleased to find a young worshipper in the remote Prussian wilderness.  They dined together and went to hear “William Tell” at the Opera.  Sumner tried to encourage his friend about his difficulties of language:  “I came to Berlin,” or Rome, or whatever place it was, as he said with his grand air of mastery, “I came to Berlin, unable to say a word in the language; and three months later when I went away, I talked it to my cabman.”  Adams felt himself quite unable to attain in so short a time such social advantages, and one day complained of his trials to Mr. Robert Apthorp, of Boston, who was passing the winter in Berlin for the sake of its music.  Mr. Apthorp told of his own similar struggle, and how he had entered a public school and sat for months with ten-year-old-boys, reciting their lessons and catching their phrases.  The idea suited Adams’s desperate frame of mind.  At least it ridded him of the university and the Civil Law and American associations in beer-cellars.  Mr. Apthorp took the trouble to negotiate with the head-master of the Friedrichs-Wilhelm-Werdersches Gymnasium for permission to Henry Adams to attend the school as a member of the Ober-tertia, a class of boys twelve or thirteen years old, and there Adams went for three months as though he had not always avoided high schools with singular antipathy.  He never did anything else so foolish but he was given a bit of education which served him some purpose in life.

It was not merely the language, though three months passed in such fashion would teach a poodle enough to talk with a cabman, and this was all that foreign students could expect to do, for they never by any chance would come in contact with German society, if German society existed, about which they knew nothing.  Adams never learned to talk German well, but the same might be said of his English, if he could believe Englishmen.  He learned not to annoy himself on this account.  His difficulties with the language gradually ceased.  He thought himself quite Germanized in 1859.  He even deluded himself with the idea that he read it as though it were English, which proved that he knew little about it; but whatever success he had in his own experiment interested him less than his contact with German education.

He had revolted at the American school and university; he had instantly rejected the German university; and as his last experience of education he tried the German high school.  The experiment was hazardous.  In 1858 Berlin was a poor, keen-witted, provincial town, simple, dirty, uncivilized, and in most respects disgusting.  Life was primitive beyond what an American boy could have imagined.  Overridden by military methods and bureaucratic pettiness, Prussia was only beginning to free her hands from internal bonds.  Apart from discipline, activity scarcely existed.  The future Kaiser Wilhelm I, regent for his insane brother King Friedrich Wilhelm IV, seemed to pass his time looking at the passers-by from the window of his modest palace on the Linden.  German manners, even at Court, were sometimes brutal, and German thoroughness at school was apt to be routine.  Bismarck himself was then struggling to begin a career against the inertia of the German system.  The condition of Germany was a scandal and nuisance to every earnest German, all whose energies were turned to reforming it from top to bottom; and Adams walked into a great public school to get educated, at precisely the time when the Germans wanted most to get rid of the education they were forced to follow.  As an episode in the search for education, this adventure smacked of Heine.

The school system has doubtless changed, and at all events the schoolmasters are probably long ago dead; the story has no longer a practical value, and had very little even at the time; one could at least say in defence of the German school that it was neither very brutal nor very immoral.  The head-master was excellent in his Prussian way, and the other instructors were not worse than in other schools; it was their system that struck the systemless American with horror.  The arbitrary training given to the memory was stupefying; the strain that the memory endured was a form of torture; and the feats that the boys performed, without complaint, were pitiable.  No other faculty than the memory seemed to be recognized.  Least of all was any use made of reason, either analytic, synthetic, or dogmatic.  The German government did not encourage reasoning.

All State education is a sort of dynamo machine for polarizing the popular mind; for turning and holding its lines of force in the direction supposed to be most effective for State purposes.  The German machine was terribly efficient.  Its effect on the children was pathetic.  The Friedrichs-Wilhelm-Werdersches Gymnasium was an old building in the heart of Berlin which served the educational needs of the small tradesmen or bourgeoisie of the neighborhood; the children were Berliner-kinder if ever there were such, and of a class suspected of sympathy and concern in the troubles of 1848.  None was noble or connected with good society.  Personally they were rather sympathetic than not, but as the objects of education they were proofs of nearly all the evils that a bad system could give.  Apparently Adams, in his rigidly illogical pursuit, had at last reached his ideal of a viciously logical education.  The boys’ physique showed it first, but their physique could not be wholly charged to the school.  German food was bad at best, and a diet of sauerkraut, sausage, and beer could never be good; but it was not the food alone that made their faces white and their flesh flabby.  They never breathed fresh air; they had never heard of a playground; in all Berlin not a cubic inch of oxygen was admitted in winter into an inhabited building; in the school every room was tightly closed and had no ventilation; the air was foul beyond all decency; but when the American opened a window in the five minutes between hours, he violated the rules and was invariably rebuked.  As long as cold weather lasted, the windows were shut.  If the boys had a holiday, they were apt to be taken on long tramps in the Thiergarten or elsewhere, always ending in over-fatigue, tobacco-smoke, sausages, and beer.  With this, they were required to prepare daily lessons that would have quickly broken down strong men of a healthy habit, and which they could learn only because their minds were morbid.  The German university had seemed a failure, but the German high school was something very near an indictable nuisance.

Before the month of April arrived, the experiment of German education had reached this point.  Nothing was left of it except the ghost of the Civil Law shut up in the darkest of closets, never to gibber again before any one who could repeat the story.  The derisive Jew laughter of Heine ran through the university and everything else in Berlin.  Of course, when one is twenty years old, life is bound to be full, if only of Berlin beer, although German student life was on the whole the thinnest of beer, as an American looked on it, but though nothing except small fragments remained of the education that had been so promising —­ or promised —­ this is only what most often happens in life, when by-products turn out to be more valuable than staples.  The German university and German law were failures; German society, in an American sense, did not exist, or if it existed, never showed itself to an American; the German theatre, on the other hand, was excellent, and German opera, with the ballet, was almost worth a journey to Berlin; but the curious and perplexing result of the total failure of German education was that the student’s only clear gain —­ his single step to a higher life —­ came from time wasted; studies neglected; vices indulged; education reversed; —­ it came from the despised beer-garden and music-hall; and it was accidental, unintended, unforeseen.

When his companions insisted on passing two or three afternoons in the week at music-halls, drinking beer, smoking German tobacco, and looking at fat German women knitting, while an orchestra played dull music, Adams went with them for the sake of the company, but with no presence of enjoyment; and when Mr. Apthorp gently protested that he exaggerated his indifference, for of course he enjoyed Beethoven, Adams replied simply that he loathed Beethoven; and felt a slight surprise when Mr. Apthorp and the others laughed as though they thought it humor.  He saw no humor in it.  He supposed that, except musicians, every one thought Beethoven a bore, as every one except mathematicians thought mathematics a bore.  Sitting thus at his beer-table, mentally impassive, he was one day surprised to notice that his mind followed the movement of a Sinfonie.  He could not have been more astonished had he suddenly read a new language.  Among the marvels of education, this was the most marvellous.  A prison-wall that barred his senses on one great side of life, suddenly fell, of its own accord, without so much as his knowing when it happened.  Amid the fumes of coarse tobacco and poor beer, surrounded by the commonest of German Haus-frauen, a new sense burst out like a flower in his life, so superior to the old senses, so bewildering, so astonished at its own existence, that he could not credit it, and watched it as something apart, accidental, and not to be trusted.  He slowly came to admit that Beethoven had partly become intelligible to him, but he was the more inclined to think that Beethoven must be much overrated as a musician, to be so easily followed.  This could not be called education, for he had never so much as listened to the music.  He had been thinking of other things.  Mere mechanical repetition of certain sounds had stuck to his unconscious mind.  Beethoven might have this power, but not Wagner, or at all events not the Wagner later than “Tannhauser.”  Near forty years passed before he reached the “Gotterdammerung.”

One might talk of the revival of an atrophied sense —­ the mechanical reaction of a sleeping consciousness —­ but no other sense awoke.  His sense of line and color remained as dull as ever, and as far as ever below the level of an artist.  His metaphysical sense did not spring into life, so that his mind could leap the bars of German expression into sympathy with the idealities of Kant and Hegel.  Although he insisted that his faith in German thought and literature was exalted, he failed to approach German thought, and he shed never a tear of emotion over the pages of Goethe and Schiller.  When his father rashly ventured from time to time to write him a word of common sense, the young man would listen to no sense at all, but insisted that Berlin was the best of educations in the best of Germanies; yet, when, at last, April came, and some genius suggested a tramp in Thuringen, his heart sang like a bird; he realized what a nightmare he had suffered, and he made up his mind that, wherever else he might, in the infinities of space and time, seek for education, it should not be again in Berlin.