The Education of Henry Adams

FAILURE (1871)

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.