Chapter 19 of the Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams. One fine May afternoon in 1870, Adams drove again up St. James's Street, wandering 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 shown so fair. Evolution from lower to higher raged like an epidemic. Jordan was the greatest of philosophers 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 eerie 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 to friends. Mrs. Milne's Gaskell and her sister, Miss Charlotte Wynne, were both dead, and Mr. James Milne's Gaskell was no longer in Parliament. First field of education seemed closed, too. One found oneself in a singular frame of mind, more eighteenth century than ever, almost rococo, and unable to catch anywhere the cogwheels 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 toward a quicker and more intelligent activity. For English reforms Adams cared nothing. The reforms were themselves medieval. The education bill of his friend W. E. Forster seemed to him a guarantee against all education he had use for. He resented change. He would have kept the Pope and 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 Statehouse and been brought up in the early Victorian epoch, he would have cast off his old skin and made his court to Malboro 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 in eight atrophy of mind. Figuring himself as already a man of action and rather far up toward 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. Like Paul Grave came one day more contentious, contemptuous, and paradoxical than ever because Napoleon III seemed to be threatening war with Germany. Paul Grave 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. Paul Grave was always extreme. His language was incautious, violent. In this of all years Adams lost sight of education. Things began smoothly and London glowed with the pleasant sense of familiarity in dinners. He sniffed with falluptuous delight the coal smoke of Cheepside and reveled in the architecture of Oxford Street. Mayfair never shone so fair to Arthur Penn Dennis 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 the 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 Edinburgh review into silence for fear of J. Gould and Jim Fisk, past even Adams's experience of English eccentricity, though it was large. He gladly set down Reeve's refusal of the Gould 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 favour. Called suddenly away from England, he dispatched 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 Banyi de Luka, 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 Banyi de Luka 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-eating 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 eighteen-fifty-nine, 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 convulsions. One had heard and read a great deal about death, and even seen a little of it, and knew by heart the thousand common places of religion and poetry which seemed to dead-and-worn senses unveil 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 colour of the tusk and 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 woman shared the sense of the Italian summer, the soft velvet air, the humour, the courage, the sensual fullness 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 sabered in battle. For many thousands of years on these hills and plains, nature had gone on sabering men and women with the same air of sensual pleasure. Friends 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 and a void of shapeless energies with resistless mass, colliding, crushing, wasting and destroying what these same energies had created and laboured for maternity to perfect. Society became fantastic, a vision of pantomime with a mechanical motion, and its so-called thought merged into the mere sense of life and pleasure in the sense. The usual anodines 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 Uschi 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 splendour of its light, and the infinity of its heavenly peace. Nature was kind, Lake Judiva 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 4th all Europe had been in peace. On July 14th 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 outbreak 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. France set up no affiche to announce the tragedy. Under one's eyes France cut herself adrift and floated off on an unknown stream toward 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-core. 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 practised 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 oneself 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 Marseillaises to order. For nearly twenty years one had been forbidden to sing the Marseillaises under any circumstances. But at last regiment after regiment marched through the streets shouting Marchon, while the bystanders cared not enough to join. Patreousen seemed to have been brought out of the government stores and distributed by grams per capita. One had seen one's own people dragged unwillingly into a war and had watched one's own regiments marched 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 everyone conspired to ignore the crisis which everyone 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 Adam's prophecy that at 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 Milne's 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 carring 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 Teraspis 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 Adam's had succeeded in educating himself, he had learned to follow a campaign. While at Wenlock he received a letter from President Elliot, inviting him to take an assistant professorship of history to be created shortly at Harvard College. After waiting ten or a dozen years for someone to show consciousness of his existence, even a terra bratula would be pleased and grateful for a compliment which implied that the new president of Harvard College wanted his help. But Adam's 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 Elliot with much regret that the honor should be above his powers.  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 1st 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 freelance and no other career stood in sight or in 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 an 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 idea of the successful statesman, and he thought about it still more, when the Westminster Review for October brought him his article on the Golds Conspiracy, which was also instantly pirated on a great scale. Peretical 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 quite 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 was 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 medieval 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 oneself 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 Elliot, 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 medieval history. With the courteous manner and bland smile so familiar for the next generation of Americans, Mr. Elliot mildly but firmly replied, If you will point out to me anyone 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 it 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 crossroads 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. But 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 from 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 the 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. As nobody did Adams form closer or longer relations than with Mr. Hewitt, 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 wirrisome 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 oneself closely to the Garfields, Arthurs, Frailing-Huisons, Blanes, Bayards, or 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 to throw off responsibility on the American people, whose bear 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 P. King. 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 offices, 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 a political one. Society forbade it, as well as residents 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?  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 seemed 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 mold 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. Board, 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 Butwell 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. CHAPTER 20 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 Elliot, 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. In Korea revealed a boarding table, somewhere in the neighborhood, also supposed to be superior in its class. Chauncey Wright, Francis Wharton, Dennett, John Fisk, 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 Elliot 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, Tory and Gurney, charming men both, could not cover the ground. Between Gurney's classical courses and Tory's modern ones lay a gap of a thousand years, which Adams was expected to fill. The students had already elected courses numbered one, two, and three 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.  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 bead 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 Alexander Dumas. All this was without offense to Sir Henry Mayne, Tyler, MacLennan, 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 wherever 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 to 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 and money. The lecture system to classes of hundreds, which was very much that of the twelfth century, suited Adams not at all. Bored 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 service. 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 a 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 unraveled enough, but complexity precedes evolution. The teraspis 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 book showed a beginning in primitive man, and came down through the salic francs 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, that they would have to exert themselves to get rid of it in the law school even more than they had exerted themselves to acquire it in 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 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 Elliott'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, orthos and barbarosas. 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 everyone 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 Fisk went so far in his notice of the family, in Appleton Cyclopedia, as to say that Henry had left a great reputation at Harvard College, which was a proof of John Fisk's personal regard that Adams heartily returned, and set the kind expression down to camaraderie. The case was different when President Elliott himself hinted that Adams's services merited recognition. Adams could have wept on his shoulder in hysterics, so grateful was he for the rare goodwill 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 criticized, 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 mold, 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 mold, 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 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 had been rather a drawback to a young man in Boston, in 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 medieval 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 the 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 certainly knew nothing else of himself. He could teach his students nothing. He was only educating himself at their cost.  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 could 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 dawns. 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 Fisk, 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 were expected to be silent unless they have observations to make, and all the elements are bound to remain a part if required to make observations. Thus it turned out that of all his many educations, Adams thought that of schoolteacher, 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 the Eighth than he did about President Grant. For seven years he wrote nothing. The review lived on his brother trials as 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 Paul Grave 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 advertisements made an editor a success. Five marked him a failure. The merits or demerits of his literature had little to do with his results except where they led to adversity. A year or two of education as editor satiated most of his appetite for the career as a profession. After a very slight experience he said no more on the subject. He felt willing to let anyone 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 to earn fifty dollars a month. With this result Henry Adams' education as his entry into life stopped and his life began. He had to take that life as best he 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 everyone 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 that they're 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 Lyle 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 40th parallel survey under government. At Washington in the winter of 1869 to 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 years work he was no judge he had become a small spring and a large mechanism and his work counted only in the summer 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 40th 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 of one wood but it was not that which Adam 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' party was out of reach in the Uintas but Arnold Hague's had come into 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 wopity 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.  On the other hand he liked to wander off alone on his mule and past 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 Longs Peak he borrowed a rod and strode 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 plotted 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 teraspis and soloria. They have nothing to do with the accident of space. King had come up that day from Greeley and a light four-wheeled buggy over a trail hardly fit for a commissariat mule and 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 toward 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 anyone. 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 textbooks. That he saw right was a different matter. Since the beginning of time no man has lived who was 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 everyone 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 sagebrush 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 lies converged but King had molded and directed his life logically, scientifically, as Adams thought American life should be directed. He had given himself education all of a peace, 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' 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 unequaled 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 80, the richest and most many-sided genius of his day.  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 40th parallel had Californian instincts. They were brothers of Bret Hart. They felt no leanings toward the simple uniformities of Lyle 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' camp, far up in the Uintas, these talks were continued till the frosts became sharp in the mountains. History and science spread out in personal horizons toward 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. Once more, this is a story of education, not of adventure. It is meant to help young men, or such as have intelligence enough to seek help. But it is not meant to amuse them. What one did, or did not do, with one's education, after getting it, need trouble the inquirer in no way. It is a personal matter, which would only confuse him. Perhaps Henry Adams was not worth educating. Most keen judges inclined to think that barely one man in a hundred owns a mind capable of reacting to any purpose on the forces that surround him, and fully half of these react wrongly. The object of education for that mind should be the teaching itself how to react with vigor and economy. No doubt the world at large will always lag so far behind the active mind as to make a soft cushion of inertia to drop upon, as it did for Henry Adams. But education should try to lessen the obstacles, diminish the friction, invigorate the energy, and should train minds to react, not at haphazard, but by choice, on the lines of force that attract their world. What one knows is in youth of little moment. They know enough who know how to learn. Throughout human history the waste of mind has been appalling, and as this story is meant to show society has conspired to promote it. No doubt the teacher is the worst criminal, but the world stands behind him and drags the student from his course. The moral is stentorian. Only the most energetic, the most highly fitted, and the most favoured have overcome the friction or the viscosity of inertia, and these were compelled to waste three forces of their energy in doing it. Fit or unfit, Henry Adams stopped his own education in 1871, and began to apply it for practical uses, like his neighbours. At the end of twenty years he found that he had finished and could sum up the result. He had no complaint to make against man or woman. They had all treated him kindly. He had never met with ill will, ill temper, or even ill manners, or no necoral. He had never seen serious dishonesty or ingratitude. He had found a readiness in the young to respond to suggestion that seemed to him far beyond all that he had reason to expect. Considering the stock complaints against the world he could not understand why he had nothing to complain of. During these twenty years he had done as much work in quantity as his neighbours wanted, more than they would ever stop to look at, and more than his share. Merely in print he thought altogether ridiculous the number of volumes he counted on the shelves of public libraries. He had no notion whether they served a useful purpose. He had worked in the dark, but so had most of his friends, even the artists, none of whom held a lofty opinion of their success in raising the standards of society, or felt profound respect for the methods or manners of their time at home or abroad, but all of whom had tried in a way to hold the standard up. The effort had been for the older generation exhausting, as one could see in the hunts. But the generation after 1870 made more figure not in proportion to public wealth or in the census, but in their own self assertion. A fair number of the men who were born in the thirties had won names, Philip Brooks, Brett Hart, Henry James, H. H. Richardson, John Lafarge, and the list might be made fairly long if it were worthwhile. But from their school had sprung others, like Augustus St. Goudens, McKim, Stanford White, and scores born in the forties who counted as force even in the mental inertia of sixty or eighty million people. Among these Clarence King, John Hay, and Henry Adams had led modest existences, trying to fill in the social gaps of a class which, as yet, showed but thin ranks and little cohesion. The combination offered no very glittering prizes, but they pursued it for twenty years, with as much patience and effort as thought had led to fame or power, until at last Henry Adams thought his own duties sufficiently performed, and his account with society settled. He had enjoyed his life amazingly, and would not have exchanged it for any other that came in his way. He was, or thought he was, perfectly satisfied with it. But for reasons that had nothing to do with education, he was tired. His nervous energy ran low.  Education had ended in eighteen seventy-one. Life was complete in eighteen ninety. The rest mattered so little. As had happened so often, he found himself in London when the question imposed its verdict on him after much fruitless effort to rest elsewhere. The time was the month of January, eighteen ninety-two. He was alone, in hospital, in the gloom of mid-winter. He was close on his fifty-fourth birthday, and Paul Mall had forgotten him as completely as it had forgotten his elders. He had not seen London for a dozen years, and was rather amused to have only a bed for a world and a familiar black fog for Horizon. The coal-fire smelt home-like. The fog had a fruity taste of youth. Anything was better than being turned out into the wastes of Wigmore Street. He could always amuse himself by living over his youth, and driving once more down Oxford Street in eighteen fifty-eight, with life before him to imagine far less amusing than it had turned out to be. The future attracted him less. Lying there for a week, he reflected on what he could do next. He had just come up from the South Seas with John Lafarge, who had reluctantly crawled away toward New York to resume the grinding routine of studio work at an age when life runs low. Adams would rather, as choice, have gone back to the east if it were only to sleep forever in the trade winds under the southern stars, wandering over the dark purple ocean with its purple sense of solitude and void. Not that he liked the sensation, but that it was the most unearthly he had felt. He had not yet happened on Rudyard Kipling's Mandalay, but he knew the poetry before he knew the poem, like millions of wanderers who have perhaps alone felt the world exactly as it is. Nothing attracted him less than the idea of beginning a new education. The old one had been poor enough. Any new one could only add to its faults. Life had been cut in halves, and the old half had passed away, education in all, leaving no stock to graft on. The new world he faced in Paris and London seemed to him fantastic. Willing to admit it real in the sense of having some kind of existence outside his own mind, he could not admit it reasonable. In Paris his heart sank to mere pulp before the dismal ballets of the Grand Opera and the eternal vaudeville of the old Palais Royale. But except for them his own Paris of the Second Empire was as extinct as that of the First Napoleon. At the galleries and exhibitions he was racked by the effort of art to be original, and when one day after much reflection John Lafarge asked whether there might not still be room for something simple in art. Adam shook his head. As he saw the world it was no longer simple and could not express itself simply. It should express what it was, and this was something that neither Adams nor Lafarge understood. Under the first blast of this furnace heat the lights seemed fairly to go out. He felt nothing in common with the world as it promised to be. He was ready to quit it and the easiest path led back to the east. But he could not venture alone and the rarest of animals is a companion. He must return to America to get one. Perhaps while waiting he might write more history and on the chance as a last resource he gave orders for copying everything he could reach in archives. But this was mere habit. He went home as a horse goes back to his stable because he knew nowhere else to go. Home was Washington. As soon as Grant's administration ended in 1877 and Everts became Secretary of State Adams went back there partly to write history but chiefly because his seven years of laborious banishment in Boston convinced him that as far as he had a function in life it was as stable companion to statesmen whether they liked it or not. At about the same time old George Bancroft did the same thing and presently John Hay came on to be Assistant Secretary of State for Mr. Everts and stayed there to write the life of Lincoln. In 1884 Adams joined him in employing Richardson to build them adjoining houses on Lafayette Square. As far as Adams had a home this was it. To the house on Lafayette Square he must turn for he had no other status no position in the world. Never did he make a decision more reluctantly than this of going back to his manger. His father and mother were dead. All his family led settled lives of their own. Except for two or three friends in Washington who were themselves uncertain of stay. No one cared whether he came or went and he cared least. There was nothing to care about. Everyone was busy. Nearly everyone seemed contented. Since 1871 nothing had ruffled the surface of the American world and even the progress of Europe in her sideways track to dis-Europeaning herself had ceased to be violent. After a dreary January in Paris at last when no excuse could be persuaded to offer itself a further delay he crossed the channel and passed a week with his old friend Milne's Gaskell at Thorns in Yorkshire while the westerly gales raved a warning against going home. Yorkshire in January is not an island in the South Seas. It has few points of resemblance to Tahiti not many to Fiji or Samoa. But as so often before it was a rest between past and future and Adams was grateful for it. At last on February 3rd he drove after a fashion down the Irish Channel on board the Teutonic. He had not crossed the Atlantic for a dozen years and had never seen an ocean steamer of the new type. He had seen nothing new of any sort or much changed in France or England. The railways made quicker time but were no more comfortable. The scale was the same. The channel service was hardly improved since 1858 or so little as to make no impression. Europe seemed to have been stationary for twenty years. To a man who had been stationary like Europe the Teutonic was a marvel. That he should be able to eat his dinner through a week of howling winter gales was a miracle. That he should have a decked state room with fresh air and read all night if he chose by electric light was matter for more wonder than life had yet supplied in its old forms. Wonder may be double even trouble. Adams's wonder ran off into figures. As the Niagara was to the Teutonic as 1860 was to 1890 so the Teutonic and 1890 must be to the next term. And then? Apparently the question concerned only America. Western Europe offered no such conundrum. There one might double scale and speed indefinitely without passing bounds. Fate was kind on that voyage. Rudyard Kipling on his wedding trip to America thanks to the mediation of Henry James dashed over the passenger his exuberant fountain of gaiety and wit as though playing a garden hose on a thirsty and faded begonia. Kipling could never know what peace of mind he gave for he could hardly ever need it himself so much. And yet in the full delight of his endless fun and variety one felt the old conundrum repeat itself. Somehow somewhere Kipling and the American were not one but two and could not be glued together. The American felt that the defect if defect it were was in himself. He had felt it when he was with Swinburne and again with Robert Louis Stevenson even under the palms of Velima. But he did not carry self-abasement to the point of thinking himself singular. Whatever the defect might be it was American. It belonged to the type. It lived in the blood. Whatever the quality might be that held him apart it was English. It lived also in the blood. One felt it little if at all with Celts and one yearned reciprocally among Fiji cannibals. Clarence King used to say that it was due to discord between the wavelengths of the man-adams. But the theory offered difficulties in measurement. Perhaps after all it was only that genius soars. But this theory too had its dark corners. All through life one had seen the American on his literary knees to the European and all through many lives back from some two centuries one had seen the European snub or patronize the American. Not always intentionally but effectually. It was the nature of things. Kipling neither snubbed nor patronized. He was all gaiety and good nature. But he would have been first to feel what one meant. Genius has to pay itself that unwilling self-respect. Toward the middle of February 1892 Adams found himself again in Washington. In Paris and London he had seen nothing to make a return to life worthwhile. In Washington he saw plenty of reasons for staying dead. Changes had taken place here. Improvements had been made with time. Much time. The city might become habitable according to some fashionable standard. But all one's friends had died or disappeared several times over leaving one almost as strange as in Boston or London. Slowly a certain society had built itself up around the government. Houses had been opened and there was much dining much calling much leaving of cards. But a solitary man counted for less than in 1868. Society seemed hardly more at home than he. Both executive and congress held it aloof. No one in society seemed to have the ear of anybody in government. No one in government knew any reason for consulting anyone in society. The world had ceased to be wholly political but politics had become less social. A survivor of the Civil War like George Bancroft or John Hay tried to keep footing but without brilliant success. They were free to say or do what they liked but no one took much notice of anything said or done. A presidential election was to take place in November and no one showed much interest in the result. The two candidates were singular persons of whom it was the common saying that one of them had no friends the other only enemies. Calvin Brice who was at that time altogether the wittiest and cleverest member of the Senate was in the habit of describing Mr. Cleveland in glowing terms and at great length as one of the loftiest natures and noblest characters of ancient or modern time. But he concluded in future I prefer to look on at his proceedings from the safe summit of some neighboring hill. The same remark applied to Mr. Harrison. In this respect they were the greatest of presidents for whatever harm they might do to their enemies was as nothing when compared to the mortality they inflicted on their friends. Men fled them as though they had the evil eye. To the American people the two candidates and the two parties were so evenly balanced that the scales showed hardly a perceptible difference. Mr. Harrison was an excellent president a man of ability and force perhaps the best president the Republican Party had put forward since Lincoln's death. Yet on the whole Adams felt a shade of preference for President Cleveland. Not so much personally as because the Democrats represented to him the last remnants of the 18th century. The survivor of Hosea Bigelow's Cornwallis the soul remaining Protestants against a bankers Olympus which had become for five and twenty years more and more despotic over Esop's frog empire. One might no longer croak except to vote for King Log or Failing Storks for Grover Cleveland and even then could not be sure whether King Banker lurked behind. The costly education in politics had led to political torpor. Everyone did not share it Clarence King and John Hay were loyal Republicans who never for a moment conceived that they could be merit in other ideals. With King the feeling was chiefly love of archaic races. Sympathy with the Negro and Indian and corresponding dislike of their enemies. But with Hay party loyalty became a phrase of being a little like the loyalty of a highly cultivated churchmen to his church. He saw all the failings of the party and still more keenly those of the partisans but he could not live outside. To Adams a Western Democrat or a Western Republican a city Democrat or a city Republican a W.C. Whitney or a J.G. Blaine were actually the same man as far as their usefulness to the objects of King Hay or Adams was concerned. They graded themselves as friends or enemies not as Republicans or Democrats. To Hay the difference was that of being respectable or not. Since 1879 King Hay and Adams had been inseparable. Step by step they had gone on in the closest sympathy rather shunning than inviting public position. Until in 1892 none of them held any post at all. With great effort in Hay's administration all King's friends including Abraham Hewitt and Charles Shirts had carried the bill for uniting the surveys and had placed King at the head of the bureau. But King waited only to organize the service and then resigned in order to seek his private fortune in the West. Hay, after serving as Assistant Secretary of State under Secretary Everts during a part of Hay's administration then also insisted on going out in order to write with Nicolay the life of Lincoln. Adams had held no office and when his friends asked the reason he could not go into long explanations but preferred to answer simply that no president had ever invited him to fill one. The reason was good and was also conveniently true but left open an awkward doubt of his morals or capacity. Why had no president ever cared to employ him? The question needed a volume of intricate explanation. There never was a day when he would have refused to perform any duty the government had imposed on him. But the American government never to his knowledge imposed duties. The point was never raised with regard to him or to anyone else. The government required candidates to offer. The business of the executive began and ended with the consent or refusal to confer. The social formula carried this passive attitude a shade further. Any public man who may for years have used some other man's house as his own when promoted to a position of patronage commonly feels himself obliged to inquire directly or indirectly whether his friend wants anything which is equivalent to a civil act of divorce since he feels awkward in the old relation. The handsomest formula in an impartial choice was the grandly courteous southern phrase of Lamar. Of course, Mr. Adams knows that anything in my power is at his service. A la disposition d'usted. The form must have been correct since it pleased both parties. He was right. Mr. Adams did know all about it. A bow and a conventional smile closed the subject forever and everyone felt flattered. Such an intimate promoted to power was always lost. His duties and cares absorbed him and affected his balance of mind. Unless his friend served some political purpose friendship was an effort. Men who neither wrote for newspapers nor made campaign speeches who rarely subscribed to the campaign fund and who entered the White House as seldom as possible placed themselves outside the sphere of usefulness and did so with entirely adequate knowledge of what they were doing. They never expected the President to ask for their services and saw no reason why he should do so. As for Henry Adams in fifty years that he knew Washington no one would have been more surprised than himself had any President ever asked him to perform so much of a service as to cross the square. Only Texas congressmen imagined that the President needed their services in some remote consulate after worrying him for months to find one. In Washington this law or custom is universally understood and no one's character necessarily suffered because he held no office. No one took office unless he wanted it and in turn the outsider was never asked to do work or subscribe money. Adams saw no office that he wanted and he gravely thought that from his point of view in the long run he was likely to be a more useful citizen without office. He could at least act as audience and in those days a Washington audience seldom filled even a small theater. He felt quite well satisfied to look on and from time to time he thought he might risk a criticism of the players. But though he found his own position regular he never quite understood that of John Hay. The Republican leaders treated Hay as one of themselves. They asked his services and took his money with the freedom that staggered even a hardened observer but they never needed him in equivalent office. In Washington Hay was the only competent man in the party for diplomatic work. He corresponded in his powers of usefulness exactly with Lord Granville in London who had been for forty years the saving grace of every liberal administration in turn. Had usefulness to the public service ever been a question Hay should have had a first class mission under Hayes. Should have been placed in the cabinet by Garfield and should have been restored to it by Harrison. These gentlemen were always using him, always invited his services and always took his money. Adams's opinion of politics and politicians as he frankly admitted lacked enthusiasm although never in his severest temper did he apply to them the terms they freely apply to each other and he explained everything by his old explanation of Grant's character as more or less a general type. But what roused in his mind more rebellion was the patience and good nature with which Hay allowed himself to be used. The trait was not confined to politics. Hay seemed to like to be used and this was one of his many charms. But in politics this sort of good nature demands supernatural patience. Whatever astonishing lapses of social convention the politicians betrayed, Hay laughed equally heartily and told the stories with constant amusement at his own expense. Like most Americans he liked to play at making presidents but unlike most he laughed not only at the presidents he helped to make but also at himself for laughing. One must be rich and come from Ohio or New York to gratify an expensive taste like this. Other men on both political flanks did the same thing and did it well less for selfish objects than for amusement of the game. But Hay alone lived in Washington and in the center of the Ohio influences that ruled the Republican party during 30 years. On the whole these influences were respectable and although Adams could not under any circumstances have had any value even financially for Ohio politicians. Hay might have much as he showed if they only knew enough to appreciate him. The American politician was occasionally an amusing object. Hay laughed and for want of other resource Adams laughed too but perhaps it was partly irritation at seeing how President Harrison dealt his cards that made Adams welcome President Cleveland back to the White House. At all events neither Hay nor King nor Adams had much to gain by re-electing Mr. Harrison in 1892 or by defeating him as far as he was concerned. And as far as concerned Mr. Cleveland they seemed to have even less personal concern. The whole country to outward appearance stood in much the same frame of mind. Everywhere was slack water. Hay himself was almost as languid and indifferent as Adams. Neither had occupation. Both had finished their literary work. The life of Lincoln had been begun completed and published hand in hand with the history of Jefferson and Madison so that between them they had written nearly all the American history there was to write. The intermediate period needed intermediate treatment. The gap between James Madison and Abraham Lincoln could not be judicially filled by either of them. Both were heartily tired of the subject and America seemed as tired as they. What was worse the redeeming energy of Americans which had generally served as the resource of minds otherwise vacant the creation of new force the application of expanding power showed signs of check. Even the year before in 1891 far off in the Pacific one had met everywhere in the east a sort of stagnation a creeping paralysis complaints of shipping and producers that spread throughout the whole southern hemisphere. Questions of exchange and silver production loomed large. Credit was shaken and a change of party government might shake it even in Washington. The matter did not concern Adams who had no credit and was always richest when the rich were poor but it helped to dull the vibration of society. However they studied it the balance of profit and loss on the last twenty years for the three friends King Hay and Adams was exceedingly obscure in 1892. They had lost twenty years but what had they gained? They often discussed the question. Hay had a singular faculty for remembering faces and would break off suddenly the thread of his talk as he looked out of the window on Lafayette Square to notice an old core commander or admiral of the Civil War tottering along to the club for his cards or his cocktail. There is old Dash who broke the rebel lines at Blankburg think of us having been a thunderbolt of war. Or what drew Adams his closer attention there goes old Bootwell gambling like the gambling kid. There they went men who had swayed the course of empire as well as the course of Hay, King and Adams less valued than the ephemeral congressmen behind them who could not have told whether the general was a Bootwell or Bootwell a General. Theirs was the highest known success and one asked what it was worth to them. Apart from personal vanity what would they sell it for? Would any one of them from President downwards refuse ten thousand a year in place of all the consideration he received from the world on account of his success? Yet consideration had value and at that time Adams enjoyed lecturing Augustus St. Gaudens in hours of depression on its economics. Honestly, you must admit that even if you don't pay your expenses you get a certain amount of advantage from doing the best work. Very likely some of the really successful Americans would be willing you should come to dinner sometimes if you did not come too often while they would think twice about Hay and would never stand me. The forgotten statesman had no value at all the general and admiral not much the historian but little. On the whole the artist stood best and of course wealth rested outside the question since it was acting as judge but in the last resort the judge certainly admitted that consideration had some value as an asset though hardly as much as ten or five thousand a year. Hay and Adams had the advantage of looking out their windows on the antiquities of Lafayette Square with the sense of having all that anyone had all that the world had to offer all that they wanted in life including their names on scores of title pages and in one or two biographical dictionaries but this had nothing to do with the consideration and they knew no more than Butwell or St. Gaudens whether to call it success. Hay had passed ten years in writing The Life of Lincoln and perhaps President Lincoln was the better for it but what Hay got from it was not so easy to see except the privilege of seeing popular bookmakers steal from his book and cover the theft by abusing the author. Adams had given ten or a dozen years to Jefferson and Madison with expenses which in any mercantile business could hardly have been reckoned at less than a hundred thousand dollars on a salary of five thousand a year and when he asked what return he got from this expenditure rather more extravagant in proportion to his means than a racing stable he could see none whatever. Such works never return money. Even Frank Parkman never printed a first edition of his relatively cheap and popular volumes numbering more than seven hundred copies until quite at the end of his life. A thousand copies of a book that cost twenty dollars or more was as much as any author could expect. Two thousand copies was a visionary estimate unless it were canvassed for subscription. As far as Adams knew he had but three serious readers Abram Hewitt, Wayne McVeigh, and Hay himself. He was amply satisfied with their consideration and could dispense with that of the other fifty nine million nine hundred and ninety nine thousand nine hundred and ninety seven but neither he nor Hay was better off in any other respect and their chief titled consideration was their right to look out of their windows on great men alive or dead in Lafayette Square a privilege which had nothing to do with their writings. The world was always good-natured civil glad to be amused open-armed to anyone who amused it patient with anyone who did not insist on putting himself in its way or costing it money but this was not consideration still less power in any of its concrete forms and applied as well or better to a comic actor. Certainly a rare soprano or tenor voice earned infinitely more applause as it gave infinitely more pleasure even in America but one does what one can with one's means and casting up one's balance sheet one expects only a reasonable return on one's capital. Hay and Adams had risked nothing and never played for high stakes King had followed the ambitious course he had played for many millions he had more than once come close to a great success but the result was still in doubt and meanwhile he was passing the best years of his life underground for companionship he was mostly lost Thus in 1892 neither Hay, King nor Adams knew whether they had attained success or how to estimate it or what to call it and the American people seemed to have no clearer idea than they indeed the American people had no idea at all they were wandering in a wilderness much more sandy than the Hebrews had ever trodden about Sinai they had neither serpents nor golden calves to worship they had lost the sense of worship for the idea that they worshiped money seemed a delusion worship of money was an old world trait a healthy appetite akin to worship of the gods or to worship of power in any concrete shape but the American wasted money more recklessly than anyone ever did before he spent more to less purpose than any extravagant court aristocracy he had no sense of relative values and knew not what to do with his money when he got it except use it to make more or throw it away probably since human society began it had seemed no such curious spectacle as the houses of the San Francisco millionaires on Knob Hill except for the railway system the enormous wealth taken out of the ground since 1840 had disappeared west of the Alleghenies the whole country might have been swept clean and could have been replaced in better form within one or two years the American mind had less respect for money than the European or Asiatic mind and bore its loss more easily but it had been deflected by its pursuit till it could turn in no other direction it shunned, distrusted, disliked the dangerous attraction of ideals and stood alone in history for its ignorance of the past personal contact brought this American trait close to Adams's notice his first step on returning to Washington took him out to the cemetery known as Rock Creek to see the bronze figure which St. Goudens had made for him in his absence naturally every detail interested him every line, every touch of the artist every change of light and shade every point of relation every possible doubt of St. Goudens's correctness of taste or feeling so that as the spring approached he was apt to stop there often to see what the figure had to tell him that was new but in all that it had to say he never once thought of questioning what it meant he supposed its meaning to be the one common place about it the oldest idea known to human thought he knew that if he asked an Asiatic its meaning not a man woman or child from Cairo to Kamchatka would have needed more than a glance to reply from the Egyptian Sphinx to the Kamakura Diabots from Prometheus to Christ from Michelangelo to Shelley art had wrought on this eternal figure almost as though it had nothing else to say the interest of the figure was not in its meaning but in the response of the observer as Adam sat there numbers of people came for the figure seemed to have become a tourist fashion and all wanted to know its meaning most took it for a portrait statue and the remnant were vacant-minded in the absence of a personal guide none felt what would have been a nursery instinct to a Hindu baby or a Japanese Jinriksha runner the only exceptions were the clergy who taught a lesson even deeper one after another brought companions there and apparently fascinated by their own reflection broke out passionately against the expression that they felt in the figure of despair of atheism of denial like the others the priest saw only what he brought like all great artists St. Gaudens held up the mirror and no more the American layman had lost sight of ideals the American priest had lost sight of faith both were more American than the old half-witted soldiers who denounced the wasting on a mere grave of money which should have been given for a drink landed lost and forgotten in the center of this vast plain of self-content Adams could see but one active interest to which all others were subservient and which absorbed the energies of some 60 million people to the exclusion of every other force real or imaginary the power of the railway system had enormously increased since 1870 already the coal output of 160 million tons closely approached the 180 million tons of the British Empire and one held one's breath at the nearness of what one had never expected to see the crossing of courses and the lead of American energies the moment was deeply exciting to a historian but the railway system itself interested one less than in 1868 since it offered less chance for future profit Adams had been born with the railway system had grown up with it had been over pretty nearly every mile of it with curious eyes and knew as much about it as his neighbors but not there could he look for a new education incomplete though it was the system seemed on the whole to satisfy the wants of society better than any other part of the social machine and society was content with its creation for the time and with itself for creating it nothing new was to be done or learned there and the world hurried on to its telephones bicycles and electric trams at past 50 Adams solemnly and painfully learned to ride the bicycle nothing else occurred to him as a means of new life nothing else offered itself however carefully he sought he looked for no change he lingered in Washington till near July without noticing a new idea then he went back to England to pass his summer on the D side in October he returned to Washington and there awaited the re-election of Mr. Cleveland which led to no deeper thought than that of taking up some small notes that happened to be outstanding he had seen enough of the world to be a coward and above all he had an uneasy distrust of bankers even dead men allow themselves a few narrow prejudices end of chapter 21