The Education of Henry Adams

UNDER the shadow of Boston State House, turning its back on the
house of John Hancock, the little passage called Hancock Avenue runs,
or ran, from Beacon Street, skirting the State House grounds, to Mount
Vernon Street, on the summit of Beacon Hill; and there, in the third
house below Mount Vernon Place, February 16, 1838, a child was born,
and christened later by his uncle, the minister of the First Church
after the tenets of Boston Unitarianism, as Henry Brooks Adams.

Had he been born in Jerusalem under the shadow of the Temple
and circumcised in the Synagogue by his uncle the high priest,
under the name of Israel Cohen, he would scarcely have been more distinctly
branded, and not much more heavily handicapped in the races of the
coming century, in running for such stakes as the century was to offer;
but, on the other hand, the ordinary traveller, who does not enter the
field of racing, finds advantage in being, so to speak, ticketed
through life, with the safeguards of an old, established traffic.
Safeguards are often irksome, but sometimes convenient, and if one
needs them at all, one is apt to need them badly. A hundred years
earlier, such safeguards as his would have secured any young man's
success; and although in 1838 their value was not very great compared
with what they would have had in 1738, yet the mere accident of
starting a twentieth-century career from a nest of associations so
colonial,--so troglodytic--as the First Church, the Boston State House,
Beacon Hill, John Hancock and John Adams, Mount Vernon Street and
Quincy, all crowding on ten pounds of unconscious babyhood, was so
queer as to offer a subject of curious speculation to the baby long
after he had witnessed the solution. What could become of such a child
of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when he should wake up to
find himself required to play the game of the twentieth? Had he been
consulted, would he have cared to play the game at all, holding such
cards as he held, and suspecting that the game was to be one of which
neither he nor any one else back to the beginning of time knew the
rules or the risks or the stakes? He was not consulted and was not
responsible, but had he been taken into the confidence of his parents,
he would certainly have told them to change nothing as far as concerned
him. He would have been astounded by his own luck. Probably no child,
born in the year, held better cards than he. Whether life was an honest
game of chance, or whether the cards were marked and forced, he could
not refuse to play his excellent hand. He could never make the usual
plea of irresponsibility. He accepted the situation as though he had
been a party to it, and under the same circumstances would do it again,
the more readily for knowing the exact values. To his life as a whole
he was a consenting, contracting party and partner from the moment he
was born to the moment he died. Only with that understanding--as a
consciously assenting member in full partnership with the society
of his age--had his education an interest to himself or to others.

As it happened, he never got to the point of playing the game
at all; he lost himself in the study of it, watching the errors of the
players; but this is the only interest in the story, which otherwise
has no moral and little incident. A story of education--seventy years
of it--the practical value remains to the end in doubt, like other
values about which men have disputed since the birth of Cain and Abel;
but the practical value of the universe has never been stated in
dollars. Although every one cannot be a Gargantua-Napoleon-Bismarck and
walk off with the great bells of Notre Dame, every one must bear his
own universe, and most persons are moderately interested in learning
how their neighbors have managed to carry theirs.

This problem of education, started in 1838, went on for three
years, while the baby grew, like other babies, unconsciously, as a
vegetable, the outside world working as it never had worked before, to
get his new universe ready for him. Often in old age he puzzled over
the question whether, on the doctrine of chances, he was at liberty
to accept himself or his world as an accident. No such accident had
ever happened before in human experience. For him, alone, the old
universe was thrown into the ash-heap and a new one created. He and his
eighteenth-century, troglodytic Boston were suddenly cut
apart--separated forever--in act if not in sentiment, by the opening
of the Boston and Albany Railroad; the appearance of the first Cunard
steamers in the bay; and the telegraphic messages which carried from
Baltimore to Washington the news that Henry Clay and James K. Polk were
nominated for the Presidency. This was in May, 1844; he was six years
old; his new world was ready for use, and only fragments of the old met
his eyes.

Of all this that was being done to complicate his education, he
knew only the color of yellow. He first found himself sitting on a
yellow kitchen floor in strong sunlight. He was three years old when
he took this earliest step in education; a lesson of color. The second
followed soon; a lesson of taste. On December 3, 1841, he developed
scarlet fever. For several days he was as good as dead, reviving only
under the careful nursing of his family. When he began to recover
strength, about January 1, 1842, his hunger must have been stronger
than any other pleasure or pain, for while in after life he retained
not the faintest recollection of his illness, he remembered quite
clearly his aunt entering the sickroom bearing in her hand a saucer
with a baked apple.

The order of impressions retained by memory might naturally be
that of color and taste, although one would rather suppose that the
sense of pain would be first to educate. In fact, the third
recollection of the child was that of discomfort. The moment he
could be removed, he was bundled up in blankets and carried from the
little house in Hancock Avenue to a larger one which his parents were
to occupy for the rest of their lives in the neighboring Mount Vernon
Street. The season was midwinter, January 10, 1842, and he never
forgot his acute distress for want of air under his blankets, or the
noises of moving furniture.

As a means of variation from a normal type, sickness in
childhood ought to have a certain value not to be classed under any
fitness or unfitness of natural selection; and especially scarlet
fever affected boys seriously, both physically and in character, though
they might through life puzzle themselves to decide whether it had
fitted or unfitted them for success; but this fever of Henry Adams
took greater and greater importance in his eyes, from the point of
view of education, the longer he lived. At first, the effect was physical.
He fell behind his brothers two or three inches in height, and
proportionally in bone and weight. His character and processes of
mind seemed to share in this fining-down process of scale. He was
not good in a fight, and his nerves were more delicate than boys'
nerves ought to be. He exaggerated these weaknesses as he grew older.
The habit of doubt; of distrusting his own judgment and of totally
rejecting the judgment of the world; the tendency to regard every
question as open; the hesitation to act except as a choice of evils;
the shirking of responsibility; the love of line, form, quality;
the horror of ennui; the passion for companionship and the antipathy
to society--all these are well-known qualities of New England
character in no way peculiar to individuals but in this instance they
seemed to be stimulated by the fever, and Henry Adams could never
make up his mind whether, on the whole, the change of character was
morbid or healthy, good or bad for his purpose. His brothers were
the type; he was the variation.

As far as the boy knew, the sickness did not affect him at all,
and he grew up in excellent health, bodily and mental, taking life as
it was given; accepting its local standards without a difficulty, and
enjoying much of it as keenly as any other boy of his age. He seemed
to himself quite normal, and his companions seemed always to think him
so. Whatever was peculiar about him was education, not character, and
came to him, directly and indirectly, as the result of that
eighteenth-century inheritance which he took with his name.

The atmosphere of education in which he lived was colonial,
revolutionary, almost Cromwellian, as though he were steeped, from his
greatest grandmother's birth, in the odor of political crime. Resistance
to something was the law of New England nature; the boy looked out on
the world with the instinct of resistance; for numberless generations
his predecessors had viewed the world chiefly as a thing to be reformed,
filled with evil forces to be abolished, and they saw no reason to
suppose that they had wholly succeeded in the abolition; the duty was
unchanged. That duty implied not only resistance to evil, but
hatred of it. Boys naturally look on all force as an enemy, and
generally find it so, but the New Englander, whether boy or man, in his
long struggle with a stingy or hostile universe, had learned also to
love the pleasure of hating; his joys were few.

Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, had always
been the systematic organization of hatreds, and Massachusetts politics
had been as harsh as the climate. The chief charm of New England was
harshness of contrasts and extremes of sensibility--a cold that
froze the blood, and a heat that boiled it--so that the pleasure of
hating--one's self if no better victim offered--was not its rarest
amusement; but the charm was a true and natural child of the soil, not
a cultivated weed of the ancients. The violence of the contrast was
real and made the strongest motive of education. The double exterior
nature gave life its relative values. Winter and summer, cold and
heat, town and country, force and freedom, marked two modes of life
and thought, balanced like lobes of the brain. Town was winter
confinement, school, rule, discipline; straight, gloomy streets, piled
with six feet of snow on the middle; frosts that made the snow sing
under wheels or runners; thaws when the streets became dangerous to
cross; society of uncles, aunts, and cousins who expected children to
behave themselves, and who were not always gratified; above all else,
winter represented the desire to escape and go free. Town was
restraint, law, unity. Country, only seven miles away, was liberty,
diversity, outlawry, the endless delight of mere sense impressions
given by nature for nothing, and breathed by boys without knowing it.

Boys are wild animals, rich in the treasures of sense, but the
New England boy had a wider range of emotions than boys of more
equable climates. He felt his nature crudely, as it was meant. To the
boy Henry Adams, summer was drunken. Among senses, smell was the
strongest--smell of hot pine-woods and sweet-fern in the scorching
summer noon; of new-mown hay; of ploughed earth; of box hedges;
of peaches, lilacs, syringas; of stables, barns, cow-yards; of salt
water and low tide on the marshes; nothing came amiss. Next to smell
came taste, and the children knew the taste of everything they saw or
touched, from pennyroyal and flagroot to the shell of a pignut and
the letters of a spelling-book--the taste of A-B, AB, suddenly
revived on the boy's tongue sixty years afterwards. Light, line, and
color as sensual pleasures, came later and were as crude as the rest.
The New England light is glare, and the atmosphere harshens color.
The boy was a full man before he ever knew what was meant by
atmosphere; his idea of pleasure in light was the blaze of a New
England sun. His idea of color was a peony, with the dew of early
morning on its petals. The intense blue of the sea, as he saw it a
mile or two away, from the Quincy hills; the cumuli in a June
afternoon sky; the strong reds and greens and purples of colored
prints and children's picture-books, as the American colors then
ran; these were ideals. The opposites or antipathies, were the cold
grays of November evenings, and the thick, muddy thaws of Boston
winter. With such standards, the Bostonian could not but develop a
double nature. Life was a double thing. After a January blizzard, the
boy who could look with pleasure into the violent snow-glare of the
cold white sunshine, with its intense light and shade, scarcely knew
what was meant by tone. He could reach it only by education.

Winter and summer, then, were two hostile lives, and bred two
separate natures. Winter was always the effort to live; summer was
tropical license. Whether the children rolled in the grass, or waded
in the brook, or swam in the salt ocean, or sailed in the bay, or
fished for smelts in the creeks, or netted minnows in the salt-marshes,
or took to the pine-woods and the granite quarries, or chased
muskrats and hunted snapping-turtles in the swamps, or mushrooms or
nuts on the autumn hills, summer and country were always sensual
living, while winter was always compulsory learning. Summer was the
multiplicity of nature; winter was school.

The bearing of the two seasons on the education of Henry Adams
was no fancy; it was the most decisive force he ever knew; it ran
though life, and made the division between its perplexing, warring,
irreconcilable problems, irreducible opposites, with growing emphasis
to the last year of study. From earliest childhood the boy was
accustomed to feel that, for him, life was double. Winter and summer,
town and country, law and liberty, were hostile, and the man who
pretended they were not, was in his eyes a schoolmaster--that is, a
man employed to tell lies to little boys. Though Quincy was but two
hours' walk from Beacon Hill, it belonged in a different world. For
two hundred years, every Adams, from father to son, had lived within
sight of State Street, and sometimes had lived in it, yet none had
ever taken kindly to the town, or been taken kindly by it. The boy
inherited his double nature. He knew as yet nothing about his great-grandfather,
who had died a dozen years before his own birth: he took for granted
that any great-grandfather of his must have always been good, and his
enemies wicked; but he divined his great-grandfather's character from
his own. Never for a moment did he connect the two ideas of Boston and
John Adams; they were separate and antagonistic; the idea of John Adams
went with Quincy. He knew his grandfather John Quincy Adams only as
an old man of seventy-five or eighty who was friendly and gentle with
him, but except that he heard his grandfather always called "the
President," and his grandmother "the Madam," he had no reason to
suppose that his Adams grandfather differed in character from his Brooks
grandfather who was equally kind and benevolent. He liked the Adams
side best, but for no other reason than that it reminded him of the
country, the summer, and the absence of restraint. Yet he felt also that
Quincy was in a way inferior to Boston, and that socially Boston looked
down on Quincy. The reason was clear enough even to a five-year old
child. Quincy had no Boston style. Little enough style had either; a
simpler manner of life and thought could hardly exist, short of
cave-dwelling. The flint-and-steel with which his grandfather Adams
used to light his own fires in the early morning was still on the
mantelpiece of his study. The idea of a livery or even a dress for
servants, or of an evening toilette, was next to blasphemy. Bathrooms,
water-supplies, lighting, heating, and the whole array of domestic
comforts, were unknown at Quincy. Boston had already a bathroom, a
water-supply, a furnace, and gas. The superiority of Boston was
evident, but a child liked it no better for that.

The magnificence of his grandfather Brooks's house in Pearl
Street or South Street has long ago disappeared, but perhaps his
country house at Medford may still remain to show what impressed the
mind of a boy in 1845 with the idea of city splendor. The President's
place at Quincy was the larger and older and far the more interesting
of the two; but a boy felt at once its inferiority in fashion. It
showed plainly enough its want of wealth. It smacked of colonial age,
but not of Boston style or plush curtains. To the end of his life he
never quite overcame the prejudice thus drawn in with his childish
breath. He never could compel himself to care for nineteenth-century
style. He was never able to adopt it, any more than his father or
grandfather or great-grandfather had done. Not that he felt it as
particularly hostile, for he reconciled himself to much that was
worse; but because, for some remote reason, he was born an
eighteenth-century child. The old house at Quincy was eighteenth
century. What style it had was in its Queen Anne mahogany panels and
its Louis Seize chairs and sofas. The panels belonged to an old colonial
Vassall who built the house; the furniture had been brought back from
Paris in 1789 or 1801 or 1817, along with porcelain and books and
much else of old diplomatic remnants; and neither of the two
eighteenth-century styles--neither English Queen Anne nor French
Louis Seize--was comfortable for a boy, or for any one else. The dark
mahogany had been painted white to suit daily life in winter gloom.
Nothing seemed to favor, for a child's objects, the older forms. On
the contrary, most boys, as well as grown-up people, preferred the
new, with good reason, and the child felt himself distinctly at a
disadvantage for the taste.

Nor had personal preference any share in his bias. The Brooks
grandfather was as amiable and as sympathetic as the Adams
grandfather. Both were born in 1767, and both died in 1848. Both were
kind to children, and both belonged rather to the eighteenth than to
the nineteenth centuries. The child knew no difference between them
except that one was associated with winter and the other with summer;
one with Boston, the other with Quincy. Even with Medford, the
association was hardly easier. Once as a very young boy he was taken
to pass a few days with his grandfather Brooks under charge of his
aunt, but became so violently homesick that within twenty-four hours
he was brought back in disgrace. Yet he could not remember ever
being seriously homesick again.

The attachment to Quincy was not altogether sentimental or
wholly sympathetic. Quincy was not a bed of thornless roses. Even
there the curse of Cain set its mark. There as elsewhere a cruel
universe combined to crush a child. As though three or four vigorous
brothers and sisters, with the best will, were not enough to crush
any child, every one else conspired towards an education which he
hated. From cradle to grave this problem of running order through
chaos, direction through space, discipline through freedom, unity
through multiplicity, has always been, and must always be, the task of
education, as it is the moral of religion, philosophy, science, art,
politics, and economy; but a boy's will is his life, and he dies when
it is broken, as the colt dies in harness, taking a new nature in
becoming tame. Rarely has the boy felt kindly towards his tamers.
Between him and his master has always been war. Henry Adams never
knew a boy of his generation to like