The Education of Henry Adams

PREFACE [Jean Jacques Rousseau]( began his famous Confessions by a vehement appeal to the Deity:—"I have shown myself as I was; contemptible and vile when I was so; good, generous, sublime when I was so; I have unveiled my interior such as Thou thyself hast seen it, Eternal Father! Collect about me

THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS CHAPTER I 1838–1848 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; a

CHAPTER II 1848–1854 Peter Chardon Brooks, the other grandfather, died January 1, 1849, bequeathing what was supposed to be the largest estate in Boston, about two million dollars, to his seven surviving children: four sons,—Edward, Peter Chardon, Gorham and Sydney; three daughters: Charlotte, marri

CHAPTER III 1850–1854 Except for politics, Mt. Vernon Street had the merit of leaving the boy-mind supple, free to turn with the world, and if one learned next to nothing, the little one did learn needed not to be unlearned. The surface was ready to take any form that education should cut into it, t

CHAPTER IV 1854–1858 One day in June, 1854, young Adams walked for the last time down the steps of Mr. Dixwell's school in Boylston Place, and felt no sensation but one of unqualified joy that this experience was ended. Never before or afterwards in his life did he close a period so long as four yea

CHAPTER V 1858–1859 A fourth child has the strength of his weakness. Being of no great value, he may throw himself away if he likes, and never be missed. Charles Francis Adams, the father, felt no love for Europe, which, as he and all the world agreed, unfitted Americans for America. A captious crit

CHAPTER VI 1859–1860 The tramp in [Thüringen]( lasted four-and-twenty hours. By the end of the first walk, his three companions,—John Bancroft, James J. Higginson and B. W.

CHAPTER VII 1860–1861 When, forty years afterwards, Henry Adams looked back over his adventures in search of knowledge, he asked himself whether fortune or fate had ever dealt its cards quite so wildly to any of his known antecessors as when it led him to begin the study of law and to vote for Abrah

CHAPTER VIII 1861 Hardly a week passed when the newspapers announced that President Lincoln had selected Charles Francis Adams as his minister to England. Once more, silently, Henry put Blackstone back on its shelf. As Friar Bacon's head sententiously announced many centuries before:—Time had passed

CHAPTER IX 1862 Of the year 1862 Henry Adams could never think without a shudder. The war alone did not greatly distress him; already in his short life he was used to seeing people wade in blood, and he could plainly discern in history, that man from the beginning had found his chief amusement in bl

CHAPTER X 1862 On Moran's promotion to be Secretary, Mr. Seward inquired whether Minister Adams would like the place of Assistant Secretary for his son. It was the first—and last—office ever offered him, if indeed he could claim what was offered in fact to his father. To them both, the change seemed

CHAPTER XI 1863 Minister Adams troubled himself little about what he did not see of an enemy. His son, a nervous animal, made life a terror by seeing too much. Minister Adams played his hand as it came, and seldom credited his opponents with greater intelligence than his own. Earl Russell suited him

CHAPTER XII 1863 Knowledge of human nature is the beginning and end of political education, but several years of arduous study in the neighborhood of Westminster led Henry Adams to think that knowledge of English human nature had little or no value outside of England. In Paris such a habit stood in

CHAPTER XIII 1864 Minister Adams's success in stopping the rebel rams fixed his position once for all in English society. From that moment he could afford to drop the character of diplomatist, and assume what, for an American minister in London, was an exclusive diplomatic advantage, the character o

CHAPTER XIV 1865–1866 The campaign of 1864 and the reelection of Mr. Lincoln in November set the American Minister on so firm a footing that he could safely regard his own anxieties as over, and the anxieties of Earl Russell and the Emperor Napoleon as begun. With a few months more his own term of f

CHAPTER XV 1867–1868 Politics, diplomacy, law, art and history had opened no outlet for future energy or effort, but a man must do something, even in Portland Place, when winter is dark and winter evenings are exceedingly long. At that moment Darwin was convulsing society. The geological champion of

CHAPTER XVI 1868 At ten o'clock of a July night, in heat that made the tropical rain-shower simmer, the Adams family and the Motley family clambered down the side of their Cunard steamer into the government tugboat, which set them ashore in black darkness at the end of some North River pier. Had the

CHAPTER XVII 1869 The first effect of this leap into the unknown was a fit of low spirits new to the young man's education; due in part to the overpowering beauty and sweetness of the Maryland autumn, almost unendurable for its strain on one who had toned his life down to the November grays and brow

CHAPTER XVIII 1869–1870 The old New Englander was apt to be a solitary animal, but the young New Englander was sometimes human. Judge Hoar brought his son Sam to Washington, and Sam Hoar loved largely and well. He taught Adams the charm of Washington spring. Education for education, none ever compar

CHAPTER XIX 1870 One fine May afternoon in 1870 Adams drove again up St. James's Street wondering more than ever at the marvels of life. Nine years had passed since the historic entrance of May, 1861. Outwardly London was the same.

CHAPTER XX 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. Ever

CHAPTER XXI 1892 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

CHAPTER XXII 1893 Drifting in the dead-water of the fin-de-siecle, and during this last decade everyone talked, and seemed to feel fin-de-siecle, where not a breath stirred the idle air of education or fretted the mental torpor of self-content, one lived alone. Adams had long ceased going into socie

CHAPTER XXIII 1894–1898 The convulsion of 1893 left its victims in dead-water, and closed much education. While the country braced itself up to an effort such as no one had thought within its powers, the individual crawled as he best could, through the wreck, and found many values of life upset. But