The Education of Henry Adams
EDITOR'S PREFACE
This volume,
written in 1905 as a sequel to the same author's "Mont Saint Michel
and Chartres," was privately printed, to the number of one hundred
copies, in 1906, and sent to the persons interested, for their
assent, correction, or suggestion. The idea of the two books was
thus explained at the end of Chapter XXIX: -
"Any schoolboy could see that man as a force must be
measured by motion from a fixed point. Psychology helped here by
suggesting a unit - the point of history when man held the highest
idea of himself as a unit in a unified universe. Eight or ten years
of study had led Adams to think he might use the century 1150-1250,
expressed in Amiens Cathedral and the Works of Thomas Aquinas, as
the unit from which he might measure motion down to his own time,
without assuming anything as true or untrue, except relation. The
movement might be studied at once in philosophy and mechanics.
Setting himself to the task, he began a volume which he mentally
knew as 'Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres: a Study of
Thirteenth-Century Unity.' From that point he proposed to fix a
position for himself, which he could label: 'The Education of Henry
Adams: a Study of Twentieth-Century Multiplicity.' With the help of
these two points of relation, he hoped to project his lines forward
and backward indefinitely, subject to correction from any one who
should know better."
The "Chartres" was finished and privately printed in
1904. The "Education" proved to be more difficult. The point on
which the author failed to please himself, and could get no light
from readers or friends, was the usual one of literary form.
Probably he saw it in advance, for he used to say, half in jest,
that his great ambition was to complete St. Augustine's
"Confessions," but that St. Augustine, like a great artist, had
worked from multiplicity to unity, while he, like a small one, had
to reverse the method and work back from unity to multiplicity. The
scheme became unmanageable as he approached his end.
Probably he was, in fact, trying only to work into
it his favorite theory of history, which now fills the last three
or four chapters of the "Education," and he could not satisfy
himself with his workmanship. At all events, he was still pondering
over the problem in 1910, when he tried to deal with it in another
way which might be more intelligible to students. He printed a
small volume called "A Letter to American Teachers," which he sent
to his associates in the American Historical Association, hoping to
provoke some response. Before he could satisfy himself even on this
minor point, a severe illness in the spring of 1912 put an end to
his literary activity forever.
The matter soon passed beyond his control. In 1913
the Institute of Architects published the "Mont-Saint-Michel and
Chartres." Already the "Education" had become almost as well known
as the "Chartres," and was freely quoted by every book whose author
requested it. The author could no longer withdraw either volume; he
could no longer rewrite either, and he could not publish that which
he thought unprepared and unfinished, although in his opinion the
other was historically purposeless without its sequel. In the end,
he preferred to leave the "Education" unpublished, avowedly
incomplete, trusting that it might quietly fade from memory.
According to his theory of history as explained in Chapters XXXIII
and XXXIV, the teacher was at best helpless, and, in the immediate
future, silence next to good-temper was the mark of sense. After
midsummer, 1914, the rule was made absolute.
The Massachusetts Historical Society now publishes
the "Education" as it was printed in 1907, with only such marginal
corrections as the author made, and it does this, not in opposition
to the author's judgment, but only to put both volumes equally
within reach of students who have occasion to consult them.
HENRY CABOT LODGE
September, 1918
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 innumerable swarm of my fellows; let them hear my
confessions; let them groan at my unworthiness; let them blush at
my meannesses! Let each of them discover his heart in his turn at
the foot of thy throne with the same sincerity; and then let any
one of them tell thee if he dares: 'I was a better man!' "
Jean Jacques was a very great educator in the manner
of the eighteenth century, and has been commonly thought to have
had more influence than any other teacher of his time; but his
peculiar method of improving human nature has not been universally
admired. Most educators of the nineteenth century have declined to
show themselves before their scholars as objects more vile or
contemptible than necessary, and even the humblest teacher hides,
if possible, the faults with which nature has generously
embellished us all, as it did Jean Jacques, thinking, as most
religious minds are apt to do, that the Eternal Father himself may
not feel unmixed pleasure at our thrusting under his eyes chiefly
the least agreeable details of his creation.
As an unfortunate result the twentieth century finds
few recent guides to avoid, or to follow. American literature
offers scarcely one working model for high education. The student
must go back, beyond Jean Jacques, to Benjamin Franklin, to find a
model even of self-teaching. Except in the abandoned sphere of the
dead languages, no one has discussed what part of education has, in
his personal experience, turned out to be useful, and what not.
This volume attempts to discuss it.
As educator, Jean Jacques was, in one respect,
easily first; he erected a monument of warning against the Ego.
Since his time, and largely thanks to him, the Ego has steadily
tended to efface itself, and, for purposes of model, to become a
manikin on which the toilet of education is to be draped in order
to show the fit or misfit of the clothes. The object of study is
the garment, not the figure. The tailor adapts the manikin as well
as the clothes to his patron's wants. The tailor's object, in this
volume, is to fit young men, in universities or elsewhere, to be
men of the world, equipped for any emergency; and the garment
offered to them is meant to show the faults of the patchwork fitted
on their fathers.
At the utmost, the active-minded young man should
ask of his teacher only mastery of his tools. The young man
himself, the subject of education, is a certain form of energy; the
object to be gained is economy of his force; the training is partly
the clearing away of obstacles, partly the direct application of
effort. Once acquired, the tools and models may be thrown away.
The manikin, therefore, has the same value as any
other geometrical figure of three or more dimensions, which is used
for the study of relation. For that purpose it cannot be spared; it
is the only measure of motion, of proportion, of human condition;
it must have the air of reality; must be taken for real; must be
treated as though it had life. Who knows? Possibly it had!
February 16, 1907
THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
CHAPTER I
QUINCY
(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; 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.
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