Latin and Greek, he could, with the help of
the modern languages, learn more completely by the intelligent work
of six weeks than in the six years he spent on them at school.
These four tools were necessary to his success in life, but he
never controlled any one of them.
Thus, at the outset, he was condemned to failure
more or less complete in the life awaiting him, but not more so
than his companions. Indeed, had his father kept the boy at home,
and given him half an hour's direction every day, he would have
done more for him than school ever could do for them. Of course,
school-taught men and boys looked down on home-bred boys, and
rather prided themselves on their own ignorance, but the man of
sixty can generally see what he needed in life, and in Henry
Adams's opinion it was not school.
Most school experience was bad. Boy associations at
fifteen were worse than none. Boston at that time offered few
healthy resources for boys or men. The bar-room and billiard-room
were more familiar than parents knew. As a rule boys could skate
and swim and were sent to dancing-school; they played a rudimentary
game of baseball, football, and hockey; a few could sail a boat;
still fewer had been out with a gun to shoot yellow-legs or a stray
wild duck; one or two may have learned something of natural history
if they came from the neighborhood of Concord; none could ride
across country, or knew what shooting with dogs meant. Sport as a
pursuit was unknown. Boat-racing came after 1850. For horse-racing,
only the trotting-course existed. Of all pleasures, winter
sleighing was still the gayest and most popular. From none of these
amusements could the boy learn anything likely to be of use to him
in the world. Books remained as in the eighteenth century, the
source of life, and as they came out - Thackeray, Dickens, Bulwer,
Tennyson, Macaulay, Carlyle, and the rest - they were devoured; but
as far as happiness went, the happiest hours of the boy's education
were passed in summer lying on a musty heap of Congressional
Documents in the old farmhouse at Quincy, reading "Quentin
Durward," "Ivanhoe," and " The Talisman," and raiding the garden at
intervals for peaches and pears. On the whole he learned most
then.
CHAPTER III
WASHINGTON
(1850-1854)
EXCEPT for politics, Mount 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, though Boston, with singular
foresight, rejected the old designs. What sort of education was
stamped elsewhere, a Bostonian had no idea, but he escaped the
evils of other standards by having no standard at all; and what was
true of school was true of society. Boston offered none that could
help outside. Every one now smiles at the bad taste of Queen
Victoria and Louis Philippe - the society of the forties - but the
taste was only a reflection of the social slack-water between a
tide passed, and a tide to come. Boston belonged to neither, and
hardly even to America. Neither aristocratic nor industrial nor
social, Boston girls and boys were not nearly as unformed as
English boys and girls, but had less means of acquiring form as
they grew older. Women counted for little as models. Every boy,
from the age of seven, fell in love at frequent intervals with some
girl - always more or less the same little girl - who had nothing
to teach him, or he to teach her, except rather familiar and
provincial manners, until they married and bore children to repeat
the habit. The idea of attaching one's self to a married woman, or
of polishing one's manners to suit the standards of women of
thirty, could hardly have entered the mind of a young Bostonian,
and would have scandalized his parents. From women the boy got the
domestic virtues and nothing else. He might not even catch the idea
that women had more to give. The garden of Eden was hardly more
primitive.
To balance this virtue, the Puritan city had always
hidden a darker side. Blackguard Boston was only too educational,
and to most boys much the more interesting. A successful blackguard
must enjoy great physical advantages besides a true vocation, and
Henry Adams had neither; but no boy escaped some contact with vice
of a very low form. Blackguardism came constantly under boys' eyes,
and had the charm of force and freedom and superiority to culture
or decency. One might fear it, but no one honestly despised it.
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