He could
not go wrong. The West must inevitably pay an enormous tribute to
Boston and New York. One's position in the East was the best in the
world for every purpose that could offer an object for going
westward. If ever in history men had been able to calculate on a
certainty for a lifetime in advance, the citizens of the great
Eastern seaports could do it in 1850 when their railway systems
were already laid out. Neither to a politician nor to a
business-man nor to any of the learned professions did the West
promise any certain advantage, while it offered uncertainties in
plenty.
At any other moment in human history, this
education, including its political and literary bias, would have
been not only good, but quite the best. Society had always welcomed
and flattered men so endowed. Henry Adams had every reason to be
well pleased with it, and not ill-pleased with himself. He had all
he wanted. He saw no reason for thinking that any one else had
more. He finished with school, not very brilliantly, but without
finding fault with the sum of his knowledge. Probably he knew more
than his father, or his grandfather, or his great-grandfather had
known at sixteen years old. Only on looking back, fifty years
later, at his own figure in 1854, and pondering on the needs of the
twentieth century, he wondered whether, on the whole the boy of
1854 stood nearer to the thought of 1904, or to that of the year 1.
He found himself unable to give a sure answer. The calculation was
clouded by the undetermined values of twentieth-century thought,
but the story will show his reasons for thinking that, in
essentials like religion, ethics, philosophy; in history,
literature, art; in the concepts of all science, except perhaps
mathematics, the American boy of 1854 stood nearer the year 1 than
to the year 1900. The education he had received bore little
relation to the education he needed. Speaking as an American of
1900, he had as yet no education at all. He knew not even where or
how to begin.
CHAPTER IV
HARVARD COLLEGE
(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 years without some sensation of loss
- some sentiment of habit - but school was what in after life he
commonly heard his friends denounce as an intolerable bore. He was
born too old for it. The same thing could be said of most New
England boys. Mentally they never were boys. Their education as men
should have begun at ten years old. They were fully five years more
mature than the English or European boy for whom schools were made.
For the purposes of future advancement, as afterwards appeared,
these first six years of a possible education were wasted in doing
imperfectly what might have been done perfectly in one, and in any
case would have had small value. The next regular step was Harvard
College. He was more than glad to go. For generation after
generation, Adamses and Brookses and Boylstons and Gorhams had gone
to Harvard College, and although none of them, as far as known, had
ever done any good there, or thought himself the better for it,
custom, social ties, convenience, and, above all, economy, kept
each generation in the track. Any other education would have
required a serious effort, but no one took Harvard College
seriously. All went there because their friends went there, and the
College was their ideal of social self-respect.
Harvard College, as far as it educated at all, was a
mild and liberal school, which sent young men into the world with
all they needed to make respectable citizens, and something of what
they wanted to make useful ones. Leaders of men it never tried to
make. Its ideals were altogether different.
1 comment