They sought
to take share in every function that was open to approach, as they
sought tickets to the opera, because they were not a part of it.
Adams did like the rest. All thought of serious education had long
vanished. He tried to acquire a few French idioms, without even
aspiring to master a subjunctive, but he succeeded better in
acquiring a modest taste for Bordeaux and Burgundy and one or two
sauces; for the Trois Freres Provencaux and Voisin's and Philippe's
and the Cafe Anglais; for the Palais Royal Theatre, and the
Varietes and the Gymnase; for the Brohans and Bressant, Rose Cheri
and Gil Perez, and other lights of the stage. His friends were good
to him. Life was amusing. Paris rapidly became familiar. In a month
or six weeks he forgot even to disapprove of it; but he studied
nothing, entered no society, and made no acquaintance. Accidental
education went far in Paris, and one picked up a deal of knowledge
that might become useful; perhaps, after all, the three months
passed there might serve better purpose than the twenty-one months
passed elsewhere; but he did not intend it - did not think it - and
looked at it as a momentary and frivolous vacation before going
home to fit himself for life. Therewith, after staying as long as
he could and spending all the money he dared, he started with mixed
emotions but no education, for home.
CHAPTER VII
TREASON
(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 Abraham Lincoln on the same day.
He dropped back on Quincy like a lump of lead; he
rebounded like a football, tossed into space by an unknown energy
which played with all his generation as a cat plays with mice. The
simile is none too strong. Not one man in America wanted the Civil
War, or expected or intended it. A small minority wanted secession.
The vast majority wanted to go on with their occupations in peace.
Not one, however clever or learned, guessed what happened. Possibly
a few Southern loyalists in despair might dream it as an impossible
chance; but none planned it.
As for Henry Adams, fresh from Europe and chaos of
another sort, he plunged at once into a lurid atmosphere of
politics, quite heedless of any education or forethought. His past
melted away. The prodigal was welcomed home, but not even his
father asked a malicious question about the Pandects. At the
utmost, he hinted at some shade of prodigality by quietly inviting
his son to act as private secretary during the winter in
Washington, as though any young man who could afford to throw away
two winters on the Civil Law could afford to read Blackstone for
another winter without a master. The young man was beyond satire,
and asked only a pretext for throwing all education to the east
wind. November at best is sad, and November at Quincy had been from
earliest childhood the least gay of seasons. Nowhere else does the
uncharitable autumn wreak its spite so harshly on the frail wreck
of the grasshopper summer; yet even a Quincy November seemed
temperate before the chill of a Boston January.
This was saying much, for the November of 1860 at
Quincy stood apart from other memories as lurid beyond description.
Although no one believed in civil war, the air reeked of it, and
the Republicans organized their clubs and parades as Wide-Awakes in
a form military in all things except weapons. Henry reached home in
time to see the last of these processions, stretching in ranks of
torches along the hillside, file down through the November night;
to the Old House, where Mr. Adams, their Member of Congress,
received them, and, let them pretend what they liked, their air was
not that of innocence.
Profoundly ignorant, anxious, and curious, the young
man packed his modest trunk again, which had not yet time to be
unpacked, and started for Washington with his family. Ten years had
passed since his last visit, but very little had changed. As in
1800 and 1850, so in 1860, the same rude colony was camped in the
same forest, with the same unfinished Greek temples for work rooms,
and sloughs for roads. The Government had an air of social
instability and incompleteness that went far to support the right
of secession in theory as in fact; but right or wrong, secession
was likely to be easy where there was so little to secede from. The
Union was a sentiment, but not much more, and in December, 1860,
the sentiment about the Capitol was chiefly hostile, so far as it
made itself felt. John Adams was better off in Philadelphia in 1776
than his great-grandson Henry in 1860 in Washington.
Patriotism ended by throwing a halo over the
Continental Congress, but over the close of the Thirty-sixth
Congress in 1860-61, no halo could be thrown by any one who saw it.
Of all the crowd swarming in Washington that winter, young Adams
was surely among the most ignorant and helpless, but he saw plainly
that the knowledge possessed by everybody about him was hardly
greater than his own. Never in a long life did he seek to master a
lesson so obscure. Mr. Sumner was given to saying after Oxenstiern:
"Quantula sapientia mundus regitur!" Oxenstiern talked of a world
that wanted wisdom; but Adams found himself seeking education in a
world that seemed to him both unwise and ignorant. The Southern
secessionists were certainly unbalanced in mind - fit for medical
treatment, like other victims of hallucination - haunted by
suspicion, by idees fixes, by violent morbid excitement; but this
was not all.
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