The Education of Henry Adams quotes

Only with that understanding—as a consciously assenting member in full partnership with the society of his age—had his education an interest to himself or to others.

As it happened, he never got to the point of playing the game at all; he lost himself in the study of it, watching the errors of the players; but this is the only interest in the story, which otherwise has no moral and little incident.

A story of education—seventy years of it—the practical value remains to the end in doubt, like other values about which men have disputed since the birth of Cain and Abel; but the practical value of the universe has never been stated in dollars.

… in no way peculiar to individuals but in this instance they seemed to be stimulated by the fever, and Henry Adams could never make up his mind whether, on the whole, the change of character was morbid or healthy, good or bad for his purpose.

His brothers were the type; he was the variation.

As far as the boy knew, the sickness did not affect him at all, and he grew up in excellent health, bodily and mental, taking life as it was given;

Boys naturally look on all force as an enemy, and generally find it so, but the New Englander, whether boy or man, in his long struggle with a stingy or hostile universe, had learned also to love the pleasure of hating; his joys were few.

Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, had always been the systematic organization of hatreds, and Massachusetts politics had been as harsh as the climate.

The chief charm of New England was harshness of contrasts and extremes of sensibility—a cold that froze the blood, and a heat that boiled it—so that the pleasure of hating—one’s self if no better victim offered—was not its rarest amusement;

… or netted minnows in the salt-marshes, or took to the pinewoods and the granite quarries, or chased muskrats and hunted snapping-turtles in the swamps, or mushrooms or nuts on the autumn hills, summer and country were always sensual living, while winter was always compulsory learning.

Summer was the multiplicity of nature; winter was school.

The bearing of the two seasons on the education of Henry Adams was no fancy; it was the most decisive force he ever knew;

What became of the rest of the family he quite forgot; but he distinctly remembered standing at the house door one summer morning in a passionate outburst of rebellion against going to school.

Naturally his mother was the immediate victim of his rage; that is what mothers are for, and boys also

; but in this case the boy had his mother at unfair disadvantage, for she was a guest, and had no means of enforcing obedience.

but boys naturally supposed, without much reasoning, that other boys had the equivalent of President grandfathers, and that churches would always go on, with the bald-headed leading citizens on the main aisle, and Presidents or their equivalents on the walls.

The Irish gardener once said to the child: “You’ll be thinkin’ you’ll be President too!”

The casuality of the remark made so strong an impression on his mind that he never forgot it. He could not remember ever to have thought on the subject; to him, that there should be a doubt of his being President was a new idea.

A coarser instrument would have impressed them more. Average human nature is very coarse, and its ideals must necessarily be average.

The world never loved perfect poise.

What the world does love is commonly absence of poise, for it has to be amused. Napoleons and Andrew Jacksons amuse it, but it is not amused by perfect balance. Had Mr. Adams’s nature been cold, he would have followed Mr. Webster, Mr. Everett, Mr.

A coarser instrument would have impressed them more. Average human nature is very coarse, and its ideals must necessarily be average. The world never loved perfect poise.

What the world does love is commonly absence of poise, for it has to be amused.

Napoleons and Andrew Jacksons amuse it, but it is not amused by perfect balance. Had Mr. Adams’s nature been cold, he would have followed Mr. Webster, Mr. Everett, Mr. Seward, and Mr. Winthrop in the lines of party discipline and self-interest.

“Were half the power that fills the world with terror, Were half the wealth bestowed on camps and courts, Given to redeem the human mind from error, There were no need of arsenals nor forts.”

Nothing quieted doubt so completely as the mental calm of the Unitarian clergy.

In uniform excellence of life and character, moral and intellectual, the score of Unitarian clergymen about Boston, who controlled society and Harvard College, were never excelled.

For them, difficulties might be ignored; doubts were waste of thought; nothing exacted solution.

Boston had solved the universe; or had offered and realized the best solution yet tried. The problem was worked out.

Of all the conditions of his youth which afterwards puzzled the grown-up man, this disappearance of religion puzzled him most. The boy went to church twice every Sunday; he was taught to read his Bible, and he learned religious poetry by heart;

To the New England mind, roads, schools, clothes, and a clean face were connected as part of the law of order or divine system.

Bad roads meant bad morals.

The moral of this Virginia road was clear, and the boy fully learned it.

Slavery was wicked, and slavery was the cause of this road’s badness which amounted to social crime—and yet, at the end of the road and product of the crime stood Mount Vernon and George Washington.

Luckily boys accept contradictions as readily as their elders do, or this boy might have become prematurely wise.

He had only to repeat what he was told—that George Washington stood alone. Otherwise this third step in his Washington education would have been his last.

Sometimes in afterlife, Adams debated whether in fact it had not ruined him and most of his companions, but, disappointment apart, Harvard College was probably less hurtful than any other university then in existence.

It taught little, and that little ill, but it left the mind open, free from bias, ignorant of facts, but docile.

The graduate had few strong prejudices. He knew little, but his mind remained supple, ready to receive knowledge.

The stamp, as such things went, was a good one.

The chief wonder of education is that it does not ruin everybody concerned in it, teachers and taught.

Sometimes in afterlife, Adams debated whether in fact it had not ruined him and most of his companions, but, disappointment apart, Harvard College was probably less hurtful than any other university then in existence.

The lesson in education was vital to these young men, who, within ten years, killed each other by scores in the act of testing their college conclusions.

Strictly, the Southerner had no mind; he had temperament.

He was not a scholar; he had no intellectual training; he could not analyze an idea, and he could not even conceive of admitting two; but in life one could get along very well without ideas, if one had only the social instinct.

The entire work of the four years could have been easily put into the work of any four months in afterlife.

Harvard College was a negative force, and negative forces have value.

Slowly it weakened the violent political bias of childhood, not by putting interests in its place, but by mental habits which had no bias at all.

Certainly Adams made no acquaintance there that he valued in afterlife so much as Richardson, but still more certainly the college relation had little to do with the later friendship.

Life is a narrow valley, and the roads run close together.

Adams would have attached himself to Richardson in any case, as he attached himself to John LaFarge or Augustus St. Gaudens or Clarence King or John Hay, none of whom were at Harvard College.

Another comment threw more light on the effect of the college education. One of the elderly gentlemen noticed the orator’s “perfect self-possession.”

Self-possession indeed! If Harvard College gave nothing else, it gave calm.

For four years each student had been obliged to figure daily before dozens of young men who knew each other to the last fibre.

cheaper as it quadrupled its wealth; less imperial as its empire widened; less dignified as it tried to be civil.

He liked it best when he hated it.

Education began at the end, or perhaps would end at the beginning. Thus far it had remained in the eighteenth century, and the next step took it back to the sixteenth. He crossed to Antwerp.

Within a day or two he was running about with the rest to beer-cellars and music-halls and dance-rooms, smoking bad tobacco, drinking poor beer, and eating sauerkraut and sausages as though he knew no better. This was easy.

One can always descend the social ladder.

The trouble came when he asked for the education he was promised. His friends took him to be registered as a student of the university; they selected his professors and courses;

they selected his professors and courses; they showed him where to buy the Institutes of Gaius and several German works on the Civil Law in numerous volumes; and they led him to his first lecture.

His first lecture was his last.

The young man was not very quick, and he had almost religious respect for his guides and advisers; but he needed no more than one hour to satisfy him that he had made another failure in education, and this time a fatal one.

As long as he could argue that his opponents were wicked, he could join in robbing and killing them without a qualm; but it might happen that the good were robbed.

Education insisted on finding a moral foundation for robbery.

He could hope to begin life in the character of no animal more moral than a monkey unless he could satisfy himself when and why robbery and murder were a virtue and duty.

In July, 1859, she was at Thun in Switzerland, and there Henry Adams joined them.

Women have, commonly, a very positive moral sense; that which they will, is right; that which they reject, is wrong; and their will, in most cases, ends by settling the moral.

Mrs. Kuhn had a double superiority. She not only adored Italy, but she cordially disliked Germany in all its varieties. She saw no gain in helping her brother to be Germanized, and she wanted him much to be civilized.

the shadows breathed and glowed, full of soft forms felt by lost senses. No sandblast of science had yet skinned off the epidermis of history, thought, and feeling. The pictures were uncleaned, the churches unrestored, the ruins unexcavated.

Medieval Rome was sorcery.

Rome was the worst spot on earth to teach nineteenth-century youth what to do with a twentieth-century world. One’s emotions in Rome were one’s private affair, like one’s glass of absinthe before dinner in the Palais Royal;

the shadows breathed and glowed, full of soft forms felt by lost senses. No sandblast of science had yet skinned off the epidermis of history, thought, and feeling. The pictures were uncleaned, the churches unrestored, the ruins unexcavated. Medieval Rome was sorcery.

Rome was the worst spot on earth to teach nineteenth-century youth what to do with a twentieth-century world.

One’s emotions in Rome were one’s private affair, like one’s glass of absinthe before dinner in the Palais Royal; they must be hurtful, else they could not have been so intense;

it made Rome a gospel of anarchy and vice; the last place under the sun for educating the young; yet it was, by common consent, the only spot that the young—of either sex and every race—passionately, perversely, wickedly loved.

Boys never see a conclusion; only on the edge of the grave can man conclude anything

; but the first impulse given to the boy is apt to lead or drive him for the rest of his life into conclusion after conclusion that he never dreamed of reaching. One looked idly enough at the Forum or at St.

Perhaps Henry learned something in Rome, though he never knew it, and never sought it.

Rome dwarfs teachers.

The greatest men of the age scarcely bore the test of posing with Rome for a background.

she gave heart and unity to it all; yet Gibbon might have gone on for the whole century, sitting among the ruins of the Capitol, and no one would have passed, capable of telling him what it meant.

Perhaps it meant nothing.

So it ended; the happiest month of May that life had yet offered, fading behind the present, and probably beyond the past, somewhere into abstract time, grotesquely out of place with the Berlin scheme or a Boston future.

Precisely this class of mind was to be the toughest problem of Adams’s practical life, but he could never make anything of it.

The lesson of Garibaldi, as education, seemed to teach the extreme complexity of extreme simplicity; but one could have learned this from a glowworm.

One did not need the vivid recollection of the low-voiced, simple-mannered, seafaring captain of Genoese adventurers and Sicilian brigands, supping in the July heat and Sicilian dirt and revolutionary clamor, among the barricaded streets of insurgent Palermo, merely in order to remember that simplicity is …

… 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.

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.

The old and typical Southern gentleman developed as cotton-planter had nothing to teach or to give, except warning. Even as example to be avoided, he was too glaring in his defiance of reason, to help the education of a reasonable being.

No one learned a useful lesson from the Confederate school except to keep away from it.

Thus, at one sweep, the whole field of instruction south of the Potomac was shut off; it was overshadowed by the cotton planters, from whom one could learn nothing but bad temper, bad manners, poker, and treason.

Innocent and unsuspicious beyond what was permitted even in a nursery, the private secretary courted both.

Private secretaries are servants of a rather low order, whose business is to serve sources of power.

The first news of a professional kind, imparted to private secretary Adams on reaching Washington, was that the President-elect, Abraham Lincoln, had selected Mr. Seward for his Secretary of State, and that Seward was to be the medium for communicating his wishes to his followers.

The picture of Washington in March, 1861, offered education, but not the kind of education that led to good. The process that Matthew Arnold described as wandering between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born, helps nothing.

Washington was a dismal school.

Even before the traitors had flown, the vultures descended on it in swarms that darkened the ground, and tore the carrion of political patronage into fragments and gobbets of fat and lean, on the very steps of the White House.

fewest of all among those who were in it.

At home, for the most part, young men went to the war, grumbled and died; in England they might grumble or not; no one listened.

Above all, the private secretary could not grumble to his chief. He knew surprisingly little, but that much he did know. He never labored so hard to learn a language as he did to hold his tongue, and it affected him for life.

Above all, the private secretary could not grumble to his chief. He knew surprisingly little, but that much he did know.

He never labored so hard to learn a language as he did to hold his tongue, and it affected him for life.

The habit of reticence—of talking without meaning—is never effaced. He had to begin it at once. He was already an adept when the party landed at Liverpool, May 13, 1861, and went instantly up to London:

Politically the prospect looked even worse, and for Secretary Seward and Senator Sumner it was so; but for the Minister, on the spot, as he came to realize exactly where he stood, the danger was not so imminent.

Mr. Adams was always one of the luckiest of men, both in what he achieved and in what he escaped.

The blow, which prostrated Seward and Sumner, passed over him. Lord John Russell had acted—had probably intended to act—kindly by him in forestalling his arrival. The blow must have fallen within three months, and would then have broken him down.

If the American Minister was in trouble today, the Russian Ambassador was in trouble yesterday, and the Frenchman would be in trouble tomorrow. It would all come in the day’s work. There was nothing professional in worry.

Empires were always tumbling to pieces and diplomats were always picking them up.

This was his whole diplomatic education, except that he found rich veins of jealousy running between every chief and his staff. His social education was more barren still, and more trying to his vanity.

… nightmare he suffered at a dance given by the old Duchess Dowager of Somerset, a terrible vision in castanets, who seized him and forced him to perform a Highland fling before the assembled nobility and gentry, with the daughter of the Turkish Ambassador for partner.

This might seem humorous to some, but to him the world turned to ashes.

When the end of the season came, the private secretary had not yet won a private acquaintance, and he hugged himself in his solitude when the story of the battle of Bull Run appeared in the Times.

Adams were kept in conversation by the old Duchess till everyone else went away except the young Duke and his cousins, who set to playing leapfrog on the lawn.

At intervals during the next thirty years Henry Adams continued to happen upon the Duke, who, singularly enough, was always playing leapfrog.

Still another nightmare he suffered at a dance given by the old Duchess Dowager of Somerset, a terrible vision in castanets, who seized him and forced him to perform a Highland fling before the assembled nobility and gentry, with the daughter of the Turkish Ambassador …

Not even Henry Brougham dared do the things he did, yet Brougham defied rebuff.

Milnes was the good-nature of London; the Gargantuan type of its refinement and coarseness; the most universal figure of May Fair.

Compared with him, figures like Hayward, or Delane, or Venables, or Henry Reeve were quite secondary, but William E. Forster stood in a different class. Forster had nothing whatever to do with May Fair.

Every diplomatist agreed with them, yet the diplomatic standard of trust seemed to be other than the parliamentarian. No professional diplomatists worried about falsehoods. Words were with them forms of expression which varied with individuals, but falsehood was more or less necessary to all.

The worst liars were the candid.

What diplomatists wanted to know was the motive that lay beyond the expression. In the case of Palmerston they were unanimous in warning new colleagues that they might expect to be sacrificed by him to any momentary personal object.

… point, he laughed, and his public laughed with him, for the usual British—or American—public likes to be amused, and thought it very amusing to see these beribboned and bestarred foreigners caught and tossed and gored on the horns of this jovial, slashing, devil-may-care British bull.

Diplomatists have no right to complain of mere lies; it is their own fault, if, educated as they are, the lies deceive them; but they complain bitterly of traps.

Palmerston was believed to lay traps. He was the enfant terrible of the British Government. On the other hand, Lady Palmerston was believed to be good and loyal.

First or last, one was to know dozens of statesmen more powerful and more agreeable than Lord Palmerston; dozens of ladies more beautiful and more painstaking than Lady Palmerston; but no political house so successful as Cambridge House.

The world never explains such riddles. The foreigners said only that Lady Palmerston was “sympathique.”

The small fry of the Legations were admitted there, or tolerated, without a further effort to recognize their existence, but they were pleased because rarely tolerated anywhere else, and there they could at least stand in a corner and look at a bishop or even …

All the way, Stirling was ejaculating explosions of wonder, until at length, at the foot of the stairs and at the climax of his imagination, he paused, and burst out:

“He’s a cross between the devil and the Duke of Argyll!”

To appreciate the full merit of this description, a judicious critic should have known both, and Henry Adams knew only one—at least in person—but he understood that to a Scotchman the likeness meant something quite portentous, beyond English experience, supernatural, and what the French call …

… as Milnes should regard Swinburne as a prodigy greatly comforted Adams, who lost his balance of mind at first in trying to imagine that Swinburne was a natural product of Oxford, as muffins and porkpies of London, at once the cause and effect of dyspepsia.

The idea that one has actually met a real genius dawns slowly on a Boston mind, but it made entry at last.

Then came the sad reaction, not from Swinburne whose genius never was in doubt, but from the Boston mind which, in its uttermost flights, was never moyenâgeux.

What could a shy young private secretary do about it? Perhaps, in his good nature, Milnes thought that Swinburne might find a friend in Stirling or Oliphant, but he could hardly have fancied Henry Adams rousing in him even an interest.

Adams could no more interest Algernon Swinburne than he could interest Encke’s comet.

To Swinburne he could be no more than a worm. The quality of genius was an education almost ultimate, for one touched there the limits of the human mind on that side; but one could only receive; one had nothing to give—nothing even to offer.

“Then, Mr. Weed, do you think that no politician can be trusted?” Mr. Weed hesitated for a moment; then said in his mild manner:

“I never advise a young man to begin by thinking so.”

This lesson, at the time, translated itself to Adams in a moral sense, as though Mr. Weed had said: “Youth needs illusions!” As he grew older he rather thought that Mr. Weed looked on it as a question of how the game should be played.

Evarts was also an economist of morals, but with him the question was rather how much morality one could afford.

“The world can absorb only doses of truth,” he said; “too much would kill it.”

One sought education in order to adjust the dose.

Everyone thought so, and the whole City was in a turmoil. Any intelligent education ought to end when it is complete. One would then feel fewer hesitations and would handle a surer world.

The old-fashioned logical drama required unity and sense; the actual drama is a pointless puzzle, without even an intrigue.

When the curtain fell on Gladstone’s speech, any student had the right to suppose the drama ended; none could have affirmed that it was about to begin; that one’s painful lesson was thrown away.

Everyone thought so, and the whole City was in a turmoil.

Any intelligent education ought to end when it is complete.

One would then feel fewer hesitations and would handle a surer world. The old-fashioned logical drama required unity and sense; the actual drama is a pointless puzzle, without even an intrigue.

that Russell was verging on senility; and that Palmerston had lost his nerve—what sort of education should have been the result of it? How should it have affected one’s future opinions and acts?

Politics cannot stop to study psychology. Its methods are rough; its judgments rougher still.

All this knowledge would not have affected either the Minister or his son in 1862.

With loss of hope came the raising of tone, until at last, after stripping Russell of every rag of defence and excuse, he closed by leaving him loaded with connivance in the rebel armaments, and ended by the famous sentence:

“It would be superfluous in me to point out to your lordship that this is war!”

What the Minister meant by this remark was his own affair; what the private secretary understood by it, was a part of his education.

Gladstone, “that politicians are the men whom, as a rule, it is most difficult to comprehend”; and he added, by way of strengthening it: “For my own part, I never have thus understood, or thought I understood, above one or two.”

Earl Russell was certainly not one of the two.

Henry Adams thought he also had understood one or two; but the American type was more familiar. Perhaps this was the sufficient result of his diplomatic education; it seemed to be the whole.

In Paris, such a habit stood in one’s way; in America, it roused all the instincts of native jealousy.

The English mind was one-sided, eccentric, systematically unsystematic, and logically illogical.

The less one knew of it, the better.

From the old-world point of view, the American had no mind; he had an economic thinking-machine which could work only on a fixed line.

The American mind exasperated the European as a buzz-saw might exasperate a pine forest.

The English mind disliked the French mind because it was antagonistic, unreasonable, perhaps hostile, but recognized it as at least a thought. The American mind was not a thought at all; it was a convention, superficial, narrow, and ignorant;

It was no offence to So-and-So; it hardly distinguished him from his fellows; and when applied to a public man, like Gladstone, it was qualified by epithets much more forcible.

Eccentricity was so general as to become hereditary distinction.

It made the chief charm of English society as well as its chief terror.

Style lingered in the background with the powdered footman behind the yellow chariot, but speaking socially the Queen had no style save what she inherited. Balmoral was a startling revelation of royal taste.

Nothing could be worse than the toilettes at Court unless it were the way they were worn.

One’s eyes might be dazzled by jewels, but they were heirlooms, and if any lady appeared well dressed, she was either a foreigner or “fast.” Fashion was not fashionable in London until the Americans and the Jews were let loose.

“I don’t think I care for foreigners!” Horror-stricken, not so much on his own account as on hers, the young man could only execute himself as gaily as he might:

“But Lady Margaret, please make one small exception for me!”

Of course she replied what was evident, that she did not call him a foreigner, and her genial Irish charm made the slip of tongue a happy courtesy;

Ninety-nine houses in every hundred were useless to him, a greater bore to him than he to them. Thus the question of getting into—or getting out of—society which troubled young foreigners greatly, settled itself after three or four years of painful speculation.

Society had no unity; one wandered about in it like a maggot in cheese; it was not a hansom cab, to be got into, or out of, at dinnertime.

Therefore he always professed himself ignorant of society;

perhaps they are human in parts”; but the dreamy habit of mind which comes from solitude in crowds is not fitness for social success except in London. Everywhere else it is injury.

England was a social kingdom whose social coinage had no currency elsewhere.

Englishwomen, from the educational point of view, could give nothing until they approached forty years old. Then they become very interesting—very charming—to the man of fifty. The young American was not worth the young Englishwoman’s notice, and never received it. Neither understood the other.

Mr. Evarts enjoyed his visit but this was merely a part of the private secretary’s day’s work. What affected his whole life was the intimacy then begun with Milnes Gaskell and his circle of undergraduate friends, just about to enter the world.

Intimates are predestined.

Adams met in England a thousand people, great and small; jostled against everyone, from royal princes to gin-shop loafers; attended endless official functions and private parties;

her sister, Miss Charlotte Wynn, was another; and both were of an age and a position in society that made their friendship a compliment as well as a pleasure. Their consent and approval settled the matter.

In England, the family is a serious fact; once admitted to it, one is there for life.

London might utterly vanish from one’s horizon, but as long as life lasted, Yorkshire lived for its friends.

Fortunately for him he knew too little ever to be an art-critic, still less an artist.

For some things ignorance is good, and art is one of them.

He knew he knew nothing, and had not the trained eye or the keen instinct that trusted itself; but he was curious, as he went on, to find out how much others knew.

Once, on returning to London, dining with Stopford Brooke, someone asked Adams what impression the Royal Academy Exhibition made on him. With a little hesitation, he suggested that it was rather a chaos, which he meant for civility; but

Stopford Brooke abruptly met it by asking whether chaos were not better than death.

Truly the question was worth discussion. For his own part, Adams inclined to think that neither chaos nor death was an object to him as a searcher of knowledge—neither would have vogue in America—neither would help him to a career.

He did the next best thing; he became a Comteist, within the limits of evolution. He was ready to become anything but quiet.

As though the world had not been enough upset in his time, he was eager to see it upset more.

He had his wish, but he lost his hold on the results by trying to understand them.

He did the next best thing; he became a Comteist, within the limits of evolution. He was ready to become anything but quiet. As though the world had not been enough upset in his time, he was eager to see it upset more.

He had his wish, but he lost his hold on the results by trying to understand them.

He never tried to understand Darwin; but he still fancied he might get the best part of Darwinism from the easier study of geology; a science which suited idle minds as well as though it were history.

… the whole motive of philosophy, and if Darwin, like a true Englishman, preferred to back into it—to reach God a posteriori—rather than start from it, like Spinoza, the difference of method taught only the moral that the best way of reaching unity was to unite.

Any road was good that arrived.

Life depended on it. One had been, from the first, dragged hither and thither like a French poodle on a string, following always the strongest pull, between one form of unity or centralization and another.

… with the universe before one succumbs to it, yet even he was surprised at Sir Charles’s ready assent, and still more so at finding himself, after half an hour’s conversation, sitting down to clear the minds of American geologists about the principles of their profession.

This was getting on fast; Arthur Pendennis had never gone so far.

The geologists were a hardy class, not likely to be much hurt by Adams’s learning, nor did he throw away much concern on their account.

The peculiar flavor of the scenery has something to do with absence of evolution; it was better marked in Egypt: it was felt wherever time-sequences became interchangeable.

One’s instinct abhors time.

As one lay on the slope of the Edge, looking sleepily through the summer haze towards Shrewsbury or Cader Idris or Caer Caradoc or Uriconium, nothing suggested sequence. The Roman road was twin to the railroad; Uriconium was well worth Shrewsbury;

He did not even care that it should be proved true, unless the process were new and amusing.

He was a Darwinian for fun.

From the beginning of history, this attitude had been branded as criminal—worse than crime—sacrilege! Society punished it ferociously and justly, in self-defence. Mr. Adams, the father, looked on it as moral weakness; it annoyed him;

Out of his millions of millions of ancestors, back to the Cambrian mollusks, everyone had probably lived and died in the illusion of Truths which did not amuse him, and which had never changed.

Henry Adams was the first in an infinite series to discover and admit to himself that he really did not care whether truth was, or was not, true.

He did not even care that it should be proved true, unless the process were new and amusing. He was a Darwinian for fun.

If he did publish, how could he tell virtuous bankers in State Street that moral and absolute principles of abstract truth, such as theirs, had nothing to do with the matter, and that they had better let it alone?

Geologists, naturally a humble and helpless class, might not revenge impertinences offered to their science; but capitalists never forgot or forgave.

With labor and caution he made one long article on British Finance in 1816, and another on the Bank Restriction of 1797–1821, and, doing both up in one package, he sent it to the North American for choice.

How much its character had changed or was changing, they could not wholly know, and they could but partly feel. For that matter, the land itself knew no more than they.

Society in America was always trying, almost as blindly as an earthworm, to realize and understand itself; to catch up with its own head, and to twist about in search of its tail.

Society offered the profile of a long, straggling caravan, stretching loosely towards the prairies, its few score of leaders far in advance and its millions of immigrants, negroes, and Indians far in the rear, somewhere in archaic time.

but the mere suggestion that a sun existed above him would outrage the self-respect of a deep-sea fish that carried a lantern on the end of its nose.

From the moment that railways were introduced, life took on extravagance.

Thus the belated reveller who landed in the dark at the Desbrosses Street ferry, found his energies exhausted in the effort to see his own length.

He passed three or four months thus, visiting relations, renewing friendships, and studying the situation.

At thirty years old, the man who has not yet got further than to study the situation, is lost, or near it.

He could see nothing in the situation that could be of use to him. His friends had won no more from it than he.

As a rule, officials dread interference. The strongest often resent it most. Any official who admits equality in discussion of his official course, feels it to be an act of virtue; after a few months or years he tires of the effort.

Every friend in power is a friend lost.

This rule is so nearly absolute that it may be taken in practice as admitting no exception. Apparent exceptions exist, and McCulloch was one of them.

The tariff was worse, though more interests upheld it. McCulloch had the singular merit of facing reform with large good-nature and willing sympathy—outside of parties, jobs, bargains, corporations or intrigues—which Adams never was to meet again.

Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.

The Civil War had bred life. The army bred courage. Young men of the volunteer type were not always docile under control, but they were handy in a fight. Adams was greatly pleased to be admitted as one of them.

Therefore, behind all the processes of political or financial or newspaper training, the social side of Washington was to be taken for granted as three-fourths of existence. Its details matter nothing. Life ceased to be strenuous, and the victim thanked God for it.

Politics and reform became the detail, and waltzing the profession.

Adams was not alone. Senator Sumner had as private secretary a young man named Moorfield Storey, who became a dangerous example of frivolity. The new Attorney-General, E. R. Hoar, brought with him from Concord a son, Sam Hoar, whose example rivalled that of Storey.

Adams knew far too little, compared with the Secretary, to contradict him, though he thought the phrase somewhat harsh even as applied to the average Congressman of 1869—he saw little or nothing of later ones—but he knew a shorter way of silencing criticism.

He had but to ask: “If a Congressman is a hog, what is a Senator?”

This innocent question, put in a candid spirit, petrified any executive officer that ever sat a week in his office. Even Adams admitted that Senators passed belief.

Yet, unlikely as it seemed, he had missed his motive narrowly, and his intention had been more than sound, for the Senators made no secret of saying with senatorial frankness that Grant’s nominations betrayed his intent as plainly as they betrayed his incompetence.

A great soldier might be a baby politician.

Adams left the Capitol, much in the same misty mental condition that he recalled as marking his railway journey to London on May 13, 1861; he felt in himself what Gladstone bewailed so sadly, “the incapacity of viewing things all round.”

One must be as commonplace as Grant’s own commonplaces to maintain such an absurdity.

The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant, was alone evidence enough to upset Darwin.

Education became more perplexing at every phase. No theory was worth the pen that wrote it. America had no use for Adams because he was eighteenth-century, and yet it worshipped Grant because he was archaic and should have lived in a cave and worn skins.

The difficulty was not the want of friends, and had the whole government been filled with them, it would have helped little without the President and the Treasury.

Grant avowed from the start a policy of drift; and a policy of drift attaches only barnacles.

At thirty, one has no interest in becoming a barnacle, but even in that character Henry Adams would have been ill-seen. His friends were reformers, critics, doubtful in party allegiance, and he was himself an object of suspicion.

No one wanted to go into opposition. As for Adams, all his hopes of success in life turned on his finding an administration to support. He knew well enough the rules of self-interest.

He was for sale. He wanted to be bought.

His price was excessively cheap, for he did not even ask an office, and had his eye, not on the Government, but on New York. All he wanted was something to support; something that would let itself be supported. Luck went dead against him.

He saw Boutwells at every counter. He found a personal grief in every tree. Fifteen or twenty years afterwards, Clarence King used to amuse him by mourning over the narrow escape that nature had made in attaining perfection.

Except for two mistakes, the earth would have been a success.

One of these errors was the inclination of the ecliptic; the other was the differentiation of the sexes, and the saddest thought about the last was that it should have been so modern.

it cannot be killed, and the fragments that survive can always laugh at the dead; but a young man has only one chance, and brief time to seize it. Anyone in power above him can extinguish the chance.

He is horribly at the mercy of fools and cowards.

One dull administration can rapidly drive out every active subordinate. At Washington, in 1869–70, every intelligent man about the Government prepared to go. The people would have liked to go too, for they stood helpless before the chaos; some laughed and some raved;

Yet the spectacle was no laughing matter to him, whatever it might be to the public.

Society is immoral and immortal; it can afford to commit any kind of folly, and indulge in any sort of vice; it cannot be killed, and the fragments that survive can always laugh at the dead; but a young man has only one chance, and brief time to seize it.

Anyone in power above him can extinguish the chance. He is horribly at the mercy of fools and cowards. One dull administration can rapidly drive out every active subordinate. At Washington, in 1869–70, every intelligent man about the Government prepared to go.

Adams repeated the story to Godkin, who made much play with it in the Nation, till it was denied. Adams saw no reason why it should be denied.

Grant had as good a right to dislike the hair as the head, if the hair seemed to him a part of it.

Very shrewd men have formed very sound judgments on less material than hair—on clothes, for example, according to Mr.

When spring came, he took to the woods, which were best of all, for after the first of April, what Maurice de Guérin called “the vast maternity” of nature showed charms more voluptuous than the vast paternity of the United States Senate.

Senators were less ornamental than the dogwood or even the judas-tree. They were, as a rule, less good company.

Adams astonished himself by remarking what a purified charm was lent to the Capitol by the greatest possible distance, as one caught glimpses of the dome over miles of forest foliage. At such moments he pondered on the distant beauty of St.

Society being immortal, could put on immortality at will.

Adams being mortal, felt only the mortality.

Death took features altogether new to him, in these rich and sensuous surroundings. Nature enjoyed it, played with it, the horror added to her charm, she liked the torture, and smothered her victim with caresses. Never had one seen her so winning.

Society being immortal, could put on immortality at will. Adams being mortal, felt only the mortality. Death took features altogether new to him, in these rich and sensuous surroundings.

Nature enjoyed it, played with it, the horror added to her charm, she liked the torture, and smothered her victim with caresses.

Never had one seen her so winning. The hot Italian summer brooded outside, over the marketplace and the picturesque peasants, and, in the singular color of the Tuscan atmosphere, the hills and vineyards of the Apennines seemed bursting with midsummer blood.

religion was the most human; but the idea that any personal deity could find pleasure or profit in torturing a poor woman, by accident, with a fiendish cruelty known to man only in perverted and insane temperaments, could not be held for a moment.

For pure blasphemy, it made pure atheism a comfort.

God might be, as the Church said, a Substance, but He could not be a Person.

For pure blasphemy, it made pure atheism a comfort.

God might be, as the Church said, a Substance, but He could not be a Person.

With nerves strained for the first time beyond their power of tension, he slowly travelled northwards with his friends, and stopped for a few days at Ouchy to recover his balance in a new world;

The effect was lurid. The public seemed to look on the war, as it had looked on the wars of Louis XIV and Francis I, as a branch of decorative art.

The French, like true artists, always regarded war as one of the fine arts.

Louis XIV practiced it; Napoleon I perfected it; and Napoleon III had till then pursued it in the same spirit with singular success. In Paris, in July, 1870, the war was brought out like an opera of Meyerbeer.

For nearly twenty years one had been forbidden to sing the “Marseillaise” under any circumstances, but at last regiment after regiment marched through the streets shouting “Marchons!” while the bystanders cared not enough to join.

Patriotism seemed to have been brought out of the Government stores, and distributed by grams per capita.

One had seen one’s own people dragged unwillingly into a war, and had watched one’s own regiments march to the front without sign of enthusiasm; on the contrary, most serious, anxious, and conscious of the whole weight of the crisis;

“But, Mr. President,” urged Adams, “I know nothing about Medieval History.” With the courteous manner and bland smile so familiar for the next generation of Americans Mr. Eliot mildly but firmly replied,

“If you will point out to me anyone who knows more, Mr. Adams, I will appoint him.”

The answer was neither logical nor convincing, but Adams could not meet it without overstepping his privileges. He could not say that, under the circumstances, the appointment of any professor at all seemed to him unnecessary.

in the Executive, Grant and Boutwell were varieties of the type—political specimens—pathetic in their helplessness to do anything with power when it came to them. They knew not how to amuse themselves; they could not conceive how other people were amused.

Work, whiskey, and cards were life.

The atmosphere of political Washington was theirs—or was supposed by the outside world to be in their control—and this was the reason why the outside world judged that Washington was fatal even for a young man of thirty-two, who had passed through the whole variety …

… was in their minds, since their professor had nothing in his, and down to the moment he took his chair and looked his scholars in the face, he had given, as far as he could remember, an hour, more or less, to the Middle Ages.

Not that his ignorance troubled him! He knew enough to be ignorant.

His course had led him through oceans of ignorance; he had tumbled from one ocean into another till he had learned to swim; but even to him education was a serious thing. A parent gives life, but as parent, gives no more.

he had tumbled from one ocean into another till he had learned to swim; but even to him education was a serious thing. A parent gives life, but as parent, gives no more. A murderer takes life, but his deed stops there.

A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.

A teacher is expected to teach truth, and may perhaps flatter himself that he does so, if he stops with the alphabet or the multiplication table, as a mother teaches truth by making her child eat with a spoon;

He had to devise schemes to find what they were thinking about, and induce them to risk criticism from their fellows. Any large body of students stifles the student. No man can instruct more than half-a-dozen students at once.

The whole problem of education is one of its cost in money.

The lecture system to classes of hundreds, which was very much that of the twelfth century, suited Adams not at all. Barred from philosophy and bored by facts, he wanted to teach his students something not wholly useless.

His only difficulty on that side was to get them to talk at all. He had to devise schemes to find what they were thinking about, and induce them to risk criticism from their fellows.

Any large body of students stifles the student.

No man can instruct more than half-a-dozen students at once. The whole problem of education is one of its cost in money.

They knew what they had to teach; he did not. They might perhaps be frauds without knowing it; but he knew certainly nothing else of himself. He could teach his students nothing; he was only educating himself at their cost.

Education, like politics, is a rough affair, and every instructor has to shut his eyes and hold his tongue as though he were a priest.

The students alone satisfied. They thought they gained something. Perhaps they did, for even in America and in the twentieth century, life could not be wholly industrial. Adams fervently hoped that they might remain content;

American society feared total wreck in the maelstrom of political and corporate administration, but it could not look for help to college dons. Adams knew, in that capacity, both Congressmen and professors, and he preferred Congressmen. The same failure marked the society of a college.

Several score of the best-educated, most agreeable, and personally the most sociable people in America united in Cambridge to make a social desert that would have starved a polar bear.

The liveliest and most agreeable of men—James Russell Lowell, Francis J.

While all these brilliant men were greedy for companionship, all were famished for want of it.

Society was a faculty-meeting without business.

The elements were there; but society cannot be made up of elements—people who are expected to be silent unless they have observations to make—and all the elements are bound to remain apart if required to make observations.

but whose failures might easily bankrupt himself. Such a Review may be made a sink of money with captivating ease. The secrets of success as an editor were easily learned; the highest was that of getting advertisements.

Ten pages of advertising made an editor a success; five marked him as a failure.

The merits or demerits of his literature had little to do with his results except when they led to adversity.

As editor he could find no writer to take his place for politics and affairs of current concern. The Review became chiefly historical. Russell Lowell and Frank Palgrave helped him to keep it literary.

The editor was a helpless drudge whose successes, if he made any, belonged to his writers; but whose failures might easily bankrupt himself.

Such a Review may be made a sink of money with captivating ease. The secrets of success as an editor were easily learned; the highest was that of getting advertisements. Ten pages of advertising made an editor a success; five marked him as a failure.

A year or two of education as editor satiated most of his appetite for that career as a profession. After a very slight experience, he said no more on the subject. He felt willing to let anyone edit, if he himself might write.

Vulgarly speaking, it was a dog’s life when it did not succeed, and little better when it did.

A professor had at least the pleasure of associating with his students; an editor lived the life of an owl. A professor commonly became a pedagogue or a pedant; an editor became an authority on advertising. On the whole, Adams preferred his attic in Washington.

Vulgarly speaking, it was a dog’s life when it did not succeed, and little better when it did. A professor had at least the pleasure of associating with his students; an editor lived the life of an owl.

A professor commonly became a pedagogue or a pedant; an editor became an authority on advertising.

On the whole, Adams preferred his attic in Washington. He was educated enough. Ignorance paid better, for at least it earned fifty dollars a month.

an editor lived the life of an owl. A professor commonly became a pedagogue or a pedant; an editor became an authority on advertising. On the whole, Adams preferred his attic in Washington. He was educated enough.

Ignorance paid better, for at least it earned fifty dollars a month.

With this result Henry Adams’s education, at his entry into life, stopped, and his life began. He had to take that life as he best could, with such accidental education as luck had given him;

One of these men was Clarence King on his way up to the camp. Adams fell into his arms. As with most friendships, it was never a matter of growth or doubt.

Friends are born in archaic horizons; they were shaped with the Pteraspis in Siluria; they have nothing to do with the accident of space.

King had come up that day from Greeley in a light four-wheeled buggy, over a trail hardly fit for a commissariat mule, as Adams had reason to know since he went back in the buggy.

his faculty of giving and taking, profusely, lavishly, whether in thought or in money as though he were Nature herself, marked him almost alone among Americans. He had in him something of the Greek—a touch of Alcibiades or Alexander.

One Clarence King only existed in the world.

A new friend is always a miracle, but at thirty-three years old, such a bird of paradise rising in the sagebrush was an avatar. One friend in a lifetime is much; two are many; three are hardly possible.

He had in him something of the Greek—a touch of Alcibiades or Alexander. One Clarence King only existed in the world.

A new friend is always a miracle, but at thirty-three years old, such a bird of paradise rising in the sagebrush was an avatar.

One friend in a lifetime is much; two are many; three are hardly possible. Friendship needs a certain parallelism of life, a community of thought, a rivalry of aim.

A new friend is always a miracle, but at thirty-three years old, such a bird of paradise rising in the sagebrush was an avatar.

One friend in a lifetime is much; two are many; three are hardly possible.

Friendship needs a certain parallelism of life, a community of thought, a rivalry of aim. King, like Adams, and all their generation, was at that moment passing the critical point of his career.

As a companion, King’s charm was great, but this was not the quality that so much attracted Adams, nor could he affect even distant rivalry on this ground.

Adams could never tell a story, chiefly because he always forgot it; and he was never guilty of a witticism, unless by accident.

King and the Fortieth Parallel influenced him in a way far more vital. The lines of their lives converged, but King had moulded and directed his life logically, scientifically, as Adams thought American life should be directed.

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;

but education should try to lessen the obstacles, diminish the friction, invigorate the energy, and should train minds to react, not at haphazard, but by choice, on the lines of force that attract their world.

What one knows is, in youth, of little moment; they know enough who know how to learn.

Throughout human history the waste of mind has been appalling, and, as this story is meant to show, society has conspired to promote it. No doubt the teacher is the worst criminal, but the world stands behind him and drags the student from his course.

What one knows is, in youth, of little moment; they know enough who know how to learn.

Throughout human history the waste of mind has been appalling, and, as this story is meant to show, society has conspired to promote it.

No doubt the teacher is the worst criminal, but the world stands behind him and drags the student from his course. The moral is stentorian.

but for reasons that had nothing to do with education, he was tired; his nervous energy ran low; and, like a horse that wears out, he quitted the racecourse, left the stable, and sought pastures as far as possible from the old.

Education had ended in 1871; life was complete in 1890; the rest mattered so little!

As had happened so often, he found himself in London when the question of return imposed its verdict on him after much fruitless effort to rest elsewhere. The time was the month of January, 1892; he was alone, in hospital, in the gloom of midwinter.

He must return to America to get one. Perhaps, while waiting, he might write more history, and on the chance as a last resource, he gave orders for copying everything he could reach in archives, but this was mere habit.

He went home as a horse goes back to his stable, because he knew nowhere else to go.

Home was Washington.

not always intentionally, but effectually. It was in the nature of things. Kipling neither snubbed nor patronized; he was all gaiety and good-nature; but he would have been first to feel what one meant.

Genius has to pay itself that unwilling self-respect.

Towards the middle of February, 1892, Adams found himself again in Washington. In Paris and London he had seen nothing to make a return to life worthwhile; in Washington he saw plenty of reasons for staying dead. Changes had taken place there;

The only exceptions were the clergy, who taught a lesson even deeper. One after another brought companions there, and, apparently fascinated by their own reflection, broke out passionately against the expression they felt in the figure of despair, of atheism, of denial.

Like the others, the priest saw only what he brought. Like all great artists, St. Gaudens held up the mirror and no more.

The American layman had lost sight of ideals; the American priest had lost sight of faith. Both were more American than the old, half-witted soldiers who denounced the wasting, on a mere grave, of money which should have been given for drink.

Like the others, the priest saw only what he brought. Like all great artists, St. Gaudens held up the mirror and no more.

The American layman had lost sight of ideals; the American priest had lost sight of faith.

Both were more American than the old, half-witted soldiers who denounced the wasting, on a mere grave, of money which should have been given for drink.

Cleveland, which led to no deeper thought than that of taking up some small notes that happened to be outstanding. He had seen enough of the world to be a coward, and above all he had an uneasy distrust of bankers.

Even dead men allow themselves a few narrow prejudices.

For years he had not dined out of his own house, and in public his face was as unknown as that of an extinct statesman. He had often noticed that six months’ oblivion amounts to newspaper-death, and that resurrection is rare.

Nothing is easier, if a man wants it, than rest, profound as the grave.

His friends sometimes took pity on him, and came to share a meal or pass a night on their passage south or northwards, but existence was, on the whole, exceedingly solitary, or seemed so to him.

W. C. Whitney rivalled Senator Brice in hospitality, and was besides an old acquaintance of the reforming era, but Adams saw him as little as he saw his chief, President Cleveland, or President Harrison or Secretary Bayard or Blaine or Olney.

One has no choice but to go everywhere or nowhere.

No one may pick and choose between houses, or accept hospitality without returning it. He loved solitude as little as others did; but he was unfit for social work, and he sank under the surface.

One has no choice but to go everywhere or nowhere. No one may pick and choose between houses, or accept hospitality without returning it.

He loved solitude as little as others did; but he was unfit for social work, and he sank under the surface.

Luckily for such helpless animals as solitary men, the world is not only good-natured but even friendly and generous; it loves to pardon if pardon is not demanded as a right.

One has no choice but to go everywhere or nowhere. No one may pick and choose between houses, or accept hospitality without returning it. He loved solitude as little as others did; but he was unfit for social work, and he sank under the surface.

Luckily for such helpless animals as solitary men, the world is not only good-natured but even friendly and generous; it loves to pardon if pardon is not demanded as a right.

Adams’s social offences were many, and no one was more sensitive to it than himself; but a few houses always remained which he could enter without being asked, and quit without being noticed. One was John Hay’s; another was Cabot Lodge’s;

At least he was bound to profess disapproval—or thought he was. From early childhood his moral principles had struggled blindly with his interests, but he was certain of one law that ruled all others—masses of men invariably follow interests in deciding morals.

Morality is a private and costly luxury.

The morality of the silver or gold standards was to be decided by popular vote, and the popular vote would be decided by interests; but on which side lay the larger interest? To him the interest was political;

As far as he could comprehend, he had nothing to lose that he cared about, but the banks stood to lose their existence.

Money mattered as little to him as to anybody, but money was their life.

For the first time he had the banks in his power; he could afford to laugh; and the whole community was in the same position, though few laughed. All sat down on the banks and asked what the banks were going to do about it.

One might as well try to educate a gravel-pit. The task was futile, which disturbed a student less than the discovery that, in pursuing it, he was becoming himself ridiculous.

Nothing is more tiresome than a superannuated pedagogue.

For the moment he was rescued, as often before, by a woman. Towards midsummer, 1895, Mrs. Cabot Lodge bade him follow her to Europe with the Senator and her two sons.

The study of history is useful to the historian by teaching him his ignorance of women; and the mass of this ignorance crushes one who is familiar enough with what are called historical sources to realize how few women have ever been known.

The woman who is known only through a man is known wrong, and excepting one or two like Mme. de Sévigné, no woman has pictured herself.

The American woman of the nineteenth century will live only as the man saw her; probably she will be less known than the woman of the eighteenth;

but it may be worth knowing to some of them that the planet offers hardly a dozen places where an elderly man can pass a week alone without ennui, and none at all where he can pass a year.

Irritated by such complaints, the world naturally answers that no man of sixty should live, which is doubtless true, though not original.

The man of sixty, with a certain irritability proper to his years, retorts that the world has no business to throw on him the task of removing its carrion, and that while he remains he has a right to require amusement—or at least education, since …

This truth also has the defect of being too true. The rule holds equally for men of half that age. Only the very young have the right to betray their ignorance or ill-breeding.

Elderly people commonly know enough not to betray themselves.

Exceptions are plenty on both sides, as the Senate knew to its acute suffering; but young or old, women or men, seemed agreed on one point with singular unanimity; each praised silence in others.

and in every point of view one had as much reason to be gratified with the result as though one had shared in the danger, instead of being vigorously employed in looking on from a great distance.

After all, friends had done the work, if not one’s self, and he too serves a certain purpose who only stands and cheers.

In June, at the crisis of interest, the Camerons came over, and took the fine old house of Surrenden Dering in Kent which they made a sort of country house to the Embassy.

Hay’s chance lay in patience and good-temper till the luck should turn, and to him the only object was time; but as political education the point seemed vital to Adams, who never liked shutting his eyes or denying an evident fact.

Practical politics consists in ignoring facts, but education and politics are two different and often contradictory things.

In this case, the contradiction seemed crude.

or even so much as to say to himself that his historical business in the Exposition concerned only the economies or developments of force since 1893, when he began the study at Chicago.

Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.

Adams had looked at most of the accumulations of art in the storehouses called Art Museums; yet he did not know how to look at the art exhibits of 1900.

and yet this energy was unknown to the American mind.

An American Virgin would never dare command; an American Venus would never dare exist.

The question, which to any plain American of the nineteenth century seemed as remote as it did to Adams, drew him almost violently to study, once it was posed; and on this point Langleys were as useless as though they were Herbert Spencers or dynamos.

They felt a railway train as power, yet they, and all other artists, constantly complained that the power embodied in a railway train could never be embodied in art.

All the steam in the world could not, like the Virgin, build Chartres.

Yet in mechanics, whatever the mechanicians might think, both energies acted as interchangeable force on man, and by action on man all known force may be measured. Indeed, few men of science measured force in any other way.

yet, as a money-value, the fall of China was chiefly studied in Paris and London as a calamity to Chinese porcelain.

The value of a Ming vase was more serious than universal war.

The drama of the Legations interested the public much as though it were a novel of Alexandre Dumas, but the bearing of the drama on future history offered an interest vastly greater.

The Geological Survey supplied stacks of volumes, and reading for steady months; while, the longer he read, the more he wondered, pondered, doubted what his delightful old friend Sir Charles Lyell would have said about it.

Truly the animal that is to be trained to unity must be caught young.

Unity is vision; it must have been part of the process of learning to see. The older the mind, the older its complexities, and the further it looks, the more it sees, until even the stars resolve themselves into multiples;

but the effect was one of chaos, and Adams stood as helpless before it as before the chaos of New York. His single thought was to keep in front of the movement, and, if necessary, lead it to chaos, but never fall behind.

Only the young have time to linger in the rear.

The amusements of youth had to be abandoned, for not even pugilism needs more staying-power than the labors of the pale-faced student of the Latin Quarter in the haunts of Montparnasse or Montmartre, where one must feel no fatigue at two o’clock in the morning …

They waited and suffered. As they stood they were out of place, and could never have been normal. Their country acted as a sink of energy like the Caspian Sea, and its surface kept the uniformity of ice and snow.

One Russian peasant kissing an icon on a saint’s day, in the Kremlin, served for a hundred million.

The student had no need to study Wallace, or reread Tolstoy or Tourguenieff or Dostoiewski to refresh his memory of the most poignant analysis of human inertia ever put in words; Gorky was more than enough: Kropotkin answered every purpose.

but forty years of varied emotions had not deadened Adams’s memories of Berlin, and he preferred, at any cost, to escape new ones. When the Lodges started for Germany, Adams took steamer for Sweden and landed happily, in a day or two, at Stockholm.

Until the student is fairly sure that his problem is soluble, he gains little by obstinately insisting on solving it.

One might doubt whether Mr. de Witte himself, or Prince Khilkoff, or any Grand Duke, or the Emperor, knew much more about it than their neighbors;

… of personal emotion, but this was little in comparison with his depth of wonder at hearing hourly reports from his most intimate friends, sent to him far within the realm of night, not to please him, but to correct the faults of the solar system.

The electro-dynamo-social universe worked better than the sun.

No such strange chance had ever happened to a historian before, and it upset for the moment his whole philosophy of conservative anarchy. The acceleration was marvellous, and wholly in the lines of unity.

From the archaic ice-barrier to the Caspian Sea, a long line of division, permanent since ice and inertia first took possession, divided his lines of force, with no relation to climate or geography or soil.

The less a tourist knows, the fewer mistakes he need make, for he will not expect himself to explain ignorance.

A century ago he carried letters and sought knowledge; today he knows that no one knows; he needs too much and ignorance is learning. He wandered south again, and came out at Kiel, Hamburg, Bremen, and Cologne.

America has always taken tragedy lightly.

Too busy to stop the activity of their twenty-million-horsepower society, Americans ignore tragic motives that would have overshadowed the Middle Ages; and the world learns to regard assassination as a form of hysteria, and death as neurosis, to be treated by a rest-cure.

… less in them all, though he now slept nine months out of the twelve, acquired an instinct of self-preservation that kept him to the north side of La Fayette Square, and, after a sufficient habitude of Presidents and Senators, deterred him from hovering between them.

Those who seek education in the paths of duty are always deceived by the illusion that power in the hands of friends is an advantage to them.

As far as Adams could teach experience, he was bound to warn them that he had found it an invariable disaster. Power is poison. Its effect on Presidents had been always tragic, chiefly as an almost insane excitement at first, and a worse reaction afterwards;

He loved the atrocities of English art and society, as he loved Charles Dickens and Miss Austen, not because of their example, but because of their humor. He made no scruple of defying sequence and denying consistency—but he was not a Senator.

Double standards are inspiration to men of letters, but they are apt to be fatal to politicians.

Adams had no reason to care whether his standards were popular or not, and no one else cared more than he;

They are trustees for the public, and whenever society assumes the property, it must confer on them that title; but the power will remain as before, whoever manages it, and will then control society without appeal, as it controls its stokers and pit-men.

Modern politics is, at bottom, a struggle not of men but of forces.

The men become every year more and more creatures of force, massed about central powerhouses. The conflict is no longer between the men, but between the motors that drive the men, and the men tend to succumb to their own motive forces.

and one of the greatest minds, between Descartes and Newton—Pascal—saw the master-motor of man in ennui, which was also scientific:

“I have often said that all the troubles of man come from his not knowing how to sit still.”

Mere restlessness forces action. “So passes the whole of life. We combat obstacles in order to get repose, and, when got, the repose is insupportable; for we think either of the troubles we have, or of those that threaten us;

but the greater the bulk to move, the greater must be the force to accelerate or deflect it.

This seemed simple as running water; but simplicity is the most deceitful mistress that ever betrayed man.

For years the student and the professor had gone on complaining that minds were unequally inert. The inequalities amounted to contrasts. One class of minds responded only to habit; another only to novelty. Race classified thought. Class-lists classified mind.

Sometimes, at dinner, one might wait till talk flagged, and then, as mildly as possible, ask one’s liveliest neighbor whether she could explain why the American woman was a failure.

Without an instant’s hesitation, she was sure to answer: “Because the American man is a failure!” She meant it.

Adams owed more to the American woman than to all the American men he ever heard of, and felt not the smallest call to defend his sex who seemed able to take care of themselves;

Her problem had been always one of physical strength and it was as physical perfection of force that her Venus had governed nature. The woman’s force had counted as inertia of rotation, and her axis of rotation had been the cradle and the family.

The idea that she was weak revolted all history; it was a paleontological falsehood that even an Eocene female monkey would have laughed at

; but it was surely true that, if her force were to be diverted from its axis, it must find a new field, and the family must pay for it.

The result was often tragic, but that was no new thing in feminine history.

Tragedy had been woman’s lot since Eve.

Her problem had been always one of physical strength and it was as physical perfection of force that her Venus had governed nature. The woman’s force had counted as inertia of rotation, and her axis of rotation had been the cradle and the family.

but we must infer chaos: “Briefly chaos is all that science can logically assert of the supersensuous.” The kinetic theory of gas is an assertion of ultimate chaos. In plain words,

Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man.

No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous;

but we must infer chaos: “Briefly chaos is all that science can logically assert of the supersensuous.” The kinetic theory of gas is an assertion of ultimate chaos. In plain words, Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man.

No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous

; but since Bacon and Newton, English thought had gone on impatiently protesting that no one must try to know the unknowable at the same time that everyone went on thinking about it. The result was as chaotic as kinetic gas;

continuous from the beginning of time, and discontinuous at each successive point. History set it down on the record—pricked its position on the chart—and waited to be led, or misled, once more.

The historian must not try to know what is truth, if he values his honesty; for, if he cares for his truths, he is certain to falsify his facts.

The laws of history only repeat the lines of force or thought. Yet though his will be iron, he cannot help now and then resuming his humanity or simianity in face of a fear.

Its first violent acceleration in historical times had ended in the catastrophe of 310. The next swerve of direction occurred towards 1500. Galileo and Bacon gave a still newer curve to it, which altered its values; but all these changes had never altered the continuity.

Only in 1900, the continuity snapped.

Vaguely conscious of the cataclysm, the world sometimes dated it from 1893, by the Roentgen rays, or from 1898, by the Curie’s radium;

but in 1904, Arthur Balfour announced on the part of British science that the human race without exception had lived and died in a world of illusion until the last year of the century.

The date was convenient, and convenience was truth.

The child born in 1900 would, then, be born into a new world which would not be a unity but a multiple. Adams tried to imagine it, and an education that would fit it.

but the staggering problem was the outlook ahead into the despotism of artificial order which nature abhorred. The physicists had a phrase for it, unintelligible to the vulgar: “All that we win is a battle—lost in advance—with the irreversible phenomena in the background of nature.”

All that a historian won was a vehement wish to escape. He saw his education complete; and was sorry he ever began it.

As a matter of taste, he greatly preferred his eighteenth-century education when God was a father and nature a mother, and all was for the best in a scientific universe.

As history unveiled itself in the new order, man’s mind had behaved like a young pearl oyster, secreting its universe to suit its conditions until it had built up a shell of nacre that embodied all its notions of the perfect.

Man knew it was true because he made it, and he loved it for the same reason.

He sacrificed millions of lives to acquire his unity, but he achieved it, and justly thought it a work of art.

Poincaré in an attic at Paris, a centre of supersensual chaos. The discovery did not distress him.

A solitary man of sixty-five years or more, alone in a Gothic cathedral or a Paris apartment, need fret himself little about a few illusions more or less.

He should have learned his lesson fifty years earlier; the times had long passed when a student could stop before chaos or order; he had no choice but to march with his world.

Of the attraction he needed no proof on his own account; the costs of his automobile were more than sufficient: but as teacher he needed to speak for others than himself.

For him, the Virgin was an adorable mistress, who led the automobile and its owner where she would

, to her wonderful palaces and châteaux, from Chartres to Rouen, and thence to Amiens and Laon, and a score of others, kindly receiving, amusing, charming and dazzling her lover, as though she were Aphrodite herself, worth all else that man ever dreamed.

Her adorer had pursued her too long, too far, and into too many manifestations of her power, to admit that she had any equivalent either of quantity or kind, in the actual world, but he could still less admit her annihilation as energy.

So he went on wooing, happy in the thought that at last he had found a mistress who could see no difference in the age of her lovers.

Her own age had no time-measure.

that of passing from one century to another without break.

The centuries dropped like autumn leaves in one’s road, and one was not fined for running over them too fast.

When the thirteenth lost breath, the fourteenth caught on, and the sixteenth ran close ahead. The hunt for the Virgin’s glass opened rich preserves. Especially the sixteenth century ran riot in sensuous worship.

Pantaleon nearby. Martyrs, murderers, Caesars, saints and assassins—half in glass and half in telegram; chaos of time, place, morals, forces and motive—gave him vertigo.

Had one sat all one’s life on the steps of Ara Coeli for this? Was assassination forever to be the last word of Progress?

No one in the street had shown a sign of protest; he himself felt none;

The effort must begin at once, for time pressed. The old formulas had failed, and a new one had to be made, but, after all, the object was not extravagant or eccentric.

One sought no absolute truth. One sought only a spool on which to wind the thread of history without breaking it.

Among indefinite possible orbits, one sought the orbit which would best satisfy the observed movement of the runaway star Groombridge, 1838, commonly called Henry Adams. As term of a nineteenth-century education, one sought a common factor for certain definite historical fractions.

The old formulas had failed, and a new one had to be made, but, after all, the object was not extravagant or eccentric. One sought no absolute truth. One sought only a spool on which to wind the thread of history without breaking it.

Among indefinite possible orbits, one sought the orbit which would best satisfy the observed movement of the runaway star Groombridge, 1838, commonly called Henry Adams.

As term of a nineteenth-century education, one sought a common factor for certain definite historical fractions. Any schoolboy could work out the problem if he were given the right to state it in his own terms.

Either separately, or in groups, or as a whole, these forces never ceased to act on him, enlarging his mind as they enlarged the surface foliage of a vegetable, and the mind needed only to respond, as the forests did, to these attractions.

Susceptibility to the highest forces is the highest genius; selection between them is the highest science; their mass is the highest educator.

Man always made, and still makes, grotesque blunders in selecting and measuring forces, taken at random from the heap, but he never made a mistake in the value he set on the whole, which he symbolized as unity and worshipped as God.

The Church was powerless to raise the ideal. What is now known as religion affected the mind of old society but little.

The laity, the people, the million, almost to a man, bet on the gods as they bet on a horse.

No doubt the Church did all it could to purify the process, but society was almost wholly pagan in its point of view, and was drawn to the Cross because, in its system of physics, the Cross had absorbed all the old occult or fetish-power.

Throughout these four centuries the empire knew that religion disturbed economy, for even the cost of heathen incense affected the exchanges; but no one could afford to buy or construct a costly and complicated machine when he could hire an occult force at trifling expense.

Fetish-power was cheap and satisfactory, down to a certain point.

Turgot and Auguste Comte long ago fixed this stage of economy as a necessary phase of social education, and historians seem now to accept it as the only gain yet made towards scientific history.