| CHAPTER II
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| BOSTON (1848-1854)
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| PETER CHARDON BROOKS, the other grandfather, died January 1,
1849, bequeathing what was supposed to be the largest estate in
Boston, about two million dollars, to his seven surviving
children: four sons -- Edward, Peter Chardon, Gorham, and Sydney;
three daughters -- Charlotte, married to Edward Everett; Ann,
married to Nathaniel Frothingham, minister of the First Church;
and Abigail Brown, born April 25, 1808, married September 3,
1829, to Charles Francis Adams, hardly a year older than herself.
Their first child, born in 1830, was a daughter, named Louisa
Catherine, after her Johnson grandmother; the second was a son,
named John Quincy, after his President grandfather; the third
took his father's name, Charles Francis; while the fourth, being
of less account, was in a way given to his mother, who named him
Henry Brooks, after a favorite brother just lost. More followed,
but these, being younger, had nothing to do with the arduous
process of educating.
| 1 | |
| The Adams connection was singularly small in Boston, but the
family of Brooks was singularly large and even brilliant, and
almost wholly of clerical New England stock. One might have
sought long in much larger and older societies for three
brothers-in-law more distinguished or more scholarly than Edward
Everett, Dr. Frothingham, and Mr. Adams. One might have sought
equally long for seven brothers-in-law more unlike. No doubt they
all bore more or less the stamp of Boston, or at least of
Massachusetts Bay, but the shades of difference amounted to
contrasts. Mr. Everett belonged to Boston hardly more than Mr.
Adams. One of the most ambitious of Bostonians, he had broken
bounds early in life by leaving the Unitarian pulpit to take a
seat in Congress where he had given valuable support to J. Q.
Adams's administration; support which, as a social consequence,
led to the marriage of the President's son, Charles Francis, with
Mr. Everett's youngest sister-in-law, Abigail Brooks. The wreck
of parties which marked the reign of Andrew Jackson had
interfered with many promising careers, that of Edward Everett
among the rest, but he had risen with the Whig Party to power,
had gone as Minister to England, and had returned to America with
the halo of a European reputation, and undisputed rank second
only to Daniel Webster as the orator and representative figure of
Boston. The other brother-in-law, Dr. Frothingham, belonged to
the same clerical school, though in manner rather the less
clerical of the two. Neither of them had much in common with Mr.
Adams, who was a younger man, greatly biassed by his father, and
by the inherited feud between Quincy and State Street; but
personal relations were friendly as far as a boy could see, and
the innumerable cousins went regularly to the First Church every
Sunday in winter, and slept through their uncle's sermons,
without once thinking to ask what the sermons were supposed to
mean for them. For two hundred years the First Church had seen
the same little boys, sleeping more or less soundly under the
same or similar conditions, and dimly conscious of the same
feuds; but the feuds had never ceased, and the boys had always
grown up to inherit them. Those of the generation of 1812 had
mostly disappeared in 1850; death had cleared that score; the
quarrels of John Adams, and those of John Quincy Adams were no
longer acutely personal; the game was considered as drawn; and
Charles Francis Adams might then have taken his inherited rights
of political leadership in succession to Mr. Webster and Mr.
Everett, his seniors. Between him and State Street the relation
was more natural than between Edward Everett and State Street;
but instead of doing so, Charles Francis Adams drew himself aloof
and renewed the old war which had already lasted since 1700. He
could not help it. With the record of J. Q. Adams fresh in the
popular memory, his son and his only representative could not
make terms with the slave-power, and the slave-power overshadowed
all the great Boston interests. No doubt Mr. Adams had principles
of his own, as well as inherited, but even his children, who as
yet had no principles, could equally little follow the lead of
Mr. Webster or even of Mr. Seward. They would have lost in
consideration more than they would have gained in patronage. They
were anti-slavery by birth, as their name was Adams and their
home was Quincy. No matter how much they had wished to enter
State Street, they felt that State Street never would trust them,
or they it. Had State Street been Paradise, they must hunger for
it in vain, and it hardly needed Daniel Webster to act as
archangel with the flaming sword, to order them away from the
door.
| 2 | |
| Time and experience, which alter all perspectives, altered this
among the rest, and taught the boy gentler judgment, but even
when only ten years old, his face was already fixed, and his
heart was stone, against State Street; his education was warped
beyond recovery in the direction of Puritan politics. Between him
and his patriot grandfather at the same age, the conditions had
changed little. The year 1848 was like enough to the year 1776 to
make a fair parallel. The parallel, as concerned bias of
education, was complete when, a few months after the death of
John Quincy Adams, a convention of anti-slavery delegates met at
Buffalo to organize a new party and named candidates for the
general election in November: for President, Martin Van Buren;
for Vice-President, Charles Francis Adams.
| 3 | |
| For any American boy the fact that his father was running for
office would have dwarfed for the time every other excitement,
but even apart from personal bias, the year 1848, for a boy's
road through life, was decisive for twenty years to come. There
was never a side-path of escape. The stamp of 1848 was almost as
indelible as the stamp of 1776, but in the eighteenth or any
earlier century, the stamp mattered less because it was standard,
and every one bore it; while men whose lives were to fall in the
generation between 1865 and 1900 had, first of all, to get rid of
it, and take the stamp that belonged to their time. This was
their education. To outsiders, immigrants, adventurers, it was
easy, but the old Puritan nature rebelled against change. The
reason it gave was forcible. The Puritan thought his thought
higher and his moral standards better than those of his
successors. So they were. He could not be convinced that moral
standards had nothing to do with it, and that utilitarian
morality was good enough for him, as it was for the graceless.
Nature had given to the boy Henry a character that, in any
previous century, would have led him into the Church; he
inherited dogma and a priori thought from the beginning of time;
and he scarcely needed a violent reaction like anti-slavery
politics to sweep him back into Puritanism with a violence as
great as that of a religious war.
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| Thus far he had nothing to do with it; his education was
chiefly inheritance, and during the next five or six years, his
father alone counted for much. If he were to worry successfully
through life's quicksands, he must depend chiefly on his father's
pilotage; but, for his father, the channel lay clear, while for
himself an unknown ocean lay beyond. His father's business in
life was to get past the dangers of the slave-power, or to fix
its bounds at least. The task done, he might be content to let
his sons pay for the pilotage; and it mattered little to his
success whether they paid it with their lives wasted on
battle-fields or in misdirected energies and lost opportunity.
The generation that lived from 1840 to 1870 could do very well
with the old forms of education; that which had its work to do
between 1870 and 1900 needed something quite new.
| 5 | |
| His father's character was therefore the larger part of his
education, as far as any single person affected it, and for that
reason, if for no other, the son was always a much interested
critic of his father's mind and temper. Long after his death as
an old man of eighty, his sons continued to discuss this subject
with a good deal of difference in their points of view. To his
son Henry, the quality that distinguished his father from all the
other figures in the family group, was that, in his opinion,
Charles Francis Adams possessed the only perfectly balanced mind
that ever existed in the name. For a hundred years, every
newspaper scribbler had, with more or less obvious excuse,
derided or abused the older Adamses for want of judgment. They
abused Charles Francis for his judgment. Naturally they never
attempted to assign values to either; that was the children's
affair; but the traits were real. Charles Francis Adams was
singular for mental poise -- absence of self-assertion or
self-consciousness -- the faculty of standing apart without
seeming aware that he was alone -- a balance of mind and temper
that neither challenged nor avoided notice, nor admitted question
of superiority or inferiority, of jealousy, of personal motives,
from any source, even under great pressure. This unusual poise of
judgment and temper, ripened by age, became the more striking to
his son Henry as he learned to measure the mental faculties
themselves, which were in no way exceptional either for depth or
range. Charles Francis Adams's memory was hardly above the
average; his mind was not bold like his grandfather's or restless
like his father's, or imaginative or oratorical -- still less
mathematical; but it worked with singular perfection, admirable
self-restraint, and instinctive mastery of form. Within its range
it was a model.
| 6 | |
| The standards of Boston were high, much affected by the old
clerical self-respect which gave the Unitarian clergy unusual
social charm. Dr. Channing, Mr. Everett, Dr. Frothingham. Dr.
Palfrey, President Walker, R. W. Emerson, and other Boston
ministers of the same school, would have commanded distinction in
any society; but the Adamses had little or no affinity with the
pulpit, and still less with its eccentric offshoots, like
Theodore Parker, or Brook Farm, or the philosophy of Concord.
Besides its clergy, Boston showed a literary group, led by
Ticknor, Prescott, Longfellow, Motley, O. W. Holmes; but Mr.
Adams was not one of them; as a rule they were much too
Websterian. Even in science Boston could claim a certain
eminence, especially in medicine, but Mr. Adams cared very little
for science. He stood alone. He had no master -- hardly even his
father. He had no scholars -- hardly even his sons.
| 7 | |
| Almost alone among his Boston contemporaries, he was not
English in feeling or in sympathies. Perhaps a hundred years of
acute hostility to England had something to do with this family
trait; but in his case it went further and became indifference to
social distinction. Never once in forty years of intimacy did his
son notice in him a trace of snobbishness. He was one of the
exceedingly small number of Americans to whom an English duke or
duchess seemed to be indifferent, and royalty itself nothing more
than a slightly inconvenient presence. This was, it is true,
rather the tone of English society in his time, but Americans
were largely responsible for changing it, and Mr. Adams had every
possible reason for affecting the manner of a courtier even if he
did not feel the sentiment. Never did his son see him flatter or
vilify, or show a sign of envy or jealousy; never a shade of
vanity or self-conceit. Never a tone of arrogance! Never a
gesture of pride!
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| The same thing might perhaps have been said of John Quincy
Adams, but in him his associates averred that it was accompanied
by mental restlessness and often by lamentable want of judgment.
No one ever charged Charles Francis Adams with this fault. The
critics charged him with just the opposite defect. They called
him cold. No doubt, such perfect poise -- such intuitive
self-adjustment -- was not maintained by nature without a
sacrifice of the qualities which would have upset it. No doubt,
too, that even his restless-minded, introspective, self-conscious
children who knew him best were much too ignorant of the world
and of human nature to suspect how rare and complete was the
model before their eyes. 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. Had it been less balanced than it was, he would
have gone with Mr. Garrison, Mr. Wendell Phillips, Mr. Edmund
Quincy, and Theodore Parker, into secession. Between the two
paths he found an intermediate one, distinctive and
characteristic -- he set up a party of his own.
| 9 | |
| This political party became a chief influence in the education
of the boy Henry in the six years 1848 to 1854, and violently
affected his character at the moment when character is plastic.
The group of men with whom Mr. Adams associated himself, and
whose social centre was the house in Mount Vernon Street,
numbered only three: Dr. John G. Palfrey, Richard H. Dana, and
Charles Sumner. Dr. Palfrey was the oldest, and in spite of his
clerical education, was to a boy often the most agreeable, for
his talk was lighter and his range wider than that of the others;
he had wit, or humor, and the give-and-take of dinner-table
exchange. Born to be a man of the world, he forced himself to be
clergyman, professor, or statesman, while, like every other true
Bostonian, he yearned for the ease of the Athenaeum Club in Pall
Mall or the Combination Room at Trinity. Dana at first suggested
the opposite; he affected to be still before the mast, a direct,
rather bluff, vigorous seaman, and only as one got to know him
better one found the man of rather excessive refinement trying
with success to work like a day-laborer, deliberately hardening
his skin to the burden, as though he were still carrying hides at
Monterey. Undoubtedly he succeeded, for his mind and will were
robust, but he might have said what his lifelong friend William
M. Evarts used to say: "I pride myself on my success in doing not
the things I like to do, but the things I don't like to do."
Dana's ideal of life was to be a great Englishman, with a seat on
the front benches of the House of Commons until he should be
promoted to the woolsack; beyond all, with a social status that
should place him above the scuffle of provincial and
unprofessional annoyances; but he forced himself to take life as
it came, and he suffocated his longings with grim
self-discipline, by mere force of will. Of the four men, Dana was
the most marked. Without dogmatism or self-assertion, he seemed
always to be fully in sight, a figure that completely filled a
well-defined space. He, too, talked well, and his mind worked
close to its subject, as a lawyer's should; but disguise and
silence it as he liked, it was aristocratic to the tenth
generation.
| 10 | |
| In that respect, and in that only, Charles Sumner was like him,
but Sumner, in almost every other quality, was quite different
from his three associates -- altogether out of line. He, too,
adored English standards, but his ambition led him to rival the
career of Edmund Burke. No young Bostonian of his time had made
so brilliant a start, but rather in the steps of Edward Everett
than of Daniel Webster. As an orator he had achieved a triumph by
his oration against war; but Boston admired him chiefly for his
social success in England and on the Continent; success that gave
to every Bostonian who enjoyed it a halo never acquired by
domestic sanctity. Mr. Sumner, both by interest and instinct,
felt the value of his English connection, and cultivated it the
more as he became socially an outcast from Boston society by the
passions of politics. He was rarely without a pocket-full of
letters from duchesses or noblemen in England. Having sacrificed
to principle his social position in America, he clung the more
closely to his foreign attachments. The Free Soil Party fared ill
in Beacon Street. The social arbiters of Boston -- George Ticknor
and the rest -- had to admit, however unwillingly, that the Free
Soil leaders could not mingle with the friends and followers of
Mr. Webster. Sumner was socially ostracized, and so, for that
matter, were Palfrey, Dana, Russell, Adams, and all the other
avowed anti-slavery leaders, but for them it mattered less,
because they had houses and families of their own; while Sumner
had neither wife nor household, and, though the most socially
ambitious of all, and the most hungry for what used to be called
polite society, he could enter hardly half-a-dozen houses in
Boston. Longfellow stood by him in Cambridge, and even in Beacon
Street he could always take refuge in the house of Mr. Lodge, but
few days passed when he did not pass some time in Mount Vernon
Street. Even with that, his solitude was glacial, and reacted on
his character. He had nothing but himself to think about. His
superiority was, indeed, real and incontestable; he was the
classical ornament of the anti-slavery party; their pride in him
was unbounded, and their admiration outspoken.
| 11 | |
| The boy Henry worshipped him, and if he ever regarded any older
man as a personal friend, it was Mr. Sumner. The relation of Mr.
Sumner in the household was far closer than any relation of
blood. None of the uncles approached such intimacy. Sumner was
the boy's ideal of greatness; the highest product of nature and
art. The only fault of such a model was its superiority which
defied imitation. To the twelve-year-old boy, his father, Dr.
Palfrey, Mr. Dana, were men, more or less like what he himself
might become; but Mr. Sumner was a different order -- heroic.
| 12 | |
| As the boy grew up to be ten or twelve years old, his father
gave him a writing-table in one of the alcoves of his Boston
library, and there, winter after winter, Henry worked over his
Latin Grammar and listened to these four gentlemen discussing the
course of anti-slavery politics. The discussions were always
serious; the Free Soil Party took itself quite seriously; and
they were habitual because Mr. Adams had undertaken to edit a
newspaper as the organ of these gentlemen, who came to discuss
its policy and expression. At the same time Mr. Adams was editing
the "Works" of his grandfather John Adams, and made the boy
read texts for proof-correction. In after years his father
sometimes complained that, as a reader of Novanglus and
Massachusettensis, Henry had shown very little consciousness of
punctuation; but the boy regarded this part of school life only
as a warning, if he ever grew up to write dull discussions in the
newspapers, to try to be dull in some different way from that of
his great-grandfather. Yet the discussions in the Boston Whig
were carried on in much the same style as those of John Adams and
his opponent, and appealed to much the same society and the same
habit of mind. The boy got as little education, fitting him for
his own time, from the one as from the other, and he got no more
from his contact with the gentlemen themselves who were all types
of the past.
| 13 | |
| Down to 1850, and even later, New England society was still
directed by the professions. Lawyers, physicians, professors,
merchants were classes, and acted not as individuals, but as
though they were clergymen and each profession were a church. In
politics the system required competent expression; it was the old
Ciceronian idea of government by the best that produced the long
line of New England statesmen. They chose men to represent them
because they wanted to be well represented, and they chose the
best they had. Thus Boston chose Daniel Webster, and Webster
took, not as pay, but as honorarium, the cheques raised for him
by Peter Harvey from the Appletons, Perkinses, Amorys, Searses,
Brookses, Lawrences, and so on, who begged him to represent them.
Edward Everett held the rank in regular succession to Webster.
Robert C. Winthrop claimed succession to Everett. Charles Sumner
aspired to break the succession, but not the system. The Adamses
had never been, for any length of time, a part of this State
succession; they had preferred the national service, and had won
all their distinction outside the State, but they too had
required State support and had commonly received it. The little
group of men in Mount Vernon Street were an offshoot of this
system; they were statesmen, not politicians; they guided public
opinion, but were little guided by it.
| 14 | |
| The boy naturally learned only one lesson from his saturation
in such air. He took for granted that this sort of world, more or
less the same that had always existed in Boston and Massachusetts
Bay, was the world which he was to fit. Had he known Europe he
would have learned no better. The Paris of Louis Philippe,
Guizot, and de Tocqueville, as well as the London of Robert Peel,
Macaulay, and John Stuart Mill, were but varieties of the same
upper-class bourgeoisie that felt instinctive cousinship with the
Boston of Ticknor, Prescott, and Motley. Even the typical
grumbler Carlyle, who cast doubts on the real capacity of the
middle class, and who at times thought himself eccentric, found
friendship and alliances in Boston -- still more in Concord. The
system had proved so successful that even Germany wanted to try
it, and Italy yearned for it. England's middle-class government
was the ideal of human progress.
| 15 | |
| Even the violent reaction after 1848, and the return of all
Europe to military practices, never for a moment shook the true
faith. No one, except Karl Marx, foresaw radical change. What
announced it? The world was producing sixty or seventy million
tons of coal, and might be using nearly a million
steam-horsepower, just beginning to make itself felt. All
experience since the creation of man, all divine revelation or
human science, conspired to deceive and betray a twelve-year-old
boy who took for granted that his ideas, which were alone
respectable, would be alone respected.
| 16 | |
| Viewed from Mount Vernon Street, the problem of life was as
simple as it was classic. Politics offered no difficulties, for
there the moral law was a sure guide. Social perfection was also
sure, because human nature worked for Good, and three instruments
were all she asked -- Suffrage, Common Schools, and Press. On
these points doubt was forbidden. Education was divine, and man
needed only a correct knowledge of facts to reach perfection:
| 17 | |
| "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."
| 18 | |
| 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. They proclaimed as their merit that they insisted on no
doctrine, but taught, or tried to teach, the means of leading a
virtuous, useful, unselfish life, which they held to be
sufficient for salvation. 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.
| 19 | |
| 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; he believed
in a mild deism; he prayed; he went through all the forms; but
neither to him nor to his brothers or sisters was religion real.
Even the mild discipline of the Unitarian Church was so irksome
that they all threw it off at the first possible moment, and
never afterwards entered a church. The religious instinct had
vanished, and could not be revived, although one made in later
life many efforts to recover it. That the most powerful emotion
of man, next to the sexual, should disappear, might be a personal
defect of his own; but that the most intelligent society, led by
the most intelligent clergy, in the most moral conditions he ever
knew, should have solved all the problems of the universe so
thoroughly as to have quite ceased making itself anxious about
past or future, and should have persuaded itself that all the
problems which had convulsed human thought from earliest recorded
time, were not worth discussing, seemed to him the most curious
social phenomenon he had to account for in a long life. The
faculty of turning away one's eyes as one approaches a chasm is
not unusual, and Boston showed, under the lead of Mr. Webster,
how successfully it could be done in politics; but in politics a
certain number of men did at least protest. In religion and
philosophy no one protested. Such protest as was made took forms
more simple than the silence, like the deism of Theodore Parker,
and of the boy's own cousin Octavius Frothingham, who distressed
his father and scandalized Beacon Street by avowing scepticism
that seemed to solve no old problems, and to raise many new ones.
The less aggressive protest of Ralph Waldo Emerson, was, from an
old-world point of view, less serious. It was naif.
| 20 | |
| The children reached manhood without knowing religion, and with
the certainty that dogma, metaphysics, and abstract philosophy
were not worth knowing. So one-sided an education could have been
possible in no other country or time, but it became, almost of
necessity, the more literary and political. As the children grew
up, they exaggerated the literary and the political interests.
They joined in the dinner-table discussions and from childhood
the boys were accustomed to hear, almost every day, table-talk as
good as they were ever likely to hear again. The eldest child,
Louisa, was one of the most sparkling creatures her brother met
in a long and varied experience of bright women. The oldest son,
John, was afterwards regarded as one of the best talkers in
Boston society, and perhaps the most popular man in the State,
though apt to be on the unpopular side. Palfrey and Dana could be
entertaining when they pleased, and though Charles Sumner could
hardly be called light in hand, he was willing to be amused, and
smiled grandly from time to time; while Mr. Adams, who talked
relatively little, was always a good listener, and laughed over a
witticism till he choked.
| 21 | |
| By way of educating and amusing the children, Mr. Adams read
much aloud, and was sure to read political literature, especially
when it was satirical, like the speeches of Horace Mann and the
"Epistles" of "Hosea Biglow," with great delight to the youth. So
he read Longfellow and Tennyson as their poems appeared, but the
children took possession of Dickens and Thackeray for themselves.
Both were too modern for tastes founded on Pope and Dr. Johnson.
The boy Henry soon became a desultory reader of every book he
found readable, but these were commonly eighteenth-century
historians because his father's library was full of them. In the
want of positive instincts, he drifted into the mental indolence
of history. So too, he read shelves of eighteenth-century poetry,
but when his father offered his own set of Wordsworth as a gift
on condition of reading it through, he declined. Pope and Gray
called for no mental effort; they were easy reading; but the boy
was thirty years old before his education reached Wordsworth.
| 22 | |
| This is the story of an education, and the person or persons
who figure in it are supposed to have values only as educators or
educated. The surroundings concern it only so far as they affect
education. Sumner, Dana, Palfrey, had values of their own, like
Hume, Pope, and Wordsworth, which any one may study in their
works; here all appear only as influences on the mind of a boy
very nearly the average of most boys in physical and mental
stature. The influence was wholly political and literary. His
father made no effort to force his mind, but left him free play,
and this was perhaps best. Only in one way his father rendered
him a great service by trying to teach him French and giving him
some idea of a French accent. Otherwise the family was rather an
atmosphere than an influence. The boy had a large and
overpowering set of brothers and sisters, who were modes or
replicas of the same type, getting the same education, struggling
with the same problems, and solving the question, or leaving it
unsolved much in the same way. They knew no more than he what
they wanted or what to do for it, but all were conscious that
they would like to control power in some form; and the same thing
could be said of an ant or an elephant. Their form was tied to
politics or literature. They amounted to one individual with
half-a-dozen sides or facets; their temperaments reacted on each
other and made each child more like the other. This was also
education, but in the type, and the Boston or New England type
was well enough known. What no one knew was whether the
individual who thought himself a representative of this type, was
fit to deal with life.
| 23 | |
| As far as outward bearing went, such a family of turbulent
children, given free rein by their parents, or indifferent to
check, should have come to more or less grief. Certainly no one
was strong enough to control them, least of all their mother, the
queen-bee of the hive, on whom nine-tenths of the burden fell, on
whose strength they all depended, but whose children were much
too self-willed and self-confident to take guidance from her, or
from any one else, unless in the direction they fancied. Father
and mother were about equally helpless. Almost every large family
in those days produced at least one black sheep, and if this
generation of Adamses escaped, it was as much a matter of
surprise to them as to their neighbors. By some happy chance they
grew up to be decent citizens, but Henry Adams, as a brand
escaped from the burning, always looked back with astonishment at
their luck. The fact seemed to prove that they were born, like
birds, with a certain innate balance. Home influences alone never
saved the New England boy from ruin, though sometimes they may
have helped to ruin him; and the influences outside of home were
negative. If school helped, it was only by reaction. The dislike
of school was so strong as to be a positive gain. The passionate
hatred of school methods was almost a method in itself. Yet the
day-school of that time was respectable, and the boy had nothing
to complain of. In fact, he never complained. He hated it because
he was here with a crowd of other boys and compelled to learn by
memory a quantity of things that did not amuse him. His memory
was slow, and the effort painful. For him to conceive that his
memory could compete for school prizes with machines of two or
three times its power, was to prove himself wanting not only in
memory, but flagrantly in mind. He thought his mind a good enough
machine, if it were given time to act, but it acted wrong if
hurried. Schoolmasters never gave time.
| 24 | |
| In any and all its forms, the boy detested school, and the
prejudice became deeper with years. He always reckoned his
school-days, from ten to sixteen years old, as time thrown away.
Perhaps his needs turned out to be exceptional, but his existence
was exceptional. Between 1850 and 1900 nearly every one's
existence was exceptional. For success in the life imposed on him
he needed, as afterwards appeared, the facile use of only four
tools: Mathematics, French, German, and Spanish. With these, he
could master in very short time any special branch of inquiry,
and feel at home in any society. 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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