| CHAPTER IV
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| HARVARD COLLEGE (1854-1858)
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| ONE day in June, 1854, young Adams walked for the last time
down the steps of Mr. Dixwell's school in Boylston Place, and
felt no sensation but one of unqualified joy that this experience
was ended. Never before or afterwards in his life did he close a
period so long as four years without some sensation of loss --
some sentiment of habit -- but school was what in after life he
commonly heard his friends denounce as an intolerable bore. He
was born too old for it. The same thing could be said of most New
England boys. Mentally they never were boys. Their education as
men should have begun at ten years old. They were fully five
years more mature than the English or European boy for whom
schools were made. For the purposes of future advancement, as
afterwards appeared, these first six years of a possible
education were wasted in doing imperfectly what might have been
done perfectly in one, and in any case would have had small
value. The next regular step was Harvard College. He was more
than glad to go. For generation after generation, Adamses and
Brookses and Boylstons and Gorhams had gone to Harvard College,
and although none of them, as far as known, had ever done any
good there, or thought himself the better for it, custom, social
ties, convenience, and, above all, economy, kept each generation
in the track. Any other education would have required a serious
effort, but no one took Harvard College seriously. All went there
because their friends went there, and the College was their ideal
of social self-respect.
| 1 | |
| Harvard College, as far as it educated at all, was a mild and
liberal school, which sent young men into the world with all they
needed to make respectable citizens, and something of what they
wanted to make useful ones. Leaders of men it never tried to
make. Its ideals were altogether different. The Unitarian clergy
had given to the College a character of moderation, balance,
judgment, restraint, what the French called mesure; excellent
traits, which the College attained with singular success, so that
its graduates could commonly be recognized by the stamp, but such
a type of character rarely lent itself to autobiography. In
effect, the school created a type but not a will. Four years of
Harvard College, if successful, resulted in an autobiographical
blank, a mind on which only a water-mark had been stamped.
| 2 | |
| 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 after life, 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.
| 3 | |
| What caused the boy most disappointment was the little he got
from his mates. Speaking exactly, he got less than nothing, a
result common enough in education. Yet the College Catalogue for
the years 1854 to 1861 shows a list of names rather distinguished
in their time. Alexander Agassiz and Phillips Brooks led it; H.
H. Richardson and O. W. Holmes helped to close it. As a rule the
most promising of all die early, and never get their names into a
Dictionary of Contemporaries, which seems to be the only popular
standard of success. Many died in the war. Adams knew them all,
more or less; he felt as much regard, and quite as much respect
for them then, as he did after they won great names and were
objects of a vastly wider respect; but, as help towards
education, he got nothing whatever from them or they from him
until long after they had left college. Possibly the fault was
his, but one would like to know how many others shared it.
Accident counts for much in companionship as in marriage. Life
offers perhaps only a score of possible companions, and it is
mere chance whether they meet as early as school or college, but
it is more than a chance that boys brought up together under like
conditions have nothing to give each other. The Class of 1858, to
which Henry Adams belonged, was a typical collection of young New
Englanders, quietly penetrating and aggressively commonplace;
free from meannesses, jealousies, intrigues, enthusiasms, and
passions; not exceptionally quick; not consciously skeptical;
singularly indifferent to display, artifice, florid expression,
but not hostile to it when it amused them; distrustful of
themselves, but little disposed to trust any one else; with not
much humor of their own, but full of readiness to enjoy the humor
of others; negative to a degree that in the long run became
positive and triumphant. Not harsh in manners or judgment, rather
liberal and open-minded, they were still as a body the most
formidable critics one would care to meet, in a long life exposed
to criticism. They never flattered, seldom praised; free from
vanity, they were not intolerant of it; but they were
objectiveness itself; their attitude was a law of nature; their
judgment beyond appeal, not an act either of intellect or emotion
or of will, but a sort of gravitation.
| 4 | |
| This was Harvard College incarnate, but even for Harvard
College, the Class of 1858 was somewhat extreme. Of unity this
band of nearly one hundred young men had no keen sense, but they
had equally little energy of repulsion. They were pleasant to
live with, and above the average of students -- German, French,
English, or what not -- but chiefly because each individual
appeared satisfied to stand alone. It seemed a sign of force; yet
to stand alone is quite natural when one has no passions; still
easier when one has no pains.
| 5 | |
| Into this unusually dissolvent medium, chance insisted on
enlarging Henry Adams's education by tossing a trio of Virginians
as little fitted for it as Sioux Indians to a treadmill. By some
further affinity, these three outsiders fell into relation with
the Bostonians among whom Adams as a schoolboy belonged, and in
the end with Adams himself, although they and he knew well how
thin an edge of friendship separated them in 1856 from mortal
enmity. One of the Virginians was the son of Colonel Robert E.
Lee, of the Second United States Cavalry; the two others who
seemed instinctively to form a staff for Lee, were
town-Virginians from Petersburg. A fourth outsider came from
Cincinnati and was half Kentuckian, N. L. Anderson, Longworth on
the mother's side. For the first time Adams's education brought
him in contact with new types and taught him their values. He saw
the New England type measure itself with another, and he was part
of the process.
| 6 | |
| Lee, known through life as "Roony," was a Virginian of the
eighteenth century, much as Henry Adams was a Bostonian of the
same age. Roony Lee had changed little from the type of his
grandfather, Light Horse Harry. Tall, largely built, handsome,
genial, with liberal Virginian openness towards all he liked, he
had also the Virginian habit of command and took leadership as
his natural habit. No one cared to contest it. None of the New
Englanders wanted command. For a year, at least, Lee was the most
popular and prominent young man in his class, but then seemed
slowly to drop into the background. The habit of command was not
enough, and the Virginian had little else. He was simple beyond
analysis; so simple that even the simple New England student
could not realize him. No one knew enough to know how ignorant he
was; how childlike; how helpless before the relative complexity
of a school. As an animal, the Southerner seemed to have every
advantage, but even as an animal he steadily lost ground.
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| 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. Dozens of eminent statesmen were men of Lee's type, and
maintained themselves well enough in the legislature, but college
was a sharper test. The Virginian was weak in vice itself, though
the Bostonian was hardly a master of crime. The habits of neither
were good; both were apt to drink hard and to live low lives; but
the Bostonian suffered less than the Virginian. Commonly the
Bostonian could take some care of himself even in his worst
stages, while the Virginian became quarrelsome and dangerous.
When a Virginian had brooded a few days over an imaginary grief
and substantial whiskey, none of his Northern friends could be
sure that he might not be waiting, round the corner, with a knife
or pistol, to revenge insult by the dry light of delirium
tremens; and when things reached this condition, Lee had to
exhaust his authority over his own staff. Lee was a gentleman of
the old school, and, as every one knows, gentlemen of the old
school drank almost as much as gentlemen of the new school; but
this was not his trouble. He was sober even in the excessive
violence of political feeling in those years; he kept his temper
and his friends under control.
| 8 | |
| Adams liked the Virginians. No one was more obnoxious to them,
by name and prejudice; yet their friendship was unbroken and even
warm. At a moment when the immediate future posed no problem in
education so vital as the relative energy and endurance of North
and South, this momentary contact with Southern character was a
sort of education for its own sake; but this was not all. No
doubt the self-esteem of the Yankee, which tended naturally to
self-distrust, was flattered by gaining the slow conviction that
the Southerner, with his slave-owning limitations, was as little
fit to succeed in the struggle of modern life as though he were
still a maker of stone axes, living in caves, and hunting the bos
primigenius, and that every quality in which he was strong, made
him weaker; but Adams had begun to fear that even in this respect
one eighteenth-century type might not differ deeply from another.
Roony Lee had changed little from the Virginian of a century
before; but Adams was himself a good deal nearer the type of his
great-grandfather than to that of a railway superintendent. He
was little more fit than the Virginians to deal with a future
America which showed no fancy for the past. Already Northern
society betrayed a preference for economists over diplomats or
soldiers -- one might even call it a jealousy -- against which
two eighteenth-century types had little chance to live, and which
they had in common to fear.
| 9 | |
| Nothing short of this curious sympathy could have brought into
close relations two young men so hostile as Roony Lee and Henry
Adams, but the chief difference between them as collegians
consisted only in their difference of scholarship: Lee was a
total failure; Adams a partial one. Both failed, but Lee felt his
failure more sensibly, so that he gladly seized the chance of
escape by accepting a commission offered him by General Winfield
Scott in the force then being organized against the Mormons. He
asked Adams to write his letter of acceptance, which flattered
Adams's vanity more than any Northern compliment could do,
because, in days of violent political bitterness, it showed a
certain amount of good temper. The diplomat felt his profession.
| 10 | |
| If the student got little from his mates, he got little more
from his masters. The four years passed at college were, for his
purposes, wasted. Harvard College was a good school, but at
bottom what the boy disliked most was any school at all. He did
not want to be one in a hundred -- one per cent of an education.
He regarded himself as the only person for whom his education had
value, and he wanted the whole of it. He got barely half of an
average. Long afterwards, when the devious path of life led him
back to teach in his turn what no student naturally cared or
needed to know, he diverted some dreary hours of faculty-meetings
by looking up his record in the class-lists, and found himself
graded precisely in the middle. In the one branch he most needed
-- mathematics -- barring the few first scholars, failure was so
nearly universal that no attempt at grading could have had value,
and whether he stood fortieth or ninetieth must have been an
accident or the personal favor of the professor. Here his
education failed lamentably. At best he could never have been a
mathematician; at worst he would never have cared to be one; but
he needed to read mathematics, like any other universal language,
and he never reached the alphabet.
| 11 | |
| Beyond two or three Greek plays, the student got nothing from
the ancient languages. Beyond some incoherent theories of
free-trade and protection, he got little from Political Economy.
He could not afterwards remember to have heard the name of Karl
Marx mentioned, or the title of "Capital." He was equally
ignorant of Auguste Comte. These were the two writers of his time
who most influenced its thought. The bit of practical teaching he
afterwards reviewed with most curiosity was the course in
Chemistry, which taught him a number of theories that befogged
his mind for a lifetime. The only teaching that appealed to his
imagination was a course of lectures by Louis Agassiz on the
Glacial Period and Paleontology, which had more influence on his
curiosity than the rest of the college instruction altogether.
The entire work of the four years could have been easily put into
the work of any four months in after life.
| 12 | |
| 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. It would also have weakened the
literary bias, if Adams had been capable of finding other
amusement, but the climate kept him steady to desultory and
useless reading, till he had run through libraries of volumes
which he forgot even to their title-pages. Rather by instinct
than by guidance, he turned to writing, and his professors or
tutors occasionally gave his English composition a hesitating
approval; but in that branch, as in all the rest, even when he
made a long struggle for recognition, he never convinced his
teachers that his abilities, at their best, warranted placing him
on the rank-list, among the first third of his class. Instructors
generally reach a fairly accurate gauge of their scholars'
powers. Henry Adams himself held the opinion that his instructors
were very nearly right, and when he became a professor in his
turn, and made mortifying mistakes in ranking his scholars, he
still obstinately insisted that on the whole, he was not far
wrong. Student or professor, he accepted the negative standard
because it was the standard of the school.
| 13 | |
| He never knew what other students thought of it, or what they
thought they gained from it; nor would their opinion have much
affected his. From the first, he wanted to be done with it, and
stood watching vaguely for a path and a direction. The world
outside seemed large, but the paths that led into it were not
many and lay mostly through Boston, where he did not want to go.
As it happened, by pure chance, the first door of escape that
seemed to offer a hope led into Germany, and James Russell Lowell
opened it.
| 14 | |
| Lowell, on succeeding Longfellow as Professor of
Belles-Lettres, had duly gone to Germany, and had brought back
whatever he found to bring. The literary world then agreed that
truth survived in Germany alone, and Carlyle, Matthew Arnold,
Renan, Emerson, with scores of popular followers, taught the
German faith. The literary world had revolted against the yoke of
coming capitalism -- its money-lenders, its bank directors, and
its railway magnates. Thackeray and Dickens followed Balzac in
scratching and biting the unfortunate middle class with savage
ill-temper, much as the middle class had scratched and bitten the
Church and Court for a hundred years before. The middle class had
the power, and held its coal and iron well in hand, but the
satirists and idealists seized the press, and as they were agreed
that the Second Empire was a disgrace to France and a danger to
England, they turned to Germany because at that moment Germany
was neither economical nor military, and a hundred years behind
western Europe in the simplicity of its standard. German thought,
method, honesty, and even taste, became the standards of
scholarship. Goethe was raised to the rank of Shakespeare -- Kant
ranked as a law-giver above Plato. All serious scholars were
obliged to become German, for German thought was revolutionizing
criticism. Lowell had followed the rest, not very
enthusiastically, but with sufficient conviction, and invited his
scholars to join him. Adams was glad to accept the invitation,
rather for the sake of cultivating Lowell than Germany, but still
in perfect good faith. It was the first serious attempt he had
made to direct his own education, and he was sure of getting some
education out of it; not perhaps anything that he expected, but
at least a path.
| 15 | |
| Singularly circuitous and excessively wasteful of energy the
path proved to be, but the student could never see what other was
open to him. He could have done no better had he foreseen every
stage of his coming life, and he would probably have done worse.
The preliminary step was pure gain. James Russell Lowell had
brought back from Germany the only new and valuable part of its
universities, the habit of allowing students to read with him
privately in his study. Adams asked the privilege, and used it to
read a little, and to talk a great deal, for the personal contact
pleased and flattered him, as that of older men ought to flatter
and please the young even when they altogether exaggerate its
value. Lowell was a new element in the boy's life. As practical a
New Englander as any, he leaned towards the Concord faith rather
than towards Boston where he properly belonged; for Concord, in
the dark days of 1856, glowed with pure light. Adams approached
it in much the same spirit as he would have entered a Gothic
Cathedral, for he well knew that the priests regarded him as only
a worm. To the Concord Church all Adamses were minds of dust and
emptiness, devoid of feeling, poetry or imagination; little
higher than the common scourings of State Street; politicians of
doubtful honesty; natures of narrow scope; and already, at
eighteen years old, Henry had begun to feel uncertainty about so
many matters more important than Adamses that his mind rebelled
against no discipline merely personal, and he was ready to admit
his unworthiness if only he might penetrate the shrine. The
influence of Harvard College was beginning to have its effect. He
was slipping away from fixed principles; from Mount Vernon
Street; from Quincy; from the eighteenth century; and his first
steps led toward Concord.
| 16 | |
| He never reached Concord, and to Concord Church he, like the
rest of mankind who accepted a material universe, remained always
an insect, or something much lower -- a man. It was surely no
fault of his that the universe seemed to him real; perhaps -- as
Mr. Emerson justly said -- it was so; in spite of the
long-continued effort of a lifetime, he perpetually fell back
into the heresy that if anything universal was unreal, it was
himself and not the appearances; it was the poet and not the
banker; it was his own thought, not the thing that moved it. He
did not lack the wish to be transcendental. Concord seemed to
him, at one time, more real than Quincy; yet in truth Russell
Lowell was as little transcendental as Beacon Street. From him
the boy got no revolutionary thought whatever -- objective or
subjective as they used to call it -- but he got good-humored
encouragement to do what amused him, which consisted in passing
two years in Europe after finishing the four years of Cambridge
| 17 | |
| The result seemed small in proportion to the effort, but it was
the only positive result he could ever trace to the influence of
Harvard College, and he had grave doubts whether Harvard College
influenced even that. Negative results in plenty he could trace,
but he tended towards negation on his own account, as one side of
the New England mind had always done, and even there he could
never feel sure that Harvard College had more than reflected a
weakness. In his opinion the education was not serious, but in
truth hardly any Boston student took it seriously, and none of
them seemed sure that President Walker himself, or President
Felton after him, took it more seriously than the students. For
them all, the college offered chiefly advantages vulgarly called
social, rather than mental.
| 18 | |
| Unluckily for this particular boy, social advantages were his
only capital in life. Of money he had not much, of mind not more,
but he could be quite certain that, barring his own faults, his
social position would never be questioned. What he needed was a
career in which social position had value. Never in his life
would he have to explain who he was; never would he have need of
acquaintance to strengthen his social standing; but he needed
greatly some one to show him how to use the acquaintance he cared
to make. He made no acquaintance in college which proved to have
the smallest use in after life. All his Boston friends he knew
before, or would have known in any case, and contact of Bostonian
with Bostonian was the last education these young men needed.
Cordial and intimate as their college relations were, they all
flew off in different directions the moment they took their
degrees. Harvard College remained a tie, indeed, but a tie little
stronger than Beacon Street and not so strong as State Street.
Strangers might perhaps gain something from the college if they
were hard pressed for social connections. A student like H. H.
Richardson, who came from far away New Orleans, and had his
career before him to chase rather than to guide, might make
valuable friendships at college. Certainly Adams made no
acquaintance there that he valued in after life 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. The valley of life grew
more and more narrow with years, and certain men with common
tastes were bound to come together. Adams knew only that he would
have felt himself on a more equal footing with them had he been
less ignorant, and had he not thrown away ten years of early life
in acquiring what he might have acquired in one.
| 19 | |
| Socially or intellectually, the college was for him negative
and in some ways mischievous. The most tolerant man of the world
could not see good in the lower habits of the students, but the
vices were less harmful than the virtues. The habit of drinking
-- though the mere recollection of it made him doubt his own
veracity, so fantastic it seemed in later life -- may have done
no great or permanent harm; but the habit of looking at life as a
social relation -- an affair of society -- did no good. It
cultivated a weakness which needed no cultivation. If it had
helped to make men of the world, or give the manners and
instincts of any profession -- such as temper, patience,
courtesy, or a faculty of profiting by the social defects of
opponents -- it would have been education better worth having
than mathematics or languages; but so far as it helped to make
anything, it helped only to make the college standard permanent
through life. The Bostonian educated at Harvard College remained
a collegian, if he stuck only to what the college gave him. If
parents went on generation after generation, sending their
children to Harvard College for the sake of its social
advantages, they perpetuated an inferior social type, quite as
ill-fitted as the Oxford type for success in the next generation.
| 20 | |
| Luckily the old social standard of the college, as President
Walker or James Russell Lowell still showed it, was admirable,
and if it had little practical value or personal influence on the
mass of students, at least it preserved the tradition for those
who liked it. The Harvard graduate was neither American nor
European, nor even wholly Yankee; his admirers were few, and his
many; perhaps his worst weakness was his self-criticism and
self-consciousness; but his ambitions, social or intellectual,
were necessarily cheap even though they might be negative. Afraid
of such serious risks, and still more afraid of personal
ridicule, he seldom made a great failure of life, and nearly
always led a life more or less worth living. So Henry Adams, well
aware that he could not succeed as a scholar, and finding his
social position beyond improvement or need of effort, betook
himself to the single ambition which otherwise would scarcely
have seemed a true outcome of the college, though it was the last
remnant of the old Unitarian supremacy. He took to the pen. He
wrote.
| 21 | |
| The College Magazine printed his work, and the College
Societies listened to his addresses. Lavish of praise the readers
were not; the audiences, too, listened in silence; but this was
all the encouragement any Harvard collegian had a reasonable hope
to receive; grave silence was a form of patience that meant
possible future acceptance; and Henry Adams went on writing. No
one cared enough to criticise, except himself who soon began to
suffer from reaching his own limits. He found that he could not
be this -- or that -- or the other; always precisely the things
he wanted to be. He had not wit or scope or force. Judges always
ranked him beneath a rival, if he had any; and he believed the
judges were right. His work seemed to him thin, commonplace,
feeble. At times he felt his own weakness so fatally that he
could not go on; when he had nothing to say, he could not say it,
and he found that he had very little to say at best. Much that he
then wrote must be still in existence in print or manuscript,
though he never cared to see it again, for he felt no doubt that
it was in reality just what he thought it. At best it showed only
a feeling for form; an instinct of exclusion. Nothing
shocked--not even its weakness.
| 22 | |
| Inevitably an effort leads to an ambition -- creates it -- and
at that time the ambition of the literary student, which almost
took place of the regular prizes of scholarship, was that of
being chosen as the representative of his class -- Class Orator
-- at the close of their course. This was political as well as
literary success, and precisely the sort of eighteenth-century
combination that fascinated an eighteenth century boy. The idea
lurked in his mind, at first as a dream, in no way serious or
even possible, for he stood outside the number of what were known
as popular men. Year by year, his position seemed to improve, or
perhaps his rivals disappeared, until at last, to his own great
astonishment, he found himself a candidate. The habits of the
college permitted no active candidacy; he and his rivals had not
a word to say for or against themselves, and he was never even
consulted on the subject; he was not present at any of the
proceedings, and how it happened he never could quite divine, but
it did happen, that one evening on returning from Boston he
received notice of his election, after a very close contest, as
Class Orator over the head of the first scholar, who was
undoubtedly a better orator and a more popular man. In politics
the success of the poorer candidate is common enough, and Henry
Adams was a fairly trained politician, but he never understood
how he managed to defeat not only a more capable but a more
popular rival.
| 23 | |
| To him the election seemed a miracle. This was no mock-modesty;
his head was as clear as ever it was in an indifferent canvass,
and he knew his rivals and their following as well as he knew
himself. What he did not know, even after four years of
education, was Harvard College. What he could never measure was
the bewildering impersonality of the men, who, at twenty years
old, seemed to set no value either on official or personal
standards. Here were nearly a hundred young men who had lived
together intimately during four of the most impressionable years
of life, and who, not only once but again and again, in different
ways, deliberately, seriously, dispassionately, chose as their
representatives precisely those of their companions who seemed
least to represent them. As far as these Orators and Marshals had
any position at all in a collegiate sense, it was that of
indifference to the college. Henry Adams never professed the
smallest faith in universities of any kind, either as boy or man,
nor had he the faintest admiration for the university graduate,
either in Europe or in America; as a collegian he was only known
apart from his fellows by his habit of standing outside the
college; and yet the singular fact remained that this commonplace
body of young men chose him repeatedly to express his and their
commonplaces. Secretly, of course, the successful candidate
flattered himself -- and them -- with the hope that they might
perhaps not be so commonplace as they thought themselves; but
this was only another proof that all were identical. They saw in
him a representative -- the kind of representative they wanted --
and he saw in them the most formidable array of judges he could
ever meet, like so many mirrors of himself, an infinite
reflection of his own shortcomings.
| 24 | |
| All the same, the choice was flattering; so flattering that it
actually shocked his vanity; and would have shocked it more, if
possible, had he known that it was to be the only flattery of the
sort he was ever to receive. The function of Class Day was, in
the eyes of nine-tenths of the students, altogether the most
important of the college, and the figure of the Orator was the
most conspicuous in the function. Unlike the Orators at regular
Commencements, the Class Day Orator stood alone, or had only the
Poet for rival. Crowded into the large church, the students,
their families, friends, aunts, uncles and chaperones, attended
all the girls of sixteen or twenty who wanted to show their
summer dresses or fresh complexions, and there, for an hour or
two, in a heat that might have melted bronze, they listened to an
Orator and a Poet in clergyman's gowns, reciting such platitudes
as their own experience and their mild censors permitted them to
utter. What Henry Adams said in his Class Oration of 1858 he soon
forgot to the last word, nor had it the least value for
education; but he naturally remembered what was said of it. He
remembered especially one of his eminent uncles or relations
remarking that, as the work of so young a man, the oration was
singularly wanting in enthusiasm. The young man -- always in
search of education -- asked himself whether, setting rhetoric
aside, this absence of enthusiasm was a defect or a merit, since,
in either case, it was all that Harvard College taught, and all
that the hundred young men, whom he was trying to represent,
expressed. 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. One had done
little but read papers to Societies, or act comedy in the Hasty
Pudding, not to speak of regular exercises, and no audience in
future life would ever be so intimately and terribly intelligent
as these. Three-fourths of the graduates would rather have
addressed the Council of Trent or the British Parliament than
have acted Sir Anthony Absolute or Dr. Ollapod before a gala
audience of the Hasty Pudding. Self-possession was the strongest
part of Harvard College, which certainly taught men to stand
alone, so that nothing seemed stranger to its graduates than the
paroxysms of terror before the public which often overcame the
graduates of European universities. Whether this was, or was not,
education, Henry Adams never knew. He was ready to stand up
before any audience in America or Europe, with nerves rather
steadier for the excitement, but whether he should ever have
anything to say, remained to be proved. As yet he knew nothing
Education had not begun.
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