| CHAPTER V
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| BERLIN (1858-1859)
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| A FOURTH child has the strength of his weakness. Being of no
great value, he may throw himself away if he likes, and never be
missed. Charles Francis Adams, the father, felt no love for
Europe, which, as he and all the world agreed, unfitted Americans
for America. A captious critic might have replied that all the
success he or his father or his grandfather achieved was chiefly
due to the field that Europe gave them, and it was more than
likely that without the help of Europe they would have all
remained local politicians or lawyers, like their neighbors, to
the end. Strictly followed, the rule would have obliged them
never to quit Quincy; and, in fact, so much more timid are
parents for their children than for themselves, that Mr. and Mrs.
Adams would have been content to see their children remain
forever in Mount Vernon Street, unexposed to the temptations of
Europe, could they have relied on the moral influences of Boston
itself. Although the parents little knew what took place under
their eyes, even the mothers saw enough to make them uneasy.
Perhaps their dread of vice, haunting past and present, worried
them less than their dread of daughters-in-law or sons-in-law who
might not fit into the somewhat narrow quarters of home. On all
sides were risks. Every year some young person alarmed the
parental heart even in Boston, and although the temptations of
Europe were irresistible, removal from the temptations of Boston
might be imperative. The boy Henry wanted to go to Europe; he
seemed well behaved, when any one was looking at him; he observed
conventions, when he could not escape them; he was never
quarrelsome, towards a superior; his morals were apparently good,
and his moral principles, if he had any, were not known to be
bad. Above all, he was timid and showed a certain sense of
self-respect, when in public view. What he was at heart, no one
could say; least of all himself; but he was probably human, and
no worse than some others. Therefore, when he presented to an
exceedingly indulgent father and mother his request to begin at a
German university the study of the Civil Law -- although neither
he nor they knew what the Civil Law was, or any reason for his
studying it -- the parents dutifully consented, and walked with
him down to the railway-station at Quincy to bid him good-bye,
with a smile which he almost thought a tear.
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| Whether the boy deserved such indulgence, or was worth it, he
knew no more than they, or than a professor at Harvard College;
but whether worthy or not, he began his third or fourth attempt
at education in November, 1858, by sailing on the steamer Persia,
the pride of Captain Judkins and the Cunard Line; the newest,
largest and fastest steamship afloat. He was not alone. Several
of his college companions sailed with him, and the world looked
cheerful enough until, on the third day, the world -- as far as
concerned the young man -- ran into a heavy storm. He learned
then a lesson that stood by him better than any university
teaching ever did -- the meaning of a November gale on the
mid-Atlantic -- which, for mere physical misery, passed
endurance. The subject offered him material for none but serious
treatment; he could never see the humor of sea-sickness; but it
united itself with a great variety of other impressions which
made the first month of travel altogether the rapidest school of
education he had yet found. The stride in knowledge seemed
gigantic. One began a to see that a great many impressions were
needed to make very little education, but how many could be
crowded into one day without making any education at all, became
the pons asinorum of tourist mathematics. How many would turn out
to be wrong whether any could turn out right, was ultimate
wisdom.
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| The ocean, the Persia, Captain Judkins, and Mr. G. P. R. James,
the most distinguished passenger, vanished one Sunday morning in
a furious gale in the Mersey, to make place for the drearier
picture of a Liverpool street as seen from the Adelphi
coffee-room in November murk, followed instantly by the
passionate delights of Chester and the romance of red-sandstone
architecture. Millions of Americans have felt this succession of
emotions. Possibly very young and ingenuous tourists feel them
still, but in days before tourists, when the romance was a
reality, not a picture, they were overwhelming. When the boys
went out to Eaton Hall, they were awed, as Thackeray or Dickens
would have felt in the presence of a Duke. The very name of
Grosvenor struck a note of grandeur. The long suite of lofty,
gilded rooms with their gilded furniture; the portraits; the
terraces; the gardens, the landscape; the sense of superiority in
the England of the fifties, actually set the rich nobleman apart,
above Americans and shopkeepers. Aristocracy was real. So was the
England of Dickens. Oliver Twist and Little Nell lurked in every
churchyard shadow, not as shadow but alive. Even Charles the
First was not very shadowy, standing on the tower to see his army
defeated. Nothing thereabouts had very much changed since he lost
his battle and his head. An eighteenth-century American boy fresh
from Boston naturally took it all for education, and was amused
at this sort of lesson. At least he thought he felt it.
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| Then came the journey up to London through Birmingham and the
Black District, another lesson, which needed much more to be
rightly felt. The plunge into darkness lurid with flames; the
sense of unknown horror in this weird gloom which then existed
nowhere else, and never had existed before, except in volcanic
craters; the violent contrast between this dense, smoky,
impenetrable darkness, and the soft green charm that one glided
into, as one emerged -- the revelation of an unknown society of
the pit -- made a boy uncomfortable, though he had no idea that
Karl Marx was standing there waiting for him, and that sooner or
later the process of education would have to deal with Karl Marx
much more than with Professor Bowen of Harvard College or his
Satanic free-trade majesty John Stuart Mill. The Black District
was a practical education, but it was infinitely far in the
distance. The boy ran away from it, as he ran away from
everything he disliked.
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| Had he known enough to know where to begin he would have seen
something to study, more vital than the Civil Law, in the long,
muddy, dirty, sordid, gas-lit dreariness of Oxford Street as his
dingy four-wheeler dragged its weary way to Charing Cross. He did
notice one peculiarity about it worth remembering. London was
still London. A certain style dignified its grime; heavy, clumsy,
arrogant, purse-proud, but not cheap; insular but large; barely
tolerant of an outside world, and absolutely self-confident. The
boys in the streets made such free comments on the American
clothes and figures, that the travellers hurried to put on tall
hats and long overcoats to escape criticism. No stranger had
rights even in the Strand. The eighteenth century held its own.
History muttered down Fleet Street, like Dr. Johnson, in Adams's
ear; Vanity Fair was alive on Piccadilly in yellow chariots with
coachmen in wigs, on hammer-cloths; footmen with canes, on the
footboard, and a shrivelled old woman inside; half the great
houses, black with London smoke, bore large funereal hatchments;
every one seemed insolent, and the most insolent structures in
the world were the Royal Exchange and the Bank of England. In
November, 1858, London was still vast, but it was the London of
the eighteenth century that an American felt and hated.
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| Education went backward. Adams, still a boy, could not guess
how intensely intimate this London grime was to become to him as
a man, but he could still less conceive himself returning to it
fifty years afterwards, noting at each turn how the great city
grew smaller as it doubled in size; 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. As the Baron Osy
steamed up the Scheldt in the morning mists, a travelling band on
deck began to play, and groups of peasants, working along the
fields, dropped their tools to join in dancing. Ostade and
Teniers were as much alive as they ever were, and even the Duke
of Alva was still at home. The thirteenth-century cathedral
towered above a sixteenth-century mass of tiled roofs, ending
abruptly in walls and a landscape that had not changed. The taste
of the town was thick, rich, ripe, like a sweet wine; it was
mediaeval, so that Rubens seemed modern; it was one of the
strongest and fullest flavors that ever touched the young man's
palate; but he might as well have drunk out his excitement in old
Malmsey, for all the education he got from it. Even in art, one
can hardly begin with Antwerp Cathedral and the Descent from the
Cross. He merely got drunk on his emotions, and had then to get
sober as he best could. He was terribly sober when he saw Antwerp
half a century afterwards. One lesson he did learn without
suspecting that he must immediately lose it. He felt his middle
ages and the sixteenth century alive. He was young enough, and
the towns were dirty enough -- unimproved, unrestored,
untouristed -- to retain the sense of reality. As a taste or a
smell, it was education, especially because it lasted barely ten
years longer; but it was education only sensual. He never dreamed
of trying to educate himself to the Descent from the Cross. He
was only too happy to feel himself kneeling at the foot of the
Cross; he learned only to loathe the sordid necessity of getting
up again, and going about his stupid business.
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| This was one of the foreseen dangers of Europe, but it vanished
rapidly enough to reassure the most anxious of parents. Dropped
into Berlin one morning without guide or direction, the young man
in search of education floundered in a mere mess of
misunderstandings. He could never recall what he expected to
find, but whatever he expected, it had no relation with what it
turned out to be. A student at twenty takes easily to anything,
even to Berlin, and he would have accepted the thirteenth century
pure and simple since his guides assured him that this was his
right path; but a week's experience left him dazed and dull.
Faith held out, but the paths grew dim. Berlin astonished him,
but he had no lack of friends to show him all the amusement it
had to offer. 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 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.
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| 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. That the language would require at least three months' hard
work before he could touch the Law was an annoying discovery; but
the shock that upset him was the discovery of the university
itself. He had thought Harvard College a torpid school, but it
was instinct with life compared with all that he could see of the
University of Berlin. The German students were strange animals,
but their professors were beyond pay. The mental attitude of the
university was not of an American world. What sort of instruction
prevailed in other branches, or in science, Adams had no occasion
to ask, but in the Civil Law he found only the lecture system in
its deadliest form as it flourished in the thirteenth century.
The professor mumbled his comments; the students made, or seemed
to make, notes; they could have learned from books or discussion
in a day more than they could learn from him in a month, but they
must pay his fees, follow his course, and be his scholars, if
they wanted a degree. To an American the result was worthless. He
could make no use of the Civil Law without some previous notion
of the Common Law; but the student who knew enough of the Common
Law to understand what he wanted, had only to read the Pandects
or the commentators at his ease in America, and be his own
professor. Neither the method nor the matter nor the manner could
profit an American education.
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| This discovery seemed to shock none of the students. They went
to the lectures, made notes, and read textbooks, but never
pretended to take their professor seriously. They were much more
serious in reading Heine. They knew no more than Heine what good
they were getting, beyond the Berlin accent -- which was bad; and
the beer -- which was not to compare with Munich; and the dancing
-- which was better at Vienna. They enjoyed the beer and music,
but they refused to be responsible for the education. Anyway, as
they defended themselves, they were learning the language.
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| So the young man fell back on the language, and being slow at
languages, he found himself falling behind all his friends, which
depressed his spirits, the more because the gloom of a Berlin
winter and of Berlin architecture seemed to him a particular sort
of gloom never attained elsewhere. One day on the Linden he
caught sight of Charles Sumner in a cab, and ran after him.
Sumner was then recovering from the blows of the South Carolinian
cane or club, and he was pleased to find a young worshipper in
the remote Prussian wilderness. They dined together and went to
hear "William Tell" at the Opera. Sumner tried to encourage his
friend about his difficulties of language: "I came to Berlin," or
Rome, or whatever place it was, as he said with his grand air of
mastery, "I came to Berlin, unable to say a word in the language;
and three months later when I went away, I talked it to my
cabman." Adams felt himself quite unable to attain in so short a
time such social advantages, and one day complained of his trials
to Mr. Robert Apthorp, of Boston, who was passing the winter in
Berlin for the sake of its music. Mr. Apthorp told of his own
similar struggle, and how he had entered a public school and sat
for months with ten-year-old-boys, reciting their lessons and
catching their phrases. The idea suited Adams's desperate frame
of mind. At least it ridded him of the university and the Civil
Law and American associations in beer-cellars. Mr. Apthorp took
the trouble to negotiate with the head-master of the
Friedrichs-Wilhelm-Werdersches Gymnasium for permission to Henry
Adams to attend the school as a member of the Ober-tertia, a
class of boys twelve or thirteen years old, and there Adams went
for three months as though he had not always avoided high schools
with singular antipathy. He never did anything else so foolish
but he was given a bit of education which served him some purpose
in life.
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| It was not merely the language, though three months passed in
such fashion would teach a poodle enough to talk with a cabman,
and this was all that foreign students could expect to do, for
they never by any chance would come in contact with German
society, if German society existed, about which they knew
nothing. Adams never learned to talk German well, but the same
might be said of his English, if he could believe Englishmen. He
learned not to annoy himself on this account. His difficulties
with the language gradually ceased. He thought himself quite
Germanized in 1859. He even deluded himself with the idea that he
read it as though it were English, which proved that he knew
little about it; but whatever success he had in his own
experiment interested him less than his contact with German
education.
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| He had revolted at the American school and university; he had
instantly rejected the German university; and as his last
experience of education he tried the German high school. The
experiment was hazardous. In 1858 Berlin was a poor, keen-witted,
provincial town, simple, dirty, uncivilized, and in most respects
disgusting. Life was primitive beyond what an American boy could
have imagined. Overridden by military methods and bureaucratic
pettiness, Prussia was only beginning to free her hands from
internal bonds. Apart from discipline, activity scarcely existed.
The future Kaiser Wilhelm I, regent for his insane brother King
Friedrich Wilhelm IV, seemed to pass his time looking at the
passers-by from the window of his modest palace on the Linden.
German manners, even at Court, were sometimes brutal, and German
thoroughness at school was apt to be routine. Bismarck himself
was then struggling to begin a career against the inertia of the
German system. The condition of Germany was a scandal and
nuisance to every earnest German, all whose energies were turned
to reforming it from top to bottom; and Adams walked into a great
public school to get educated, at precisely the time when the
Germans wanted most to get rid of the education they were forced
to follow. As an episode in the search for education, this
adventure smacked of Heine.
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| The school system has doubtless changed, and at all events the
schoolmasters are probably long ago dead; the story has no longer
a practical value, and had very little even at the time; one
could at least say in defence of the German school that it was
neither very brutal nor very immoral. The head-master was
excellent in his Prussian way, and the other instructors were not
worse than in other schools; it was their system that struck the
systemless American with horror. The arbitrary training given to
the memory was stupefying; the strain that the memory endured was
a form of torture; and the feats that the boys performed, without
complaint, were pitiable. No other faculty than the memory seemed
to be recognized. Least of all was any use made of reason, either
analytic, synthetic, or dogmatic. The German government did not
encourage reasoning.
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| All State education is a sort of dynamo machine for polarizing
the popular mind; for turning and holding its lines of force in
the direction supposed to be most effective for State purposes.
The German machine was terribly efficient. Its effect on the
children was pathetic. The Friedrichs-Wilhelm-Werdersches
Gymnasium was an old building in the heart of Berlin which served
the educational needs of the small tradesmen or bourgeoisie of
the neighborhood; the children were Berliner-kinder if ever there
were such, and of a class suspected of sympathy and concern in
the troubles of 1848. None was noble or connected with good
society. Personally they were rather sympathetic than not, but as
the objects of education they were proofs of nearly all the evils
that a bad system could give. Apparently Adams, in his rigidly
illogical pursuit, had at last reached his ideal of a viciously
logical education. The boys' physique showed it first, but their
physique could not be wholly charged to the school. German food
was bad at best, and a diet of sauerkraut, sausage, and beer
could never be good; but it was not the food alone that made
their faces white and their flesh flabby. They never breathed
fresh air; they had never heard of a playground; in all Berlin
not a cubic inch of oxygen was admitted in winter into an
inhabited building; in the school every room was tightly closed
and had no ventilation; the air was foul beyond all decency; but
when the American opened a window in the five minutes between
hours, he violated the rules and was invariably rebuked. As long
as cold weather lasted, the windows were shut. If the boys had a
holiday, they were apt to be taken on long tramps in the
Thiergarten or elsewhere, always ending in over-fatigue,
tobacco-smoke, sausages, and beer. With this, they were required
to prepare daily lessons that would have quickly broken down
strong men of a healthy habit, and which they could learn only
because their minds were morbid. The German university had seemed
a failure, but the German high school was something very near an
indictable nuisance.
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| Before the month of April arrived, the experiment of German
education had reached this point. Nothing was left of it except
the ghost of the Civil Law shut up in the darkest of closets,
never to gibber again before any one who could repeat the story.
The derisive Jew laughter of Heine ran through the university and
everything else in Berlin. Of course, when one is twenty years
old, life is bound to be full, if only of Berlin beer, although
German student life was on the whole the thinnest of beer, as an
American looked on it, but though nothing except small fragments
remained of the education that had been so promising -- or
promised -- this is only what most often happens in life, when
by-products turn out to be more valuable than staples. The German
university and German law were failures; German society, in an
American sense, did not exist, or if it existed, never showed
itself to an American; the German theatre, on the other hand, was
excellent, and German opera, with the ballet, was almost worth a
journey to Berlin; but the curious and perplexing result of the
total failure of German education was that the student's only
clear gain -- his single step to a higher life -- came from time
wasted; studies neglected; vices indulged; education reversed; --
it came from the despised beer-garden and music-hall; and it was
accidental, unintended, unforeseen.
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| When his companions insisted on passing two or three afternoons
in the week at music-halls, drinking beer, smoking German
tobacco, and looking at fat German women knitting, while an
orchestra played dull music, Adams went with them for the sake of
the company, but with no presence of enjoyment; and when Mr.
Apthorp gently protested that he exaggerated his indifference,
for of course he enjoyed Beethoven, Adams replied simply that he
loathed Beethoven; and felt a slight surprise when Mr. Apthorp
and the others laughed as though they thought it humor. He saw no
humor in it. He supposed that, except musicians, every one
thought Beethoven a bore, as every one except mathematicians
thought mathematics a bore. Sitting thus at his beer-table,
mentally impassive, he was one day surprised to notice that his
mind followed the movement of a Sinfonie. He could not have been
more astonished had he suddenly read a new language. Among the
marvels of education, this was the most marvellous. A prison-wall
that barred his senses on one great side of life, suddenly fell,
of its own accord, without so much as his knowing when it
happened. Amid the fumes of coarse tobacco and poor beer,
surrounded by the commonest of German Haus-frauen, a new sense
burst out like a flower in his life, so superior to the old
senses, so bewildering, so astonished at its own existence, that
he could not credit it, and watched it as something apart,
accidental, and not to be trusted. He slowly came to admit that
Beethoven had partly become intelligible to him, but he was the
more inclined to think that Beethoven must be much overrated as a
musician, to be so easily followed. This could not be called
education, for he had never so much as listened to the music. He
had been thinking of other things. Mere mechanical repetition of
certain sounds had stuck to his unconscious mind. Beethoven might
have this power, but not Wagner, or at all events not the Wagner
later than "Tannhauser." Near forty years passed before he
reached the "Gotterdammerung."
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| One might talk of the revival of an atrophied sense -- the
mechanical reaction of a sleeping consciousness -- but no other
sense awoke. His sense of line and color remained as dull as
ever, and as far as ever below the level of an artist. His
metaphysical sense did not spring into life, so that his mind
could leap the bars of German expression into sympathy with the
idealities of Kant and Hegel. Although he insisted that his faith
in German thought and literature was exalted, he failed to
approach German thought, and he shed never a tear of emotion over
the pages of Goethe and Schiller. When his father rashly ventured
from time to time to write him a word of common sense, the young
man would listen to no sense at all, but insisted that Berlin was
the best of educations in the best of Germanies; yet, when, at
last, April came, and some genius suggested a tramp in Thuringen,
his heart sang like a bird; he realized what a nightmare he had
suffered, and he made up his mind that, wherever else he might,
in the infinities of space and time, seek for education, it
should not be again in Berlin.
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