Like a half-buried former civilization—famous, extensive, and perplexing—the Adams family is being uncovered for us. The evolution from generation to generation is made clearer, and the factors that link each. John begat John Quincy who begat Charles Francis who begat Henry. The papers of the first three are coming out in handsome amplitude. “Think of your forefathers! Think of your posterity!” was John Quincy Adams's injunction. They force us to do so—to involve ourselves in their central yet idiosyncratic chronicle. They meet us halfway, for all Adamses had an eye to posterity.
Henry of the fourth generation has especially engrossed us, because he is the most interesting and tantalizing of the lot. There have been half a dozen books about him in the last decade or so, including the very good ones by William H. Jordy and J. C. Levenson. Max Baym has discussed his French interests, Henry Wasser his scientific notions. Edward N. Saveth has examined yet other aspects. But the most complete record is the trilogy by Ernest Samuels, a solid and admirable achievement which tells us as much about Henry Adams's inner and outer life as we are ever likely to learn.1 Samuels is sensible, pertinacious, sympathetic but not idolatrous, and modestly speculative. The picture differs a good deal, though perhaps not fundamentally, from the one disclosed in The Education of Henry Adams—that curious work which is both less and more than an autobiography. Here is the complete story of an incomplete man. Or is that a fair comment? Which of us is not incomplete? Whatever the answer, Henry remains a figure to tease the imagination. As Lionel Trilling has said, we cannot react consistently to Adams. “Sometimes he is irresistible. . . . Sometimes he is hateful. . . . It often occurs to us to believe that his is the finest American intelligence we can possibly know, while again it sometimes seems that his mind is so special, and so refined in specialness, as to be beside any possible point.”
The hateful or at least unlikable sides of Henry Adams are not concealed by Professor Samuels. We are reminded that the English diplomatist Cecil Spring Rice, who was later to become his devoted friend, found him “cynical” and “vindictive.” Another English acquaintance, Lord Morley, irked by the tone of The Education, said, “If Adams had ever looked at himself naked in a glass, he would have rated other men a little more gently.” Adams irritated a generation of American Presidents, from Rutherford B. Hayes to his erstwhile friend, Theodore Roosevelt. Other public men were rubbed raw by his combination of arrogance and humility. A typical reaction was that of Justice Holmes, in the course of a conversation with Owen Wister:
Holmes: “If the country had put him on a pedestal, I think Henry Adams with his gifts could have rendered distinguished service.”
Wister: “What was the matter with Henry Adams?”
Holmes: “He wanted it handed to him on a silver platter.”
Not only Henry but the whole family, past and present, tended to leave this impression. From John Adams onward they were regarded as stiff, perverse, moody, sharp-tongued. They showed the same disposition toward one another. Spring Rice noted that “They are all clever, but they all make a sort of profession of eccentricity. . . . Two of them were arguing. One said, ‘It seems to me that I am the only one of the family who inherits anything of our grandfather's manners.’ ‘But you dissipated your inheritance young,’ answered the other. . . .” They were well aware of and almost boasted of their unlikableness, as if they thought it an essential corollary of being honest. Thus Henry's elder brother, Charles Francis Adams, Jr., served in the Civil War with the 1st Massachusetts Cavalry. In January 1864 his company, under his influence, was the only one in the regiment to reenlist at the expiration of the first agreement. Charles wrote to his father:
To be egotistical, I think I see the old family traits cropping out in myself. These men don't care for me personally. They think me cold, reserved and formal. They feel no affection for me, but . . . they have faith in my power of accomplishing results and in my integrity. . . .
The consequences within the family were sometimes bizarre. Its members had moments of intimacy, especially when they rallied together to defend the Adams reputation against strangers. Otherwise they made few concessions. Charles Francis Adams Jr., in a stratagem concealed from his brother, wrote a long unsigned review of Henry's biography of Albert Gallatin for the Nation. He called the book “clumsy,” and “little short of . . . an outrage” for anyone who sought a true insight into Gallatin. Henry never discovered who had attacked him. His brother's motives were no doubt high-minded, at any rate on the surface. But obscure jealousies were at work. Who was to carry on the family's great tradition? Neither Charles nor the other elder brother John exactly sought the office. Nor did Henry or his younger brother Brooks Adams. But none was quite content to let the others have the limelight. “My father and brothers,” Henry had acknowledged, “block my path fatally, for all three stand before me in order of promotion.” The erratic Brooks, to his understandable chagrin, was once defeated by two votes in an attempt to secure election to the Massachusetts legislature. They were the votes of two of his uncles. Integrity, one might think, could be overdone. Charles, Henry, and Brooks all wrote history, and on occasion were of considerable help to one another. Yet they got on one another's nerves. Henry deliberately absented himself from Brooks's wedding. True, his own wife had committed suicide in 1885, and thereafter he could not endure reminders of matrimony. But a hostile observer could wonder at the circumstances of Henry's childless marriage, and could point out that Henry's impatience with Brooks was more widely based. Perhaps the impatience was justified. Like Henry, but with an extra quality of vehemence, Brooks wanted to provoke people as much as he wanted to instruct them. In his writings he preached calamity with increasing shrillness. Even at the stage in his life when he believed in reform, Brooks's sympathies were confined to his own class. In later life he became rabid-detecting conspiracies, dreaming of government by the strong. “Brooks is too brutal, too blatant, too emphatic . . . to please any large number of people,” said Henry.
He himself was of a more timid disposition. Yet the brothers had a good deal in common. Each was at heart conservative, and in a sense class-ridden. Henry had gone to Harvard, studied in Europe, served as his father's secretary in London from 1861 to 1868 while C. F. Adams, Sr. was minister to Britain. He then lived in Washington; taught history for some years at Harvard; and came back to Washington to lead the life of a gentleman-scholar. Never in this stretch of time, or subsequently, did he have close contact with commonplace people. Though he fretted now and then at his London situation, he never came back to enlist in the Union army—an experience that certainly left its mark on Charles Francis, Jr. The spectacle of poverty seems not to have moved him. The only physical suffering that appears to have made a deep impression was, typically enough, confined to the family: the death of his sister from lockjaw. H. S. Commager has drawn the contrast between Henry and Jane Addams. She devoted herself to the wretched multitudes in the Chicago slums. Henry nursed his investments and took long trips abroad. Her autobiography, Twenty Years at Hull-House, is a personal yet selfless document. The Education of Henry Adams, though impersonal and generalized, is astoundingly self-centered.
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Like Brooks, Henry passed through a phase of reformism, though he finally retired from the contest and began to express a withering contempt for the reform mentality, with its faith in democratic aspiration and its trust in ballot-box panaceas. Even in the Adamses' Washington heyday, during the late 1870's and early 1880's, we discover from Samuels that Henry and his wife shrank from the political hurlyburly. They lived close by the White House, they knew political leaders, and they relished political gossip. But their operations were confined to a select circle, based on an almost censoriously prim standard of selection. They condescended to President and Mrs. Hayes, and shuddered at senators like Blaine and Conkling. They snubbed visiting stage-performers—Sarah Bernhardt, Adelina Patti, Lily Langtry—whose morals they suspected. Their friend Henry James found the Adams sociopolitical code not altogether to his taste, if we may judge from the notes for his short story “Pandora.” The character in this story presumably modeled on Adams is named “Bonnycastle.” James makes Bonnycastle say, in discussing a dinnerparty: “Hang it, there's only a month left; let us be vulgar and have some fun—let us invite the President.” Bonnycastle, he acutely remarks, “was not in politics, though politics were much in him.”
Henry Adams at one stage certainly hankered after some sort of public career. But in the maneuvers between—so to speak—the regulars and the volunteers, Henry and his amateur friends are easy targets for ridicule. Few were willing to soil their hands, few seemed to grasp what had happened to the old America for which they felt so proprietary an emotion. Disdainful of both major parties, the Adamses and their political intimates switched allegiances, and developed temporary enthusiasms for temporary third-party movements. They wrote articles denouncing corruption and stupidity, and ostracized political leaders at social gatherings; and were then piqued to be ignored in turn, or insulted, as Henry thought himself, by the offer of a diplomatic post not in a European capital but—of all places—in Guatemala City. They recommended civil-service reform and a few other nostrums which were of only peripheral importance. They appealed to a “people” in whom they had no great confidence, and to men of cultivated minds—by which they meant themselves.
They vented their discouragement or their confused expectations in political novels like Henry Adams's (anonymous) Democracy (1880) and Francis Marion Crawford's An American Politician (1884). Their inadequacy is made abundantly, if unwittingly, clear in Crawford's book. His hero is a Massachusetts gentleman-reformer: a figure much like Henry's other elder brother, John, who ran unsuccessfully for the Massachusetts governorship. Like John, Crawford's hero is a Democrat. But his chief argument is that party politics are the ruination of the United States. Where then does salvation lie? Crawford resorts to wishful fantasy. America's destinies are safeguarded by a mysterious triumvirate, referred to only as “X,” “Y” and “Z,” members of
a small community of men which had existed from the earliest days of American independence. . . . It had frequently occurred that all three members of the council simultaneously held seats in the senate. . . . More than one President since Washington had sat at one time or another in the triumvirate; secretaries of state, orators, lawyers, financiers and philanthropists had given the best years of their lives to the duties of the council. . . .
Crawford assures us that these men had more than once “turned the scale of the country's future.” But his is a thin dream to set beside the commanding reality of control as wielded by, say, the George Washington Plunkitt of Tammany Hall who “seen his opportunities and he took 'em.”
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Adams's own novel is less naive. Yet it is no more useful as a guide to action. As Irving Howe has pointed out (Politics and the Novel), Adams affects to despise the behavior of Senator Ratcliffe, the character in Democracy who embodies corrupt ambition. But Ratcliffe is a far stronger figure than his disparagers. His sentiments are debated but not refuted; there is no genuine collision of ideas, and the author's response to politics seems, in Howe's words, “that of an esthete rather than a moralist.” Indeed, in Democracy and in his second novel, Esther (1884), as well as in the subsequent worship of femininity that led him to write Mont St. Michel and Chartres (1904, privately printed), one almost feels that Adams has chosen to be a woman. Women symbolize his own, secondary role. His heroines are ambitious in a fashion. Mrs. Lee in Democracy, comes to Washington “to measure . . . the capacity of the motive power.” There was, we are told, “a very general impression . . . that Mrs. Lee would like nothing better than to be in the White House.” Again: “What she wanted was Power.” The same significant word is used of the heroine of Esther, with an equally significant qualification. Esther Dudley has “an instinct for power,” though “not the love of responsibility.”
In his fiction Henry Adams chose to examine the world through women's eyes because they, like him, existed in a kind of graceful purdah. They may be brilliant, they may yearn for power, but they are compelled to proceed by indirection. Though they may be privy to great events, women participate merely as spectators, critics, hint-droppers—never as creators, instigators, prime movers. In crisis the sole gesture open to them is flight. Mrs. Lee runs off to Europe, Esther to Canada; Henry, too, was an incessant traveler. The only means of achieving power for such women is to be wooed by, married by it. The only free decision left to them is whether to accept or not. Both of Adams's heroines decline the proposal. We recall Justice Holmes's caustic version of the plight of Henry Adams: He wanted it handed to him on a silver platter—as if “it” were an invitation to a waltz.
Within their limited realm women are permitted to be social arbiters. The dislike of Jews, so marked in Henry's later years, might be interpreted in these terms. Good society, American or European, had no properly defined place for the Jew. If Jews were more a symptom than a chief cause of the world's decline, as Henry probably conceded, he was nevertheless ready to agree with Brooks Adams that the Jew was a sinister, conspiratorial figure. The wicked bankers plotted together with an effectiveness that the gentlemanly Francis Marion Crawford would have liked to attribute to his virtuous but alas imaginary triumvirate. What was a Jew like Dreyfus doing as a French army officer? How could his purpose not be nefarious? Henry Adams was convinced that Dreyfus was guilty of espionage. He resisted the proof of Dreyfus's innocence, and maintained that the military were correct in closing their ranks against the clamorous Dreyfusards. Honor was at stake—the honor of the fatherland; and for a man descended from two Presidents the word “fatherland” had an almost literal application.
The intellectual systems of Henry Adams are equally open to question. The charge against him is vigorously put in Yvor Winters's Anatomy of Nonsense. According to Winters, Adams was the unlucky inheritor of a debased New England Calvinism. The Calvinist mind was an “allegorical machine.” Even the most minor incident embodied some portentous significance. By the early 19th century, this attitude had broadened and weakened into the blank, generalizing tone of Unitarianism or—in the absence of easy religious belief—taken the form of “a kind of willed confusion and religious horror, best represented in literature” (says Winters) “by Melville's Pierre and The Confidence Man and by the later work of Henry Adams.”
Even as a young man Henry strove to find a pattern in the universe, yet told himself there probably was none. He was driven “to read every event with . . . allegorical precision; and since every event was isolated and impenetrable he read in each new event the meaning that the universe was meaningless.” He became a seeker convinced he would find nothing, a connoisseur of bafflement and frustration. As his early ambitions for personal success dwindled, so for him mankind as a whole dwindled to pygmy scale and then to infinitesimal consequence in the scheme of things. He plunged into geology, into physics and mathematics, but less for enlightenment than in order to find fresh examples to illustrate his thesis that the universe was a weary chaos.
Formulas, dates, numbers fascinated him. He deployed them with a joking dogmatism, half frivolous, half anguished, to reinforce his contention that the only operative laws were laws of degradation or of nightmare acceleration. He fashioned numerological metaphors of the abyss: the squares that escape by giant leaps toward infinity; their opposites, the inverse squares that shrink within themselves, in pursuit of nothingness; the asymptotes that skirt the edge of nonexistence. These formulas of failure can be seen as signs of an inordinate egotism. It was perhaps egotism of a solipsistic variety, in somehow equating the fate of one Adams with that of the cosmos. Louis XIV thought that disaster would overtake mankind when he was dead (“Après moi le déluge”): to judge from the calculations of the aging Henry Adams, the world would come to an end at about the same moment that he did. Henry knew how crushing was the sense of failure in his ancestors. John Quincy Adams, rejected by the electorate in 1828 after one unhappy term as President, remembered a song from Grétry's opera Richard Cocur-de-Lion which he had heard sung thirty years before, and felt its bitter meaning for himself: “O Richard, o man roi, l'univers t'abandonne.” His grandson Henry knew the anecdote, and seemed bent on turning the tables. If the universe had abandoned his grandfather, he himself could decide to abandon the universe.
In short, Henry Adams might be viewed as an extreme example of the late 19th-century American patriciate, endowed with the characteristic minor virtues of such a class (refinement, wit, cosmopolitanism, personal honesty), and the characteristic minor vices (snobbery, malice, diffidence, self-pity).
But then, to come back to Lionel Trilling's response, a quite different and much more attractive interpretation may be put on the man and his writings.
It is not easy to put the two views together so that the more favorable carries due weight. A striking instance is the long essay by Yvor Winters, already cited, in which a devastating critique of Adams's intellectual equipment is suddenly followed by lavish praise of the nine-volume History. Winters describes this as possibly “the greatest historical work in English, with the probable exception of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.” His analysis of the History is plausible, but in context we see that Winters has had to wrestle with his equivocal response to Henry Adams.
The easiest way out is to echo Winters's praise, to total up the sum of Adams's other writings, and to conclude that he is after all a major American author. The mere bulk is impressive; so is the range, from medieval to modern times, from poetry and fiction to rigorous scholarship. Major authors can be forgiven almost anything. What then if Henry Adams was a querulous snob? But this will not quite do. For one thing, even after Samuels's exhaustive inquiry, some aspects of Adams's authorship remain a little puzzling. For another, we ought to ask ourselves whether Adams and other members of the American patriciate did not in their era have a right to feel sorry for themselves.
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Let us consider his writings. We may for the moment put aside the private correspondence, not published in his lifetime. The problem is why, if Adams is now deemed so excellent an historian, his qualities were not fully appreciated by contemporaries. Samuels offers some partial answers, and others suggest themselves. Thus, the volumes of the History were published at intervals; reviewers, dealing with isolated portions, failed to perceive the grand design—the symmetry of the work, the large generalizations on national character and on the evolution of democracies. Again, Adams did nothing to commend himself to reviewers. The cluster of friends who read preliminary proofs were disqualified from reviewing the finished product. He refrained from sweetening other potential critics by distributing complimentary copies, or praising their works. Possibly a few of the critics resented Adams for being who he was. The academics among them could well have been irritated by a man who refused the offer of honorary degrees (from Harvard and Yale), and who avoided the meetings of the American Historical Association—including the one at which he was supposed to deliver the presidential address. Nor was this office of president as flattering a recognition as might appear. In that day it went to a curious assortment of professors, popularizers, and public men.
Adams was right in thinking that there was no large market for serious historical scholarship. Perhaps he hoped for too much, and attempted to satisfy incompatible desires within his own nature. Gibbon and Macaulay were much on his mind: he wanted to compose literary masterpieces. He was also determined to be scientific in the narrow sense of being punctilious. Hence the burrowing in sources, the long direct quotations which he (urged on by his brother Charles) took to be the hallmark of true history. And he dreamed of being scientific in some far larger way. The quest was lifelong. At the age of twenty-five, in a letter to Charles, Henry sketched his current philosophical interests. He went on to speculate that “in every progression, somehow or other, the nations move by the same process which has never been explained but is evident in the ocean and the air.”2 Thirty years later, in the essay on “The Tendency of History,” Adams shows how much the search for this explanation has occupied him. He speaks of the tantalizing awareness among historians of standing
on the brink of a great generalization that would reduce all history under a law as clear as the laws which govern the material world. . . . No teacher with a spark of imagination or with an idea of scientific method can have helped dreaming of the immortality that would be achieved by the man who should successfully apply Darwin's method to the facts of human history.
The endeavor was heroic, and a factor to be reckoned with in the final assessment of Henry Adams. However he might camouflage or deride his ambitions, this was a considerable one. But the results are disappointing. Of course he was a gifted historian. Still, he did not altogether find the formulas, literary or methodological, he was looking for. The style of the History, and of the previous biographies of Gallatin and Randolph, is as interesting as Winters says. It is, though, too lapidary in places (too close to Gibbon?), and verges on melodrama in others (an overdose of Macaulay?). The scientific theorizing sounds more tentative than Adams probably meant it to be. The rival claims of narrative and exposition, of the exceptional individual and the average mass, are not firmly resolved. We know how perfect a style—supple, wry, allusive, entirely personal—Adams evolved in his correspondence. Perhaps we read his histories with this in mind. Reviewers at the time had no such advantage. They may have been slightly repelled by the alternations of assertion and questioning, of national pride and headshaking pessimism; by the Gibbonian, distanced irony; and by the sheer tedium of complicated diplomatic exchanges, no matter how lucidly rendered. Adams was far more intelligent than his successor in the presidency of the American Historical Association, Senator Hoar of Massachusetts. Hoar's presidential address was a humorless protest at the denigration of American history by unspecified cynics. Presumably Henry Adams was one of the offenders at whom Hoar aimed his rather clumsy darts. But one can see what Hoar was getting at. There was something unspoken, pontifical, rebarbative, caustic in the public style of Adams's middle years.
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Having said this, we must immediately stress that he does deserve to be taken seriously, as scholar and as stylist. He did aim very high. If he could not be a universal man, he did nevertheless deal in universals. Historians before his time often spoke of “universal” history. What it might amount to none could precisely explain. Even so, the idea persisted as a grand if indistinct challenge. Adams attempted to combine this earlier search for the philosopher's stone with the newer passion for “scientific” history, so as to arrive at universal scientific history. The product would have to be on the scale of Marx or Comte, Darwin or Spencer, but still more intellectually exact than these. Adams could not have labored so long and hard if he had not in his inmost being clung to the vision of winning immortality as one of the great system-builders of his time. It was odd that he went about the task in such a way as to be regarded as temperamentally frivolous and negative. Though he traveled comfortably and often, and could be accused of trying to run away from himself, he never journeyed out of mere boredom. His travels had a purpose, whether he was in Tahiti or Japan, the American West or the cathedral towns of Normandy. The truest picture of Henry Adams is not of a holiday-maker in a panama hat, or of a spoiled old salon-wit, but of a man alone at a table stacked with books and transcripts, absorbed in thought, and writing firmly and fluently.
Another way to see him is as a craftsman of letters. His concern with good writing far transcended dandyism. He could not bear slovenly or superfluous phrases. When he was editor of the North American Review he showed no mercy to contributors' manuscripts, however eminent the author. He took enormous trouble over the style and content of some of Brooks's work. Henry was equally severe on his own writing. He wrote better in 1880 than in 1870, better in 1890 than in 1880, and so on to the end of his days. The perverse reluctance to let certain works appear under his own name, or appear at all, was in part the hesitation of a perfectionist. When early essays were reprinted he revised them with the utmost care. Another part of his hesitation came from uncertainty as to who constituted his audience, and how they should therefore be addressed. The compromise of his later days, when he devised Mont St. Michel and the Education as private entertainments, was in literary terms brilliantly right. Here, as in his private correspondence, he hit upon just the appropriate form in which to disport the persona of one whom friends dubbed the Angelic Porcupine. By his standards it was a minuscule achievement; yet it has been the principal guarantor of immortality for Henry Adams.
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There remains the final question of the quality of the American patriciate. Fastidiousness, petulance, estrangement, snobbishness, anti-Semitism: these are certainly evident in Henry and his friends, and hard to defend without falling into the same restricted mode of thought. We can at least emphasize that Henry suffered more than his friends from the fact of being an Adams, and that he did his best to escape this peculiar circumstance. Could he be blamed for feeling that the United States was his country, and that it had gone on the wrong track? He came to despair of democracy, yet he never believed that other nations were better. They were even worse, and for Adams to assert this was a demonstration of patriotism. As a young man, and into middle age, he continued to think he was a citizen of a great country. If his optimism gradually evaporated, so did that of scores of his contemporaries—by no means all of them old-stock American gentry. His misanthropy was no greater, for example, than that of Mark Twain, and more firmly based on knowledge and insight. The America of the Gilded Age was no edifying spectacle for an honest and sensitive man. We may laugh at the feeble expedients of gentlemen-reformers; but what else could they have done? The choice lay between ineffective protest, and capitulation to the major political and commercial interests. Neither was satisfactory. Those who took the other road than Henry's lost as much as they gained. Power entailed not only responsibility, but complicity in dubious enterprises. Henry Adams, to reiterate, did his best. His best was not good enough. Nor was anyone else's, in the rarefied atmosphere of the Adams dynasty. We may say of him, as John Dos Passos has said of Thorstein Veblen, that he never could get his tongue around the essential yes. For this, in the last analysis, is Henry Adams not to be honored instead of scolded?
1 The Young Henry Adams (1948); Henry Adams: The Middle Years (1958); Henry Adams: The Major Phase (1964), by Ernest Samuels, Harvard University Press, $5.50, $750, $10.00, respectively.
2 Italics mine.
