Books: Educatee

HENRY ADAMS—James Truslow Adams—A. & C. Boni ($2.50).

Few U. S. scions have been so heavily helped and hindered by their heredity and environment as the late, famously educated Henry Adams (1838-1918). Presidents of the U. S. were his great-grandfather and his grandfather; his father was Minister to the Court of St. James’s; what was there left for him? This brief (246-page) but comprehensive biography by James Truslow Adams (no kin) was originally intended as an introduction to Henry Adams’ as-yet-unpublished Works. The Depression brought it out as a single volume, the first life of Henry Adams to be written.

High-spiring family tradition closed out all but a few directions for Henry Adams’ ambitious nose. By ancestral precept and example a public career was indicated. But no Adams was a vote-beseecher: politics was closed. No Adams kept shop: business was out. As his father’s secretary in London Henry developed a taste for high (especially English) government society and would have welcomed a diplomatic post; but he was never offered one. Hoping to become a political power through the Press, he wrote for the North American Review and as Washington correspondent for The Nation; but when President Grant’s itchy-palmed administration came in, the thickly venal atmosphere was too much for Henry. As he grew older, his early will-to-power rarefied itself into an ironic, scholarly contemplation of U. S. history, the U. S. scene. After teaching history at Harvard and editing the North American Review, he settled down to write. His anonymous novel Democracy (the Washington Merry-Go-Round of 1880) was the sensation of a London season. His History of the United States is still eulogized by fellow-historians. But his two most widely-famed books, The Education of Henry Adams, Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres, were written for himself and a few privileged friends, originally issued in private editions.

Washington sightseers still flock to the grave in Rock Creek Cemetery where Henry Adams and his wife lie buried, to ask each other tripperish questions about the brooding bronze figure, famed work of Adams’ friend Augustus Saint-Gaudens. In accordance with Henry’s educated will, “no inscription, date, letters or other attempt at memorial” give curious onlookers any clear hint of what his education amounted to.