The Lingering Irrelevance of Henry Adams

...Henry Adams kept saying yes, it had, and he kept on pursuing old things, saying the pursuit was private, making case after clever case for the relevance of what he knew and kept finding out...

...Here the pain and the complexity, the disappointments and the futility, so clear to the sophisticated and the sophomoric if not always to the healthy minded, take their stand...

...The Education of Henry Adams, Chapter XXV] But in most cases, as the velocity of history increased, tied to the ever changing artifacts of modernity, the disjunction between a traditional view of the accumu lated past and the sudden present grew...

...In public as in philosophical matters, Adams did not confuse traditional learning with traditional wisdom...

...For if the Adams family was an honorable clan of the antique American republic, Henry Adams lived his most interesting days in the American empire, democratic, no longer essentially republican, conducted less by individuals than en masse...

...As late as January, 1815, division into several nationalities was still thought to be possible...

...Contemporary theory characteristically explains or explains away the apparent tendentiousness of traditional forms of intellectual endeavor, especially non-applied, individualist ones...

...Since traditional culture did not appear to him sufficient to explain what was happening all about him, Adams looked elsewhere for explanation and made the wisdom of the ages something of a private, aesthetic passion, a matter of taste in a world in which taste might be a sign of virtue...

...Disappointment in the American majority led Adams to his language, but his writing is not a license for us to simulate his alienation, for we do not commonly share in the experience that alienated him...

...So much, after all, has changed and if the conditions Adams remarked have grown worse, much of the vantage from which he criticized them has disappeared...

...He read the evidence of the Jeffersotiian past to discover the drift in the story, as well as to establish the history itself...

...A democratic lack of faith in democracy may perhaps approach Adams's Tocquevillean view of its development, but the match is unstable...

...Thinking about why this should be and reading some recent books about Henry Adams leads one to a series of surprising encounters with our culture...

...he had a corresponding republican horror of the aggrandizing monopoly and encroaching state that might impose themselves on the individual, conferring benefit and identity...

...The real hurt of a life denied its highest ambition may dignify his wrongheadedness...

...He is even less prone to the composed, decadent enjoyment of anomaly preached by Santayana...

...Although he knew himself not meant for it, he refused to pretend that he only pretended it didn't matter...

...I wonder if we dare learn Henry Adams's lessons from him...

...Before the end, one began to pray to it...

...He lived at the center of a society which posed a sterling alternative to America's bruising elite...

...They do not always honor what one might like them to...

...from the concluding chapter, Volume Nine, Chapter Ten] Adams presided over that terrible moment when historians began to lose their confidence in history's sweep and commenced monographically, profession ally, and collectively to attend to the minute...

...Not even New York seemed more clearly marked for prosperity than this solitary Southern city, which already possessed banking capital in abundance, intelligence, enterprise, the traditions of high culture and aristocratic ambition, all supported by slave-labor, which could be indefinitely increased by the African slavetrade...

...At a time when we share so much of his unease and discontent, a considered look at Henry Adams might do some good, not to strengthen us in attitudes we haven't earned but to see in this last republican and first imperial American a clue to our condition...

...Underlying the History is hindsight of a pointed sort...

...Adams saw politics and business from an individualist point of view, and his conservatism stemmed in large part from his view that private property and the state should afford the individual protection...

...Even more seductive than Adams's thought is his poised, tense relationship with de mocracy...

...But lacking Adams's good and bad humor, Blackmur makes less of Adams as a subject than Adams did...

...The principles of private association narrow as those of public association generalize...

...More Americans sense the attractions of a cosmopolitan private life with taste elevated to the status of duty...

...If Boston was building a canal to the Merrimac, and Philadelphia one along the Schuylkill to the Susquehanna, Charleston had nearly completed another which brought the Santee River to its harbor and was planning a road to Tennessee which should draw the whole interior within reach...

...The Adams past strives to discover a historical moment which has in turn its own past and future, which are distinctively part of our past, if only we pay strict enough attention...

...Volume One, Chapter One] Until 1815 nothing in the future of the American Union was regarded as settled...

...This they conceive as an alternative to a public, working life that degrades these private sensibilities...

...As Adams understood, a popular book must have a non-professional constituency, and the influential American constituencies of his time, powerful and popular, ignored his History...

...Though he understood the demise of the old principles and the inherent weaknesses that unfitted them for nation building, he did not lose altogether his taste for what republicanism might have made of a democratic nation: At the core of his inaction, Adams cherished a republican conservatism...

...The curious and veiled question of his writing and his life concerns how completely knowledge can Robert Dawidoff teaches history at the Claremont Graduate School and is the author of The Education of John Randolph (Norton), winner of the Allan Nevins Award of the Society of American Historians...

...9 / SEPTEMBER 1981...

...Even if one simply longs for those old days unencumbered by delusions of their restoration, he must still beware the complex longing that identifies with Adams or other opulent turn-of-the-century figures...

...He recommended himself to his rather private public as a case of miseducation, a study in disappointment, an instance of failure...

...indeed, Dusinberre relies upon the subsequent writings of professional historians to vindicate Adams's reputation as a historian...

...Much respected, often consulted, wonderfully good, perhaps the finest American history, Adams's History is not a popular classic...

...He never abandoned his view of the White House, never strayed except briefly from as close to power as he could get...

...He did not understand the zest with which a man might take up politics or business...

...Just because he was an Adams and backed by a tradition doesn't mean that his republican despair can be the proper measure of our democratic confusion...

...we comfort ourselves with watered down, decadent pleasures and despair of our allegiances before they are even tried...

...Some people choke on the weasel words that regard faith and poetry and civility and all the undemocratic unmaterial as a private matter of sensibility or as humanities in need of saving...

...Adams aimed instead at knowledge...

...Adams may end up as guru to American snobbery...

...Henry Adams didn't accomplish very much, however much and however well he wrote...

...Times really have changed...

...Adams hoped to show what could have been known in 1800 and 1815 without intruding with what he himself knew in 1876...

...Such a destiny, repeating the usual experience of history, was not necessarily more unfortunate than the career of a single nationality wholly American...

...stubborn independence, a regional base, a staunch record of expert public service did not carry the same force in the Gilded Age that they did in 1796 and 1824...

...If any portion of the United States might hope for a sudden and magnificent bloom, South Carolina seemed entitled to expect it...

...Adams knew what had been sacrificed in forgoing public ascendancy...

...But Dusinberre's aim at a general reading audience is less true...

...As he grew accustomed to the great gallery of machines, he began to feel the forty-foot dynamos as a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the cross...

...We read him because we sense underlying so much of what he wrote an interest in the coming into its own of a world in which we inescapably live...

...The charming puzzle of his irony cannot alter the fact that in calling himself unfitted to his times he was saying wonderfully and first something we would have to say about him...

...The study of his doomsday science may make one liable to accept its disappointed, elitist premises...

...R. P. Blackmur, whose collected essays on Henry Adams have recently appeared, directs our attention to the later Adams...

...Political power represented different interests, indeed different kinds of interests, from those it had when the Adamses found civic fame...

...his acceptance that the world might dictate to one how it should be viewed...

...He never troubled to keep secret, only to keep private, this republic of style with its aristocracy of talent, wealth, and wit...

...We seek the stigma that marked his suffering...

...but to Adams the dynamo became a symbol of infinity...

...Our intellectual habits are bad...

...At table, Henry Adams liked to insist that large things be talked about in small talk and small in large...

...Our trips abroad cannot teach us to know the world as he could know it in the late nineteenth century...

...Although a colony in domestic exile, this private utopia everywhere touched power and sometimes coincided with it...

...His education should be instructive...

...He wanted to pick and choose among the latest things and conditions...

...This History has its admirers, though at the time of its publication they were few...

...Henry Adams wanted most of all not to be misunderstood...

...One uniform and harmonious system appealed to the imagination as a triumph of human progress, offering prospects of peace and ease, contentment and philanthropy, such as the world had not seen...

...He will share in Adams's earnest figurative activity...

...He took care to suit up his observations in fancy modern dress...

...elections and popular exertions had nothing to do with it...

...Indeed, Adams was such an engaging writer that to study him seems to lead to some sharing of his views...

...Henry Adams represents a strain in American life to which education, not ideology, appears to expose, if not entitle one...

...but it invited dangers, formidable because unusual or altogether unknown...

...We are as interested in him as we are in his work...

...In some ways, educated Americans stick in worn grooves of Henry Adams's making...

...The kaleidoscopic stages through which the relationship of the American elite to the American people has developed, the confidence of control, the pastoral of sympathy, the disillusion of disagreement, and all the gradations between, happen to all political groups alike...

...In Henry Adams: The Myth of Failure,' William Dusinberre argues that the History is Adams's great work, written during the best years of his life, and that its failure to score and the death of Mrs...

...When he thought he had found another source of power, dynamic or medieval, he pursued it...

...Dusinberre's point is that we should read Adams alongside Gibbon and Macaulay...

...His explanations of events substituted the Tocquevillean scheme of democracy and the immense, ordered detail of "scientific history" for the melodramatic home blend of Democracy the Americans had good reason to prefer...

...He had quickly discovered that the paths to power disgusted him...

...Theory as an explanation or perhaps a bridge over the void between past and present shadows the contemporary intellectual...

...We cannot escape democracy, even if Adams did...

...Does Adams teach us to criticize ourselves as well as to bewail what we take to be our destiny...

...The gentleman and connoisseur lingered privately in a modern age that superannuated him with his apparent connivance...

...By temperament and by situation, Adams found himself outside the field of American favor in his day...

...Rarely had such a situation, combined with such resources, failed to produce some wonderful result . . . but although the future of South Carolina might be brilliant, like that of other oligarchies in which only a few thousand freemen took part, such a development seemed to diverge far from the path likely to be followed by Northern society, and bade fair to increase and complicate the social and economical difficulties with which Americans had to deal...

...He travelled the world over, turning his life to literary account...

...Its principles offered a picturesque challenge to democratic corruption...

...In a way, the History makes difficult reading because it offers such a detailed account and such a resisted indictment...

...Nobody studies in order to become disillusioned...

...His disillusion with writing history abounds...

...Our compromised grandeur does not let us in on his secrets...

...Charleston in 1800...

...he lacked the motives to do what one had to do to get ahead in American political or economic life...

...His master Tocqueville warned that a democratic people "are more prone to become enervated than debauched...

...Theory softens the harsh inapplicability of that world of accumulated wisdom to this world of ours...

...To him, the dynamo itself was but an ingenious channel for conveying somewhere the heat latent in a few tons of poor coal hidden in a dirty engine-house carefully kept out of sight...

...Most of his famous notions offer an alternative to political and economic power as they existed in his own day...

...Adams appealed to Blackmur a>most sentimentally as the last available figure to know what men once knew and still to know something of what modern man had to face...

...The luxury at our command will never be as exclusive as was his...

...He wrote about how one ought to regard this big change in the American regime and how one ought to understand its having come about and how Henry Adams experienced it...

...We do talk about big things as if they were little and the little loom too big...

...He doubted the utility of the older fashioned knowledge in the new and modern worlds, but not his own fidelity to it...

...His clever pictures of the politicos and tycoons of his day lack even the minimal sympathy for his subjects that one might expect, and his versions of his ancestors reduce their ambitions to the abstract scale of their virtues...

...A fair number of Americans have enough money and advantages to discern in themselves a difference...

...History in this instance accomplishes the reconciliation of his hopes and fears...

...We have perhaps too easily taken up this light, unhappy habit without understanding what unhappiness forced Adams to it...

...might only know now, what I knew then...

...Henry Adams isn't to blame for this, of course, but his popularity may reflect it and a certain reading of him may encourage it...

...The planet itself seemed less impressive, in its old-fashioned, deliberate, annual or daily revolution, than this huge wheel, revolving within arm's length at some vertiginous speed, and barely murmuring -scarcely humming an audible warning to stand a hair's-breadth further for respect of power-while it would not wake the baby lying close against its frame...

...Subjective, anarchic, heated, Adams ensconced in the focal place of those works by which he is best known, his changed motto: "if...

...It was not merely that Adams was reserved, intellectual, arrogant, short, Bostonian, Adamsy, and unpopular...

...History's very moderation, its detachment, except where the family honor is engaged, may keep it from a reading public hungry for the statedness of conclusion that characterized his late works...

...The private world of family and friendship and association this inspires draws attention and energy away from an increasingly alien public sphere...

...His Education, of course, and his other later writings puzzle out the connections between the humane and the material sciences...

...in particular, they do not honor one by distinguishing one from them...

...His "failure" took root in disdain as much as in disappointment, and thus deflected without exhausting his energy and ambition...

...Henry Adams has more readers now than he ever did before, and their interest in him, sometimes scholarly, is not strictly academic...

...Blackmur'$ is the Adams we somehow take for granted, writ on a smaller scale...

...He is the Emerson of modern American intellectuals, whose mistakes as well as whose accuracy, whose confusions as well as whose clarity compel attention...

...The advantages of being an Adams had become social and intellectual...

...He cultivated a sophisticated sus 8 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1981 pense in order to sharpen the reader's awareness of the complexity of history and to free the past from the tyranny of the historian's moment: The town promised hopefully to prove equal to its task...

...Torn by an attachment to the things and stories, the art and thinking of past ages, he resorts to theories, ever more complex, ironic, obscure, and personal, to substitute for the coherence he imagines the things he cherishes to have come from...

...That is why his ironies cemented what they only appeared to deny...

...Adams's status as an accepted prophet of modern America's raised consciousness slights such an issue...

...The corruption of such a system might prove to be proportionate with its dimensions, and uniformity might lead to evils as serious as were commonly ascribed to diversity...

...This chasm would render the past unknowable unless it were to be constantly reinterpreted in light of the present...

...He intended the Virgin to count again in a world governed by the laws of force and physics...

...American historians presumably know how good it is...

...University of Virginia Press, 520.00...

...Useful, too, is an ironic, distanced view of the growth of democracy...

...We ought not to look in our lives for his sacrifice...

...Reading these powerful, uneven essays, one senses a continuation, a participation in Henry Adams's thinking...

...Can the world they imply really have gone so utterly by...

...However good the books by and about Henry Adams are, his example can only continue us in our ruinous habits of self-deception and petty sophistication...

...Adams's historical writings betray his sympathy for states' rights republicanism, even as he denounced its mischief and declared its day to be done...

...and they were in 1800 not behind-they hoped to outstrip-their rivals...

...Robert Dawidoff THE LINGERING IRRELEVANCE OF HENRY ADAMS Emerson ended up on samplers in parlors...

...The exemplary private life in each age, however, might still be the province of timeless, inherited wisdom...

...For Adams meant his metaphors to accomplish some feat of understanding...

...As Adams came to doubt the ability of the intelligent narrative, grounded only in fact and the principles of its inquiry, to make a sound statement that people might like and also understand, he seems to have lost interest in an audience beyond his own sort...

...But a uni versity education, a profession, a wine cellar, and a taste for art do not an honest Adams make...

...They had in common that they reduced to comparative insignificance 10 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1981 the acknowledged workings of that political and economic system in which he felt himself unfitted to play the leader's part...

...One observes and even acts in the huge public arena with a reserved sense of connection and responsibility...

...Disillusion happens, sometimes because the world does change and often because what one knows no longer holds...

...Adams together caused Adams to abandon history for irony and the luxuriant, falsifying myth of his failure...

...One intellectual habit in America has been to take up an Adamsy tone about democracy...

...Among the thousand symbols of ultimate energy, the dynamo was not so human as some, but it was the most expressive...

...Across the street from the White House, Adams and his un-commonwealth flourished, taking advantage of American inattention, liberality, gullibility, and snobbery...

...Henry Adams did not set his face against the modern...

...The public history of each age would therefore, by turns, be added to the body of inherited learning and would, by turns, become inaccessible to the ages following...

...Adams's History of the United States During the Administrations of Jefferson and Madison, the nine-volume work that occupied his middle years, looks implicitly to the contrast between the early republic and the centralized, swaggering corruption of the early empire...

...He blamed John Randolph for corrupting republican doctrines with the defense of slavery and the Essex Junto for tainting states' rights with their treason...

...The example of Henry Adams helped Blackmur to look around from a private world with which the critic could identify, a world of distinction and leisure intelligently and magnificently occupied, cosmopolitan and hard-working, old-world American...

...He could not accept fiction and art in token of politics and economics...

...Along with sycophancy, office seeking, reformist and radical crusading, the high-toned alienation that observes all of this and theorizes about it has been much in evidence...

...And so they have...

...Some part of the nation, prosperous and educated, may readily see the People as Other...

...Nowhere in the Union was intelligence, wealth, and education greater in proportion to numbers than in the little society of cotton and rice planters who ruled South Carolina...

...Certainly writers like Blackmur take courage from his example...

...then he would turn hilariously, hysterically to estimating its moment of impending calamity...

...His ancestors may have been awkward popular politicians, but ambition and a sense of duty made them persevere at least in trying, something Henry Adams shied at doing...

...Adams recognized that the casualties of this reinterpretation would include most of the values he cherished, and so he settled on a peculiar compromise with the modern world...

...Unsurprisingly, they shifted power to the person with a mind keen enough to understand their workings...

...But what Adams resorted to out of manic desperation, we turn to out of habit...

...Emerson ended up on samplers in parlors, Adams may end up by becoming guru to American snobbery...

...There is a case to be made that when Adams complained that his education did him no lasting good and a great deal of harm, he was saying that, however contented he might be with private things, they made a poor substitute for public ones...

...inherited instinct taught the natural expression of a man before silent and infinke force...

...He included the modern in his canon, tried out its organizing notions, used its science as his metaphors, and so quickened history to the speed of its lights as science continually revised itself...

...He understood that the distinction in his case was something of a stigma that even exclusivity and irony could not dispel...

...Adams seems to be saying something like "if it had been known then, what I know now...

...approach or even make do in the absence of power...

...A history must serve its readers with explanations that suit the horizons of their curiosity and with writing that entertains and stirs them...

...Am:l his metaphors have a power almost as urgent as literal truth...

...We long for their alienation, relatively untouched by the qualms of social conscience, bereft of thoughts about how much of our social conscience goes to the heart of our social life but not theirs...

...The famous chapter "The Dynamo and the Virgin" is but one of Adams's attempts to take account (Henry Adams, Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, $19.95...

...of the incredible phenomena of his age: Then he showed his scholar the great hall of dynamos, and explained how little he knew about electricity or force of any kind, even of his own special sun, which spouted heat in inconceivable volume, but which, as far as he knew, might spout less or more, at any time, for all the certainty he felt in it...

...His mannered and exclusive life and his glittering associations and friendships with the interesting of all continents protected him from the vulgarity he loathed...

...If he made the Virgin a symbol in the absence of faith, he did the same with thermodynamics...

...Henry Adams satisfied a curiosity more exacting than the American reading public maintained and wrote in an English more difficult than generally amused them...

...indeed, we sometimes can't tell them apart...

...Adams's thinking without its descriptive aspect loses much of its authority...

...Henry Adams may encourage his reader in unlucky habits...

...for if the effects of divided nationality were certain to be unhappy, those of a single society with equal certainty defied experience or sound speculation...

...They did not bear the guilt of the American empire they envisaged nor did they suffer from the perception of injustices democracy visits upon the consciences of its fortunate...

...The History marks a phase in Adams's lifetime subject: He sought to understand our national arrival at what he considered a debauched, materialist, and painful point in history...

...One may, however, absorb his wrongheadedness more easily than one may master his life...

...One doesn't sense that he could imagine the pleasures a Blaine, a Morgan, a Roosevelt, or even a Lodge might have taken in their own bloated, blustering ways...

...Nevertheless, the History suggests a citizenship, an allegiance to Adams's lengthy picture of a brief 16-year span, a loyalty to the sufficiency of historical explanation, to a creed that undermines providential and patriotic reasoning...

...Perhaps that is why the later Adams handed down a severer judgment of America's distress and offered less exacting reasoning...

...It has become common to regard political life with easy contempt, at best a spectator sport with gambling allowed...

...but maybe they shouldn't...

...This attitude leads, among other things, to the translation of moral into aesthetic sensibilities and the relegation of such matters to an ever more important private sphere...

...Conspiracy, corruption, the workings of history, his changing concepts of force and phase, the dynamo, the Virgin, the mystic orient, the dualities of masculine and feminine, uniformity and multiplicity-all suggested themselves to Adams at moments in his career as explanations for what had happened to life...

...L1 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1981 11...

...This lends urgency to the writing, which is reflected in the versatile and elastic syntax, the characteristic Adams attempt to make the simple-minded American English past tense sustain the complexity of scientific history...

...He felt this as the pain of democracy to the end and wondered why...

...His modern audience would have to share some part of his perception of an America in the grip of forces, although it would not have to equal the consciousness or conscientiousness of his view...

...Being in general still convinced that History was on their side, and hence expecting history also to stand with them, they probably sensed in Adams's work more complexity than their right-minded optimism required...

...No doubt there is an Adams party of sorts...

...Writers about Adams do not commonly ask how much one must resemble him to share his views, although they usually make it clear how much his views reflected his eccentric experience and how very much his the views were...

...The modern theorizer is less likely than was Adams to indulge ironic contemplations of the genuine insignificance of what he has to say...

...Although he has finally gained an audience, he could not, as Henry James could, give up America in order to imagine it...

...The key to Adams's experience of the democratic world was not power but knowledge...

...The republic and a kind of American republican aristocracy readied Henry Adams to be uniquely democracy's metaphorical victim...

...He knew as much of everything as THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1981 7 anyone could and as many of everyone who mattered...

...In particular, what one has had to sacrifice to be modern has been hard to let go, and the accomodating terms the modern sensibility offers to the cherished traditional can be humiliating...

...There would be a time when Henry Adams would spend his energies trying to locate metaphorically and mystically the force and meaning of America's falling off...

...The reduction of the glory of civilization to taste and imagination proves especially hard for those whose allegiance is to more old fashioned kinds of knowledge and the ways of living they demand...

...There is an insidious nostalgia in the common reading of Henry Adams that confuses his times with ours, when much of the point of what he wrote was that the times that made him were gone and that new times meant new men...

...Adams's History may yet acquire an audience, although not in the way Dusinberre expects...

...He agreed that history and the public present should be viewed in modern terms: the phase theory, his various THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1981 9 attempts to explain things as they had come to be in scientific terms...

...Adams did not necessarily consider art the equal of power or imagine sensibility the equal of explanation...

...Adams's History examines a critical epoch in American history, looking for the seeds of a future condition, a condition his later works take for granted...

...They were Bancroft's still...

...There are so many historians nowadays that even demanding histories are bound to thrive...

...Emulating his ultimate despair of things, we not only miss his point but mislead ourselves into thinking that because we share so many of his interests and concerns, we have come to them in a way that truly distinguishes us...

...Nor do they excuse us, as they seem to have excused him, from the social responsibilities democracy imposes on its own...

...The History represents not only a fruitful period in his own life but a rare moment of balance between his optimistic and pessimistic renderings of our past and future...

...Nashville was nearer to Charleston than to any other seaport in the Union, and Charleston lay nearest to the rich trade of the West Indies...

...Henry Adams understood this and acknowledged that politically his way was pretty much blocked...

...He makes it respectable for a healthyminded soul to prefer History to The Edu cation of Henry Adams or Mont SaintMichel and Chartres, but he cannot rehabilitate it into a much-read classic...

...We may have learned, like Henry Adams, to stew on certain aspects of our lives...