Man on the Brink

...A year later Adams’s wife, an accomplished photographer, killed herself at their home in Washington by swallowing chemicals used for developing photographs...

...Henry Adams was a great writer, and one of America’s preeminent historians, author of The Life of Albert Gallatin, John Randolph, and his magisterial History of the United States during the Administration of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison...

...A century ago Adams sent copies of this text to his close friends for comment...

...Returning to America after nearly a decade, Henry Adams found the country changed...

...All his scientifi c determinism and theorizing about historical materialism yielded discontentment...

...The two-thousand year failure of Christianity roared upward from Broadway, and no Constantine the Great was in sight...

...In 1884, halfway through his history of Jefferson’s presidency, Adams wrote to another master historian, Francis Parkman, that he was convinced that a new scientifi c “school of history would leave us antiquated” and that the other sciences would prove man to be like a “tree and almost as unconscious...

...Adams’s pessimism about any providential purpose in history soon led to his giving up writing history altogether, especially as his mind had become entrapped in abstract deterministic theories of history...

...He also wrote political novels still well worth reading, Democracy and Esther...

...Johns Adams, Henry’s great-grandfather, would have scoffed at such a philosophe reduction of man...

...Patrick J. Walsh is a writer in Quincy, Massachusetts...

...Still, at 30, Adams hoped to offer his talents in public service for government reform...

...In the margins, neatly handwritten, are his notes for a corrected version never published in his lifetime...

...His Education juxtaposed this unity with what he called “Twentieth-Century Multiplicity...

...Every country is a variation of the same theme,” he wrote...

...John Lukacs says of his History of the United States during the Administration of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison that, in “literary judgment and a quality of style,” it is “probably without equal in the writings of American historians...

...Taking to world travel “he had become estray, a fl otsam or jetsam of wreckage...

...He entered the ancient cathedrals of France but was incapable of bowing at the knee: “There the contrite sinner was welcomed with such tenderness as to make me still wish I were one...

...His father, Charles Francis Adams, was the son of our sixth president, John Quincy Adams, who in turn was the son of the illustrious John Adams...

...The Education was published in 1918, after Adams’ death, by the Massachusetts Historical Society, and won a Pulitzer Prize...

...Henry Adams believed that the 20th century triumph of capitalism, science, and technology negated the humanity of human beings, and warned that modernity was en route to a cataclysmic collapse: “Religion, art, politics, manners are either vulgarized or dead or turned into moneymaking agencies...

...Unlike the leaders of the European Union, Henry Adams understood that “Europe was a unity then, in thought, will, and object...

...Denial may not be the fi nal word...

...Offered an assistant professorship of medieval history at Harvard in 1870, he left Washington for Cambridge where he also assumed the editorship of the North American Review...

...A traveler in the highways of history looked out of a club window on the turmoil of Fifth Avenue and felt himself in Rome, under Diocletian, witnessing the anarchy, conscious of the compulsion, eager for the solution, but unable to conceive whence the next impulse was to come or how it was to act...

...Adams commissioned his friend Augustus Saint-Gaudens to sculpt a monument over her grave in Rock Creek Cemetery, and Saint-Gaudens responded by creating a masterwork of American art...

...Our Lady may well have looked down with pity on his soul, as she had on others who had made the pilgrimage to her shrine at Chartres...

...Adams had sympathy for Jefferson—not because of bitterness against his own Federalist ancestors, or because Adams was “an honorary Southerner” or furtive Jeffersonian Republican (as Garry Wills imagines in Henry Adams and the Making of America)—but because Adams satirizes the utterly impractical visionary policies of Jefferson and Madison, narrating the demise of Jeffersonian Republicanism...

...But in Mont Saint Michel and Chartres he expressed a longing beyond the ache of modernity: ennui...

...Adams never mentions his wife in the Education...

...In 1872 he married the erratic Marian Hooper and, though childless, their 10-year marriage gave birth to his histories and novels, and were the most fruitful years of Adams’s life...

...Christianity was the unit...

...Jefferson’s purchase of Louisiana in 1804 destroyed the Republican tenet of a “strict construction” of the Constitution, and his embargo actually curtailed liberty, along with property rights, while investing government with what his own Treasury secretary, Albert Gallatin, called “the most arbitrary powers...

...Yet Adams identifi ed with Jefferson the failed idealist...

...The faith of his “people had passed from Calvinism to Unitarianism, and from this to free thinking, until in the days of our Adams there was little left to the intellect but a great denial...

...When he died in 1918 a poem entitled “A Prayer to the Virgin of Chartres” was found in Adams’ wallet...

...Adams held the chaotic disunity of his time responsible for what he regarded as a life of failure, and explained the private printing in a letter: “I stopped publishing books twenty years ago because I could not induce anybody to show the least interest in them...

...This “Conservative, Christian, Anarchist” sought a graceful synthesis of the past and present which would connect man with the eternal and give human life some meaning...

...Disenchanted with the gilded American present, Adams turned to the American past...

...BY PATRICK J. WALSH At the Massachusetts Historical Society’s library, an American classic lies open before me: Henry Adams’s The Education of Henry Adams, privately printed in 1907...

...This edition belonged to Henry Adams...

...President Lincoln appointed Charles Francis Adams to serve as Minister to Britain during the Civil War and Henry served his father as an unoffi cial, unpaid private secretary during 1861-68...

...Henry attended Harvard and after graduation in 1858 departed for Germany to study civil law...

...But the Grant administration’s “policy of drift” ended such plans, and a thoroughly disappointed idealist, Adams now believed “the system of 1789 had broken down and with it the 18th-century fabric of a priori, or moral principles...

...A great mechanical revolution had occurred, transferring power to “coal, iron and steam,” usurping the older order of “agriculture, handwork and learning...

...Still a young man, Adams found himself out of place in this new world and labeled himself a “relic of the eighteenth century...

...Of course, Adams (1838-1918) descended from a prestigious pedigree...

...He felt himself just as helpless as Jefferson the “grasshopper” against the chaotic, impersonal forces of history...

...Perhaps Henry Adams, the unhappy son of New England Puritanism, opened his heart and was, in the end, surprised by joy...

...A companion book to the Education, also privately published (in 1904), is Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, Adams called it “a study of Thirteenth-Century Unity...

...The tragedy of Henry Adams, wrote Paul Elmer More, “is that of a man who could not rest in negation, yet could fi nd no positive faith to take its place...