Window and Cross in Henry Adams’ Education

WINDOW AND CROSS IN HENRY ADAMS' EDUCATION IKennethMacLean A distinguishing paradox of Western literature of recent time is the frequent combining, in even measures of poetry and prose, of the matters of society and history with those of personality and the individual. The Education oj Henry Adams so combines. Its formal interest as social history cannot be overstated. In its earlier sections it moves through the mind of nineteenth-century New England-the lingering of the Enlightenment, the calm of Harvard, the shattering dilemmas of the Civil War. During this war Adams acted as private secretary for his father who was the United States Minister in London, and the second large movement of this volume presents a great deal of nineteenth-century England as tbis society moved further into its industrial phase-London growing smaller as it doubled in size. We see the scene, and we are introduced to the greater tones of government , literature, and country-house life. Further on, into the 70's and after, the Education brings us back to this continent where a Pennsylvania mind, devoted to "work, whiskey, and cards," was creating the new America of railways, oil, dynamos, hoping to find Fortune asleep in an elevator. The last chapters, less social than philosophical, deal sceptically with dominant turn-of-th~ntury theories and syntheses, while developing Adams' own questionable laws of inertia and acceleration . In the later pages, too, the reader is carried into the sleepy trades, into the religion of the Far East, and finally into the mediaeval religion of the nearer West. Within this impressive socia-philosophical story (of greatest value in itself, and clearly the work of the admirable historian of Jefferson and Madison) there moves, even as valuably, a private spirit, a private secretary, in full literary and imaginative intimacy. At moments the Education seems to breathe among those pleasant intimacies of French life which were given a final expression in the Impressionists-the walk, the book, the meal, the solitary observation, as single as one's glass of absinthe before dinner in the Palais Royal. It WINDOW AND CROSS IN HENRY ADAMS' Education 333 includes older, sharper English intimacies as well. It incorporates some of that enormous solitude of Gibbon. It suggests, too, the close domesticity of Sterne, the confining atmosphere of Cowper. Rooms and shadowy shades lead into personal comers and enclosures that are suffocating, claustrophobic, even shameful. The maggot is lost in the cheese; the earthworm is feeling for a light at the end of the corridor. The valley of life grows thin and narrow-narrow often with the resolved meanings of the imagination. The long gloom of Norwegian fiords, the sleeping distances of Russian inertia, startle this small inside life. The intimacy of the Education is finally of the kind which moves among those sensitive images of thought, beyond which education does not go. Its intimacy is imaginative. It touches the skin. For comparable imaginative attentions, the Prelude and Tristram Shandy offer parallels . Adams indeed begins as Wordsworth's child and as poor Tristram, and something of the delicacy of both these spirits pursues the whole of Education. His name is Groombridge. Henry Adams is of course often, less attractively, Mr. Shandy the philosopher and idea-ist. In approaching and preserving the sensitive imaginative moment, Adams perhaps drew obliquely upon his Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres of 1904, written just before the Education. Adams' late and decisive interest in Gothic architecture was stimulated by his old friend and travelling companion John La Farge, who was interested professionally in mediaeval glass. The hunt for the Virgin's glass opened rich preserves. Especially the sixteenth century fan riot in sensuous worship. Then the ocean of religion, which had flooded France, broke into Shelley's light dissolved in starshowers thrown, which had left every remote village strewn with fragments that flashed like jewels, and were tossed into hidden clefts of peace and forgetfulness. "Chartres is all windows," Adams said. And so is the Education. It is proper to regard its sharply bright imaginative moments (there are perhaps a hundred or more) as psychological windows enclosing the soul, shining across a pearl-grey mental grisaille. The prose, Norman and New...