A STUDY IN IRONY.*
Ix Mount Vernon Street, in the third house below Mount Vernon Place, Boston, a child was born on February 16th, 1838. That child was Henry Adams. When the Fairies came to visit the cradle, Pleasure, Wealth, and Fame all passed the infant by. But one Fairy remained behind to bless. It was not, however, Macaulay's " glorious lady with the eyes of light "—the spirit who brought to him "the sense of Beauty and the thirst of Troth." It was a guide, and guardian much more tenacious, much mere complex, and muck more elusive. She who laid her hand on the head of Henry Adams was the Fairy Iron's, the spirit who sees too far and yet not far enough, who • TAB liduaation of Henry Adams : Ataninngrapini. With an Introduction by Henry Cabot Lodge. Hoitou and Newyork Houghton Mifflin CO. 115 ud.1 feels deeply the sense of tears in mortal things, but sees also that kindly, that divine humour in the universe which so often reconciles man to his destiny while it appears to mock him. It was the true Ironia of Socrates, of Greek Tragedy, and also a those later thinkers to whose inspiring genius the name of Romantic Irony has been given.
He, then, who would understand Adams must banish from Ids thought all idea of the pseudo-irony of later times. He trust forgo that degraded sense of the word which makes Ironia a smirking and satirical jade, with a hard, cruel laugh, instead of the gentle smile of pity and humour, which teaches but does not deride, which redeems the human heart from its most profound discouragements, which may bring a remedy even to fhosa to whom has come the dreadful revelation that things done can never be undone, that not even the gods upon the past have power, and that acts and their consequences see for all time inseparable.
It was the faculty of Irony that inspired and ruled the life of Henry Adams, perhaps more than of any man of whom we have a conscious record. Though in this singular book (written originally for his private friends in the year 1907, and now given to the world with an Introduction by Senator Lodge) the word "irony," as far as we can discover, never occurs, the whole book is shot through and through in every line and every word with, that strange quality.
Irony may no doubt in one sense have unmanned and undone Henry Adams, but also in just as strong a sense it saved and made him. But for the ironic sense which caused him to regard his whole life as a long endeavour of the unteachable to be taught and made him call his Autobiography The Education of Henry Adams, we feel that with hint the wells of existence would have been broken up. Being the man he was, he could not have lived without the sustaining sense of the true Irony. It was his consolation even as it was his cross. So strongly does the present writer feel this that if he were asked to write an inscription for the tomb of Henry Adams he would model it on the greatest of fanciful epitaphs— the epitaph which in the Cathedral Chapel of Christ Church, Oxford, preserves the memory of John Burton, the Anatomist of Melancholy. For Henry Adams the words would run ;—
" Ponds notus Paucioribus ignotus Cui vitam dedit - Et mortem Ironia."
As surely as Melancholy bestowed life as well as death upon Burton, Irony bestowed the joint gift upon Henry Adams. And Henry Adams was, like Burton, essentially the man known to few, and yet to fewer unknown. AU the more strongly because only half consciously, all the better minds in America felt that in Henry Adams a great, if a strange and wayward, intellectual force was at work. Henry Adams only wrote one book of importance, his history of Jefferson's Administra- tion, but all those who know how difficult it is to write history in true focus, and to prevent the vision becoming distorted in dealing with a piece of history treated minutely and in great detail, will realize that that work is by no means amongst the least worthy of those gifts with which the Muse Clio has endowed the modern world. Whether it was accident or some conscious effort that made Henry Adams choose this particular period we do not ]now, but at any rate it was one which would naturally appeal to a man with a sense of the irony of human events. As Adams himself points out, how could political Irony go further than to place Jefferson, the intellectual Sansculotte, in such & position that he had to declare war upon the French Republic, and make it the very first duty of the man who went to Washington as President in the spirit of the bare-footed friar of Jacobinical democracy to arrange a table of precedents for the politicians and officials of the Capital of the Union!
He who turns from this review to the book itself may very likely at that be amazed that we have found so much that is strange, wayward, nay, unnatural, in a book which appears to begin like an ordinary autobiography. Yet if he takes the trouble to go through with the work he will, we believe, find justification for our interpretation on almost every page. It is wonderfully impressive thus to learn, though never from his ,wn words, that Adams found the world in which he lived an almost unintelligible riddle, yet a riddle which 'he felt under bond to assail—which he dared not neglect. The pathos
of the situation would have been unbearable but for that irony of which we have spoken—the faculty which gives us the
remedy for our dread inheritance of pity and terror. Perhaps one of the beet ways in which we can illustrate what we mean is by quoting the passage which describes how Henry Adams, who had been for some five years his father's Private Secretary in the American Legation in London, returned to America in the year 1868 - " At ten o'clock of a July night, in heat that made the tropical rain-shower simmer, the Adams family and the Motley family clambered down the Bide of their Cunard steamer into the Government tugboat, which set them ashore in black darkness at the end of some North River pier. Had they been Tyrian
traders of the year B.C. 1000, landing from a galley fresh from
Gibraltar, they could hardly have been stranger on the shore of a world, so changed from what it had been ten years
before. The historian of the Dutch, no longer historian but diplomatist, started up an unknown street, m company with the private secretary who had become private citizen, in search of a carriage to convey the two parties to the Brevoort House. The pursuit was arduous, but successful. Towards midnight they found shelter once more in their native land. How much its character had changed or was changing, they could not wholly know, and they could but partly feel. For that matter, the land itself knew no more than they. Society in America was always trying, almost as blindly as an earthworm, to realize and understand itself ; to catch up with its own head, and to twist about in search of its tail. Society offered the profile of a long, straggling caravan, stretching loosely, towards the prairies, its few score of leaders far in advance and its millions of immigrants, negroes, and Indians far in the rear, somewhere in archaic time. It enjoyed the vast advantage over Europe that all seemed, for the moment, to move in one direction, while Europe wasted most of its energy in trying several contradictory movements at once; but whenever Europe or Asia should be polarized or oriented towards the same point, America might easily lose her lead. Meanwhile each newcomer needed to slip into a place as near the head of the caravan as possible, and needed most to know where the leader. could be found. One could divine pretty nearly where the force lay, since the last ten years had given to the great mechanical energies—coal, iron, steam—a distinct superiority in power over the old industrial elements—agriculture, handwork, end learning ; but the result of this revolution on a survivor from the fifties resembled the action of the earthworm he twisted about, in vain, to recover his starting-point ; he could no longer see his own trail ; he had become an astray ; a flotsam or jetsam of wreckage ; a belated reveller, or a scholar.gipsv like Matthew Arnold's. His world was dead. Not a Polish Jew fresh from Warsaw or Cracow—not a furtive Yacoob or Ysaac still reeking of the Ghetto, snarling a weird Yiddish to the officers of the Customs—but had a keener instinct, an intenser energy, and a freer hand than he—American of Americans, with Heaven knew how many Puritans and Patriots behind him, and an education that had cost a civil war. He made no complaint and found no fault with his thee; he was no worse off than the Indians or the buffalo who had been ejected from their heritage by his own people ; but he vehemently insisted that he was not himself at fault. The defeat was not due to him, nor yet to any superiority of his rivals. He hail been unfairly forced out of the track, and must get back into it as best he could."
But perhaps the strangest thing in this strange book is that these pas,ages are intermingled with a great deal of very interesting positive history, especially as concerns the relations between the United States and the United Kingdom during the Civil War. If Adams is not always quite fair to the British Govern- ment, he certainly always meant to be fair, and he knew how to discriminate. Incidentally we get most memorable pictures of Lord John -tassel!, Palmerston, and Gladstone. The touches in regard to 1—ilmerston, indeed, can never be neglected by any future Englis.. historian who wants to paint in full the strange picture of the whiskered Cupid of the Middle Victorian age. Henry Adams does what very few people have ever done. He dares to tell the whole unfortunate story of Gladetone's Southern proclivities without hiding anything or setting down aught in kindliness rather than truth. • After declaring sardonically that Gladstone was " the only resolute, vehement, conscientious champion of Russell, Napoleon, and Jefferson Davis," Adams thus paints the three British statesmen:— " Young Adorns thought Earl Russell a statesman of the old school, clear about his objects and unscrupulous in his methods—dishonest but strong. Russell ardently asserted that he had no objects, and that though he might be weak he was above all else honest. Minister Adams leaned to Russell personally and thought him true, but officially, in practice. treated him as false. Punch, before 1802, commonly drew Russell as a schoolboy telling lies, and afterwards as prematurely senile, at seventy. Education stopped there. No one, either in or out of England, ever offered a•rational explanation of Earl Russell. Palmerston was simple—so simple as to mislead the. student altogether—but scarcely more consistent. The world thought him positive, decided, reckless ; the record proved him to be cautious, careful, vacillating. Minister Adams took him for pugnacious and quarrelsome ; the ' Lives of Russell, Gladstone, and Granville show him to have been good-tempered, conciliatory, avoiding quarrels. He surprised the Minister by refusing to pursue his attack on General Butler. He tried to check Russell. He scolded Gladstone. He dis- couraged Napoleon. Except Disraeli none of the English statesman were so cautious as he in talking of America. Palmerston told no falsehoods ; made no professions ; concealed no opinions ; was detected in no double-dealing. The most mortifying failure in Henry Adams's long education was that, after forty pears of confirmed dislike, distrust, and detraction of Lord Palmerston, he was obliged at hat to admit himself in error, and to consent in spirit—for by that time he was nearly as dead as any of them—to beg his pardon. Gladstone was quite another story, but with him a student's difficulties were leas because they were shared by all the world, including Gladstone himself. He WAS the sum of contradictions. The highest education could reach, in this analysis, only a reduction to the absurd, but no absurdity that a young man could reach in 1802 would have approached the level that Mr. Gladstone admitted, proclaimed, in his confessions of 1898. which brought all reason and all hope of education to a stillstand."
We have put up a finger-post to this most haunting, attractive, and stimulating book. And, strange to say, it is stimulating although the whole effort of the writer seems to be to drag the reader down with him into spiritual depths no plummet has ever sounded. We can only say, in leaving Henry Adams's Anani Figura, that if our review is inadequate, which we frankly admit it is, it is because no review not as long as the book itself could be adequate. It is a book which can only tell its own tale. There are some things in regard to which interpretation is impossible. At least we are in good company. Senator Lodge, who understood Adams better than any of his contem- poraries, in his Editorial Preface when he attempts to make us understand the book by quoting a passage from Henry Adams's Mosf.Sainf•Michel and Chartres only darkens the gloom. All wo can do is to leave our readers to the pleasure or pain, for there will be both, of studying The Education of Henry Adams for themselves, and wo hope it will not be long before Messrs. Houghton Mifflin will have sent a competent stock of copies to England. At present we believe that the book is not obtainable in this country.
One word more. It is a source of pride to the Spectator that perhaps Henry Adams's last published utterance was a letter from him to Lord Newton which we were allowed to print (October 2160914) in our columns. It was a letter of generous sympathy with the Allies and of warm feeling towards England. In truth Adams loved our people and our Ward, though it was part of the universal irony that he should so often have to conceal his affection under the guise of strongly hostile criticism. But hostileas his critieismsounds, it can never deceive those who have followed the secret of Henry Adams's life, or say rather of his education—the education so earnestly sought for but never found. Though the best of good Americans, his was essentially "Anise. 'saturable: Anglisana."
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