Henry Adams

Letters of Henry Adams, 1858-1891. By Worthington Chauncey Ford. (Constable. 218.) ThosE who place the Education of Henry Adams among the best and most fascinating of modem autobiographies, will seize eagerly upon this portly volume of correspondence. The strange blanks and reticences of that remarkable book, its quiet omission of the twenty crucial years which include Adams' married life and the crushing grief of his wife's death, were partly filled by the charming sketch of the gentler and more winning aspects of his baffling personality which is prefixed to the Letters to a Niece. But there is much left to be revealed to us, before our portrait of that hypersensitive and tenderhearted intellectual, "Henricus Adams Porcupinus Angelicus," is complete. That portrait must give due place to the fastidious man of letters, historian, and political philosopher ; to the reverent lover of childhood, who kept concealed in his study cupboard a perfectly equipped doll's house for the use of young visitors ; to the biting critic of human nature, who yet loved "all young miall things, including dogs " ; and to the mediaeval enthusiast and devout—though tmchurched—client of the Virgin of Chartres. From this point of view, however, we have to confess that the letters are a disappointment. Mr. Chauncey Ford tells us that after tragedy overcame his life, Adams recalled much of his earlier correspondence and also destroyed his diaries and papers. The letters of this period that remain and are here published are therefore those he considered—as indeed they mostly are—of slight importance. Devoted readers of the Education will, it is true, find some interesting sidelights cast upon the scenes there described ; and, in the startling difference between the consummate craftsmanship of the autobiography and the often undistinguished language of the letters, will perceive anew how great a literary artist Adams was, how remarkable his power of distilling significance from eirctunstance. He has himself compared his " confessions " with those of St. Augustine ; characteristically observing that "Augustine, like a great artist, had worked from multiplicity to unity, while he, like a small one, had to reverse the method." And. though perhaps no contrast could be more complete than that between the detached objectivity of the modem American and the passionate subjectivism of the African saint, we can

now see that the Education does belong to that group of human documents, of which St. Augustine's confessions is the typical i.xample ; documents in which the most candid self revelation is yet controlled by conscious art, and the chronicle of a life is transmuted into the history of a soul.

Only enthusiasts, then, will feel deeply interested in the first three hundred pages or so of this book. But when we come to the long sequence of letters written, mostly to

MN. Don Cameron, during those travels in the East and the South Seas which followed the loss of his wife—wanderings in which he strove to cure his own "insanity of restlessness," by living and thinking "from minute to minute "---we are admitted to some knowledge of a phase in Adams' development

tvhich the Education deliberately omits. These years of out- ward adventure and interior loneliness deepened and spirit- ualized him ; and gradually transformed the man of letters and student of political history into the writer of Mont St. ichcl and Chartres. In these letters too, Adams' highly

cultivated powers of observation and description come 1 igorously- into play ; and the discomforts and excitements of nineteenth century travel are made vividly real to us. He saw -Japan in her moment of transition, the Pacific islands

before much that is now lost had been swept away ; and seldom missed the significant detail in that which he saw.

A characteristic and particularly interesting sample of his manner is the disconcerting but convincing picture of his visit to Robert Louis Stevenson at Vailima

We came out on a clearing dotted with burned stumps, exactly like a clearing in our backwoods. In the middle stood a two-storey 1 risk shanty with steps outside to the upper floor and a galvanized iron roof. A pervasive atmosphere of dirt seemed to hang around it. . . . As we reached the steps a figure came out that I cannot do justice to. Imagine a man HO thin and emaciated that he looked like a bundle of sticks in a bag, with a head and eyes morbidly intelligent and restless. Ho was costumed in a dirty striped cotton pyjamas, the ham/ legs tucked into coarse knit woollen stockings, one of which was bright brown in colour, the other a purplish dark tone. With him was a woman who retired for a moment into the house to reappear a moment afterwards. . . . She wore the usual missionary nightgown, which was no cleaner than her husband's shirt and drawers, but she- omitted the stockings."

Though he came to appreciate on closer knowledge the courage involved in Stevenson's precarious and poverty-stricken

life-

" His fragility passes description, but his endurance passes his fragility "—this represents Adams' first-hand impression al a fellow-craftsman, before reflection. and pity had worked over it. It is as merciless as an untouched photograph; and this is the side of their writer's strange mixed character which the letters mainly reveal. The best fruits of his long

education are only fully seen in his old age ; coloured as it wits by that which he called the "twelfth century strain in his soul," and softened by that half mystical, half romantic devotion to the Virgin, as the Mother of Mercy over against the blind forces of creation and destruction, which gave peace to the last phases of his long life Help me to feel ! not with my insect souse— With yours, that felt all life alive in you. Infinite heart beating at your expense.

Infinite passion breathing the breath you drew !

Help me to bear ! not my own baby load, . But yours ; who bore the failure of the light, The strength, the knowledge, and the thought of Cod, The futile folly of the Infinite."

These are the concluding verses of that "Prayer to the Virgin of Chartres" which was apparently written when he

was planning the Education, and was found among his private papers after his death. Those who feel a certain disappoint-

ment with the letters should remember that they mainly represent the external contacts of the deeply reserved and very lonely soul, something of whose secret life is here