WHAT BOSTON THOUGHT
AT- the beginning of The Education of Henry Adams, the narrator, commenting on his birth and upbringing, asserted that " had he been born in Jerusalem under the shadow of the Temple and • circumcised in the Synagogue by his uncle the high priest, under the name of Israel Cohen, he would scarcely have been more distinctly branded." Mrs. Henry Adams, Marian Hooper, was almost or quite as branded as her husband. Mr. Ward reminds us that in ancestry she " was half Puritan and half Pilgrim," a distinction which may not be appreciated in this country which, among many other odd notions of American history, believes that the Pilgrim Fathers founded Massachusetts. Her marriage to Henry Adams united two intelligent persons, anxious to live freely in the modern world, anxious to free themselves from the more crippling bonds of their Bostonian origin, but incurably Bostonian, all the same. They might visit Egypt and live in Washington, but they carried their climate with them, for as the old lady said in 1898, " Boston isn't a place, it's a state of mind." And for those who like that state of mind (as this reviewer does) this is a book full of entertain- ment and interest.
Miss Hooper saw the great review of the veteran Union troops in Washington in 1865 and saw Sherman refuse to shake hands with that highly unlikeable Pennsylvanian, Edwin Stanton. It was a gesture that her husband and his- friends - were to imitate again and again, with Quay and Blaine and IiiMiwell and other public figures who fell below the rigorous Adams, Boston and Nation standards, playing the part of Statiton. It is characteristic that the most living part of this book is the Washington section, which is full of the guarda e passes spirit that came so easily to the whole Adams family as to Most Bostonians. That spirit was, of course, given a chance to display itself outside the United States too ; the dullness of Berlin ; the looseness of Paris (where Mrs. Adams seems to have been inspired by the returning spirit of her gre4-grandmother-in-law, Abigail Adams) ; the English abroad, rude and mean and stupid ; these_ and many other 'example, of the great truth that there's no place like Boston and no people like -good Tkisiortians, ate snick on a pin and
added to the • collection.- But in Washington the same spirit got _even more scope, because the Adams connexion had, if not more reason, more material for condemnation. The letters recall that simpler Washington with the brick houses that have now disappeared or gone down in the world ; with the endless battle over precedence and place ; with the visiting foreigners and shady diplomats either playing the game with less scruple than the natives or innocently imagining that it was possible to live outside the sacred North-West. In that world the Adams family found almost enough food to sate even its appetite for feeling superior. But as that family, and especially Henry Adams, have made of that appetite an excuse for an art worthy of Saint Simon, the letters make excellent reading and are useful historical documents.
They would be more useful, as documents, if their editor had had a more ordinary sense of what are an editor's duties. From one point of view, these letters are most elaborately edited. The notes must cover about half as much space as the text. But as the notes are very often merely quotations from The Education or the Letters of Henry Adams, they are hardly necessary to help towards the understanding of a book most of whose potential readers, it is safe to guess, already know the earlier works. More odd still is the habit of illus- trating the political references by long quotations from the Nation " because the political sympathies and the mental atmosphere of the reform group of Independents to which the Adamses belonged are best represented in the columns of that weekly." But when did it become the duty of an editor to bolster up the errors or illusions of the author of the text ? Mr. Thoron could have saved a lot of space by brief elucidations of the more difficult allusions, or he could have spent the same amount of space as he has on correcting or amplifying the text. Why, for instance, should the reader be left under the illusion that Motley's removal from London was entirely unjustified and frivolous when in reality it was based partly on faults of temper and a view of a minister's duty which had aroused the ironic amusement of so good a judge as Henry Adams's father, " Minister Adams " ? The same failure to make the real point can be seen in the notes on the MacSweeny controversy which hurt Lowell's reputation as a diplomatist but, what was much more important from the Adams point of view, had a direct bearing on the fortunes of Blaine. On the other hand, there are elaborate notes for persons who require to be told who George Eliot was or to learn from Mr. Thoron that Bonington " painted coast and street scenes."
One last point is raised by the statement that Mrs. Adams " died . . . on the sixth of December." The shock of his wife's death was a great event in Henry Adams's life ; we have in this book a good deal of material bearing on the famous monument to her ; we have also, in this book, a great deal of comment on the morals and manners of members of families which are still known to the public. What is the objection, over fifty years after the tragedy, to stating that Mrs. Adams, by accident or design, died of an overdose of a drug ? -
D. W. BROGAN.
Previous page
