American Historian
The Formative Years. By Henry Adams. Condensed and edited by Herbert Agar. (Collins. Two volumes. Two guineas.)
HENRY ADAMS professed never to have heard of ten men who had read his history of the United States during the administrations of Jefferson and Madison. This did not disconcert him, for few authors have bothered less about the reception of their work. If he had a popular audience in mind it was that of a subsequent genera- tion. As he wrote to an English friend : "You see I am writing for a continent of a hundred million people fifty years hence " ; and, he adds, "I can't stop to think what England will read." That a new popular version of the work should be published in England sixty years later might have surprised him. The new venture is welcome. The book has been inaccessible, and its nine volumes have been a deterrent. The new edition consists of a selection which reduces the work to a manageable length without perceptibly weakening its structure. It looks as if England will read Adams history which the passage of time has shown to be one of the finest pieces of American historical writing.
Adams' quality as a historian derives from his sense of personal identity with the stream of historical events. As a member of America's most distinguished family, he could not help regarding the history of the United States in some measure as a family chronicle. Brought up at Quincy and serving an apprenticeship to his father, who held the traditional family post at St James's during the fateful years of the Civil War, Adams had always understood he must play a conspicuous part in national life. That this part would not be in politics he only learnt on his return to the U.S. In the "Gilded Age" of the post-bellum period the familiar land- marks which had guided the Adamses in their leadership were obliterated. In addition a fastidiousness, enhanced by long residence abroad, inhibited him from playing an effective part in affairs. Too self-conscious for action, he turned to the writing of history in the hope that he would by this means be able to explain his personal relation to events. The final results of this quest are the works of his maturity, the autobiography and Mont St. Michel and Chartres. Before this achievement he worked as a journeyman, and the History is the finest by-product of his period of self-discipline.
This study of his grandfather's generation was based upon exten- sive research, and the main outlines thus revealed still stand. His historical imagination led him unerringly to ask the significant question. The exacting discipline he underwent as a writer ensured an effortless style and a vivid narrative sense. In his more general chapters he displays steadiness of vision and a detachment rarely achieved by American historians. He is under no illusions. The grandeur of conception behind the founding of the republic does not blind him to the mran aspects of the actual achievement. His know- ledge of Europe enables him to assess the American experiment in terms of its European setting. Yet beneath his scepticism with its ironic overtones, there persists a steady belief in the "democratic dogma" which gives the history a balance it might have lost had it been written twenty years later. For as he grew older Adams' disillusion with the idea of democratic progress turned him further in on himself to find comfort in a mysticism quite alien to the
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