AS 36 A&5 v.2l COMMEMORATIVE TRIBUTE TO HENRY ADAMS By PAUL ELMER MORE PREPARED FOR THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OF ARTS AND LETTERS 1920 AMERICAN ACADEMY OF ARTS AND LETTERS 1922 A Uo V. Ll Copyright, 1922, by THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OF ARTS AND LETTERS THE DE VINNE PRESS NEW YORK HENRY ADAMS BY PAUL E. MORE By the death of Henry Adams, in March of 1918, in his eighty-first year, the Academy lost a member distin guished in many ways, a man who reveled in all the riddles of life and himself left for those curious in the natural history of the human soul a riddle not easily solved. In one re spect he was American by every fiber of his being. Great-grandson of the second President of the United States, grandson of a later President, son of the Minister to the Court of St. James s during the trying years of the Civil War, reared in a tradition of al most chauvinistic patriotism, he might ACADEMY NOTES M52233 THE AMERICAN ACADEMY be regarded as an impersonation of that New Englandism which pene trated the bones and marrow of the national character. And he was, throughout life, acutely conscious of his inheritance. Yet from another side he was con spicuously un-American ; and of this, too, he was conscious, and never felt really at home in the land of his an cestors. It was a difference in mind, in thought, which, whatever else may be said, has not been "the master part of us," and which was so in Henry Adams. This is not to say that Amer ica is mentally sluggish, or has failed of large accomplishment in scholar ship and invention and the arts; but that detached intellectuality which dis solves the substance of life into a ques tion, that restless inquisitiveness which pierces all veils of custom and is only strengthened the more it is baffled, that outreaching of "the imperious ACADEMY NOTES OF ARTS AND LETTERS lonely thinking power" which makes an imprisonment of its very freedom, the spirit, in a word, which Matthew Arnold described in his Empedocles, these are distinctly not American, and they distinctly are what characterize Henry Adams. The variety of his intellectual achievement is more remarkable than their magnitude. As a teacher of his tory at Harvard for seven years he was one of the .pioneers of the semi nary method of study. Besides other more or less notable works in this field he published a History of Jefferson s and Madison s Administrations, mon umental in bulk, and almost unique in its combination of documentary re search, philosophical reflection, and literary charm. He divulged a scien tific theory of the periods of human growth and decline in history which is strikingly original and, it must be added, rather sad. For six years he AND MONOGRAPHS THE AMERICAN ACADEMY edited the North American Review, then the most solid magazine of the country. He wrote two novels, one of which, Democracy, aroused a good deal of heated comment by its satirical picture of Washington political soci ety. He composed verse, not much in quantity, but weighted with thought and emotion and technically more than respectable. His letters, printed since his death, show him to have been a master of the quaint and whimsical in this delicate genre. Above all he has left two books of extraordinary qual ity, his Education and his Mont-Saint- Michel and Chartres, one of which is like the portrait of a naked mind caught by some art of spiritual pho tography, the other of which has made the whole mental and emotional life of the twelfth century a vehicle for the same insatiate personality. This, however one may judge the individual works, is a record scarcely paralleled ACADEMY NOTES OF ARTS AND LETTERS by the production of any other Amer ican author. In the long run interest probably will center on the last two works, the Education and the Mont-Saint-Michel. By education Adams meant not at all the mere accumulation of knowledge, of which, nevertheless, he had abun dance, but that insight into the nature of things which should enable a man to know what the world is and what he himself is, and so to adjust his life to the forces that play upon it. In that sense education came to our Acade mician slowly, if it came at all, and the pages of his autobiography are a continual, and sometimes a bitter, complaint over the fact that he, the heir of all the ages and of all the Adamses, should be held at bay by the baffling sphinx of existence. He sent his intellect to work in the various fields of learning of which the cen tury was so proud history, science, AND MONOGRAPHS THE AMERICAN ACADEMY politics, art, religion seeking an answer to the question everywhere put to him : Why are you here, and who am I who set you here? Only at the end of his life did he read the riddle, and for those who read his books left another riddle to solve. Standing before the great dynamo at the Paris Exposition, in 1900, he thought he saw in that wheel, revolv ing with such vertiginous speed, so terribly silent, so majestically regular in its motion, a symbol of the ruthless, impersonal force which science discov ers at the center of the universe : "Among the thousand symbols of ulti mate energy, the dynamo was not so human as some, but it was the most expressive." Then from this inhuman sign he turned, by a kind of revulsion of feeling, to what \vas most opposite to it in every respect. He wrote his book to show that the Virgin Mother of God, in whose honor the cathe- ACADEMY NOTES OF ARTS AND LETTERS 7 dral of Chartres had been raised and adorned, was the real object of wor ship in the Middle Ages just because she was the symbol and warrant of something inconsequent, whimsically merciful, contemptuous of law, hu man, feminine, in the governing of the world. That he should have turned from one to the other of these forces is not strange, but that he should have found it consonant to adore them to gether is a feat of audacious thinking, if not of education. AND MONOGRAPHS 14 DAY USE RETURN TO DESK FROM WHICH BORROWED LOAN DEPT. This book is due on the last date stamped below, or on the date to which renewed. Renewed books are subject to immediate recall. 3tJan 64|C REC D LD JAN24 64-10PM 19 1965 2 4 BEC16 REC D tD JANf* JUL7 64-7 PM DEC 13 68 DEPT, LD 21A-40m-4/63 (D6471slO)476B General Library University of California Berkeley PAMPHLET BINDER Syraci N. Y. Stockton, Colif. U.C. BERKELEY LIB