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 
 
 
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