In other words, he told a series of jokes to make people think he had not meant it, after all. But he had. In this one great book of his, Mark Twain told the truth about what he really thought about man and the world.
He lived for twenty-five years after publishing Huckleberry Finn, but they were not happy years. His beloved younger daughter, Susy, died while the rest of the family was away on a trip; his older daughter became an invalid, as did his wife, who then died. Old Mark Twain put on his famous white suit and went on lecture tours to entertain the world he hated. He wrote many books, but those he considered to be the worst—that is, the ones that most clearly revealed his views of his fellow human beings—he was reluctant to publish. He lived “full of malice,” as he wrote to a friend, “saturated with malignity.” He had been born when Halley’s Comet visited the solar system in 1835; he predicted that he would “go out with it” when it came again, and so he did, departing this life on April 21, 1910, within a few hours of the comet’s closest approach to the Earth. Any loving reader will hope that Mark Twain’s journey to freedom was a comfortable one, and that he found life upon the comet as easy as he had known it would have been upon a raft.
HENRY ADAMS
1838–1918
The United States in 1800
Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres
The Education of Henry Adams
Henry Adams was born in Boston in 1838, the great-grandson of President John Adams and the grandson of President John Quincy Adams. He graduated from Harvard in 1858, then studied at Berlin and toured Germany and Italy. He served as secretary to his father while the latter was minister to Great Britain during the Civil War. After the war Adams taught history at Harvard but left his academic “exile” in 1877 to live in Washington among his important friends and to write books.
Henry Adams was the first member of his distinguished family to be a literary man. This both pleased and disturbed him. He never got over the feeling—expressed with eloquence in his autobiography—that he had betrayed his distinctive genius by refusing to follow in the political footsteps of his forebears. He thought of the Adams line as wearing thin or playing out in the generation of himself and his brother Brooks Adams (also a historian). This feeling, confirmed by the then-current excitement about the discovery of the Second Law of Thermodynamics (that everything in the universe “runs down” and eventually suffers a “heat death”), led him to propose a highly pessimistic theory of history, according to which things in general could not help but grow worse as time passed. Looking around him at the end of the nineteenth century, and comparing his own time to the period when the United States was new, as well as to the even earlier period of the Middle Age in Europe, he found reason to believe his theory true. And he wrote three books about it.
The first was the nine-volume History of the United States of America from 1801 to 1817 (published 1889–1891), which analyzed the American experience during the presidencies of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. Much of this fine and readable work has since been superseded, but the first six chapters, in which Adams attempted to set forth the state of the union at the beginning of the nineteenth century, remain a marvelous summary of the condition and prospects of America at the time. These six chapters have been republished under the title The United States in 1800, and they are worth reading if only because of their posing of what Adams thought was the great American question: Considering the weakness and relative poverty, and especially the sparseness of population of the States in 1800, how had it been possible for the nation to grow to its present (that is, in 1890) greatness in the span of only three generations?
This is a good question, and Adams’s answer is interesting. The relatively few persons who occupied North America in 1800 would not have been able to achieve what they actually did achieve if all were not actively involved in the achievement, he says. But to be actively involved they had to be educated. The greatest of all American inventions, therefore, according to Adams, and the source of the nation’s greatness, is universal, free, public education. If the United States in 1800 had retained the European system, of educating a few very well and most not at all, then the nation might not have survived and could not have prospered.
The second book that grew out of Henry Adams’s theory of history was Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres (1904), an account of the art, literature, and philosophy of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in Europe (mostly in France). The book begins with a study of the great fortress in Brittany dedicated to Saint Michael the Archangel, which represented for Adams the aggressive religious militarism of the twelfth century (which is also reflected in the first Crusades). Reading the pages devoted to Mont-Saint-Michel and its builders will lead you to open the travel section of your Sunday newspaper in search of tours to western France. But the best is yet to come. Adams’s book moves south and east toward Paris, to the soaring gothic cathedrals of the thirteenth century, most of them dedicated to the Virgin Mary. Of all these great buildings, Nôtre Dame de Chartres is not only the largest but also the most beautiful, says Adams. If Adams’s words do not convince you of this, you will soon see for yourself, because I predict that you will not be able to resist extending your tour from Brittany into the Ile-de-France, with Chartres as the final goal of your pilgrimage.
Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres is not only about cathedrals and fortresses. Some of its best chapters deal with the other arts and the literature of the Middle Ages in France and Italy. Adams was a critic of pure and exalted taste and when he praises a work—for example, The Song of Roland—you want to immediately read or see it. The finest of all the chapters may be the one on Saint Thomas Aquinas, in which Adams compares the Summa Theologica (Summa Theologiae is the correct Latin name and the one used by scholars), Aquinas’s masterwork, to a cathedral, declaring it to be the analogue in words of Chartres in stone.
Finally, Adams wrote his autobiography, in which he refers to himself throughout in the third person (Adams did this; Adams said that) and attempts to justify his life’s work in the face of his own severe criticisms of himself. The Education of Henry Adams, published 1906, is one of the best of all autobiographies, but it is somehow not a pleasant book. Read it after reading The United States in 1800 and Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres, but do not expect to feel the same exhilaration that those works inspire.
This, perhaps, is precisely the point Adams wanted to make. History, taken overall, is a melancholy tale, a winding down of great energies and creative impulses into their present-day analogues: enormous, sprawling organizations devoted entirely to greed. Toward the end of The Education, in the chapter titled “A Law of Acceleration,” Adams reveals that he is not completely hopeless. In comparing the works of men who worshiped the Virgin with those of men who worship the dynamo, he concedes that it is possible to imagine a future that is as good as, even better than, the past. But to attain this, says Adams, we have to change our ideas and our ways more rapidly and more profoundly than we ever have.