The Education of Henry Adams: An Autobiography by Henry Adams

Author:Henry Adams
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Historians -- United States -- Biography, 1838-1918, Adams, Henry
Publisher: Standard Ebooks
Published: 2022-10-04T17:27:17+00:00

XVII

Pres­i­dent Grant (1869)

The first ef­fect of this leap in­to the un­known was a fit of low spir­its new to the young man’s ed­u­ca­tion; due in part to the over­pow­er­ing beau­ty and sweet­ness of the Mary­land au­tumn, al­most un­en­durable for its strain on one who had toned his life down to the No­vem­ber grays and browns of north­ern Eu­rope. Life could not go on so beau­ti­ful and so sad. Luck­i­ly, no one else felt it or knew it. He bore it as well as he could, and when he picked him­self up, win­ter had come, and he was set­tled in bach­e­lor’s quar­ters, as mod­est as those of a clerk in the De­part­ments, far out on G Street, to­wards George­town, where an old Finn named Dohna, who had come out with the Rus­sian Min­is­ter Stoeck­el long be­fore, had bought or built a new house. Con­gress had met. Two or three months re­mained to the old ad­min­is­tra­tion, but all in­ter­est cen­tred in the new one. The town be­gan to swarm with of­fice-seek­ers, among whom a young writ­er was lost. He drift­ed among them, un­no­ticed, glad to learn his work un­der cov­er of the con­fu­sion. He nev­er as­pired to be­come a reg­u­lar re­porter; he knew he should fail in try­ing a ca­reer so am­bi­tious and en­er­get­ic; but he picked up friends on the press—Nord­hoff, Mu­rat Hal­stead, Hen­ry Wat­ter­son, Sam Bowles—all re­form­ers, and all mixed and jum­bled to­geth­er in a tidal wave of ex­pec­ta­tion, wait­ing for Gen­er­al Grant to give or­ders. No one seemed to know much about it. Even Sen­a­tors had noth­ing to say. One could on­ly make notes and study fi­nance.

In wait­ing, he amused him­self as he could. In the amuse­ments of Wash­ing­ton, ed­u­ca­tion had no part, but the sim­plic­i­ty of the amuse­ments proved the sim­plic­i­ty of ev­ery­thing else, am­bi­tions, in­ter­ests, thoughts, and knowl­edge. Prover­bial­ly Wash­ing­ton was a poor place for ed­u­ca­tion, and of course young diplo­mats avoid­ed or dis­liked it, but, as a rule, diplo­mats dis­liked ev­ery place ex­cept Paris, and the world con­tained on­ly one Paris. They abused Lon­don more vi­o­lent­ly than Wash­ing­ton; they praised no post un­der the sun; and they were mere­ly de­scrib­ing three-fourths of their sta­tions when they com­plained that there were no the­atres, no restau­rants, no monde, no demi­monde, no drives, no splen­dor, and, as Mme. de Struve used to say, no grandez­za. This was all true; Wash­ing­ton was a mere po­lit­i­cal camp, as tran­sient and tem­po­rary as a camp-meet­ing for re­li­gious re­vival, but the diplo­mats had least rea­son to com­plain, since they were more sought for there than they would ev­er be else­where. For young men Wash­ing­ton was in one way par­adise, since they were few, and great­ly in de­mand. Af­ter watch­ing the ab­ject unim­por­tance of the young diplo­mat in Lon­don so­ci­ety, Adams found him­self a young duke in Wash­ing­ton. He had ten years of youth to make up, and a rav­en­ous ap­petite. Wash­ing­ton was the eas­i­est so­ci­ety he had ev­er seen, and even the Bosto­ni­an be­came sim­ple, good-na­tured, al­most ge­nial, in the soft­ness of a Wash­ing­ton spring.

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