Chapter V. Berlin (1858-1859)

The Education of Henry Adams

by Henry Adams

A FOURTH child has the strength of his weakness. Being of no
great value, he may throw himself away if he likes, and never be
missed. Charles Francis Adams, the father, felt no love for Europe,
which, as he and all the world agreed, unfitted Americans for
America. A captious critic might have replied that all the success he
or his father or his grandfather achieved was chiefly due to the
field that Europe gave them, and it was more than likely that without
the help of Europe they would have all remained local politicians or
lawyers, like their neighbors, to the end. Strictly followed, the
rule would have obliged them never to quit Quincy; and, in fact, so
much more timid are parents for their children than for themselves,
that Mr. and Mrs. Adams would have been content to see their children
remain forever in Mount Vernon Street, unexposed to the temptations
of Europe, could they have relied on the moral influences of Boston
itself. Although the parents little knew what took place under their
eyes, even the mothers saw enough to make them uneasy. Perhaps their
dread of vice, haunting past and present, worried them less than
their dread of daughters-in-law or sons-in-law who might not fit into
the somewhat narrow quarters of home. On all sides were risks. Every
year some young person alarmed the parental heart even in Boston, and
although the temptations of Europe were irresistible, removal from
the temptations of Boston might be imperative. The boy Henry wanted
to go to Europe; he seemed well behaved, when any one was looking at
him; he observed conventions, when he could not escape them; he was
never quarrelsome, towards a superior; his morals were apparently
good, and his moral principles, if he had any, were not known to be
bad. Above all, he was timid and showed a certain sense of
self-respect, when in public view. What he was at heart, no one could
say; least of all himself; but he was probably human, and no worse
than some others. Therefore, when he presented to an exceedingly
indulgent father and mother his request to begin at a German
university the study of the Civil Law -- although neither he nor they
knew what the Civil Law was, or any reason for his studying it -- the
parents dutifully consented, and walked with him down to the
railway-station at Quincy to bid him good-bye, with a smile which he
almost thought a tear.

Whether the boy deserved such indulgence, or was worth it, he
knew no more than they, or than a professor at Harvard College; but
whether worthy or not, he began his third or fourth attempt at
education in November, 1858, by sailing on the steamer Persia, the
pride of Captain Judkins and the Cunard Line; the newest, largest and
fastest steamship afloat. He was not alone. Several of his college
companions sailed with him, and the world looked cheerful enough
until, on the third day, the world -- as far as concerned the young
man -- ran into a heavy storm. He learned then a lesson that stood by
him better than any university teaching ever did -- the meaning of a
November gale on the mid-Atlantic -- which, for mere physical misery,
passed endurance. The subject offered him material for none but
serious treatment; he could never see the humor of sea-sickness; but
it united itself with a great variety of other impressions which made
the first month of travel altogether the rapidest school of education
he had yet found. The stride in knowledge seemed gigantic. One began
a to see that a great many impressions were needed to make very
little education, but how many could be crowded into one day without
making any education at all, became the pons asinorum of tourist
mathematics. How many would turn out to be wrong whether any could
turn out right, was ultimate wisdom.

The ocean, the Persia, Captain Judkins, and Mr. G. P. R. James,
the most distinguished passenger, vanished one Sunday morning in a
furious gale in the Mersey, to make place for the drearier picture of
a Liverpool street as seen from the Adelphi coffee-room in November
murk, followed instantly by the passionate delights of Chester and
the romance of red-sandstone architecture. Millions of Americans have
felt this succession of emotions. Possibly very young and ingenuous
tourists feel them still, but in days before tourists, when the
romance was a reality, not a picture, they were overwhelming. When
the boys went out to Eaton Hall, they were awed, as Thackeray or
Dickens would have felt in the presence of a Duke. The very name of
Grosvenor struck a note of grandeur. The long suite of lofty, gilded
rooms with their gilded furniture; the portraits; the terraces; the
gardens, the landscape; the sense of superiority in the England of
the fifties, actually set the rich nobleman apart, above Americans
and shopkeepers. Aristocracy was real. So was the England of Dickens.
Oliver Twist and Little Nell lurked in every churchyard shadow, not
as shadow but alive. Even Charles the First was not very shadowy,
standing on the tower to see his army defeated. Nothing thereabouts
had very much changed since he lost his battle and his head. An
eighteenth-century American boy fresh from Boston naturally took it
all for education, and was amused at this sort of lesson. At least he
thought he felt it.

Then came the journey up to London through Birmingham and the
Black District, another lesson, which needed much more to be rightly
felt. The plunge into darkness lurid with flames; the sense of
unknown horror in this weird gloom which then existed nowhere else,
and never had existed before, except in volcanic craters; the violent
contrast between this dense, smoky, impenetrable darkness, and the
soft green charm that one glided into, as one emerged -- the
revelation of an unknown society of the pit -- made a boy
uncomfortable, though he had no idea that Karl Marx was standing
there waiting for him, and that sooner or later the process of
education would have to deal with Karl Marx much more than with
Professor Bowen of Harvard College or his Satanic free-trade majesty
John Stuart Mill. The Black District was a practical education, but
it was infinitely far in the distance. The boy ran away from it, as
he ran away from everything he disliked.

Had he known enough to know where to begin he would have seen
something to study, more vital than the Civil Law, in the long,
muddy, dirty, sordid, gas-lit dreariness of Oxford Street as his
dingy four-wheeler dragged its weary way to Charing Cross. He did
notice one peculiarity about it worth remembering. London was still
London. A certain style dignified its grime; heavy, clumsy, arrogant,
purse-proud, but not cheap; insular but large; barely tolerant of an
outside world, and absolutely self-confident. The boys in the streets
made such free comments on the American clothes and figures, that the
travellers hurried to put on tall hats and long overcoats to escape
criticism. No stranger had rights even in the Strand. The eighteenth
century held its own. History muttered down Fleet Street, like Dr.
Johnson, in Adams's ear; Vanity Fair was alive on Piccadilly in
yellow chariots with coachmen in wigs, on hammer-cloths; footmen with
canes, on the footboard, and a shrivelled old woman inside; half the
great houses, black with London smoke, bore large funereal
hatchments; every one seemed insolent, and the most insolent
structures in the world were the Royal Exchange and the Bank of
England. In November, 1858, London was still vast, but it was the
London of the eighteenth century that an American felt and hated.

Education went backward. Adams, still a boy, could not guess how
intensely intimate this London grime was to become to him as a man,
but he could still less conceive himself returning to it fifty years
afterwards, noting at each turn how the great city grew smaller as it
doubled in size; cheaper as it quadrupled its wealth; less imperial
as its empire widened; less dignified as it tried to be civil. He
liked it best when he hated it. Education began at the end, or
perhaps would end at the beginning. Thus far it had remained in the
eighteenth century, and the next step took it back to the sixteenth.
He crossed to Antwerp. As the Baron Osy steamed up the Scheldt in the
morning mists, a travelling band on deck began to play, and groups of
peasants, working along the fields, dropped their tools to join in
dancing. Ostade and Teniers were as much alive as they ever were, and
even the Duke of Alva was still at home. The thirteenth-century
cathedral towered above a sixteenth-century mass of tiled roofs,
ending abruptly in walls and a landscape that had not changed. The
taste of the town was thick, rich, ripe, like a sweet wine; it was
mediaeval, so that Rubens seemed modern; it was one of the strongest
and fullest flavors that ever touched the young man's palate; but he
might as well have drunk out his excitement in old Malmsey, for all
the education he got from it. Even in art, one can hardly begin with
Antwerp Cathedral and the Descent from the Cross. He merely got drunk
on his emotions, and had then to get sober as he best could. He was
terribly sober when he saw Antwerp half a century afterwards. One
lesson he did learn without suspecting that he must immediately lose
it. He felt his middle ages and the sixteenth century alive. He was
young enough, and the towns were dirty enough -- unimproved,
unrestored, untouristed -- to retain the sense of reality. As a taste
or a smell, it was education, especially because it lasted barely ten
years longer; but it was education only sensual. He never dreamed of
trying to educate himself to the Descent from the Cross. He was only
too happy to feel himself kneeling at the foot of the Cross; he
learned only to loathe the sordid necessity of getting up again, and
going about his stupid business.

This was one of the foreseen dangers of Europe, but it vanished
rapidly enough to reassure the most anxious of parents. Dropped into
Berlin one morning without guide or direction, the young man in
search of education floundered in a mere mess of misunderstandings.
He could never recall what he expected to find, but whatever he
expected, it had no relation with what it turned out to be. A student
at twenty takes easily to anything, even to Berlin, and he would have
accepted the thirteenth century pure and simple since his guides
assured him that this was his right path; but a week's experience
left him dazed and dull. Faith held out, but the paths grew dim.
Berlin astonished him, but he had no lack of friends to show him all
the amusement it had to offer. Within a day or two he was running
about with the rest to beer-cellars and music-halls and dance-rooms,
smoking bad tobacco, drinking poor beer, and eating sauerkraut and
sausages as though he knew no better. This was easy. One can always
descend the social ladder. The trouble came when he asked for the
education he was promised. His friends took him to be registered as a
student of the university; they selected his professors and courses;
they showed him where to buy the Institutes of Gaius and several
German works on the Civil Law in numerous volumes; and they led him
to his first lecture.

His first lecture was his last. The young man was not very
quick, and he had almost religious respect for his guides and
advisers; but he needed no more than one hour to satisfy him that he
had made another failure in education, and this time a fatal one.
That the language would require at least three months' hard work
before he could touch the Law was an annoying discovery; but the
shock that upset him was the discovery of the university itself. He
had thought Harvard College a torpid school, but it was instinct with
life compared with all that he could see of the University of Berlin.
The German students were strange animals, but their professors were
beyond pay. The mental attitude of the university was not of an
American world. What sort of instruction prevailed in other branches,
or in science, Adams had no occasion to ask, but in the Civil Law he
found only the lecture system in its deadliest form as it flourished
in the thirteenth century. The professor mumbled his comments; the
students made, or seemed to make, notes; they could have learned from
books or discussion in a day more than they could learn from him in a
month, but they must pay his fees, follow his course, and be his
scholars, if they wanted a degree. To an American the result was
worthless. He could make no use of the Civil Law without some
previous notion of the Common Law; but the student who knew enough of
the Common Law to understand what he wanted, had only to read the
Pandects or the commentators at his ease in America, and be his own
professor. Neither the method nor the matter nor the manner could
profit an American education.

This discovery seemed to shock none of the students. They went
to the lectures, made notes, and read textbooks, but never pretended
to take their professor seriously. They were much more serious in
reading Heine. They knew no more than Heine what good they were
getting, beyond the Berlin accent -- which was bad; and the beer --
which was not to compare with Munich; and the dancing -- which was
better at Vienna. They enjoyed the beer and music, but they refused
to be responsible for the education. Anyway, as they defended
themselves, they were learning the language.

So the young man fell back on the language, and being slow at
languages, he found himself falling behind all his friends, which
depressed his spirits, the more because the gloom of a Berlin winter
and of Berlin architecture seemed to him a particular sort of gloom
never attained elsewhere. One day on the Linden he caught sight of
Charles Sumner in a cab, and ran after him. Sumner was then
recovering from the blows of the South Carolinian cane or club, and
he was pleased to find a young worshipper in the remote Prussian
wilderness. They dined together and went to hear "William Tell" at
the Opera. Sumner tried to encourage his friend about his
difficulties of language: "I came to Berlin," or Rome, or whatever
place it was, as he said with his grand air of mastery, "I came to
Berlin, unable to say a word in the language; and three months later
when I went away, I talked it to my cabman." Adams felt himself quite
unable to attain in so short a time such social advantages, and one
day complained of his trials to Mr. Robert Apthorp, of Boston, who
was passing the winter in Berlin for the sake of its music. Mr.
Apthorp told of his own similar struggle, and how he had entered a
public school and sat for months with ten-year-old-boys, reciting
their lessons and catching their phrases. The idea suited Adams's
desperate frame of mind. At least it ridded him of the university and
the Civil Law and American associations in beer-cellars. Mr. Apthorp
took the trouble to negotiate with the head-master of the
Friedrichs-Wilhelm-Werdersches Gymnasium for permission to Henry
Adams to attend the school as a member of the Ober-tertia, a class of
boys twelve or thirteen years old, and there Adams went for three
months as though he had not always avoided high schools with singular
antipathy. He never did anything else so foolish but he was given a
bit of education which served him some purpose in life.

It was not merely the language, though three months passed in
such fashion would teach a poodle enough to talk with a cabman, and
this was all that foreign students could expect to do, for they never
by any chance would come in contact with German society, if German
society existed, about which they knew nothing. Adams never learned
to talk German well, but the same might be said of his English, if he
could believe Englishmen. He learned not to annoy himself on this
account. His difficulties with the language gradually ceased. He
thought himself quite Germanized in 1859. He even deluded himself
with the idea that he read it as though it were English, which proved
that he knew little about it; but whatever success he had in his own
experiment interested him less than his contact with German
education.

He had revolted at the American school and university; he had
instantly rejected the German university; and as his last experience
of education he tried the German high school. The experiment was
hazardous. In 1858 Berlin was a poor, keen-witted, provincial town,
simple, dirty, uncivilized, and in most respects disgusting. Life was
primitive beyond what an American boy could have imagined. Overridden
by military methods and bureaucratic pettiness, Prussia was only
beginning to free her hands from internal bonds. Apart from
discipline, activity scarcely existed. The future Kaiser Wilhelm I,
regent for his insane brother King Friedrich Wilhelm IV, seemed to
pass his time looking at the passers-by from the window of his modest
palace on the Linden. German manners, even at Court, were sometimes
brutal, and German thoroughness at school was apt to be routine.
Bismarck himself was then struggling to begin a career against the
inertia of the German system. The condition of Germany was a scandal
and nuisance to every earnest German, all whose energies were turned
to reforming it from top to bottom; and Adams walked into a great
public school to get educated, at precisely the time when the Germans
wanted most to get rid of the education they were forced to follow.
As an episode in the search for education, this adventure smacked of
Heine.

The school system has doubtless changed, and at all events the
schoolmasters are probably long ago dead; the story has no longer a
practical value, and had very little even at the time; one could at
least say in defence of the German school that it was neither very
brutal nor very immoral. The head-master was excellent in his
Prussian way, and the other instructors were not worse than in other
schools; it was their system that struck the systemless American with
horror. The arbitrary training given to the memory was stupefying;
the strain that the memory endured was a form of torture; and the
feats that the boys performed, without complaint, were pitiable. No
other faculty than the memory seemed to be recognized. Least of all
was any use made of reason, either analytic, synthetic, or dogmatic.
The German government did not encourage reasoning.

All State education is a sort of dynamo machine for polarizing
the popular mind; for turning and holding its lines of force in the
direction supposed to be most effective for State purposes. The
German machine was terribly efficient. Its effect on the children was
pathetic. The Friedrichs-Wilhelm-Werdersches Gymnasium was an old
building in the heart of Berlin which served the educational needs of
the small tradesmen or bourgeoisie of the neighborhood; the children
were Berliner-kinder if ever there were such, and of a class
suspected of sympathy and concern in the troubles of 1848. None was
noble or connected with good society. Personally they were rather
sympathetic than not, but as the objects of education they were
proofs of nearly all the evils that a bad system could give.
Apparently Adams, in his rigidly illogical pursuit, had at last
reached his ideal of a viciously logical education. The boys'
physique showed it first, but their physique could not be wholly
charged to the school. German food was bad at best, and a diet of
sauerkraut, sausage, and beer could never be good; but it was not the
food alone that made their faces white and their flesh flabby. They
never breathed fresh air; they had never heard of a playground; in
all Berlin not a cubic inch of oxygen was admitted in winter into an
inhabited building; in the school every room was tightly closed and
had no ventilation; the air was foul beyond all decency; but when the
American opened a window in the five minutes between hours, he
violated the rules and was invariably rebuked. As long as cold
weather lasted, the windows were shut. If the boys had a holiday,
they were apt to be taken on long tramps in the Thiergarten or
elsewhere, always ending in over-fatigue, tobacco-smoke, sausages,
and beer. With this, they were required to prepare daily lessons that
would have quickly broken down strong men of a healthy habit, and
which they could learn only because their minds were morbid. The
German university had seemed a failure, but the German high school
was something very near an indictable nuisance.

Before the month of April arrived, the experiment of German
education had reached this point. Nothing was left of it except the
ghost of the Civil Law shut up in the darkest of closets, never to
gibber again before any one who could repeat the story. The derisive
Jew laughter of Heine ran through the university and everything else
in Berlin. Of course, when one is twenty years old, life is bound to
be full, if only of Berlin beer, although German student life was on
the whole the thinnest of beer, as an American looked on it, but
though nothing except small fragments remained of the education that
had been so promising -- or promised -- this is only what most often
happens in life, when by-products turn out to be more valuable than
staples. The German university and German law were failures; German
society, in an American sense, did not exist, or if it existed, never
showed itself to an American; the German theatre, on the other hand,
was excellent, and German opera, with the ballet, was almost worth a
journey to Berlin; but the curious and perplexing result of the total
failure of German education was that the student's only clear gain --
his single step to a higher life -- came from time wasted; studies
neglected; vices indulged; education reversed; -- it came from the
despised beer-garden and music-hall; and it was accidental,
unintended, unforeseen.

When his companions insisted on passing two or three afternoons
in the week at music-halls, drinking beer, smoking German tobacco,
and looking at fat German women knitting, while an orchestra played
dull music, Adams went with them for the sake of the company, but
with no presence of enjoyment; and when Mr. Apthorp gently protested
that he exaggerated his indifference, for of course he enjoyed
Beethoven, Adams replied simply that he loathed Beethoven; and felt a
slight surprise when Mr. Apthorp and the others laughed as though
they thought it humor. He saw no humor in it. He supposed that,
except musicians, every one thought Beethoven a bore, as every one
except mathematicians thought mathematics a bore. Sitting thus at his
beer-table, mentally impassive, he was one day surprised to notice
that his mind followed the movement of a Sinfonie. He could not have
been more astonished had he suddenly read a new language. Among the
marvels of education, this was the most marvellous. A prison-wall
that barred his senses on one great side of life, suddenly fell, of
its own accord, without so much as his knowing when it happened. Amid
the fumes of coarse tobacco and poor beer, surrounded by the
commonest of German Haus-frauen, a new sense burst out like a flower
in his life, so superior to the old senses, so bewildering, so
astonished at its own existence, that he could not credit it, and
watched it as something apart, accidental, and not to be trusted. He
slowly came to admit that Beethoven had partly become intelligible to
him, but he was the more inclined to think that Beethoven must be
much overrated as a musician, to be so easily followed. This could
not be called education, for he had never so much as listened to the
music. He had been thinking of other things. Mere mechanical
repetition of certain sounds had stuck to his unconscious mind.
Beethoven might have this power, but not Wagner, or at all events not
the Wagner later than "Tannhauser." Near forty years passed before he
reached the "Gotterdammerung."

One might talk of the revival of an atrophied sense -- the
mechanical reaction of a sleeping consciousness -- but no other sense
awoke. His sense of line and color remained as dull as ever, and as
far as ever below the level of an artist. His metaphysical sense did
not spring into life, so that his mind could leap the bars of German
expression into sympathy with the idealities of Kant and Hegel.
Although he insisted that his faith in German thought and literature
was exalted, he failed to approach German thought, and he shed never
a tear of emotion over the pages of Goethe and Schiller. When his
father rashly ventured from time to time to write him a word of
common sense, the young man would listen to no sense at all, but
insisted that Berlin was the best of educations in the best of
Germanies; yet, when, at last, April came, and some genius suggested
a tramp in Thuringen, his heart sang like a bird; he realized what a
nightmare he had suffered, and he made up his mind that, wherever
else he might, in the infinities of space and time, seek for
education, it should not be again in Berlin.