Henry Adams and the Adams Family—John Hay and Frank Mason—The Three Mousquetaires of Culture—Paris—“The Frenchman”—The South of France
I
I have been of late reading The Education of Henry Adams, and it recalls many persons and incidents belonging to the period about which I am now writing. I knew Henry Adams well; first in London, then in Boston and finally throughout his prolonged residence in Washington City. He was an Adams; very definitely an Adams, but, though his ghost may revisit the glimpses of the moon and chide me for saying so, with an English “cut to his jib.”
No three brothers could be more unlike than Charles Francis, John Quincy and Henry Adams. Brooks Adams I did not know. They represented the fourth generation of the brainiest pedigree—that is in continuous line—known to our family history. Henry thought he was a philosopher and tried to be one. He thought he was a man of the world and wanted to be one. He was, in spite of himself, a provincial.
Provincialism is not necessarily rustic, even suburban. There is no provincial quite so provincial as he who has passed his life in great cities. The Parisian boulevardier taken away from the asphalt, the cockney a little off Clapham Common and the Strand, is lost. Henry Adams knew his London and his Paris, his Boston and his Quincy—we must not forget Quincy—well. But he had been born, and had grown up, between the lids of history, and for all his learning and travel he never got very far outside them.
In manner and manners, tone and cast of thought he was English—delightfully English—though he cultivated the cosmopolite. His house in the national capital, facing the Executive Mansion across Lafayette Square—especially during the life of his wife, an adorable woman, who made up in sweetness and tact for some of the qualities lacking in her husband—was an intellectual and high-bred center, a rendezvous for the best ton and the most accepted people. The Adamses may be said to have succeeded the Eameses as leaders in semi-social, semi-literary and semi-political society.
There was a trio—I used to call them the Three Musketeers of Culture—John Hay, Henry Cabot Lodge and Henry Adams. They made an interesting and inseparable trinity—Caleb Cushing, Robert J. Walker and Charles Sumner not more so—and it was worth while to let them have the floor and to hear them talk; Lodge, cool and wary as a politician should be; Hay, helterskelter, the real man of the world crossed on a Western stock; and Adams, something of a litératteur, a statesman and a cynic.
John Randolph Tucker, who when he was in Congress often met Henry at dinners and the like, said to him on the appearance of the early volumes of his History of the United States: “I am not disappointed, for how could an Adams be expected to do justice to a Randolph?”
While he was writing this history Adams said to me: “There is an old villain—next to Andrew Jackson the greatest villain of his time—a Kentuckian—don’t say he was a kinsman of yours!—whose papers, if he left any, I want to see.”
“To whom are you referring?” I asked with mock dignity.