Part 15 (1/2)

The Aular limitations which sometimes drove the student of civilized norance--lost in the darkness of his own gropings--the scholar finds hinorant that there is a thing called ignorance; who have forgotten how to amuse themselves; who cannot even understand that they are bored

The Aetic, ingenious person, always awake and trying to get ahead of his neighbors Perhaps this idea of the national character o; it was not correct for Washi+ngton There the American showed hiure, rather in the mould of Abrahaic; or like Grant, inarticulate, uncertain, distrustful of himself, still more distrustful of others, and awed by money That the American, by temperament, worked to excess, was true; work and whiskey were his stimulants; as a form of vice; but he never cared much for money or power after he earned them The aot from it; he had no use for wealth Jim Fisk alone seemed to knohat he wanted; Jay Gould never did At Washi+ngton one met mostly such true Americans, but if one wanted to know them better, one went to study them in Europe Bored, patient, helpless; pathetically dependent on his wife and daughters; indulgent to excess; mostly a modest, decent, excellent, valuable citizen; the American was to beto every listener that the happiest day of his life would be the day he should land on the pier at New York He was ashaer answered to the stiht All his iy, his keen analytic perceptions, were oriented in one direction, and he could not change it Congress was full of such men; in the Senate, Sumner was almost the only exception; in the Executive, Grant and Boutere varieties of the type--political speci with pohen it came to them They knew not how to amuse themselves; they could not conceive how other people were amused Work, whiskey, and cards were life The atton was theirs--or was supposed by the outside world to be in their control--and this was the reason why the outside world judged that Washi+ngton was fatal even for a young h the whole variety of temptations, in every capital of Europe, for a dozen years; who never played cards, and who loathed whiskey

CHAPTER XX

FAILURE (1871)

FAR back in childhood, a its earliest memories, Henry Adae He looeport, his mother drove him out to visit his aunt, Mrs Everett Edward Everett was then President of the college and lived in the old President's House on Harvard Square The boy re-room, on the left of the hall door, in which Mrs Everett received thereyhound in the corner The house had an air of colonial self-respect that impressed even a nine-year-old child

When Adams closed his intervieith President Eliot, he asked the Bursar about his aunt's old drawing-room, for the house had been turned to base uses The room and the deserted kitchen adjacent to it were to let He took them Above him, his brother Brooks, then a law student, had rooms, with a private staircase Opposite was J R

Dennett, a young instructor almost as literary as Adams himself, and -table, sohborhood, also supposed to be superior in its class Chauncey Wright, Francis Wharton, Dennett, John Fiske, or their equivalents in learning and lecture, were seen there, a three or four law students like Brooks Adaements, all of them had to be satisfied The standard was below that of Washi+ngton, but it was, for the moment, the best

For the next nine months the assistant Professor had no time to waste on coth in trying to keep one day ahead of his duties Often the stint ran on, till night and sleep ran short He could not stop to think whether he were doing the work rightly He could not get it done to please hily, for he never could satisfy himself what to do

The fault he had found with Harvard College as an undergraduatea great effort to meet these self-criticisms, and had elected President Eliot in 1869 to carry out its refor reformers, and had tried his hand on his own department of History The two full Professors of History--Torrey and Gurney, charround Between Gurney's classical courses and Torrey's ap of a thousand years, which Adams was expected to fill The students had already elected courses nuht or as to teach If their new professor had asked what idea was in theirat all was in theirin his, and down to the moment he took his chair and looked his scholars in the face, he had given, as far as he could rees

Not that his ignorance troubled hinorant His course had led hinorance; he had tumbled from one ocean into another till he had learned to swiives life, but as parent, gives no more A murderer takes life, but his deed stops there

A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops A teacher is expected to teach truth, and may perhaps flatter himself that he does so, if he stops with the alphabet or theher child eat with a spoon; but morals are quite another truth and philosophy is more coue, a record, a romance, or as an evolution; and whether he affirots of the pit He makes of his scholars either priests or atheists, plutocrats or socialists, judges or anarchists, almost in spite of himself In essence incoherent and iht as such--or falsified

Adams wanted to do neither He had no theory of evolution to teach, and could not reeable tales to aish-minded boys, in order to publish them afterwards as lectures He could still less colo-Saxon Chronicle and the Venerable Bede by heart He saw no relation whatever between his students and the Middle Ages unless it were the Church, and there the ground was particularly dangerous He knew better than though he were a professional historian that thethem into the line of evolution froreater man than Lamarck or Linnaeus; but history had nowhere broken down so pitiably, or avowed itself so hopelessly bankrupt, as there

Since Gibbon, the spectacle was almost a scandal History had lost even the sense of shame It was a hundred years behind the experimental sciences For all serious purpose, it was less instructive than Walter Scott and Alexandre Dumas

All this ithout offence to Sir Henry Maine, Tyler, McLennan, Buckle, Auguste Comte, and the various philosophers who, from time to time, stirred the scandal, and ht make some use of these writers or their theories; but Adae expected hi the boys a few elerace to the university This was formal; and he could frankly tell the boys that, provided they passed their exaet their facts where they liked, and use the teacher only for questions The only privilege a student had that orth his clai to the professor, and the professor was bound to encourage it

His only difficulty on that side was to get them to talk at all He had to devise sche about, and induce thee body of students stifles the student No man can instruct more than half-a-dozen students at once The whole problem of education is one of its cost in money

The lecture system to classes of hundreds, which was very much that of the twelfth century, suited Adams not at all Barred from philosophy and bored by facts, he wanted to teach his students so not wholly useless The nue was, in his experience, barely one in ten; the rest could not be est All were respectable, and in seven years of contact, Adams never had cause to complain of one; but nine minds in ten take polish passively, like a hard surface; only the tenth sensibly reacts

Adaht that, as no one seemed to care what he did, he would try to cultivate this tenth h necessarily at the expense of the other nine He frankly acted on the rule that a teacher, who knew nothing of his subject, should not pretend to teach his scholars what he did not know, but should join the it The rather pretentious naiven to this process of instruction, but the na professor who respected neither history nor method, and whose sole object of interest was his students'

to it a Gere

The task was doomed to failure for a reason which he could not control Nothing is easier than to teach historical method, but, when learned, it has little use History is a tangled skein that one may take up at any point, and break when one has unravelled enough; but corins horribly fro, and one has but the loosest relative truths to follow up Adaed to force his material into some shape to which a method could be applied He could think only of law as subject; the Law School as end; and he took, as victi inning, as far as the books showed a beginning in prih the Salic Franks to the Norlish Since no textbooks existed, the professor refused to profess, knowing no more than his students, and the students read what they pleased and co could beholes all over the field of archaic society; no difficulty stopped thees yielded before their attack, and customary law became familiar as the police court; undoubtedly they learned, after a fashi+on, to chase an idea, like a hare, through as dense a thicket of obscure facts as they were likely to meet at the bar; but their teacher knew from his own experience that his wonderful method led nowhere, and they would have to exert theet rid of it in the Law School even e Their science had no system, and could have none, since its subject was ht, the professor could notan active ht in time train Adams as a professor, but this result was still less to his taste He wanted to help the boys to a career, but not one of his many devices to stimulate the intellectual reaction of the student's mind satisfied either him or the students

For himself he was clear that the fault lay in the systee of hi that his mind required conflict, competition, contradiction even more than that of the student He too wanted a rank-list to set his naun in the lecture-room at his own desk He would have seated a rival assistant professor opposite hi opposite views Nothing short of this would ever interest either the professor or the student; but of all university freaks, no irregularity shocked the intellectual atmosphere so much as contradiction or competition between teachers In that respect the thirteenth-century university syste of the modern school

All his pretty efforts to create conflicts of thought a his students failed for want of system None met the needs of instruction

In spite of President Eliot's reforenerous, liberal support, the system remained costly, clumsy and futile The university--as far as it was represented by Henry Adareat waste of ti

Heto inflict their results on his students, and by a happy chance he was in the full tide of fashi+on The Ger their new e his head with a halo of Pepins and Merwigs, Othos and Barbarossas James Bryce had even discovered the Holy Roman Empire Germany was never so powerful, and the assistant Professor of History had nothing else as his stock in trade He imposed Germany on his scholars with a heavy hand He was rejoiced; but he sorateful On the whole, he was content neither hat he had taught nor with the way he had taught it The seven years he passed in teaching seemed to hie As a professor, he regarded hiht he knehat he reat many experiments, and wholly succeeded in none He had succu that he tried to do He regarded the syste; more mischievous to the teachers than to the students; fallacious fro to end He quitted the university at last, in 1877, with a feeling, that, if it had not been for the invariable courtesy and kindness shown by every one in it, from the President to the injured students, he should be sore at his failure

These were his own feelings, but they see iraduate days, the college insisted on expressing an opposite view John Fiske went so far in his notice of the family in ”Appleton's Cyclopedia,” as to say that Henry had left a great reputation at Harvard College; which was a proof of John Fiske's personal regard that Adams heartily returned; and set the kind expression down to camaraderie The case was different when President Eliot hinition Adarateful was he for the rare good-will that inspired the coe to think that he esteemed himself entitled to distinction