Part 15 (2/2)

He knew better, and his was ah to deserve self-respect Yet nothing in the vanity of life struck hie, which he had persistently criticised, abused, abandoned, and neglected, should alone have offered hieht have its faults, but at least it redeemed America, since it was true to its own

The only part of education that the professor thought a success was the students He found them excellent company Cast more or less in the same mould, without violent emotions or sentinorant of all that ht or hoped, their estion They were quick to respond; plastic to a ue Their faith in education was so full of pathos that one dared not ask theot it Adams did put the question to one of theree of Harvard College is worth o” This reply upset his experience; for the degree of Harvard College had been rather a drawback to a young ton So far as it went, the ansas good, and settled one's doubts Adaiven twenty years to pursuing the same education, and was no nearer a result than they He still had to take for grantedthe rest, that his teaching did theood he could do theue They needed much faith then; they were likely to need

He never knehether his colleagues shared his doubts about their own utility Unlike himself, they knew more or less their business He could not tell his scholars that history gloith social virtue; the Professor of Chemistry cared not a chemical atom whether society was virtuous or not Adams could not pretend that mediaeval society proved evolution; the Professor of Physics slad to dwell on the virtues of the Church and the triumphs of its art: the Professor of Political Economy had to treat them as waste of force They knehat they had to teach; he did not

Theyit; but he knew certainly nothing else of hi; he was only educating hih affair, and every instructor has to shut his eyes and hold his tongue as though he were a priest The students alone satisfied They thought they gained so Perhaps they did, for even in America and in the twentieth century, life could not be wholly industrial Adaht re twenty years more to pass, and they should turn on him as fiercely as he had turned on his old instructors--what answer could he uilty, and tried to reforuilty from the start, and his refore

The lecture-rooh, but the faculty-room orse American society feared total wreck in the maelstrom of political and corporate ade dons Adaressresse Several score of the best-educated, reeable, and personally the e to make a social desert that would have starved a polar bear

The liveliest and reeable of assiz, his son Alexander, Gurney, John Fiske, William James and a dozen others, ould have made the joy of London or Paris--tried their best to break out and be like other e and Boston, but society called them professors, and professors they had to be While all these brilliant reedy for companionshi+p, all were fa without business The elements were there; but society cannot be made up of elements--people who are expected to be silent unless they have observations to make--and all the elements are bound to remain apart if required to make observations

Thus it turned out that of all his ht that of school-teacher the thinnest Yet he was forced to admit that the education of an editor, in some ways, was thinner still The editor had barely time to edit; he had none to write If copy fell short, he was obliged to scribble a book-review on the virtues of the Anglo-Saxons or the vices of the Popes; for he knew more about Edward the Confessor or Boniface VIII than he did about President Grant For seven years he wrote nothing; the Review lived on his brother Charles's railway articles The editor could help others, but could do nothing for hiotten by the time he had been an editor for twelve months As editor he could find no writer to take his place for politics and affairs of current concern The Review becarave helped hie whose successes, if he ht easily bankrupt himself Such a Reviewease The secrets of success as an editor were easily learned; the highest was that of getting advertise made an editor a success; five marked him as a failure The merits or demerits of his literature had little to do with his results except when they led to adversity

A year or two of education as editor satiated most of his appetite for that career as a profession After a very slight experience, he said noto let any one edit, if he hi's life when it did not succeed, and little better when it did A professor had at least the pleasure of associating with his students; an editor lived the life of an owl A professor coue or a pedant; an editor beca On the whole, Adaton He was educated enough Ignorance paid better, for at least it earned fifty dollars a month

With this result Henry Adams's education, at his entry into life, stopped, and his life began He had to take that life as he best could, with such accidental education as luck had given hiin again, he would do it on a better systeht he knew nearly what systeot his head above water so far as to serve for a model, as he did twenty or thirty years afterwards; but the editorshi+p of the North American Review had one solitary merit; it made the editor acquainted at a distance with almost every one in the country who could write or who could be the cause of writing Ada these clever people as one of the hi them, only one stood out in extraordinary prominence as the type and model of what Adams would have liked to be, and of what the American, as he conceived, should have been and was not

Thanks to the article on Sir Charles Lyell, Adaists, and the extent of his knowledge mattered eologists were as a class not much better off than himself, and friends were sorely few

One of his friends frohbor in Quincy, Frank Eist and joined the Fortieth Parallel Survey under Governton in the winter of 1869-70, Eo out with him on one of the field-parties in summer Of course when Adams took the Review he put it at the service of the Survey, and regretted only that he could not dowas at last over, and his July North A breath of relief, and took the next train for the West Of his year's work he was no judge He had becoe mechanism, and his work counted only in the sum; but he had been treated civilly by everybody, and he felt at ho in his pocket the July number of the North American, with a notice of the Fortieth Parallel Survey by Professor J D Whitney, he started for the plains and the Rocky Mountains

In the year 1871, the West was still fresh, and the Union Pacific was young Beyond the Missouri River, one felt the ates of an old education, worth studying if one would; but it was not that which Adaht; rather, he came out to spy upon the land of the future The Survey occasionally borrowed troopers fro on hostile Indians, but otherwise the topographers and geologists thought more about minerals than about Sioux They held under their hammers a thousand miles of mineral country with all its riddles to solve, and its stores of possible wealth to mark They felt the future in their hands

Eue's had coe of Ada to the story of education They were all hardened ranted, and spared each other the lish and Scotch life, the stories of the big game they killed A bear was an occasional amusement; a wapiti was a constant necessity; but the only wild anierous to man was a rattlesnake or a skunk One shot for amusement, but one had other a it up; so that he rarely unslung the little carbine he was in a manner required to carry On the other hand, he liked to wander off alone on hisawhen the party was ca's Peak, he borrowed a rod, and rode down over a rough trail into Estes Park, for some trout The day was fine, and hazy with the smoke of forest fires a thousand lish beauties off to the base of its bordering mountains in natural landscape and archaic peace; the strea its banks Hour after hour the sun moved ard and the fish ether, until at last when the fisherht Darkness caught hi to tumble into some fifty-foot hole, he ”allowed”

he was lost, and turned back In half-an-hour he was out of the hills, and under the stars of Estes Park, but he saw no prospect of supper or of bed

Estes Park was large enough to serve for a bed on a suht for an army of professors, but the supper question offered difficulties There was but one cabin in the Park, near its entrance, and he felt no great confidence in finding it, but he thought his mule cleverer than hiainst the stars fenced his range of error The patient entle slope of the ground, and soht showed in the distance As the mule came up to the cabin door, two or three er

One of theseon his way up to the camp

Adams fell into his arrowth or doubt Friends are born in archaic horizons; they were shaped with the Pteraspis in Siluria; they have nothing to do with the accident of space King had coy, over a trail hardly fit for a commissariat mule, as Aday In the cabin, luxury provided a roouests They shared the roo had everything to interest and delight Adams He knew more than Adams did of art and poetry; he knew America, especially west of the hundredth meridian, better than any one; he knew the professor by heart, and he knew the Congressman better than he did the professor He knew even women; even the A ood for hieneration further than the text-books That he saw right was a differentof tiht; the charreat deal y which swept every one into the current of his interest; his personal char, profusely, lavishly, whether in thought or in h he were Nature herself,A of the Greek--a touch of Alcibiades or Alexander One Clarence King only existed in the world

A new friend is always a miracle, but at thirty-three years old, such a bird of paradise rising in the sage-brush was an avatar

One friend in a lifetime is much; two are many; three are hardly possible Friendshi+p needs a certain parallelis, like Ada the critical point of his career The one, co from the west, saturated with the sunshi+ne of the Sierras, s of London, and both had the same problems to handle--the same stock of implements--the same field to work in; above all, the sa's charreat, but this was not the quality that so much attracted Adaround Adaot it; and he was never guilty of a witticis and the Fortieth Parallel influenced hied, but King had ically, scientifically, as Adaiven hi in the ether, he could look back and look forward on a straight line, with scientific knowledge for its base Adams's life, past or future, was a succession of violent breaks or waves, with no base at all King's abnorreat success

None of his contele-handed, or were likely to leave so deep a trail He had ress to adopt alanized, as a civil--not military--measure, a Government Survey He had paralleled the Continental Railway in Geology; a feat as yet unequalled by other governments which had as a rule no continents to survey He was creating one of the classic scientific works of the century The chances were great that he could, whenever he chose to quit the Governold and silver, copper or coal, and build up his fortune as he pleased Whatever prize he wanted lay ready for him--scientific social, literary, political--and he kne to take thehty the richest and oistic he was that none of his friends felt envy of his extraordinary superiority, but rather grovelled before it, so that women were jealous of the power he had over s were one The men worshi+pped not so much their friend, as the ideal American they all wanted to be The wo had no faith in the A men of the Fortieth Parallel had Californian instincts; they were brothers of Bret Harte They felt no leanings towards the simple uniforht and ies; to thee; they cared little for simplicity and much for complexity; but it was the complexity of Nature, not of New York or even of the Mississippi Valley King loved paradox; he started theht or lost; but they delighted Adas, to persuade hi than science The only question left open to doubt was their relative money value

In Emmons's camp, far up in the Uintahs, these talks were continued till the frosts became sharp in the mountains History and science spread out in personal horizons towards goals no longer far away No more education was possible for either ot to stand the chances of the world they lived in; and when Adaain the humble tasks of schoolmaster and editor he was harnessed to his cart Education, systematic or accidental, had done its worst Henceforth, he went on, submissive

CHAPTER XXI

TWENTY YEARS AFTER (1892)