IN Mount Vernon Street, in the third house below Mount Vernon Place, Boston, a child was born on February 16, 1838. That child was Henry Adams. When the fairies came to visit the cradle, Pleasure, Wealth, and Fame all passed the infant by. But one fairy remained behind to bless. It was not, however, Macaulay's 'glorious lady with the eyes of light' - the spirit who brought to him 'the sense of Beauty and the thirst of Truth.' It was a guide and a guardian much more conscious, much more complex, and much more elusive. She who laid her hand on the head of Henry Adams was the Fairy Ironia, the spirit who sees too far and yet not far enough, who feels deeply the sense of tears in mortal things, but sees also that kindly, that divine humor in the universe which so often reconciles man to his destiny while it appears to mock him. It was the true Ironia of Socrates, of Greek Tragedy, and also of those later thinkers to whose inspiring genius the name of Romantic Irony has been given.

He, then, who would understand Adams must banish from his thought all idea of the pseudo-irony of later times. He must forego that degraded sense of the word which makes Ironia a smirking and satirical jade, with a hard, cruel laugh, instead of the gentle smile of pity and humor, which teaches but does not deride, which redeems the human heart from its most profound discouragements, which may bring a remedy even to those to whom has come the dreadful revelation that things done can never be undone, that not even the gods upon the past have power, and that acts and their consequences are for all time inseparable.

It was the faculty of Irony that inspired and ruled the life of Henry Adams, perhaps more than of any man of whom we have a conscious record. Though in this singular book (written originally for his private friends in the year 1907, and now given to the world with an Introduction by Senator Lodge) the word 'irony,' as far as we can discover, never occurs, the whole book is shot through and through in every line and every word with that strange quality.

Irony may no doubt in one sense have unmanned and undone Henry Adams, but also in just as strong a sense it saved and made him. But for the ironic sense which caused him to regard his whole life as a long endeavor of the unteachable to be taught, and made him call his autobiography The Education of Henry Adams, we feel that with him the wells of existence would have been broken up. Being the man he was, he could not have lived without the sustaining sense of the true Irony. It was his consolation even as it was his cross. So strongly does the present writer feel this, that if he were asked to write an inscription for the tomb of Henry Adams he would model it on the greatest of fanciful epitaphs the epitaph which in the Cathedral Chapel of Christ Church, Oxford, preserves the memory of John Burton, the Anatomist of Melancholy. For Henry Adams the words would run: Paucis notus,

Paucioribus ignotus Cui vitam dedit

Et mortem Ironia.

As surely as Melancholy bestowed life as well as death upon Burton, Irony bestowed the joint gift upon Henry

Adams. And Henry Adams was, like Burton, essentially the man known to few, and yet to fewer unknown. All the more strongly because only half consciously, all the better minds in America felt that in Henry Adams a great, if a strange and wayward, intellectual force was at work. Henry Adams wrote only one book of importance, his history of Jefferson's administration, but all those who know how difficult it is to write history in true focus, and to prevent the vision becoming distorted in dealing with a piece of history treated minutely and in great detail, will realize that that work is by no means among the least worthy of those gifts with which the Muse Clio has endowed the modern world. Whether it was accident or some conscious effort that made Henry Adams choose this particular period we do not know, but at any rate it was one which would naturally appeal to a man with a sense of the irony of human events. As Adams himself points out, how could political Irony go further than to place Jefferson, the intellectual Sansculotte, in such a position that he had to declare war upon the French Republic, and make it the very first duty of the man who went to Washington as President in the spirit of the bare-footed friar of Jacobinical democracy to arrange a table of precedence for the politicians and officials of the Capital of the Union!

He who turns from this review to the book itself may very likely at first be amazed that we have found so much that is strange, wayward, nay, unnatural, in a book which appears to begin like an ordinary autobiography. Yet, if he takes the trouble to go through with the work, he will, we believe, find justification for our interpretation on almost every page. It is wonderfully impressive thus to learn, though never from his own words, that

Adams found the world in which he lived an almost unintelligible riddle, yet a riddle which he felt under bond to assail—which he dared not neglect. The pathos of the situation would have been unbearable but for that irony of which we have spoken the faculty which gives us the remedy for our dread inheritance of pity and terror. Perhaps one of the best ways in which we can illustrate what we mean is by quoting the passage which describes how Henry Adams, who had been for some five years his father's Private Secretary in the American Legation in London, returned to America in the year 1868:

At ten o'clock of a July night, in heat that made the tropical rain-shower simmer, the Adams family and the Motley family clambered down the side of their Cunard steamer into the government tugboat, which set them ashore in black darkness at the end of some North River pier. Had they been Tyrian traders of the year B.C. 1000, landing from a galley fresh from Gibraltar, they could hardly have been stranger on the shore of a world, so changed from what it had been ten years before. The historian of the Dutch, no longer historian but diplomatist, started up an unknown street, in company with the private secretary who had become private citizen, in search of a carriage to convey the two parties to the Brevoort House. The pursuit was arduous, but successful. Towards midnight they found shelter once more in their native land. How much its character had changed or was changing, they could not wholly know, and they could but partly feel. For that matter, the land itself knew no more than they. Society in America was always trying, almost as blindly as an earthworm, to realize and understand itself; to catch up with its own head, and to twist about in search of its tail. Society offered the profile of a long, straggling caravan,

stretching loosely towards the prairies, its

few score of leaders far in advance and its millions of immigrants, negroes, and Indians far in the rear, somewhere in archaic time. It enjoyed the vast advantage over Europe that all seemed, for the moment, to move in one direction, while Europe wasted most of its energy in trying several

contradictory movements at once; but whenever Europe or Asia should be polarized or oriented towards the same point, America might easily lose her lead. Meanwhile each newcomer needed to slip into a place as near the head of the caravan as possible, and needed most to know where the leaders could be found. One could divine pretty nearly where the force lay, since the last ten years had given to the great mechanical energies — coal, iron, steam a distinct superiority in power over the old industrial elements agriculture, handwork, and learning; but the result of this

revolution on a survivor from the fifties resembled the action of the earthworm; he twisted about, in vain, to recover his starting-point; he could no longer see his own trail; he had become an estray; a flotsam or jetsam of wreckage; a belated reveler, or a scholar-gypsy like Matthew Arnold's. His world was dead. Not a Polish Jew fresh from Warsaw or Cracow - not a furtive Yacoob or Ysaac still reeking of the Ghetto, snarling a weird Yiddish to the officers of the Customs but had a keener instinct, an intenser energy, and a freer hand than he American of Americans, with Heaven knew how many Puritans and Patriots behind him, and an education that had cost a civil war. He made no complaint and found no fault with his time; he was no worse off than the Indians or the buffalo who had been ejected from their heritage by his own people; but he vehemently insisted that he was not himself at fault. The defeat was not due to him, nor yet to any superiority of his rivals. He had been unfairly forced out of the track, and must get back into it as best he could.

But perhaps the strangest thing in this strange book is that these passages are intermingled with a great deal of very interesting positive history, especially as concerns the relations between the United States and the United Kingdom during the Civil War. If Adams is not always quite fair to the British government, he certainly always meant to be fair, and he knew how to discriminate. Incidentally, we get most memorable pictures of Lord John Russell, Palmerston, and Gladstone. The touches in regard to Palmerston, indeed, can never be neglected by any future English historian who wants

to paint in full the strange picture of the whiskered Cupid of the Middle Victorian age. Henry Adams does what very few people have ever done. He dares to tell the whole unfortunate story of Gladstone's southern proclivities without hiding anything or setting down aught in kindliness rather than truth. After declaring sardonically that Gladstone was 'the only resolute, vehement, conscientious champion of Russell, Napoleon, and Jefferson Davis,' Adams thus paints the three British statesmen:

Young Adams thought Earl Russell a statesman of the old school, clear about his objects and unscrupulous in his methods dishonest but strong. Russell ardently asserted that he had no objects, and that though he might be weak he was above all else honest. Minister Adams leaned to Russell personally and thought him true, but officially, in practice, treated him as false. Punch, before 1862, commonly drew Russell as a schoolboy telling lies, and afterwards as prematurely senile, at seventy. Education stopped there. No one, either in or out of England, ever offered a rational explanation of Earl Russell Palmerston was simple so simple as to mislead the student altogether but scarcely more consistent. The world thought him positive, decided, reckless; the record proved him to be cautious, careful, vacillating. Minister Adams took him for pugnacious and quarrelsome; the 'Lives' of Russell, Gladstone, and Granville show him to have been good-tempered, conciliatory, avoiding quarrels. He surprised the Minister by refusing to pursue his attack on General Butler. He tried to check Russell. He scolded Gladstone. He discouraged Napoleon. Except Disraeli none of the English statesmen were so cautious as he in talking of America. Palmerston told no falsehoods; made no professions; concealed no opinions; was detected in no double-dealing. The most mortifying failure in Henry Adams's long education was that, after forty years of confirmed dislike, distrust, and detraction of Lord Palmerston, he was obliged at last to admit himself in error, and to consent in spirit - for by that time he was nearly as dead as any of them -to beg his pardon. Gladstone was quite another story, but with him a student's difficulties were less because they were shared by all the world,,

including Gladstone himself. He was the sum of contradictions. The highest education could reach, in this analysis, only a reduction to the absurd, but no absurdity that a young man could reach in 1862 would have approached the level that Mr. Gladstone admitted, proclaimed, in his confessions of 1896, which brought all reason and all hope of education to a stillstand.

We have put up a finger-post to this most haunting, attractive, and stimulating book. And, strange to say, it is stimulating although the whole effort of the writer seems to be to drag the reader down with him into spiritual depths no plummet has ever sounded. We can only say, in leaving Henry Adams's Animi Figura, that if our review is inadequate, which we frankly admit it is, it is because no review not as long as the book itself could be adequate. It is a book which can only tell its own tale. There are some things in regard to which interpretation is impossible. At least we are in good company. Senator Lodge, who understood Adams better than any of his contemporaries, in his Editorial Preface, when he attempts to make us understand the book by quoting a passage from Henry Adams's Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres, only darkens the gloom. All we can

The Spectator

do is to leave our readers to the pleasure or pain, for there will be both, of studying The Education of Henry Adams for themselves, and we hope it will not be long before Messrs. Houghton Mifflin will have sent a competent stock of copies to England. At present we believe that the book is not obtainable in this country.

One word more. It is a source of pride to the Spectator that perhaps Henry Adams's last published utterance was a letter from him to Lord Newton which we were allowed to print (October 21, 1914) in our columns. It was a letter of generous sympathy with the Allies and of warm feeling towards England. In truth Adams loved our people and our island, though it was part of the universal irony that he should so often have to conceal his affection under the guise of strongly hostile criticism. But hostile as his criticism sounds, it can never deceive those who have followed the secret of Henry Adams's life, or say, rather, of his education the education so earnestly sought for but never found. Though the best of good Americans, his was essentially Anima naturaliter Anglicana.

FOREMOST among President Wilson's Fourteen Points, the prelude to the international incidents, since watched with world-wide interest from day to day, comes the simple announcement, 'No secret diplomacy.' That to old Foreign Office hands would have seemed a curt message that their occupation was gone; it has indeed been progressively discredited since its failure to prevent Turkey from joining the war on the German side. Subsequent occurrences have thrown some doubt on the wisdom of withholding passports from the Labor Party for the Socialist Congress at Stockholm. Here, again, our diplomacy showed a shortsightedness and lack of resource that have so often been the cause of complications and failures, perfectly avoidable with a little more imagination, tempered by practical shrewdness. The conversations between Socialist delegates of every nation would have committed no European government, and might have served a most useful purpose in enlightening German opinion as to the amount of outside popular support to be looked for by the German government when contemplating the manipulation of Socialist ideas to Imperial ends. This might at least have proved a step in the direction of peace.

What actually happened? The Bolsheviki promptly prepared to resent the refusal of passports by a course of conduct aggravating and multiplying tenfold the difficulties of the position. Meanwhile, changes or rumors of change in our diplomatic personnel brought the

prevailing uncertainty and confusion to the verge of chaos. The best of all envoys to Washington is a lawyer. Lord Reading, having crossed the Atlantic, was not likely to wear out his welcome, and need not have been recalled. The bestowal of two great prizes, Paris and Petrograd, in our international service had still to be awarded. Had the late Sir Henry Austin Lee replaced Sir George Buchanan in the once capital of the Tsar, he would have brought to his position a knowledge of the Russian language unique among the members of his profession. As our representative in the Rue Faubourg-Saint-Honoré he would have seemed to social, political, and popular Paris at last the right man in the right place. During an entire generation he had been greeted by every class and every interest, not merely as the great official of a popular ally, but as a typical specimen of the English resident with a happy gift of being all things to all

men.

As British representative on the Suez Canal Board, on the Seine, on the Thames (1875), as secretary of the Channel Tunnel Commission, he found himself among familiar faces in each capacity. Allied with Sir John Pilter, doyen of the British colony, he combined diplomacy with business in the management of Anglo-French institutions like the British Charitable Fund, the British schools, and the Hertford Hospital. His acquaintance with French life and character began with his Red Cross work under Lord Wantage before he entered the Foreign