Education of Henry Adams quote on Hullabaloo Blog

[David Morris]

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/

On page 264, Adams is telling about a dinner with journalist Adam
Badeau, a follower of Grant. In this, I don't think Reagan is the only
modern figure getting nailed, and notice how in the same passage,
Adams disproves Darwin's Theory of Evolution. True literary genius.
(Remember, too, that Adams is writing in third person.)


Badeau, who had come to Washington for a consulate which was slow to
reach him, resorted more or less to whiskey for encouragement, and
became irritable, besides being loquacious. He talked much about
Grant, and showed a certain artistic feeling for analysis of
character, as a true literary critic would naturally do. Loyal to
Grant, and still more so to Mrs. Grant, who acted as his patroness, he
said nothing, even when far gone, that was offensive about either, but
he held that no one except himself and Rawlins understood the General.
To him, Grant appeared as an intermittent energy, immensely powerful
when awake, but passive and plastic in repose. He said that neither he
nor the rest of the staff knew why Grant succeeded; they believed in
him because of his success. For stretches of time, his mind seemed
torpid. Rawlins and the others would systematically talk their ideas
into it, for weeks, not directly, but by discussion among themselves,
in his presence. In the end, he would announce the idea as his own,
without seeming conscious of the discussion; and would give the orders
to carry it out with all the energy that belonged to his nature. They
could never measure his character or be sure when he would act. They
could never follow a mental process in his thought. They were not sure
that he did think.

In all this, Adams took deep interest, for although he was not, like
Badeau, waiting for Mrs. Grant's power of suggestion to act on the
General's mind in order to germinate in a consulate or a legation, his
portrait gallery of great men was becoming large, and it amused him to
add an authentic likeness of the greatest general the world had seen
since Napoleon. Badeau's analysis was rather delicate; infinitely
superior to that of Sam Ward or Charles Nordhoff.

Badeau took Adams to the White House one evening and introduced him to
the President and Mrs. Grant. First and last, he saw a dozen
Presidents at the White House, and the most famous were by no means
the most agreeable, but he found Grant the most curious object of
study among them all. About no one did opinions differ so widely.
Adams had no opinion, or occasion to make one. A single word with
Grant satisfied him that, for his own good, the fewer words he risked,
the better. Thus far in life he had met with but one man of the same
intellectual or unintellectual type--Garibaldi. Of the two, Garibaldi
seemed to him a trifle the more intellectual, but, in both, the
intellect counted for nothing; only the energy counted. The type was
pre-intellectual, archaic, and would have seemed so even to the
cave-dwellers. Adam, according to legend, was such a man.

In time one came to recognize the type in other men, with differences
and variations, as normal; men whose energies were the greater, the
less they wasted on thought; men who sprang from the soil to power;
apt to be distrustful of themselves and of others; shy; jealous;
sometimes vindictive; more or less dull in outward appearance; always
needing stimulants, but for whom action was the highest stimulant--the
instinct of fight. Such men were forces of nature, energies of the
prime, like the Pteraspis, but they made short work of scholars. They
had commanded thousands of such and saw no more in them than in
others. The fact was certain; it crushed argument and intellect at
once.

Adams did not feel Grant as a hostile force; like Badeau he saw only
an uncertain one. When in action he was superb and safe to follow;
only when torpid he was dangerous. To deal with him one must stand
near, like Rawlins, and practice more or less sympathetic habits.
Simple-minded beyond the experience of Wall Street or State Street, he
resorted, like most men of the same intellectual calibre, to
commonplaces when at a loss for expression: "Let us have peace!" or,
"The best way to treat a bad law is to execute it"; or a score of such
reversible sentences generally to be gauged by their sententiousness;
but sometimes he made one doubt his good faith; as when he seriously
remarked to a particularly bright young woman that Venice would be a
fine city if it were drained. In Mark Twain, this suggestion would
have taken rank among his best witticisms; in Grant it was a measure
of simplicity not singular. Robert E. Lee betrayed the same
intellectual commonplace, in a Virginian form, not to the same degree,
but quite distinctly enough for one who knew the American. What
worried Adams was not the commonplace; it was, as usual, his own
education. Grant fretted and irritated him, like the Terebratula, as a
defiance of first principles. He had no right to exist. He should have
been extinct for ages. The idea that, as society grew older, it grew
one-sided, upset evolution, and made of education a fraud. That, two
thousand years after Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, a man like
Grant should be called--and should actually and truly be--the highest
product of the most advanced evolution, made evolution ludicrous. One
must be as commonplace as Grant's own commonplaces to maintain such an
absurdity. The progress of evolution from President Washington to
President Grant, was alone evidence enough to upset Darwin.