STEPHEN MILLER
265
diminished thing of the life being recounted. "The truth is that any
retraced story of bourgeois lives...throws a chill upon the scene, the time,
the subject, the small mapped-out facts....The art of the biographer–
devilish art!-is somehow practically
thinning.
It
simplifies even while
seeking to enrich.. ..The proof is that I wanted to invest dear old Boston
with a mellow, a golden glow-and that for those who know, like your–
self, I only make it bleak-and weak!" James clearly disagrees with
Adams's view of "dear old Boston," but he tactfully says that it is the dis–
tortions of biography that account for Adams's negative view of their
common past.
In many respects,
The Education
is an elaboration of the main point
of Adams's letter to James, which is that "we knew nothing." In a letter
to a friend, Adams suggests that the book is a call for educational reform:
"Please try...to think of it
[The Education]
as what it was written for–
a serious effort to reform American education by showing what it ought
to be." This remark makes little sense, for the main point of
The Educa–
tion
is that reform-educational reform, immigration reform, political
reform-is pointless. "Above all, it [the scientific view of history] was
profoundly unmoral, and tended to discourage effort." According to
Adams, science-or more specifically the kinetic theory of gas-predicted
the acceleration of history. "Therefore, dispute was idle, discussion was
futile, and silence, next to good-temper, was the mark of sense.
If
the
acceleration, measured by the development and economy of forces, were
to continue at its rate since 1890, the mathematician of 1950 should be
able to plot the past and future orbit of the human race as accurately as
that of the November meteoroids." There was nothing to do but "wait
the end." Or try, as Adams did, to plot the grim future.
In a sense, then, everyone is unfit for a future that promises doom,
yet Adams says that his generation was more unfit than others to suc–
ceed in the new world of late nineteenth-century America . In the second
paragraph of
The Education,
he claims that his chances of success are
as poor as that of a Jew. "Had he been born in Jerusalem under the
shadow of the Temple and circumcised in the Synagogue by his uncle the
high priest, under the name of Israel Cohen, he would scarcely have
been more distinctly branded, and not much more heavily handicapped
in the races of the coming century, in running for such stakes as the century
was to offer." Yet later in the book he strongly implies that the Jews are
far more likely than he is to succeed. "His world was dead. Not a Pol–
ish 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 surer
