STEPHEN MILLER
267
close at hand, for the old one had plainly reached the end of his
strength, and his failure had become catastrophic.
But he knows something that the new man doesn't know: "The two–
thousand-years failure of Christianity roared upward from Broadway,
and no Constantine the Great was in sight."
Adams's pessimism-especially his attempt to use science to predict
the future-did not sit well with William James, who told him: "I don't
follow or share your way of conceiving the historical problem as the
determination of a curve by points." James praised only the boyhood
part of
The Education.
As for the rest, he offered Adams a dubious com–
pliment: "There is a hodge-podge of world-fact, private fact, philoso–
phy, irony, (with the word 'education' stirred in too much for my
appreciation!) which gives a unique cachet to the thing, and gives a very
pleasant
Gesammteindruck
of H.A.'s
Self."
William James strongly
implies that
The Education
is incoherent.
Responding to William james's critique, Adams characteristically
mocks his efforts: "I am the champion failer of all," he says, adding that
the book is a failed "literary experiment" that should be thrown into the
fire.
In
a subsequent letter to William James, he says that his book is
"rotten" because his mind has gone to seed. "You do not reflect that I am
seventy years old-yesterday,-and quite senile." Admitting that he
"had a weakness for science mixed with metaphysics," Adams was very
much aware that his voyages into strange seas of thought were regarded
by many of his friends as foolish, so he often laced his abstruse scientific–
historic speculations with self-mockery.
On May 6,1908, Adams sent Henry James a copy of
The Education,
this time strongly implying that it is an autobiography, not a represen–
tative portrait of his generation. The volume, he says, "is a mere shield
of protection in the grave. I advise you to take your own life in the same
way, in order to prevent biographers from taking it in theirs." Two days
later James thanked him profusely for the book, but he didn't comment
on it until August 3
I,
1909-more than a year later. Praising the book
as "admirable
&
intensely interesting," James apologized for not reply–
ing earlier. "I speak of the reasons for my ugly dumbness as many, but
they really all come back to my having been left by you with the crush–
ing consciousness of far too much to say. I lost myself in your ample
pages as in a sea of memories
&
visions
&
associations-I dived deep,
&
I think I felt your extraordinary element." He continues in this ful–
some vein for another two sentences-not saying anything specific
