268
PARTISAN REVIEW
about the book. James undoubtedly read the boyhood part, but one
wonders if he read the rest.
Many of Adams's friends were not impressed by
The Education.
Sena–
tor Henry Cabot Lodge disliked the way Adams treated him; the
medievalist Henry Osborn Taylor, who had been Adams's student at Har–
vard in the
I870S,
wrote in his copy: "In this book the mind of Henry
Adams rattles around the universe to little purpose." Charles W. Eliot, the
President of Harvard, was reported to have said about Adams and his
autobiography: "An overrated man and a much overrated book."
The verdict of posterity was far more favorable.
The Education
became a best-seller when it was published in
1918
(in
1916
Adams
approved its publication after his death), and in
1919
it won a Pulitzer
Prize. Reprinted many times thereafter,
The Education
has been regarded
by many critics as one of the classics of American literature as well as a
key modernist text. Recently,
The Education
was voted the best nonfic–
tion book of the century by a panel of historians, scientists, and book
critics.
It
influenced, among others,
T.
S. Eliot, who reviewed it favorably
in
1919.
The book was popular because its deep pessimism about the
future of Western civilization struck a chord. World War I persuaded
many people that Adams was right to have spoken of catastrophe and
chaos, and he was right to have spoken of the illusions of turn-of-the–
century America. "Few centres of great energy," Adams says in
The Edu–
cation,
"lived in illusion more complete or archaic than Washington."
But Adams, as we have seen, had his own illusions about the power of
Jews and about a science of history. Why did the supposed machinations
of Jewish financiers loom so large in his mind if, as he says, "no one was
to blame"?
If
anyone pressed him on his theories of doom, Adams
always had an answer: self-mockery.
It
was his shield of protection-not
only in his letters but in
The Education
itself. "Did he himself quite know
what he meant? Certainly not!" Or: "He seemed to know nothing-to
be groping in darkness-to be falling forever in space; and the worst
depth consisted in the assurance, incredible as it seemed, that no one
knew more."
Adams often defended himself by pleading ignorance and confusion.
"No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for
words are slippery and thought is viscous." This is a dodge, for Adams
meant what he said about Jews and about a science of history; he was
serious, his self-mockery notwithstanding. The self-mockery is a pre–
ventive defense; he calls himself a fool before anyone else does.
It
is also
a dodge to say that "thought is viscous." There are degrees of viscosity.
Adams's attempt to wring non-scientific meanings from scientific laws
