Eventually Adams’s self-identity as a historian in the strictest sense (see Fig. 1.35) rested upon his History of the United States during the First Administration of Thomas Jefferson to the Second Administration of James Madison. But when the mammoth work was completed, its author realized that the nine volumes were out of tune with the times—and with his own self. The masterpiece reflected him as he had been in 1870, rather than as he was in 1890.
The thousands of pages of his huge book, despite the many insights they afforded, failed to deconstruct the past and reconstruct it in ways opportune to foreseeing or fashioning the future of the country. After all, the nation was undergoing wrenching changes even as Henry Adams wrote. Larger ambitions may have kindled in him the desire to explicate America as it had been in 1800. Family history played a role, since that year had witnessed the trouncing of John Adams by Jefferson in the presidential election—but inflating the importance of that turning point in the Adamsian dynasty would be a misjudgment. Another of the author’s motivations may have been to make sense of 1800 while it could still be discerned in the rearview mirror as he took a spin in one of many recent inventions that were transforming the world, the automobile.
Adams accepted an appointment at Harvard University at the ripe age of thirty-two, still primed to be a wunderkind, in the very year of 1870 that he singled out in corresponding with Elizabeth Cameron. The professorship offered him was not in early American but rather in medieval history. Fortuitously, but still not irrelevantly, the future incumbent was lodging at the ruins of a medieval monastery, Wenlock Abbey, when the letter arrived that invited him to take the post. At the time, Adams was not
38 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 3
a presumptive shoo-in for the chair in terms of his intellectual profile or past track record. He had not penned a single word on any topic bearing on the Middle Ages, and his only degree was his Harvard BA. He was recruited by Charles W. Eliot (see Fig. 1.36), who had become president of the university after Henry’s father, Charles Francis Adams,had declined that post. In his autobiography, the has-been academic recounts ironically his final discussion as professor-to-be with Eliot. The tête-à-tête took place in September of 1870, after Adams had returned from Europe in the face of the Franco-Prussian war. He averred that the history of the Middle Ages was a closed book to him, but Eliot parried with a pledge: “If you will point out to me anyone who knows more, Mr. Adams, I will appoint him.” Outplayed, the prospective appointee tendered his acceptance.
The whole of France was soon to whirl downward in a prolonged tailspin.
In contrast, Harvard benefited from the overall prosperity and confidence that distinguished the United States at that time. No better barometer can be established for the balmy breezes prevailing within American culture than to observe that in 1869 and 1870 three major art museums were founded: the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, DC, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. All three brought the art of the Middle Ages in at the ground floor. More generally, all three reflected a collective, national commitment to cultural advancement and education, an enterprise that had no more prominent and affluent expression, then or now, than at the great university in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Fig. 1.35 Henry Adams. Photograph by Marian Hooper Adams, 1883. Boston, Massachusetts Historical Society, Marian Hooper Adams Photographs, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/
File:Henry_Adams_seated_at_desk_in_study,_writing,_in_light_coat,_photograph_by_Marian_
Hooper_Adams,_1883.jpg
When Adams assumed the position as a medievalist at the university, he proclaimed to a friend that he was completely unknowledgeable, indeed “utterly and grossly ignorant” of medieval history, but nonetheless undeterred. This profession of ignorance was overplayed. At least in the honeyed hindsight of the memoirs he wrote almost exactly a half century later, he had had in 1858 a warmly positive and lyrical reaction to his very first unmediated exposure to the Middle Ages. In that year, he experienced his first European town, in the form of Antwerp (see Fig. 1.37). Although Adams overstated his dearth of knowledge, the move to the professorship at Harvard did dragoon him into embarking upon a sustained mission of self-education. In many regards, he was an amateur antiquarian where the Middle Ages were concerned. Soon he was held accountable for a thousand years of history, and taught a general survey of Europe from the tenth to sixteenth centuries.
In The Education of Henry Adams, Adams felt impelled to label “Failure” the chapter on his years as a Harvard faculty member. His own worst critic, and yet never lacking confidence, he could not give himself a passing mark. Not a decade after taking his professorship as if it had been potluck, he left the university to seek further education in an unexpected place, outside any institution, as a gentleman and a scholar. Initially, he remained at least in aspiration a historian, but his identity allowed and even compelled him to have other ambitions, for both power and creation.
Fig. 1.36 Charles William Eliot. Photograph by E. Chickering & Co., 1904. Washington, DC, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
40 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 3
Fig. 1.37 Antwerp Cathedral. Engraving, 1855. Artist unknown. Charles A. Dana, ed., Meyer’s Universum: Views of the Most Remarkable Places and Objects of All Countries
(New York: H. J. Meyer, 1855), 6390.