Page:The Education of Henry Adams (1907).djvu/279

 the Holy Roman Empire. Germany was never so powerful, and the Assistant Professor of History had nothing else as his stock in trade. He imposed Germany on his scholars with a heavy hand. He was rejoiced; but he sometimes doubted whether they should be grateful. On the whole, he was content neither with what he had taught nor with the way he had taught it. The seven years he passed in teaching seemed to him lost.

The uses of adversity are beyond measure strange. As a Professor, he regarded himself as a failure. Without false modesty he thought he knew what he meant. He had tried a great many experiments, and wholly succeeded in none. He had succumbed to the weight of the system. He had accomplished nothing that he tried to do. He regarded the system as wrong; more mischievous to the teachers than to the students; fallacious from the beginning to end. He quitted the University at last, in 1877, with a feeling, that, if it had not been for the invariable courtesy and kindness shown by everyone in it, from the President to the injured students, he should be sore at his failure.

These were his own feelings, but they seemed not to be felt in the College. With the same perplexing impartiality that had so much disconcerted him in his undergraduate days, the College insisted on expressing an opposite view. John Fiske went so far in his notice of the family in Appleton's Cyclopedia, as to say that Henry had left a great reputation at Harvard College; which was a proof of John Fiske's personal regard that Adams heartily returned; and set the kind expression down to camaraderie. The case was different when President Eliot himself hinted that Adams's services merited recognition. Adams could have wept on his shoulder in hysterics, so grateful was he for the rare good-will that inspired the compliment; but he could not allow the College to think that he esteemed himself entitled to distinction. He knew better, and his was among the failures which were respectable enough to deserve self-respect. Yet nothing in the vanity of life struck him as more humiliating than that Harvard College, which he had persistently criticised, abused, abandoned and neglected, should alone have offered him a dollar, an office, an encouragement or a kindness. Harvard College might have its faults, but at least it redeemed America, since it was true to its own.