Page:The Education of Henry Adams (1907).djvu/381

 knowing too much of his neighbors, and thinking too much of himself. Many years earlier "William M. Evarts had pointed out to Adams the impossibility of uniting New England behind a New England leader. The trait led to good ends,—such as admiration of Abraham Lincoln and George Washington,—but the virtue was exacting; for New England standards were various, scarcely reconcileable with each other, and constantly multiplying in number, until balance between them threatened to become impossible. The old ones were quite difficult enough:—State Street and the Banks exacted one stamp; the old congregational clergy another; Harvard College, poor in votes, but rich in social influence, a third; the foreign element, especially the Irish, held aloof, and seldom consented to approve anyone; the new socialist class, rapidly growing, promised to become more exclusive than the Irish. New power was disintegrating society, and setting independent centres of force to work, until money had all it could do to hold the machine together. No one could represent it faithfully as a whole.

Naturally, Adams's sympathies lay strongly with Lodge, but the task of appreciation was much more difficult in his case than in that of his chief friend and scholar, the President. As a type for study, or a standard for education, Lodge was the more interesting of the two. Roosevelts are born and never can be taught; but Lodge was a creature of teaching,—Boston incarnate,—the child of his local parentage; and while his ambition led him to be more, the intent, though virtuous, was,—as Adams admitted in his own case,—restless. An excellent talker, a voracious reader, a ready wit, an accomplished orator, with a clear mind and a powerful memory, he could never feel perfectly at ease whatever leg he stood on, but shifted, sometimes with painful strain of temper, from one sensitive muscle to another, uncertain whether to pose as an uncompromising Yankee; or a pure American; or a patriot in the still purer atmosphere of Irish, Germans or Jews; or a scholar and historian of Harvard College. English to the last fibre of his thought,—saturated with English literature, English tradition, English taste,—revolted by every vice and by most virtues of Frenchmen and Germans, or any other continental standards, but at home and happy among the vices and extravagances of Shakespeare;—standing first on the social, then on the political foot; now worshipping, now banning; shocked by the wanton