Page:The Education of Henry Adams (1907).djvu/78

 of mastery;—"I came to Berlin, unable to say a word in the language; and three months later when I went away, I talked it to my cabman." Adams felt himself quite unable to attain in so short a time such social advantages, and one day complained of his trials to Mr. Robert Abthorp of Boston who was passing the winter in Berlin for the sake of its music. Mr. Abthorp told of his own similar struggle, and how he had entered a public school and sat for months with ten-year-old boys, reciting their lessons and catching their phrases. The idea suited Adams's desperate frame of mind. At least it ridded him of the University and the Civil Law and American associations in beer-cellars. Mr. Abthorp took the trouble to negotiate with the head-master of the Friedrichs-Wilhelm-Werdersches Gymnasium for permission to Henry Adams to attend the school as a member of the Ober-tertia, a class of boys twelve or thirteen years old, and there Adams went for three months as though he had not always avoided high-schools with singular antipathy. He never did anything else so foolish, but he was given a bit of education which served him some purpose in life.

It was not merely the language, though three months passed in such fashion would teach a poodle enough to talk with a cabman, and this was all that foreign students could expect to do, for they never by any chance would come in contact with German society, if German society existed, about which they knew nothing. Adams never learned to talk German well, but the same might be said of his English, if he could believe Englishmen. He learned not to annoy himself on this account. His difficulties with the language gradually ceased. He thought himself quite Germanised in 1859. He even deluded himself with the idea that he read it as though it were English, which proved that he knew little about it; but whatever success he had in his own experiment, interested him less than his contact with German education.

He had revolted at the American school and university; he had instantly rejected the German University; and as his last experience of education he tried the German high-school. The experiment was hasardous. In 1858 Berlin was a poor, keen-witted, provincial town, simple, dirty, uncivilised, and in most respects disgusting. Life was primitive beyond what an American boy could have imagined. Overridden by military methods and bureaucratic pettiness, Prussia was only beginning to free her hands