LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.
[Letters of the length of one of our leading paragraphs arc often more read, and therefore more effective, than those which treble the space.] THE LATE MR. HENRY ADAMS.
[TO THE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR."]
Sia—There died in Washington in Holy Week an American whose passing even in these prodigious days will stir memories for those of us who ourselves approach the Great Crossing. Henry Adams was here as secretary to his father, the American Minister to the Court of St. James, during the very anxious days of the Lincoln Administration and the " Trent episode." He was the grandson of John Quincy Adams, the sixth President, and the great-grand- eon of the second President, and always, it seemed to me, in the regard of Washington there was some slight dynastic recognition of this illustrious ancestry. Or was the perhaps almost deference paid him because Adams was not like other mortals ? He was rather a " man with a mask," except to that small circle of friends wherein he was expansive. I must not do more than merely note that his place in permanent literature is secure. The beauty of his English—nor is this less true of his brothers Charles Francis and Brooks—is a fount of pure delight.
Adams and John Hay, their houses in Lafayette Square actually under the same roof, were devoted friends. Every afternoon, winter and summer, the two strolled up Connecticut Avenue, passed the British Embassy, and had, be sure, something jocular but agreeable to say about those lions couchant! Thence the walk took the direction of Dupont Circle, till they were lost to our view. Adams for the last quarter of a century appears to have had a mystic's premonition of this world-war. No one who, like the writer, was privileged to see much of him but will recall his strange lucubrations as to chaos and some cosmic disaster at hand. He would generally foreshadow these convulsions with a smiling face. More than once I asked him, was he the least in earnest ? He would counter such a question probably with " What is jest and what is earnest ?" A friend who saw him but a few days before his death, and who sends me a farewell greeting from him, writes of him words the vraisentblance of which his few surviving friends will recognize :— " The dear old man was kindly, courteous, and sarcastic to the last. With him passes the last link of the old-time Washington. He remembered what it was before the Civil War, and he had watched it all the days since. But never had he noted such changes as those of the last two years, and was devoutly awaiting a comet to engulf it! There was a service in the House in the afternoon. He lay in the midst of all the books, pictures, and objets d'art you remember, and in the room where Hay, Roosevelt, Cabot Lodge, John Lafarge, Clarence King, St. Gaudens, had so often met. I noticed only Harry White, Alice Roosevelt, and Jusserand. Washington has just begun to warn to spring. There
is a bursting forth of Japanese trees and shrubs in every corner. A southern balm is in the air, but the old quiet and diplomatic humdrum—that has for ever vanished. Everywhere is bustle and hurry, confusion and crowding. To-night there is a full Paschal moon and its light falls on the St. Gaudens in Rock Creek Cemetery. There there is Peace because there is Oblivion. Our Lady of Nirvana, the Enigma, the perfection of the N4ant, is there, and our dear friend will be remembered as long as the Republic because he lies there under her protection. In these days it is calming and terrible to look at the monument, its spell oblivion. Would that the whole weary world could behold her and be hushed."
And truly the mortal and immortal responsibility of Henry Adams is for that figure—is no less his than the great sculptor's. There is no visitor to Washington in all the cycles ahead but will ask himself what is for him the significance of this Eleusinian
Previous page
