THE SAGE OF LAFAYETTE PARK

HENRY ADAMS

Selected Letters

Edited by Ernest Samuels

Harvard University Press/Belknap

612 pp. $29.95

IN 1850, the 12-year-old Henry Adams was taken by his father to the White House in Washington to meet President Zachary Taylor. The lad was not particularly impressed. As to the White House, he would say in his perversely brilliant autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams, about 60 years later, "all the boy's family had lived there . . . and he took it for granted that he should some day live in it. He felt no sensation whatever before Presidents. A President was a matter of course in every respectable family; he had two in his own." Thus ruminated the grandson of John Quincy Adams (president, 1825-29) and the great-grandson of John Adams (likewise, 1797-1801). Little wonder that, writing to his older brother from Berlin in 1858, fresh out of Harvard College, young Henry seized upon two components basic to the Adamses' makeup: "One is a continual tendency towards politics; the other is family pride."

The letter is the first offering in this rich and weighty collection. The last, which speaks wistfully about a possible meeting of minds between historians and scientists and laments the passing of old friends, was dictated to his assistant in March 1918, 12 days before Adams died of a stroke. In between are letters from literally all over the world, no few of them essayistic in length and style, to a broad array of correspondents. The letters give a steadily, deeply intelligent and an increasingly skeptical and even caustic view of the social, political and intellectual life on the American and world scene in Adams's time.

The editorial feat here represented is prodigious: an expert gathering from the 4,500 letters of Henry Adams extant, most of the latter having been published in a six-volume edition in the 1980s. The present selection, with its superb scholarly notations, has been made by Ernest Samuels, a co-editor of the complete edition and the author of the exemplary prize-winning biography of Henry Adams.

With Adams as the exceedingly acute guide and relentlessly ironic commentator, we pass through the Civil War years, spent by Henry in London, where his father, the American minister appointed by Lincoln, sought to cope with British pro-slavery and pro-Southern sentiment; we see Washington from the 1870s onwards, down the tangled decades through the administrations of Adams's old associate Theodore Roosevelt. His closest friend, John Hay, was secretary of state ("I am a courtier! an intime of the White House!" Adams wrote in mock-vanity, and so he was, in a manner unmatched by any private citizen before or since). And we witness the suicide of his wife Marian "Clover" Hooper, descendant of a suicide-prone Boston family, the event of 1885 that broke his life "in halves."

There followed years of far-flung, exhaustively reported travel: "I am always contented when I am in motion, and ask no better than to wander on," he told his English friend, Charles Milnes Gaskell in 1888, and to the same correspondent a few years later, he totted up the travel statistics of recent months -- 2,000 miles from Tahiti to Fiji, and the same distance from Fiji to Sydney, the same again from Australia to Torres Straits, from there to Batavia and to Singapore and so on. No commotion in European and global affairs, meanwhile, escaped his inquisitive notice: financial crises in Britain, the Boxer Rebellion, the Russo-Japanese war, political agitations in pre-war Paris, the coming of world conflict.

We are made privy as the letters go forward to those many things Adams scorned or detested: almost all French art and writing and theater; the cultural reputation of ancient Greece ("ridiculous" and "academic" were among the adjectives applied); the Dreyfus affair (a farce); Jews and bankers (whom he ended by coalescing); mountains and volcanoes; virtually every aspect of modern society. He also made occasional avowals of admiration: for Michelangelo's Medici statues in Florence; for George Washington ("Washington's breadth defies me," he remarked in 1908, "and his balance passes comparison"); rather to his surprise, the American community in 1900s Paris, including the well-orchestrated ambiance of Edith Wharton; the 13th-century cult of the Virgin and the cathedral at Chartres, along with the mind and writings of St. Thomas Aquinas -- all enshrined in Mont St. Michel and Chartres, first printed (privately) in 1904.

He was impressed above all by two public displays. At the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, the architectural feats of Stanford White and others struck him as "the only work my age has produced really worthy of it." At the Paris Exposition seven years later, he stared for hours at the great dynamos, "watching them run as noiselessly and as smoothly as the planets." Electrical power was the God of the new century, he pronounced to John Hay in December 1900. He became aware of the enormous contrast between the power of medieval religious belief and that of the new machinery, and worked out the contrast in his two sequential masterpieces, Mont. St. Michel and The Education.

But we are not often taken into Henry Adams's truly private being. He is one of the great American letter-writers, but he belongs to the tradition, starting with Hawthorne, of writers gifted in the arts of self-concealment -- as against, say, a no less expressive writer like Hart Crane who was so given to self-exposure.

Adams revealed something of himself to his younger brother Brooks and to John Hay and Charles Gaskell; but he opened up the most to Elizabeth Cameron, the wife of Sen. James Donald Cameron of Pennsylvania. She was 24 years younger than her husband and 20 years younger than Adams, and was said to be the most beautiful woman in Washington. Adams developed a scarcely controllable and invariably thwarted passion for her after his wife's death, and it fed upon their proximity in Washington and Paris.

A moment of keenest anguish was expressed by Adams in November 1891, after he had seen Elizabeth Cameron off on her steamer from England to America. He summed up his despairing and accurate sense of their relationship: "No matter how much I may efface myself or how little I may ask, I must always make more demand on you than you can gratify and you must always have the consciousness that, whatever I may profess, I want more than I can have . . . I am not old enough to be a tame cat, and you are too old to accept me in any other character."

He would put a good face on it when he next saw her, but he would bring "a heart as sick as ever a man had who knew that he would lose the only object he loved because he loved too much."

The passage gives the reader, this reader anyhow, not only a rush of sympathy but a curious degree of comfort in knowing that the arch ironist, the detached and somber philosopher of history, could be subject to such human and humanising emotions.

R.W.B. Lewis is the author of "The Jameses: a Family Narrative."

Articles appear as they were originally printed in The Washington Post and may not include subsequent corrections.