Henry’s postcollegiate journey to Europe signified, depending upon one’s perspective, either a great break from family tradition or yet another pivot down a familiar path. His people, after all, had been sailing to the Continent ever since 1778, when John Adams, appointed as a special envoy by the fledgling U.S. government, boarded the frigate Boston with his preteen son John Quincy, bound for France. Over the next several decades, numerous European courts came to know one Adams or another. Henry, by contrast, sought not the clerical routine of an American mission but rather the leisure of unaccounted hours to consider carefully his next move and perhaps identify his real vocation. Brothers John and Charles were already admitted to the Suffolk County (Massachusetts) bar, a depressing concession, so Henry thought, to the gray ghosts of the Old House that he hoped to avoid. Hardly a renegade, the green graduate stood in solid company. For the pressure to identify early an occupation figured prominently in the thinking, strategies, and evasions of many privileged young men disinclined to inflict upon the world yet more lawyers, politicians, and physicians. Under strain they might gesture in the direction of these rote professions only to later make their escapes. To note but two famous examples, the novelist Henry James, author of such classics as The Portrait of a Lady and The Bostonians, briefly attended Harvard Law School (1862–63) before launching a literary career; his brother William, the noted philosopher and psychologist, took the degree of M.D. at the Harvard Medical School in 1869 but never practiced medicine.
Negotiating for his short-term freedom, Henry asked his father for $2,000 for two years—about $55,000 in current dollars—promising upon his return to take up the duties of a “jurist,” an authority and commentator, that is, on legal concerns.1 He intended, so he told the Governor, to study civil law at Heidelberg and Berlin as well as in Paris. Naturally his language skills could only, he pointed out, be improved. The extent to which Charles Francis accepted the veracity of Henry’s well-planned plea is a matter of conjecture, but there never seemed to be any real question about the young man’s emancipation from Massachusetts. A third son and a Brooks to boot, Henry considered himself eminently expendable and thus safe to be set free. There were, he supposed, already enough Adams men fingering musty law books and biding their time to claim the mundane political prizes they thought their due.
Still, parental doubts lingered. Neither Abigail nor Charles Francis were eager to let this much loved son go and took only small comfort in the fact that their eldest child, Louisa, then living in Italy with her husband of four years, Charles Kuhn, a former sugar broker, represented some vague shadow of American oversight. The Governor in particular took the separation hard. After seeing Henry off at the train station, Charles Francis confessed to his diary of an enveloping sadness: “My happiness is all at home, and he is on the whole that one of my sons who is possessed of the most agreeable home qualities. When we came home to our shortened evening table, I was under greater depression than I have felt for a long time.”2
On October 9, eleven days after embarking on what one passenger called a “rough and tedious crossing,” Henry and a small number of former classmates arrived in Liverpool aboard the RMS Persia, an iron side-wheeler reputed to be the fastest steamship in the world. From Liverpool, he set off for London, where he spent a few days sightseeing before crossing the Channel to Antwerp aboard the steamer Baron Osy; a brief layover at Hanover prefaced his Berlin debut on the 22nd. Thus began a trying period for the young scholar, who perhaps read his difficulties—negotiating the language, loneliness, and lack of female company—into subsequent brittle appraisals of this period. “He loved, or thought he loved the people,” he later wrote of these years, “but the Germany he loved was the eighteenth-century which the Germans were ashamed of, and were destroying as fast as they could. Of the Germany to come, he knew nothing.”3
Part of Henry’s troubles involved the after-tremors of an unrequited love. While at Harvard he had fallen quite completely for Caroline Bigelow, doe-eyed, trim waisted, and the daughter of a Massachusetts Supreme Court justice. A serious boy uninitiated in the ways of flirtation, he had perhaps opened his heart as never before. These still tender feelings followed him overseas. From a distant Germany he wrote to Charles of Carry’s spell, “I wasted a good deal of superfluous philanthropy on her. It was my last and longest hit, that. Lasted me a matter of three years and might be still hanging round me if I’d remained at home, though I had pretty much found her out the Spring before I graduated. It cost me the hardest heart-aches ever I had before I could sit quiet under the conviction that she is—what she is.… By God, I grind my teeth even now to think how easily I let myself be led by that doll.”4 Years would pass before he let himself be led again.
Having begun his coursework in Berlin, Henry took an immediate dislike to the university’s austerely formal academic environment. Professors lectured out of textbooks, he later complained, and refused to engage undergraduates in discussion. He compared the system to an unsatisfying apprenticeship in which students paid for the credential of a degree but failed to acquire any useful knowledge. Turned loose on their own, he thought they might have a chance at self-education, but the regimented system of instruction worked against this. Their principal function, he once fumed, was to pay the salaries of a top-heavy professoriate. Defeated by the language and unable to follow his lessons, Henry quickly employed a “Dutch teacher” to come by each morning for conversation and look over his exercises. Needless to say, his first dispiriting weeks in Germany were humbling. “Here I am, then, in Berlin,” he groaned to his brother Charles, “independent; unknown and unknowing; hating the language and yet grubbing into it.”5
Though confused by the lectures—“I can’t catch anything at all”—Henry maintained the polite fiction during these initial months abroad that a legal career beckoned. He sketched out plans for a two-year education in Europe, followed by two additional years back in Boston reading law, at which point, he somewhat arbitrarily proposed, he might abandon the East altogether, cross the Mississippi, and become a giant of jurisprudence in St. Louis. These were, of course, boyish reveries, part of Henry’s stumbling search to find traction and offer, at least to his family, the semblance of stability. More generally, he spent a considerable amount of time in Germany organizing excursions and ruminating on his persistently thin finances. Concerts and theaters, wine shops and beer gardens were all temptations to be indulged. He saw Mozart’s Zauberflöte and Beethoven’s Fidelio at the Berlin Opera Haus, enjoyed a “remarkably well done” presentation of Hamlet in the local language, and sampled other Schauspielhaus performances of Oberon, Don Juan, and Wagner’s Rienzi. Henry liked Maraschino liqueur and a nicely spiced Glühwein and more generally consumed Piesporter and Rhine wine. All of these entertainments and appetites added up. “But you see,” he appealed to Charles (though he might just as easily have been showing off), “a single bat [spree], a single evening passed as is sometimes done, from six in the afternoon till three in the morning… may make necessary a week’s economy.” And while retrenching “on the heavy cheap,” as he put it, the penitent scholar sat in Berlin cellars and quietly suffered “boiled sausages and a mug of beer.”6
Pleasurable—if expensive—evenings out to the contrary, Henry’s sense of duty kept him in the classroom, though not at the University of Berlin. Simply unable to fathom the lectures, he dropped his legal studies and in January enrolled as a special student in the Friedrichs-Wilhelm-Werdesches Gymnasium, which housed some 450 students. The boys in his class of forty-four ranged from ten to nineteen; most were under fifteen. Henry, the “older” American, obviously stuck out like a sore thumb. “One or two of the little fellows I am quite fond of,” he wrote to Sumner back in America, “and you would split if you could see me walking away from school with a small boy under each arm, to whom I have to bend down to talk.… I am stared at as a sort of wild beast by the rest of the school… [although] they treat me with a certain sort of respect, and yet as one of themselves.”7
Sitting in the third row, Henry struggled to absorb the language (his chief reason for being at the gymnasium) in which his lessons—Greek, Latin, history, and religion—were taught. With more confidence he took some critical note of his classmates’ diet, complexion, and general physical countenance. He found them on the whole “pale, heavy, [and] dirty.” This he chalked up to too much “sauer kohl and sausages” and a lack of exercise. He reported that mere proximity to these pasty faces in the drab winter months “made [him] feel sick and low-spirited.” He too, however, appeared to have picked up a bit of winter weight. “Adams has become a little fatter,” observed Benjamin Crowninshield, a Harvard friend also tramping about Europe at this time. He noticed further that Henry, already battling an uncooperative hairline, had compensated with muttonchop sideburns cleanly kept off a still boyish lip and chin.8
By March Adams had had enough and sought an honorable and all-encompassing retreat from the law, from language training, and most especially from Berlin. In a letter to Charles he happily granted, “For my own part I feel as certain that I never shall be a lawyer, as you are that I’m not fit for it.” But this confession only begged the question: If he were not to study law, what would constitute his reason for remaining in Europe? A number of answers came conveniently to hand: he wanted, like a number of his fellow Harvard alums, to experience the Continent’s outstanding cultural amenities; continued language training augured well for future diplomatic service; and exposure to Europe traditionally benefited Adams men, broadening their education and making them more suitable for public careers. Years later, Henry framed those drifting days abroad in a brief admission that may contain multiple meanings: “Adams stayed because he did not want to go home.”9
Neither, however, did he wish to remain in Berlin, a city in which, Crowninshield contended, “he look[ed] like a beaten dog with the tail between the hind legs.” In early April he left the Prussian capital for a holiday in Dresden, the center of the Kingdom of Saxony some 115 miles to the south. His letters to family up to this time suggested a blending of youthful confusion, occupational frustration, and perhaps a trace of depression. The escape promised a clean start, as did the end of an oppressive central European winter. In the hopeful light of spring, he wrote to Charles of his altogether more radiant surroundings: “Sun doesn’t set till after eight and I tell you, sir, that a sunset concert on the Brühlsche Terrasse at Dresden, sitting under the trees and smoking with a view down the Elbe at the sunset, and a view up the Elbe to the pine hills above, is something jolly. I don’t deny it, Sir, I enjoy this life.” If still troubled by having to solicit the Governor for financial assistance, Henry nevertheless took advantage of his altogether brighter Dresden days to scour the city and neighboring countryside. He paid a call on the Königstein Fortress—a medieval castle that dated back to the thirteenth century—and pronounced its valley environs “deuced pretty.” He adopted a less generous line regarding the region’s much admired artistic holdings, posing as something of a seasoned if sniffy connoisseur. After touring the vast Grünes Gewölbe (Green Vault) museum in Dresden, one of the oldest collections of treasures in the world, he smugly declared the gallery “rather a bore… [just a] lot of old knick-knacks, precious stones and all that; decided bore. Palace, frescoes, rather good but no[t] great.” He further adopted a rather inelegant attitude toward the “too coarse complexioned and dowdy… German women,” who, he idly swore, didn’t “please” him. Of course such insecurity-driven assertions allowed Henry to rationalize his annoyingly persistent lack of female attention. With varying degrees of gallows humor and self-pity he wrote Charles, “No one has taken the trouble to fall in love with me.”10
Inevitably, Henry’s Dresden holiday—with its offshoot journeys to Nuremberg and Thun—turned into an extended stay. Returning briefly to Berlin at the end of summer, he realized the impossibility of enduring another long and isolating winter in the capital. Concerned, as he put it to Charles, that he was about to “sink into a chronic melancholy here,” he made other plans. Writing to his mother, he stated simply, “Berlin is too much for me. The city itself, the mode of life here, the American society and the climate have all disagreed with me so much that… I didn’t care to go through it all again.” After petitioning his “papa,” Henry received permission in late October for a permanent removal to Dresden. There, over the next several months, he gave himself up to the luxury of riding lessons, continued to work on his German, and more generally took in the stray books, ideas, and conversations orbiting about him. He also discovered that to be an Adams meant something even overseas. Of the mistress of the house in which he was staying Henry related to Charles with ill-concealed pride, “[She] has once or twice spoken of my ‘historical name’ &c so that I suppose some one has told her my grandfather was president. She has tact enough however to leave me alone.”11
In April he uprooted once again, leaving Dresden for a series of stops in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Making his way, finally, to northern Italy, he joined his sister Louisa and her husband. There, he became intensely interested in the Italian Risorgimento, the Resurgence or “rising again” then contesting papal and Austrian authority on the way to creating the Kingdom of Italy. And simply by virtue of being an Adams, even a third son, he discovered that he might have access to some of the major figures of the movement. Compared to his gray German days, Henry took easily to Italy, which touched off all sorts of historical and aesthetic associations in the young man. From its powerful influence would be planted the seed of perhaps his greatest work.