The long contraction of Christian belief in the modern liberal West recast the place of faith in Henry Adams’s America. Set in context, two centuries of deism, industrialization, and scientific discovery contributed to a ripening culture of religious doubt. Having only vicariously registered Puritanism’s slow if certain New England retreat, Adams more directly faced the profound implications of his own secular age. This legacy of the Enlightenment reached confidently across generations, identified in a series of formerly heretical ideas. The Scottish philosopher David Hume and the English historian Edward Gibbon condemned, in their respective works, idolatry, ecclesiastical superstition, and the unsavory side of papal history; in their wake ranged thinkers as disparate as the political economist Karl Marx and the utilitarian theorist John Stuart Mill, who each argued powerfully for freedom from religion—“the opium,” the former memorably insisted, “of the people.” The British novelist and poet Thomas Hardy (1840–1928), author of Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Far from the Madding Crowd, still later captured the cultural shift in his remarkable verse “God’s Funeral”:
In Henry’s day, the politician and orator Robert G. Ingersoll, known as “the Great Agnostic,” proved to be the most arresting advocate of “freethinking” in the United States since Thomas Paine, author of the celebrated revolutionary pamphlet “Common Sense,” though attacked a century later by Theodore Roosevelt as a “filthy little atheist” for his “impious” book The Age of Reason. As president of the American Secular Union in the 1880s and 1890s, Ingersoll often mocked religious belief, training, and cultural influence, thus making “Ingersollism” synonymous with “agnosticism.” A Civil War veteran, speaker at the 1876 Republican National Convention, and attorney general of Illinois, he enjoyed, despite holding controversial opinions on religion (and women’s rights), a prominent, even favorable profile.
For the nation’s churches, the threat of Ingersollism paled beside the sundry miseries inflicted by the industrial process. In response, the Social Gospel movement (c. 1880–1920), strongest among Congregationalists, Unitarians, and Episcopalians, acknowledged the inadequacy of conventional Christianity to address the great inequalities of wealth and health in an America enamored of social Darwinism. Applying Christian ethics to community problems, reformers such as Hull House cofounder Jane Addams, the muckraking journalist Jacob Riis, and the theologian Walter Rauschenbusch sought to address, among other evils, the problems of poverty, alcoholism, child labor, crime, and urban slums. The movement’s ability to rally large numbers around the cause of social justice offers some indication of the culture’s desire to promote moral reform in an era otherwise dominated by technology and industry.
In his own way, Adams too, if principally interested in political morality, traced the transformation in thinking that led to a more secular society. In the summer of 1883 he took a brief break from the Jeffersonians to draft Esther, a short palate-cleansing novel of ideas. Selectively autobiographical, the book ruminated on the diminishing role of religion in a century filled with scientific discoveries.2 There are few clues in his letters explaining the project’s origins; aside from Clover, he kept his authorship a secret, telling only King and Hay and then only some years after publication. Esther, rather, is credited to “Frances Snow Compton,” which almost sounds like an equivocal tribute to the Governor, whose name and chilly reserve are evoked in the nom de plume. The novel’s tensions and emphases, however, are perfectly Henry. For to read Adams closely on nearly any subject is to encounter a restless mind lingering over those things lost, and Esther is no exception. Henry broods anxiously in its pages over the inevitable weakening of traditional forms of art, philosophy, and worship before the persistence of modern pressures. As in Democracy, this book too ends on an unmistakable note of quiet defeat.
Adams asserts the obsolescence theme quite obviously in naming his novel’s heroine “Esther Dudley” after the title character of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s story “Old Esther Dudley” (1839). Hawthorne’s is a tale of an aged Revolutionary-era loyalist (“the daughter of an ancient and once eminent family”) unable to grasp the fact that the defeated British are never returning to her native Massachusetts. She waits in vain for the restoration of the royal governor and the familiar way of life he represents. But the new republican governor bluntly informs Esther that America has moved on, abandoning convention to live as “a new race of men”:
Your life has been prolonged until the world has changed around you. You have treasured up all that time has rendered worthless—the principles, feelings, manners, modes of being and acting, which another generation has flung aside—and you are a symbol of the past. And I, and these men around me—we represent a new race of men—living no longer in the past, scarcely in the present—but projecting our lives forward into the future. Ceasing to model ourselves on ancestral superstitions, it is our faith and principle to press onward, onward!3
Henry’s Esther similarly scrutinizes a dying way of life, for the upheaval in thought, customs, and manners outlined by Hawthorne extended beyond the Revolutionary era, of course. Esther Dudley’s fate could be said to have prefaced that of the Adams family, or even the waning high Brahminism of Henry’s day.
Adams’s Esther is a young woman, a gifted amateur painter and a nonbeliever. Her father, Dr. William Dudley, possesses an independent income that permits an early retirement; a nonpracticing physician, he is gravely ill and a skeptic like his daughter. The descriptions of Esther and William are so close to Clover (a gifted amateur photographer and a nonbeliever) and her father, Robert (a gravely ill physician with an independent income), as to beg for authorial anonymity. Adams, in fact, based several characters on acquaintances. George Strong, a professor of geology, a religious doubter, and a charming cut-up à la Clarence King, is Esther’s cousin; Stephen Hazard, the reverend of New York’s St. John’s Church and Esther’s would-be beau, is modeled on Henry’s second cousin Phillips Brooks, the rector of Boston’s Trinity Church; the artist Wharton paints murals for Hazard’s chapel and approximates John La Farge, who produced Trinity’s exquisite stained-glass windows; and finally Catherine Brooke, a fresh breeze from the unfenced West, is cast in the attractive image of Elizabeth Cameron.
In the interest of keeping Esther’s authorship a secret, Henry placed the novel in Manhattan. The principal actors are Esther and Hazard, who are in love, but her skepticism and his faith ultimately keep them apart. In having his heroine reject Hazard, Adams confirms his own journey through a godless universe. Esther’s confession, “Is it not enough to know myself?… Some people are made with faith. I am made without it,” is emblematic of a growing generation of agnostics and nonbelievers who have crossed the Darwinian Rubicon.4
While drafting Democracy, Henry targeted the graft and corruption culture that greased the skids of American politics. Esther’s probing discussion of religious doubt, by contrast, drew from its author a more internal reaction in which Adams mourned the passing of the old Emersonian universe of openness and possibility. Esther is a tragedy not because of Esther and Hazard’s doomed romance (carried on in too rarified an air to interest warm-blooded readers), but because it sympathetically unpacks the exhaustion of traditional conceptions of community and spirituality. On this melancholy note, Henry wrote from the heart. His quest to leave behind a world of bankers, urban bosses, and evolutionists eventually led him far from industrial America and the quantitative nineteenth century. Though not a believer, he wished, nevertheless, to believe in something. In the final decades of his life he would fall under the spell of medieval French music, art, and architecture; his interests in chansons, cathedrals, and crusades no doubt met certain intellectual needs, and yet they struck also and perhaps primarily a resonant emotional chord.
Much commentary on Esther has focused, sometimes recklessly, on Henry’s treatment of Clover in the novel. There is little doubt that he modeled Esther physically and somewhat emotionally on his wife—and perhaps on other women as well. Several decades after the book appeared, one of Adams’s nieces related as much to a scholar: “I believe what H.A. told me—the only time he ever spoke to me about the book—that Esther, the character, was two or 3 people in one.” A likely inspiration is Ann Palmer, a close friend and occasional traveling companion of Clover’s whom Henry liked as well. But in writing of Esther’s physical appearance, Adams seems to have had only his wife in mind. He once, as indicated, said of Clover, “She is certainly not handsome… [and] dresses badly”; Esther is described as having “a bad figure” and “dresses to suit her figure and sometimes overdoes it.” A more intriguing connection between Clover and Esther involves the question of filial piety. Esther is devoted to an ill father and cannot make space for another man. In his 1979 biography Clover, Otto Friedrich speculates that Henry’s resentment at standing second in his wife’s affections found a vindictive voice in the novel. “Once it is read as a roman à clef,” Friedrich argues, “it suddenly becomes a strange attack on Clover, an exasperated, middle-aged, long-suppressed outburst against her at almost every point on which she was vulnerable.” Other scholars have noted that Henry’s critical portrait of Esther is countered by a far more flattering representation of Elizabeth Cameron as a charming expression of the ungoverned frontier.5
Some commentators have further maintained that Henry used Esther for the intensely personal objective of preparing his wife for Dr. Hooper’s expected death, which followed in April 1885. This idea originated with Clarence King who, following Clover’s suicide eight months after her father’s passing, assumed that Henry must have felt “regret at having exposed” so much of Clover’s private and religious views in the novel. There is inferential evidence for such an argument. Henry wrote to Hay several months after Clover’s death, “I will not pretend that the book is not precious to me, but its value has nothing to do with the public who could never understand that such a book might be written in one’s heart’s blood.”6
This gnomic admission should be balanced, however, by remembering that Adams wavered between shades of concealment and confession in the Education and may have done the same in Esther. Clover’s suicide casts a retrospectively somber diagnosis on the novel, but Brooke’s coltish enthusiasms and Strong’s bonhomie give a vitality and occasional levity to the book that belies a merely funereal reading. Moreover, the philosophical back-and-forth between Esther and Hazard (which seconds as sexual tension) suggests that, above all, Henry aspired to write a study of ideas. Indeed, it is possible to see in the questioning Esther even more of Henry than Clover. For like his protagonist, Adams never quite reconciled with the secularism that he absorbed as part of the general cultural drift. Esther, in some desperation, cries out to Strong, “I want to submit [to religion].… Why can’t some of you make me?”7 Henry, a self-proclaimed martyr before the mechanical universe, would come to make of Chartres and Mont-Saint-Michel the foundations of a fresh faith, or at least a modern iteration of the Romantic ideal in which he might find meaning and inspiration. He too, in other words, sought submission to a higher power.
Having completed Esther, Adams again turned to the publisher Henry Holt. He recommended that the book be placed in Holt’s American Novel Series but attached an unusual condition: it was to receive no publicity whatsoever. He wished to conduct, so he insisted, an “experiment” to see if the book might find a readership without the “vulgarity” of advertising. Recognizing the financial dangers for the publisher, he offered to pay Holt for the printing costs. There are several possible reasons for his extraordinary request. He may have sincerely wished to test the power of promotion, or, having revealed so much of himself, his wife, and their marriage, he perhaps self-consciously pulled back, or he may simply have doubted Esther’s appeal, to which he could then hold his odd condition accountable. Later, when his lengthy History languished in small sales, Henry made disparaging comments on the fickle book-buying public, writing defensively to one correspondent, “I never expected that the book would produce anything for the author.”8
A few months after publication, with fewer than six hundred copies sold, Henry conceded to Holt, “My experiment has failed.… So far as I know, not a man, woman or child has ever read or heard of Esther.” The novel’s subsequent release in England proved equally humiliating to Adams, even as it received a slight marketing boost from publicists. Henry’s acceptance of advertising in Britain calls into question the reason he had given for withholding it in America. “On the other side [England],” he improbably explained to Holt, “I wanted to try a different experiment: namely, to test the value of English criticism. For this reason, advertisement becomes necessary.” But sales in England were tepid and the few reviews cold and unsympathetic. A notice in the Saturday Review said the book read “more like a theological treatise than a novel.”9 Henry eventually purchased the remaining stock from his publisher and had the books destroyed.
It is tempting to see Esther as an isolated, even peculiar project among Adams’s writings. And yet when considered alongside certain of his other works a definite pattern appears. After clashing with John Torrey Morse over the inclusion of the Burr biography in the American Statesmen Series, Henry refused to release the manuscript. In a similar fashion he for years withheld completely from popular consumption his two late masterpieces, Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres and the Education, which he had privately printed and distributed to a select few. Like Esther, these too were “personal” books. He seemed to take a grim satisfaction in ignoring the public and thereby denying it the opportunity to ignore him. He further and somewhat perversely insisted, in Esther’s case, that the novel was simply too intimate and audiences had no right to it. “I would not let anyone read the story,” he explained several years after its stillborn birth, “for fear the reader should profane it.”10 He appeared, if anything, desperately determined to rise above mere sales and savor the pleasure of his superior secret. Whatever the case, the novel punctuated a period of Henry’s domestic life. The year 1885 would bring deep and irreparable changes—and that relentless momentum began with a move.