DIPLOMACY (1861)

  HARDLY a week passed when the newspapers announced that
President Lincoln had selected Charles Francis Adams as his Minister to
England. Once more, silently, Henry put Blackstone back on its shelf.
As Friar Bacon's head sententiously announced many centuries before:
Time had passed! The Civil Law lasted a brief day; the Common Law
prolonged its shadowy existence for a week. The law, altogether, as
path of education, vanished in April, 1861, leaving a million young men
planted in the mud of a lawless world, to begin a new life without
education at all. They asked few questions, but if they had asked
millions they would have got no answers. No one could help. Looking
back on this moment of crisis, nearly fifty years afterwards, one could
only shake one's white beard in silent horror. Mr. Adams once more
intimated that he thought himself entitled to the services of one of
his sons, and he indicated Henry as the only one who could be spared
from more serious duties. Henry packed his trunk again without a word.
He could offer no protest. Ridiculous as he knew himself about to be in
his new role, he was less ridiculous than his betters. He was at least
no public official, like the thousands of improvised secretaries and
generals who crowded their jealousies and intrigues on the President.
He was not a vulture of carrion--patronage. He knew that his father's
appointment was the result of Governor Seward's personal friendship; he
did not then know that Senator Sumner had opposed it, or the reasons
which Sumner alleged for thinking it unfit; but he could have supplied
proofs enough had Sumner asked for them, the strongest and most
decisive being that, in his opinion, Mr. Adams had chosen a private
secretary far more unfit than his chief. That Mr. Adams was unfit might
well be, since it was hard to find a fit appointment in the list of
possible candidates, except Mr. Sumner himself; and no one knew so well
as this experienced Senator that the weakest of all Mr. Adams's proofs
of fitness was his consent to quit a safe seat in Congress for an
exceedingly unsafe seat in London with no better support than Senator
Sumner, at the head of the Foreign Relations Committee, was likely to
give him. In the family history, its members had taken many a dangerous
risk, but never before had they taken one so desperate.

  The private secretary troubled himself not at all about the
unfitness of any one; he knew too little; and, in fact, no one, except
perhaps Mr. Sumner, knew more. The President and Secretary of State
knew least of all. As Secretary of Legation the Executive appointed the
editor of a Chicago newspaper who had applied for the Chicago
Post-Office; a good fellow, universally known as Charley Wilson, who
had not a thought of staying in the post, or of helping the Minister.
The Assistant Secretary was inherited from Buchanan's time, a hard
worker, but socially useless. Mr. Adams made no effort to find
efficient help; perhaps he knew no name to suggest; perhaps he knew too
much of Washington, but he could hardly have hoped to find a staff of
strength in his son.

  The private secretary was more passive than his father, for he
knew not where to turn. Sumner alone could have smoothed his path by
giving him letters of introduction, but if Sumner wrote letters, it was
not with the effect of smoothing paths. No one, at that moment, was
engaged in smoothing either paths or people. The private secretary was
no worse off than his neighbors except in being called earlier into
service. On April 13 the storm burst and rolled several hundred
thousand young men like Henry Adams into the surf of a wild ocean, all
helpless like himself, to be beaten about for four years by the waves
of war. Adams still had time to watch the regiments form ranks before
Boston State House in the April evenings and march southward, quietly
enough, with the air of business they wore from their cradles, but with
few signs or sounds of excitement. He had time also to go down the
harbor to see his brother Charles quartered in Fort Independence before
being thrown, with a hundred thousand more, into the furnace of the
Army of the Potomac to get educated in a fury of fire. Few things were
for the moment so trivial in importance as the solitary private
secretary crawling down to the wretched old Cunard steamer Niagara at
East Boston to start again for Liverpool. This time the pitcher of
education had gone to the fountain once too often; it was fairly
broken; and the young man had got to meet a hostile world without
defence--or arms.

  The situation did not seem even comic, so ignorant was the
world of its humors; yet Minister Adams sailed for England, May 1,
1861, with much the same outfit as Admiral Dupont would have enjoyed if
the Government had sent him to attack Port Royal with one cabin-boy in
a rowboat. Luckily for the cabin-boy, he was alone. Had Secretary
Seward and Senator Sumner given to Mr. Adams the rank of Ambassador and
four times his salary, a palace in London, a staff of trained
secretaries, and personal letters of introduction to the royal family
and the whole peerage, the private secretary would have been cabin-boy
still, with the extra burden of many masters; he was the most fortunate
person in the party, having for master only his father who never
fretted, never dictated, never disciplined, and whose idea of American
diplomacy was that of the eighteenth century. Minister Adams remembered
how his grandfather had sailed from Mount Wollaston in midwinter, 1778,
on the little frigate Boston, taking his eleven-year-old son John
Quincy with him, for secretary, on a diplomacy of adventure that had
hardly a parallel for success. He remembered how John Quincy, in 1809,
had sailed for Russia, with himself, a baby of two years old, to cope
with Napoleon and the Czar Alexander single-handed, almost as much of
an adventurer as John Adams before him, and almost as successful. He
thought it natural that the Government should send him out as an
adventurer also, with a twenty-three-year-old son, and he did not even
notice that he left not a friend behind him. No doubt he could depend
on Seward, but on whom could Seward depend? Certainly not on the
Chairman of the Committee of Foreign Relations. Minister Adams had no
friend in the Senate; he could hope for no favors, and he asked none.
He thought it right to play the adventurer as his father and
grandfather had done before him, without a murmur. This was a lofty
view, and for him answered his objects, but it bore hard on cabin-boys,
and when, in time, the young man realized what had happened, he felt it
as a betrayal. He modestly thought himself unfit for the career of
adventurer, and judged his father to be less fit than himself. For the
first time America was posing as the champion of legitimacy and order.
Her representatives should know how to play their role; they should
wear the costume; but, in the mission attached to Mr. Adams in 1861,
the only rag of legitimacy or order was the private secretary, whose
stature was not sufficient to impose awe on the Court and Parliament of
Great Britain.

  One inevitable effect of this lesson was to make a victim of
the scholar and to turn him into a harsh judge of his masters. If they
overlooked him, he could hardly overlook them, since they stood with
their whole weight on his body. By way of teaching him quickly, they
sent out their new Minister to Russia in the same ship. Secretary
Seward had occasion to learn the merits of Cassius M. Clay in the
diplomatic service, but Mr. Seward's education profited less than the
private secretary's, Cassius Clay as a teacher having no equal though
possibly some rivals. No young man, not in Government pay, could be
asked to draw, from such lessons, any confidence in himself, and it was
notorious that, for the next two years, the persons were few indeed who
felt, or had reason to feel, any sort of confidence in the Government;
fewest of all among those who were in it. At home, for the most part,
young men went to the war, grumbled and died; in England they might
grumble or not; no one listened.

  Above all, the private secretary could not grumble to his
chief. He knew surprisingly little, but that much he did know. He never
labored so hard to learn a language as he did to hold his tongue, and
it affected him for life. The habit of reticence--of talking without
meaning--is never effaced. He had to begin it at once. He was already
an adept when the party landed at Liverpool, May 13, 1861, and went
instantly up to London: a family of early Christian martyrs about to be
flung into an arena of lions, under the glad eyes of Tiberius
Palmerston. Though Lord Palmerston would have laughed his peculiar
Palmerston laugh at figuring as Tiberius, he would have seen only
evident resemblance in the Christian martyrs, for he had already
arranged the ceremony.

  Of what they had to expect, the Minister knew no more than his
son. What he or Mr. Seward or Mr. Sumner may have thought is the affair
of history and their errors concern historians. The errors of a private
secretary concerned no one but himself, and were a large part of his
education. He thought on May 12 that he was going to a friendly
Government and people, true to the anti-slavery principles which had
been their steadiest profession. For a hundred years the chief effort
of his family had aimed at bringing the Government of England into
intelligent cooperation with the objects and interests of America. His
father was about to make a new effort, and this time the chance of
success was promising. The slave States had been the chief apparent
obstacle to good understanding. As for the private secretary himself,
he was, like all Bostonians, instinctively English. He could not
conceive the idea of a hostile England. He supposed himself, as one of
the members of a famous anti-slavery family, to be welcome everywhere
in the British Islands.

  On May 13, he met the official announcement that England
recognized the belligerency of the Confederacy. This beginning of a new
education tore up by the roots nearly all that was left of Harvard
College and Germany. He had to learn--the sooner the better--that his
ideas were the reverse of truth; that in May, 1861, no one in
England--literally no one--doubted that Jefferson Davis had made or
would make a nation, and nearly all were glad of it, though not often
saying so. They mostly imitated Palmerston who, according to Mr.
Gladstone, "desired the severance as a diminution of a dangerous power,
but prudently held his tongue." The sentiment of anti-slavery had
disappeared. Lord John Russell, as Foreign Secretary, had received the
rebel emissaries, and had decided to recognize their belligerency
before the arrival of Mr. Adams in order to fix the position of the
British Government in advance. The recognition of independence would
then become an understood policy; a matter of time and occasion.

  Whatever Minister Adams may have felt, the first effect of this
shock upon his son produced only a dullness of comprehension--a sort of
hazy inability to grasp the missile or realize the blow. Yet he
realized that to his father it was likely to be fatal. The chances were
great that the whole family would turn round and go home within a few
weeks. The horizon widened out in endless waves of confusion. When he
thought over the subject in the long leisure of later life, he grew
cold at the idea of his situation had his father then shown himself
what Sumner thought him to be--unfit for his post. That the private
secretary was unfit for his--trifling though it were--was proved by his
unreflecting confidence in his father. It never entered his mind that
his father might lose his nerve or his temper, and yet in a subsequent
knowledge of statesmen and diplomats extending over several
generations, he could not certainly point out another who could have
stood such a shock without showing it. He passed this long day, and
tedious journey to London, without once thinking of the possibility
that his father might make a mistake. Whatever the Minister thought,
and certainly his thought was not less active than his son's, he showed
no trace of excitement. His manner was the same as ever; his mind and
temper were as perfectly balanced; not a word escaped; not a nerve
twitched.

  The test was final, for no other shock so violent and sudden
could possibly recur. The worst was in full sight. For once the private
secretary knew his own business, which was to imitate his father as
closely as possible and hold his tongue. Dumped thus into Maurigy's
Hotel at the foot of Regent Street, in the midst of a London season,
without a friend or even an acquaintance, he preferred to laugh at his
father's bewilderment before the waiter's "'amhandheggsir" for
breakfast, rather than ask a question or express a doubt. His
situation, if taken seriously, was too appalling to face. Had he known
it better, he would only have thought it worse.

  Politically or socially, the outlook was desperate, beyond
retrieving or contesting. Socially, under the best of circumstances, a
newcomer in London society needs years to establish a position, and
Minister Adams had not a week or an hour to spare, while his son had
not even a remote chance of beginning. Politically the prospect looked
even worse, and for Secretary Seward and Senator Sumner it was so; but
for the Minister, on the spot, as he came to realize exactly where he
stood, the danger was not so imminent. Mr. Adams was always one of the
luckiest of men, both in what he achieved and in what he escaped. The
blow, which prostrated Seward and Sumner, passed over him. Lord John
Russell had acted--had probably intended to act--kindly by him in
forestalling his arrival. The blow must have fallen within three
months, and would then have broken him down. The British Ministers were
a little in doubt still--a little ashamed of themselves--and certain to
wait the longer for their next step in proportion to the haste of their
first.

  This is not a story of the diplomatic adventures of Charles
Francis Adams, but of his son Henry's adventures in search of an
education, which, if not taken too seriously, tended to humor. The
father's position in London was not altogether bad; the son's was
absurd. Thanks to certain family associations, Charles Francis Adams
naturally looked on all British Ministers as enemies; the only public
occupation of all Adamses for a hundred and fifty years at least, in
their brief intervals of quarrelling with State Street, had been to
quarrel with Downing Street; and the British Government, well used to a
liberal unpopularity abroad, even when officially rude liked to be
personally civil. All diplomatic agents are liable to be put, so to
speak, in a corner, and are none the worse for it. Minister Adams had
nothing in especial to complain of; his position was good while it
lasted, and he had only the chances of war to fear. The son had no such
compensations. Brought over in order to help his father, he could
conceive no way of rendering his father help, but he was clear that his
father had got to help him. To him, the Legation was social ostracism,
terrible beyond anything he had known. Entire solitude in the great
society of London was doubly desperate because his duties as private
secretary required him to know everybody and go with his father and
mother everywhere they needed escort. He had no friend, or even enemy,
to tell him to be patient. Had any one done it, he would surely have
broken out with the reply that patience was the last resource of fools
as well as of sages; if he was to help his father at all, he must do it
at once, for his father would never so much need help again. In fact he
never gave his father the smallest help, unless it were as a footman,
clerk, or a companion for the younger children.

  He found himself in a singular situation for one who was to be
useful. As he came to see the situation closer, he began to doubt
whether secretaries were meant to be useful. Wars were too common in
diplomacy to disturb the habits of the diplomat. Most secretaries
detested their chiefs, and wished to be anything but useful. At the St.
James's Club, to which the Minister's son could go only as an invited
guest, the most instructive conversation he ever heard among the young
men of his own age who hung about the tables, more helpless than
himself, was: "Quel chien de pays!" or, "Que tu es beau aujourd'hui,
mon cher!" No one wanted to discuss affairs; still less to give or get
information. That was the affair of their chiefs, who were also slow to
assume work not specially ordered from their Courts. If the American
Minister was in trouble to-day, the Russian Ambassador was in trouble
yesterday, and the Frenchman would be in trouble to-morrow. It would
all come in the day's work. There was nothing professional in worry.
Empires were always tumbling to pieces and diplomats were always
picking them up.

  This was his whole diplomatic education, except that he found
rich veins of jealousy running between every chief and his staff. His
social education was more barren still, and more trying to his vanity.
His little mistakes in etiquette or address made him writhe with
torture. He never forgot the first two or three social functions he
attended: one an afternoon at Miss Burdett Coutts's in Stratton Place,
where he hid himself in the embrasure of a window and hoped that no one
noticed him; another was a garden-party given by the old anti-slavery
Duchess Dowager of Sutherland at Chiswick, where the American Minister
and Mrs. Adams were kept in conversation by the old Duchess till every
one else went away except the young Duke and his cousins, who set to
playing leap-frog on the lawn. At intervals during the next thirty
years Henry Adams continued to happen upon the Duke, who, singularly
enough, was always playing leap-frog. Still another nightmare he
suffered at a dance given by the old Duchess Dowager of Somerset, a
terrible vision in castanets, who seized him and forced him to perform
a Highland fling before the assembled nobility and gentry, with the
daughter of the Turkish Ambassador for partner. This might seem
humorous to some, but to him the world turned to ashes.

  When the end of the season came, the private secretary had not
yet won a private acquaintance, and he hugged himself in his solitude
when the story of the battle of Bull Run appeared in the Times. He felt
only the wish to be more private than ever, for Bull Run was a worse
diplomatic than military disaster. All this is history and can be read
by public schools if they choose; but the curious and unexpected
happened to the Legation, for the effect of Bull Run on them was almost
strengthening. They no longer felt doubt. For the next year they went
on only from week to week, ready to leave England at once, and never
assuming more than three months for their limit. Europe was waiting to
see them go. So certain was the end that no one cared to hurry it.

  So far as a private secretary could see, this was all that saved
his father. For many months he looked on himself as lost or finished in
the character of private secretary; and as about to begin, without
further experiment, a final education in the ranks of the Army of the
Potomac where he would find most of his friends enjoying a much
pleasanter life than his own. With this idea uppermost in his mind, he
passed the summer and the autumn, and began the winter. Any winter in
London is a severe trial; one's first winter is the most trying; but
the month of December, 1861, in Mansfield Street, Portland Place, would
have gorged a glutton of gloom.

  One afternoon when he was struggling to resist complete nervous
depression in the solitude of Mansfield Street, during the absence of
the Minister and Mrs. Adams on a country visit, Reuter's telegram
announcing the seizure of Mason and Slidell from a British mail-steamer
was brought to the office. All three secretaries, public and private
were there--nervous as wild beasts under the long strain on their
endurance--and all three, though they knew it to be not merely their
order of departure--not merely diplomatic rupture--but a declaration of
war--broke into shouts of delight. They were glad to face the end. They
saw it and cheered it! Since England was waiting only for its own
moment to strike, they were eager to strike first.

  They telegraphed the news to the Minister, who was staying with
Monckton Milnes at Fryston in Yorkshire. How Mr. Adams took it, is told
in the "Lives" of Lord Houghton and William E. Forster who was one of
the Fryston party. The moment was for him the crisis of his diplomatic
career; for the secretaries it was merely the beginning of another
intolerable delay, as though they were a military outpost waiting
orders to quit an abandoned position. At the moment of sharpest
suspense, the Prince Consort sickened and died. Portland Place at
Christmas in a black fog was never a rosy landscape, but in 1861 the
most hardened Londoner lost his ruddiness. The private secretary had
one source of comfort denied to them--he should not be private
secretary long.

  He was mistaken--of course! He had been mistaken at every
point of his education, and, on this point, he kept up the same mistake
for nearly seven years longer, always deluded by the notion that the
end was near. To him the Trent Affair was nothing but one of many
affairs which he had to copy in a delicate round hand into his books,
yet it had one or two results personal to him which left no trace on
the Legation records. One of these, and to him the most important, was
to put an end forever to the idea of being "useful." Hitherto, as an
independent and free citizen, not in the employ of the Government, he
had kept up his relations with the American press. He had written
pretty frequently to Henry J. Raymond, and Raymond had used his letters
in the New York Times. He had also become fairly intimate with the two
or three friendly newspapers in London, the Daily News, the Star, the
weekly Spectator; and he had tried to give them news and views that
should have a certain common character, and prevent clash. He had even
gone down to Manchester to study the cotton famine, and wrote a long
account of his visit which his brother Charles had published in the
Boston Courier. Unfortunately it was printed with his name, and
instantly came back upon him in the most crushing shape possible--that
of a long, satirical leader in the London Times. Luckily the Times did
not know its victim to be a part, though not an official, of the
Legation, and lost the chance to make its satire fatal; but he
instantly learned the narrowness of his escape from old Joe Parkes, one
of the traditional busy-bodies of politics, who had haunted London
since 1830, and who, after rushing to the Times office, to tell them
all they did not know about Henry Adams, rushed to the Legation to tell
Adams all he did not want to know about the Times. For a moment Adams
thought his "usefulness" at an end in other respects than in the press,
but a day or two more taught him the value of obscurity. He was totally
unknown; he had not even a club; London was empty; no one thought twice
about the Times article; no one except Joe Parkes ever spoke of it; and
the world had other persons--such as President Lincoln, Secretary
Seward, and Commodore Wilkes--for constant and favorite objects of
ridicule. Henry Adams escaped, but he never tried to be useful again.
The Trent Affair dwarfed individual effort. His education at least had
reached the point of seeing its own proportions. "Surtout point de
zele!" Zeal was too hazardous a profession for a Minister's son to
pursue, as a volunteer manipulator, among Trent Affairs and rebel
cruisers. He wrote no more letters and meddled with no more newspapers,
but he was still young, and felt unkindly towards the editor of the
London Times.

  Mr. Delane lost few opportunities of embittering him, and he
felt little or no hope of repaying these attentions; but the Trent
Affair passed like a snowstorm, leaving the Legation, to its surprise,
still in place. Although the private secretary saw in this delay--which
he attributed to Mr. Seward's good sense--no reason for changing his
opinion about the views of the British Government, he had no choice but
to sit down again at his table, and go on copying papers, filing
letters, and reading newspaper accounts of the incapacity of Mr.
Lincoln and the brutality of Mr. Seward--or vice versa. The heavy
months dragged on and winter slowly turned to spring without improving
his position or spirits. Socially he had but one relief; and, to the
end of life, he never forgot the keen gratitude he owed for it. During
this tedious winter and for many months afterwards, the only gleams of
sunshine were on the days he passed at Walton-on-Thames as the guest of
Mr. and Mrs. Russell Sturgis at Mount Felix.

  His education had unfortunately little to do with bankers,
although old George Peabody and his partner, Junius Morgan, were strong
allies. Joshua Bates was devoted, and no one could be kinder than
Thomas Baring, whose little dinners in Upper Grosvenor Street were
certainly the best in London; but none offered a refuge to compare with
Mount Felix, and, for the first time, the refuge was a liberal
education. Mrs. Russell Sturgis was one of the women to whom an
intelligent boy attaches himself as closely as he can. Henry Adams was
not a very intelligent boy, and he had no knowledge of the world, but
he knew enough to understand that a cub needed shape. The kind of
education he most required was that of a charming woman, and Mrs.
Russell Sturgis, a dozen years older than himself, could have
good-naturedly trained a school of such, without an effort, and with
infinite advantage to them. Near her he half forgot the anxieties of
Portland Place. During two years of miserable solitude, she was in this
social polar winter, the single source of warmth and light.

  Of course the Legation itself was home, and, under such
pressure, life in it could be nothing but united. All the inmates made
common cause, but this was no education. One lived, but was merely
flayed alive. Yet, while this might be exactly true of the younger
members of the household, it was not quite so with the Minister and
Mrs. Adams. Very slowly, but quite steadily, they gained foothold. For
some reason partly connected with American sources, British society had
begun with violent social prejudice against Lincoln, Seward, and all
the Republican leaders except Sumner. Familiar as the whole tribe of
Adamses had been for three generations with the impenetrable stupidity
of the British mind, and weary of the long struggle to teach it its own
interests, the fourth generation could still not quite persuade itself
that this new British prejudice was natural. The private secretary
suspected that Americans in New York and Boston had something to do
with it. The Copperhead was at home in Pall Mall. Naturally the
Englishman was a coarse animal and liked coarseness. Had Lincoln and
Seward been the ruffians supposed, the average Englishman would have
liked them the better. The exceedingly quiet manner and the
unassailable social position of Minister Adams in no way conciliated
them. They chose to ignore him, since they could not ridicule him. Lord
John Russell set the example. Personally the Minister was to be kindly
treated; politically he was negligible; he was there to be put aside.
London and Paris imitated Lord John. Every one waited to see Lincoln
and his hirelings disappear in one vast debacle. All conceived that the
Washington Government would soon crumble, and that Minister Adams would
vanish with the rest.

  This situation made Minister Adams an exception among
diplomats. European rulers for the most part fought and treated as
members of one family, and rarely had in view the possibility of total
extinction; but the Governments and society of Europe, for a year at
least, regarded the Washington Government as dead, and its Ministers as
nullities. Minister Adams was better received than most nullities
because he made no noise. Little by little, in private, society took
the habit of accepting him, not so much as a diplomat, but rather as a
member of opposition, or an eminent counsel retained for a foreign
Government. He was to be received and considered; to be cordially
treated as, by birth and manners, one of themselves. This curiously
English way of getting behind a stupidity gave the Minister every
possible advantage over a European diplomat. Barriers of race,
language, birth, habit, ceased to exist. Diplomacy held diplomats apart
in order to save Governments, but Earl Russell could not hold Mr. Adams
apart. He was undistinguishable from a Londoner. In society few
Londoners were so widely at home. None had such double personality and
corresponding double weight.

  The singular luck that took him to Fryston to meet the shock of
the Trent Affair under the sympathetic eyes of Monckton Milnes and
William E. Forster never afterwards deserted him. Both Milnes and
Forster needed support and were greatly relieved to be supported. They
saw what the private secretary in May had overlooked, the hopeless
position they were in if the American Minister made a mistake, and,
since his strength was theirs, they lost no time in expressing to all
the world their estimate of the Minister's character. Between them the
Minister was almost safe.

  One might discuss long whether, at that moment, Milnes or
Forster were the more valuable ally, since they were influences of
different kinds. Monckton Milnes was a social power in London, possibly
greater than Londoners themselves quite understood, for in London
society as elsewhere, the dull and the ignorant made a large majority,
and dull men always laughed at Monckton Milnes. Every bore was used to
talk familiarly about "Dicky Milnes," the "cool of the evening"; and of
course he himself affected social eccentricity, challenging ridicule
with the indifference of one who knew himself to be the first wit in
London, and a maker of men--of a great many men. A word from him went
far. An invitation to his breakfast-table went farther. Behind his
almost Falstaffian mask and laugh of Silenus, he carried a fine, broad,
and high intelligence which no one questioned. As a young man he had
written verses, which some readers thought poetry, and which were
certainly not altogether prose. Later, in Parliament he made speeches,
chiefly criticised as too good for the place and too high for the
audience. Socially, he was one of two or three men who went everywhere,
knew everybody, talked of everything, and had the ear of Ministers; but
unlike most wits, he held a social position of his own that ended in a
peerage, and he had a house in Upper Brook Street to which most clever
people were exceedingly glad of admission. His breakfasts were famous,
and no one liked to decline his invitations, for it was more dangerous
to show timidity than to risk a fray. He was a voracious reader, a
strong critic, an art connoisseur in certain directions, a collector of
books, but above all he was a man of the world by profession, and loved
the contacts--perhaps the collisions--of society. Not even Henry
Brougham dared do the things he did, yet Brougham defied rebuff. Milnes
was the good-nature of London; the Gargantuan type of its refinement
and coarseness; the most universal figure of May Fair.

  Compared with him, figures like Hayward, or Delane, or
Venables, or Henry Reeve were quite secondary, but William E. Forster
stood in a different class. Forster had nothing whatever to do with May
Fair. Except in being a Yorkshireman he was quite the opposite of
Milnes. He had at that time no social or political position; he never
had a vestige of Milnes's wit or variety; he was a tall, rough,
ungainly figure, affecting the singular form of self-defense which the
Yorkshiremen and Lancashiremen seem to hold dear--the exterior
roughness assumed to cover an internal, emotional, almost sentimental
nature. Kindly he had to be, if only by his inheritance from a Quaker
ancestry, but he was a Friend one degree removed. Sentimental and
emotional he must have been, or he could never have persuaded a
daughter of Dr. Arnold to marry him. Pure gold, without a trace of base
metal; honest, unselfish, practical; he took up the Union cause and
made himself its champion, as a true Yorkshireman was sure to do,
partly because of his Quaker anti-slavery convictions, and partly
because it gave him a practical opening in the House. As a new member,
he needed a field.

  Diffidence was not one of Forster's weaknesses. His practical
sense and his personal energy soon established him in leadership, and
made him a powerful champion, not so much for ornament as for work.
With such a manager, the friends of the Union in England began to take
heart. Minister Adams had only to look on as his true champions, the
heavy-weights, came into action, and even the private secretary caught
now and then a stray gleam of encouragement as he saw the ring begin to
clear for these burly Yorkshiremen to stand up in a prize-fight likely
to be as brutal as ever England had known. Milnes and Forster were not
exactly light-weights, but Bright and Cobden were the hardest hitters
in England, and with them for champions the Minister could tackle even
Lord Palmerston without much fear of foul play.

  In society John Bright and Richard Cobden were never seen, and
even in Parliament they had no large following. They were classed as
enemies of order,--anarchists,--and anarchists they were if hatred of
the so-called established orders made them so. About them was no sort
of political timidity. They took bluntly the side of the Union against
Palmerston whom they hated. Strangers to London society, they were at
home in the American Legation, delightful dinner-company, talking
always with reckless freedom. Cobden was the milder and more
persuasive; Bright was the more dangerous to approach; but the private
secretary delighted in both, and nourished an ardent wish to see them
talk the same language to Lord John Russell from the gangway of the
House.

  With four such allies as these, Minister Adams stood no longer
quite helpless. For the second time the British Ministry felt a little
ashamed of itself after the Trent Affair, as well it might, and
disposed to wait before moving again. Little by little, friends
gathered about the Legation who were no fair-weather companions. The
old anti-slavery, Exeter Hall, Shaftesbury clique turned out to be an
annoying and troublesome enemy, but the Duke of Argyll was one of the
most valuable friends the Minister found, both politically and
socially, and the Duchess was as true as her mother. Even the private
secretary shared faintly in the social profit of this relation, and
never forgot dining one night at the Lodge, and finding himself after
dinner engaged in instructing John Stuart Mill about the peculiar
merits of an American protective system. In spite of all the
probabilities, he convinced himself that it was not the Duke's claret
which led him to this singular form of loquacity; he insisted that it
was the fault of Mr. Mill himself who led him on by assenting to his
point of view. Mr. Mill took no apparent pleasure in dispute, and in
that respect the Duke would perhaps have done better; but the secretary
had to admit that though at other periods of life he was sufficiently
and even amply snubbed by Englishmen, he could never recall a single
occasion during this trying year, when he had to complain of rudeness.

  Friendliness he found here and there, but chiefly among his
elders; not among fashionable or socially powerful people, either men
or women; although not even this rule was quite exact, for Frederick
Cavendish's kindness and intimate relations made Devonshire House
almost familiar, and Lyulph Stanley's ardent Americanism created a
certain cordiality with the Stanleys of Alderley whose house was one of
the most frequented in London. Lorne, too, the future Argyll, was
always a friend. Yet the regular course of society led to more literary
intimacies. Sir Charles Trevelyan's house was one of the first to which
young Adams was asked, and with which his friendly relations never
ceased for near half a century, and then only when death stopped them.
Sir Charles and Lady Lyell were intimates. Tom Hughes came into close
alliance. By the time society began to reopen its doors after the death
of the Prince Consort, even the private secretary occasionally saw a
face he knew, although he made no more effort of any kind, but silently
waited the end. Whatever might be the advantages of social relations to
his father and mother, to him the whole business of diplomacy and
society was futile. He meant to go home.

Henry and his father arrive at Liverpool on May 13, 1861, the same day that the British Ministry issues a "Proclamation of Neutrality" regarding the war in the United States. Through the editor of the New York Times, and without the knowledge of his father, Henry has arranged to be the newspaper's London correspondent. Between June 7, 1861, and January 4, 1862, Henry publishes thirty-two unsigned letters in the daily. The atmosphere in England startles both Henry and his father. They had expected the English to oppose slavery and support the North; on the contrary, due primarily to financial interests, there is significant support for the Confederacy. On December 16, a supposedly anonymous letter to the Boston Daily Courier is identified as Henry's, resulting in considerable difficulty for the young writer.

Henry has no business agreeing to serve as London correspondent for the New York Times. As Ernest Samuels points out in The Young Henry Adams, the State Department clearly prohibits "all communications with the press." Henry might argue that he is not officially an employee of the State Department, serving as a private secretary to his father; but he knows that he could put his father in an awkward position and that neither his father nor hostile critics would accept his excuse. Other than contacts at the newspaper, only his brother Charles is in on the secret. The historical situation is explosive. Instead of finding an England that supports the North and considers the South to be in rebellion, Charles Francis faces avowed neutrality, which puts the South on equal footing. A blockade of Confederate ports concerns cotton processors in England who fear that supplies may be extensively interrupted, causing serious economic hardship. They support recognition of the Confederacy and hope for an early end to the fighting, with the South surviving as an independent nation. Henry's letters to New York are designed to strengthen his father's position in England; but a separate letter, published in the Boston Daily Courier on December 16, nearly destroys his purpose. Henry has visited Manchester in hopes of explaining -- and perhaps disarming -- the cotton industry's support of the South. His letter on the topic is supposed to be anonymous, but the Boston editor reveals the source. Henry effectively points out that the Cotton Supply Association has experimented with India cotton and may not need materials from the South. Unfortunately, he does not stop there. An incidental paragraph on Manchester social life speaks well of the city but unfavorably of London. "In London," Henry writes, "the guests shift for themselves, and a stranger had better depart at once so soon as he has looked at the family pictures." Manchester hosts provide lovely suppers; in London, a guest is lucky to get a few "thimblefuls of ice cream and hard seed cakes." After identification, the London journalists have a field day. The Times mocks him mercilessly as a "Special Commissioner" to England's "dangerous coast." The Examiner recommends softer cakes for the poor boy. Henry is terrified that the London papers may identify him as the author of the letters to the New York Times, which would be ruin for him and probably his father. Brother Charles urges him to leave his father's service and carry on a separate fight; but throughout his life, Henry avoids public battles.  As soon as he can, he resigns as London correspondent. He needs a more private outlet for his writing talent. Glossary Jefferson Davis  president of the Confederate States of America . ostracism rejection or exclusion, as by society. Quel chien de pays!  What a dog of a country! Que tu es beau aujourdhui, mon cher!  You're looking fine today, my dear! debacle overwhelming defeat or total failure. diffidence lack of confidence in oneself.


FOES OR FRIENDS (1862)

  OF the year 1862 Henry Adams could never think without a
shudder. The war alone did not greatly distress him; already in his
short life he was used to seeing people wade in blood, and he could
plainly discern in history, that man from the beginning had found his
chief amusement in bloodshed; but the ferocious joy of destruction at
its best requires that one should kill what one hates, and young Adams
neither hated nor wanted to kill his friends the rebels, while he
wanted nothing so much as to wipe England off the earth. Never could
any good come from that besotted race! He was feebly trying to save his
own life. Every day the British Government deliberately crowded him one
step further into the grave. He could see it; the Legation knew it; no
one doubted it; no one thought of questioning it. The Trent Affair
showed where Palmerston and Russell stood. The escape of the rebel
cruisers from Liverpool was not, in a young man's eyes, the sign of
hesitation, but the proof of their fixed intention to intervene. Lord
Russell's replies to Mr. Adams's notes were discourteous in their
indifference, and, to an irritable young private secretary of
twenty-four, were insolent in their disregard of truth. Whatever forms
of phrase were usual in public to modify the harshness of invective, in
private no political opponent in England, and few political friends,
hesitated to say brutally of Lord John Russell that he lied. This was
no great reproach, for, more or less, every statesman lied, but the
intensity of the private secretary's rage sprang from his belief that
Russell's form of defence covered intent to kill. Not for an instant
did the Legation draw a free breath. The suspense was hideous and
unendurable.

  The Minister, no doubt, endured it, but he had support and
consideration, while his son had nothing to think about but his friends
who were mostly dying under McClellan in the swamps about Richmond, or
his enemies who were exulting in Pall Mall. He bore it as well as he
could till midsummer, but, when the story of the second Bull Run
appeared, he could bear it no longer, and after a sleepless night,
walking up and down his room without reflecting that his father was
beneath him, he announced at breakfast his intention to go home into
the army. His mother seemed to be less impressed by the announcement
than by the walking over her head, which was so unlike her as to
surprise her son. His father, too, received the announcement quietly.
No doubt they expected it, and had taken their measures in advance. In
those days, parents got used to all sorts of announcements from their
children. Mr. Adams took his son's defection as quietly as he took Bull
Run; but his son never got the chance to go. He found obstacles
constantly rising in his path. The remonstrances of his brother
Charles, who was himself in the Army of the Potomac, and whose opinion
had always the greatest weight with Henry, had much to do with delaying
action; but he felt, of his own accord, that if he deserted his post in
London, and found the Capuan comforts he expected in Virginia where he
would have only bullets to wound him, he would never forgive himself
for leaving his father and mother alone to be devoured by the wild
beasts of the British amphitheatre. This reflection might not have
stopped him, but his father's suggestion was decisive. The Minister
pointed out that it was too late for him to take part in the actual
campaign, and that long before next spring they would all go home
together.

  The young man had copied too many affidavits about rebel
cruisers to miss the point of this argument, so he sat down again to
copy some more. Consul Dudley at Liverpool provided a continuous
supply. Properly, the affidavits were no business of the private
secretary, but practically the private secretary did a second
secretary's work, and was glad to do it, if it would save Mr. Seward
the trouble of sending more secretaries of his own selection to help
the Minister. The work was nothing, and no one ever complained of it;
not even Moran, the Secretary of Legation after the departure of
Charley Wilson, though he might sit up all night to copy. Not the work,
but the play exhausted. The effort of facing a hostile society was bad
enough, but that of facing friends was worse. After terrific disasters
like the seven days before Richmond and the second Bull Run, friends
needed support; a tone of bluff would have been fatal, for the average
mind sees quickest through a bluff; nothing answers but candor; yet
private secretaries never feel candid, however much they feel the
reverse, and therefore they must affect candor; not always a simple act
when one is exasperated, furious, bitter, and choking with tears over
the blunders and incapacity of one's Government. If one shed tears,
they must be shed on one's pillow. Least of all, must one throw extra
strain on the Minister, who had all he could carry without being
fretted in his family. One must read one's Times every morning over
one's muffin without reading aloud--"Another disastrous Federal
Defeat"; and one might not even indulge in harmless profanity.
Self-restraint among friends required much more effort than keeping a
quiet face before enemies. Great men were the worst blunderers. One day
the private secretary smiled, when standing with the crowd in the
throne-room while the endless procession made bows to the royal family,
at hearing, behind his shoulder, one Cabinet Minister remark gaily to
another: "So the Federals have got another licking!" The point of the
remark was its truth. Even a private secretary had learned to control
his tones and guard his features and betray no joy over the "lickings"
of an enemy--in the enemy's presence.

  London was altogether beside itself on one point, in especial;
it created a nightmare of its own, and gave it the shape of Abraham
Lincoln. Behind this it placed another demon, if possible more
devilish, and called it Mr. Seward. In regard to these two men, English
society seemed demented. Defence was useless; explanation was vain; one
could only let the passion exhaust itself. One's best friends were as
unreasonable as enemies, for the belief in poor Mr. Lincoln's brutality
and Seward's ferocity became a dogma of popular faith. The last time
Henry Adams saw Thackeray, before his sudden death at Christmas in
1863, was in entering the house of Sir Henry Holland for an evening
reception. Thackeray was pulling on his coat downstairs, laughing
because, in his usual blind way, he had stumbled into the wrong house
and not found it out till he shook hands with old Sir Henry, whom he
knew very well, but who was not the host he expected. Then his tone
changed as he spoke of his--and Adams's--friend, Mrs. Frank Hampton, of
South Carolina, whom he had loved as Sally Baxter and painted as Ethel
Newcome. Though he had never quite forgiven her marriage, his warmth of
feeling revived when he heard that she had died of consumption at
Columbia while her parents and sister were refused permission to pass
through the lines to see her. In speaking of it, Thackeray's voice
trembled and his eyes filled with tears. The coarse cruelty of Lincoln
and his hirelings was notorious. He never doubted that the Federals
made a business of harrowing the tenderest feelings of
women--particularly of women--in order to punish their opponents. On
quite insufficient evidence he burst into violent reproach. Had Adams
carried in his pocket the proofs that the reproach was unjust, he would
have gained nothing by showing them. At that moment Thackeray, and all
London society with him, needed the nervous relief of expressing
emotion; for if Mr. Lincoln was not what they said he--was what were
they?

  For like reason, the members of the Legation kept silence, even
in private, under the boorish Scotch jibes of Carlyle. If Carlyle was
wrong, his diatribes would give his true measure, and this measure
would be a low one, for Carlyle was not likely to be more sincere or
more sound in one thought than in another. The proof that a philosopher
does not know what he is talking about is apt to sadden his followers
before it reacts on himself. Demolition of one's idols is painful, and
Carlyle had been an idol. Doubts cast on his stature spread far into
general darkness like shadows of a setting sun. Not merely the idols
fell, but also the habit of faith. If Carlyle, too, was a fraud, what
were his scholars and school?

  Society as a rule was civil, and one had no more reason to
complain than every other diplomatist has had, in like conditions, but
one's few friends in society were mere ornament. The Legation could not
dream of contesting social control. The best they could do was to
escape mortification, and by this time their relations were good enough
to save the Minister's family from that annoyance. Now and then, the
fact could not be wholly disguised that some one had refused to
meet--or to receive--the Minister; but never an open insult, or any
expression of which the Minister had to take notice. Diplomacy served
as a buffer in times of irritation, and no diplomat who knew his
business fretted at what every diplomat--and none more commonly than
the English--had to expect; therefore Henry Adams, though not a
diplomat and wholly unprotected, went his way peacefully enough, seeing
clearly that society cared little to make his acquaintance, but seeing
also no reason why society should discover charms in him of which he
was himself unconscious. He went where he was asked; he was always
courteously received; he was, on the whole, better treated than at
Washington; and he held his tongue.

  For a thousand reasons, the best diplomatic house in London was
Lord Palmerston's, while Lord John Russell's was one of the worst. Of
neither host could a private secretary expect to know anything. He
might as well have expected to know the Grand Lama. Personally Lord
Palmerston was the last man in London that a cautious private secretary
wanted to know. Other Prime Ministers may perhaps have lived who
inspired among diplomatists as much distrust as Palmerston, and yet
between Palmerston's word and Russell's word, one hesitated to decide,
and gave years of education to deciding, whether either could be
trusted, or how far. The Queen herself in her famous memorandum of
August 12, 1850, gave her opinion of Palmerston in words that differed
little from words used by Lord John Russell, and both the Queen and
Russell said in substance only what Cobden and Bright said in private.
Every diplomatist agreed with them, yet the diplomatic standard of
trust seemed to be other than the parliamentarian. No professional
diplomatists worried about falsehoods. Words were with them forms of
expression which varied with individuals, but falsehood was more or
less necessary to all. The worst liars were the candid. What
diplomatists wanted to know was the motive that lay beyond the
expression. In the case of Palmerston they were unanimous in warning
new colleagues that they might expect to be sacrificed by him to any
momentary personal object. Every new Minister or Ambassador at the
Court of St. James received this preliminary lesson that he must, if
possible, keep out of Palmerston's reach. The rule was not secret or
merely diplomatic. The Queen herself had emphatically expressed the
same opinion officially. If Palmerston had an object to gain, he would
go down to the House of Commons and betray or misrepresent a foreign
Minister, without concern for his victim. No one got back on him with a
blow equally mischievous--not even the Queen--for, as old Baron Brunnow
described him: "C'est une peau de rhinocere!" Having gained his point,
he laughed, and his public laughed with him, for the usual British--or
American--public likes to be amused, and thought it very amusing to see
these beribboned and bestarred foreigners caught and tossed and gored
on the horns of this jovial, slashing, devil-may-care British bull.

  Diplomatists have no right to complain of mere lies; it is
their own fault, if, educated as they are, the lies deceive them; but
they complain bitterly of traps. Palmerston was believed to lay traps.
He was the enfant terrible of the British Government. On the other
hand, Lady Palmerston was believed to be good and loyal. All the
diplomats and their wives seemed to think so, and took their troubles
to her, believing that she would try to help them. For this reason
among others, her evenings at home--Saturday Reviews, they were
called--had great vogue. An ignorant young American could not be
expected to explain it. Cambridge House was no better for entertaining
than a score of others. Lady Palmerston was no longer young or
handsome, and could hardly at any age have been vivacious. The people
one met there were never smart and seldom young; they were largely
diplomatic, and diplomats are commonly dull; they were largely
political, and politicians rarely decorate or beautify an evening
party; they were sprinkled with literary people, who are notoriously
unfashionable; the women were of course ill-dressed and middle-aged;
the men looked mostly bored or out of place; yet, beyond a doubt,
Cambridge House was the best, and perhaps the only political house in
London, and its success was due to Lady Palmerston, who never seemed to
make an effort beyond a friendly recognition. As a lesson in social
education, Cambridge House gave much subject for thought. First or
last, one was to know dozens of statesmen more powerful and more
agreeable than Lord Palmerston; dozens of ladies more beautiful and
more painstaking than Lady Palmerston; but no political house so
successful as Cambridge House. The world never explains such riddles.
The foreigners said only that Lady Palmerston was "sympathique."

  The small fry of the Legations were admitted there, or
tolerated, without a further effort to recognize their existence, but
they were pleased because rarely tolerated anywhere else, and there
they could at least stand in a corner and look at a bishop or even a
duke. This was the social diversion of young Adams. No one knew
him--not even the lackeys. The last Saturday evening he ever attended,
he gave his name as usual at the foot of the staircase, and was rather
disturbed to hear it shouted up as "Mr. Handrew Hadams!" He tried to
correct it, and the footman shouted more loudly: "Mr. Hanthony Hadams!"
With some temper he repeated the correction, and was finally announced
as "Mr. Halexander Hadams," and under this name made his bow for the
last time to Lord Palmerston who certainly knew no better.

  Far down the staircase one heard Lord Palmerston's laugh as he
stood at the door receiving his guests, talking probably to one of his
henchmen, Delane, Borthwick, or Hayward, who were sure to be near. The
laugh was singular, mechanical, wooden, and did not seem to disturb his
features. "Ha! ... Ha! ... Ha!" Each was a slow, deliberate
ejaculation, and all were in the same tone, as though he meant to say:
"Yes! ... Yes! ... Yes!" by way of assurance. It was a laugh of 1810
and the Congress of Vienna. Adams would have much liked to stop a
moment and ask whether William Pitt and the Duke of Wellington had
laughed so; but young men attached to foreign Ministers asked no
questions at all of Palmerston and their chiefs asked as few as
possible. One made the usual bow and received the usual glance of
civility; then passed on to Lady Palmerston, who was always kind in
manner, but who wasted no remarks; and so to Lady Jocelyn with her
daughter, who commonly had something friendly to say; then went through
the diplomatic corps, Brunnow, Musurus, Azeglio, Apponyi, Van de Weyer,
Bille, Tricoupi, and the rest, finally dropping into the hands of some
literary accident as strange there as one's self. The routine varied
little. There was no attempt at entertainment. Except for the desperate
isolation of these two first seasons, even secretaries would have found
the effort almost as mechanical as a levee at St. James's Palace.

  Lord Palmerston was not Foreign Secretary; he was Prime
Minister, but he loved foreign affairs and could no more resist scoring
a point in diplomacy than in whist. Ministers of foreign powers,
knowing his habits, tried to hold him at arms'-length, and, to do this,
were obliged to court the actual Foreign Secretary, Lord John Russell,
who, on July 30, 1861, was called up to the House of Lords as an earl.
By some process of personal affiliation, Minister Adams succeeded in
persuading himself that he could trust Lord Russell more safely than
Lord Palmerston. His son, being young and ill-balanced in temper,
thought there was nothing to choose. Englishmen saw little difference
between them, and Americans were bound to follow English experience in
English character. Minister Adams had much to learn, although with him
as well as with his son, the months of education began to count as
aeons.

  Just as Brunnow predicted, Lord Palmerston made his rush at
last, as unexpected as always, and more furiously than though still a
private secretary of twenty-four. Only a man who had been young with
the battle of Trafalgar could be fresh and jaunty to that point, but
Minister Adams was not in a position to sympathize with octogenarian
youth and found himself in a danger as critical as that of his numerous
predecessors. It was late one after noon in June, 1862, as the private
secretary returned, with the Minister, from some social function, that
he saw his father pick up a note from his desk and read it in silence.
Then he said curtly: "Palmerston wants a quarrel!" This was the point
of the incident as he felt it. Palmerston wanted a quarrel; he must not
be gratified; he must be stopped. The matter of quarrel was General
Butler's famous woman-order at New Orleans, but the motive was the
belief in President Lincoln's brutality that had taken such deep root
in the British mind. Knowing Palmerston's habits, the Minister took for
granted that he meant to score a diplomatic point by producing this
note in the House of Commons. If he did this at once, the Minister was
lost; the quarrel was made; and one new victim to Palmerston's passion
for popularity was sacrificed.

  The moment was nervous--as far as the private secretary knew,
quite the most critical moment in the records of American
diplomacy--but the story belongs to history, not to education, and can
be read there by any one who cares to read it. As a part of Henry
Adams's education it had a value distinct from history. That his father
succeeded in muzzling Palmerston without a public scandal, was well
enough for the Minister, but was not enough for a private secretary who
liked going to Cambridge House, and was puzzled to reconcile
contradictions. That Palmerston had wanted a quarrel was obvious; why,
then, did he submit so tamely to being made the victim of the quarrel?
The correspondence that followed his note was conducted feebly on his
side, and he allowed the United States Minister to close it by a
refusal to receive further communications from him except through Lord
Russell. The step was excessively strong, for it broke off private
relations as well as public, and cost even the private secretary his
invitations to Cambridge House. Lady Palmerston tried her best, but the
two ladies found no resource except tears. They had to do with American
Minister perplexed in the extreme. Not that Mr. Adams lost his temper,
for he never felt such a weight of responsibility, and was never more
cool; but he could conceive no other way of protecting his Government,
not to speak of himself, than to force Lord Russell to interpose. He
believed that Palmerston's submission and silence were due to Russell.
Perhaps he was right; at the time, his son had no doubt of it, though
afterwards he felt less sure. Palmerston wanted a quarrel; the motive
seemed evident; yet when the quarrel was made, he backed out of it; for
some reason it seemed that he did not want it--at least, not then. He
never showed resentment against Mr. Adams at the time or afterwards. He
never began another quarrel. Incredible as it seemed, he behaved like a
well-bred gentleman who felt himself in the wrong. Possibly this change
may have been due to Lord Russell's remonstrances, but the private
secretary would have felt his education in politics more complete had
he ever finally made up his mind whether Palmerston was more angry with
General Butler, or more annoyed at himself, for committing what was in
both cases an unpardonable betise.

  At the time, the question was hardly raised, for no one doubted
Palmerston's attitude or his plans. The season was near its end, and
Cambridge House was soon closed. The Legation had troubles enough
without caring to publish more. The tide of English feeling ran so
violently against it that one could only wait to see whether General
McClellan would bring it relief. The year 1862 was a dark spot in Henry
Adams's life, and the education it gave was mostly one that he gladly
forgot. As far as he was aware, he made no friends; he could hardly
make enemies; yet towards the close of the year he was flattered by an
invitation from Monckton Milnes to Fryston, and it was one of many acts
of charity towards the young that gave Milnes immortality. Milnes made
it his business to be kind. Other people criticised him for his manner
of doing it, but never imitated him. Naturally, a dispirited,
disheartened private secretary was exceedingly grateful, and never
forgot the kindness, but it was chiefly as education that this first
country visit had value. Commonly, country visits are much alike, but
Monckton Milnes was never like anybody, and his country parties served
his purpose of mixing strange elements. Fryston was one of a class of
houses that no one sought for its natural beauties, and the winter
mists of Yorkshire were rather more evident for the absence of the
hostess on account of them, so that the singular guests whom Milnes
collected to enliven his December had nothing to do but astonish each
other, if anything could astonish such men. Of the five, Adams alone
was tame; he alone added nothing to the wit or humor, except as a
listener; but they needed a listener and he was useful. Of the
remaining four, Milnes was the oldest, and perhaps the sanest in spite
of his superficial eccentricities, for Yorkshire sanity was true to a
standard of its own, if not to other conventions; yet even Milnes
startled a young American whose Boston and Washington mind was still
fresh. He would not have been startled by the hard-drinking,
horse-racing Yorkshireman of whom he had read in books; but Milnes
required a knowledge of society and literature that only himself
possessed, if one were to try to keep pace with him. He had sought
contact with everybody and everything that Europe could offer. He knew
it all from several points of view, and chiefly as humorous.

  The second of the party was also of a certain age; a quiet,
well-mannered, singularly agreeable gentleman of the literary class.
When Milnes showed Adams to his room to dress for dinner, he stayed a
moment to say a word about this guest, whom he called Stirling of Keir.
His sketch closed with the hint that Stirling was violent only on one
point--hatred of Napoleon III. On that point, Adams was himself
sensitive, which led him to wonder how bad the Scotch gentleman might
be. The third was a man of thirty or thereabouts, whom Adams had
already met at Lady Palmerston's carrying his arm in a sling. His
figure and bearing were sympathetic--almost pathetic--with a certain
grave and gentle charm, a pleasant smile, and an interesting story. He
was Lawrence Oliphant, just from Japan, where he had been wounded in
the fanatics' attack on the British Legation. He seemed exceptionally
sane and peculiarly suited for country houses, where every man would
enjoy his company, and every woman would adore him. He had not then
published "Piccadilly"; perhaps he was writing it; while, like all the
young men about the Foreign Office, he contributed to The Owl.

  The fourth was a boy, or had the look of one, though in fact a
year older than Adams himself. He resembled in action--and in this
trait, was remotely followed, a generation later, by another famous
young man, Robert Louis Stevenson--a tropical bird, high-crested,
long-beaked, quick-moving, with rapid utterance and screams of humor,
quite unlike any English lark or nightingale. One could hardly call him
a crimson macaw among owls, and yet no ordinary contrast availed.
Milnes introduced him as Mr. Algernon Swinburne. The name suggested
nothing. Milnes was always unearthing new coins and trying to give them
currency. He had unearthed Henry Adams who knew himself to be worthless
and not current. When Milnes lingered a moment in Adams's room to add
that Swinburne had written some poetry, not yet published, of really
extraordinary merit, Adams only wondered what more Milnes would
discover, and whether by chance he could discover merit in a private
secretary. He was capable of it.

  In due course this party of five men sat down to dinner with
the usual club manners of ladyless dinner-tables, easy and formal at
the same time. Conversation ran first to Oliphant who told his dramatic
story simply, and from him the talk drifted off into other channels,
until Milnes thought it time to bring Swinburne out. Then, at last, if
never before, Adams acquired education. What he had sought so long, he
found; but he was none the wiser; only the more astonished. For once,
too, he felt at ease, for the others were no less astonished than
himself, and their astonishment grew apace. For the rest of the evening
Swinburne figured alone; the end of dinner made the monologue only
freer, for in 1862, even when ladies were not in the house, smoking was
forbidden, and guests usually smoked in the stables or the kitchen; but
Monckton Milnes was a licensed libertine who let his guests smoke in
Adams's bedroom, since Adams was an American-German barbarian ignorant
of manners; and there after dinner all sat--or lay--till far into the
night, listening to the rush of Swinburne's talk. In a long experience,
before or after, no one ever approached it; yet one had heard accounts
of the best talking of the time, and read accounts of talkers in all
time, among the rest, of Voltaire, who seemed to approach nearest the
pattern.

  That Swinburne was altogether new to the three types of
men-of-the-world before him; that he seemed to them quite original,
wildly eccentric, astonishingly gifted, and convulsingly droll, Adams
could see; but what more he was, even Milnes hardly dared say. They
could not believe his incredible memory and knowledge of literature,
classic, mediaeval, and modern; his faculty of reciting a play of
Sophocles or a play of Shakespeare, forward or backward, from end to
beginning; or Dante, or Villon, or Victor Hugo. They knew not what to
make of his rhetorical recitation of his own unpublished
ballads--"Faustine"; the "Four Boards of the Coffin Lid"; the "Ballad
of Burdens"--which he declaimed as though they were books of the Iliad.
It was singular that his most appreciative listener should have been
the author only of pretty verses like "We wandered by the brook-side,"
and "She seemed to those that saw them meet"; and who never cared to
write in any other tone; but Milnes took everything into his
sympathies, including Americans like young Adams whose standards were
stiffest of all, while Swinburne, though millions of ages far from
them, united them by his humor even more than by his poetry. The story
of his first day as a member of Professor Stubbs's household was
professionally clever farce, if not high comedy, in a young man who
could write a Greek ode or a Provencal chanson as easily as an English
quatrain.

  Late at night when the symposium broke up, Stirling of Keir
wanted to take with him to his chamber a copy of "Queen Rosamund," the
only volume Swinburne had then published, which was on the library
table, and Adams offered to light him down with his solitary bedroom
candle. All the way, Stirling was ejaculating explosions of wonder,
until at length, at the foot of the stairs and at the climax of his
imagination, he paused, and burst out: "He's a cross between the devil
and the Duke of Argyll!"

  To appreciate the full merit of this description, a judicious
critic should have known both, and Henry Adams knew only one--at least
in person--but he understood that to a Scotchman the likeness meant
something quite portentous, beyond English experience, supernatural,
and what the French call moyenageux, or mediaeval with a grotesque
turn. That Stirling as well as Milnes should regard Swinburne as a
prodigy greatly comforted Adams, who lost his balance of mind at first
in trying to imagine that Swinburne was a natural product of Oxford, as
muffins and pork-pies of London, at once the cause and effect of
dyspepsia. The idea that one has actually met a real genius dawns
slowly on a Boston mind, but it made entry at last.

  Then came the sad reaction, not from Swinburne whose genius
never was in doubt, but from the Boston mind which, in its uttermost
flights, was never moyenageux. One felt the horror of Longfellow and
Emerson, the doubts of Lowell and the humor of Holmes, at the wild
Walpurgis-night of Swinburne's talk. What could a shy young private
secretary do about it? Perhaps, in his good nature, Milnes thought that
Swinburne might find a friend in Stirling or Oliphant, but he could
hardly have fancied Henry Adams rousing in him even an interest. Adams
could no more interest Algernon Swinburne than he could interest
Encke's comet. To Swinburne he could be no more than a worm. The
quality of genius was an education almost ultimate, for one touched
there the limits of the human mind on that side; but one could only
receive; one had nothing to give--nothing even to offer.

  Swinburne tested him then and there by one of his favorite
tests--Victor Hugo for to him the test of Victor Hugo was the surest
and quickest of standards. French poetry is at best a severe exercise
for foreigners; it requires extraordinary knowledge of the language and
rare refinement of ear to appreciate even the recitation of French
verse; but unless a poet has both, he lacks something of poetry. Adams
had neither. To the end of his life he never listened to a French
recitation with pleasure, or felt a sense of majesty in French verse;
but he did not care to proclaim his weakness, and he tried to evade
Swinburne's vehement insistence by parading an affection for Alfred de
Musset. Swinburne would have none of it; de Musset was unequal; he did
not sustain himself on the wing.

  Adams would have given a world or two, if he owned one, to
sustain himself on the wing like de Musset, or even like Hugo; but his
education as well as his ear was at fault, and he succumbed. Swinburne
tried him again on Walter Savage Landor. In truth the test was the
same, for Swinburne admired in Landor's English the qualities that he
felt in Hugo's French; and Adams's failure was equally gross, for, when
forced to despair, he had to admit that both Hugo and Landor bored him.
Nothing more was needed. One who could feel neither Hugo nor Landor was
lost.

  The sentence was just and Adams never appealed from it. He knew
his inferiority in taste as he might know it in smell. Keenly mortified
by the dullness of his senses and instincts, he knew he was no
companion for Swinburne; probably he could be only an annoyance; no
number of centuries could ever educate him to Swinburne's level, even
in technical appreciation; yet he often wondered whether there was
nothing he had to offer that was worth the poet's acceptance. Certainly
such mild homage as the American insect would have been only too happy
to bring, had he known how, was hardly worth the acceptance of any one.
Only in France is the attitude of prayer possible; in England it became
absurd. Even Monckton Milnes, who felt the splendors of Hugo and
Landor, was almost as helpless as an American private secretary in
personal contact with them. Ten years afterwards Adams met him at the
Geneva Conference, fresh from Paris, bubbling with delight at a call he
had made on Hugo: "I was shown into a large room," he said, "with women
and men seated in chairs against the walls, and Hugo at one end
throned. No one spoke. At last Hugo raised his voice solemnly, and
uttered the words: 'Quant a moi, je crois en Dieu!' Silence followed.
Then a woman responded as if in deep meditation: 'Chose sublime! un
Dieu qui croit en Dieu!"'

  With the best of will, one could not do this in London; the
actors had not the instinct of the drama; and yet even a private
secretary was not wholly wanting in instinct. As soon as he reached
town he hurried to Pickering's for a copy of "Queen Rosamund," and at
that time, if Swinburne was not joking, Pickering had sold seven
copies. When the "Poems and Ballads" came out, and met their great
success and scandal, he sought one of the first copies from Moxon. If
he had sinned and doubted at all, he wholly repented and did penance
before "Atalanta in Calydon," and would have offered Swinburne a solemn
worship as Milnes's female offered Hugo, if it would have pleased the
poet. Unfortunately it was worthless.

  The three young men returned to London, and each went his own
way. Adams's interest in making friends was something desperate, but
"the London season," Milnes used to say, "is a season for making
acquaintances and losing friends"; there was no intimate life. Of
Swinburne he saw no more till Monckton Milnes summoned his whole array
of Frystonians to support him in presiding at the dinner of the
Authors' Fund, when Adams found himself seated next to Swinburne,
famous then, but no nearer. They never met again. Oliphant he met
oftener; all the world knew and loved him; but he too disappeared in
the way that all the world knows. Stirling of Keir, after one or two
efforts, passed also from Adams's vision into Sir William
Stirling-Maxwell. The only record of his wonderful visit to Fryston may
perhaps exist still in the registers of the St. James's Club, for
immediately afterwards Milnes proposed Henry Adams for membership, and
unless his memory erred, the nomination was seconded by Tricoupi and
endorsed by Laurence Oliphant and Evelyn Ashley. The list was a little
singular for variety, but on the whole it suggested that the private
secretary was getting on.

As the war continues back home, Henry struggles with London's social life. Despite disappointments, he does make the acquaintance of a number of talented writers, most notably Algernon Swinburne. More important is the developing tension between the Legation and British political leaders who favor the South and come close to diplomatic recognition of the Confederacy. One practical crisis involves two warships that English shipbuilders have produced under contract to Confederacy. Another crisis is primarily diplomatic but even more dangerous as the Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, attempts to turn an incident at the surrender of New Orleans into an international issue.

Although he recognizes the seriousness of his father's role in keeping England from recognizing the Confederacy, Henry is a twenty-four-year-old bachelor whose social life is important to him. He feels that he is suffering and, at one point , makes the ludicrous, self-indulgent observation that his friends in the Union army are "enjoying a much pleasanter life" than he is. Still somewhat superficial and biased, Henry resents the cold shoulder that he receives from the English aristocracy, especially since Henry, frankly, thinks of himself as an aristocrat. On the positive side, English liberals and radical reformers, most of whom abhor slavery, are more congenial. Of special interest to a fledgling writer, Henry becomes acquainted with such talented authors as Robert Browning, John Stuart Mill, Charles Dickens, and Oliver Goldsmith. This year, 1862, he is especially impressed with the young poet Algernon Swinburne. Only a year older than Henry, Swinburne dazzles Adams with his knowledge of literature and his ease of perception; he is a contemporary who is "quite original, wildly eccentric, astonishingly gifted and convulsingly droll." Henry is sincerely humbled. Of greater concern is his father's struggle to keep the English from diplomatic recognition of the Confederacy. Charles Francis Adams must demonstrate just enough toughness to keep the English in check without going too far and starting another war. Tensions mount when it is discovered that the Confederates have had two cruisers built in England, setting sail as if they were British ships and then being armed from another ship and hoisting the rebel colors at sea. Even more dangerous is the attitude of the Prime Minister, John Henry Temple, Viscount Palmerston . Palmerston appears to be looking for a fight, perhaps hoping for an excuse to recognize the Confederacy. He latches on to an incident at the surrender of New Orleans. There, victorious Union General Benjamin Franklin Butler ordered that any woman who insulted a Yankee soldier should be arrested as a common prostitute. Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, angrily eager to support the honor of Southern womanhood, decreed that, if Butler were ever captured, the General should be hanged as a felon. Recognizing a popular cause, Palmerston rants to the British House of Commons that the Union has disgraced the Anglo-Saxon race! Henry's father calmly stands up to Palmerston, refusing to receive further communication from the Prime Minister except through the apparently levelheaded British Foreign Secretary, Lord Russell. The implication is that diplomatic recognition of the Confederacy would mean war between the United States and Great Britain. Palmerston backs down, but the problems have just begun. Glossary remonstrances protests, complaints, objections. harrowing causing mental distress to; tormenting; vexing. enfant terrible  an unmanageable, mischievous child. betise  blunder. dyspepsia indigestion. Quant a moi, je crois en Dieu!  As for me, I believe in God! Chose sublime! un Dieu qui croit en Dieu! What a sublime thing! a God who believes in God!