ECCENTRICITY (1863)

  KNOWLEDGE of human nature is the beginning and end of political
education, but several years of arduous study in the neighborhood of
Westminster led Henry Adams to think that knowledge of English human
nature had little or no value outside of England. In Paris, such a
habit stood in one's way; in America, it roused all the instincts of
native jealousy. The English mind was one-sided, eccentric,
systematically unsystematic, and logically illogical. The less one knew
of it, the better.

  This heresy, which scarcely would have been allowed to
penetrate a Boston mind--it would, indeed, have been shut out by
instinct as a rather foolish exaggeration--rested on an experience
which Henry Adams gravely thought he had a right to think
conclusive--for him. That it should be conclusive for any one else
never occurred to him, since he had no thought of educating anybody
else. For him--alone--the less English education he got, the better!

  For several years, under the keenest incitement to
watchfulness, he observed the English mind in contact with itself and
other minds. Especially with the American the contact was interesting
because the limits and defects of the American mind were one of the
favorite topics of the European. From the old-world point of view, the
American had no mind; he had an economic thinking-machine which could
work only on a fixed line. The American mind exasperated the European
as a buzz-saw might exasperate a pine forest. The English mind disliked
the French mind because it was antagonistic, unreasonable, perhaps
hostile, but recognized it as at least a thought. The American mind was
not a thought at all; it was a convention, superficial, narrow, and
ignorant; a mere cutting instrument, practical, economical, sharp, and
direct.

  The English themselves hardly conceived that their mind was
either economical, sharp, or direct; but the defect that most struck an
American was its enormous waste in eccentricity. Americans needed and
used their whole energy, and applied it with close economy; but English
society was eccentric by law and for sake of the eccentricity itself.

  The commonest phrase overheard at an English club or
dinner-table was that So-and-So "is quite mad." It was no offence to
So-and-So; it hardly distinguished him from his fellows; and when
applied to a public man, like Gladstone, it was qualified by epithets
much more forcible. Eccentricity was so general as to become hereditary
distinction. It made the chief charm of English society as well as its
chief terror.

  The American delighted in Thackeray as a satirist, but
Thackeray quite justly maintained that he was not a satirist at all,
and that his pictures of English society were exact and good-natured.
The American, who could not believe it, fell back on Dickens, who, at
all events, had the vice of exaggeration to extravagance, but Dickens's
English audience thought the exaggeration rather in manner or style,
than in types. Mr. Gladstone himself went to see Sothern act Dundreary,
and laughed till his face was distorted--not because Dundreary was
exaggerated, but because he was ridiculously like the types that
Gladstone had seen--or might have seen--in any club in Pall Mall.
Society swarmed with exaggerated characters; it contained little else.

  Often this eccentricity bore all the marks of strength; perhaps
it was actual exuberance of force, a birthmark of genius. Boston
thought so. The Bostonian called it national character--native
vigor--robustness--honesty--courage. He respected and feared it.
British self-assertion, bluff, brutal, blunt as it was, seemed to him a
better and nobler thing than the acuteness of the Yankee or the polish
of the Parisian. Perhaps he was right.

  These questions of taste, of feeling, of inheritance, need no
settlement. Every one carries his own inch-rule of taste, and amuses
himself by applying it, triumphantly, wherever he travels. Whatever
others thought, the cleverest Englishmen held that the national
eccentricity needed correction, and were beginning to correct it. The
savage satires of Dickens and the gentler ridicule of Matthew Arnold
against the British middle class were but a part of the rebellion, for
the middle class were no worse than their neighbors in the eyes of an
American in 1863; they were even a very little better in the sense that
one could appeal to their interests, while a university man, like
Gladstone, stood outside of argument. From none of them could a young
American afford to borrow ideas.

  The private secretary, like every other Bostonian, began by
regarding British eccentricity as a force. Contact with it, in the
shape of Palmerston, Russell, and Gladstone, made him hesitate; he saw
his own national type--his father, Weed, Evarts, for instance--deal
with the British, and show itself certainly not the weaker; certainly
sometimes the stronger. Biassed though he were, he could hardly be
biassed to such a degree as to mistake the effects of force on others,
and while--labor as he might--Earl Russell and his state papers seemed
weak to a secretary, he could not see that they seemed strong to
Russell's own followers. Russell might be dishonest or he might be
merely obtuse--the English type might be brutal or might be only
stupid--but strong, in either case, it was not, nor did it seem strong
to Englishmen.

Eccentricity was not always a force; Americans were deeply interested
in deciding whether it was always a weakness. Evidently, on the
hustings or in Parliament, among eccentricities, eccentricity was at
home; but in private society the question was not easy to answer. That
English society was infinitely more amusing because of its
eccentricities, no one denied. Barring the atrocious insolence and
brutality which Englishmen and especially Englishwomen showed to each
other--very rarely, indeed, to foreigners--English society was much
more easy and tolerant than American. One must expect to be treated
with exquisite courtesy this week and be totally forgotten the next,
but this was the way of the world, and education consisted in learning
to turn one's back on others with the same unconscious indifference
that others showed among themselves. The smart of wounded vanity lasted
no long time with a young man about town who had little vanity to
smart, and who, in his own country, would have found himself in no
better position. He had nothing to complain of. No one was ever brutal
to him. On the contrary, he was much better treated than ever he was
likely to be in Boston--let alone New York or Washington--and if his
reception varied inconceivably between extreme courtesy and extreme
neglect, it merely proved that he had become, or was becoming, at home.
Not from a sense of personal griefs or disappointments did he labor
over this part of the social problem, but only because his education
was becoming English, and the further it went, the less it promised.

  By natural affinity the social eccentrics commonly sympathized
with political eccentricity. The English mind took naturally to
rebellion--when foreign--and it felt particular confidence in the
Southern Confederacy because of its combined attributes--foreign
rebellion of English blood--which came nearer ideal eccentricity than
could be reached by Poles, Hungarians, Italians or Frenchmen. All the
English eccentrics rushed into the ranks of rebel sympathizers, leaving
few but well-balanced minds to attach themselves to the cause of the
Union. None of the English leaders on the Northern side were marked
eccentrics. William E. Forster was a practical, hard-headed
Yorkshireman, whose chief ideals in politics took shape as working
arrangements on an economical base. Cobden, considering the one-sided
conditions of his life, was remarkably well balanced. John Bright was
stronger in his expressions than either of them, but with all his
self-assertion he stuck to his point, and his point was practical. He
did not, like Gladstone, box the compass of thought; "furiously
earnest," as Monckton Milnes said, "on both sides of every question";
he was rather, on the whole, a consistent conservative of the old
Commonwealth type, and seldom had to defend inconsistencies. Monckton
Milnes himself was regarded as an eccentric, chiefly by those who did
not know him, but his fancies and hobbies were only ideas a little in
advance of the time; his manner was eccentric, but not his mind, as any
one could see who read a page of his poetry. None of them, except
Milnes, was a university man. As a rule, the Legation was troubled very
little, if at all, by indiscretions, extravagances, or contradictions
among its English friends. Their work was largely judicious, practical,
well considered, and almost too cautious. The "cranks" were all rebels,
and the list was portentous. Perhaps it might be headed by old Lord
Brougham, who had the audacity to appear at a July 4th reception at the
Legation, led by Joe Parkes, and claim his old credit as "Attorney
General to Mr. Madison." The Church was rebel, but the dissenters were
mostly with the Union. The universities were rebel, but the university
men who enjoyed most public confidence--like Lord Granville, Sir George
Cornewall Lewis, Lord Stanley, Sir George Grey--took infinite pains to
be neutral for fear of being thought eccentric. To most observers, as
well as to the Times, the Morning Post, and the Standard, a vast
majority of the English people seemed to follow the professional
eccentrics; even the emotional philanthropists took that direction;
Lord Shaftesbury and Carlyle, Fowell Buxton, and Gladstone, threw their
sympathies on the side which they should naturally have opposed, and
did so for no reason except their eccentricity; but the "canny" Scots
and Yorkshiremen were cautious.

  This eccentricity did not mean strength. The proof of it was
the mismanagement of the rebel interests. No doubt the first cause of
this trouble lay in the Richmond Government itself. No one understood
why Jefferson Davis chose Mr. Mason as his agent for London at the same
time that he made so good a choice as Mr. Slidell for Paris. The
Confederacy had plenty of excellent men to send to London, but few who
were less fitted than Mason. Possibly Mason had a certain amount of
common sense, but he seemed to have nothing else, and in London society
he counted merely as one eccentric more. He enjoyed a great
opportunity; he might even have figured as a new Benjamin Franklin with
all society at his feet; he might have roared as lion of the season and
made the social path of the American Minister almost impassable; but
Mr. Adams had his usual luck in enemies, who were always his most
valuable allies if his friends only let them alone. Mason was his
greatest diplomatic triumph. He had his collision with Palmerston; he
drove Russell off the field; he swept the board before Cockburn; he
overbore Slidell; but he never lifted a finger against Mason, who
became his bulwark of defence.

  Possibly Jefferson Davis and Mr. Mason shared two defects in
common which might have led them into this serious mistake. Neither
could have had much knowledge of the world, and both must have been
unconscious of humor. Yet at the same time with Mason, President Davis
sent out Slidell to France and Mr. Lamar to Russia. Some twenty years
later, in the shifting search for the education he never found, Adams
became closely intimate at Washington with Lamar, then Senator from
Mississippi, who had grown to be one of the calmest, most reasonable
and most amiable Union men in the United States, and quite unusual in
social charm. In 1860 he passed for the worst of Southern fire-eaters,
but he was an eccentric by environment, not by nature; above all his
Southern eccentricities, he had tact and humor; and perhaps this was a
reason why Mr. Davis sent him abroad with the others, on a futile
mission to St. Petersburg. He would have done better in London, in
place of Mason. London society would have delighted in him; his stories
would have won success; his manners would have made him loved; his
oratory would have swept every audience; even Monckton Milnes could
never have resisted the temptation of having him to breakfast between
Lord Shaftesbury and the Bishop of Oxford.

  Lamar liked to talk of his brief career in diplomacy, but he
never spoke of Mason. He never alluded to Confederate management or
criticised Jefferson Davis's administration. The subject that amused
him was his English allies. At that moment--the early summer of
1863--the rebel party in England were full of confidence, and felt
strong enough to challenge the American Legation to a show of power.
They knew better than the Legation what they could depend upon: that
the law officers and commissioners of customs at Liverpool dared not
prosecute the ironclad ships; that Palmerston, Russell, and Gladstone
were ready to recognize the Confederacy; that the Emperor Napoleon
would offer them every inducement to do it. In a manner they owned
Liverpool and especially the firm of Laird who were building their
ships. The political member of the Laird firm was Lindsay, about whom
the whole web of rebel interests clung--rams, cruisers, munitions, and
Confederate loan; social introductions and parliamentary tactics. The
firm of Laird, with a certain dignity, claimed to be champion of
England's navy; and public opinion, in the summer of 1863, still
inclined towards them.

  Never was there a moment when eccentricity, if it were a force,
should have had more value to the rebel interest; and the managers must
have thought so, for they adopted or accepted as their champion an
eccentric of eccentrics; a type of 1820; a sort of Brougham of
Sheffield, notorious for poor judgment and worse temper. Mr. Roebuck
had been a tribune of the people, and, like tribunes of most other
peoples, in growing old, had grown fatuous. He was regarded by the
friends of the Union as rather a comical personage--a favorite subject
for Punch to laugh at--with a bitter tongue and a mind enfeebled even
more than common by the political epidemic of egotism. In all England
they could have found no opponent better fitted to give away his own
case. No American man of business would have paid him attention; yet.
the Lairds, who certainly knew their own affairs best, let Roebuck
represent them and take charge of their interests.

  With Roebuck's doings, the private secretary had no concern
except that the Minister sent him down to the House of Commons on June
30, 1863, to report the result of Roebuck's motion to recognize the
Southern Confederacy. The Legation felt no anxiety, having Vicksburg
already in its pocket, and Bright and Forster to say so; but the
private secretary went down and was admitted under the gallery on the
left, to listen, with great content, while John Bright, with
astonishing force, caught and shook and tossed Roebuck, as a big
mastiff shakes a wiry, ill-conditioned, toothless, bad-tempered
Yorkshire terrier. The private secretary felt an artistic sympathy with
Roebuck, for, from time to time, by way of practice, Bright in a
friendly way was apt to shake him too, and he knew how it was done. The
manner counted for more than the words. The scene was interesting, but
the result was not in doubt.

  All the more sharply he was excited, near the year 1879, in
Washington, by hearing Lamar begin a story after dinner, which, little
by little, became dramatic, recalling the scene in the House of
Commons. The story, as well as one remembered, began with Lamar's
failure to reach St. Petersburg at all, and his consequent detention in
Paris waiting instructions. The motion to recognize the Confederacy was
about to be made, and, in prospect of the debate, Mr. Lindsay collected
a party at his villa on the Thames to bring the rebel agents into
relations with Roebuck. Lamar was sent for, and came. After much
conversation of a general sort, such as is the usual object or resource
of the English Sunday, finding himself alone with Roebuck, Lamar, by
way of showing interest, bethought himself of John Bright and asked
Roebuck whether he expected Bright to take part in the debate: "No,
sir!" said Roebuck sententiously; "Bright and I have met before. It was
the old story--the story of the sword-fish and the whale! NO, sir! Mr.
Bright will not cross swords with me again!"

  Thus assured, Lamar went with the more confidence to the House
on the appointed evening, and was placed under the gallery, on the
right, where he listened to Roebuck and followed the debate with such
enjoyment as an experienced debater feels in these contests, until, as
he said, he became aware that a man, with a singularly rich voice and
imposing manner, had taken the floor, and was giving Roebuck the most
deliberate and tremendous pounding he ever witnessed, "until at last,"
concluded Lamar, "it dawned on my mind that the sword-fish was getting
the worst of it."

  Lamar told the story in the spirit of a joke against himself
rather than against Roebuck; but such jokes must have been unpleasantly
common in the experience of the rebel agents. They were surrounded by
cranks of the worst English species, who distorted their natural
eccentricities and perverted their judgment. Roebuck may have been an
extreme case, since he was actually in his dotage, yet this did not
prevent the Lairds from accepting his lead, or the House from taking
him seriously. Extreme eccentricity was no bar, in England, to extreme
confidence; sometimes it seemed a recommendation; and unless it caused
financial loss, it rather helped popularity.

  The question whether British eccentricity was ever strength
weighed heavily in the balance of education. That Roebuck should
mislead the rebel agents on so strange a point as that of Bright's
courage was doubly characteristic because the Southern people
themselves had this same barbaric weakness of attributing want of
courage to opponents, and owed their ruin chiefly to such ignorance of
the world. Bright's courage was almost as irrational as that of the
rebels themselves. Every one knew that he had the courage of a
prize-fighter. He struck, in succession, pretty nearly every man in
England that could be reached by a blow, and when he could not reach
the individual he struck the class, or when the class was too small for
him, the whole people of England. At times he had the whole country on
his back. He could not act on the defensive; his mind required attack.
Even among friends at the dinner-table he talked as though he were
denouncing them, or someone else, on a platform; he measured his
phrases, built his sentences, cumulated his effects, and pounded his
opponents, real or imagined. His humor was glow, like iron at dull
heat; his blow was elementary, like the thrash of a whale.

  One day in early spring, March 26, 1863, the Minister requested
his private secretary to attend a Trades-Union Meeting at St. James's
Hall, which was the result of Professor Beesly's patient efforts to
unite Bright and the Trades-Unions on an American platform. The
secretary went to the meeting and made a report which reposes somewhere
on file in the State Department to this day, as harmless as such
reports should be; but it contained no mention of what interested young
Adams most--Bright's psychology. With singular skill and oratorical
power, Bright managed at the outset, in his opening paragraph, to
insult or outrage every class of Englishman commonly considered
respectable, and, for fear of any escaping, he insulted them repeatedly
under consecutive heads. The rhetorical effect was tremendous:--

  "Privilege thinks it has a great interest in the American
contest," he began in his massive, deliberate tones; "and every morning
with blatant voice, it comes into our streets and curses the American
Republic. Privilege has beheld an afflicting spectacle for many years
past. It has beheld thirty million of men happy and prosperous, without
emperors--without king (cheers)--without the surroundings of a court
(renewed cheers)--without nobles, except such as are made by eminence
in intellect and virtue--without State bishops and State priests, those
vendors of the love that works salvation (cheers)--without great armies
and great navies--without a great debt and great taxes--and Privilege
has shuddered at what might happen to old Europe if this great
experiment should succeed."

  An ingenious man, with an inventive mind, might have managed,
in the same number of lines, to offend more Englishmen than Bright
struck in this sentence; but he must have betrayed artifice and hurt
his oratory. The audience cheered furiously, and the private secretary
felt peace in his much troubled mind, for he knew how careful the
Ministry would be, once they saw Bright talk republican principles
before Trades-Unions; but, while he did not, like Roebuck, see reason
to doubt the courage of a man who, after quarrelling with the
Trades-Unions, quarreled with all the world outside the Trades-Unions,
he did feel a doubt whether to class Bright as eccentric or
conventional. Every one called Bright "un-English," from Lord
Palmerston to William E. Forster; but to an American he seemed more
English than any of his critics. He was a liberal hater, and what he
hated he reviled after the manner of Milton, but he was afraid of no
one. He was almost the only man in England, or, for that matter, in
Europe, who hated Palmerston and was not afraid of him, or of the press
or the pulpit, the clubs or the bench, that stood behind him. He
loathed the whole fabric of sham religion, sham loyalty, sham
aristocracy, and sham socialism. He had the British weakness of
believing only in himself and his own conventions. In all this, an
American saw, if one may make the distinction, much racial
eccentricity, but little that was personal. Bright was singularly well
poised; but he used singularly strong language.

  Long afterwards, in 1880, Adams happened to be living again in
London for a season, when James Russell Lowell was transferred there as
Minister; and as Adams's relations with Lowell had become closer and
more intimate with years, he wanted the new Minister to know some of
his old friends. Bright was then in the Cabinet, and no longer the most
radical member even there, but he was still a rare figure in society.
He came to dinner, along with Sir Francis Doyle and Sir Robert
Cunliffe, and as usual did most of the talking. As usual also, he
talked of the things most on his mind. Apparently it must have been
some reform of the criminal law which the Judges opposed, that excited
him, for at the end of dinner, over the wine, he took possession of the
table in his old way, and ended with a superb denunciation of the
Bench, spoken in his massive manner, as though every word were a
hammer, smashing what it struck:--

  "For two hundred years, the Judges of England sat on the Bench,
condemning to the penalty of death every man, woman, and child who
stole property to the value of five shillings; and, during all that
time, not one Judge ever remonstrated against the law. We English are a
nation of brutes, and ought to be exterminated to the last man."

  As the party rose from table and passed into the drawing-room,
Adams said to Lowell that Bright was very fine. "Yes!" replied Lowell,
"but too violent!"

  Precisely this was the point that Adams doubted. Bright knew
his Englishmen better than Lowell did--better than England did. He knew
what amount of violence in language was necessary to drive an idea into
a Lancashire or Yorkshire head. He knew that no violence was enough to
affect a Somersetshire or Wiltshire peasant. Bright kept his own head
cool and clear. He was not excited; he never betrayed excitement. As
for his denunciation of the English Bench, it was a very old story, not
original with him. That the English were a nation of brutes was a
commonplace generally admitted by Englishmen and universally accepted
by foreigners; while the matter of their extermination could be treated
only as unpractical, on their deserts, because they were probably not
very much worse than their neighbors. Had Bright said that the French,
Spaniards, Germans, or Russians were a nation of brutes and ought to be
exterminated, no one would have found fault; the whole human race,
according to the highest authority, has been exterminated once already
for the same reason, and only the rainbow protects them from a
repetition of it. What shocked Lowell was that he denounced his own
people.

  Adams felt no moral obligation to defend Judges, who, as far as
he knew, were the only class of society specially adapted to defend
themselves; but he was curious--even anxious--as a point of education,
to decide for himself whether Bright's language was violent for its
purpose. He thought not. Perhaps Cobden did better by persuasion, but
that was another matter. Of course, even Englishmen sometimes
complained of being so constantly told that they were brutes and
hypocrites, although they were told little else by their censors, and
bore it, on the whole, meekly; but the fact that it was true in the
main troubled the ten-pound voter much less than it troubled Newman,
Gladstone, Ruskin, Carlyle, and Matthew Arnold. Bright was personally
disliked by his victims, but not distrusted. They never doubted what he
would do next, as they did with John Russell, Gladstone, and Disraeli.
He betrayed no one, and he never advanced an opinion in practical
matters which did not prove to be practical.

  The class of Englishmen who set out to be the intellectual
opposites of Bright, seemed to an American bystander the weakest and
most eccentric of all. These were the trimmers, the political
economists, the anti-slavery and doctrinaire class, the followers of de
Tocqueville, and of John Stuart Mill. As a class, they were timid--with
good reason--and timidity, which is high wisdom in philosophy, sicklies
the whole cast of thought in action. Numbers of these men haunted
London society, all tending to free-thinking, but never venturing much
freedom of thought. Like the anti-slavery doctrinaires of the forties
and fifties, they became mute and useless when slavery struck them in
the face. For type of these eccentrics, literature seems to have chosen
Henry Reeve, at least to the extent of biography. He was a bulky figure
in society, always friendly, good-natured, obliging, and useful; almost
as universal as Milnes and more busy. As editor of the Edinburgh Review
he had authority and even power, although the Review and the whole Whig
doctrinaire school had begun--as the French say--to date; and of course
the literary and artistic sharpshooters of 1867--like Frank
Palgrave--frothed and foamed at the mere mention of Reeve's name.
Three-fourths of their fury was due only to his ponderous manner.
London society abused its rights of personal criticism by fixing on
every too conspicuous figure some word or phrase that stuck to it.
Every one had heard of Mrs. Grote as "the origin of the word
grotesque." Every one had laughed at the story of Reeve approaching
Mrs. Grote, with his usual somewhat florid manner, asking in his
literary dialect how her husband the historian was: "And how is the
learned Grotius?" "Pretty well, thank you, Puffendorf!" One winced at
the word, as though it were a drawing of Forain.

  No one would have been more shocked than Reeve had he been
charged with want of moral courage. He proved his courage afterwards by
publishing the "Greville Memoirs," braving the displeasure of the
Queen. Yet the Edinburgh Review and its editor avoided taking sides
except where sides were already fixed. Americanism would have been bad
form in the liberal Edinburgh Review; it would have seemed eccentric
even for a Scotchman, and Reeve was a Saxon of Saxons. To an American
this attitude of oscillating reserve seemed more eccentric than the
reckless hostility of Brougham or Carlyle, and more mischievous, for he
never could be sure what preposterous commonplace it might encourage.

  The sum of these experiences in 1863 left the conviction that
eccentricity was weakness. The young American who should adopt English
thought was lost. From the facts, the conclusion was correct, yet, as
usual, the conclusion was wrong. The years of Palmerston's last
Cabinet, 1859 to 1865, were avowedly years of truce--of arrested
development. The British system like the French, was in its last stage
of decomposition. Never had the British mind shown itself so
decousu--so unravelled, at sea, floundering in every sort of historical
shipwreck. Eccentricities had a free field. Contradictions swarmed in
State and Church. England devoted thirty years of arduous labor to
clearing away only a part of the debris. A young American in 1863 could
see little or nothing of the future. He might dream, but he could not
foretell, the suddenness with which the old Europe, with England in its
wake, was to vanish in 1870. He was in dead-water, and the
parti-colored, fantastic cranks swam about his boat, as though he were
the ancient mariner, and they saurians of the prime.

THE PERFECTION OF HUMAN SOCIETY (1864)

  MINISTER ADAMS'S success in stopping the rebel rams fixed his
position once for all in English society. From that moment he could
afford to drop the character of diplomatist, and assume what, for an
American Minister in London, was an exclusive diplomatic advantage, the
character of a kind of American Peer of the Realm. The British never
did things by halves. Once they recognized a man's right to social
privileges, they accepted him as one of themselves. Much as Lord Derby
and Mr. Disraeli were accepted as leaders of Her Majesty's domestic
Opposition, Minister Adams had a rank of his own as a kind of leader of
Her Majesty's American Opposition. Even the Times conceded it. The
years of struggle were over, and Minister Adams rapidly gained a
position which would have caused his father or grandfather to stare
with incredulous envy.

  This Anglo-American form of diplomacy was chiefly undiplomatic,
and had the peculiar effect of teaching a habit of diplomacy useless or
mischievous everywhere but in London. Nowhere else in the world could
one expect to figure in a role so unprofessional. The young man knew no
longer what character he bore. Private secretary in the morning, son in
the afternoon, young man about town in the evening, the only character
he never bore was that of diplomatist, except when he wanted a card to
some great function. His diplomatic education was at an end; he seldom
met a diplomat, and never had business with one; he could be of no use
to them, or they to him; but he drifted inevitably into society, and,
do what he might, his next education must be one of English social
life. Tossed between the horns of successive dilemmas, he reached his
twenty-sixth birthday without the power of earning five dollars in any
occupation. His friends in the army were almost as badly off, but even
army life ruined a young man less fatally than London society. Had he
been rich, this form of ruin would have mattered nothing; but the young
men of 1865 were none of them rich; all had to earn a living; yet they
had reached high positions of responsibility and power in camps and
Courts, without a dollar of their own and with no tenure of office.

  Henry Adams had failed to acquire any useful education; he
should at least have acquired social experience. Curiously enough, he
failed here also. From the European or English point of view, he had no
social experience, and never got it. Minister Adams happened on a
political interregnum owing to Lord Palmerston's personal influence
from 1860 to 1865; but this political interregnum was less marked than
the social still-stand during the same years. The Prince Consort was
dead; the Queen had retired; the Prince of Wales was still a boy. In
its best days, Victorian society had never been "smart." During the
forties, under the influence of Louis Philippe, Courts affected to be
simple, serious and middle class; and they succeeded. The taste of
Louis Philippe was bourgeois beyond any taste except that of Queen
Victoria. Style lingered in the background with the powdered footman
behind the yellow chariot, but speaking socially the Queen had no style
save what she inherited. Balmoral was a startling revelation of royal
taste. Nothing could be worse than the toilettes at Court unless it
were the way they were worn. One's eyes might be dazzled by jewels, but
they were heirlooms, and if any lady appeared well dressed, she was
either a foreigner or "fast." Fashion was not fashionable in London
until the Americans and the Jews were let loose. The style of London
toilette universal in 1864 was grotesque, like Monckton Milnes on
horseback in Rotten Row.

  Society of this sort might fit a young man in some degree for
editing Shakespeare or Swift, but had little relation with the society
of 1870, and none with that of 1900. Owing to other causes, young Adams
never got the full training of such style as still existed. The
embarrassments of his first few seasons socially ruined him. His own
want of experience prevented his asking introductions to the ladies who
ruled society; his want of friends prevented his knowing who these
ladies were; and he had every reason to expect snubbing if he put
himself in evidence. This sensitiveness was thrown away on English
society, where men and women treated each others' advances much more
brutally than those of strangers, but young Adams was son and private
secretary too; he could not be as thick-skinned as an Englishman. He
was not alone. Every young diplomat, and most of the old ones, felt
awkward in an English house from a certainty that they were not
precisely wanted there, and a possibility that they might be told so.

  If there was in those days a country house in England which had
a right to call itself broad in views and large in tastes, it was
Bretton in Yorkshire; and if there was a hostess who had a right to
consider herself fashionable as well as charming, it was Lady Margaret
Beaumont; yet one morning at breakfast there, sitting by her side--not
for his own merits--Henry Adams heard her say to herself in her languid
and liberal way, with her rich voice and musing manner, looking into
her tea-cup: "I don't think I care for foreigners!" Horror-stricken,
not so much on his own account as on hers, the young man could only
execute himself as gaily as he might: "But Lady Margaret, please make
one small exception for me!" Of course she replied what was evident,
that she did not call him a foreigner, and her genial Irish charm made
the slip of tongue a happy courtesy; but none the less she knew that,
except for his momentary personal introduction, he was in fact a
foreigner, and there was no imaginable reason why she should like him,
or any other foreigner, unless it were because she was bored by
natives. She seemed to feel that her indifference needed a reason to
excuse itself in her own eyes, and she showed the subconscious sympathy
of the Irish nature which never feels itself perfectly at home even in
England. She, too, was some shadowy shade un-English.

  Always conscious of this barrier, while the war lasted the
private secretary hid himself among the herd of foreigners till he
found his relations fixed and unchangeable. He never felt himself in
society, and he never knew definitely what was meant as society by
those who were in it. He saw far enough to note a score of societies
which seemed quite independent of each other. The smartest was the
smallest, and to him almost wholly strange. The largest was the
sporting world, also unknown to him except through the talk of his
acquaintances. Between or beyond these lay groups of nebulous
societies. His lawyer friends, like Evarts, frequented legal circles
where one still sat over the wine and told anecdotes of the bench and
bar; but he himself never set eyes on a judge except when his father
took him to call on old Lord Lyndhurst, where they found old Lord
Campbell, both abusing old Lord Brougham. The Church and the Bishops
formed several societies which no secretary ever saw except as an
interloper. The Army; the Navy; the Indian Service; the medical and
surgical professions; City people; artists; county families; the
Scotch, and indefinite other subdivisions of society existed, which
were as strange to each other as they were to Adams. At the end of
eight or ten seasons in London society he professed to know less about
it, or how to enter it, than he did when he made his first appearance
at Miss Burdett Coutts's in May, 1861.

  Sooner or later every young man dropped into a set or circle,
and frequented the few houses that were willing to harbor him. An
American who neither hunted nor raced, neither shot nor fished nor
gambled, and was not marriageable, had no need to think of society at
large. Ninety-nine houses in every hundred were useless to him, a
greater bore to him than he to them. Thus the question of getting
into--or getting out of--society which troubled young foreigners
greatly, settled itself after three or four years of painful
speculation. Society had no unity; one wandered about in it like a
maggot in cheese; it was not a hansom cab, to be got into, or out of,
at dinner-time.

  Therefore he always professed himself ignorant of society; he
never knew whether he had been in it or not, but from the accounts of
his future friends, like General Dick Taylor or George Smalley, and of
various ladies who reigned in the seventies, he inclined to think that
he knew very little about it. Certain great houses and certain great
functions of course he attended, like every one else who could get
cards, but even of these the number was small that kept an interest or
helped education. In seven years he could remember only two that seemed
to have any meaning for him, and he never knew what that meaning was.
Neither of the two was official; neither was English in interest; and
both were scandals to the philosopher while they scarcely enlightened
men of the world.

  One was at Devonshire House, an ordinary, unpremeditated
evening reception. Naturally every one went to Devonshire House if
asked, and the rooms that night were fairly full of the usual people.
The private secretary was standing among the rest, when Mme. de
Castiglione entered, the famous beauty of the Second Empire. How
beautiful she may have been, or indeed what sort of beauty she was,
Adams never knew, because the company, consisting of the most refined
and aristocratic society in the world, instantly formed a lane, and
stood in ranks to stare at her, while those behind mounted on chairs to
look over their neighbors' heads; so that the lady walked through this
polite mob, stared completely out of countenance, and fled the house at
once. This was all!

  The other strange spectacle was at Stafford House, April 13,
1864, when, in a palace gallery that recalled Paolo Veronese's pictures
of Christ in his scenes of miracle, Garibaldi, in his gray capote over
his red shirt, received all London, and three duchesses literally
worshipped at his feet. Here, at all events, a private secretary had
surely caught the last and highest touch of social experience; but what
it meant--what social, moral, or mental development it pointed out to
the searcher of truth--was not a matter to be treated fully by a leader
in the Morning Post or even by a sermon in Westminster Abbey. Mme. de
Castiglione and Garibaldi covered, between them, too much space for
simple measurement; their curves were too complex for mere arithmetic.
The task of bringing the two into any common relation with an ordered
social system tending to orderly development--in London or
elsewhere--was well fitted for Algernon Swinburne or Victor Hugo, but
was beyond any process yet reached by the education of Henry Adams, who
would probably, even then, have rejected, as superficial or
supernatural, all the views taken by any of the company who looked on
with him at these two interesting and perplexing sights.

  From the Court, or Court society, a mere private secretary got
nothing at all, or next to nothing, that could help him on his road
through life. Royalty was in abeyance. One was tempted to think in
these years, 1860-65, that the nicest distinction between the very best
society and the second-best, was their attitude towards royalty. The
one regarded royalty as a bore, and avoided it, or quietly said that
the Queen had never been in society. The same thing might have been
said of fully half the peerage. Adams never knew even the names of half
the rest; he never exchanged ten words with any member of the royal
family; he never knew any one in those years who showed interest in any
member of the royal family, or who would have given five shillings for
the opinion of any royal person on any subject; or cared to enter any
royal or noble presence, unless the house was made attractive by as
much social effort as would have been necessary in other countries
where no rank existed. No doubt, as one of a swarm, young Adams
slightly knew various gilded youth who frequented balls and led such
dancing as was most in vogue, but they seemed to set no value on rank;
their anxiety was only to know where to find the best partners before
midnight, and the best supper after midnight. To the American, as to
Arthur Pendennis or Barnes Newcome, the value of social position and
knowledge was evident enough; he valued it at rather more than it was
worth to him; but it was a shadowy thing which seemed to vary with
every street corner; a thing which had shifting standards, and which no
one could catch outright. The half-dozen leaders and beauties of his
time, with great names and of the utmost fashion, made some of the
poorest marriages, and the least showy careers.

  Tired of looking on at society from the outside, Adams grew to
loathe the sight of his Court dress; to groan at every announcement of
a Court ball; and to dread every invitation to a formal dinner. The
greatest social event gave not half the pleasure that one could buy for
ten shillings at the opera when Patti sang Cherubino or Gretchen, and
not a fourth of the education. Yet this was not the opinion of the best
judges. Lothrop Motley, who stood among the very best, said to him
early in his apprenticeship that the London dinner and the English
country house were the perfection of human society. The young man
meditated over it, uncertain of its meaning. Motley could not have
thought the dinner itself perfect, since there was not then--outside of
a few bankers or foreigners--a good cook or a good table in London, and
nine out of ten of the dinners that Motley ate came from Gunter's, and
all were alike. Every one, especially in young society, complained
bitterly that Englishmen did not know a good dinner when they ate it,
and could not order one if they were given carte blanche. Henry Adams
was not a judge, and knew no more than they, but he heard the
complaints, and he could not think that Motley meant to praise the
English cuisine.

  Equally little could Motley have meant that dinners were good
to look at. Nothing could be worse than the toilettes; nothing less
artistic than the appearance of the company. One's eyes might be
dazzled by family diamonds, but, if an American woman were present, she
was sure to make comments about the way the jewels were worn. If there
was a well-dressed lady at table, she was either an American or "fast."
She attracted as much notice as though she were on the stage. No one
could possibly admire an English dinner-table.

  Least of all did Motley mean that the taste or the manners were
perfect. The manners of English society were notorious, and the taste
was worse. Without exception every American woman rose in rebellion
against English manners. In fact, the charm of London which made most
impression on Americans was the violence of its contrasts; the extreme
badness of the worst, making background for the distinction,
refinement, or wit of a few, just as the extreme beauty of a few superb
women was more effective against the plainness of the crowd. The result
was mediaeval, and amusing; sometimes coarse to a degree that might
have startled a roustabout, and sometimes courteous and considerate to
a degree that suggested King Arthur's Round Table; but this artistic
contrast was surely not the perfection that Motley had in his mind. He
meant something scholarly, worldly, and modern; he was thinking of his
own tastes.

  Probably he meant that, in his favorite houses, the tone was
easy, the talk was good, and the standard of scholarship was high. Even
there he would have been forced to qualify his adjectives. No German
would have admitted that English scholarship was high, or that it was
scholarship at all, or that any wish for scholarship existed in
England. Nothing that seemed to smell of the shop or of the
lecture-room was wanted. One might as well have talked of Renan's
Christ at the table of the Bishop of London, as talk of German
philology at the table of an Oxford don. Society, if a small literary
class could be called society, wanted to be amused in its old way.
Sydney Smith, who had amused, was dead; so was Macaulay, who instructed
if he did not amuse; Thackeray died at Christmas, 1863; Dickens never
felt at home, and seldom appeared, in society; Bulwer Lytton was not
sprightly; Tennyson detested strangers; Carlyle was mostly detested by
them; Darwin never came to town; the men of whom Motley must have been
thinking were such as he might meet at Lord Houghton's breakfasts:
Grote, Jowett, Milman, or Froude; Browning, Matthew Arnold, or
Swinburne; Bishop Wilberforce, Venables, or Hayward; or perhaps
Gladstone, Robert Lowe, or Lord Granville. A relatively small class,
commonly isolated, suppressed, and lost at the usual London dinner,
such society as this was fairly familiar even to a private secretary,
but to the literary American it might well seem perfection since he
could find nothing of the sort in America. Within the narrow limits of
this class, the American Legation was fairly at home; possibly a score
of houses, all liberal, and all literary, but perfect only in the eyes
of a Harvard College historian. They could teach little worth learning,
for their tastes were antiquated and their knowledge was ignorance to
the next generation. What was altogether fatal for future purposes,
they were only English.

  A social education in such a medium was bound to be useless in
any other, yet Adams had to learn it to the bottom. The one thing
needful for a private secretary, was that he should not only seem, but
should actually be, at home. He studied carefully, and practised
painfully, what seemed to be the favorite accomplishments of society.
Perhaps his nervousness deceived him; perhaps he took for an ideal of
others what was only his reflected image; but he conceived that the
perfection of human society required that a man should enter a
drawing-room where he was a total stranger, and place himself on the
hearth-rug, his back to the fire, with an air of expectant benevolence,
without curiosity, much as though he had dropped in at a charity
concert, kindly disposed to applaud the performers and to overlook
mistakes. This ideal rarely succeeded in youth, and towards thirty it
took a form of modified insolence and offensive patronage; but about
sixty it mellowed into courtesy, kindliness, and even deference to the
young which had extraordinary charm both in women and in men.
Unfortunately Adams could not wait till sixty for education; he had his
living to earn; and the English air of patronage would earn no income
for him anywhere else.

  After five or six years of constant practice, any one can
acquire the habit of going from one strange company to another without
thinking much of one's self or of them, as though silently reflecting
that "in a world where we are all insects, no insect is alien; perhaps
they are human in parts"; but the dreamy habit of mind which comes from
solitude in crowds is not fitness for social success except in London.
Everywhere else it is injury. England was a social kingdom whose social
coinage had no currency elsewhere.

  Englishwomen, from the educational point of view, could give
nothing until they approached forty years old. Then they become very
interesting--very charming--to the man of fifty. The young American was
not worth the young Englishwoman's notice, and never received it.
Neither understood the other. Only in the domestic relation, in the
country--never in society at large--a young American might accidentally
make friends with an Englishwoman of his own age, but it never happened
to Henry Adams. His susceptible nature was left to the mercy of
American girls, which was professional duty rather than education as
long as diplomacy held its own.

  Thus he found himself launched on waters where he had never
meant to sail, and floating along a stream which carried him far from
his port. His third season in London society saw the end of his
diplomatic education, and began for him the social life of a young man
who felt at home in England--more at home there than anywhere else.
With this feeling, the mere habit of going to garden-parties, dinners,
receptions, and balls had nothing to do. One might go to scores without
a sensation of home. One might stay in no end of country houses without
forgetting that one was a total stranger and could never be anything
else. One might bow to half the dukes and duchesses in England, and
feel only the more strange. Hundreds of persons might pass with a nod
and never come nearer. Close relation in a place like London is a
personal mystery as profound as chemical affinity. Thousands pass, and
one separates himself from the mass to attach himself to another, and
so make, little by little, a group.

  One morning, April 27, 1863, he was asked to breakfast with Sir
Henry Holland, the old Court physician who had been acquainted with
every American Minister since Edward Everett, and was a valuable social
ally, who had the courage to try to be of use to everybody, and who,
while asking the private secretary to breakfast one day, was too
discreet to betray what he might have learned about rebel doings at his
breakfast-table the day before. He had been friendly with the Legation,
in the teeth of society, and was still bearing up against the weight of
opinion, so that young Adams could not decline his invitations,
although they obliged him to breakfast in Brook Street at nine o'clock
in the morning, alternately with Mr. James M. Mason. Old Dr. Holland
was himself as hale as a hawk, driving all day bare-headed about
London, and eating Welsh rarebit every night before bed; he thought
that any young man should be pleased to take his early muffin in Brook
Street, and supply a few crumbs of war news for the daily peckings of
eminent patients. Meekly, when summoned, the private secretary went,
and on reaching the front door, this particular morning, he found there
another young man in the act of rapping the knocker. They entered the
breakfastroom together, where they were introduced to each other, and
Adams learned that the other guest was a Cambridge undergraduate,
Charles Milnes Gaskell, son of James Milnes Gaskell, the Member for
Wenlock; another of the Yorkshire Milneses, from Thornes near
Wakefield. Fate had fixed Adams to Yorkshire. By another chance it
happened that young Milnes Gaskell was intimate at Cambridge with
William Everett who was also about to take his degree. A third chance
inspired Mr. Evarts with a fancy for visiting Cambridge, and led
William Everett to offer his services as host. Adams acted as courier
to Mr. Evarts, and at the end of May they went down for a few days,
when William Everett did the honors as host with a kindness and
attention that made his cousin sorely conscious of his own social
shortcomings. Cambridge was pretty, and the dons were kind. Mr. Evarts
enjoyed his visit but this was merely a part of the private secretary's
day's work. What affected his whole life was the intimacy then begun
with Milnes Gaskell and his circle of undergraduate friends, just about
to enter the world.

  Intimates are predestined. Adams met in England a thousand
people, great and small; jostled against every one, from royal princes
to gin-shop loafers; attended endless official functions and private
parties; visited every part of the United Kingdom and was not quite a
stranger at the Legations in Paris and Rome; he knew the societies of
certain country houses, and acquired habits of Sunday-afternoon calls;
but all this gave him nothing to do, and was life wasted. For him
nothing whatever could be gained by escorting American ladies to
drawing-rooms or American gentlemen to levees at St. James's Palace, or
bowing solemnly to people with great titles, at Court balls, or even by
awkwardly jostling royalty at garden-parties; all this was done for the
Government, and neither President Lincoln nor Secretary Seward would
ever know enough of their business to thank him for doing what they did
not know how to get properly done by their own servants; but for Henry
Adams--not private secretary--all the time taken up by such duties was
wasted. On the other hand, his few personal intimacies concerned him
alone, and the chance that made him almost a Yorkshireman was one that
must have started under the Heptarchy.

  More than any other county in England, Yorkshire retained a
sort of social independence of London. Scotland itself was hardly more
distinct. The Yorkshire type had always been the strongest of the
British strains; the Norwegian and the Dane were a different race from
the Saxon. Even Lancashire had not the mass and the cultivation of the
West Riding. London could never quite absorb Yorkshire, which, in its
turn had no great love for London and freely showed it. To a certain
degree, evident enough to Yorkshiremen, Yorkshire was not English--or
was all England, as they might choose to express it. This must have
been the reason why young Adams was drawn there rather than elsewhere.
Monckton Milnes alone took the trouble to draw him, and possibly Milnes
was the only man in England with whom Henry Adams, at that moment, had
a chance of calling out such an un-English effort. Neither Oxford nor
Cambridge nor any region south of the Humber contained a considerable
house where a young American would have been sought as a friend.
Eccentricity alone did not account for it. Monckton Milnes was a
singular type, but his distant cousin, James Milnes Gaskell, was
another, quite as marked, in an opposite sense. Milnes never seemed
willing to rest; Milnes Gaskell never seemed willing to move. In his
youth one of a very famous group--Arthur Hallam, Tennyson, Manning,
Gladstone, Francis Doyle--and regarded as one of the most promising; an
adorer of George Canning; in Parliament since coming of age; married
into the powerful connection of the Wynns of Wynstay; rich according to
Yorkshire standards; intimate with his political leaders; he was one of
the numerous Englishmen who refuse office rather than make the effort
of carrying it, and want power only to make it a source of indolence.
He was a voracious reader and an admirable critic; he had forty years
of parliamentary tradition on his memory; he liked to talk and to
listen; he liked his dinner and, in spite of George Canning, his dry
champagne; he liked wit and anecdote; but he belonged to the generation
of 1830, a generation which could not survive the telegraph and
railway, and which even Yorkshire could hardly produce again. To an
American he was a character even more unusual and more fascinating than
his distant cousin Lord Houghton.

  Mr. Milnes Gaskell was kind to the young American whom his son
brought to the house, and Mrs. Milnes Gaskell was kinder, for she
thought the American perhaps a less dangerous friend than some
Englishman might be, for her son, and she was probably right. The
American had the sense to see that she was herself one of the most
intelligent and sympathetic women in England; her sister, Miss
Charlotte Wynn, was another; and both were of an age and a position in
society that made their friendship a compliment as well as a pleasure.
Their consent and approval settled the matter. In England, the family
is a serious fact; once admitted to it, one is there for life. London
might utterly vanish from one's horizon, but as long as life lasted,
Yorkshire lived for its friends.

  In the year 1857, Mr. James Milnes Gaskell, who had sat for
thirty years in Parliament as one of the Members for the borough of
Wenlock in Shropshire, bought Wenlock Abbey and the estate that
included the old monastic buildings. This new, or old, plaything amused
Mrs. Milnes Gaskell. The Prior's house, a charming specimen of
fifteenth-century architecture, had been long left to decay as a
farmhouse. She put it in order, and went there to spend a part of the
autumn of 1864. Young Adams was one of her first guests, and drove
about Wenlock Edge and the Wrekin with her, learning the loveliness of
this exquisite country, and its stores of curious antiquity. It was a
new and charming existence; an experience greatly to be envied--ideal
repose and rural Shakespearian peace--but a few years of it were likely
to complete his education, and fit him to act a fairly useful part in
life as an Englishman, an ecclesiastic, and a contemporary of Chaucer.

After devoting several chapters to diplomatic tensions in London, Adams alters the tone to consider British personalities and the social scene. He sees a propensity for eccentricity in the English character and asks whether this is strength or a weakness. It seems to Adams that eccentrics support the Confederacy. Socially, Henry finds no personal improvement. He challenges the veracity of an acquaintance's observation that the London dinner and the English country-house are "the perfection of human society." Henry sees little of merit in London other than the opera, but he does appreciate the people of Yorkshire.

The change of tone allows Adams to direct his attention to English character and social life, which continue to upset him. His prejudices are strong throughout the book, and he does not hesitate to stereotype entire nations. His wit tends toward paradox. Early in Chapter XII, he states that the "English mind was one-sided, eccentric, systematically unsystematic and logically illogical. The less one knew of it the better." This echoes an even harsher observation in the previous chapter, where he contends that the "British mind is the slowest of all minds," as evidenced by the time it takes for the significance of victories at Vicksburg and Gettysburg to sink in. The old-world view of Americans, according to Adams, is equally stereotyped; Europeans think of Yanks as having no mind at all. Instead of brains, they possess economic calculating machines. Another Adams absolute soon follows: that the greatest defect among the English is the enormous waste caused by eccentricity. London intellectuals, especially, are literally the opposite of concentric; they are off balance, seldom centered in the same spot on any two issues. They take delight in being odd or unconventional. It seems a compliment at an English club or dinner table to say, "So-and-So is 'quite mad,'" as if being deranged were indicative of greater genius. With his penchant for being contrary, Adams challenges this point of view. He poses the question of whether eccentricity is strength or a weakness. Adams feels that many Americans, especially Bostonians, are overly impressed with the English and falsely see eccentricity as a sign of intellectual vigor or even courage. Eccentric English adore the nonconformity of rebellion, most particularly that of the South because it represents revolt against the economic dullards of the Union who had the audacity to cast off British leadership in 1776. Adams maintains that eccentricity is weakness because it is ineffective. It does not get the job done, as evidenced by the failure of the Confederacy and the English eccentrics' bungling attempts to aid the South. Eccentrics also tend to underestimate opponents, especially levelheaded New Englanders. The events of 1863, the battles of the Civil War, as well as diplomacy in England, prove his point: "The sum of these experiences . . . left the conviction that eccentricity was weakness. The young American who should adopt English thought was lost." Socially, Adams is disappointed to the point of resentment. The official assistant secretary of the Legation, Benjamin Moran, mentions Henry frequently in his diary of the period, suggesting that young Adams strikes a pose of disdain only because he is not accepted: "He was there  pretending that he disliked it and yet asking to be presented to everybody of note." This is consistent with the tone of the Education, in which Adams first yearns for a place among the aristocrats and then, not receiving it, says that the "greatest social event gave not half the pleasure" that he could purchase for ten shillings at the opera. When John Lothrop Motley, a historian and later Minister to England, refers to the London dinner and English country-house as "the perfection of human society," Adams sets off on a rant of condemnation toward the English. They would not know a good dinner if they could find one in London and would not know how to order one anywhere. Conversation is eccentric, and any woman who dresses well must be "either an American or 'fast' ." He does like the folk of Yorkshire for their independence and plain good sense. As for the rest of his social experience, he concludes that it adds nothing to the shifting search for an education that he never finds in England. Glossary obtuse not sharp or pointed; blunt. hustings here, a political campaign. crank informal word for an eccentric person. sententious expressing much in a few words. decousu  unconnected, disjointed. toilettes  here, dress or costume. interregnum an interval between successive reigns; a period when a country has no leader. Patti Adelina Patti , a famous coloratura soprano.


DILETTANTISM (1865-1866)

  THE campaign of 1864 and the reelection of Mr. Lincoln in
November set the American Minister on so firm a footing that he could
safely regard his own anxieties as over, and the anxieties of Earl
Russell and the Emperor Napoleon as begun. With a few months more his
own term of four years would come to an end, and even though the
questions still under discussion with England should somewhat prolong
his stay, he might look forward with some confidence to his return home
in 1865. His son no longer fretted. The time for going into the army
had passed. If he were to be useful at all, it must be as a son, and as
a son he was treated with the widest indulgence and trust. He knew that
he was doing himself no good by staying in London, but thus far in life
he had done himself no good anywhere, and reached his twenty-seventh
birthday without having advanced a step, that he could see, beyond his
twenty-first. For the most part, his friends were worse off than he.
The war was about to end and they were to be set adrift in a world they
would find altogether strange.

  At this point, as though to cut the last thread of relation,
six months were suddenly dropped out of his life in England. The London
climate had told on some of the family; the physicians prescribed a
winter in Italy. Of course the private secretary was detached as their
escort, since this was one of his professional functions; and he passed
six months, gaining an education as Italian courier, while the Civil
War came to its end. As far as other education went, he got none, but
he was amused. Travelling in all possible luxury, at some one else's
expense, with diplomatic privileges and position, was a form of travel
hitherto untried. The Cornice in vettura was delightful; Sorrento in
winter offered hills to climb and grottoes to explore, and Naples near
by to visit; Rome at Easter was an experience necessary for the
education of every properly trained private secretary; the journey
north by vettura through Perugia and Sienna was a dream; the Splugen
Pass, if not equal to the Stelvio, was worth seeing; Paris had always
something to show. The chances of accidental education were not so
great as they had been, since one's field of experience had grown
large; but perhaps a season at Baden Baden in these later days of its
brilliancy offered some chances of instruction, if it were only the
sight of fashionable Europe and America on the race-course watching the
Duke of Hamilton, in the middle, improving his social advantages by the
conversation of Cora Pearl.

  The assassination of President Lincoln fell on the party while
they were at Rome, where it seemed singularly fitting to that nursery
of murderers and murdered, as though America were also getting
educated. Again one went to meditate on the steps of the Santa Maria in
Ara Coeli, but the lesson seemed as shallow as before. Nothing
happened. The travellers changed no plan or movement. The Minister did
not recall them to London. The season was over before they returned;
and when the private secretary sat down again at his desk in Portland
Place before a mass of copy in arrears, he saw before him a world so
changed as to be beyond connection with the past. His identity, if one
could call a bundle of disconnected memories an identity, seemed to
remain; but his life was once more broken into separate pieces; he was
a spider and had to spin a new web in some new place with a new
attachment.

  All his American friends and contemporaries who were still
alive looked singularly commonplace without uniforms, and hastened to
get married and retire into back streets and suburbs until they could
find employment. Minister Adams, too, was going home "next fall," and
when the fall came, he was going home "next spring," and when the
spring came, President Andrew Johnson was at loggerheads with the
Senate, and found it best to keep things unchanged. After the usual
manner of public servants who had acquired the habit of office and lost
the faculty of will, the members of the Legation in London continued
the daily routine of English society, which, after becoming a habit,
threatened to become a vice. Had Henry Adams shared a single taste with
the young Englishmen of his time, he would have been lost; but the
custom of pounding up and down Rotten Row every day, on a hack, was not
a taste, and yet was all the sport he shared. Evidently he must set to
work; he must get a new education; he must begin a career of his own.

  Nothing was easier to say, but even his father admitted two
careers to be closed. For the law, diplomacy had unfitted him; for
diplomacy he already knew too much. Any one who had held, during the
four most difficult years of American diplomacy, a position at the
centre of action, with his hands actually touching the lever of power,
could not beg a post of Secretary at Vienna or Madrid in order to bore
himself doing nothing until the next President should do him the honor
to turn him out. For once all his advisers agreed that diplomacy was
not possible.

  In any ordinary system he would have been called back to serve
in the State Department, but, between the President and the Senate,
service of any sort became a delusion. The choice of career was more
difficult than the education which had proved impracticable. Adams saw
no road; in fact there was none. All his friends were trying one path
or another, but none went a way that he could have taken. John Hay
passed through London in order to bury himself in second-rate Legations
for years, before he drifted home again to join Whitelaw Reid and
George Smalley on the Tribune. Frank Barlow and Frank Bartlett carried
Major-Generals' commissions into small law business. Miles stayed in
the army. Henry Higginson, after a desperate struggle, was forced into
State Street; Charles Adams wandered about, with brevet-brigadier rank,
trying to find employment. Scores of others tried experiments more or
less unsuccessful. Henry Adams could see easy ways of making a hundred
blunders; he could see no likely way of making a legitimate success.
Such as it was, his so-called education was wanted nowhere.

  One profession alone seemed possible--the press. In 1860 he
would have said that he was born to be an editor, like at least a
thousand other young graduates from American colleges who entered the
world every year enjoying the same conviction; but in 1866 the
situation was altered; the possession of money had become doubly
needful for success, and double energy was essential to get money.
America had more than doubled her scale. Yet the press was still the
last resource of the educated poor who could not be artists and would
not be tutors. Any man who was fit for nothing else could write an
editorial or a criticism. The enormous mass of misinformation
accumulated in ten years of nomad life could always be worked off on a
helpless public, in diluted doses, if one could but secure a table in
the corner of a newspaper office. The press was an inferior pulpit; an
anonymous schoolmaster; a cheap boarding-school but it was still the
nearest approach to a career for the literary survivor of a wrecked
education. For the press, then, Henry Adams decided to fit himself, and
since he could not go home to get practical training, he set to work to
do what he could in London.

  He knew, as well as any reporter on the New York Herald, that
this was not an American way of beginning, and he knew a certain number
of other drawbacks which the reporter could not see so clearly. Do what
he might, he drew breath only in the atmosphere of English methods and
thoughts; he could breathe none other. His mother--who should have been
a competent judge, since her success and popularity in England exceeded
that of her husband--averred that every woman who lived a certain time
in England came to look and dress like an Englishwoman, no matter how
she struggled. Henry Adams felt himself catching an English tone of
mind and processes of thought, though at heart more hostile to them
than ever. As though to make him more helpless and wholly distort his
life, England grew more and more agreeable and amusing. Minister Adams
became, in 1866, almost a historical monument in London; he held a
position altogether his own. His old opponents disappeared. Lord
Palmerston died in October, 1865; Lord Russell tottered on six months
longer, but then vanished from power; and in July, 1866, the
conservatives came into office. Traditionally the Tories were easier to
deal with than the Whigs, and Minister Adams had no reason to regret
the change. His personal relations were excellent and his personal
weight increased year by year. On that score the private secretary had
no cares, and not much copy. His own position was modest, but it was
enough; the life he led was agreeable; his friends were all he wanted,
and, except that he was at the mercy of politics, he felt much at ease.
Of his daily life he had only to reckon so many breakfasts; so many
dinners; so many receptions, balls, theatres, and country-parties; so
many cards to be left; so many Americans to be escorted--the usual
routine of every young American in a Legation; all counting for nothing
in sum, because, even if it had been his official duty--which it was
not--it was mere routine, a single, continuous, unbroken act, which led
to nothing and nowhere except Portland Place and the grave.

  The path that led somewhere was the English habit of mind which
deepened its ruts every day. The English mind was like the London
drawing-room, a comfortable and easy spot, filled with bits and
fragments of incoherent furnitures, which were never meant to go
together, and could be arranged in any relation without making a whole,
except by the square room. Philosophy might dispute about innate ideas
till the stars died out in the sky, but about innate tastes no one,
except perhaps a collie dog, has the right to doubt; least of all, the
Englishman, for his tastes are his being; he drifts after them as
unconsciously as a honey-bee drifts after his flowers, and, in England,
every one must drift with him. Most young Englishmen drifted to the
race-course or the moors or the hunting-field; a few towards books; one
or two followed some form of science; and a number took to what, for
want of a better name, they called Art. Young Adams inherited a certain
taste for the same pursuit from his father who insisted that he had it
not, because he could not see what his son thought he saw in Turner.
The Minister, on the other hand, carried a sort of aesthetic rag-bag of
his own, which he regarded as amusement, and never called art. So he
would wander off on a Sunday to attend service successively in all the
city churches built by Sir Christopher Wren; or he would disappear from
the Legation day after day to attend coin sales at Sotheby's, where his
son attended alternate sales of drawings, engravings, or water-colors.
Neither knew enough to talk much about the other's tastes, but the only
difference between them was a slight difference of direction. The
Minister's mind like his writings showed a correctness of form and line
that his son would have been well pleased had he inherited.

  Of all supposed English tastes, that of art was the most
alluring and treacherous. Once drawn into it, one had small chance of
escape, for it had no centre or circumference, no beginning, middle, or
end, no origin, no object, and no conceivable result as education. In
London one met no corrective. The only American who came by, capable of
teaching, was William Hunt, who stopped to paint the portrait of the
Minister which now completes the family series at Harvard College. Hunt
talked constantly, and was, or afterwards became, a famous teacher, but
Henry Adams did not know enough to learn. Perhaps, too, he had
inherited or acquired a stock of tastes, as young men must, which he
was slow to outgrow. Hunt had no time to sweep out the rubbish of
Adams's mind. The portrait finished, he went.

  As often as he could, Adams ran over to Paris, for sunshine,
and there always sought out Richardson in his attic in the Rue du Bac,
or wherever he lived, and they went off to dine at the Palais Royal,
and talk of whatever interested the students of the Beaux Arts.
Richardson, too, had much to say, but had not yet seized his style.
Adams caught very little of what lay in his mind, and the less,
because, to Adams, everything French was bad except the restaurants,
while the continuous life in England made French art seem worst of all.
This did not prove that English art, in 1866, was good; far from it;
but it helped to make bric-a-brac of all art, after the manner of
England.

  Not in the Legation, or in London, but in Yorkshire at Thornes,
Adams met the man that pushed him furthest in this English garden of
innate disorder called taste. The older daughter of the Milnes Gaskells
had married Francis Turner Palgrave. Few Americans will ever ask
whether any one has described the Palgraves, but the family was one of
the most describable in all England at that day. Old Sir Francis, the
father, had been much the greatest of all the historians of early
England, the only one who was un-English; and the reason of his
superiority lay in his name, which was Cohen, and his mind which was
Cohen also, or at least not English. He changed his name to Palgrave in
order to please his wife. They had a band of remarkable sons: Francis
Turner, Gifford, Reginald, Inglis; all of whom made their mark. Gifford
was perhaps the most eccentric, but his "Travels" in Arabia were
famous, even among the famous travels of that generation. Francis
Turner--or, as he was commonly called, Frank Palgrave--unable to work
off his restlessness in travel like Gifford, and stifled in the
atmosphere of the Board of Education, became a critic. His art
criticisms helped to make the Saturday Review a terror to the British
artist. His literary taste, condensed into the "Golden Treasury,"
helped Adams to more literary education than he ever got from any taste
of his own. Palgrave himself held rank as one of the minor poets; his
hymns had vogue. As an art-critic he was too ferocious to be liked;
even Holman Hunt found his temper humorous; among many rivals, he may
perhaps have had a right to claim the much-disputed rank of being the
most unpopular man in London; but he liked to teach, and asked only for
a docile pupil. Adams was docile enough, for he knew nothing and liked
to listen. Indeed, he had to listen, whether he liked or not, for
Palgrave's voice was strident, and nothing could stop him. Literature,
painting, sculpture, architecture were open fields for his attacks,
which were always intelligent if not always kind, and when these
failed, he readily descended to meaner levels. John Richard Green, who
was Palgrave's precise opposite, and whose Irish charm of touch and
humor defended him from most assaults, used to tell with delight of
Palgrave's call on him just after he had moved into his new Queen Anne
house in Kensington Square: "Palgrave called yesterday, and the first
thing he said was, 'I've counted three anachronisms on your front
doorstep.'"

  Another savage critic, also a poet, was Thomas Woolner, a type
almost more emphatic than Palgrave in a society which resounded with
emphasis. Woolner's sculpture showed none of the rough assertion that
Woolner himself showed, when he was not making supernatural effort to
be courteous, but his busts were remarkable, and his work altogether
was, in Palgrave's clamorous opinion, the best of his day. He took the
matter of British art--or want of art--seriously, almost ferociously,
as a personal grievance and torture; at times he was rather terrifying
in the anarchistic wrath of his denunciation. As Henry Adams felt no
responsibility for English art, and had no American art to offer for
sacrifice, he listened with enjoyment to language much like Carlyle's,
and accepted it without a qualm. On the other hand, as a third member
of this critical group, he fell in with Stopford Brooke whose tastes
lay in the same direction, and whose expression was modified by
clerical propriety. Among these men, one wandered off into paths of
education much too devious and slippery for an American foot to follow.
He would have done better to go on the race-track, as far as concerned
a career.

  Fortunately for him he knew too little ever to be an
art-critic, still less an artist. For some things ignorance is good,
and art is one of them. He knew he knew nothing, and had not the
trained eye or the keen instinct that trusted itself; but he was
curious, as he went on, to find out how much others knew. He took
Palgrave's word as final about a drawing of Rembrandt or Michael
Angelo, and he trusted Woolner implicitly about a Turner; but when he
quoted their authority to any dealer, the dealer pooh-poohed it, and
declared that it had no weight in the trade. If he went to a sale of
drawings or paintings, at Sotheby's or Christie's, an hour afterwards,
he saw these same dealers watching Palgrave or Woolner for a point, and
bidding over them. He rarely found two dealers agree in judgment. He
once bought a water-color from the artist himself out of his studio,
and had it doubted an hour afterwards by the dealer to whose place he
took it for framing. He was reduced to admit that he could not prove its
authenticity; internal evidence was against it.

  One morning in early July, 1867, Palgrave stopped at the
Legation in Portland Place on his way downtown, and offered to take
Adams to Sotheby's, where a small collection of old drawings was on
show. The collection was rather a curious one, said to be that of Sir
Anthony Westcomb, from Liverpool, with an undisturbed record of a
century, but with nothing to attract notice. Probably none but
collectors or experts examined the portfolios. Some dozens of these
were always on hand, following every sale, and especially on the
lookout for old drawings, which became rarer every year. Turning
rapidly over the numbers, Palgrave stopped at one containing several
small drawings, one marked as Rembrandt, one as Rafael; and putting his
finger on the Rafael, after careful examination; "I should buy this,"
he said; "it looks to me like one of those things that sell for five
shillings one day, and fifty pounds the next." Adams marked it for a
bid, and the next morning came down to the auction. The numbers sold
slowly, and at noon he thought he might safely go to lunch. When he
came back, half an hour afterwards, the drawing was gone. Much annoyed
at his own stupidity, since Palgrave had expressly said he wanted the
drawing for himself if he had not in a manner given it to Adams, the
culprit waited for the sale to close, and then asked the clerk for the
name of the buyer. It was Holloway, the art-dealer, near Covent Garden,
whom he slightly knew. Going at once to the shop he waited till young
Holloway came in, with his purchases under his arm, and without attempt
at preface, he said: "You bought to-day, Mr. Holloway, a number that I
wanted. Do you mind letting me have it?" Holloway took out the parcel,
looked over the drawings, and said that he had bought the number for
the sake of the Rembrandt, which he thought possibly genuine; taking
that out, Adams might have the rest for the price he paid for the
lot--twelve shillings.

  Thus, down to that moment, every expert in London had probably
seen these drawings. Two of them--only two--had thought them worth
buying at any price, and of these two, Palgrave chose the Rafael,
Holloway the one marked as Rembrandt. Adams, the purchaser of the
Rafael, knew nothing whatever on the subject, but thought he might
credit himself with education to the value of twelve shillings, and
call the drawing nothing. Such items of education commonly came higher.

  He took the drawing to Palgrave. It was closely pasted to an
old, rather thin, cardboard mount, and, on holding it up to the window,
one could see lines on the reverse. "Take it down to Reed at the
British Museum," said Palgrave; "he is Curator of the drawings, and, if
you ask him, he will have it taken off the mount." Adams amused himself
for a day or two by searching Rafael's works for the figure, which he
found at last in the Parnasso, the figure of Horace, of which, as it
happened--though Adams did not know it--the British Museum owned a much
finer drawing. At last he took the dirty, little, unfinished red-chalk
sketch to Reed whom he found in the Curator's room, with some of the
finest Rafael drawings in existence, hanging on the walls. "Yes!" said
Mr Reed; "I noticed this at the sale; but it's not Rafael!" Adams,
feeling himself incompetent to discuss this subject, reported the
result to Palgrave, who said that Reed knew nothing about it. Also this
point lay beyond Adams's competence; but he noted that Reed was in the
employ of the British Museum as Curator of the best--or nearly the
best--collection in the world, especially of Rafaels, and that he
bought for the Museum. As expert he had rejected both the Rafael and
the Rembrandt at first-sight, and after his attention was recalled to
the Rafael for a further opinion he rejected it again.

  A week later, Adams returned for the drawing, which Mr. Reed
took out of his drawer and gave him, saying with what seemed a little
doubt or hesitation: "I should tell you that the paper shows a
water-mark, which I find the same as that of paper used by Marc
Antonio." A little taken back by this method of studying art, a method
which even a poor and ignorant American might use as well as Rafael
himself, Adams asked stupidly: "Then you think it genuine?" "Possibly!"
replied Reed; "but much overdrawn."

  Here was expert opinion after a second revise, with help of
water-marks! In Adams's opinion it was alone worth another twelve
shillings as education; but this was not all. Reed continued: "The
lines on the back seem to be writing, which I cannot read, but if you
will take it down to the manuscript-room, they will read it for you."

  Adams took the sheet down to the keeper of the manuscripts and
begged him to read the lines. The keeper, after a few minutes' study,
very obligingly said he could not: "It is scratched with an artist's
crayon, very rapidly, with many unusual abbreviations and old forms. If
any one in Europe can read it, it is the old man at the table yonder,
Libri! Take it to him!"

  This expert broke down on the alphabet! He could not even judge
a manuscript; but Adams had no right to complain, for he had nothing to
pay, not even twelve shillings, though he thought these experts worth
more, at least for his education. Accordingly he carried his paper to
Libri, a total stranger to him, and asked the old man, as deferentially
as possible, to tell him whether the lines had any meaning. Had Adams
not been an ignorant person he would have known all about Libri, but
his ignorance was vast, and perhaps was for the best. Libri looked at
the paper, and then looked again, and at last bade him sit down and
wait. Half an hour passed before he called Adams back and showed him
these lines:--

  "Or questo credo ben che una elleria
   Te offende tanto che te offese il core.
   Perche sei grande nol sei in tua volia;
   Tu vedi e gia non credi il tuo valore;
   Passate gia son tutte gelosie;
   Tu sei di sasso; non hai piu dolore."

  As far as Adams could afterwards recall it, this was Libri's
reading, but he added that the abbreviations were many and unusual;
that the writing was very ancient; and that the word he read as
"elleria" in the first line was not Italian at all.

  By this time, one had got too far beyond one's depth to ask
questions. If Libri could not read Italian, very clearly Adams had
better not offer to help him. He took the drawing, thanked everybody,
and having exhausted the experts of the British Museum, took a cab to
Woolner's studio, where he showed the figure and repeated Reed's
opinion. Woolner snorted: "Reed's a fool!" he said; "he knows nothing
about it; there may be a rotten line or two, but the drawing's all
right."

  For forty years Adams kept this drawing on his mantelpiece,
partly for its own interest, but largely for curiosity to see whether
any critic or artist would ever stop to look at it. None ever did,
unless he knew the story. Adams himself never wanted to know more about
it. He refused to seek further light. He never cared to learn whether
the drawing was Rafael's, or whether the verse was Rafael's, or
whether even the water-mark was Rafael's. The experts--some scores of
them including the British Museum,--had affirmed that the drawing was
worth a certain moiety of twelve shillings. On that point, also, Adams
could offer no opinion, but he was clear that his education had
profited by it to that extent--his amusement even more.

  Art was a superb field for education, but at every turn he met
the same old figure, like a battered and illegible signpost that ought
to direct him to the next station but never did. There was no next
station. All the art of a thousand--or ten thousand--years had brought
England to stuff which Palgrave and Woolner brayed in their mortars;
derided, tore in tatters, growled at, and howled at, and treated in
terms beyond literary usage. Whistler had not yet made his appearance
in London, but the others did quite as well. What result could a
student reach from it? Once, on returning to London, dining with
Stopford Brooke, some one asked Adams what impression the Royal Academy
Exhibition made on him. With a little hesitation, he suggested that it
was rather a chaos, which he meant for civility; but Stopford Brooke
abruptly met it by asking whether chaos were not better than death.
Truly the question was worth discussion. For his own part, Adams
inclined to think that neither chaos nor death was an object to him as
a searcher of knowledge--neither would have vogue in America--neither
would help him to a career. Both of them led him away from his objects,
into an English dilettante museum of scraps, with nothing but a
wall-paper to unite them in any relation of sequence. Possibly English
taste was one degree more fatal than English scholarship, but even this
question was open to argument. Adams went to the sales and bought what
he was told to buy; now a classical drawing by Rafael or Rubens; now a
water-color by Girtin or Cotman, if possible unfinished because it was
more likely to be a sketch from nature; and he bought them not because
they went together--on the contrary, they made rather awkward spots on
the wall as they did on the mind--but because he could afford to buy
those, and not others. Ten pounds did not go far to buy a Michael
Angelo, but was a great deal of money to a private secretary. The
effect was spotty, fragmentary, feeble; and the more so because the
British mind was constructed in that way--boasted of it, and held it to
be true philosophy as well as sound method.

  What was worse, no one had a right to denounce the English as
wrong. Artistically their mind was scrappy, and every one knew it, but
perhaps thought itself, history, and nature, were scrappy, and ought to
be studied so. Turning from British art to British literature, one met
the same dangers. The historical school was a playground of traps and
pitfalls. Fatally one fell into the sink of history--antiquarianism.
For one who nourished a natural weakness for what was called history,
the whole of British literature in the nineteenth century was
antiquarianism or anecdotage, for no one except Buckle had tried to
link it with ideas, and commonly Buckle was regarded as having failed.
Macaulay was the English historian. Adams had the greatest admiration
for Macaulay, but he felt that any one who should even distantly
imitate Macaulay would perish in self-contempt. One might as well
imitate Shakespeare. Yet evidently something was wrong here, for the
poet and the historian ought to have different methods, and Macaulay's
method ought to be imitable if it were sound; yet the method was more
doubtful than the style. He was a dramatist; a painter; a poet, like
Carlyle. This was the English mind, method, genius, or whatever one
might call it; but one never could quite admit that the method which
ended in Froude and Kinglake could be sound for America where passion
and poetry were eccentricities. Both Froude and Kinglake, when one met
them at dinner, were very agreeable, very intelligent; and perhaps the
English method was right, and art fragmentary by essence. History, like
everything else, might be a field of scraps, like the refuse about a
Staffordshire iron-furnace. One felt a little natural reluctance to
decline and fall like Silas Wegg on the golden dust-heap of British
refuse; but if one must, one could at least expect a degree from Oxford
and the respect of the Athenaeum Club.

  While drifting, after the war ended, many old American friends
came abroad for a holiday, and among the rest, Dr. Palfrey, busy with
his "History of New England." Of all the relics of childhood, Dr.
Palfrey was the most sympathetic, and perhaps the more so because he,
too, had wandered into the pleasant meadows of antiquarianism, and had
forgotten the world in his pursuit of the New England Puritan. Although
America seemed becoming more and more indifferent to the Puritan except
as a slightly rococo ornament, he was only the more amusing as a study
for the Monkbarns of Boston Bay, and Dr. Palfrey took him seriously, as
his clerical education required. His work was rather an Apologia in the
Greek sense; a justification of the ways of God to Man, or, what was
much the same thing, of Puritans to other men; and the task of
justification was onerous enough to require the occasional relief of a
contrast or scapegoat. When Dr. Palfrey happened on the picturesque but
unpuritanic figure of Captain John Smith, he felt no call to beautify
Smith's picture or to defend his moral character; he became impartial
and penetrating. The famous story of Pocahontas roused his latent New
England scepticism. He suggested to Adams, who wanted to make a
position for himself, that an article in the North American Review on
Captain John Smith's relations with Pocahontas would attract as much
attention, and probably break as much glass, as any other stone that
could be thrown by a beginner. Adams could suggest nothing better. The
task seemed likely to be amusing. So he planted himself in the British
Museum and patiently worked over all the material he could find, until,
at last, after three or four months of labor, he got it in shape and
sent it to Charles Norton, who was then editing the North American. Mr.
Norton very civilly and even kindly accepted it. The article appeared
in January, 1867.

  Surely, here was something to ponder over, as a step in
education; something that tended to stagger a sceptic! In spite of
personal wishes, intentions, and prejudices; in spite of civil wars and
diplomatic education; in spite of determination to be actual, daily,
and practical, Henry Adams found himself, at twenty-eight, still in
English society, dragged on one side into English dilettantism, which
of all dilettantism he held the most futile; and, on the other, into
American antiquarianism, which of all antiquarianism he held the most
foolish. This was the result of five years in London. Even then he knew
it to be a false start. He had wholly lost his way. If he were ever to
amount to anything, he must begin a new education, in a new place, with
a new purpose.

President Lincoln's re-election in November 1864 confirms the strength of the Union as well as the firm position of the American Ministry in England. In order to improve the health of some of the Adams family, physicians recommend that they spend the winter of 1864-1865 in Italy; Henry serves as their escort for a visit of about six months. The Civil War ends on April 9, 1865, when General Lee surrenders to General Grant at Appomattox Court House in Virginia. On April 14, John Wilkes Booth shoots President Lincoln, who is attending a play at Ford's Theatre in Washington, D. C.; the President dies the next morning. The tourists remain in Italy for the season. Concerned with the Reconstruction and facing a hostile Senate, President Andrew Johnson decides to leave the London Ministry as it is and concentrate on other matters. After his return to England, Henry wonders about a future career and dabbles in the arts.

Adams barely mentions the end of the Civil War and spends less than half a page on the death of Lincoln. The first topic was of more interest to him in its earlier progress; the second was, he suggests, of little educational value at all. Initially, the cursory treatment of the death of Lincoln seems especially odd. Keep in mind that Henry is half a world away from Washington and has not been in the States since the beginning of the war. The one time that he saw Lincoln , at the Inaugural Ball in 1861, he was not favorably impressed. If Lincoln showed any sign of greatness, Henry missed it. Adams saw "a long, awkward figure," plain, apparently absent-minded, seemingly concerned only about some white kid gloves. It bothered Henry that the new President showed "the same painful sense of becoming educated and of needing education" that Henry possessed: "o man living needed so much education as the new President but . . . all the education he could get would not be enough."  Lincoln was a frontiersman, rough-hewn, not at all the aristocratic, sophisticated type of leader that Henry had been raised to respect. It does not yet occur to young Henry that Lincoln might turn his need for education into an asset, continually growing in office. Adams later realizes that his negative assessment was incorrect, but Lincoln is never a man with whom he can identify. Henry does briefly contemplate the assassination, but the narrator of the Education rarely shows passion about emotional matters. All things considered, it is not so surprising that he shows none here. Such education as he has achieved has eliminated two possible careers for Henry. His father agrees that the young man is not cut out to be a lawyer. As for diplomacy, Henry feels that nothing could ever match the intensity and excitement of his time in London during the Civil War. Writing seems to be the one remaining profession for him -- or perhaps editing for the press. However, his experience with the rough and tumble realities of newspaper work has been disillusioning. He will have to wait to see what his return to the States brings. Meanwhile, Henry's pursuit of education causes him to explore the world of art; but he finds that he has neither the talent nor the taste to be anything more than a dilettante, an admittedly superficial amateur. His pursuit of a small drawing, possibly by the Renaissance painter Rafael , convinces him that even the so-called "experts" often don't know what they are doing. He decides to dabble in art for amusement and pleasure but with no more serious purpose. Glossary brevet a military promotion to higher honorary rank but without higher pay. Turner Joseph Mallord William Turner , English painter. bric-a-brac small, rare, or artistic objects placed about a room for decoration. anachronism anything out of its proper time in history, especially earlier than its time. deferentially in a courteous or respectful manner.