 8. Diplomacy, 1861 Hardly a week passed when the newspapers announced that President Lincoln had selected Charles Francis Adams as his minister to England. Once more, silently, Henry put Blackstone back on its shelf. As Friar Bacon's head sententiously announced many centuries before, time had passed. The civil law lasted a brief day. The common law prolonged its shadowy existence for a week. The law, altogether, as path of education, vanished in April 1861, leaving a million young men planted in the mud of a lawless world, to begin a new life without education at all. They asked few questions, but if they had asked millions they would have got no answers. No one could help. Looking back on this moment of crisis nearly fifty years afterwards, one could only shake one's white beard in silent horror. Mr. Adams once more intimated that he thought himself entitled to the services of one of his sons, and he indicated Henry as the only one who could be spared from more serious duties. Henry packed his trunk again without a word. He could offer no protest. Ridiculous as he knew himself about to be in his new role, he was less ridiculous than his betters. He was at least no public official like the thousands of impoverished secretaries and generals who crowded their jealousies and intrigues on the President. He was not a vulture of Carrie and patronage. He knew that his father's appointment was the result of Governor Seward's personal friendship. He did not then know that Senator Sumner had opposed it, or the reasons which Sumner alleged for thinking it unfit. But he could have supplied proofs enough had Sumner asked for them, the strongest and most decisive being that in his opinion Mr. Adams had chosen a private secretary far more unfit than his chief. That Mr. Adams was unfit might well be, since it was hard to find a fit appointment in the list of possible candidates except Mr. Sumner himself, and no one knew so well as this experienced senator that the weakest of all Mr. Adams's proofs of fitness was his consent to quit a safe seat in Congress for an exceedingly unsafe seat in London, with no better support than Senator Sumner at the head of the Foreign Relations Committee was likely to give him. In the family history its members had taken many a dangerous risk, but never before had they taken one so desperate. The private secretary troubled himself not at all about the unfitness of any one. He knew too little. And in fact no one except perhaps Mr. Sumner knew more. The President and Secretary of State knew least of all. As Secretary of Legation the executive appointed the editor of a Chicago newspaper who had applied for the Chicago Post Office. A good fellow, universally known as Charlie Wilson, who had not a thought of staying in the Post or of helping the minister. The assistant secretary was inherited from Buchanan's time, a hard worker but socially useless. Mr. Adams made no effort to find efficient help. Perhaps he knew no name to suggest. Perhaps he knew too much of Washington. But he could hardly have hoped to find a staff of strength in his son. The private secretary was more passive than his father, for he knew not where to turn. Sumner alone could have smoothed his path by giving him letters of introduction. But if Sumner wrote letters it was not with the effect of smoothing paths. No one at that moment was engaged in smoothing either paths or people. The private secretary was no worse off than his neighbors except in being called earlier to service. On April 13th the storm burst and rolled several hundred thousand young men like Henry Adams into the surf of a wild ocean, all helpless like himself, to be beaten about for four years by the waves of war. Adams still had time to watch the regiments form ranks before Boston Statehouse and the April evenings and march southward quietly enough with the air of business they wore from their cradles, but with few signs or sounds of excitement. He had time also to go down to the harbor to see his brother Charles quartered in Fort Independence before being thrown with a hundred thousand more into the furnace of the Army of the Potomac to get educated in a fury of fire. Few things were for the moment so trivial in importance as the solitary private secretary crawling down to the wretched old Cunard steamer Niagara at East Boston to start again for Liverpool. This time the pitcher of education had gone to the fountain once too often, it was fairly broken, and the young man had got to meet a hostile world without defence or arms. The situation did not seem even comic, so ignorant was the world of its humours. Yet Minister Adams sailed for England May 1st, 1861, with much the same outfit as Admiral DuPont would have enjoyed if the government had sent him to attack Port Royal with one cabin boy and a rowboat. Luckily for the cabin boy he was alone. Had Secretary Seward and Senator Sumner given to Mr. Adams the rank of ambassador and four times his salary, a palace in London, a staff of trained secretaries, and personal letters of introduction to the royal family and the whole peerage, the private secretary would have been cabin boy still with the extra burden of many masters. He was the most fortunate person in the party, having for master only his father, who never fretted, never dictated, never disciplined, and whose idea of American diplomacy was that of the eighteenth century. Minister Adams remembered how his grandfather had sailed from Mount Wollaston in midwinter 1778 on the little frigate Boston, taking his eleven-year-old son, John Quincy, with him for secretary, on a diplomacy of adventure that had hardly a parallel for success. He remembered how John Quincy in 1809 had sailed for Russia with himself, a baby of two years old, to cope with Napoleon and the Tsar Alexander single-handed, almost as much of an adventurer as John Adams before him, and almost as successful. He thought it natural that the government should send him out as an adventurer also, with a twenty-three-year-old son, and he did not even notice that he left not a friend behind him. No doubt he could depend on Seward, but on whom could Seward depend? Certainly not on the chairman of the Committee of Foreign Relations. Minister Adams had no friend in the Senate. He could hope for no favors, and he asked none. He thought it right to play the adventurer as his father and grandfather had done before him, without a murmur. This was a lofty view, and for him answered his objects, but it bore hard on cabin boys, and when in time the young man realized what had happened, he felt it as a betrayal. He modestly thought himself unfit for the career of adventurer, and judged his father to be less fit than himself. For the first time America was posing as the champion of legitimacy and order. Her representatives should know how to play their role. They should wear the costume. But in the mission attached to Mr. Adams in 1861, the only rag of legitimacy or order was the private secretary, whose stature was not sufficient to impose awe on the court and Parliament of Great Britain. One inevitable effect of this lesson was to make a victim of the scholar, and to turn him into a harsh judge of his masters. If they overlooked him he could hardly overlook them, since they stood with their whole weight on his body. By way of teaching him quickly, they sent out their new minister to Russia in the same ship. Secretary Seward had occasion to learn the merits of Cassius M. Clay in the diplomatic service. But Mr. Seward's education profited less than the private secretaries. Cassius Clay is a teacher having no equal, though possibly some rivals. No young man, not in government pay, could be asked to draw from such lessons any confidence in himself. And it was notorious that for the next two years the persons were few indeed who felt or had reason to feel any sort of confidence in the government, fewest of all among those who were in it. And home for the most part young men went to the war, grumbled and died. In England they might grumble or not, no one listened. Above all the private secretary could not grumble to his chief. He knew surprisingly little, but that much he did now. He never labored so hard to learn a language as he did to hold his tongue, and it affected him for life. The habit of reticence, of talking without meaning, is never effaced. He had to begin it at once. He was already an adept when the party landed at Liverpool May 13th, 1861, and went instantly up to London. A family of early Christian martyrs about to be flung into an arena of lions under the glad eyes of Tiberius Palmerston. Though Lord Palmerston would have laughed his peculiar Palmerston laugh at figuring as Tiberius, he would have seen only evident resemblance in the Christian martyrs, for he had already arranged the ceremony. Of what they had to expect the minister knew no more than his son. What he or Mr. Seward or Mr. Sumner may have thought is the affair of history, and their errors concern historians. The errors of a private secretary concerned no one but himself, and were a large part of his education. He thought on May 12th that he was going to a friendly government and people, true to the anti-slavery principles which had been their steadiest profession. For a hundred years the chief effort of his family had aimed at bringing the government of England into intelligent cooperation with the objects and interests of America. His father was about to make a new effort, and this time the chance of success was promising. The slave states had been the chief apparent obstacle to good understanding. As for the private secretary himself, he was, like all Bostonians, instinctively English. He could not conceive the idea of a hostile England. He supposed himself as one of the members of a famous anti-slavery family to be welcomed everywhere in the British islands. On May 13th he met the official announcement that England recognized the belligerency of the Confederacy. This beginning of a new education tore up by the roots nearly all that was left of Harvard College and Germany. He had to learn, the sooner the better, that his ideas were the reverse of truth. That in May 1861 no one in England, literally no one, doubted that Jefferson Davies had made or would make a nation, and nearly all were glad of it, though not often saying so. They mostly imitated Palmerston, who, according to Mr. Gladstone, desired the severance as a diminution of a dangerous power, but prudently held his tongue. The sentiment of anti-slavery had disappeared. Lord John Russell, as foreign secretary, had received the rebel emissaries, and had decided to recognize their belligerency before the arrival of Mr. Adams in order to fix the position of the British government in advance. The recognition of independence would then become an understood policy, a matter of time and occasion. Whatever Mr. Adams may have felt, the first effect of this shock upon his son produced only a dullness of comprehension, a sort of hazy inability to grasp the missile or realize the blow. Yet he realized that to his father it was likely to be fatal. The chances were great that the whole family would turn round and go home within a few weeks. The horizon widened out in endless waves of confusion. When he thought over the subject in the long leisure of later life, he grew cold at the idea of his situation had his father then shown himself what Sumner thought him to be, unfit for his post. That the private secretary was unfit for his, trifling though it were, was proved by his unreflecting confidence in his father. It never entered his mind that his father might lose his nerve or his temper, and yet, in a subsequent knowledge of statesmen and diplomats extending over several generations, he could not certainly point out another who could have stood such a shock without showing it. He passed this long day and tedious journey to London without once thinking of the possibility that his father might make a mistake. Whatever the minister thought, and certainly his thought was not less active than his son's, he showed no trace of excitement. His manner was the same as ever. His mind and temper were as perfectly balanced, not a word escaped, not a nerve twitched. The test was final, for no other shock so violent and sudden could possibly recur. The worst was in full sight. For once the private secretary knew his own business, which was to imitate his father as closely as possible and hold his tongue. Dumped thus into Morigy's hotel at the foot of Regent Street, in the midst of a London season, without a friend or even an acquaintance, he preferred to laugh at his father's bewilderment before the waiters, amen eggs, sir, for breakfast, rather than ask a question or express a doubt. His situation, if taken seriously, was too appalling to face. Had he known it better, he would only have thought it worse. Politically or socially the outlook was desperate, beyond retrieving or contesting. Socially, under the best of circumstances, a newcomer in London society needs years to establish a position, and Minister Adams had not a week or an hour to spare, while his son had not even a remote chance of beginning. Politically the prospect looked even worse, and for Secretary Seward and Senator Sumner it was so. But for the minister, on the spot, as he came to realize exactly where he stood, the danger was not so imminent. Mr. Adams was always one of the luckiest of men, both in what he achieved and in what he escaped. The blow, which prostrated Seward and Sumner, passed over him. Lord John Russell had acted, had probably intended to act, kindly by him, in forestalling his arrival. The blow must have fallen within three months, and would then have broken him down. The British ministers were a little in doubt still, a little ashamed of themselves, and certain to wait the longer for their next step in proportion to the haste of their first. This is not a story of the diplomatic adventures of Charles Francis Adams, but of his son Henry's adventures in search of an education, which, if not taken too seriously, tended to humor. The father's position in London was not altogether bad. The son's was absurd. Thanks to certain family associations, Charles Francis Adams naturally looked on all British ministers as enemies. The only public occupation of all Adamses for a hundred and fifty years at least, in their brief intervals of quarrelling with State Street, had been to quarrel with Downing Street. And the British government, well used to a liberal unpopularity abroad, even when officially rude, liked to be personally civil. All diplomatic agents are liable to be put, so to speak, in a corner, and are none the worse for it. Minister Adams had nothing in his special to complain of. His position was good while it lasted, and he had only the chances of war to fear. The son had no such compensations. Brought over in order to help his father, he could conceive no way of rendering his father help. But he was clear that his father had got to help him. To him the legation was social ostracism, terrible beyond anything he had known. Entire solitude in the great society of London was doubly desperate, because his duties as private secretary required him to know everybody and go with his father and mother everywhere they needed escort. He had no friend or even enemy to tell him to be patient. Had anyone done it he would surely have broken out with the reply that patience was the last resource of fools as well as of sages. If he was to help his father at all he must do it at once, for his father would never so much need help again. In fact he never gave his father the smallest help, unless it were as a footman, a clerk, or a companion for the younger children. He found himself in a singular situation for one who was to be useful. As he came to see the situation closer he began to doubt where the secretaries were meant to be useful. Wars were too common in diplomacy to disturb the habits of the diplomat. Most secretaries detested their chiefs and wished to be anything but useful. At the Saint James's Club, to which the minister's son could go only as an invited guest, the most instructive conversation he ever heard among the young men of his own age who hung about the tables more helpless than himself was, Kelshian du pays, or Que tu es beau aujourd'hui mon cher? No one wanted to discuss affairs, still less to give or get information. That was the affair of their chiefs, who were also slow to assume work not specially ordered from their courts. If the American minister was in trouble today, the Russian ambassador was in trouble yesterday, and the Frenchman would be in trouble tomorrow, it would all come in the day's work. There was nothing professional in worry. Empires were always tumbling to pieces, and diplomats were always picking them up. This was his whole diplomatic education, except that he found rich veins of jealousy running between every chief and his staff. His social education was more barren still and more trying to his vanity. His little mistakes in etiquette or address made him writhe with torture. He never forgot the first two or three social functions he attended. One, an afternoon at Miss Burdett Coots in Stratten Place, where he hid himself in the embrasure of a window and hoped that no one noticed him. Another was at a garden party given by the old anti-slavery Duchess Dowager of Sutherland at Chiswick, where the American minister and Mrs. Adams were kept in conversation by the old Duchess till everyone else went away except the young Duke and his cousins, who set to playing leapfrog on the lawn. At intervals during the next thirty years Henry Adams continued to happen upon the Duke, who, singularly enough, was always playing leapfrog. Still another nightmare he suffered at a dance given by the old Duchess Dowager of Somerset, a terrible vision in castanets, who seized him and forced him to perform a highland fling before the assembled nobility and gentry with the daughter of the Turkish ambassador for partner. This might seem humorous to some, but to him the world turned to ashes. When the end of the season came the private secretary had not yet won a private acquaintance, and he hugged himself in his solitude when the story of the Battle of Bull Run appeared in the times. He felt only the wish to be more private than ever, for Bull Run was a worse diplomatic than military disaster. All this is history and can be read by public schools if they choose, but the curious and unexpected happened to the legation, for the effect of Bull Run on them was almost strengthening. They no longer felt doubt. For the next year they went on only from week to week, ready to leave England at once, and never assuming more than three months for their limit. Europe was waiting to see them go. So certain was the end that no one cared to hurry it. So far as a private secretary could see this was all that saved his father. For many months he looked on himself as lost or finished in the character of private secretary, and is about to begin without further experiment a final education in the ranks of the army of the Potomac, where he would find most of his friends enjoying a much pleasanter life than his own. With this idea uppermost in his mind he passed the summer and the autumn and began the winter. Any winter in London is a severe trial. One's first winter is the most trying, but the month of December, 1861, in Mansfield Street, Portland Place, would have gorged a glutton of gloom. One afternoon when he was struggling to resist complete nervous depression in the solitude of Mansfield Street, during the absence of the minister and Mrs. Adams on a country visit, Reuters Telegram announcing the seizure of Mason and Slidell from a British mail steamer was brought to the office. All three secretaries, public and private, were there. Reuters' wild beasts under the long strain on their endurance. And all three, though they knew it to be not merely their order of departure, not merely diplomatic rupture, but a declaration of war, broke into shouts of delight. They were glad to face the end. They saw it and cheered it. Since England was waiting only for its own moment to strike, they were eager to strike first. They telegraphed the news to the minister, who was staying with Moncton Milne's at Freiston in Yorkshire. How Mr. Adams took it is told in the lives of Lord Houghton and William E. Forster, who was one of the Freiston party. The moment was for him the crisis of his diplomatic career, for the secretaries it was merely the beginning of another intolerable delay, as though they were a military outpost waiting orders to quit in abandoned position. At the moment of sharpest suspense the prince consort sickened and died. Portland place at Christmas in a black fog was never a rosy landscape, but in 1861 the most hardened Londoner lost his ruddiness. The private secretary had one source of comfort denied to them. He should not be private secretary long. He was mistaken, of course. He had been mistaken at every point of his education, and on this point he kept up the same mistake for nearly seven years longer, always deluded by the notion that the end was near. To him the Trent affair was nothing but one of the many affairs which he had to copy in a delicate round hand into his books. Yet it had one or two results personal to him which left no trace on the legation records. One of these, and to him the most important, was to put an end forever to the idea of being useful. Hitherto as an independent and free citizen, not in the employ of the government, he had kept up his relations with the American press. He had written pretty frequently to Henry J. Raymond, and Raymond had used his letters in the New York Times. He had also become fairly intimate with two or three friendly newspapers in London, the Daily News, the Star, the Weekly Spectator, and he had tried to give them news and views that should have a certain common character and prevent clash. He had even gone down to Manchester to study the cotton famine and wrote a long account of his visit which his brother Charles had published in the Boston Courier. Unfortunately it was printed with his name and instantly came back upon him in the most crushing shape possible, that of a long satirical leader in the London Times. Luckily the Times did not know its victim to be a part, though not an official, of the legation and had lost the chance to make it satire fatal. But he instantly learned the narrowness of his escape from old Joe Parks, one of the traditional busybodies of politics, who had haunted London since 1830 and who, after rushing to the Times office to tell them all they did not know about Henry Adams, rushed to the legation to tell Adams all he did not want to know about the Times. For a moment Adams thought his usefulness at an end in other respects than in the press. But a day or two more taught him the value of obscurity. He was totally unknown. He had not even a club. London was empty. No one thought twice about the Times article. No one except Joe Parks ever spoke of it. And the world had other persons, such as President Lincoln, Secretary Seward, and Commodore Wilkes for constant and favourite objects of ridicule. Henry Adams escaped, but he never tried to be useful again. The Trent Affair dwarfed individual effort. His education at least had reached the point of seeing its own proportions. Zeal was too hazardous a profession for a minister's son to pursue as a volunteer manipulator among Trent affairs and rebel cruisers. He wrote no more letters and meddled with no more newspapers. But he was still young and felt unkindly toward the editor of the London Times. Mr. Delayne lost few opportunities of embittering him, and he felt little or no hope of repaying these attentions. But the Trent Affair passed like a snowstorm, leaving the legation, to its surprise, still in place. Although the private secretary saw in this delay, which he attributed to Mr. Seward's good sense, no reason for changing his opinion about the views of the British government. He had no choice but to sit down again at his table and go on copying papers, filing letters, and reading newspaper accounts of the incapacity of Mr. Lincoln and the brutality of Mr. Seward or vice versa. The heavy months dragged on, and winter slowly turned to spring without improving his position or spirits. Socially he had but one relief, and to the end of life he never forgot the keen gratitude he owed for it. During this tedious winter and for many months afterwards, the only gleams of sunshine were on the days he passed at Walton on Thames as the guest of Mr. and Mrs. Russell Sturgis at Mount Felix. His education had unfortunately little to do with bankers, although old George Peabody and his partner, Junius Morgan, were strong allies. Joshua Bates was devoted, and no one could be kinder than Thomas Bering, whose little dinners in Upper Gravener Street were certainly the best in London. But none offered a refuge to compare with Mount Felix, and for the first time the refuge was a liberal education. Mrs. Russell Sturgis was one of the women to whom an intelligent boy attaches himself as closely as he can. Henry Adams was not a very intelligent boy, and he had no knowledge of the world, but he knew enough to understand that a cub needed shape. The kind of education he most required was that of a charming woman, and Mrs. Russell Sturgis, a dozen years older than himself, could have good-naturedly trained a school of such without an effort and with infinite advantage to them. Near her he half forgot the anxieties of Portland Place. During two years of miserable solitude she was in this social polar winter, the single source of warmth and light. Of course the legation itself was home, and under such pressure life in it could be nothing but united. All the inmates made common cause, but this was no education. One lived, but was merely flayed alive. Yet, while this might be exactly true of the younger members of the household, it was not quite so with the minister and Mrs. Adams. Very slowly, but quite steadily, they gained foothold. For some reason, partly connected with American sources, British society had begun with violent social prejudice against Lincoln, Seward, and all the Republican leaders except Sumner. Familiar as the whole tribe of Adamses had been for three generations with the impenetrable stupidity of the British mind, and weary of the long struggle to teach it its own interests, the fourth generation could not still quite persuade itself that this new British prejudice was natural. The private secretary suspected that Americans in New York and Boston had something to do with it. The copperhead was at home in Palm All. Naturally, the Englishman was a coarse animal and liked coarseness. Had Lincoln and Seward been the Ruffians supposed, the average Englishman would have liked them the better. The exceedingly quiet manner and the unassailable social position of Minister Adams in no way conciliated them. They chose to ignore him, since they could not ridicule him. Lord John Russell set the example. Personally, the minister was to be kindly treated. Politically, he was negligible. He was there to be put aside. London and Paris imitated Lord John. Everyone waited to see Lincoln and his hirelings disappear in one vast debacle. All conceived that the Washington government would soon crumble and that Minister Adams would vanish with the rest. This situation made Minister Adams an exception among diplomats. European rulers, for the most part, fought and treated as members of one family and rarely had in view the possibility of total extinction. But the governments and society of Europe, for a year at least, regarded the Washington government as dead and its ministers as nullities. Minister Adams was better received than most nullities because he made no noise. Little by little in private society took the habit of accepting him, not so much as a diplomat, but rather as a member of opposition or an eminent council retained for a foreign government. He was to be received and considered to be cordially treated as by birth and manners one of themselves. This curiously English way of getting behind a stupidity gave the minister every possible advantage over a European diplomat. Barriers of race, language, birth, habit ceased to exist. Diplomacy held diplomats apart in order to save governments. But Earl Russell could not hold Mr. Adams apart. He was undistinguishable from a Londoner. In society few Londoners were so widely at home. None had such double personality and corresponding double weight. The singular luck that took him to Freistown to meet the shock of the Trent Affair under the sympathetic eyes of Moncton Milnes and William E. Forster never afterward deserted him. Both Milnes and Forster needed support and were greatly relieved to be supported. They saw what the private secretary in May had overlooked, the hopeless position they were in if the American minister made a mistake, and since his strength was theirs they lost no time in expressing to all the world their estimate of the minister's character. Between them the minister was almost safe. One might discuss long whether at that moment Milnes or Forster were the most valuable ally, since they were influences of different kinds. Moncton Milnes was a social power in London, possibly greater than Londoners themselves quite understood, for in London society as elsewhere the dull and the ignorant made a large majority, and dull men always laughed at Moncton Milnes. Every boar was used to talk familiarly about Dickie Milnes, the cool of the evening, and of course he himself affected social eccentricity, challenging ridicule with the indifference of one who knew himself to be the first wit in London and a maker of men, of a great many men. A word from him went far. An invitation to his breakfast table went farther. Behind his almost foxtaphy and mask and laugh of Salinas he carried a fine broad and high intelligence which no one questioned. As a young man he had written verses which some readers thought poetry and which were certainly not altogether prose. Later in Parliament he made speeches, chiefly criticised as too good for the place and too high for the audience. Socially he was one of two or three men who went everywhere, knew everybody, talked of everything, and had the ear of ministers. But unlike most wits he had a social position of his own that ended in a peerage, and he had a house in Upper Brook Street to which most clever people were exceedingly glad of admission. His breakfasts were famous and no one liked to decline his invitations, for it was more dangerous to show timidity than to risk a fray. He was a voracious reader, a strong critic, an art connoisseur in certain directions, a collector of books, but above all he was a man of the world by profession and loved the contacts, perhaps the collisions of society. Not even Henry Brome dared to do the things he did, yet Brome defied Rebuff. Milne's was the good nature of London, the gargantuan type of its refinement and coarseness, the most universal figure of Mayfair. Compared with him, figures like Hayward or Delayne or Venables or Henry Reeve were quite secondary. But William E. Forster stood in a different class. Forster had nothing whatever to do with Mayfair. Except in being a Yorkshire man, he was quite the opposite of Milne's. He had at that time no social or political position. He never had a vestige of Milne's wit or variety. He was a tall, rough, ungainly figure, affecting the singular form of self-defense which the Yorkshire men and Lancashire men seemed to hold dear, the exterior roughness assumed to cover an internal, emotional, almost sentimental nature. Kindly he had to be, if only by his inheritance from a Quaker ancestry. But he was a friend one degree removed. Sentimental and emotional he must have been, or he could never have persuaded a daughter of Dr. Arnold to marry him. Pure gold without a trace of base metal. Honest, unselfish, practical. He took up the union cause and made himself its champion, as a true Yorkshire man was sure to do. Partly because of his Quaker anti-slavery convictions, and partly because it gave him a practical opening in the house, as a new member he needed a field. Diffidence was not one of force's weaknesses. His practical sense and his personal energy soon established him in leadership, and made him a powerful champion, not so much for ornament as for work. With such a manager the friends of the Union of England began to take heart. Minister Adams had only to look on as his true champions, the heavyweights, came into action, and even the private secretary caught, now and then, a stray gleam of encouragement, as he saw the ring begin to clear for these burly Yorkshire men to stand up in a prize fight likely to be as brutal as ever England had known. Mills and Forster were not exactly lightweight, but Bright and Cobden were the hardest hitters in England, and with them for champions the minister could tackle even Lord Palmerston without much fear of foul play. In society John Bright and Richard Cobden were never seen, and even in Parliament they had no large following. They were classed as enemies of order, anarchists, and anarchists they were if hatred of the so-called established orders made them so. About them was no sort of political timidity. They took bluntly the side of the Union against Palmerston, whom they hated. Strangers to London society they were at home in the American delegation, delightful dinner company, talking always with reckless freedom. Cobden was the milder and more persuasive. Bright was the more dangerous to approach, but the private secretary delighted in both, and nourished an ardent wish to see them talk the same language to Lord John Russell from the gangway of the house. With four allies such as these minister Adams stood no longer quite helpless. For the second time the British ministry felt a little ashamed of itself after the Trent affair, as well it might, and disposed to wait before moving again. Little by little friends gathered around the legation who were no fair-weather companions. The old anti-slavery Exeter Hall Shaftesbury clique turned out to be an annoying and troublesome enemy. But the Duke of Argyle was one of the most valuable friends the minister found both politically and socially, and the Duchess was as true as her mother. Even the private secretary shared faintly in the social prophet of this relation, and never forgot dining one night at the lodge, and finding himself after dinner engaged in instructing John Stuart Mill about the peculiar merits of an American protective system. In spite of all the probabilities he convinced himself that it was not the Duke's claret which led him to this singular form of locacity. He insisted that it was the fault of Mr. Mill himself who led him on by assenting to his point of view. Mr. Mill took no apparent pleasure in dispute, and in that respect the Duke would perhaps have done better. But the secretary had to admit that though at other periods of life he was sufficiently and even amply snubbed by Englishmen, he could never recall a single occasion during this trying year when he had to complain of rudeness. Friendliness he found here and there but chiefly among his elders, not among fashionable or socially powerful people, either men or women. Although not even this rule was quite exact, for Frederick Cavendish's kindness and intimate relations made Devonshire House almost familiar, and Edward Stanley's ardent Americanism created a certain cordiality with the Stanley's of Alderley, whose house was one of the most frequented in London. Lorne, too, the future Argyle, was always a friend. Yet the regular course of society led to more literary intimacies. Sir Charles Travalian's house was one of the first to which young Adams was asked, and with which his friendly relations never ceased for near half a century, and then only when death stopped them. Sir Charles and Lady Lyall were intimates. Tom Hughes came into close alliance. By the time society began to reopen its doors after the death of the Prince Consort, even the private secretary occasionally saw a face he knew, although he made no more effort of any kind but silently waited the end. Whatever might be the advantages of social relations to his father and mother, to him the whole business of diplomacy and society was futile. He meant to go home. CHAPTER IX Of the year 1862 Henry Adams could never think without a shudder. The war alone did not greatly distress him. Already in his short life he was used to seeing people wade in blood, and he could plainly discern in history that man from the beginning had found his chief amusement in bloodshed. But the ferocious joy of destruction at its best requires that one should kill what one hates, and young Adams neither hated nor wanted to kill his friends, the rebels, while he wanted nothing so much as to wipe England off the earth. Never could any good come from that besotted race. He was feebly trying to save his own life. Every day the British government deliberately crowded him one step further into the grave. He could see it. The legation knew it. No one doubted it. No one thought of questioning it. The Trent Affair showed where Palmerston and Russell stood. The escape of the rebel cruisers from Liverpool was not, in a young man's eyes, the sign of hesitation, but the proof of their fixed intention to intervene. Lord Russell's replies to Mr. Adams's notes were discourteous in their indifference, and to an irritable young private secretary of twenty-four were insolent in their disregard of truth. Whatever forms of phrase were usual in public to modify the harshness of invective, in private no political opponent in England and few political friends hesitated to say brutally of Lord John Russell that he lied. This was no great reproach for more or less every statesman lied, but the intensity of the private secretary's rage sprang from his belief that Russell's form of defence covered intent to kill. Not for an instant did the legation draw a free breath. The suspense was hideous and unendurable. The minister no doubt endured it, but he had support and consideration, while his son had nothing to think about but his friends were mostly dying under McClellan in the swamps of Outrichmond, or his enemies who were exalting in Paul Mall. He bore it as well as he could till mid-summer, but when the story of the second bull run appeared he could bear it no longer, and after a sleepless night walking up and down his room without reflecting that his father was beneath him, he announced at breakfast his intention to go home into the army. His mother seemed to be less impressed by the announcement than by the walking over her head, which was so unlike her as to surprise her son. His father too received the announcement quietly. No doubt they expected it, and had taken their measures in advance. In those days parents got used to all sorts of announcements from their children. Mr. Adams took his son's defection as quietly as he took bull run, but his son never got the chance to go. He found obstacles constantly rising in his path. The remonstrances of his brother Charles, who was himself in the army of the Potomac, and whose opinion had always the greatest weight with Henry, had much to do with delaying action. But he felt of his own accord that if he deserted his post in London and found the capoean comforts he expected in Virginia, where he would have only bullets to wound him, he would never forgive himself for leaving his father and mother alone to be devoured by the wild beasts of the British amphitheatre. This reflection might not have stopped him, but his father's suggestion was decisive. The minister pointed out that it was too late for him to take part in the actual campaign, and that long before next spring they would all go home together. The young man had copied too many affidavits about rebel cruisers to miss the point of this argument, so he sat down again to copy some more. Consul Dudley at Liverpool provided a continuous supply. Properly the affidavits were no business of the private secretary, but practically the private secretary did a second secretary's work, and was glad to do it, if it would save Mr. Seward the trouble of sending more secretaries of his own selection to help the minister. The work was nothing, and no one ever complained of it, not even Moran, the secretary of legation after the departure of Charlie Wilson, though he might sit up all night to copy. Not the work, but the play, exhausted. The effort of facing a hostile society was bad enough, but that of facing friends was worse. After terrific disasters like the seven days before Richmond and the second bull run, friends needed support. A tone of bluff would have been fatal, for the average mind sees quickest through a bluff. Nothing answers but candor. Yet private secretaries never feel candid, however much they feel the reverse, and therefore they must affect candor. Not always a simple act when one is exasperated, furious, bitter, and choking with tears over the blunders and incapacity of one's government. If one shed tears, they must be shed on one's pillow. Least of all, must one throw extra strain on the minister who had all he could carry without being fretted in his family. One must read one's times every morning over one's muffin without reading aloud, another disastrous federal defeat, and one might not even indulge in harmless profanity. Self-restraint among friends required much more effort than keeping a quiet face before enemies. Great men were the worst blunderers. One day the private secretary smiled when standing with the crowd in the throne room while the endless procession made bows to the royal family. At hearing, behind his shoulder, one cabinet minister remarked gaily to another, so the Federals have got another licking. The point of the remark was its truth. Even a private secretary had learned to control his tones and guard his features and betray no joy over the lickings of an enemy in the enemy's presence. London was altogether beside itself on one point in a special. It created a nightmare of its own, and gave it the shape of Abraham Lincoln. Behind this it placed another demon, if possible more devilish, and called it Mr. Seward. In regard to these two men, English society seemed demented. Defence was useless. Explanation was vain. One could only let the passion exhaust itself. One's best friends were as unreasonable as enemies, for the belief in poor Mr. Lincoln's brutality and Seward's ferocity became a dogma of popular faith. The last time Henry Adams saw Thackeray before his sudden death at Christmas in 1863 was in entering the house of Sir Henry Holland for an evening reception. Thackeray was pulling on his coat downstairs, laughing, because in his usual blind way he had stumbled into the wrong house, and not found out till he shook hands with old Sir Henry, whom he knew very well, but who was not the host he expected. Then his tone changed as he spoke of his and Adams's friend, Mrs. Frank Hampton of South Carolina, whom he had loved as Sally Baxter and painted as Ethel Newcomb. Though he had never quite forgiven her marriage, his warmth of feeling revived when he heard that she had died of consumption at Columbia while her parents and sister were refused permission to pass through the lines to see her. In speaking of it Thackeray's voice trembled in his eyes filled with tears. The coarse cruelty of Lincoln and his hirelings was notorious. He never doubted that the Federals made a business of harrowing the tenderest feelings of women, particularly of women, in order to punish their opponents. On quite insufficient evidence he burst into violent reproach. Had Adams carried in his pocket the proofs that the reproach was unjust he would have gained nothing by showing them. At that moment Thackeray and all London society with him needed the nervous relief of expressing emotion. For if Mr. Lincoln was not what they said he was, what were they? For like reason the members of the legation kept silence, even in private under the boorish, jibes of Carlisle. If Carlisle was wrong his diatribes would give his true measure, and this measure would be a low one, for Carlisle was not likely to be more sincere or more sound in one thought than in another. The proof that a philosopher does not know what he is talking about is apt to satan his followers before it reacts upon himself. Demolition of one's idols is painful, and Carlisle had been an idol. Doubts cast on his stature spread far into general darkness like shadows of a setting sun. Not merely the idols fell, but also the habit of faith. If Carlisle too was a fraud what were his scholars and school? Society as a rule was civil, and one had no more reason to complain than every other diplomatist had, in like conditions. But one's few friends and society were mere ornament. The legation could not dream of contesting social control. The best they could do was to escape mortification, and by this time their relations were good enough to save the minister's family from that annoyance. Now and then the fact could not be wholly disguised that someone had refused to meet or to receive the minister, but never an open insult or any expression of which the minister had to take notice. Diplomacy served as a buffer in times of irritation, and no diplomat who knew his business fretted at what every diplomat and none more commonly than the English had to expect. Therefore Henry Adams, though not a diplomat and wholly unprotected, went his way peacefully enough, seeing clearly that society cared little to make his acquaintance, but seeing also no reason why society should discover charms in him of which he was himself unconscious. He went where he was asked, he was always courteously received, he was on the whole better treated than at Washington, and he held his tongue. For a thousand reasons the best diplomatic house in London was Lord Palmerston's, while Lord John Russell's was one of the worst. Of neither host could a private secretary expect to know anything. He might as well have expected to know the Grand Lama. Personally Lord Palmerston was the last man in London that a cautious private secretary wanted to know. Other prime ministers may perhaps have lived who inspired among diplomatists as much distrust as Palmerston, and yet between Palmerston's word and Russell's word one hesitated to decide, and gave years of education to deciding whether either could be trusted or how far. The Queen herself in her famous memorandum of August 12th, 1850, gave her opinion of Palmerston in words that differed little from words used by Lord John Russell, and both the Queen and Russell said in substance only what Cobden and Bright said in private. Every diplomatist agreed with them, yet the diplomatic standard of trust seemed to be other than the parliamentarian. No professional diplomatists worried about falsehoods. Words were with them forms of expression which varied with individuals, but falsehood was more or less necessary to all. The worst liars were the candid. What diplomatists wanted to know was the motive that lay beyond the expression. In the case of Palmerston they were unanimous in warning new colleagues that they might expect to be sacrificed by him to any momentary personal object. Every new minister or ambassador at the court of St. James received this preliminary lesson that he must, if possible, keep out of Palmerston's reach. The rule was not secret or merely diplomatic. The Queen herself had emphatically expressed the same opinion officially. If Palmerston had an object to gain he would go down to the House of Commons and betray or misrepresent a foreign minister without concern for his victim. No one got back on him with a blow equally mischievous, not even the Queen. For, as old Baron Brunau described him, c'est un peu de renassère. Having gained his point he laughed, and his public laughed with him, for the usual British or American public likes to be amused, and thought it very amusing to see these baribund and bestowed foreigners caught and tossed and gored on the horns of this jovial, slashing, devil-may-care British bull. Diplomatists have no right to complain of mere lies. It is their own fault, if educated as they are, the lies deceive them. But they complain bitterly of traps. Palmerston was believed to lay traps. He was the enfant terrible of the British government. On the other hand, Lady Palmerston was believed to be good and loyal. All the diplomats and their wives seemed to think so, and took their troubles to her, believing that she would try to help them. For this reason, among others, her evenings at home, Saturday reviews they were called, had great vogue. An ignorant young American could not be expected to explain it. Cambridge House was no better for entertaining than a score of others. Lady Palmerston was no longer young or handsome, and could hardly at any age have been vivacious. The people one met there were never smart and seldom young. They were largely diplomatic, and diplomats are commonly dull. They were largely political, and politicians rarely decorate or beautify an evening party. They were sprinkled with literary people who are notoriously unfashionable. The women were, of course, ill-dressed and middle-aged. The men looked mostly bored or out of place. Yet, beyond a doubt, Cambridge House was the best, and perhaps the only political house in London, and its success was due to Lady Palmerston, who never seemed to make an effort beyond a friendly recognition. As a lesson in social education, Cambridge House gave much subject for thought. First or last, one was to know dozens of statesmen more powerful and more agreeable than Lord Palmerston. Dozens of ladies more beautiful and more painstaking than Lady Palmerston. But no political house so successful as Cambridge House. The world never explains such riddles. The foreigners said only that Lady Palmerston was sympathique. The small fry of the legations were admitted there or tolerated without a further effort to recognize their existence. But they were pleased because rarely tolerated anywhere else, and there they could at least stand in a corner and look at a bishop or even a duke. This was the social diversion of young Adams. No one knew him, not even the lackeys. The last Saturday evening he ever attended, he gave his name as usual at the foot of the staircase, and was rather disturbed to hear it shouted up as Mr. Andrew Adams. He tried to correct it, and the footman shouted more loudly, Mr. Anthony Adams. With some temper he repeated the correction was finally announced as Mr. Alexander Adams. And under this name made his bow for the last time to Lord Palmerston, who certainly knew no better. Far down the staircase one heard Lord Palmerston's laugh as he stood at the door receiving his guests, talking probably to one of his henchmen, Delayne, Borthick, or Hayward, who were sure to be near. The laugh was singular, mechanical, wooden, and did not seem to disturb his features. Ha! Ha! Ha! Each was a slow, deliberate ejaculation, and all were in the same tone as though he meant to say yes, yes, yes, by way of assurance. It was a laugh of 1810 and the Congress of Vienna. Adams would have much liked to stop a moment and ask whether William Pitt and the Duke of Wellington had laughed so. But young men attached to foreign ministers asked no questions at all of Palmerston, and their chiefs asked as few as possible. One made the usual bow and received the usual glance of civility, then passed on to Lady Palmerston, who was always kind in manner, but who wasted no remarks, and so to Lady Jocelyn, with her daughter, who commonly had something friendly to say, and then went through the diplomatic corps, Brunau, Mussurus, Ezeglio, Aponni, Van de Vyre, Bile, Trikupi, and the rest, finally dropping into the hands of some literary accident as strange there as oneself. The routine varied little. There was no attempt at entertainment. Except for the desperate isolation of these two first seasons, even secretaries would have found the effort almost as mechanical as a la vie at St. James's Palace. Lord Palmerston was not foreign secretary. He was prime minister. But he loved foreign affairs, and could no more resist scoring a point in diplomacy than in wist. Ministers of foreign powers, knowing his habits, tried to hold him at arms length, and to do this were obliged to court the actual foreign secretary, Lord John Russell, who on July 30th, 1861, was called up to the House of Lords as an Earl. By some process of personal affiliation, Minister Adams succeeded in persuading himself that he could trust Lord Russell more safely than Lord Palmerston. His son, being young and ill-balanced and temper, thought there was nothing to choose. Englishmen saw little difference between them, and Americans were bound to follow English experience in English character. Minister Adams had much to learn, although with him, as well as with his son, the months of education began to count as eons. Just as Brunow predicted, Lord Palmerston made his rush at last, as unexpected as always, and more furiously than those still a private secretary of twenty-four. Only a man who had been young with the battle of Trafalgar could be fresh and jaunty to that point. But Minister Adams was not in a position to sympathize with octogenarian youth, and found himself in a danger as critical as that of his numerous predecessors. It was late one afternoon in June, 1862, as the private secretary returned with the minister from some social function, that he saw his father pick up a note from his desk and read it in silence. Then he said, curtly, Palmerston wants a quarrel. This was the point of the incident, as he felt it. Palmerston wanted a quarrel. He must not be gratified. He must be stopped. The matter of quarrel was General Butler's famous woman order at New Orleans. But the motive was the belief in President Lincoln's brutality that had taken such a deep root in the British mind. Knowing Palmerston's habits, the minister took for granted that he meant to score a diplomatic point by producing this note in the House of Commons. If he did this at once, the minister was lost, the quarrel was made, and one new victim to Palmerston's passion for popularity was sacrificed. The moment was nervous, as far as the private secretary knew, quite the most critical moment in the records of American diplomacy. But the story belongs to history, not to education, and can be read there by anyone who cares to read it. As a part of Henry Adams's education, it had a value distinct from history. That his father succeeded in muzzling Palmerston without a public scandal was well enough for the minister, but was not enough for a private secretary who liked going to Cambridge House and was puzzled to reconcile contradictions. That Palmerston had wanted a quarrel was obvious. Why, then, did he submit so tamely to being made the victim of the quarrel? The correspondence that followed his note was conducted feebly on his side, and he allowed the United States minister to close it by a refusal to receive further communications from him except through Lord Russell. The step was excessively strong, for it broke off private relations as well as public and cost even the private secretary his invitations to Cambridge House. Lady Palmerston tried her best, but the two ladies found no resource except tears. They had to do with an American minister perplexed in the extreme. Not that Mr. Adams lost his temper, for he never felt such a weight of responsibility, and was never more cool. But he could conceive no other way of protecting his government, not to speak of himself, than to force Lord Russell to interpose. He believed that Palmerston's submission and silence were due to Russell. Perhaps he was right. At the time his son had no doubt of it, though afterwards he felt less sure. Palmerston wanted a quarrel, the motive seemed evident, yet when the quarrel was made he backed out of it. For some reason it seemed that he did not want it, at least not then. He never showed resentment against Mr. Adams at the time or afterwards. He never began another quarrel. Incredible as it seemed he behaved like a well-bred gentleman who felt himself in the wrong. Possibly this change may have been due to Lord Russell's remonstrances. But the private secretary would have felt his education in politics more complete had he ever finally made up his mind whether Palmerston was more angry with General Butler or more annoyed at himself for committing what was in both cases an unpardonable baitis. At the time the question was hardly raised for no one doubted Palmerston's attitude or his plans. The season was near its end and Cambridge House was soon closed. The legation had troubles enough without caring to publish more. The tide of English feeling ran so violently against it that one could only wait to see whether General McClellan would bring it relief. The year 1862 was a dark spot in Henry Adams's life and the education it gave was mostly one that he gladly forgot. As far as he was aware he made no friends. He could hardly make enemies. Yet toward the close of the year he was flattered by an invitation from Moncton Milnes to Freiston. And it was one of many acts of charity toward the young that gave Milnes immortality. Milnes made it his business to be kind. Other people criticized him for his manner of doing it, but never imitated him. Naturally a dispirited, disheartened private secretary was exceedingly grateful and never forgot the kindness. But it was chiefly as education that this first country visit had value. Commonly country visits are much alike, but Moncton Milnes was never like anybody, and his country parties served his purpose of mixing strange elements. Freiston was one of a class of houses that no one sought for its natural beauties, and the winter mists of Yorkshire were rather more evident for the absence of the hostess on account of them, so that the singular guests whom Milnes collected to enliven his December had nothing to do but astonish each other, if anything could astonish such men. Of the fives Adams alone was tame. He alone added nothing to the wit or humour except as listener. But they needed a listener, and he was useful. Of the remaining four Milnes was the oldest, and perhaps the sanest in spite of his superficial eccentricities, for Yorkshire sanity was true to a standard of its own, if not to other conventions. Yet even Milnes startled a fresh American whose Boston and Washington Mind was still fresh. He would not have been startled by the hard-drinking horse-racing Yorkshire men of whom he had read in books. But Milnes required a knowledge of society and literature that only himself possessed if one were to try to keep pace with him. He had sought contact with everybody and everything that Europe could offer. He knew it all from several points of view, and chiefly as humorous. The second of the party was also of a certain age, a quiet, well-mannered, singularly agreeable gentleman of the literary class. When Milnes showed Adams to his room to dress for dinner, he stayed a moment to say a word about this guest, whom he called Sterling of Kier. His sketch closed with the hint that Sterling was violent only on one point, hatred of Napoleon III. On that point Adams was himself sensitive, which led him to wonder how bad the Scotch gentleman might be. The third was a man of thirty or thereabouts whom Adams had already met at Lady Palmerston's, carrying his arm in a sling. His figure and bearing were sympathetic, almost pathetic, with a certain grave and gentle charm, a pleasant smile, and an interesting story. He was Lawrence Oliphant, just from Japan, where he had been wounded in the fanatics attack on the British delegation. He seemed exceptionally sane and peculiarly suited for country houses, where every man would enjoy his company and every woman would adore him. He had not then published Piccadilly, perhaps he was writing it, while, like all the young men about the Foreign Office, he contributed to the owl. The fourth was a boy, or had the look of one, though in fact a year older than Adams himself. He resembled inaction, and this trait was remotely followed a generation later by another famous young man, Robert Louis Stevenson, a tropical bird, high-crested, long-beaked, quick moving, with a rapid utterance and screams of humor, quite unlike any English lark or nightingale. One could hardly call him a crimson macaw among owls, and yet no ordinary contrast availed. Milnes introduced him as Mr. Algernon Swinburne. The name suggested nothing. Milnes was always unearthing new coins and trying to give them currency. He had unearthed Henry Adams, who knew himself to be worthless and not current. When Milnes lingered a moment in Adams's room to add that Swinburne had written some poetry not yet published of really extraordinary merit, Adams only wondered what more Milnes would discover, and whether by chance he could discover merit in a private secretary. He was capable of it. In due course this party of five men sat down to dinner with the usual club manners of ladyless dinner tables, easy and formal at the same time. Conversation ran first to Oliphant, who told his dramatic story simply, and from him the talk drifted off into other channels, until Milnes thought it time to bring Swinburne out. Then at last, if never before, Adams acquired education. What he had sought so long, he found. But he was none the wiser, only the more astonished. For once, too, he felt at ease, for the others were no less astonished than himself, and their astonishment grew apace. For the rest of the evening Swinburne figured alone. The end of dinner made the monologue only freer, for in 1862, even when ladies were not in the house, smoking was forbidden, and guests usually smoked in the stables or the kitchen. But Moncton Milnes was a licensed libertine who let his guests smoke in Adams's bedroom, since Adams was an American-German barbarian ignorant of manners, and there after dinner all sat or lay till far into the night, listening to the rush of Swinburne's talk. In a long experience before or after no one ever approached it, yet one had heard accounts of the best talking of the time, and read accounts of talkers in all time, among the rest, of Voltaire, who seemed to approach nearest to the pattern. That Swinburne was altogether new to the three types of men of the world before him, that he seemed to them quite original, wildly eccentric, astonishingly gifted, and convulsingly droll Adams could see. But what more he was, even Milnes hardly dared to say. They could not believe his incredible memory and knowledge of literature, classic, medieval, and modern, his faculty of reciting a play of Sophocles or a play of Shakespeare forward or backward from end to beginning, or Dante or Villon or Victor Hugo. They knew not what to make of his rhetorical recitation of his own unpublished ballads, Faustine, the Four Boards of the Coffin Lid, the Ballad of Burdens, which he declaimed as though they were books of the Iliad. It was singular that his most appreciative listener should have been the author only of pretty verses like We Wandered by the Brookside, and she seemed to those that saw them meet, and who never cared to write in any other tone. But Milnes took everything into his sympathies, including Americans like young Adams, whose standards were stiffest of all, while Swinburne, though millions of ages far from them, united them by his humor even more than by his poetry. The story of his first day as a member of Professor Stubbs's household was professionally clever farce, if not high comedy, in a young man who could write a Greek ode or a Provençal chanson as easily as an English quatrain. Late at night when the symposium broke up, Sterling of Kier wanted to take with him into his chamber a copy of Queen Rosamond, the only volume Swinburne had then published, which was on the library table, and Adams offered to light him down with his solitary bedroom candle. All the way Sterling was ejaculating explosions of wonder until at length at the foot of the stairs and at the climax of his imagination he paused and burst out. He's a cross between the Devil and the Duke of Argyle. To appreciate the full merit of this description a judicious critic should have known both, and Henry Adams knew only one, at least in person. But he understood that to a Scotchman the likeness meant something quite portentous beyond English experience, supernatural, and what the French call Moyena go, or medieval with a grotesque turn. That Sterling as well as Milne's should regard Swinburne as a prodigy greatly comforted Adams, who lost his balance of mind at first in trying to imagine that Swinburne was a natural product of Oxford as muffins and pork pies of London, at once the cause and effect of dyspepsia. The idea that one had actually met a real genius dawns slowly on a Boston mind, but it made entry at last. Then came the sad reaction not from Swinburne, whose genius never was in doubt, but from the Boston mind, which in its uttermost flights was never Moyena go. One felt the horror of Long Fellow and Emerson, the doubts of Lowell and the humour of Holmes at the wild Valpergie Snacht of Swinburne's talk. What could a shy young private secretary do about it? Perhaps in his good nature Milne's thought that Swinburne might find a friend in Sterling or Oliphant, but he could hardly have fancied Henry Adams rousing in him even in interest. Adams could no more interest Algernon Swinburne than he could interest Enki's Comet. To Swinburne he could be no more than a worm. The quality of genius was an education almost ultimate, for one touched there the limits of the human mind on that side, but one could only receive one had nothing to give, nothing even to offer. Swinburne tested him then and there by one of his favourite tests, Victor Hugo, for to him the test of Victor Hugo was the surest and quickest of standards. French poetry is at best a severe exercise for foreigners. It requires extraordinary knowledge of the language and rare refinement of ear to appreciate even the recitation of French verse. But unless a poet has both he lacks something of poetry. Adams had neither. To the end of his life he never listened to a French recitation with pleasure or felt a sense of majesty in French verse. But he did not care to proclaim his weakness, and he tried to evade Swinburne's vehement insistence by parading in affection for Alfred de Musée. Swinburne would have none of it. De Musée was unequal. He did not sustain himself on the wing. Adams would have given a world or two if he owned one to sustain himself on the wing like de Musée or even like Hugo. But his education as well as his ear was at fault and he succumbed. Swinburne tried him again on Walter Savage Lander. In truth the test was the same for Swinburne admired in Lander's English the qualities that he felt in Hugo's French and Adams's failure was equally gross. For when forced to despair he had to admit that both Hugo and Lander bored him. Nothing more was needed. One who could feel neither Hugo nor Lander was lost. The sentence was just and Adams never repealed from it. He knew his inferiority in taste as he might know it in smell. Keenly mortified by the dullness of his senses and instincts he knew he was no companion for Swinburne. Probably he could be only in annoyance. No number of centuries could ever educate him to Swinburne's level even in technical appreciation. Yet he often wondered whether there was nothing he had to offer that was worth the poet's acceptance. Certainly such mild homage as the American insect would have been only too happy to bring had he known how was hardly worth the acceptance of anyone. Only in France is the attitude of prayer possible. In England it becomes absurd. Even Moncton Millens who felt the splendours of Hugo and Lander was almost as helpless as an American private secretary in personal contact with them. Ten years afterwards Adams met him at the Geneva conference fresh from Paris bubbling with delight at a call he had made on Hugo. I was shown into a large room, he said, with women and men seated in chairs against the walls and Hugo at one end throned. No one spoke. At last Hugo raised his voice solemnly and uttered the words, Quant à moi je crois et Dieu. Silence followed. Then a woman responded as if in deep meditation. Chos sublime. Endure qui quoi endure. With the best of will one could not do this in London. The actors had not the instinct of the drama and yet even a private secretary was not wholly wanting an instinct. As soon as he reached town he hurried to Pickering's for a copy of Queen Rosamond and at that time if Swinburne was not joking Pickering had sold seven copies. When the poems and ballads came out and met their great success and scandal he sought one of the first copies from Moxham. If he had sinned and doubted at all he wholly repented and did penance before Atalanta in Caledon and would have offered Swinburne a solemn worship as Milne's female offered Hugo if it would have pleased the poet. Unfortunately it was worthless. The three young men returned to London and each went his own way. Adams's interest in making friends was something desperate but the London season Milne's used to say is a season for making acquaintances and losing friends. There was no intimate life. Of Swinburne he saw no more till Moncton Milne's summoned his whole array of Freystonians to support him in presiding at the dinner of the author's fund when Adams found himself seated next to Swinburne famous then but no nearer. They never met again. Olyphant he met Offener all the world knew and loved him but he too disappeared in the way that all the world knows. Sterling of Kier after one or two efforts passed also from Adams's vision into Sir William Sterling Maxwell. The only record of his wonderful visit to Freyston may perhaps exist still in the registers of the St. James's Club for immediately afterwards Milne's proposed Henry Adams for membership and unless his memory aired the nomination was seconded by Tri-Coupé and endorsed by Lawrence Olyphant and Evelyn Ashley. The list was a little singular for variety but on the whole it suggested that the private secretary was getting on. End of Chapter 9