 CHAPTER XIII 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 Darby 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 to do what he might, his next education must be one of English social life. Tossed between the horns of successive dilemmas, he reached his 26th 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 stillstand 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 footmen 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 mongten mills 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. According 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 other's 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 Bommel. 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. 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 notice 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 Everts, 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 Lindhurst, where they found Old Lord Campbell, both abusing Old Lord Brome. 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 Bird at Coots in May, 1861. Sooner or later every young man dropped into a set or circle and frequented the few houses that were willing to harbour 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 and 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 handsome cab to be caught into or out of at dinnertime. 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 Smolley, and of various ladies who reigned in the seventies, he was inclined to think that he knew very little about it. Certain great houses and certain great functions, of course, he attended, like everyone 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 everyone 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 Madame de Castillon 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 neighbour's 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 13th, 1864, when, in a palace gallery that recalled Paolo Veronese's pictures of Christ in his scenes of miracle, Garibaldi in his grey 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 had 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. Some de Castillon 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 sites. 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 to 65, that the nicest distinction between the very best society and the second best was their attitude toward 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 anyone in those years who showed interest in any member of the royal family or 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 suppers after midnight. To the American, as to Arthur Pendenis or Barn's Newcombe, the value of social position and knowledge was evident enough. He valued it 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 Paddy 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 gunters, and all were alike. Everyone, 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 medieval and amusing, sometimes coarse to a degree that might have startled a roust about, 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 dawn. Society, if a small literary class could be called society, wanted to be amused in its old way. Sidney 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, Carlisle 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. The men of whom Motley must have been thinking were such as he might meet at Lord Houghton's breakfasts, Grote, Jowett, Millman, or Froud, Browning, Matthew Arnold, or Swinburne, Bishop Wilberforce, Venables or Hayward, or perhaps Gladstone, Robert Low, or Lord Grandville. 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 only thing needful for a private secretary was that he should not only seem, but should actually be, at home. He studied carefully and practiced 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 toward 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, anyone can acquire the habit of going from one strange company to another without thinking much of oneself 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. English women, 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 English woman's notice and never received it. Another 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 English woman 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 invitation, 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 hail as a hawk, driving all day bare-headed about London, and eating Welsh rare-beard 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 wrapping the knocker. They entered the breakfast-room together where they were introduced to each other, and Adams learned that the other guest was a Cambridge undergraduate, Charles Milne's Gaskell, son of James Milne's Gaskell, the member for Wenlock, another of the Yorkshire Milne's's, from Thorns, near Wakefield. Fate had fixed Adams to Yorkshire. By another chance it happened that young Milne's Gaskell was intimate at Cambridge with William Everett, who was also about to take his degree. A third chance inspired Mr. Everett with a fancy for visiting Cambridge, and led William Everett to offer his services as host. Adams acted as courier to Mr. Everett, and at the end of May they went down for a few days when William Everett did the honours as host with a kindness and attention that made his cousins sorely conscious of his own social shortcomings. Cambridge was pretty, and the dawns were kind. Mr. Everett's 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 Milne's 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 everyone 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 levies 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 haptarchy. 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. Moncton 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. Excentricity alone did not account for it. Moncton Milnes was a singular type, but his distant cousin, James Milnes Gascall, was another quite as marked in an opposite sense. Milnes never seemed willing to rest. Milnes Gascall 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 winds of Wednesday, rich according to the Yorkshire standards, intimate with his political leaders. He was one of the numerous Englishmen who refused 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 Gascall was kind to the young American whom his son brought to the house, and Mrs. Milnes Gascall was kinder, for she thought the American perhaps a less dangerous friend than some Englishmen 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 Wynne, 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 Gascall, 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 Gascall. The priors' 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 Wreckon with her, learning the loveliness of this exquisite country and its stores of curious antiquity. It was a new and charming existence, and experience greatly to be envied, ideal repose and rural Shakespearean 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, and ecclesiastic, and a contemporary of Chaucer. CHAPTER XIV The Campaign of 1864 and the re-election 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 the other education went he got none, but he was amused. Travelling in all possible luxury at someone else's expense with diplomatic privileges and position was a form of travel hitherto untried. The cornice and vittura was delightful. Sorrento in winter offered hills to climb and grottos to explore, and Naples nearby to visit. Rome at Easter was an experience necessary for the education of every properly trained private secretary. The journey north by vittura through Perugia and Siena was a dream. The splugin 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 and 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 and 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 to 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 Englishman 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. Anyone who had held during the four most difficult years of American diplomacy a position at the center of action, with his hands actually touching the lever of power, could not beg a post of secretariat 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 advisors 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 away 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 White Law Reed and John 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. 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 in popularity in England, exceeded that of her husband, a word that every woman who lived a certain time in England came to look and dress like an English woman, 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 allegation, all counting for nothing in some, 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 hole 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 Englishmen, for his tastes are his being. He drifts after them as unconsciously as a honeybee drifts after his flowers, and in England everyone must drift with him. Most young Englishmen drifted to the race-course or the moors or the hunting-field. A few toured 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 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 and gravings or watercolours. Neither knew enough to talk much about the others' 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 de Bach, or wherever he lived, and they went off to dine at the Palais Royale, 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 brick-a-brack of all art after the manner of England. Not in the Legation or in London, but in Yorkshire at Thorns, Adams met the man that pushed him furthest in this English garden of innate disorder called taste. The older daughter of the Milne's Gascals had married Frances Turner Paul Grave. Few Americans will ever ask whether anyone has described the Paul Graves, 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 Paul Grave in order to please his wife. They had a band of remarkable sons, Frances 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. Frances Turner, or as he was commonly called, Frank Paul Grave, 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. Paul Grave 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 dorsal pupil. Adams was dorsal enough, for he knew nothing and liked to listen. Indeed, he had to listen whether he liked it or not, for Paul Grave'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 Paul Grave's precise opposite, and whose Irish charm of touch and humor defended him for most assaults, used to tell with delight of Paul Grave's call on him just after he had moved into his new Queen Anne House in Kensington Square. Paul Grave 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 Wulner, a type almost more emphatic than Paul Grave in a society which resounded with emphasis. Wulner's sculpture showed none of the rough assertion that Wulner himself showed when he was not making supernatural effort to be courteous. But his busts were remarkable, and his work altogether was in Paul Grave'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 Carlisle'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 to the racetrack, 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 Paul Grave's word as final about a drawing of Rembrandt or Michelangelo, and he trusted Wulner 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 Paul Grave or Wulner for a point, and bidding over them. He rarely found two dealers agree in judgment. He once bought a watercolor 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, Paul Grave stopped at the location 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 Westkin 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, Paul Grave stopped at one containing several small drawings, one marked as Rembrandt, one as Raphael, and putting his finger on the Raphael 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 Paul Grave 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 today, 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 Paul Grave chose the Raphael, Holloway, the one marked as Rembrandt. Adams, the purchaser of the Raphael, 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 Paul Grave. 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 read at the British Museum, said Paul Grave. 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 Raphael's works for the figure, which he found at last in the Parnasso, the figure of Horus, 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-shock sketch to read, whom he found in the curator's room, with some of the finest Raphael drawings in existence hanging on the walls. Yes, said Mr. Read, I noticed this at the sale, but it's not Raphael. Adams, feeling himself incompetent to discuss the subject, reported the result to Paul Grave, who said that Reed knew nothing about it. Also this point lay beyond Adams' competence, but he noticed that Read was in the employ of the British Museum as curator of the best, or nearly the best, collection in the world, especially of Raphael's, and that he bought for the museum. As expert he had rejected both the Raphael and the Rembrandt at first sight, and after his attention was recalled to the Raphael for a further opinion he rejected it again. A week later Adams returned for the drawing which Mr. Read took out of his drawer and gave to him, saying, with what seemed a little doubt or hesitation, I should tell you that the paper shows a watermark which I find the same as the paper used by Mark Antonia. A little taken aback by this method of studying art, a method which even a poor and ignorant American might use as well as Raphael himself, Adams asked stupidly, then you think it genuine? Possibly, replied Read, but much overdrawn. Here was expert opinion, after a second revise, with help of watermarks. In Adams's opinion it was alone worth another twelve shillings as education, but this was not all. Read 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 anyone 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 the 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. As far as Adams could afterwards recall it, this was Libri's reading, and he added that the abbreviations were many and unusual, that the writing was very ancient, and that the word he read as alleria 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 Raphaels or whether the verses were Raphaels or whether even the watermark was Raphaels. 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 Paul Grave and Wulner braided in their mortars, derided, tore and tatters, growled at, howled at, 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, someone 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 wallpaper 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 Raphael or Rubens, now a water-color by Gertin 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 Michelangelo, but it 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 everyone knew it, but perhaps thought itself, history, and nature were scrappy, and not 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. Originally 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 anyone who should even distantly imitate Macaulay would perish in self-contempt. Everyone 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 Carlisle. 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 Froud and King Lake could be sound for America where passion and poetry were eccentricities. Both Froud and King Lake, 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 Weg 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 Atheneum 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 to be coming more and more indifferent to the Puritan, except as a slightly Rococo ornament, he was only the more amusing as a study for the monk-barns 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 upon 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 skepticism. 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 skeptic. 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. CHAPTER XV OF THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS BY HENRY ADAMS This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. CHAPTER XV DARWINISM 1867-1868 Politics, diplomacy, law, art, and history had opened no outlet for future energy or effort. But a man must do something, even in Portland Place, when winter is dark and winter evenings are exceedingly long. At that moment Darwin was convulsing society. The geological champion of Darwin was Sir Charles Lyle, and the Lyles were intimate at the legation. Sir Charles constantly said of Darwin what Paul Graves said of Tennyson, that the first time he came to town Adams should be asked to meet him. But neither of them ever came to town, or ever cared to meet a young American, and one could not go to them because they were known to dislike intrusion. The only Americans who were not allowed to intrude were the half dozen in the legation. Adams was content to read Darwin, especially his origin of species and his voyage of the beagle. He was a Darwinist before the letter, a predestined follower of the tide. But he was hardly trained to follow Darwin's evidences. Fragmentary the British mind might be, but in those days it was doing a great deal of work in a very un-English way, building up so many and such vast theories on such narrow foundations as to shock the conservative and delight the frivolous. The atomic theory, the correlation and conservation of energy, the mechanical theory of the universe, the kinetic theory of gases, and Darwin's law of natural selection were examples of what a young man had to take on trust. Neither he nor anyone else knew enough to verify them. In his ignorance of mathematics he was particularly helpless, but this never stood in his way. The ideas were new and seemed to lead somewhere, to some great generalization which would finish one's clamour to be educated. That a beginner should understand them at all or believe them all, no one could expect, still less exact. Henry Adams was Darwinist because it was easier than not, for his ignorance exceeded belief, and one must know something in order to contradict even such triflers as Tindall and Huxley. By rights he should also have been a Marxist, but some narrow trait of the New England nature seemed to blight socialism, and he tried in vain to make himself a convert. He did the next best thing. He became a Comptist within the limits of evolution. He was ready to become anything but quiet. As though the world had not been enough upset in his time, he was eager to see it upset more. He had his wish, but he lost his hold on the results by trying to understand them. He never tried to understand Darwin, but he still fancied he might get the best part of Darwinism from the easier study of geology, a science which suited idle minds as well as though it were history. Every curate in England dabbled in geology and hunted for vestiges of creation. Darwin hunted only for vestiges of natural selection, and Adams followed him, although he cared nothing about selection, unless perhaps for the indirect amusement of upsetting curates. He felt like nine men in ten, an instinctive belief in evolution, but he felt no more concern in natural than in unnatural selection, though he seized with greediness the new volume on the antiquity of man, which Sir Charles Lyle published in 1863 in order to support Darwin by wrecking the Garden of Eden. Sir Charles next brought out, in 1866, a new edition of his principles, then the highest textbook of geology. But here the Darwinian doctrine grew in stature. Natural selection led back to natural evolution, and at last to natural uniformity. This was a vast stride. Unbroken evolution under uniform conditions pleased everyone, except curates and bishops. It was the very best substitute for religion, a safe, conservative, practical, thoroughly common law deity. Such a working system for the universe suited a man who had just helped to waste five or ten thousand and million dollars and a million lives, more or less, to enforce unity and uniformity on people who objected to it. The idea was only too seductive in its perfection. It had the charm of art. Unity and uniformity were the whole motive of philosophy, and Darwin, like a true Englishman, preferred to back into it, to reach God aposteriori, rather than start from it like a banoza. The difference of method taught only the moral that the best way of reaching unity was to unite. Any road was good that arrived. Life depended on it. One had been from the first dragged hither and thither like a French poodle on a string, following always the strongest pull between one form of unity or centralization and another. The proof that one had acted wisely because of obeying the primordial habit of nature flattered one's self-esteem. Steady, uniform, unbroken evolution from lower to higher seemed easy. So one day, when Sir Charles came to the legation to inquire about getting his principles properly noticed in America, young Adams found nothing simpler than to suggest that he could do it himself, if Sir Charles would tell him what to say. Youth risks such encounters with the universe before one succumbs to it, yet even he was surprised at Sir Charles's ready ascent, and still more so at finding himself after half an hour's conversation, sitting down to clear the minds of American geologists about the principles of their profession. This was getting on fast. Arthur Penn Dennis had never gone so far. The geologists were a hardy class, not likely to be much hurt by Adams's learning, nor did he throw away much concern on their account. He undertook the task, chiefly to educate not them, but himself. And if Sir Isaac Newton had, like Sir Charles Lyle, asked him to explain for Americans his last edition of the Principia, Adams would have jumped at the chance. Unfortunately the mere reading of such works for amusement is quite a different matter from studying them for criticism. Ignorance must always begin at the beginning. Adams must inevitably have begun by asking Sir Isaac for an intelligible reason why the apple fell to the ground. He did not know enough to be satisfied with the fact. The law of gravitation was so and so, but what was gravitation? And he would have been thrown quite off his base if Sir Isaac had answered that he did not know. At the very outset Adams struck on Sir Charles's glacial theory or theories. He was ignorant enough to think that the glacial epoch looked like a chasm between him and a uniformitarian world. If the glacial period were a uniformity what was catastrophe? To him the two or three labored guesses that Sir Charles suggested or borrowed to explain glaciation were proof of nothing and were quite unsolid as support for so immense a superstructure as geological uniformity. If one were at liberty to be as lax in science as in theology and to assume unity from the start one might better say so as the church did and not invite attack by appearing weak in evidence. Naturally a young man altogether ignorant could not say this to Sir Charles Lyle or Sir Isaac Newton, but he was forced to state Sir Charles's views which he thought weak as hypotheses and worthless as proofs. Sir Charles himself seemed shy of them. Adams hinted his heresies in vain. At last he resorted to what he thought the bold experiment of inserting a sentence in the text intended to provoke correction. The introduction by Louis Agassiz of this new geological agent seemed at first sight inconsistent with Sir Charles's argument, obliging him to allow that causes had in fact existed on the earth capable of producing more violent geological changes than would be possible in our own day. The hint produced no effect. Sir Charles said not a word. He let the paragraph stand. And Adams never knew whether the great uniformitarian was strict or lax in his uniformitarian creed. But he doubted. Objections fatal to one mind are futile to another, and as far as concerned the article the matter ended there, although the glacial epoch remained a misty region in the young man's Darwinism. Had it been the only one he would not have fretted about it, but uniformity often worked clearly and sometimes did not work as natural selection at all. Finding himself at a loss for some single figure to illustrate the law of natural selection, Adams asked Sir Charles for the simplest case of uniformity on record. Much to his surprise Sir Charles told him that certain forms, like terabracula, appeared to be identical from the beginning to the end of geological time. Since this was altogether too much uniformity and much too little selection, Adams gave up the attempt to begin at the beginning and tried starting at the end, himself. Taking for granted that the vertebrates would serve his purpose, he asked Sir Charles to introduce him to the first vertebrate. According to his bewilderment Sir Charles informed him that the first vertebrate was a very respectable fish, among the earliest of all fossils, which had lived, and whose bones were still reposing, under Adams's own favorite abbey on Wenlock Edge. By this time in 1867 Adams had learned to know Shropshire familiarly, and it was the part of his diplomatic education which he loved best. Like Catherine Allney in Northanger Abbey he yearned for nothing so keenly as to feel at home in a thirteenth-century abbey, unless it were to haunt a fifteenth-century priors' house, and both of these joys were his at Wenlock. With companions or without he never tired of it. Whether he rode about the Wrecken or visited all the historical haunts from Ludlow Castle and Stokesy to Boscobel and Euriconium, or followed the Roman road or scratched in the Abbey ruins, all was amusing and carried a flavor of its own like that of the Roman Campania. But perhaps he liked best to ramble over the edge on a summer afternoon and look across the marches to the mountains of Wales. The peculiar flavor of the scenery had something to do with absence of evolution. It was better marked in Egypt. It was felt wherever time sequences became interchangeable. One's instinct abhors time. As one lay on the slope of the edge looking sleepily through the summer haze toward Shrewsbury or Cater Idris or Keir Karatec or Euriconium, nothing suggested sequence. The Roman road was twinned to the railroad. Euriconium was well worth Shrewsbury. Wenlock and Bildwos was far superior to Bridge North. The shepherds of Caracticus or Offa or the monks of Bildwos had they approached where he lay in the grass would have taken him only for another and tame a variety of Welsh thief. They would have seen little to surprise them in the modern landscape unless it were the steam of a distant railway. One might mix up the terms of time as one liked or stuffed the present anywhere into the past measuring time by false staff's Shrewsbury clock without violent sense of wrong, as one could do it on the Pacific Ocean, but the triumph of all was to look south along the edge to the abode of one's earliest ancestor and nearest relative, the Ganoid Fish, whose name, according to Professor Huxley, was Taraspus, a cousin of the Sturgeon, and whose kingdom, according to Sir Roderick Murchison, was called Soluria. Life began and ended there. Behind that horizon lay only the Cambrian, without vertebrates or any other organism except a few shellfish. On the further verge of the Cambrian rose the crystalline rocks from which every trace of organic existence had been erased. That here, on the Wenlock edge of time, a young American seeking only frivolous amusement should find a legitimate parentage as modern as though just caught in the Severn below, astonished him as much as though he had found Darwin himself. In the scale of evolution one vertebrate was as good as another. For anything he or anyone else knew, nine hundred and ninety-nine parts of evolution out of a thousand lay behind or below the Taraspus. To an American in search of a father it mattered nothing whether the father breathed through lungs or walked on fins or on feet. Evolution of mind was altogether another matter and belonged to another science, but whether one traced descent from the shark or the wolf was immaterial even in morals. This matter had been discussed for ages without scientific result. La Fontaine and other fabulists maintained that the wolf, even in morals, stood higher than the man, and in view of the late Civil War Adam's had doubts of his own on the facts of moral evolution. Tout bien considéré je te soutiens ensemble. Qu'est-ce qu'elle iraite pour ce qu'elle iraite? Il vaut mieux être un loop qu'un homme. It might well be. At all events it did not enter into the problem of Taraspus, for it was quite certain that no complete proof of natural selection had occurred back to the time of Taraspus, and that before Taraspus was eternal void. No trace of any vertebrate had been found there, only starfish, shellfish, polyps, or trilobites, whose kindly descendants he had often bathed with as a child on the shores of Quincy Bay. That Taraspus and shark were his cousins, great-uncles or grandfathers, in no way troubled him, but that either or both of them should be older than evolution itself seemed to him perplexing, nor could he at all simplify the problem by taking the sudden back somersault into Quincy Bay in search of the fascinating creature he had called a horseshoe, whose huge dome of shell and sharp spur of tail had so alarmed him as a child. In Soloria, he understood, Sir Roderick Murchison called the horseshoe a limulus, which helped nothing. Neither in limulus nor in terabratula, nor in this astraceon filipi, any more than in the Taraspus, could one conceive an ancestor. But if one must, the choice mattered little. Cousinship had limits, but no one knew enough to fix them. When the vertebrate vanished in Soloria, it disappeared instantly and forever. Neither vertebra nor scale nor print reappeared, nor any trace of ascent or descent to a lower type. The vertebrate began in the Ludlow shale as complete as Adams himself, in some respects more so, at the top of the column of organic evolution, and geology offered no sort of proof that he had ever been anything else. Ponder over it as he might. Adams could see nothing in the theory of Sir Charles but pure inference, precisely like the inference of Paley, that if one found a watch, one inferred a watchmaker. He could detect no more evolution in life since the Taraspus than he could detect it in architecture since the Abbey. All he could prove was change. Cold power alone asserted evolution of power, and only by violence could be forced to assert selection of type. All this seemed trivial to the true Darwinian, and to Sir Charles it was mere defect in the geological record. Sir Charles labored only to heap up the evidences of evolution, to accumulate them, till the mass became irresistible. With that purpose Adams gladly studied and tried to help Sir Charles, but behind the lesson of the day he was conscious that in geology, as in theology, he could prove only evolution that did not evolve, uniformity that was not uniform, and selection that did not select. To other Darwinians, except Darwin, natural selection seemed a dogma to be put in the place of the Athanasian creed. It was a form of religious hope, a promise of ultimate perfection. Adams wished no better. He warmly sympathized in the object, but when he came to ask himself what he truly thought, he felt that he had no faith, that whenever the new hobby should be brought out, he should surely drop off from Darwinism like a monkey from a perch, that the idea of one form, law, order, or sequence had no more value for him than the idea of none, that what he valued most was motion and that what attracted his mind was change. Psychology was to him a new study and a dark corner of education. As he lay on Wenlock Edge with the sheep nibbling the grass close about him as they or their betters had nibbled the grass or whatever there was to nibble in the Silurian kingdom of Teraspis, he seemed to have fallen on an evolution far more wonderful than that of fishes. He did not like it, he could not account for it, and he determined to stop it. Never since the days of his limitless ancestry had any of his ascendants thought thus. Their modes of thought might be many, but their thought was one. Out of his millions of millions of ancestors, back to the Cambrian mollusks, every one had probably lived and died in the illusion of truths which did not amuse him and which had never changed. Henry Adams was the first in an infinite series to discover and admit to himself that he really did not care whether the truth was or was not true. He did not even care that it should be proved true unless the process were new and amusing. He was a Darwinian for fun. From the beginning of history this attitude had been branded as criminal, worse than crime, sacrilege. Society punished it ferociously and justly in self-defense. Mr. Adams the father looked on it as moral weakness, it annoyed him. But it did not annoy him nearly so much as it annoyed his son, who had no need to learn from Hamlet the fatal effect of the pale cast of thought on Enterprise's great or small. He had no notion of letting the currents of his action be turned awry by this form of conscience. To him the current of his time was to be his current, lead where it might. He put psychology under lock and key. He insisted on maintaining his absolute standards, on aiming at ultimate unity. The mania for handling all the sides of every question, leading into every window and opening every door, was as blue beard judiciously pointed out to his wives, fatal to their practical usefulness in society. One could not stop to chase doubts as though they were rabbits. One had no time to paint and putty the surface of law, even though it were cracked and rotten. For the young men whose lives were cast in the generation between 1867 and 1900, law should be evolution from lower to higher, aggregation of the atom in the mass, concentration of multiplicity in unity, compulsion of anarchy in order. And he would force himself to follow wherever it led, though he should sacrifice five thousand millions more in money and a million more lives. As the path ultimately led it sacrificed much more than this, but at the time he thought the price he named a high one, and he could not foresee that science and society would desert him in paying it. He at least took his education as a Darwinian in good faith. The church was gone and duty was dim, but will should take its place, founded deeply in interest and law. This was the result of five or six years in England, a result so British as to be almost the equivalent of an Oxford degree. Quite serious about it he set to work at once. While confusing his ideas about geology to the apparent satisfaction of Sir Charles, who left him his field compass and token of it, Adams turned resolutely to business and attacked the burning question of species payments. His principles assured him that the honest way to resume payments was to restrict currency. He thought he might win a name among financiers and statesmen at home by showing how this task had been done by England, after the classical suspension of 1797 to 1821. Setting himself to the study of this perplexed period, he waited as well as he could through a morass of volumes, pamphlets and debates, until he learned, to his confusion, that the Bank of England itself and all the best British financial writers held that restriction was a fatal mistake, and that the best treatment of a debased currency was to let it alone, as the Bank had in fact done. Time and patience were the remedies. The shock of this discovery to his financial principles was serious, much more serious than the shock of the terabracula and teraspis to his principles on geology. A mistake about evolution was not fatal. A mistake about species payments would destroy forever the last hope of employment in State Street. Six months of patient labour would be thrown away if he did not publish, and with it his whole scheme of making himself a position as a practical man of business. If he did publish, how could he tell virtuous bankers in State Street that moral and absolute principles of abstract truth, such as theirs, had nothing to do with the matter, and that they had better let it alone? Geologists, naturally a humble and helpless class, might not revenge impertinent's offer to their science, but capitalists never forgot or forgave. With labour and caution he made one long article on British finance in 1816, and another on the bank restriction of 1797 to 1821, and, doing both up in one package, he sent it to the North American for choice. He knew that two heavy technical financial studies thus thrown at an editor's head would probably return to crush the author, but the audacity of youth is more sympathetic when successful than his ignorance. The editor accepted both. When the post brought his letter, Adams looked at it as though he were a debtor who had begged for an extension. He read it with as much relief as the debtor if it had brought him the loan. The letter gave the new writer literary rank. Henceforward he had the freedom of the press. These articles, following those on Pocahontas and Lyle, enrolled him on the permanent staff of the North American Review. Precisely what this rank was worth no one could say, but for fifty years the North American Review had been the stagecoach which carried literary Bostonians to such distinction as they had achieved. Few writers had ideas which warranted thirty pages of development, but for such a thought they had the review alone offered space. An article was a small volume which required at least three months' work and was paid at best five dollars a page. Not many men even in England or France could write a good thirty page article, and practically no one in America read them. But a few score of people, mostly in search of items to steal, ran over the pages to extract an idea or a fact, which was a sort of wild game, a bluefish or a teal, worth anywhere from fifty cents to five dollars. Newspaper writers had their eye on quarterly pickings. The circulation of the review had never exceeded three or four hundred copies, and the review had never paid its reasonable expenses. Yet it stood at the head of American literary periodicals. It was a source of suggestion to cheaper workers. It reached far into societies that never knew its existence. It was an organ worth playing on, and in the fancy of Henry Adams it led, in some indistinct future, to playing on a New York Daily newspaper. With the editor's letter under his eyes, Adams asked himself what better he could have done. On the whole, considering his helplessness, he thought he had done as well as his neighbours. No one could yet guess which of his contemporaries was most likely to play a part in the great world. A shrewd prophet in Wall Street might perhaps have set a mark on Pierpott Morgan, but hardly on the Rockefellers, or William C. Whitney, or White Law Reed. No one would have picked out William McKinley or John Hay or Mark Hanna for great statesmen. Adam was ignorant of the careers in store for Alexander Agassiz and Henry Higginson. Philip's Brooks was unknown, Henry James was unheard, Howells was new, Richardson and Lafarge were struggling for a start. Out of any score of names and reputations that should reach beyond the century, the thirty years old who were starting in the year 1867 could show none that was so far in advance as to warrant odds in its favour. The Army men had, for the most part, fallen to the ranks. When Adam's foreseen the future exactly as it came he would have been no wiser and could have chosen no better path. Thus it turned out that the last year in England was the pleasantest. He was already old in society and belonged to the Solorian horizon. The Prince of Wales had come. Mr. Disraeli, Lord Stanley, and the future Lord Salisbury had thrown into the background the memories of Palmerston and Russell. Europe was moving rapidly, and the conduct of England during the American Civil War was the last thing that London liked to recall. The revolution since 1861 was nearly complete, and for the first time in history the American felt himself almost as strong as an Englishman. He had thirty years to wait before he should feel himself stronger. Meanwhile, even a private secretary could afford to be happy. His old education was finished. His new one was not begun. He still loitered a year, feeling himself near the very end of a long, anxious, tempestuous, successful voyage, with another to follow and a summer sea between. He made what use he could of it. In February 1868 he was back in Rome with his friend Milne's Gaskell. For another season he wandered on horseback over the Campania or on foot through the Rome of the Middle Ages, and sat once more on the steps of Arakoweli as had become with him almost a superstition, like the waters of the fountain of Trevi. Rome was still tragic and solemn as ever, with its medieval society, artistic, literary and clerical, taking itself as seriously as in the days of Byron and Shelley. The long ten years of accidental education had changed nothing for him there. He knew no more in 1868 than in 1858. He had learned nothing whatever that made Rome more intelligible to him, or made life easier to handle. The case was no better when he got back to London and went through his last season. London had become his vice. He loved his haunts, his houses, his habits, even his handsome cabs. He loved growling like an Englishman, and going into society where he knew not a face and cared not a straw. He lived deep into the lives and loves and disappointments of his friends. When at last he found himself back again at Liverpool, his heart wrenched by the act of parting. He moved mechanically, unstrung, but he had no more required education than when he first trod the steps of the Adelphi Hotel in November 1858. He could see only one great change, and this was wholly in years. Eaton Hall no longer impressed his imagination, even the architecture of Chester roused but a sleepy interest. He felt no sensation whatever in the atmosphere of the British peerage, but mainly an habitual dislike to most of the people who frequented their country houses. He had become English to the point of sharing their petty social divisions, their dislikes and prejudices against each other. He took England no longer with the awe of American youth, but with the habit of an old and rather worn suit of clothes. As far as he knew, this was all that Englishman meant by social education. But in any case, it was all the education he had gained from seven years in London. End of Chapter 15