| CHAPTER XII
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| ECCENTRICITY (1863)
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| KNOWLEDGE of human nature is the beginning and end of political
education, but several years of arduous study in the neighborhood
of Westminster led Henry Adams to think that knowledge of English
human nature had little or no value outside of England. In Paris,
such a habit stood in one's way; in America, it roused all the
instincts of native jealousy. The English mind was one-sided,
eccentric, systematically unsystematic, and logically illogical.
The less one knew of it, the better.
| 1 | |
| This heresy, which scarcely would have been allowed to
penetrate a Boston mind -- it would, indeed, have been shut out
by instinct as a rather foolish exaggeration -- rested on an
experience which Henry Adams gravely thought he had a right to
think conclusive -- for him. That it should be conclusive for any
one else never occurred to him, since he had no thought of
educating anybody else. For him -- alone -- the less English
education he got, the better!
| 2 | |
| For several years, under the keenest incitement to
watchfulness, he observed the English mind in contact with itself
and other minds. Especially with the American the contact was
interesting because the limits and defects of the American mind
were one of the favorite topics of the European. From the
old-world point of view, the American had no mind; he had an
economic thinking-machine which could work only on a fixed line.
The American mind exasperated the European as a buzz-saw might
exasperate a pine forest. The English mind disliked the French
mind because it was antagonistic, unreasonable, perhaps hostile,
but recognized it as at least a thought. The American mind was
not a thought at all; it was a convention, superficial, narrow,
and ignorant; a mere cutting instrument, practical, economical,
sharp, and direct.
| 3 | |
| The English themselves hardly conceived that their mind was
either economical, sharp, or direct; but the defect that most
struck an American was its enormous waste in eccentricity.
Americans needed and used their whole energy, and applied it with
close economy; but English society was eccentric by law and for
sake of the eccentricity itself.
| 4 | |
| The commonest phrase overheard at an English club or
dinner-table was that So-and-So "is quite mad." It was no offence
to So-and-So; it hardly distinguished him from his fellows; and
when applied to a public man, like Gladstone, it was qualified by
epithets much more forcible. Eccentricity was so general as to
become hereditary distinction. It made the chief charm of English
society as well as its chief terror.
| 5 | |
| The American delighted in Thackeray as a satirist, but
Thackeray quite justly maintained that he was not a satirist at
all, and that his pictures of English society were exact and
good-natured. The American, who could not believe it, fell back
on Dickens, who, at all events, had the vice of exaggeration to
extravagance, but Dickens's English audience thought the
exaggeration rather in manner or style, than in types. Mr.
Gladstone himself went to see Sothern act Dundreary, and laughed
till his face was distorted -- not because Dundreary was
exaggerated, but because he was ridiculously like the types that
Gladstone had seen -- or might have seen -- in any club in Pall
Mall. Society swarmed with exaggerated characters; it contained
little else.
| 6 | |
| Often this eccentricity bore all the marks of strength; perhaps
it was actual exuberance of force, a birthmark of genius. Boston
thought so. The Bostonian called it national character -- native
vigor -- robustness -- honesty -- courage. He respected and
feared it. British self-assertion, bluff, brutal, blunt as it
was, seemed to him a better and nobler thing than the acuteness
of the Yankee or the polish of the Parisian. Perhaps he was
right.
| 7 | |
| These questions of taste, of feeling, of inheritance, need no
settlement. Every one carries his own inch-rule of taste, and
amuses himself by applying it, triumphantly, wherever he travels.
Whatever others thought, the cleverest Englishmen held that the
national eccentricity needed correction, and were beginning to
correct it. The savage satires of Dickens and the gentler
ridicule of Matthew Arnold against the British middle class were
but a part of the rebellion, for the middle class were no worse
than their neighbors in the eyes of an American in 1863; they
were even a very little better in the sense that one could appeal
to their interests, while a university man, like Gladstone, stood
outside of argument. From none of them could a young American
afford to borrow ideas.
| 8 | |
| The private secretary, like every other Bostonian, began by
regarding British eccentricity as a force. Contact with it, in
the shape of Palmerston, Russell, and Gladstone, made him
hesitate; he saw his own national type -- his father, Weed,
Evarts, for instance -- deal with the British, and show itself
certainly not the weaker; certainly sometimes the stronger.
Biassed though he were, he could hardly be biassed to such a
degree as to mistake the effects of force on others, and while --
labor as he might -- Earl Russell and his state papers seemed
weak to a secretary, he could not see that they seemed strong to
Russell's own followers. Russell might be dishonest or he might
be merely obtuse -- the English type might be brutal or might be
only stupid -- but strong, in either case, it was not, nor did it
seem strong to Englishmen.
| 9 | |
| Eccentricity was not always a force; Americans were deeply
interested in deciding whether it was always a weakness.
Evidently, on the hustings or in Parliament, among
eccentricities, eccentricity was at home; but in private society
the question was not easy to answer. That English society was
infinitely more amusing because of its eccentricities, no one
denied. Barring the atrocious insolence and brutality which
Englishmen and especially Englishwomen showed to each other --
very rarely, indeed, to foreigners -- English society was much
more easy and tolerant than American. One must expect to be
treated with exquisite courtesy this week and be totally forgotten
the next, but this was the way of the world, and education
consisted in learning to turn one's back on others with the same
unconscious indifference that others showed among themselves. The
smart of wounded vanity lasted no long time with a young man about
town who had little vanity to smart, and who, in his own country,
would have found himself in no better position. He had nothing to
complain of. No one was ever brutal to him. On the contrary, he
was much better treated than ever he was likely to be in Boston --
let alone New York or Washington -- and if his reception varied
inconceivably between extreme courtesy and extreme neglect, it
merely proved that he had become, or was becoming, at home. Not
from a sense of personal griefs or disappointments did he labor
over this part of the social problem, but only because his
education was becoming English, and the further it went, the less
it promised.
| 10 | |
| By natural affinity the social eccentrics commonly sympathized
with political eccentricity. The English mind took naturally to
rebellion -- when foreign -- and it felt particular confidence in
the Southern Confederacy because of its combined attributes --
foreign rebellion of English blood -- which came nearer ideal
eccentricity than could be reached by Poles, Hungarians, Italians
or Frenchmen. All the English eccentrics rushed into the ranks of
rebel sympathizers, leaving few but well-balanced minds to attach
themselves to the cause of the Union. None of the English leaders
on the Northern side were marked eccentrics. William E. Forster
was a practical, hard-headed Yorkshireman, whose chief ideals in
politics took shape as working arrangements on an economical
base. Cobden, considering the one-sided conditions of his life,
was remarkably well balanced. John Bright was stronger in his
expressions than either of them, but with all his self-assertion
he stuck to his point, and his point was practical. He did not,
like Gladstone, box the compass of thought; "furiously earnest,"
as Monckton Milnes said, "on both sides of every question"; he
was rather, on the whole, a consistent conservative of the old
Commonwealth type, and seldom had to defend inconsistencies.
Monckton Milnes himself was regarded as an eccentric, chiefly by
those who did not know him, but his fancies and hobbies were only
ideas a little in advance of the time; his manner was eccentric,
but not his mind, as any one could see who read a page of his
poetry. None of them, except Milnes, was a university man. As a
rule, the Legation was troubled very little, if at all, by
indiscretions, extravagances, or contradictions among its English
friends. Their work was largely judicious, practical, well
considered, and almost too cautious. The "cranks" were all
rebels, and the list was portentous. Perhaps it might be headed
by old Lord Brougham, who had the audacity to appear at a July
4th reception at the Legation, led by Joe Parkes, and claim his
old credit as "Attorney General to Mr. Madison." The Church was
rebel, but the dissenters were mostly with the Union. The
universities were rebel, but the university men who enjoyed most
public confidence -- like Lord Granville, Sir George Cornewall
Lewis, Lord Stanley, Sir George Grey -- took infinite pains to be
neutral for fear of being thought eccentric. To most observers,
as well as to the Times, the Morning Post, and the Standard, a
vast majority of the English people seemed to follow the
professional eccentrics; even the emotional philanthropists took
that direction; Lord Shaftesbury and Carlyle, Fowell Buxton, and
Gladstone, threw their sympathies on the side which they should
naturally have opposed, and did so for no reason except their
eccentricity; but the "canny" Scots and Yorkshiremen were
cautious.
| 11 | |
| This eccentricity did not mean strength. The proof of it was
the mismanagement of the rebel interests. No doubt the first
cause of this trouble lay in the Richmond Government itself. No
one understood why Jefferson Davis chose Mr. Mason as his agent
for London at the same time that he made so good a choice as Mr.
Slidell for Paris. The Confederacy had plenty of excellent men to
send to London, but few who were less fitted than Mason. Possibly
Mason had a certain amount of common sense, but he seemed to have
nothing else, and in London society he counted merely as one
eccentric more. He enjoyed a great opportunity; he might even
have figured as a new Benjamin Franklin with all society at his
feet; he might have roared as lion of the season and made the
social path of the American Minister almost impassable; but Mr.
Adams had his usual luck in enemies, who were always his most
valuable allies if his friends only let them alone. Mason was his
greatest diplomatic triumph. He had his collision with
Palmerston; he drove Russell off the field; he swept the board
before Cockburn; he overbore Slidell; but he never lifted a
finger against Mason, who became his bulwark of defence.
| 12 | |
| Possibly Jefferson Davis and Mr. Mason shared two defects in
common which might have led them into this serious mistake.
Neither could have had much knowledge of the world, and both must
have been unconscious of humor. Yet at the same time with Mason,
President Davis sent out Slidell to France and Mr. Lamar to
Russia. Some twenty years later, in the shifting search for the
education he never found, Adams became closely intimate at
Washington with Lamar, then Senator from Mississippi, who had
grown to be one of the calmest, most reasonable and most amiable
Union men in the United States, and quite unusual in social
charm. In 1860 he passed for the worst of Southern fire-eaters,
but he was an eccentric by environment, not by nature; above all
his Southern eccentricities, he had tact and humor; and perhaps
this was a reason why Mr. Davis sent him abroad with the others,
on a futile mission to St. Petersburg. He would have done better
in London, in place of Mason. London society would have delighted
in him; his stories would have won success; his manners would
have made him loved; his oratory would have swept every audience;
even Monckton Milnes could never have resisted the temptation of
having him to breakfast between Lord Shaftesbury and the Bishop
of Oxford.
| 13 | |
| Lamar liked to talk of his brief career in diplomacy, but he
never spoke of Mason. He never alluded to Confederate management
or criticised Jefferson Davis's administration. The subject that
amused him was his English allies. At that moment -- the early
summer of 1863 -- the rebel party in England were full of
confidence, and felt strong enough to challenge the American
Legation to a show of power. They knew better than the Legation
what they could depend upon: that the law officers and
commissioners of customs at Liverpool dared not prosecute the
ironclad ships; that Palmerston, Russell, and Gladstone were
ready to recognize the Confederacy; that the Emperor Napoleon
would offer them every inducement to do it. In a manner they
owned Liverpool and especially the firm of Laird who were
building their ships. The political member of the Laird firm was
Lindsay, about whom the whole web of rebel interests clung --
rams, cruisers, munitions, and Confederate loan; social
introductions and parliamentary tactics. The firm of Laird, with
a certain dignity, claimed to be champion of England's navy; and
public opinion, in the summer of 1863, still inclined towards
them.
| 14 | |
| Never was there a moment when eccentricity, if it were a force,
should have had more value to the rebel interest; and the
managers must have thought so, for they adopted or accepted as
their champion an eccentric of eccentrics; a type of 1820; a sort
of Brougham of Sheffield, notorious for poor judgment and worse
temper. Mr. Roebuck had been a tribune of the people, and, like
tribunes of most other peoples, in growing old, had grown
fatuous. He was regarded by the friends of the Union as rather a
comical personage -- a favorite subject for Punch to laugh at --
with a bitter tongue and a mind enfeebled even more than common
by the political epidemic of egotism. In all England they could
have found no opponent better fitted to give away his own case.
No American man of business would have paid him attention; yet.
the Lairds, who certainly knew their own affairs best, let
Roebuck represent them and take charge of their interests.
| 15 | |
| With Roebuck's doings, the private secretary had no concern
except that the Minister sent him down to the House of Commons on
June 30, 1863, to report the result of Roebuck's motion to
recognize the Southern Confederacy. The Legation felt no anxiety,
having Vicksburg already in its pocket, and Bright and Forster to
say so; but the private secretary went down and was admitted
under the gallery on the left, to listen, with great content,
while John Bright, with astonishing force, caught and shook and
tossed Roebuck, as a big mastiff shakes a wiry, ill-conditioned,
toothless, bad-tempered Yorkshire terrier. The private secretary
felt an artistic sympathy with Roebuck, for, from time to time,
by way of practice, Bright in a friendly way was apt to shake him
too, and he knew how it was done. The manner counted for more
than the words. The scene was interesting, but the result was not
in doubt.
| 16 | |
| All the more sharply he was excited, near the year 1879, in
Washington, by hearing Lamar begin a story after dinner, which,
little by little, became dramatic, recalling the scene in the
House of Commons. The story, as well as one remembered, began
with Lamar's failure to reach St. Petersburg at all, and his
consequent detention in Paris waiting instructions. The motion to
recognize the Confederacy was about to be made, and, in prospect
of the debate, Mr. Lindsay collected a party at his villa on the
Thames to bring the rebel agents into relations with Roebuck.
Lamar was sent for, and came. After much conversation of a
general sort, such as is the usual object or resource of the
English Sunday, finding himself alone with Roebuck, Lamar, by way
of showing interest, bethought himself of John Bright and asked
Roebuck whether he expected Bright to take part in the debate:
"No, sir!" said Roebuck sententiously; "Bright and I have met
before. It was the old story -- the story of the sword-fish and
the whale! NO, sir! Mr. Bright will not cross swords with me
again!"
| 17 | |
| Thus assured, Lamar went with the more confidence to the House
on the appointed evening, and was placed under the gallery, on
the right, where he listened to Roebuck and followed the debate
with such enjoyment as an experienced debater feels in these
contests, until, as he said, he became aware that a man, with a
singularly rich voice and imposing manner, had taken the floor,
and was giving Roebuck the most deliberate and tremendous
pounding he ever witnessed, "until at last," concluded Lamar, "it
dawned on my mind that the sword-fish was getting the worst of
it."
| 18 | |
| Lamar told the story in the spirit of a joke against himself
rather than against Roebuck; but such jokes must have been
unpleasantly common in the experience of the rebel agents. They
were surrounded by cranks of the worst English species, who
distorted their natural eccentricities and perverted their
judgment. Roebuck may have been an extreme case, since he was
actually in his dotage, yet this did not prevent the Lairds from
accepting his lead, or the House from taking him seriously.
Extreme eccentricity was no bar, in England, to extreme
confidence; sometimes it seemed a recommendation; and unless it
caused financial loss, it rather helped popularity.
| 19 | |
| The question whether British eccentricity was ever strength
weighed heavily in the balance of education. That Roebuck should
mislead the rebel agents on so strange a point as that of
Bright's courage was doubly characteristic because the Southern
people themselves had this same barbaric weakness of attributing
want of courage to opponents, and owed their ruin chiefly to such
ignorance of the world. Bright's courage was almost as irrational
as that of the rebels themselves. Every one knew that he had the
courage of a prize-fighter. He struck, in succession, pretty
nearly every man in England that could be reached by a blow, and
when he could not reach the individual he struck the class, or
when the class was too small for him, the whole people of
England. At times he had the whole country on his back. He could
not act on the defensive; his mind required attack. Even among
friends at the dinner-table he talked as though he were
denouncing them, or someone else, on a platform; he measured his
phrases, built his sentences, cumulated his effects, and pounded
his opponents, real or imagined. His humor was glow, like iron at
dull heat; his blow was elementary, like the thrash of a whale.
| 20 | |
| One day in early spring, March 26, 1863, the Minister requested
his private secretary to attend a Trades-Union Meeting at St.
James's Hall, which was the result of Professor Beesly's patient
efforts to unite Bright and the Trades-Unions on an American
platform. The secretary went to the meeting and made a report
which reposes somewhere on file in the State Department to this
day, as harmless as such reports should be; but it contained no
mention of what interested young Adams most -- Bright's
psychology. With singular skill and oratorical power, Bright
managed at the outset, in his opening paragraph, to insult or
outrage every class of Englishman commonly considered
respectable, and, for fear of any escaping, he insulted them
repeatedly under consecutive heads. The rhetorical effect was
tremendous:--
| 21 | |
| "Privilege thinks it has a great interest in the American
contest," he began in his massive, deliberate tones; "and every
morning with blatant voice, it comes into our streets and curses
the American Republic. Privilege has beheld an afflicting
spectacle for many years past. It has beheld thirty million of
men happy and prosperous, without emperors -- without king
(cheers) -- without the surroundings of a court (renewed
cheers)--without nobles, except such as are made by eminence in
intellect and virtue -- without State bishops and State priests,
those vendors of the love that works salvation (cheers) --
without great armies and great navies -- without a great debt and
great taxes -- and Privilege has shuddered at what might happen
to old Europe if this great experiment should succeed."
| 22 | |
| An ingenious man, with an inventive mind, might have managed,
in the same number of lines, to offend more Englishmen than
Bright struck in this sentence; but he must have betrayed
artifice and hurt his oratory. The audience cheered furiously,
and the private secretary felt peace in his much troubled mind,
for he knew how careful the Ministry would be, once they saw
Bright talk republican principles before Trades-Unions; but,
while he did not, like Roebuck, see reason to doubt the courage
of a man who, after quarrelling with the Trades-Unions, quarreled
with all the world outside the Trades-Unions, he did feel a doubt
whether to class Bright as eccentric or conventional. Every one
called Bright "un-English," from Lord Palmerston to William E.
Forster; but to an American he seemed more English than any of
his critics. He was a liberal hater, and what he hated he reviled
after the manner of Milton, but he was afraid of no one. He was
almost the only man in England, or, for that matter, in Europe,
who hated Palmerston and was not afraid of him, or of the press
or the pulpit, the clubs or the bench, that stood behind him. He
loathed the whole fabric of sham religion, sham loyalty, sham
aristocracy, and sham socialism. He had the British weakness of
believing only in himself and his own conventions. In all this,
an American saw, if one may make the distinction, much racial
eccentricity, but little that was personal. Bright was singularly
well poised; but he used singularly strong language.
| 23 | |
| Long afterwards, in 1880, Adams happened to be living again in
London for a season, when James Russell Lowell was transferred
there as Minister; and as Adams's relations with Lowell had
become closer and more intimate with years, he wanted the new
Minister to know some of his old friends. Bright was then in the
Cabinet, and no longer the most radical member even there, but he
was still a rare figure in society. He came to dinner, along with
Sir Francis Doyle and Sir Robert Cunliffe, and as usual did most
of the talking. As usual also, he talked of the things most on
his mind. Apparently it must have been some reform of the
criminal law which the Judges opposed, that excited him, for at
the end of dinner, over the wine, he took possession of the table
in his old way, and ended with a superb denunciation of the
Bench, spoken in his massive manner, as though every word were a
hammer, smashing what it struck:--
| 24 | |
| "For two hundred years, the Judges of England sat on the Bench,
condemning to the penalty of death every man, woman, and child
who stole property to the value of five shillings; and, during
all that time, not one Judge ever remonstrated against the law.
We English are a nation of brutes, and ought to be exterminated
to the last man."
| 25 | |
| As the party rose from table and passed into the drawing-room,
Adams said to Lowell that Bright was very fine. "Yes!" replied
Lowell, " but too violent! "
| 26 | |
| Precisely this was the point that Adams doubted. Bright knew
his Englishmen better than Lowell did -- better than England did.
He knew what amount of violence in language was necessary to
drive an idea into a Lancashire or Yorkshire head. He knew that
no violence was enough to affect a Somersetshire or Wiltshire
peasant. Bright kept his own head cool and clear. He was not
excited; he never betrayed excitement. As for his denunciation of
the English Bench, it was a very old story, not original with
him. That the English were a nation of brutes was a commonplace
generally admitted by Englishmen and universally accepted by
foreigners; while the matter of their extermination could be
treated only as unpractical, on their deserts, because they were
probably not very much worse than their neighbors. Had Bright
said that the French, Spaniards, Germans, or Russians were a
nation of brutes and ought to be exterminated, no one would have
found fault; the whole human race, according to the highest
authority, has been exterminated once already for the same
reason, and only the rainbow protects them from a repetition of
it. What shocked Lowell was that he denounced his own people.
| 27 | |
| Adams felt no moral obligation to defend Judges, who, as far as
he knew, were the only class of society specially adapted to
defend themselves; but he was curious -- even anxious -- as a
point of education, to decide for himself whether Bright's
language was violent for its purpose. He thought not. Perhaps
Cobden did better by persuasion, but that was another matter. Of
course, even Englishmen sometimes complained of being so
constantly told that they were brutes and hypocrites, although
they were told little else by their censors, and bore it, on the
whole, meekly; but the fact that it was true in the main troubled
the ten-pound voter much less than it troubled Newman, Gladstone,
Ruskin, Carlyle, and Matthew Arnold. Bright was personally
disliked by his victims, but not distrusted. They never doubted
what he would do next, as they did with John Russell, Gladstone,
and Disraeli. He betrayed no one, and he never advanced an
opinion in practical matters which did not prove to be practical.
| 28 | |
| The class of Englishmen who set out to be the intellectual
opposites of Bright, seemed to an American bystander the weakest
and most eccentric of all. These were the trimmers, the political
economists, the anti-slavery and doctrinaire class, the followers
of de Tocqueville, and of John Stuart Mill. As a class, they were
timid -- with good reason -- and timidity, which is high wisdom
in philosophy, sicklies the whole cast of thought in action.
Numbers of these men haunted London society, all tending to
free-thinking, but never venturing much freedom of thought. Like
the anti-slavery doctrinaires of the forties and fifties, they
became mute and useless when slavery struck them in the face. For
type of these eccentrics, literature seems to have chosen Henry
Reeve, at least to the extent of biography. He was a bulky figure
in society, always friendly, good-natured, obliging, and useful;
almost as universal as Milnes and more busy. As editor of the
Edinburgh Review he had authority and even power, although the
Review and the whole Whig doctrinaire school had begun -- as the
French say -- to date; and of course the literary and artistic
sharpshooters of 1867 -- like Frank Palgrave -- frothed and
foamed at the mere mention of Reeve's name. Three-fourths of
their fury was due only to his ponderous manner. London society
abused its rights of personal criticism by fixing on every too
conspicuous figure some word or phrase that stuck to it. Every
one had heard of Mrs. Grote as "the origin of the word
grotesque." Every one had laughed at the story of Reeve
approaching Mrs. Grote, with his usual somewhat florid manner,
asking in his literary dialect how her husband the historian was:
"And how is the learned Grotius?" "Pretty well, thank you,
Puffendorf! " One winced at the word, as though it were a drawing
of Forain.
| 29 | |
| No one would have been more shocked than Reeve had he been
charged with want of moral courage. He proved his courage
afterwards by publishing the "Greville Memoirs," braving the
displeasure of the Queen. Yet the Edinburgh Review and its editor
avoided taking sides except where sides were already fixed.
Americanism would have been bad form in the liberal Edinburgh
Review; it would have seemed eccentric even for a Scotchman, and
Reeve was a Saxon of Saxons. To an American this attitude of
oscillating reserve seemed more eccentric than the reckless
hostility of Brougham or Carlyle, and more mischievous, for he
never could be sure what preposterous commonplace it might
encourage.
| 30 | |
| The sum of these experiences in 1863 left the conviction that
eccentricity was weakness. The young American who should adopt
English thought was lost. From the facts, the conclusion was
correct, yet, as usual, the conclusion was wrong. The years of
Palmerston's last Cabinet, 1859 to 1865, were avowedly years of
truce -- of arrested development. The British system like the
French, was in its last stage of decomposition. Never had the
British mind shown itself so decousu -- so unravelled, at sea,
floundering in every sort of historical shipwreck. Eccentricities
had a free field. Contradictions swarmed in State and Church.
England devoted thirty years of arduous labor to clearing away
only a part of the debris. A young American in 1863 could see
little or nothing of the future. He might dream, but he could not
foretell, the suddenness with which the old Europe, with England
in its wake, was to vanish in 1870. He was in dead-water, and the
parti-colored, fantastic cranks swam about his boat, as though he
were the ancient mariner, and they saurians of the prime.
| 31 | |
|