| CHAPTER XIV
| -1 | |
| DILETTANTISM (1865-1866)
| 0 | |
| THE campaign of 1864 and the reelection of Mr. Lincoln in
November set the American Minister on so firm a footing that he
could safely regard his own anxieties as over, and the anxieties
of Earl Russell and the Emperor Napoleon as begun. With a few
months more his own term of four years would come to an end, and
even though the questions still under discussion with England
should somewhat prolong his stay, he might look forward with some
confidence to his return home in 1865. His son no longer fretted.
The time for going into the army had passed. If he were to be
useful at all, it must be as a son, and as a son he was treated
with the widest indulgence and trust. He knew that he was doing
himself no good by staying in London, but thus far in life he had
done himself no good anywhere, and reached his twenty-seventh
birthday without having advanced a step, that he could see,
beyond his twenty-first. For the most part, his friends were
worse off than he. The war was about to end and they were to be
set adrift in a world they would find altogether strange.
| 1 | |
| At this point, as though to cut the last thread of relation,
six months were suddenly dropped out of his life in England. The
London climate had told on some of the family; the physicians
prescribed a winter in Italy. Of course the private secretary was
detached as their escort, since this was one of his professional
functions; and he passed six months, gaining an education as
Italian courier, while the Civil War came to its end. As far as
other education went, he got none, but he was amused. Travelling
in all possible luxury, at some one else's expense, with
diplomatic privileges and position, was a form of travel hitherto
untried. The Cornice in vettura was delightful; Sorrento in
winter offered hills to climb and grottoes to explore, and Naples
near by to visit; Rome at Easter was an experience necessary for
the education of every properly trained private secretary; the
journey north by vettura through Perugia and Sienna was a dream;
the Splugen Pass, if not equal to the Stelvio, was worth seeing;
Paris had always something to show. The chances of accidental
education were not so great as they had been, since one's field
of experience had grown large; but perhaps a season at Baden
Baden in these later days of its brilliancy offered some chances
of instruction, if it were only the sight of fashionable Europe
and America on the race-course watching the Duke of Hamilton, in
the middle, improving his social advantages by the conversation
of Cora Pearl.
| 2 | |
| The assassination of President Lincoln fell on the party while
they were at Rome, where it seemed singularly fitting to that
nursery of murderers and murdered, as though America were also
getting educated. Again one went to meditate on the steps of the
Santa Maria in Ara Coeli, but the lesson seemed as shallow as
before. Nothing happened. The travellers changed no plan or
movement. The Minister did not recall them to London. The season
was over before they returned; and when the private secretary sat
down again at his desk in Portland Place before a mass of copy in
arrears, he saw before him a world so changed as to be beyond
connection with the past. His identity, if one could call a
bundle of disconnected memories an identity, seemed to remain;
but his life was once more broken into separate pieces; he was a
spider and had to spin a new web in some new place with a new
attachment.
| 3 | |
| All his American friends and contemporaries who were still
alive looked singularly commonplace without uniforms, and
hastened to get married and retire into back streets and suburbs
until they could find employment. Minister Adams, too, was going
home "next fall," and when the fall came, he was going home "next
spring," and when the spring came, President Andrew Johnson was
at loggerheads with the Senate, and found it best to keep things
unchanged. After the usual manner of public servants who had
acquired the habit of office and lost the faculty of will, the
members of the Legation in London continued the daily routine of
English society, which, after becoming a habit, threatened to
become a vice. Had Henry Adams shared a single taste with the
young Englishmen of his time, he would have been lost; but the
custom of pounding up and down Rotten Row every day, on a hack,
was not a taste, and yet was all the sport he shared. Evidently
he must set to work; he must get a new education he must begin a
career of his own.
| 4 | |
| Nothing was easier to say, but even his father admitted two
careers to be closed. For the law, diplomacy had unfitted him;
for diplomacy he already knew too much. Any one who had held,
during the four most difficult years of American diplomacy, a
position at the centre of action, with his hands actually
touching the lever of power, could not beg a post of Secretary at
Vienna or Madrid in order to bore himself doing nothing until the
next President should do him the honor to turn him out. For once
all his advisers agreed that diplomacy was not possible.
| 5 | |
| In any ordinary system he would have been called back to serve
in the State Department, but, between the President and the
Senate, service of any sort became a delusion. The choice of
career was more difficult than the education which had proved
impracticable. Adams saw no road; in fact there was none. All his
friends were trying one path or another, but none went a way that
he could have taken. John Hay passed through London in order to
bury himself in second-rate Legations for years, before he
drifted home again to join Whitelaw Reid and George Smalley on
the Tribune. Frank Barlow and Frank Bartlett carried
Major-Generals' commissions into small law business. Miles stayed
in the army. Henry Higginson, after a desperate struggle, was
forced into State Street; Charles Adams wandered about, with
brevet-brigadier rank, trying to find employment. Scores of
others tried experiments more or less unsuccessful. Henry Adams
could see easy ways of making a hundred blunders; he could see no
likely way of making a legitimate success. Such as it was, his
so-called education was wanted nowhere.
| 6 | |
| One profession alone seemed possible -- the press. In 1860 he
would have said that he was born to be an editor, like at least a
thousand other young graduates from American colleges who entered
the world every year enjoying the same conviction; but in 1866
the situation was altered; the possession of money had become
doubly needful for success, and double energy was essential to
get money. America had more than doubled her scale. Yet the press
was still the last resource of the educated poor who could not be
artists and would not be tutors. Any man who was fit for nothing
else could write an editorial or a criticism. The enormous mass
of misinformation accumulated in ten years of nomad life could
always be worked off on a helpless public, in diluted doses, if
one could but secure a table in the corner of a newspaper office.
The press was an inferior pulpit; an anonymous schoolmaster; a
cheap boarding-school but it was still the nearest approach to a
career for the literary survivor of a wrecked education. For the
press, then, Henry Adams decided to fit himself, and since he
could not go home to get practical training, he set to work to do
what he could in London.
| 7 | |
| He knew, as well as any reporter on the New York Herald, that
this was not an American way of beginning, and he knew a certain
number of other drawbacks which the reporter could not see so
clearly. Do what he might, he drew breath only in the atmosphere
of English methods and thoughts; he could breathe none other. His
mother -- who should have been a competent judge, since her
success and popularity in England exceeded that of her husband --
averred that every woman who lived a certain time in England came
to look and dress like an Englishwoman, no matter how she
struggled. Henry Adams felt himself catching an English tone of
mind and processes of thought, though at heart more hostile to
them than ever. As though to make him more helpless and wholly
distort his life, England grew more and more agreeable and
amusing. Minister Adams became, in 1866, almost a historical
monument in London; he held a position altogether his own. His
old opponents disappeared. Lord Palmerston died in October, 1865;
Lord Russell tottered on six months longer, but then vanished
from power; and in July, 1866, the conservatives came into
office. Traditionally the Tories were easier to deal with than
the Whigs, and Minister Adams had no reason to regret the change.
His personal relations were excellent and his personal weight
increased year by year. On that score the private secretary had
no cares, and not much copy. His own position was modest, but it
was enough; the life he led was agreeable; his friends were all
he wanted, and, except that he was at the mercy of politics, he
felt much at ease. Of his daily life he had only to reckon so
many breakfasts; so many dinners; so many receptions, balls,
theatres, and country-parties; so many cards to be left; so many
Americans to be escorted -- the usual routine of every young
American in a Legation; all counting for nothing in sum, because,
even if it had been his official duty -- which it was not -- it
was mere routine, a single, continuous, unbroken act, which led
to nothing and nowhere except Portland Place and the grave.
| 8 | |
| The path that led somewhere was the English habit of mind which
deepened its ruts every day. The English mind was like the London
drawing-room, a comfortable and easy spot, filled with bits and
fragments of incoherent furnitures, which were never meant to go
together, and could be arranged in any relation without making a
whole, except by the square room. Philosophy might dispute about
innate ideas till the stars died out in the sky, but about innate
tastes no one, except perhaps a collie dog, has the right to
doubt; least of all, the Englishman, for his tastes are his
being; he drifts after them as unconsciously as a honey-bee
drifts after his flowers, and, in England, every one must drift
with him. Most young Englishmen drifted to the race-course or the
moors or the hunting-field; a few towards books; one or two
followed some form of science; and a number took to what, for
want of a better name, they called Art. Young Adams inherited a
certain taste for the same pursuit from his father who insisted
that he had it not, because he could not see what his son thought
he saw in Turner. The Minister, on the other hand, carried a sort
of aesthetic rag-bag of his own, which he regarded as amusement,
and never called art. So he would wander off on a Sunday to
attend service successively in all the city churches built by Sir
Christopher Wren; or he would disappear from the Legation day
after day to attend coin sales at Sotheby's, where his son
attended alternate sales of drawings, engravings, or
water-colors. Neither knew enough to talk much about the other's
tastes, but the only difference between them was a slight
difference of direction. The Minister's mind like his writings
showed a correctness of form and line that his son would have
been well pleased had he inherited.
| 9 | |
| 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.
| 10 | |
| As often as he could, Adams ran over to Paris, for sunshine,
and there always sought out Richardson in his attic in the Rue du
Bac, or wherever he lived, and they went off to dine at the
Palais Royal, and talk of whatever interested the students of the
Beaux Arts. Richardson, too, had much to say, but had not yet
seized his style. Adams caught very little of what lay in his
mind, and the less, because, to Adams, everything French was bad
except the restaurants, while the continuous life in England made
French art seem worst of all. This did not prove that English
art, in 1866, was good; far from it; but it helped to make
bric-a-brac of all art, after the manner of England.
| 11 | |
| Not in the Legation, or in London, but in Yorkshire at Thornes,
Adams met the man that pushed him furthest in this English garden
of innate disorder called taste. The older daughter of the Milnes
Gaskells had married Francis Turner Palgrave. Few Americans will
ever ask whether any one has described the Palgraves, but the
family was one of the most describable in all England at that
day. Old Sir Francis, the father, had been much the greatest of
all the historians of early England, the only one who was
un-English; and the reason of his superiority lay in his name,
which was Cohen, and his mind which was Cohen also, or at least
not English. He changed his name to Palgrave in order to please
his wife. They had a band of remarkable sons: Francis Turner,
Gifford, Reginald, Inglis; all of whom made their mark. Gifford
was perhaps the most eccentric, but his "Travels" in Arabia were
famous, even among the famous travels of that generation. Francis
Turner -- or, as he was commonly called, Frank Palgrave -- unable
to work off his restlessness in travel like Gifford, and stifled
in the atmosphere of the Board of Education, became a critic. His
art criticisms helped to make the Saturday Review a terror to the
British artist. His literary taste, condensed into the "Golden
Treasury," helped Adams to more literary education than he ever
got from any taste of his own. Palgrave himself held rank as one
of the minor poets; his hymns had vogue. As an art-critic he was
too ferocious to be liked; even Holman Hunt found his temper
humorous; among many rivals, he may perhaps have had a right to
claim the much-disputed rank of being the most unpopular man in
London; but he liked to teach, and asked only for a docile pupil.
Adams was docile enough, for he knew nothing and liked to listen.
Indeed, he had to listen, whether he liked or not, for Palgrave's
voice was strident, and nothing could stop him. Literature,
painting, sculpture, architecture were open fields for his
attacks, which were always intelligent if not always kind, and
when these failed, he readily descended to meaner levels. John
Richard Green, who was Palgrave's precise opposite, and whose
Irish charm of touch and humor defended him from most assaults,
used to tell with delight of Palgrave's call on him just after he
had moved into his new Queen Anne house in Kensington Square:
"Palgrave called yesterday, and the first thing he said was,
'I've counted three anachronisms on your front doorstep.' "
| 12 | |
| Another savage critic, also a poet, was Thomas Woolner, a type
almost more emphatic than Palgrave in a society which resounded
with emphasis. Woolner's sculpture showed none of the rough
assertion that Woolner himself showed, when he was not making
supernatural effort to be courteous, but his busts were
remarkable, and his work altogether was, in Palgrave's clamorous
opinion, the best of his day. He took the matter of British art
-- or want of art -- seriously, almost ferociously, as a personal
grievance and torture; at times he was rather terrifying in the
anarchistic wrath of his denunciation. as Henry Adams felt no
responsibility for English art, and had no American art to offer
for sacrifice, he listened with enjoyment to language much like
Carlyle's, and accepted it without a qualm. On the other hand, as
a third member of this critical group, he fell in with Stopford
Brooke whose tastes lay in the same direction, and whose
expression was modified by clerical propriety. Among these men,
one wandered off into paths of education much too devious and
slippery for an American foot to follow. He would have done
better to go on the race-track, as far as concerned a career.
| 13 | |
| Fortunately for him he knew too little ever to be an
art-critic, still less an artist. For some things ignorance is
good, and art is one of them. He knew he knew nothing, and had
not the trained eye or the keen instinct that trusted itself; but
he was curious, as he went on, to find out how much others knew.
He took Palgrave's word as final about a drawing of Rembrandt or
Michael Angelo, and he trusted Woolner implicitly about a Turner;
but when he quoted their authority to any dealer, the dealer
pooh-poohed it, and declared that it had no weight in the trade.
If he went to a sale of drawings or paintings, at Sotheby's or
Christie's, an hour afterwards, he saw these same dealers
watching Palgrave or Woolner for a point, and bidding over them.
He rarely found two dealers agree in judgment. He once bought a
water-color from the artist himself out of his studio, and had it
doubted an hour afterwards by the dealer to whose place he took
it for framing He was reduced to admit that he could not prove
its authenticity; internal evidence was against it.
| 14 | |
| One morning in early July, 1867, Palgrave stopped at the
Legation in Portland Place on his way downtown, and offered to
take Adams to Sotheby's, where a small collection of old drawings
was on show. The collection was rather a curious one, said to be
that of Sir Anthony Westcomb, from Liverpool, with an undisturbed
record of a century, but with nothing to attract notice. Probably
none but collectors or experts examined the portfolios. Some
dozens of these were always on hand, following every sale, and
especially on the lookout for old drawings, which became rarer
every year. Turning rapidly over the numbers, Palgrave stopped at
one containing several small drawings, one marked as Rembrandt,
one as Rafael; and putting his finger on the Rafael, after
careful examination; "I should buy this," he said; "it looks to
me like one of those things that sell for five shillings one day,
and fifty pounds the next." Adams marked it for a bid, and the
next morning came down to the auction. The numbers sold slowly,
and at noon he thought he might safely go to lunch. When he came
back, half an hour afterwards, the drawing was gone. Much annoyed
at his own stupidity, since Palgrave had expressly said he wanted
the drawing for himself if he had not in a manner given it to
Adams, the culprit waited for the sale to close, and then asked
the clerk for the name of the buyer. It was Holloway, the
art-dealer, near Covent Garden, whom he slightly knew. Going at
once to the shop he waited till young Holloway came in, with his
purchases under his arm, and without attempt at preface, he said:
"You bought to-day, Mr. Holloway, a number that I wanted. Do you
mind letting me have it?" Holloway took out the parcel, looked
over the drawings, and said that he had bought the number for the
sake of the Rembrandt, which he thought possibly genuine; taking
that out, Adams might have the rest for the price he paid for the
lot -- twelve shillings.
| 15 | |
| Thus, down to that moment, every expert in London had probably
seen these drawings. Two of them -- only two -- had thought them
worth buying at any price, and of these two, Palgrave chose the
Rafael, Holloway the one marked as Rembrandt. Adams, the
purchaser of the Rafael, knew nothing whatever on the subject,
but thought he might credit himself with education to the value
of twelve shillings, and call the drawing nothing. Such items of
education commonly came higher.
| 16 | |
| He took the drawing to Palgrave. It was closely pasted to an
old, rather thin, cardboard mount, and, on holding it up to the
window, one could see lines on the reverse. "Take it down to Reed
at the British Museum," said Palgrave; "he is Curator of the
drawings, and, if you ask him, he will have it taken off the
mount." Adams amused himself for a day or two by searching
Rafael's works for the figure, which he found at last in the
Parnasso, the figure of Horace, of which, as it happened --
though Adams did not know it -- the British Museum owned a much
finer drawing. At last he took the dirty, little, unfinished
red-chalk sketch to Reed whom he found in the Curator's room,
with some of the finest Rafael drawings in existence, hanging on
the walls. "Yes!" said Mr Reed; "I noticed this at the sale; but
it's not Rafael!" Adams, feeling himself incompetent to discuss
this subject, reported the result to Palgrave, who said that Reed
knew nothing about it. Also this point lay beyond Adams's
competence; but he noted that Reed was in the employ of the
British Museum as Curator of the best -- or nearly the best --
collection in the world, especially of Rafaels, and that he
bought for the Museum. As expert he had rejected both the Rafael
and the Rembrandt at first-sight, and after his attention was
recalled to the Rafael for a further opinion he rejected it
again.
| 17 | |
| A week later, Adams returned for the drawing, which Mr. Reed
took out of his drawer and gave him, saying with what seemed a
little doubt or hesitation: "I should tell you that the paper
shows a water-mark, which I kind the same as that of paper used
by Marc Antonio." A little taken back by this method of studying
art, a method which even a poor and ignorant American might use
as well as Rafael himself, Adams asked stupidly: "Then you think
it genuine?" "Possibly!" replied Reed; "but much overdrawn."
| 18 | |
| Here was expert opinion after a second revise, with help of
water-marks! In Adams's opinion it was alone worth another twelve
shillings as education; but this was not all. Reed continued:
"The lines on the back seem to be writing, which I cannot read,
but if you will take it down to the manuscript-room, they will
read it for you."
| 19 | |
| Adams took the sheet down to the keeper of the manuscripts and
begged him to read the lines. The keeper, after a few minutes'
study, very obligingly said he could not: "It is scratched with
an artist's crayon, very rapidly, with many unusual abbreviations
and old forms. If any one in Europe can read it, it is the old
man at the table yonder, Libri! Take it to him!"
| 20 | |
This expert broke down on the alphabet! He could not even judge
a manuscript; but Adams had no right to complain, for he had
nothing to pay, not even twelve shillings, though he thought
these experts worth more, at least for his education. Accordingly
he carried his paper to Libri, a total stranger to him, and asked
the old man, as deferentially as possible, to tell him whether
the lines had any meaning. Had Adams not been an ignorant person
he would have known all about Libri, but his ignorance was vast,
and perhaps was for the best. Libri looked at the paper, and then
looked again, and at last bade him sit down and wait. Half an
hour passed before he called Adams back and showed him these
lines:--
"Or questo credo ben che una elleria
Te offende tanto che te offese il core.
Perche sei grande nol sei in tua volia;
Tu vedi e gia non credi il tuo valore;
Passate gia son tutte gelosie;
Tu sei di sasso; non hai piu dolore."
| 21 | |
| As far as Adams could afterwards recall it, this was Libri's
reading, but he added that the abbreviations were many and
unusual; that the writing was very ancient; and that the word he
read as "elleria" in the first line was not Italian at all.
| 22 | |
| 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 maybe a rotten
line or two, but the drawing's all right."
| 23 | |
| For forty years Adams kept this drawing on his mantelpiece,
partly for its own interest, but largely for curiosity to see
whether any critic or artist would ever stop to look at it. None
ever did, unless he knew the story. Adams himself never wanted to
know more about it. He refused to seek further light. He never
cared to learn whether the drawing was Rafael's, or whether the
verse were Rafael's, or whether even the water-mark was Rafael's.
The experts -- some scores of them including the British Museum,
-- had affirmed that the drawing was worth a certain moiety of
twelve shillings. On that point, also, Adams could offer no
opinion, but he was clear that his education had profited by it
to that extent -- his amusement even more.
| 24 | |
| Art was a superb field for education, but at every turn he met
the same old figure, like a battered and illegible signpost that
ought to direct him to the next station but never did. There was
no next station. All the art of a thousand -- or ten thousand --
years had brought England to stuff which Palgrave and Woolner
brayed in their mortars; derided, tore in tatters, growled at,
and howled at, and treated in terms beyond literary usage.
Whistler had not yet made his appearance in London, but the
others did quite as well. What result could a student reach from
it? Once, on returning to London, dining with Stopford Brooke,
some one asked Adams what impression the Royal Academy Exhibition
made on him. With a little hesitation, he suggested that it was
rather a chaos, which he meant for civility; but Stopford Brooke
abruptly met it by asking whether chaos were not better than
death. Truly the question was worth discussion. For his own part,
Adams inclined to think that neither chaos nor death was an
object to him as a searcher of knowledge -- neither would have
vogue in America -- neither would help him to a career. Both of
them led him away from his objects, into an English dilettante
museum of scraps, with nothing but a wall-paper to unite them in
any relation of sequence. Possibly English taste was one degree
more fatal than English scholarship, but even this question was
open to argument. Adams went to the sales and bought what he was
told to buy; now a classical drawing by Rafael or Rubens; now a
water-color by Girtin or Cotman, if possible unfinished because
it was more likely to be a sketch from nature; and he bought them
not because they went together -- on the contrary, they made
rather awkward spots on the wall as they did on the mind -- but
because he could afford to buy those, and not others. Ten pounds
did not go far to buy a Michael Angelo, but was a great deal of
money to a private secretary. The effect was spotty, fragmentary,
feeble; and the more so because the British mind was constructed
in that way -- boasted of it, and held it to be true philosophy
as well as sound method.
| 25 | |
| What was worse, no one had a right to denounce the English as
wrong. Artistically their mind was scrappy, and every one knew
it, but perhaps thought itself, history, and nature, were
scrappy, and ought to be studied so. Turning from British art to
British literature, one met the same dangers. The historical
school was a playground of traps and pitfalls. Fatally one fell
into the sink of history -- antiquarianism. For one who nourished
a natural weakness for what was called history, the whole of
British literature in the nineteenth century was antiquarianism
or anecdotage, for no one except Buckle had tried to link it with
ideas, and commonly Buckle was regarded as having failed.
Macaulay was the English historian. Adams had the greatest
admiration for Macaulay, but he felt that any one who should even
distantly imitate Macaulay would perish in self-contempt. One
might as well imitate Shakespeare. Yet evidently something was
wrong here, for the poet and the historian ought to have
different methods, and Macaulay's method ought to be imitable if
it were sound; yet the method was more doubtful than the style.
He was a dramatist; a painter; a poet, like Carlyle. This was the
English mind, method, genius, or whatever one might call it; but
one never could quite admit that the method which ended in Froude
and Kinglake could be sound for America where passion and poetry
were eccentricities. Both Froude and Kinglake, when one met them
at dinner, were very agreeable, very intelligent; and perhaps the
English method was right, and art fragmentary by essence.
History, like everything else, might be a field of scraps, like
the refuse about a Staffordshire iron-furnace. One felt a little
natural reluctance to decline and fall like Silas Wegg on the
golden dust-heap of British refuse; but if one must, one could at
least expect a degree from Oxford and the respect of the
Athenaeum Club.
| 26 | |
| While drifting, after the war ended, many old American friends
came abroad for a holiday, and among the rest, Dr. Palfrey, busy
with his "History of New England." Of all the relics of
childhood, Dr. Palfrey was the most sympathetic, and perhaps the
more so because he, too, had wandered into the pleasant meadows
of antiquarianism, and had forgotten the world in his pursuit of
the New England Puritan. Although America seemed becoming more
and more indifferent to the Puritan except as a slightly rococo
ornament, he was only the more amusing as a study for the
Monkbarns of Boston Bay, and Dr. Palfrey took him seriously, as
his clerical education required. His work was rather an Apologia
in the Greek sense; a justification of the ways of God to Man,
or, what was much the same thing, of Puritans to other men; and
the task of justification was onerous enough to require the
occasional relief of a contrast or scapegoat. When Dr. Palfrey
happened on the picturesque but unpuritanic figure of Captain
John Smith, he felt no call to beautify Smith's picture or to
defend his moral character; he became impartial and penetrating.
The famous story of Pocahontas roused his latent New England
scepticism. He suggested to Adams, who wanted to make a position
for himself, that an article in the North American Review on
Captain John Smith's relations with Pocahontas would attract as
much attention, and probably break as much glass, as any other
stone that could be thrown by a beginner. Adams could suggest
nothing better. The task seemed likely to be amusing. So he
planted himself in the British Museum and patiently worked over
all the material he could find, until, at last, after three or
four months of labor, he got it in shape and sent it to Charles
Norton, who was then editing the North American. Mr. Norton very
civilly and even kindly accepted it. The article appeared in
January, 1867.
| 27 | |
| Surely, here was something to ponder over, as a step in
education; something that tended to stagger a sceptic! In spite
of personal wishes, intentions, and prejudices; in spite of civil
wars and diplomatic education; in spite of determination to be
actual, daily, and practical, Henry Adams found himself, at
twenty-eight, still in English society, dragged on one side into
English dilettantism, which of all dilettantism he held the most
futile; and, on the other, into American antiquarianism, which of
all antiquarianism he held the most foolish. This was the result
of five years in London. Even then he knew it to be a false
start. He had wholly lost his way. If he were ever to amount to
anything, he must begin a new education, in a new place, with a
new purpose.
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