The Education of Henry Adams
routine of every young American in a Legation; all counting for nothing
in sum, because, even if it had been his official duty--which it was
not--it was mere routine, a single, continuous, unbroken act, which led
to nothing and nowhere except Portland Place and the grave.
The path that led somewhere was the English habit of mind which
deepened its ruts every day. The English mind was like the London
drawing-room, a comfortable and easy spot, filled with bits and
fragments of incoherent furnitures, which were never meant to go
together, and could be arranged in any relation without making a whole,
except by the square room. Philosophy might dispute about innate ideas
till the stars died out in the sky, but about innate tastes no one,
except perhaps a collie dog, has the right to doubt; least of all, the
Englishman, for his tastes are his being; he drifts after them as
unconsciously as a honey-bee drifts after his flowers, and, in England,
every one must drift with him. Most young Englishmen drifted to the
race-course or the moors or the hunting-field; a few towards books; one
or two followed some form of science; and a number took to what, for
want of a better name, they called Art. Young Adams inherited a certain
taste for the same pursuit from his father who insisted that he had it
not, because he could not see what his son thought he saw in Turner.
The Minister, on the other hand, carried a sort of aesthetic rag-bag of
his own, which he regarded as amusement, and never called art. So he
would wander off on a Sunday to attend service successively in all the
city churches built by Sir Christopher Wren; or he would disappear from
the Legation day after day to attend coin sales at Sotheby's, where his
son attended alternate sales of drawings, engravings, or water-colors.
Neither knew enough to talk much about the other's tastes, but the only
difference between them was a slight difference of direction. The
Minister's mind like his writings showed a correctness of form and line
that his son would have been well pleased had he inherited.
Of all supposed English tastes, that of art was the most
alluring and treacherous. Once drawn into it, one had small chance of
escape, for it had no centre or circumference, no beginning, middle, or
end, no origin, no object, and no conceivable result as education. In
London one met no corrective. The only American who came by, capable of
teaching, was William Hunt, who stopped to paint the portrait of the
Minister which now completes the family series at Harvard College. Hunt
talked constantly, and was, or afterwards became, a famous teacher, but
Henry Adams did not know enough to learn. Perhaps, too, he had
inherited or acquired a stock of tastes, as young men must, which he
was slow to outgrow. Hunt had no time to sweep out the rubbish of
Adams's mind. The portrait finished, he went.
As often as he could, Adams ran over to Paris, for sunshine,
and there always sought out Richardson in his attic in the Rue du Bac,
or wherever he lived, and they went off to dine at the Palais Royal,
and talk of whatever interested the students of the Beaux Arts.
Richardson, too, had much to say, but had not yet seized his style.
Adams caught very little of what lay in his mind, and the less,
because, to Adams, everything French was bad except the restaurants,
while the continuous life in England made French art seem worst of all.
This did not prove that English art, in 1866, was good; far from it;
but it helped to make bric-a-brac of all art, after the manner of
England.
Not in the Legation, or in London, but in Yorkshire at Thornes,
Adams met the man that pushed him furthest in this English garden of
innate disorder called taste. The older daughter of the Milnes Gaskells
had married Francis Turner Palgrave. Few Americans will ever ask
whether any one has described the Palgraves, but the family was one of
the most describable in all England at that day. Old Sir Francis, the
father, had been much the greatest of all the historians of early
England, the only one who was un-English; and the reason of his
superiority lay in his name, which was Cohen, and his mind which was
Cohen also, or at least not English. He changed his name to Palgrave in
order to please his wife. They had a band of remarkable sons: Francis
Turner, Gifford, Reginald, Inglis; all of whom made their mark. Gifford
was perhaps the most eccentric, but his "Travels" in Arabia were
famous, even among the famous travels of that generation. Francis
Turner--or, as he was commonly called, Frank Palgrave--unable to work
off his restlessness in travel like Gifford, and stifled in the
atmosphere of the Board of Education, became a critic. His art
criticisms helped to make the Saturday Review a terror to the British
artist. His literary taste, condensed into the "Golden Treasury,"
helped Adams to more literary education than he ever got from any taste
of his own. Palgrave himself held rank as one of the minor poets; his
hymns had vogue. As an art-critic he was too ferocious to be liked;
even Holman Hunt found his temper humorous; among many rivals, he may
perhaps have had a right to claim the much-disputed rank of being the
most unpopular man in London; but he liked to teach, and asked only for
a docile pupil. Adams was docile enough, for he knew nothing and liked
to listen. Indeed, he had to listen, whether he liked or not, for
Palgrave's voice was strident, and nothing could stop him. Literature,
painting, sculpture, architecture were open fields for his attacks,
which were always intelligent if not always kind, and when these
failed, he readily descended to meaner levels. John Richard Green, who
was Palgrave's precise opposite, and whose Irish charm of touch and
humor defended him from most assaults, used to tell with delight of
Palgrave's call on him just after he had moved into his new Queen Anne
house in Kensington Square: "Palgrave called yesterday, and the first
thing he said was, 'I've counted three anachronisms on your front
doorstep.'"
Another savage critic, also a poet, was Thomas Woolner, a type
almost more emphatic than Palgrave in a society which resounded with
emphasis. Woolner's sculpture showed none of the rough assertion that
Woolner himself showed, when he was not making supernatural effort to
be courteous, but his busts were remarkable, and his work altogether
was, in Palgrave's clamorous opinion, the best of his day. He took the
matter of British art--or want of art--seriously, almost ferociously,
as a personal grievance and torture; at times he was rather terrifying
in the anarchistic wrath of his denunciation. As Henry Adams felt no
responsibility for English art, and had no American art to offer for
sacrifice, he listened with enjoyment to language much like Carlyle's,
and accepted it without a qualm. On the other hand, as a third member
of this critical group, he fell in with Stopford Brooke whose tastes
lay in the same direction, and whose expression was modified by
clerical propriety. Among these men, one wandered off into paths of
education much too devious and slippery for an American foot to follow.
He would have done better to go on the race-track, as far as concerned
a career.
Fortunately for him he knew too little ever to be an
art-critic, still less an artist. For some things ignorance is good,
and art is one of them. He knew he knew nothing, and had not the
trained eye or the keen instinct that trusted itself; but he was
curious, as he went on, to find out how much others knew. He took
Palgrave's word as final about a drawing of Rembrandt or Michael
Angelo, and he trusted Woolner implicitly about a Turner; but when he
quoted their authority to any dealer, the dealer pooh-poohed it, and
declared that it had no weight in the trade. If he went to a sale of
drawings or paintings, at Sotheby's or Christie's, an hour afterwards,
he saw these same dealers watching Palgrave or Woolner for a point, and
bidding over them. He rarely found two dealers agree in judgment. He
once bought a water-color from the artist himself out of his studio,
and had it doubted an hour afterwards by the dealer to whose place he
took it for framing. He was reduced to admit that he could not prove its
authenticity; internal evidence was against it.
One morning in early July, 1867, Palgrave stopped at the
Legation in Portland Place on his way downtown, and offered to take
Adams to Sotheby's, where a small collection of old drawings was on
show. The collection was rather a curious one, said to be that of Sir
Anthony Westcomb, from Liverpool, with an undisturbed record of a
century, but with nothing to attract notice. Probably none but
collectors or experts examined the portfolios. Some dozens of these
were always on hand, following every sale, and especially on the
lookout for old drawings, which became rarer every year. Turning
rapidly over the numbers, Palgrave stopped at one containing several
small drawings, one marked as Rembrandt, one as Rafael; and putting his
finger on the Rafael, after careful examination; "I should buy this,"
he said; "it looks to me like one of those things that sell for five
shillings one day, and fifty pounds the next." Adams marked it for a
bid, and the next morning came down to the auction. The numbers sold
slowly, and at noon he thought he might safely go to lunch. When he
came back, half an hour afterwards, the drawing was gone. Much annoyed
at his own stupidity, since Palgrave had expressly said he wanted the
drawing for himself if he had not in a manner given it to Adams, the
culprit waited for the sale to close, and then asked the clerk for the
name of the buyer. It was Holloway, the art-dealer, near Covent Garden,
whom he slightly knew. Going at once to the shop he waited till young
Holloway came in, with his purchases under his arm, and without attempt
at preface, he said: "You bought to-day, Mr. Holloway, a number that I
wanted. Do you mind letting me have it?" Holloway took out the parcel,
looked over the drawings, and said that he had bought the number for
the sake of the Rembrandt, which he thought possibly genuine; taking
that out, Adams might have the rest for the price he paid for the
lot--twelve shillings.
Thus, down to that moment, every expert in London had probably
seen these drawings. Two of them--only two--had thought them worth
buying at any price, and of these two, Palgrave chose the Rafael,
Holloway the one marked as Rembrandt. Adams, the purchaser of the
Rafael, knew nothing whatever on the subject, but thought he might
credit himself with education to the value of twelve shillings, and
call the drawing nothing. Such items of education commonly came higher.
He took the drawing to Palgrave. It was closely pasted to an
old, rather thin, cardboard mount, and, on holding it up to the window,
one could see lines on the reverse. "Take it down to Reed at the
British Museum," said Palgrave; "he is Curator of the drawings, and, if
you ask him, he will have it taken off the mount." Adams amused himself
for a day or two by searching Rafael's works for the figure, which he
found at last in the Parnasso, the figure of Horace, of which, as it
happened--though Adams did not know it--the British Museum owned a much
finer drawing. At last he took the dirty, little, unfinished red-chalk
sketch to Reed whom he found in the Curator's room, with some of the
finest Rafael drawings in existence, hanging on the walls. "Yes!" said
Mr Reed; "I noticed this at the sale; but it's not Rafael!" Adams,
feeling himself incompetent to discuss this subject, reported the
result to Palgrave, who said that Reed knew nothing about it. Also this
point lay beyond Adams's competence; but he noted that Reed was in the