The Education of Henry Adams
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.
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 find 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."
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."
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!"
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."
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.
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 Rafael's, or whether the verse was 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 Lyell, and the Lyells were intimate
at the Legation. Sir Charles constantly said of Darwin, what Palgrave
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,