Chapter XIV. Dilettantism (1865-1866)

The Education of Henry Adams

by Henry Adams

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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 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."

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 maybe 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 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.

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.