University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER XII
ECCENTRICITY (1863)

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 cam 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!"
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."

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.

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
some one 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.

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:—

"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."

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 "unEnglish,"
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.

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:—

"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."

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!"

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 décousu—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 débris. 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.