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CHAPTER XIII THE PERFECTION OF HUMAN SOCIETY (1864)
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CHAPTER XIII
THE PERFECTION OF HUMAN SOCIETY (1864)

MINISTER ADAMS'S success in stopping the rebel
rams fixed his position once for all in English society.
From that moment he could afford to drop the character
of diplomatist, and assume what, for an American Minister
In London, was an exclusive diplomatic advantage, the
character of a kind of American Peer of the Realm. The British
never did things by halves. Once they recognized a man's right
to social privileges, they accepted him as one of themselves. Much
as Lord Derby and Mr. Disraeli were accepted as leaders of Her
Majesty's domestic Opposition, Minister Adams had a rank of
his own as a kind of leader of Her Majesty's American Opposition.
Even the Times conceded it. The years of struggle were
over, and Minister Adams rapidly gained a position which would
have caused his father or grandfather to stare with incredulous envy.

This Anglo-American form of diplomacy was chiefly undiplomatic,
and had the peculiar effect of teaching a habit of
diplomacy useless or mischievous everywhere but In London.
Nowhere else in the world could one expect to figure in a rôle so
unprofessional. The young man knew no longer what character
he bore. Private secretary in the morning, son in the afternoon,
young man about town in the evening, the only character he never
bore was that of diplomatist, except when he wanted a card to some
great function. His diplomatic education was at an end; he seldom
met a diplomat, and never had business with one; he could be of
no use to them, or they to him; but he drifted Inevitably into society,
and, do what he might, his next education must be one of
English social life. Tossed between the horns of successive dilemmas,
he reached his twenty-sixth birthday without the power of
earning five dollars in any occupation. His friends in the army


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were almost as badly off, but even army life ruined a young man
less fatally than London society. Had he been rich, this form of
ruin would have mattered nothing; but the young men of 1865
were none of them rich; all had to earn a living; yet they had
reached high positions of responsibility and power in camps and
Courts, without a dollar of their own and with no tenure of office.

Henry Adams had failed to acquire any useful education; he
should at least have acquired social experience. Curiously enough,
he failed here also. From the European or English point of view,
he had no social experience, and never got it. Minister Adams
happened on a political interregnum owing to Lord Palmerston's
personal influence from 1860 to 1865; but this political interregnum
was less marked than the social still-stand during the same
years. The Prince Consort was dead; the Queen had retired; the
Prince of Wales was still a boy. In its best days, Victorian society
had never been "smart." During the forties, under the influence
of Louis Philippe, Courts affected to be simple, serious and middle
class; and they succeeded. The taste of Louis Philippe was
bourgeois beyond any taste except that of Queen Victoria. Style
lingered in the background with the powdered footman behind
the yellow chariot, but speaking socially the Queen had no style
save what she inherited. Balmoral was a startling revelation of
royal taste. Nothing could be worse than the toilettes at Court
unless it were the way they were worn. One's eyes might be dazzled
by jewels, but they were heirlooms, and if any lady appeared
well dressed, she was either a foreigner or "fast." Fashion was not
fashionable in London until the Americans and the Jews were
let loose. The style of London toilette universal in 1864 was grotesque,
like Monckton Milnes on horseback in Rotten Row.

Society of this sort might fit a young man in some degree for
editing Shakespeare or Swift, but had little relation with the society
of 1870, and none with that of 1900. Owing to other causes,
young Adams never got the full training of such style as still
existed. The embarrassments of his first few seasons socially


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ruined him. His own want of experience prevented his asking
introductions to the ladies who ruled society; his want of friends
prevented his knowing who these ladies were; and he had every
reason to expect snubbing if he put himself in evidence. This
sensitiveness was thrown away on English society, where men
and women treated each others' advances much more brutally
than those of strangers, but young Adams was son and private
secretary too; he could not be as thick-skinned as an Englishman.
He was not alone. Every young diplomat, and most of the old
ones, felt awkward in an English house from a certainty that they
were not precisely wanted there, and a possibility that they might
be told so.

If there was in those days a country house in England which
had a right to call itself broad in views and large in tastes, it was
Bretton in Yorkshire; and if there was a hostess who had a right
to consider herself fashionable as well as charming, it was Lady
Margaret Beaumont; yet one morning at breakfast there, sitting
by her side—not for his own merits—Henry Adams heard her
say to herself in her languid and liberal way, with her rich voice
and musing manner, looking into her tea-cup: "I don't think I
care for foreigners!" Horror-stricken, not so much, on his own
account as on hers, the young man could only execute himself as
gaily as he might: "But Lady Margaret, please make one small
exception for me!" Of course she replied what was evident, that
she did not call him a foreigner, and her genial Irish charm made
the slip of tongue a happy courtesy; but none the less she knew
that, except for his momentary personal introduction, he was in
fact a foreigner, and there was no imaginable reason why she should
like him, or any other foreigner, unless it were because she was
bored by natives. She seemed to feel that her indifference needed
a reason to excuse itself in her own eyes, and she showed the subconscious
sympathy of the Irish nature which never feels itself
perfectly at home even in England. She, too, was some shadowy
shade un-English.


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Always conscious of this barrier, while the war lasted the private
secretary hid himself among the herd of foreigners till he found
his relations fixed and unchangeable. He never felt himself in society,
and he never knew definitely what was meant as society
by those who were in it. He saw far enough to note a score of societies
which seemed quite independent of each other. The smartest
was the smallest, and to him almost wholly strange. The largest
was the sporting world, also unknown to him except through the
talk of his acquaintances. Between or beyond these lay groups of
nebulous societies. His lawyer friends, like Evarts, frequented
legal circles where one still sat over the wine and told anecdotes
of the bench and bar; but he himself never set eyes on a judge except
when his father took him to call on old Lord Lyndhurst, where
they found old Lord Campbell, both abusing old Lord Brougham.
The Church and the Bishops formed several societies which no
secretary ever saw except as an interloper. The Army; the Navy;
the Indian Service; the medical and surgical professions; City
people; artists; county families; the Scotch, and indefinite other
subdivisions of society existed, which were as strange to each
other as they were to Adams. At the end of eight or ten seasons in
London society he professed to know less about it, or how to enter
it, than he did when he made his first appearance at Miss Burdett
Coutts's in May, 1861.

Sooner or later every young man dropped into a set or circle,
and frequented the few houses that were willing to harbor him.
An American who neither hunted nor raced, neither shot nor
fished nor gambled, and was not marriageable, had no need to
think of society at large. Ninety-nine houses in every hundred
were useless to him, a greater bore to him than he to them. Thus
the question of getting into—or getting out of-society which
troubled young foreigners greatly, settled itself after three or four
years of painful speculation. Society had no unity; one wandered
about in it like a maggot in cheese; it was not a hansom cab, to
be got into, or out of, at dinner-time.


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Therefore he always professed himself ignorant of society; he
never knew whether he had been in it or not, but from the accounts
of his future friends, like General Dick Taylor or George
Smalley, and of various ladies who reigned in the seventies, he
inclined to think that he knew very little about it. Certain great
houses and certain great functions of course he attended, like
every one else who could get cards, but even of these the number
was small that kept an interest or helped education. In seven
years he could remember only two that seemed to have any meaning
for him, and he never knew what that meaning was. Neither
of the two was official; neither was English in interest; and both
were scandals to the philosopher while they scarcely enlightened
men of the world.

One was at Devonshire House, an ordinary, unpremeditated
evening reception. Naturally every one went to Devonshire
House if asked, and the rooms that night were fairly full of the
usual people. The private secretary was standing among the rest,
when Mme. de Castiglione entered, the famous beauty of the
Second Empire. How beautiful she may have been, or indeed what
sort of beauty she was, Adams never knew, because the company,
consisting of the most refined and aristocratic society in the world,
instantly formed a lane, and stood in ranks to stare at her, while
those behind mounted on chairs to look over their neighbors' heads;
so that the lady walked through this polite mob, stared completely
out of countenance, and fled the house at once. This was all!

The other strange spectacle was at Stafford House, April 13,
1864, when, in a palace gallery that recalled Paolo Veronese's
pictures of Christ in his scenes of miracle, Garibaldi, in his gray
capote over his red shirt, received all London, and three duchesses
literally worshipped at his feet. Here, at all events, a private
secretary had surely caught the last and highest touch of social
experience; but what it meant—what social, moral, or mental
development it pointed out to the searcher of truth—was not a
matter to be treated fully by a leader in the Morning Post or even


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by a sermon in Westminster Abbey. Mme. de Castiglione and
Garibaldi covered, between them, too much space for simple
measurement; their curves were too complex for mere arithmetic.
The task of bringing the two into any common relation with an
ordered social system tending to orderly development—in London
or elsewhere—was well fitted for Algernon Swinburne or
Victor Hugo, but was beyond any process yet reached by the education
of Henry Adams, who would probably, even then, have
rejected, as superficial or supernatural, all the views taken by any
of the company who looked on with him at these two interesting
and perplexing sights.

From the Court, or Court society, a mere private secretary got
nothing at all, or next to nothing, that could help him on his
road through life. Royalty was in abeyance. One was tempted to
think in these years, 1860–65, that the nicest distinction between
the very best society and the second-best, was their attitude towards
royalty. The one regarded royalty as a bore, and avoided
it, or quietly said that the Queen had never been in society. The
same thing might have been said of fully half the peerage Adams
never knew even the names of half the rest; he never exchanged
ten words with any member of the royal family; he never knew
any one in those years who showed interest in any member of the
royal family, or who would have given five shillings for the opinion
of any royal person on any subject; or cared to enter any royal
or noble presence, unless the house was made attractive by as
much social effort as would have been necessary in other countries
where no rank existed. No doubt, as one of a swarm, young
Adams slightly knew various gilded youth who frequented balls
and led such dancing as was most in vogue, but they seemed to
set no value on rank; their anxiety was only to know where to
find the best partners before midnight, and the best supper after
midnight. To the American, as to Arthur Pendennis or Barnes
Newcome, the value of social position and knowledge was evident
enough; he valued it at rather more than it was worth to


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him' but it was a shadowy thing which seemed to vary with every
street corner; a thing which had shifting standards, and which no
one could catch outright. The half-dozen leaders and beauties of
his time, with great names and of the utmost fashion, made some
of the poorest marriages, and the least showy careers.

Tired of looking on at society from the outside, Adams grew to
loathe the sight of his Court dress; to groan at every announcement
of a Court ball; and to dread every invitation to a formal dinner.
The greatest social event gave not half the pleasure that one could
buy for ten shillings at the opera when Patti sang Cherubino or
Gretchen, and not a fourth of the education. Yet this was not
the opinion of the best judges. Lothrop Motley, who stood among
the very best, said to him early in his apprenticeship that the
London dinner and the English country house were the perfection
of human society. The young man meditated over it, uncertain
of its meaning. Motley could not have thought the dinner itself
perfect, since there was not then—outside of a few bankers or
foreigners—a good cook or a good table in London, and nine out
of ten of the dinners that Motley ate came from Gunter's, and
all were alike. Every one, especially in young society, complained
bitterly that Englishmen did not know a good dinner when they
ate it, and could not order one if they were given carte blanche.
Henry Adams was not a judge, and knew no more than they, but
he heard the complaints, and he could not think that Motley
meant to praise the English cuisine.

Equally little could Motley have meant that dinners were good
to look at. Nothing could be worse than the toilettes; nothing less
artistic than the appearance of the company. One's eyes might be
dazzled by family diamonds, but, if an American woman were
present, she was sure to make comments about the way the jewels
were worn. If there was a well-dressed lady at table, she was
either an American or "fast." She attracted as much notice as
though she were on the stage. No one could possibly admire an
English dinner-table.


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Least of all did Motley mean that the taste or the manners were
perfect. The manners of English society were notorious, and the
taste was worse. Without exception every American woman rose
in rebellion against English manners. In fact, the charm of London
which made most impression on Americans was the violence
of its contrasts; the extreme badness of the worst, making background
for the distinction, refinement, or wit of a few, just as the
extreme beauty of a few superb women was more effective against
the plainness of the crowd. The result was mediæval, and amusing;
sometimes coarse to a degree that might have startled a
roustabout, and sometimes courteous and considerate to a degree
that suggested King Arthur's Round Table; but this artistic contrast
was surely not the perfection that Motley had in his mind.
He meant something scholarly, worldly, and modern; he was
thinking of his own tastes.

Probably he meant that, in his favorite houses, the tone was
easy, the talk was good, and the standard of scholarship was high.
Even there he would have been forced to qualify his adjectives.
No German would have admitted that English scholarship was
high, or that it was scholarship at all, or that any wish for scholarship
existed in England. Nothing that seemed to smell of the shop
or of the lecture-room was wanted. One might as well have talked
of Renan's Christ at the table of the Bishop of London, as talk
of German philology at the table of an Oxford don. Society, if a
small literary class could be called society, wanted to be amused
in its old way. Sydney Smith, who had amused, was dead; so was
Macaulay, who instructed if he did not amuse; Thackeray died
at Christmas, 1863; Dickens never felt at home, and seldom appeared,
in society; Bulwer Lytton was not sprightly; Tennyson
detested strangers; Carlyle was mostly detested by them; Darwin
never came to town; the men of whom Motley must have been
thinking were such as he might meet at Lord Houghton's breakfasts:
Grote, Jowett, Milman, or Froude; Browning, Matthew
Arnold, or Swinburne; Bishop Wilberforce, Venables, or Hayward;


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or perhaps Gladstone, Robert Lowe, or Lord Granville. A relatively
small class, commonly isolated, suppressed, and lost at the
usual London dinner, such society as this was fairly familiar even
to a private secretary, but to the literary American it might well
seem perfection since he could find nothing of the sort in America.
Within the narrow limits of this class, the American Legation was
fairly at home; possibly a score of houses, all liberal, and all literary,
but perfect only in the eyes of a Harvard College historian.
They could teach little worth learning, for their tastes were antiquated
and their knowledge was ignorance to the next generation.
What was altogether fatal for future purposes, they were
only English.

A social education in such a medium was bound to be useless in
any other, yet Adams had to learn it to the bottom. The one thing
needful for a private secretary, was that he should not only seem,
but should actually be, at home. He studied carefully, and practised
painfully, what seemed to be the favorite accomplishments of
society. Perhaps his nervousness deceived him; perhaps he took
for an ideal of others what was only his reflected image; but he
conceived that the perfection of human society required that a man
should enter a drawing-room where he was a total stranger, and
place himself on the hearth-rag, his back to the fire, with an air of
expectant benevolence, without curiosity, much as though he had
dropped in at a charity concert, kindly disposed to applaud the
performers and to overlook mistakes. This ideal rarely succeeded
in youth, and towards thirty it took a form of modified insolence
and offensive patronage; but about sixty it mellowed into courtesy,
kindliness, and even deference to the young which had extraordinary
charm both in women and in men. Unfortunately Adams
could not wait till sixty for education; he had his living to earn; and
the English air of patronage would earn no income for him anywhere
else.

After five or six years of constant practice, any one can acquire
the habit of going from one strange company to another


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without thinking much of one's self or of them, as though silently
reflecting that "in a world where we are all insects, no insect is
alien; perhaps they are human in parts"; but the dreamy habit
of mind which comes from solitude in crowds is not fitness for
social success except in London. Everywhere else it is injury. England
was a social kingdom whose social coinage had no currency
elsewhere.

Englishwomen, from the educational point of view, could give
nothing until they approached forty years old. Then they become
very interesting—very charming—to the man of fifty.
The young American was not worth the young Englishwoman's
notice, and never received it. Neither understood the other. Only
in the domestic relation, in the country—never in society at
large—a young American might accidentally make friends with
an Englishwoman of his own age, but it never happened to Henry
Adams. His susceptible nature was left to the mercy of American
girls, which was professional duty rather than education as long
as diplomacy held its own.

Thus he found himself launched on waters where he had never
meant to sail, and floating along a stream which carried him far
from his port. His third season in London society saw the end
of his diplomatic education, and began for him the social life of
a young man who felt at home in England—more at home there
than anywhere else. With this feeling, the mere habit of going to
garden-parties, dinners, receptions, and balls had nothing to do.
One might go to scores without a sensation of home. One might
stay in no end of country houses without forgetting that one was a
total stranger and could never be anything else. One might bow
to half the dukes and duchesses in England, and feel only the more
strange. Hundreds of persons might pass with a nod and never
come nearer. Close relation in a place like London is a personal
mystery as profound as chemical affinity. Thousands pass, and
one separates himself from the mass to attach himself to another,
and so make, little by little, a group.


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One morning, April 27, 1863, he was asked to breakfast with Sir
Henry Holland, the old Court physician who had been acquainted
with every American Minister since Edward Everett, and was
a valuable social ally, who had the courage to try to be of use to
everybody, and who, while asking the private secretary to breakfast
one day, was too discreet to betray what he might have
learned about rebel doings at his breakfast-table the day before.
He had been friendly with the Legation, in the teeth of society,
and was still bearing up against the weight of opinion, so that
young Adams could not decline his invitations, although they
obliged him to breakfast in Brook Street at nine o'clock in the
morning, alternately with Mr. James M. Mason. Old Dr. Holland
was himself as hale as a hawk, driving all day bare-headed
about London, and eating Welsh rarebit every night before bed;
he thought that any young man should be pleased to take his
early muffin in Brook Street, and supply a few crumbs of war
news for the daily peckings of eminent patients. Meekly, when
summoned, the private secretary went, and on reaching the front
floor, this particular morning, he found there another young man
in the act of rapping the knocker. They entered the breakfast-room
together, where they were introduced to each other, and
Adams learned that the other guest was a Cambridge undergraduate,
Charles Milnes Gaskell, son of James Milnes Gaskell, the
Member for Wenlock; another of the Yorkshire Milneses, from
Thornes near Wakefield. Fate had fixed Adams to Yorkshire.
By another chance it happened that young Milnes Gaskell
was intimate at Cambridge with William Everett who was also
about to take his degree. A third chance inspired Mr. Evarts with
a fancy for visiting Cambridge, and led William Everett to offer
Ms services as host. Adams acted as courier to Mr. Evarts, and
at the end of May they went down for a few days, when William
Everett did the honors as host with a kindness and attention that
made his cousin sorely conscious of his own social shortcomings.
Cambridge was pretty, and the dons were kind. Mr. Evarts enjoyed


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his visit, but this was merely a part of the private secretary's
day's work. What affected his whole life was the intimacy then
begun with Milnes Gaskell and his circle of undergraduate friends,
just about to enter the world.

Intimates are predestined. Adams met in England a thousand
people, great and small; jostled against every one, from royal
princes to gin-shop loafers; attended endless official functions
and private parties; visited every part of the United Kingdom
and was not quite a stranger at the Legations in Paris and Rome;
he knew the societies of certain country houses, and acquired
habits of Sunday-afternoon calls; but all this gave him nothing
to do, and was life wasted. For him nothing whatever could be
gained by escorting American ladies to drawing-rooms or American
gentlemen to levees at St. James's Palace, or bowing solemnly
to people with great titles, at Court balls, or even by awkwardly
jostling royalty at garden-parties; all this was done for the Government,
and neither President Lincoln nor Secretary Seward would
ever know enough of their business to thank him for doing what
they did not know how to get properly done by their own servants;
but for Henry Adams—not private secretary—all the time
taken up by such duties was wasted. On the other hand, his few
personal intimacies concerned him alone, and the chance that
made him almost a Yorkshireman was one that must have started
under the Heptarchy.

More than any other county in England, Yorkshire retained a
sort of social independence of London. Scotland itself was hardly
more distinct. The Yorkshire type had always been the strongest
of the British strains; the Norwegian and the Dane were a
different race from the Saxon. Even Lancashire had not the
mass and the cultivation of the West Riding. London could
never quite absorb Yorkshire, which, in its turn had no great love
for London and freely showed it. To a certain degree, evident
enough to Yorkshiremen, Yorkshire was not English—or was
all England, as they might choose to express it. This must have


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been the reason why young Adams was drawn there rather than
elsewhere. Monckton Milnes alone took the trouble to draw him,
and possibly Milnes was the only man in England with whom
Henry Adams, at that moment, had a chance of calling out such
an un-English effort. Neither Oxford nor Cambridge nor any region
south of the Humber contained a considerable house where
a young American would have been sought as a friend. Eccentricity
alone did not account for it. Monckton Milnes was a singular
type, but his distant cousin, James Milnes Gaskell, was
another, quite as marked, in an opposite sense. Milnes never
seemed willing to rest; Milnes Gaskell never seemed willing to
move. In his youth one of a very famous group—Arthur Hallam,
Tennyson, Manning, Gladstone, Francis Doyle—and regarded
as one of the most promising; an adorer of George Canning;
in Parliament since coming of age; married into the powerful
connection of the Wynns of Wynstay; rich according to Yorkshire
standards; intimate with his political leaders; he was one of the
numerous Englishmen who refuse office rather than make the effort
of carrying it, and want power only to make it a source of
indolence. He was a voracious reader and an admirable critic;
he had forty years of parliamentary tradition on his memory; he
liked to talk and to listen; he liked his dinner and, in spite of George
Canning, his dry champagne; he liked wit and anecdote; but he
belonged to the generation of 1830, a generation which could not
survive the telegraph and railway, and which even Yorkshire could
hardly produce again. To an American he was a character even
more unusual and more fascinating than his distant cousin Lord
Houghton.

Mr. Milnes Gaskell was kind to the young American whom his
son brought to the house, and Mrs. Milnes Gaskell was kinder, for
she thought the American perhaps a less dangerous friend than
some Englishman might be, for her son, and she was probably
right. The American had the sense to see that she was herself one
of the most intelligent and sympathetic women in England; her


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sister, Miss Charlotte Wynn, was another; and both were of an
age and a position in society that made their friendship a compliment
as well as a pleasure. Their consent and approval settled the
matter. In England, the family is a serious fact; once admitted to
it, one is there for life. London might utterly vanish from one's
horizon, but as long as life lasted, Yorkshire lived for its friends.

In the year 1857, Mr. James Milnes Gaskell, who had sat for
thirty years in Parliament as one of the Members for the borough
of Wenlock in Shropshire, bought Wenlock Abbey and the estate
that included the old monastic buildings. This new, or old, plaything
amused Mrs. Milnes Gaskell. The Prior's house, a charming
specimen of fifteenth-century architecture, had been long left
to decay as a farmhouse. She put it in order, and went there to
spend a part of the autumn of 1864. Young Adams was one of
her first guests, and drove about Wenlock Edge and the Wrekin
with her, learning the loveliness of this exquisite country, and
its stores of curious antiquity. It was a new and charming existence;
an experience greatly to be envied—ideal repose and rural
Shakespearian peace-but a few years of it were likely to complete
his education, and fit him to act a fairly useful part in life
as an Englishman, an ecclesiastic, and a contemporary of Chaucer.