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 came 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 someone 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 "un-English," 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
decousu--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 debris. 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.