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 role 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 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 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.
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.
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 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 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.
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 mediaeval, 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; 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-rug, 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 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.
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 door, this particular morning, he found there
another young man in the act of rapping the knocker. They entered the
breakfastroom 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 his 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 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
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 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.