Part 4 (1/2)

Yet he could talk to his cabman and conscientiously did his cathedrals, his Rhine, and whatever his coested Faithful to his self-contracted sche tinters in study of the Civil Law, he went back to Dresden with a letter to the Frau Hofrathin von Reichenbach, in whose house Lowell and other Americans had pursued studies more or less serious In those days, ”The Initials” was a new book The charave also a certain reflected light to Dresden Young Adaalleries and go to the theatre; but his social failure in the line of ”The Initials,” was hu and he succumbed to it The Frau Hofrathin herself was sohter at the total disco American in the face of her society Possibly an education e experience of the world; Raphael Pu, at about the sa their education by a picturesque intier Indians All experience is an arch, to build upon Yet Adauess what use his second winter in Germany was to him, or what he expected it to be Even the doctrine of accidental education broke down There were no accidents in Dresden As soon as the winter was over, he closed and locked the Ger breath of relief, and took the road to Italy He had then pursued his education, as it pleased hihteen months, and in spite of the infinite variety of new impressions which had packed themselves into his mind, he knew no raduated He had norant as a schoolboy of society He was unfit for any career in Europe, and unfitted for any career in Ah to see what alife to follow accidental and devious paths, one ht perhaps find soe, but this had been no part of Henry Adaes, and followed it till he found it led nowhere Nothing had been further from his mind when he started in November, 1858, than to beco else, he had become in April, 1860, when he joined his sister in Florence His father had been in the right The younghis father asked hiht back for the time and money put into his experiment! The only possible ansould be: ”Sir, I am a tourist!”

The ansas not what he hadhis father, in turn, what equivalent his brothers or cousins or friends at hoot out of the same time and money spent in Boston All they had put into the laas certainly throay, but were they happier in science? In theory one ht say, with some show of proof, that a pure, scientific education was alone correct; yet many of his friends who took it, found reason to co but a pure, scientific world in which they lived

Meanwhile his father had quite enough perplexities of his oithout seeking more in his son's errors His Quincy district had sent hi of 1860 he was in the full confusion of no candidates for the Presidential election in November He supported Mr Seward The Republican Party was an unknown force, and the Democratic Party was torn to pieces No one could see far into the future Fathers could blunder as well as sons, and, in 1860, every one was conscious of being dragged along paths much less secure than those of the European tourist For the ti ht heart to take whatever chance fragive hiood from the bad

He had of both sorts more than he kne to use Perhaps the most useful purpose he set hi letters, during the next three months, to his brother Charles, which his brother caused to be printed in the Boston Courier; and the exercise was good for him He had little to say, and said it not very well, but that mattered less The habit of expression leads to the search for so remains as a residuum of the commonplace itself, if one strikes out every co men as a rule saw little in Italy, or anywhere else, and in after life when Adaan to learn what soht that he should have betrayed his own inferiority as though it were his pride, while he invited his neighbors to measure and admire; but it was still the nearest approach he had yet ent act

For the rest, Italy was mostly an emotion and the emotion naturally centred in Roh, while bitterly hostile to Paris, seeiti education in a serious spirit, taking for granted that everything had a cause, and that nature tended to an end, Roether the most violent vice in the world, and Rome before 1870 was seductive beyond resistance Thewomen, have passed the month of May in Rome since then, and conceive that the charm continues to exist Possibly it does--in thehts and shadoere still mediaeval, and lowed, full of soft forms felt by lost senses No sand-blast of science had yet skinned off the epider The pictures were uncleaned, the churches unrestored, the ruins unexcavated Mediaeval Rome was sorcery Rome was the worst spot on earth to teach nineteenth-century youth what to do with a twentieth-century world One's elass of absinthe before dinner in the Palais Royal; they must be hurtful, else they could not have been so intense; and they were surely immoral, for no one, priest or politician, could honestly read in the ruins of Rome any other certain lesson than that they were evidence of the just judgs ofospel of anarchy and vice; the last place under the sun for educating the young; yet it was, by co--of either sex and every race--passionately, perversely, wickedly loved

Boys never see a conclusion; only on the edge of the grave can iven to the boy is apt to lead or drive him for the rest of his life into conclusion after conclusion that he never dreah at the Foruot the look, and it never ceased reacting To a young Bostonian, fresh from Germany, Rome seemed a pure emotion, quite free from economic or actual values, and he could not in reason or co up conundrum after conundrum in his educational path, which seeot to connect; that seeot to be somehow solved Rome was not a beetle to be dissected and dropped; not a bad French novel to be read in a railway train and thrown out of theafter other bad French novels, the morals of which could never approach the iland; it was going to be America Rome could not be fitted into an orderly, middle-class, Bostonian, systeress applied to it Not even tie of helpless historians--had value for it The Forum no more led to the Vatican than the Vatican to the Foruht bewith a thousand reat word Evolution had not yet, in 1860, ion had preached the sa in the entire history of Ro but flat contradiction

Of course both priests and evolutionists bitterly denied this heresy, but what they affirmed or denied in 1860 had very little iroundProbably it was more vital in May, 1860, than it had been in October, 1764, when the idea of writing the Decline and Fall of the city first started to thein the Church of the Zoccolanti or Franciscan Friars, while they were singing Vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, on the ruins of the Capitol” Murray's Handbook had the grace to quote this passage froraphy,” which led Adams more than once to sit at sunset on the steps of the Church of Santa Maria di Ara Coeli, curiously wondering that not an inch had been gained by Gibbon--or all the historians since--towards explaining the Fall The reat experiments of Western civilization had left there the chiefproved that the city ht not still survive to express the failure of a third

The youngfor a Gibbon never entered his mind He was a tourist, even to the depths of his sub-consciousness, and it ell for hireatest ofthe ruins of the Capitol,”

unless they have soinal to say about it Tacitus could do it; so could Michael Angelo; and so, at a pinch, could Gibbon, though in figure hardly heroic; but, in sum, none of them could say veryto hihbor, the blind beggar,next him, on the church steps No one ever had answered the question to the satisfaction of any one else; yet every one who had either head or heart, felt that sooner or later he must make up his mind what answer to accept Substitute the word America for the word Rome, and the question beca in Roht it Roe scarcely bore the test of posing with Roround

Perhaps Garibaldi--possibly even Cavour--could have sat ”in the close of the evening, a the ruins of the Capitol,” but one hardly saw Napoleon III there, or Pal, Ada in the studio of Halishman came in, evidently excited, and told of the shock he had just received, when riding near the Circus Maxiuillotine, where some criminal had been put to death an hour or two before The sudden surprise had quite overcome him; and Adams, who seldom saw the point of a story till time had blunted it, listened syrim horror had for the moment wiped out the memory of two thousand years of Roman bloodshed, or the consolation, derived from history and statistics, thatOnly by slow degrees, he grappled the conviction that the victiround of the Circus Maxi'sseelish Pippa Passes; while afterwards, in the light of Belgravia dinner-tables, he never ht have sat with Gibbon, a the ruins, and few Ro never revealed the poetic depths of Saint Francis; Williaelo, and Mommsen hardly said all that one felt by instinct in the lives of Cicero and Caesar They taught what, as a rule, needed no teaching, the lessons of a rather cheap i coies; without her, the Western world was pointless and fraght have gone on for the whole century, sitting a the ruins of the Capitol, and no one would have passed, capable of telling hi

So it ended; the happiestbehind the present, and probably beyond the past, sorotesquely out of place with the Berlin scheme or a Boston future Adae He would have put it better had he said that knowledge was absorbing hi impressions he knew no more when he left Rome than he did when he entered it As a marketable object, his value was less His next step went far to convince him that accidental education, whatever its econoiously successful as an object in itself Everything conspired to ruin his sound scherant as well as pauper He went on to Naples, and there, in the hot June, heard rumors that Garibaldi and his thousand were about to attack Paler on the American Minister, Chandler of Pennsylvania, he was kindly treated, not for his merit, but for his name, and Mr Chandler amiably consented to send him to the seat of war as bearer of despatches to Captain Pal Adaovern Prince Caracciolo

He told all about it to the Boston Courier; where the narrative probably exists to this day, unless the files of the Courier have wholly perished; but of its bearing on education the Courier did not speak He hi whatever, and as its value as a post-graduate course

Quite apart from its value as life attained, realized, capitalized, it had also a certain value as a lesson in soh Adams could never classify the branch of study Loosely, the tourist called it knowledge of norance of men Captain Pal man's uncle, Sydney Brooks, took hi call on Garibaldi, whom they found in the Senate House towards sunset, at supper with his picturesque and piratic staff, in the full noise and color of the Palered to Rossini and the Italian opera, or to Alexandre Dumas at the least, but the spectacle was not its educational side Garibaldi left the table, and, sitting down at the , had a feords of talk with Captain Pal Adams At that moment, in the summer of 1860, Garibaldi was certainly the ies in the world; the htly Even then society was dividing between banker and anarchist One or the other, Garibaldi must serve Himself a typical anarchist, sure to overshadow Europe and alarer than Naples, his success depended on his y was beyond doubt

Adams had the chance to look this sphinx in the eyes, and, for five minutes, to watch hireatest achievement and most splendid action One saw a quiet-featured, quiet-voiced man in a red flannel shi+rt; absolutely i Sympathetic it was, and one felt that it was siht be childlike, but could forht be a Napoleon or a Spartacus; in the hands of Cavour he ht, like the rest of the world, be only the vigorous player in the game he did not understand The student was none the wiser

This compound nature of patriot and pirate had illu, and was noAmerican who had no experience in double natures In the end, if the ”Autobiography” tells truth, Garibaldi saw and said that he had not understood his own acts; that he had been an instrument; that he had served the purposes of the class he least wanted to help; yet in 1860 he thought himself the revolution anarchic, Napoleonic, and his a Bostonian have made of a character like this, internally alive with childlike fancies, and externally quiet, si with apparent conviction the usual commonplaces of popular politics that all politicians use as the se of their intercourse with the public; but never betraying a thought?

Precisely this class of hest proble of it The lesson of Garibaldi, as education, seemed to teach the extreme complexity of extreloorm One did not need the vivid recollection of the low-voiced, si captain of Genoese adventurers and Sicilian brigands, supping in the July heat and Sicilian dirt and revolutionary claent Palermo, merely in order to remember that simplicity is complex

Adams left the problem as he found it, and came north to stumble over others, less picturesque but nearer He squandered two or three months on Paris From the first he had avoided Paris, and had wanted no French influence in his education He disapproved of France in the luh to order dinner and buy a theatre ticket; but more he did not seek He disliked the Empire and the Emperor particularly, but this was a trifle; he dislikedup a long list of all that he disliked, he disapproved of the whole, once for all, and shut theuratively out of his life

France was not serious, and he was not serious in going there

He did this in good faith, obeying the lessons his teachers had taught hi in no way responsible for the French and sincerely disapproving the he disapproved Stated thus crudely, the idea sounds derisive; but, as a matter of fact, several thousand Americans passed ht to take share in every function that was open to approach, as they sought tickets to the opera, because they were not a part of it Adaht of serious education had long vanished He tried to acquire a few French idio toa undy and one or two sauces; for the Trois Freres Provencaux and Voisin's and Philippe's and the Cafe Anglais; for the Palais Royal Theatre, and the Varietes and the Gymnase; for the Brohans and Bressant, Rose Cheri and Gil Perez, and other lights of the stage His friends were good to hi Paris rapidly becaot even to disapprove of it; but he studied nothing, entered no society, and made no acquaintance Accidental education went far in Paris, and one picked up a deal of knowledge that ht become useful; perhaps, after all, the three ht serve better purpose than the twenty-one months passed elsewhere; but he did not intend it--did not think it--and looked at it as aho as long as he could and spending all the money he dared, he started with mixed emotions but no education, for home

CHAPTER VII

TREASON (1860-1861)

WHEN, forty years afterwards, Henry Adae, he asked himself whether fortune or fate had ever dealt its cards quite so wildly to any of his known antecessors as when it led hiin the study of law and to vote for Abraham Lincoln on the same day

He dropped back on Quincy like a lump of lead; he rebounded like a football, tossed into space by an unknown energy which played with all his generation as a cat plays withNot one man in America wanted the Civil War, or expected or intended it A so on with their occupations in peace Not one, however clever or learned, guessed what happened Possibly a few Southern loyalists in despair ht dream it as an impossible chance; but none planned it