with a broken and contrite spirit, prepared to admit that
his life had no meaning, and conscious that in any case it no
longer mattered.

After all, the speculations of Henry Adams, his thrusts at philosophy,
seem as futile as those of that very great American John Burroughs. It
is the facts of life as seen through his personality, the changes in our
political history as analyzed so skilfully by him after the manner of no
other man that make his book supremely interesting.

The real man is not hidden in "The Education of Henry Adams." We can no
longer talk of the degeneracy of American literary taste when we know
that this very American, characteristic, and illuminating book was a
"best seller" in our country for several months. Some who like to bewail
the degeneracy of our art and literature and of our drama, declare that
its popularity is simply due to a fashion. Biographies are the fashion,
and therefore it is the transitory habit of the illiterate book buyer to
purchase, if he does not read, biographies. This view may be dismissed
with a scornful wave of the hand.

When I took up "The Education of Henry Adams," I was informed that it
was "pathetic." Personally, it has never struck me that Henry Adams, as
far as I know him, is at all pathetic. He did not assume an air of
pathos when he read my review in _Scribner's Monthly_--before it became
the _Century_--of the novel "Democracy." Mr. Richard Watson Gilder, the
editor, was away at the time, and I recall his whimsical horror when on
his return he read the things I had said about a novel, which I, in the
heat of youth, held to be entirely un-American.

Mr. Henry Adams's book, in my opinion, has no element of pathos. Adams
lived a rare and interesting life. He loved beauty, and was so prepared
by tradition and education that he knew how to appreciate beauty
wherever he found it, and to give reasons for its being beautiful.
Against the rough material obstacles in life, which are supposed to be
good for a man, but are not at all good, since they absorb a great deal
of energy that is subtracted from his later life, he was not obliged to
struggle. Like Theodore Roosevelt, the greatest of all modern
Americans, who was a man of letters in love with life, Adams was not
compelled to look up to social strata above him, and, whatever the
enraged democrats may say, this in itself is a great advantage. One can
see from his "Education" that his material difficulties w