Page:Adams - Essays in Modernity.djvu/67

Rh second term, and went to study in Paris. There, a few months later, I lost sight of you, A letter to you at the ranche was returned to me, with the intelligence that you had gone away and left no address; and it was, I see, just about that time that I discovered I was becoming as hopelessly restless and dissatisfied as I had been at Oxford. Renan was a great personal disappointment to me. A teacher of spirituality and an ideal philosophy was visibly ending an old age of universal disillusionment in gourmandise, and his ironically epicurean remorse (I mean his remorse for not having been an ironical epicure) was not to my taste. Thus, presently, I found myself in Jena, seeking out Ernst Häckel, as a sort of moral tonic for a relaxed soul. But there, too, I soon found the old disgust, the old unrest. Häckel's limitations are fearful. A scientific Philistine with genius, who speaks of France as a frivolous abode of barbarism, and is training up mobs of blatant young tow-heads in the full fervour of this outrageous creed of second-rate Teutonic Chauvinism, could not satisfy me long. Then I went off to Italy and Sicily with a dear little Jew antiquarian, a Herr Doctor of Jena, and helped him to get together materials for a monograph on the Saracens in Europe, till the old restlessness came upon me once again—not this time in the shape of a personal disgust (it