Page:Americans (1922).djvu/331

 by rising men of the "people," whom he has half or wholly despised—by Franklin, by Paine, by Jefferson, by Jackson, by Lincoln, by Grant. But when John Quincy was defeated by Jackson, though he thought God had abandoned America, he felt himself still high priest. And though Henry thought the progress of evolution from Washington to Grant sufficient to upset Darwin, and though he regarded Grant as a man who should have lived in a cave and worn skins, he reinstated Darwin in the next breath; for Henry Adams would not have changed places with Washington; he regarded Washington himself as but a cave man in comparison with Henry Adams!

In revulsion from a world bent on making twelve dividends of ten per cent in a year and spending them for it knew not what, the Adams energy in him had been diverted to the production of a human measure of civilization; to a register of the value of art and social life and manners and those other by-products of coal and iron which the Philistines of every age rate as superfluous things; to a search, finally, to an inquiry all the way from Kelvin to the Virgin of Chartres, for some principle of Unity, for some splendor to illumine the gray twilight of an industrial democracy. He did not find it, but the quest was glorious.

Henry Adams was an egotist. Granted. But what an egotist! Not since Byron