Thackeray and Dickens followed Balzac in
scratching and biting the unfortunate middle class with savage
ill-temper, much as the middle class had scratched and bitten the
Church and Court for a hundred years before. The middle class had
the power, and held its coal and iron well in hand, but the
satirists and idealists seized the press, and as they were agreed
that the Second Empire was a disgrace to France and a danger to
England, they turned to Germany because at that moment Germany
was neither economical nor military, and a hundred years behind
western Europe in the simplicity of its standard. German thought,
method, honesty, and even taste, became the standards of
scholarship. Goethe was raised to the rank of Shakespeare -- Kant
ranked as a law-giver above Plato. All serious scholars were
obliged to become German, for German thought was revolutionizing
criticism. Lowell had followed the rest, not very
enthusiastically, but with sufficient conviction, and invited his
scholars to join him. Adams was glad to accept the invitation,
rather for the sake of cultivating Lowell than Germany, but still
in perfect good faith. It was the first serious attempt he had
made to direct his own education, and he was sure of getting some
education out of it; not perhaps anything that he expected, but
at least a path.
Singularly circuitous and excessively wasteful of energy the
path proved to be, but the student could never see what other was
open to him.
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