as Henry Adams felt no
responsibility for English art, and had no American art to offer
for sacrifice, he listened with enjoyment to language much like
Carlyle's, and accepted it without a qualm. On the other hand, as
a third member of this critical group, he fell in with Stopford
Brooke whose tastes lay in the same direction, and whose
expression was modified by clerical propriety. Among these men,
one wandered off into paths of education much too devious and
slippery for an American foot to follow. He would have done
better to go on the race-track, as far as concerned a career.
Fortunately for him he knew too little ever to be an
art-critic, still less an artist. For some things ignorance is
good, and art is one of them. He knew he knew nothing, and had
not the trained eye or the keen instinct that trusted itself; but
he was curious, as he went on, to find out how much others knew.
He took Palgrave's word as final about a drawing of Rembrandt or
Michael Angelo, and he trusted Woolner implicitly about a Turner;
but when he quoted their authority to any dealer, the dealer
pooh-poohed it, and declared that it had no weight in the trade.
If he went to a sale of drawings or paintings, at Sotheby's or
Christie's, an hour afterwards, he saw these same dealers
watching Palgrave or Woolner for a point, and bidding over them.
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