With a little hesitation, he suggested that it was
rather a chaos, which he meant for civility; but Stopford Brooke
abruptly met it by asking whether chaos were not better than
death. Truly the question was worth discussion. For his own part,
Adams inclined to think that neither chaos nor death was an
object to him as a searcher of knowledge -- neither would have
vogue in America -- neither would help him to a career. Both of
them led him away from his objects, into an English dilettante
museum of scraps, with nothing but a wall-paper to unite them in
any relation of sequence. Possibly English taste was one degree
more fatal than English scholarship, but even this question was
open to argument. Adams went to the sales and bought what he was
told to buy; now a classical drawing by Rafael or Rubens; now a
water-color by Girtin or Cotman, if possible unfinished because
it was more likely to be a sketch from nature; and he bought them
not because they went together -- on the contrary, they made
rather awkward spots on the wall as they did on the mind -- but
because he could afford to buy those, and not others. Ten pounds
did not go far to buy a Michael Angelo, but was a great deal of
money to a private secretary. The effect was spotty, fragmentary,
feeble; and the more so because the British mind was constructed
in that way -- boasted of it, and held it to be true philosophy
as well as sound method.
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