To deal with him one
must stand near, like Rawlins, and practice more or less
sympathetic habits. Simple-minded beyond the experience of Wall
Street or State Street, he resorted, like most men of the same
intellectual calibre, to commonplaces when at a loss for
expression: "Let us have peace!" or, "The best way to treat a bad
law is to execute it"; or a score of such reversible sentences
generally to be gauged by their sententiousness; but sometimes he
made one doubt his good faith; as when he seriously remarked to a
particularly bright young woman that Venice would be a fine city
if it were drained. In Mark Twain, this suggestion would have
taken rank among his best witticisms; in Grant it was a measure
of simplicity not singular. Robert E. Lee betrayed the same
intellectual commonplace, in a Virginian form, not to the same
degree, but quite distinctly enough for one who knew the
American. What worried Adams was not the commonplace; it was, as
usual, his own education. Grant fretted and irritated him, like
the Terebratula, as a defiance of first principles. He had no
right to exist. He should have been extinct for ages. The idea
that, as society grew older, it grew one-sided, upset evolution,
and made of education a fraud. That, two thousand years after
Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, a man like Grant should be
called -- and should actually and truly be -- the highest product
of the most advanced evolution, made evolution ludicrous.
Pages:
377
378
379
380
381
382
383
384
385
386
387
388
389
390
391
392
393
394
395
396
397
398
399
400
401