Not
that he liked the sensation, but that it was the most unearthly
he had felt. He had not yet happened on Rudyard Kipling's
"Mandalay," but he knew the poetry before he knew the poem, like
millions of wanderers, who have perhaps alone felt the world
exactly as it is. Nothing attracted him less than the idea of
beginning a new education. The old one had been poor enough; any
new one could only add to its faults. Life had been cut in
halves, and the old half had passed away, education and all,
leaving no stock to graft on.
The new world he faced in Paris and London seemed to him
fantastic Willing to admit it real in the sense of having some
kind of existence outside his own mind, he could not admit it
reasonable. In Paris, his heart sank to mere pulp before the
dismal ballets at the Grand Opera and the eternal vaudeville at
the old Palais Royal; but, except for them, his own Paris of the
Second Empire was as extinct as that of the first Napoleon. At
the galleries and exhibitions, he was racked by the effort of art
to be original, and when one day, after much reflection, John La
Farge asked whether there might not still be room for something
simple in art, Adams shook his head. As he saw the world, it was
no longer simple and could not express itself simply. It should
express what it was; and this was something that neither Adams
nor La Farge understood.
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