If history
had a chapter with which he thought himself familiar, it was the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries; yet so little has labor to do
with knowledge that these bare playgrounds of the lecture system
turned into green and verdurous virgin forests merely through the
medium of younger eyes and fresher minds. His German bias must
have given his youth a terrible twist, for the Lodges saw at a
glance what he had thought unessential because un-German. They
breathed native air in the Normandy of 1200, a compliment which
would have seemed to the Senator lacking in taste or even in
sense when addressed to one of a class of men who passed life in
trying to persuade themselves and the public that they breathed
nothing less American than a blizzard; but this atmosphere, in
the touch of a real emotion, betrayed the unconscious humor of
the senatorial mind. In the thirteenth century, by an unusual
chance, even a Senator became natural, simple, interested,
cultivated, artistic, liberal -- genial.
Through the Lodge eyes the old problem became new and personal;
it threw off all association with the German lecture-room. One
could not at first see what this novelty meant; it had the air of
mere antiquarian emotion like Wenlock Abbey and Pteraspis; but it
expelled archaic law and antiquarianism once for all, without
seeming conscious of it; and Adams drifted back to Washington
with a new sense of history.
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