The same thing might be said, in a different sense, of Voltaire;
while, as every one knows, the money-value of any hand-stroke of
Watteau or Hogarth, Nattier or Sir Joshua, is out of all
proportion to the importance of the men. Society seemed to
delight in talking with solemn conviction about serious values,
and in paying fantastic prices for nothing but the most futile.
The drama acted at Peking, in the summer of 1900, was, in the
eyes of a student, the most serious that could be offered for his
study, since it brought him suddenly to the inevitable struggle
for the control of China, which, in his view, must decide the
control of the world; yet, as a money-value, the fall of China
was chiefly studied in Paris and London as a calamity to Chinese
porcelain. The value of a Ming vase was more serious than
universal war.
The drama of the Legations interested the public much as though
it were a novel of Alexandre Dumas, but the bearing of the drama
on future history offered an interest vastly greater. Adams knew
no more about it than though he were the best-informed statesman
in Europe. Like them all, he took for granted that the Legations
were massacred, and that John Hay, who alone championed China's
"administrative entity," would be massacred too, since he must
henceforth look on, in impotence, while Russia and Germany
dismembered China, and shut up America at home.
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