Even more vigorously than in the twelfth century, Paris
taught in the twentieth, with no other school approaching it for
variety of direction and energy of mind. Of the teaching in
detail, a man who knew only what accident had taught him in the
nineteenth century, could know next to nothing, since science had
got quite beyond his horizon, and mathematics had become the only
necessary language of thought; but one could play with the toys
of childhood, including Ming porcelain, salons of painting,
operas and theatres, beaux-arts and Gothic architecture, theology
and anarchy, in any jumble of time; or totter about with Joe
Stickney, talking Greek philosophy or recent poetry, or studying
"Louise" at the Opera Comique, or discussing the charm of youth
and the Seine with Bay Lodge and his exquisite young wife. Paris
remained Parisian in spite of change, mistress of herself though
China fell. Scores of artists -- sculptors and painters, poets
and dramatists, workers in gems and metals, designers in stuffs
and furniture -- hundreds of chemists, physicists, even
philosophers, philologists, physicians, and historians -- were at
work, a thousand times as actively as ever before, and the mass
and originality of their product would have swamped any previous
age, as it very nearly swamped its own; but the effect was one of
chaos, and Adams stood as helpless before it as before the chaos
of New York.
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