"failed" because his culture was of no use there. Brooks tried for greatness in naturalistic philosophy, but found that his creed ignobly reduced all heroes to automata. But Henry, without otherwise committing himself, sought to comprehend and to represent his world, and he achieved greatness. Like yet unlike his ancestors who were painted by Copley and Stuart, he is in the grand style.
The Education of Henry Adams marks with precision the hour when its author became conscious of his variation. It was in England, towards the close of the war, where as secretary to his father he had exhausted all the excitements of the diplomatic "game," and London society had begun to pall, and loitering in Italy had ceased to charm, yet he was collecting bric-à-brac and sketches by the old masters and becoming attached to his habits and his hansom cabs, and was in a fair way to become one of those dilettantish, blasé young Americans of the period, whom Henry James has preserved like pressed flowers for posterity. It was after Sir Charles Lyell and the evolutionists had set him off on a new quest for a "father"—it mattered not, he said, "whether the father breathed through lungs, or walked on fins, or on feet." It was in that summer hour, characteristically marked by him with its picturesque accessories, when he had wandered to Wenlock Edge in Shropshire, and, throwing himself on the grass where he could look across the Marches
