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show the role of the context in understanding a specific text. He con–
cludes persuasively that the relation is reciprocal. The text is in the
context and the context is in the text .
I am puzzled , however, by White's interpretation of Henry
Adams, which seems to me basically mistaken . He quotes D. W.
Brogan's introduction to the 1961 edition of
The Education
oj
Henry
Adams
without trying to refute these comments, arguing that one
could give a totally different account of what the text means and that
Brogan's remarks are arbitrary . I do not see what are the grounds for
dismissing Brogan, who makes sound comments that are by no
means only a question of taste, as White suggests . For instance,
Brogan is surely right that the
Education
is a record of disillusionment
with the victorious Union, and that Adams was an artist in the sense
that he knew how to compose his autobiography and how to tell his
story vividly and personally, in spite of the concealment of the third
person narrative . But White, I think , totally misinterprets Adams's
mentality and historical position when he sees him as being more
like Oscar Wilde. "The location of the artist's persona is in the
precious , however serious, world of Oscar Wilde and Swinburne,
whom Adams professes to admire ." This is utterly mistaken: Adams
many times emphasizes that he comes from the eighteenth century.
Poetry played only a very minor part in his mental landscape. He
did not admire Swinburne ; he was rather puzzled and astonished by
him when he had to listen to his tirades on a visit to Monckton
Milnes's country house,
Fryston,
in 1862. There is simply no evi–
dence that Adams was decadent in any sense of the nineteenth–
century
fin-de-siecle.
His taste in poetry, as he tells us, was deter–
mined by Palgrave's
Treasury of English Verse
(1864) and was un–
touched by newer developments.
Nor is it correct to accuse Adams of intending the
Education
as a
superior alternative to the
Confessions
of St. Augustine: "Its superior–
ity consists , it is suggested, not so much in its worldliness (in con–
trast to the Christian mythology of Augustine's
Confessions)
as
in
its
egotism (a quality Augustine seeks to erode in his own text as much
by precept as by discursive example) ." There is, however, no indica–
tion that Adams considered his own.view of history and his egotism
to be superior to St. Augustine's. Adams, after all, argued for a
theory of history, which assumes a decline from the unity of the Mid–
dle Ages, admiringly expounded in
Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres,
to
the multiplicity and chaos of the modern age . The fact that Adams
was critical or even rejected all philosophies of history, like Hegel's,
Marx's and Darwin's, does not mean that he appealed only, as
