tle and complex, at times more exasperating, yet upon the whole
more engaging, and above all more pervasive, than you are likely to come
upon in any autobiography of modern times. It is really wonderful how the
clothes fall away from the manikin, how with the best effort at draping
they in fact refuse to be put on at all. The reason is simple; for the
constant refrain of the study is that no clothes were ever found. The
manikin is therefore always in evidence for lack of covering, and ends by
having to apologize for its very existence. "To the tired student, the idea
that he must give it up [the search for philosophy-clothes] seemed sheer
senility. As long as he could whisper, he would go on as he had begun,
bluntly refusing to meet his creator with the admission that the creation
had taught him nothing except that the square of the hypothenuse of a
right-angled triangle might for convenience be taken as equal to something
else." On his own premises, the assumption that the manikin would ever meet
his creator (if he indeed had one), or that his creator would be concerned
with his opinion of the creation, is gratuitous. On his own premises, there
is something too much of the ego here. The _Education of Henry Adams_,
conceived as a study in the philosophy of history, turns out in fact to be
an _Apologia pro vita sua_, one of the most self-centered and
self-revealing books in the language.

The revelation is not indeed of the direct sort that springs from frank and
insouciant spontaneity. Since the revelation was not intended, the process
is tortuous in the extreme. It is a revelation that comes by the way, made
manifest in the effort to conceal it, overlaid by all sorts of cryptic
sentences and self-deprecatory phrases, half hidden by the protective
coloring taken on by a sensitive mind commonly employing paradox and
delighting in perverse and teasing mystification. One can never be sure
what the book means; but taken at its face value the _Education_ seems to
be the story of a man who regarded life from the outside, as a spectator at
the play, a play in which his own part as spectator was taken by a minor
character. The play was amusing in its absurdity, but it touched not the
spectator, Henry Adams, who was content to sit in his protected stall and
laugh in his sleeve at the play and the players--and most of all at himself
for laughing. Such is the implication; but I think it was not so. In the
_Mont-Saint-Michel_[17] Ada