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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #66074 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/66074)
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-The Project Gutenberg eBook of Mere Literature and Other Essays, by
-Woodrow Wilson
-
-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
-most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
-whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
-of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
-www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you
-will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before
-using this eBook.
-
-Title: Mere Literature and Other Essays
-
-Author: Woodrow Wilson
-
-Release Date: August 17, 2021 [eBook #66074]
-
-Language: English
-
-Produced by: Charlene Taylor, Charlie Howard, and the Online Distributed
-             Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was
-             produced from images generously made available by The
-             Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
-
-*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MERE LITERATURE AND OTHER
-ESSAYS ***
-
-
-
-
-
-Books by Woodrow Wilson
-
-
-  CONGRESSIONAL GOVERNMENT. A Study in American Politics.
-    16mo, $1.25.
-
-  MERE LITERATURE, and Other Essays. 12mo, $1.50.
-
-
-  HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
-  BOSTON AND NEW YORK
-
-
-
-
-  MERE LITERATURE
-
-  _AND OTHER ESSAYS_
-
-
-  BY
-  WOODROW WILSON
-
-
-  [Illustration]
-
-
-  BOSTON AND NEW YORK
-  HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
-  The Riverside Press, Cambridge
-
-
-
-
-  Copyright, 1896,
-  BY WOODROW WILSON
-
-  _All rights reserved._
-
-
-
-
-  TO
-  STOCKTON AXSON
-
-  BY EVERY GIFT OF MIND A CRITIC
-  AND LOVER OF LETTERS
-  BY EVERY GIFT OF HEART A FRIEND
-  THIS LITTLE VOLUME
-  IS AFFECTIONATELY
-  DEDICATED
-
-
-
-
-CONTENTS.
-
-
-                                             PAGE
-
-    I. MERE LITERATURE                          1
-
-   II. THE AUTHOR HIMSELF                      28
-
-  III. ON AN AUTHOR’S CHOICE OF COMPANY        50
-
-   IV. A LITERARY POLITICIAN                   69
-
-    V. THE INTERPRETER OF ENGLISH LIBERTY     104
-
-   VI. THE TRUTH OF THE MATTER                161
-
-  VII. A CALENDAR OF GREAT AMERICANS          187
-
- VIII. THE COURSE OF AMERICAN HISTORY         213
-
-
-⁂ All but one of the essays brought together in this volume have
-already been printed, either in the _Atlantic Monthly_, the _Century
-Magazine_, or the _Forum_. The essay on Burke appears here for the
-first time in print.
-
-
-
-
-MERE LITERATURE.
-
-
-
-
-I.
-
-“MERE LITERATURE.”
-
-
-A singular phrase this, “mere literature,”--the irreverent invention
-of a scientific age. Literature we know, but “mere” literature? We are
-not to read it as if it meant _sheer_ literature, literature in the
-essence, stripped of all accidental or ephemeral elements, and left
-with nothing but its immortal charm and power. “Mere literature” is a
-serious sneer, conceived in all honesty by the scientific mind, which
-despises things that do not fall within the categories of demonstrable
-knowledge. It means _nothing but literature_, as who should say, “mere
-talk,” “mere fabrication,” “mere pastime.” The scientist, with his
-head comfortably and excusably full of knowable things, takes nothing
-seriously and with his hat off, except human knowledge. The creations
-of the human spirit are, from his point of view, incalculable vagaries,
-irresponsible phenomena, to be regarded only as play, and, for the
-mind’s good, only as recreation,--to be used to while away the tedium
-of a railway journey, or to amuse a period of rest or convalescence;
-mere byplay, mere make-believe.
-
-And so very whimsical things sometimes happen, because of this
-scientific and positivist spirit of the age, when the study of the
-literature of any language is made part of the curriculum of our
-colleges. The more delicate and subtle purposes of the study are
-put quite out of countenance, and literature is commanded to assume
-the phrases and the methods of science. It would be very painful if
-it should turn out that schools and universities were agencies of
-Philistinism; but there are some things which should prepare us for
-such a discovery. Our present plans for teaching everybody involve
-certain unpleasant things quite inevitably. It is obvious that you
-cannot have universal education without restricting your teaching
-to such things as can be universally understood. It is plain that
-you cannot impart “university methods” to thousands, or create
-“investigators” by the score, unless you confine your university
-education to matters which dull men can investigate, your laboratory
-training to tasks which mere plodding diligence and submissive patience
-can compass. Yet, if you do so limit and constrain what you teach, you
-thrust taste and insight and delicacy of perception out of the schools,
-exalt the obvious and the merely useful above the things which are
-only imaginatively or spiritually conceived, make education an affair
-of tasting and handling and smelling, and so create Philistia, that
-country in which they speak of “mere literature.” I suppose that in
-Nirvana one would speak in like wise of “mere life.”
-
-The fear, at any rate, that such things may happen cannot fail to set
-us anxiously pondering certain questions about the systematic teaching
-of literature in our schools and colleges. How are we to impart
-classical writings to the children of the general public? “Beshrew the
-general public!” cries Mr. Birrell. “What in the name of the Bodleian
-has the general public got to do with literature?” Unfortunately, it
-has a great deal to do with it; for are we not complacently forcing the
-general public into our universities, and are we not arranging that
-all its sons shall be instructed how they may themselves master and
-teach our literature? You have nowadays, it is believed, only to heed
-the suggestions of pedagogics in order to know how to impart Burke or
-Browning, Dryden or Swift. There are certain practical difficulties,
-indeed; but there are ways of overcoming them. You must have strength
-if you would handle with real mastery the firm fibre of these men; you
-must have a heart, moreover, to feel their warmth, an eye to see what
-they see, an imagination to keep them company, a pulse to experience
-their delights. But if you have none of these things, you may make
-shift to do without them. You may count the words they use, instead,
-note the changes of phrase they make in successive revisions, put their
-rhythm into a scale of feet, run their allusions--particularly their
-female allusions--to cover, detect them in their previous reading.
-Or, if none of these things please you, or you find the big authors
-difficult or dull, you may drag to light all the minor writers of
-their time, who are easy to understand. By setting an example in such
-methods you render great services in certain directions. You make the
-higher degrees of our universities available for the large number of
-respectable men who can count, and measure, and search diligently; and
-that may prove no small matter. You divert attention from thought,
-which is not always easy to get at, and fix attention upon language,
-as upon a curious mechanism, which can be perceived with the bodily
-eye, and which is worthy to be studied for its own sake, quite apart
-from anything it may mean. You encourage the examination of forms,
-grammatical and metrical, which can be quite accurately determined and
-quite exhaustively catalogued. You bring all the visible phenomena of
-writing to light and into ordered system. You go further, and show how
-to make careful literal identification of stories somewhere told ill
-and without art with the same stories told over again by the masters,
-well and with the transfiguring effect of genius. You thus broaden
-the area of science; for you rescue the concrete phenomena of the
-expression of thought--the necessary syllabification which accompanies
-it, the inevitable juxtaposition of words, the constant use of
-particles, the habitual display of roots, the inveterate repetition of
-names, the recurrent employment of meanings heard or read--from their
-confusion with the otherwise unclassifiable manifestations of what had
-hitherto been accepted, without critical examination, under the lump
-term “literature,” simply for the pleasure and spiritual edification to
-be got from it.
-
-An instructive differentiation ensues. In contrast with the orderly
-phenomena of speech and writing, which are amenable to scientific
-processes of examination and classification, and which take rank with
-the orderly successions of change in nature, we have what, for want
-of a more exact term, we call “mere literature,”--the literature
-which is not an expression of form, but an expression of spirit. This
-is a fugitive and troublesome thing, and perhaps does not belong
-in well-conceived plans of universal instruction; for it offers
-many embarrassments to pedagogic method. It escapes all scientific
-categories. It is not pervious to research. It is too wayward to be
-brought under the discipline of exposition. It is an attribute of so
-many different substances at one and the same time, that the consistent
-scientific man must needs put it forth from his company, as without
-responsible connections. By “mere literature” he means mere evanescent
-color, wanton trick of phrase, perverse departures from categorical
-statement,--something _all_ personal equation, such stuff as dreams are
-made of.
-
-We must not all, however, be impatient of this truant child of fancy.
-When the schools cast her out, she will stand in need of friendly
-succor, and we must train our spirits for the function. We must
-be free-hearted in order to make her happy, for she will accept
-entertainment from no sober, prudent fellow who shall counsel her to
-mend her ways. She has always made light of hardship, and she has
-never loved or obeyed any, save those who were of her own mind,--those
-who were indulgent to her humors, responsive to her ways of thought,
-attentive to her whims, content with her “mere” charms. She already
-has her small following of devotees, like all charming, capricious
-mistresses. There are some still who think that to know her is better
-than a liberal education.
-
-There is but one way in which you can take mere literature as an
-education, and that is directly, at first hand. Almost any media except
-her own language and touch and tone are non-conducting. A descriptive
-catalogue of a collection of paintings is no substitute for the little
-areas of color and form themselves. You do not want to hear about a
-beautiful woman, simply,--how she was dressed, how she bore herself,
-how the fine color flowed sweetly here and there upon her cheeks,
-how her eyes burned and melted, how her voice thrilled through the
-ears of those about her. If you have ever seen a woman, these things
-but tantalize and hurt you, if you cannot see her. You want to be in
-her presence. You know that only your own eyes can give you direct
-knowledge of her. Nothing but her presence contains her life. ’Tis the
-same with the authentic products of literature. You can never get their
-beauty at second hand, or feel their power except by direct contact
-with them.
-
-It is a strange and occult thing how this quality of “mere literature”
-enters into one book, and is absent from another; but no man who
-has once felt it can mistake it. I was reading the other day a book
-about Canada. It is written in what the reviewers have pronounced to
-be an “admirable, spirited style.” By this I take them to mean that
-it is grammatical, orderly, and full of strong adjectives. But these
-reviewers would have known more about the style in which it is written
-if they had noted what happens on page 84. There a quotation from Burke
-occurs. “There is,” says Burke, “but one healing, catholic principle of
-toleration which ought to find favor in this house. It is wanted not
-only in our colonies, but here. The thirsty earth of our own country
-is gasping and gaping and crying out for that healing shower from
-heaven. The noble lord has told you of the right of those people by
-treaty; but I consider the right of conquest so little, and the right
-of human nature so much, that the former has very little consideration
-with me. I look upon the people of Canada as coming by the dispensation
-of God under the British government. I would have us govern it in the
-same manner as the all--wise disposition of Providence would govern
-it. We know he suffers the sun to shine upon the righteous and the
-unrighteous; and we ought to suffer all classes to enjoy equally the
-right of worshiping God according to the light he has been pleased
-to give them.” The peculiarity of such a passage as that is, that it
-needs no context. Its beauty seems almost independent of its subject
-matter. It comes on that eighty-fourth page like a burst of music in
-the midst of small talk,--a tone of sweet harmony heard amidst a rattle
-of phrases. The mild noise was unobjectionable enough until the music
-came. There is a breath and stir of life in those sentences of Burke’s
-which is to be perceived in nothing else in that volume. Your pulses
-catch a quicker movement from them, and are stronger on their account.
-
-It is so with all essential literature. It has a quality to move you,
-and you can never mistake it, if you have any blood in you. And it has
-also a power to instruct you which is as effective as it is subtle,
-and which no research or systematic method can ever rival. ’Tis a sore
-pity if that power cannot be made available in the classroom. It is
-not merely that it quickens your thought and fills your imagination
-with the images that have illuminated the choicer minds of the race. It
-does indeed exercise the faculties in this wise, bringing them into the
-best atmosphere, and into the presence of the men of greatest charm and
-force; but it does a great deal more than that. It acquaints the mind,
-by direct contact, with the forces which really govern and modify
-the world from generation to generation. There is more of a nation’s
-politics to be got out of its poetry than out of all its systematic
-writers upon public affairs and constitutions. Epics are better
-mirrors of manners than chronicles; dramas oftentimes let you into the
-secrets of statutes; orations stirred by a deep energy of emotion or
-resolution, passionate pamphlets that survive their mission because
-of the direct action of their style along permanent lines of thought,
-contain more history than parliamentary journals. It is not knowledge
-that moves the world, but ideals, convictions, the opinions or fancies
-that have been held or followed; and whoever studies humanity ought to
-study it alive, practice the vivisection of reading literature, and
-acquaint himself with something more than anatomies which are no longer
-in use by spirits.
-
-There are some words of Thibaut, the great jurist, which have long
-seemed to me singularly penetrative of one of the secrets of the
-intellectual life. “I told him,” he says,--he is speaking of an
-interview with Niebuhr,--“I told him that I owed my gayety and vigor,
-in great part, to my love for the classics of all ages, even those
-outside the domain of jurisprudence.” Not only the gayety and vigor
-of his hale old age, surely, but also his insight into the meaning
-and purpose of laws and institutions. The jurist who does not love
-the classics of all ages is like a post-mortem doctor presiding at a
-birth, a maker of manikins prescribing for a disease of the blood, a
-student of masks setting up for a connoisseur in smiles and kisses.
-In narrating history, you are speaking of what was done by men; in
-discoursing of laws, you are seeking to show what courses of action,
-and what manner of dealing with one another, men have adopted. You
-can neither tell the story nor conceive the law till you know how the
-men you speak of regarded themselves and one another; and I know of
-no way of learning this but by reading the stories they have told of
-themselves, the songs they have sung, the heroic adventures they have
-applauded. I must know what, if anything, they revered; I must hear
-their sneers and gibes; must learn in what accents they spoke love
-within the family circle; with what grace they obeyed their superiors
-in station; how they conceived it politic to live, and wise to die;
-how they esteemed property, and what they deemed privilege; when they
-kept holiday, and why; when they were prone to resist oppression, and
-wherefore,--I must see things with their eyes, before I can comprehend
-their law books. Their jural relationships are not independent of
-their way of living, and their way of thinking is the mirror of their
-way of living.
-
-It is doubtless due to the scientific spirit of the age that these
-plain, these immemorial truths are in danger of becoming obscured.
-Science, under the influence of the conception of evolution, devotes
-itself to the study of forms, of specific differences, of the manner
-in which the same principle of life manifests itself variously under
-the compulsions of changes of environment. It is thus that it has
-become “scientific” to set forth the manner in which man’s nature
-submits to man’s circumstances; scientific to disclose morbid moods,
-and the conditions which produce them; scientific to regard man, not
-as the centre or source of power, but as subject to power, a register
-of external forces instead of an originative soul, and character as
-a product of man’s circumstances rather than a sign of man’s mastery
-over circumstance. It is thus that it has become “scientific” to
-analyze language as itself a commanding element in man’s life. The
-history of word-roots, their modification under the influences of
-changes wrought in the vocal organs by habit or by climate, the laws of
-phonetic change to which they are obedient, and their persistence under
-all disguises of dialect, as if they were full of a self-originated
-life, a self-directed energy of influence, is united with the study
-of grammatical forms in the construction of scientific conceptions
-of the evolution and uses of human speech. The impression is created
-that literature is only the chosen vessel of these forms, disclosing
-to us their modification in use and structure from age to age. Such
-vitality as the masterpieces of genius possess comes to seem only a
-dramatization of the fortunes of words. Great writers construct for the
-adventures of language their appropriate epics. Or, if it be not the
-words themselves that are scrutinized, but the style of their use, that
-style becomes, instead of a fine essence of personality, a matter of
-cadence merely, or of grammatical and structural relationships. Science
-is the study of the forces of the world of matter, the adjustments, the
-apparatus, of the universe; and the scientific study of literature has
-likewise become a study of apparatus,--of the forms in which men utter
-thought, and the forces by which those forms have been and still are
-being modified, rather than of thought itself.
-
-The essences of literature of course remain the same under all forms,
-and the true study of literature is the study of these essences,--a
-study, not of forms or of differences, but of likenesses,--likenesses
-of spirit and intent under whatever varieties of method, running
-through all forms of speech like the same music along the chords
-of various instruments. There is a sense in which literature is
-independent of form, just as there is a sense in which music is
-independent of its instrument. It is my cherished belief that Apollo’s
-pipe contained as much eloquent music as any modern orchestra. Some
-books live; many die: wherein is the secret of immortality? Not
-in beauty of form, nor even in force of passion. We might say of
-literature what Wordsworth said of poetry, the most easily immortal
-part of literature: it is “the impassioned expression which is in the
-countenance of all science; it is the breath of the finer spirit of
-all knowledge.” Poetry has the easier immortality because it has the
-sweeter accent when it speaks, because its phrases linger in our ears
-to delight them, because its truths are also melodies. Prose has much
-to overcome,--its plainness of visage, its less musical accents, its
-homelier turns of phrase. But it also may contain the immortal essence
-of truth and seriousness and high thought. It too may clothe conviction
-with the beauty that must make it shine forever. Let a man but have
-beauty in his heart, and, believing something with his might, put it
-forth arrayed as he sees it, the lights and shadows falling upon it on
-his page as they fall upon it in his heart, and he may die assured that
-that beauty will not pass away out of the world.
-
-Biographers have often been puzzled by the contrast between certain
-men as they lived and as they wrote. Schopenhauer’s case is one of the
-most singular. A man of turbulent life, suffering himself to be cut
-to exasperation by the petty worries of his lot, he was nevertheless
-calm and wise when he wrote, as if the Muse had rebuked him. He wrote
-at a still elevation, where small and temporary things did not come
-to disturb him. ’Tis a pity that for some men this elevation is so
-far to seek. They lose permanency by not finding it. Could there be a
-deliberate regimen of life for the author, it is plain enough how he
-ought to live, not as seeking fame, but as deserving it.
-
-   “Fame, like a wayward girl, will still be coy
-    To those who woo her with too slavish knees;
-    But makes surrender to some thoughtless boy,
-    And dotes the more upon a heart at ease.
-
-           *       *       *       *       *
-
-   “Ye love-sick bards, repay her scorn with scorn;
-    Ye love-sick artists, madmen that ye are,
-    Make your best bow to her and bid adieu;
-    Then, if she likes it, she will follow you.”
-
-It behooves all minor authors to realize the possibility of their being
-discovered some day, and exposed to the general scrutiny. They ought
-to live as if conscious of the risk. They ought to purge their hearts
-of everything that is not genuine and capable of lasting the world a
-century, at least, if need be. Mere literature is made of spirit. The
-difficulties of style are the artist’s difficulties with his tools. The
-spirit that is in the eye, in the pose, in mien or gesture, the painter
-must find in his color-box; as he must find also the spirit that
-nature displays upon the face of the fields or in the hidden places
-of the forest. The writer has less obvious means. Word and spirit do
-not easily consort. The language which the philologists set out before
-us with such curious erudition is of very little use as a vehicle
-for the essences of the human spirit. It is too sophisticated and
-self-conscious. What you need is, not a critical knowledge of language,
-but a quick feeling for it. You must recognize the affinities between
-your spirit and its idioms. You must immerse your phrase in your
-thought, your thought in your phrase, till each becomes saturated with
-the other. Then what you produce is as necessarily fit for permanency
-as if it were incarnated spirit.
-
-And you must produce in color, with the touch of imagination which
-lifts what you write away from the dull levels of mere exposition.
-Black-and-white sketches may serve some purposes of the artist,
-but very little of actual nature is in mere black-and-white. The
-imagination never works thus with satisfaction. Nothing is ever
-conceived completely when conceived so grayly, without suffusion
-of real light. The mind creates, as great Nature does, in colors,
-with deep chiaroscuro and burning lights. This is true not only of
-poetry and essentially imaginative writing, but also of the writing
-which seeks nothing more than to penetrate the meaning of actual
-affairs,--the writing of the greatest historians and philosophers,
-the utterances of orators and of the great masters of political
-exposition. Their narratives, their analyses, their appeals, their
-conceptions of principle, are all dipped deep in the colors of the
-life they expound. Their minds respond only to realities, their eyes
-see only actual circumstance. Their sentences quiver and are quick
-with visions of human affairs,--how minds are bent or governed, how
-action is shaped or thwarted. The great “constructive” minds, as we
-call them, are of this sort. They “construct” by seeing what others
-have not imagination enough to see. They do not always know more, but
-they always realize more. Let the singular reconstruction of Roman
-history and institutions by Theodor Mommsen serve as an illustration.
-Safe men distrust this great master. They cannot find what he finds
-in the documents. They will draw you truncated figures of the antique
-Roman state, and tell you the limbs cannot be found, the features of
-the face have nowhere been unearthed. They will cite you fragments such
-as remain, and show you how far these can be pieced together toward the
-making of a complete description of private life and public function
-in those first times when the Roman commonwealth was young; but what
-the missing sentences were they can only weakly conjecture. Their eyes
-cannot descry those distant days with no other aids than these. Only
-the greatest are dissatisfied, and go on to paint that ancient life
-with the materials that will render it lifelike,--the materials of the
-constructive imagination. They have other sources of information. They
-see living men in the old documents. Give them but the torso, and they
-will supply head and limbs, bright and animate as they must have been.
-If Mommsen does not quite do that, another man, with Mommsen’s eye and
-a touch more of color on his brush, might have done it,--may yet do it.
-
-It is in this way that we get some glimpse of the only relations that
-scholarship bears to literature. Literature can do without exact
-scholarship, or any scholarship at all, though it may impoverish
-itself thereby; but scholarship cannot do without literature. It needs
-literature to float it, to set it current, to authenticate it to the
-race, to get it out of closets, and into the brains of men who stir
-abroad. It will adorn literature, no doubt; literature will be the
-richer for its presence; but it will not, it cannot, of itself create
-literature. Rich stuffs from the East do not create a king, nor warlike
-trappings a conqueror. There is, indeed, a natural antagonism, let it
-be frankly said, between the standards of scholarship and the standards
-of literature. Exact scholarship values things in direct proportion
-as they are verifiable; but literature knows nothing of such tests.
-The truths which it seeks are the truths of self-expression. It is a
-thing of convictions, of insights, of what is felt and seen and heard
-and hoped for. Its meanings lurk behind nature, not in the facts of
-its phenomena. It speaks of things as the man who utters it saw them,
-not necessarily as God made them. The personality of the speaker runs
-throughout all the sentences of real literature. That personality may
-not be the personality of a poet: it may be only the personality of
-the penetrative seer. It may not have the atmosphere in which visions
-are seen, but only that in which men and affairs look keenly cut in
-outline, boldly massed in bulk, consummately grouped in detail, to the
-reader as to the writer. Sentences of perfectly clarified wisdom may
-be literature no less than stanzas of inspired song, or the intense
-utterances of impassioned feeling. The personality of the sunlight is
-in the keen lines of light that run along the edges of a sword no less
-than in the burning splendor of the rose or the radiant kindlings of a
-woman’s eye. You may feel the power of one master of thought playing
-upon your brain as you may feel that of another playing upon your heart.
-
-Scholarship gets into literature by becoming part of the originating
-individuality of a master of thought. No man is a master of thought
-without being also a master of its vehicle and instrument, style,
-that subtle medium of all its evasive effects of light and shade.
-Scholarship is material; it is not life. It becomes immortal only when
-it is worked upon by conviction, by schooled and chastened imagination,
-by thought that runs alive out of the inner fountains of individual
-insight and purpose. Colorless, or without suffusion of light from some
-source of light, it is dead, and will not twice be looked at; but made
-part of the life of a great mind, subordinated, absorbed, put forth
-with authentic stamp of currency on it, minted at some definite mint
-and bearing some sovereign image, it will even outlast the time when
-it shall have ceased to deserve the acceptance of scholars,--when it
-shall, in fact, have become “mere literature.”
-
-Scholarship is the realm of nicely adjusted opinion. It is the business
-of scholars to assess evidence and test conclusions, to discriminate
-values and reckon probabilities. Literature is the realm of conviction
-and vision. Its points of view are as various as they are oftentimes
-unverifiable. It speaks individual faiths. Its groundwork is not
-erudition, but reflection and fancy. Your thoroughgoing scholar dare
-not reflect. To reflect is to let himself in on his material; whereas
-what he wants is to keep himself apart, and view his materials in
-an air that does not color or refract. To reflect is to throw an
-atmosphere about what is in your mind,--an atmosphere which holds all
-the colors of your life. Reflection summons all associations, and
-they so throng and move that they dominate the mind’s stage at once.
-The plot is in their hands. Scholars, therefore, do not reflect;
-they label, group kind with kind, set forth in schemes, expound
-with dispassionate method. Their minds are not stages, but museums;
-nothing is done there, but very curious and valuable collections are
-kept there. If literature use scholarship, it is only to fill it with
-fancies or shape it to new standards, of which of itself it can know
-nothing.
-
-True, there are books reckoned primarily books of science and of
-scholarship which have nevertheless won standing as literature; books
-of science such as Newton wrote, books of scholarship such as Gibbon’s.
-But science was only the vestibule by which such a man as Newton
-entered the temple of nature, and the art he practiced was not the art
-of exposition, but the art of divination. He was not only a scientist,
-but also a seer; and we shall not lose sight of Newton because we value
-what he was more than what he knew. If we continue Gibbon in his fame,
-it will be for love of his art, not for worship of his scholarship. We
-some of us, nowadays, know the period of which he wrote better even
-than he did; but which one of us shall build so admirable a monument
-to ourselves, as artists, out of what we know? The scholar finds his
-immortality in the form he gives to his work. It is a hard saying, but
-the truth of it is inexorable: be an artist, or prepare for oblivion.
-You may write a chronicle, but you will not serve yourself thereby. You
-will only serve some fellow who shall come after you, possessing, what
-you did not have, an ear for the words you could not hit upon; an eye
-for the colors you could not see; a hand for the strokes you missed.
-
-Real literature you can always distinguish by its form, and yet it is
-not possible to indicate the form it should have. It is easy to say
-that it should have a form suitable to its matter; but how suitable?
-Suitable to set the matter off, adorn, embellish it, or suitable simply
-to bring it directly, quick and potent, to the apprehension of the
-reader? This is the question of style, about which many masters have
-had many opinions; upon which you can make up no safe generalization
-from the practice of those who have unquestionably given to the matter
-of their thought immortal form, an accent or a countenance never to be
-forgotten. Who shall say how much of Burke’s splendid and impressive
-imagery is part and stuff of his thought, or tell why even that part
-of Newman’s prose which is devoid of ornament, stripped to its shining
-skin, and running bare and lithe and athletic to carry its tidings to
-men, should promise to enjoy as certain an immortality? Why should
-Lamb go so quaintly and elaborately to work upon his critical essays,
-taking care to perfume every sentence, if possible, with the fine
-savor of an old phrase, if the same business could be as effectively
-done in the plain and even cadences of Mr. Matthew Arnold’s prose?
-Why should Gibbon be so formal, so stately, so elaborate, when he
-had before his eyes the example of great Tacitus, whose direct,
-sententious style had outlived by so many hundred years the very
-language in which he wrote? In poetry, who shall measure the varieties
-of style lavished upon similar themes? The matter of vital thought
-is not separable from the thinker; its forms must suit his handling
-as well as fit his conception. Any style is author’s stuff which is
-suitable to his purpose and his fancy. He may use rich fabrics with
-which to costume his thoughts, or he may use simple stone from which
-to sculpture them, and leave them bare. His only limits are those of
-art. He may not indulge a taste for the merely curious or fantastic.
-The quaint writers have quaint thoughts; their material is suitable.
-They do not merely satisfy themselves as virtuosi, with collections of
-odd phrases and obsolete meanings. They needed twisted words to fit
-the eccentric patterns of their thought. The great writer has always
-dignity, restraint, propriety, adequateness; what time he loses these
-qualities he ceases to be great. His style neither creaks nor breaks
-under his passion, but carries the strain with unshaken strength. It
-is not trivial or mean, but speaks what small meanings fall in its way
-with simplicity, as conscious of their smallness. Its playfulness is
-within bounds; its laugh never bursts too boisterously into a guffaw.
-A great style always knows what it would be at, and does the thing
-appropriately, with the larger sort of taste.
-
-This is the condemnation of tricks of phrase, devices to catch the
-attention, exaggerations and loud talk to hold it. No writer can afford
-to strive after effect, if his striving is to be apparent. For just
-and permanent effect is missed altogether unless it be so completely
-attained as to seem like some touch of sunlight, perfect, natural,
-inevitable, wrought without effort and without deliberate purpose
-to be effective. Mere audacity of attempt can, of course, never win
-the wished for result; and if the attempt be successful, it is not
-audacious. What we call audacity in a great writer has no touch of
-temerity, sauciness, or arrogance in it. It is simply high spirit,
-a dashing and splendid display of strength. Boldness is ridiculous
-unless it be impressive, and it can be impressive only when backed by
-solid forces of character and attainment. Your plebeian hack cannot
-afford the showy paces; only the full-blooded Arabian has the sinew
-and proportion to lend them perfect grace and propriety. The art of
-letters eschews the bizarre as rigidly as does every other fine art. It
-mixes its colors with brains, and is obedient to great Nature’s sane
-standards of right adjustment in all that it attempts.
-
-You can make no catalogue of these features of great writing; there is
-no science of literature. Literature in its essence is mere spirit, and
-you must experience it rather than analyze it too formally. It is the
-door to nature and to ourselves. It opens our hearts to receive the
-experiences of great men and the conceptions of great races. It awakens
-us to the significance of action and to the singular power of mental
-habit. It airs our souls in the wide atmosphere of contemplation. “In
-these bad days, when it is thought more educationally useful to know
-the principle of the common pump than Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn,” as
-Mr. Birrell says, we cannot afford to let one single precious sentence
-of “mere literature” go by us unread or unpraised. If this free people
-to which we belong is to keep its fine spirit, its perfect temper
-amidst affairs, its high courage in the face of difficulties, its wise
-temperateness and wide-eyed hope, it must continue to drink deep and
-often from the old wells of English undefiled, quaff the keen tonic of
-its best ideals, keep its blood warm with all the great utterances of
-exalted purpose and pure principle of which its matchless literature
-is full. The great spirits of the past must command us in the tasks of
-the future. Mere literature will keep us pure and keep us strong. Even
-though it puzzle or altogether escape scientific method, it may keep
-our horizon clear for us, and our eyes glad to look bravely forth upon
-the world.
-
-
-
-
-II.
-
-THE AUTHOR HIMSELF.
-
-
-Who can help wondering, concerning the modern multitude of books, where
-all these companions of his reading hours will be buried when they
-die; which will have monuments erected to them; which escape the envy
-of time and live? It is pathetic to think of the number that must be
-forgotten, after having been removed from the good places to make room
-for their betters.
-
-Much the most pathetic thought about books, however, is that excellence
-will not save them. Their fates will be as whimsical as those of the
-humankind which produces them. Knaves find it as easy to get remembered
-as good men. It is not right living or learning or kind offices, simply
-and of themselves, but--something else that gives immortality of fame.
-Be a book never so scholarly, it may die; be it never so witty, or
-never so full of good feeling and of an honest statement of truth, it
-may not live.
-
-When once a book has become immortal, we think that we can see why
-it became so. It contained, we perceive, a casting of thought which
-could not but arrest and retain men’s attention; it said some things
-once and for all because it gave them their best expression. Or else it
-spoke with a grace or with a fire of imagination, with a sweet cadence
-of phrase and a full harmony of tone, which have made it equally dear
-to all generations of those who love the free play of fancy or the
-incomparable music of perfected human speech. Or perhaps it uttered
-with candor and simplicity some universal sentiment; perchance pictured
-something in the tragedy or the comedy of man’s life as it was never
-pictured before, and must on that account be read and read again as not
-to be superseded. There must be something special, we judge, either
-in its form or in its substance, to account for its unwonted fame and
-fortune.
-
-This upon first analysis, taking one book at a time. A look deeper
-into the heart of the matter enables us to catch at least a glimpse of
-a single and common source of immortality. The world is attracted by
-books as each man is attracted by his several friends. You recommend
-that capital fellow So-and-So to the acquaintance of others because
-of his discriminating and diverting powers of observation: the very
-tones and persons--it would seem the very selves--of every type of man
-live again in his mimicries and descriptions. He is the dramatist
-of your circle; you can never forget him, nor can any one else; his
-circle of acquaintances can never grow smaller. Could he live on and
-retain perennially that wonderful freshness and vivacity of his, he
-must become the most famous guest and favorite of the world. Who that
-has known a man quick and shrewd to see dispassionately the inner
-history, the reason and the ends, of the combinations of society,
-and at the same time eloquent to tell of them, with a hold on the
-attention gained by a certain quaint force and sagacity resident in
-no other man, can find it difficult to understand why we still resort
-to Montesquieu? Possibly there are circles favored of the gods who
-have known some fellow of infinite store of miscellaneous and curious
-learning, who has greatly diverted both himself and his friends by a
-way peculiar to himself of giving it out upon any and all occasions,
-item by item, as if it were all homogeneous and of a piece, and by his
-odd skill in making unexpected application of it to out-of-the-way,
-unpromising subjects, as if there were in his view of things mental no
-such disintegrating element as incongruity. Such a circle would esteem
-it strange were Burton not beloved of the world. And so of those, if
-any there be, who have known men of simple, calm, transparent natures,
-untouched by storm or perplexity, whose talk was full of such serious,
-placid reflection as seemed to mirror their own reverent hearts,--talk
-often prosy, but more often touchingly beautiful, because of its
-nearness to nature and the solemn truth of life. There may be those,
-also, who have felt the thrill of personal contact with some stormy
-peasant nature full of strenuous, unsparing speech concerning men and
-affairs. These have known why a Wordsworth or a Carlyle must be read by
-all generations of those who love words of first-hand inspiration. In
-short, in every case of literary immortality originative personality is
-present. Not origination simply,--that may be mere invention, which in
-literature has nothing immortal about it; but origination which takes
-its stamp and character from the originator, which is his spirit given
-to the world, which is himself outspoken.
-
-Individuality does not consist in the use of the very personal pronoun,
-_I_: it consists in tone, in method, in attitude, in point of view;
-it consists in saying things in such a way that you will yourself be
-recognized as a force in saying them. Do we not at once know Lamb
-when he speaks? And even more formal Addison, does not his speech
-bewray and endear him to us? His personal charm is less distinct, much
-less fascinating, than that which goes with what Lamb speaks, but a
-charm he has sufficient for immortality. In Steele the matter is more
-impersonal, more mortal. Some of Dr. Johnson’s essays, you feel, might
-have been written by a dictionary. It is impersonal matter that is dead
-matter. Are you asked who fathered a certain brilliant, poignant bit
-of political analysis? You say, Why, only Bagehot could have written
-that. Does a wittily turned verse make you hesitate between laughter at
-its hit and grave thought because of its deeper, covert meaning? Do you
-not know that only Lowell could do that? Do you catch a strain of pure
-Elizabethan music and doubt whether to attribute it to Shakespeare or
-to another? Do you not _know_ the authors who still live?
-
-Now, the noteworthy thing about such individuality is that it will not
-develop under every star, or in one place just as well as in another;
-there is an atmosphere which kills it, and there is an atmosphere
-which fosters it. The atmosphere which kills it is the atmosphere of
-sophistication, where cleverness and fashion and knowingness thrive:
-cleverness, which is froth, not strong drink; fashion, which is a thing
-assumed, not a thing of nature; and knowingness, which is naught.
-
-Of course there are born, now and again, as tokens of some rare mood
-of Nature, men of so intense and individual a cast that circumstance
-and surroundings affect them little more than friction affects an
-express train. They command their own development without even
-the consciousness that to command costs strength. These cannot be
-sophisticated; for sophistication is subordination to the ways of your
-world. But these are the very greatest and the very rarest; and it
-is not the greatest and the rarest alone who shape the world and its
-thought. That is done also by the great and the merely extraordinary.
-There is a rank and file in literature, even in the literature of
-immortality, and these must go much to school to the people about them.
-
-It is by the number and charm of the individualities which it contains
-that the literature of any country gains distinction. We turn
-anywhither to know men. The best way to foster literature, if it may be
-fostered, is to cultivate the author himself,--a plant of such delicate
-and precarious growth that special soils are needed to produce it in
-its full perfection. The conditions which foster individuality are
-those which foster simplicity, thought and action which are direct,
-naturalness, spontaneity. What are these conditions?
-
-In the first place, a certain helpful ignorance. It is best for the
-author to be born away from literary centres, or to be excluded from
-their ruling set if he be born in them. It is best that he start out
-with his thinking, not knowing how much has been thought and said about
-everything. A certain amount of ignorance will insure his sincerity,
-will increase his boldness and shelter his genuineness, which is his
-hope of power. Not ignorance of life, but life may be learned in any
-neighborhood;--not ignorance of the greater laws which govern human
-affairs, but they may be learned without a library of historians
-and commentators, by imaginative sense, by seeing better than by
-reading;--not ignorance of the infinitudes of human circumstance, but
-these may be perceived without the intervention of universities;--not
-ignorance of one’s self and of one’s neighbor; but innocence of the
-sophistications of learning, its research without love, its knowledge
-without inspiration, its method without grace; freedom from its shame
-at trying to know many things as well as from its pride of trying to
-know but one thing; ignorance of that faith in small confounding facts
-which is contempt for large reassuring principles.
-
-Our present problem is not how to clarify our reasonings and perfect
-our analyses, but how to reënrich and reënergize our literature. That
-literature is suffering, not from ignorance, but from sophistication
-and self-consciousness; and it is suffering hardly less from excess
-of logical method. Ratiocination does not keep us pure, render us
-earnest, or make us individual and specific forces in the world. Those
-inestimable results are accomplished by whatever implants principle
-and conviction, whatever quickens with inspiration, fills with purpose
-and courage, gives outlook, and makes character. Reasoned thinking
-does indeed clear the mind’s atmospheres and lay open to its view
-fields of action; but it is loving and believing, sometimes hating and
-distrusting, often prejudice and passion, always the many things which
-we call the one thing, character, which create and shape our acting.
-Life quite overtowers logic. Thinking and erudition alone will not
-equip for the great tasks and triumphs of life and literature: the
-persuading of other men’s purposes, the entrance into other men’s minds
-to possess them forever. Culture broadens and sweetens literature,
-but native sentiment and unmarred individuality create it. Not all of
-mental power lies in the processes of thinking. There is power also
-in passion, in personality, in simple, native, uncritical conviction,
-in unschooled feeling. The power of science, of system, is executive,
-not stimulative. I do not find that I derive inspiration, but only
-information, from the learned historians and analysts of liberty; but
-from the sonneteers, the poets, who, speak its spirit and its exalted
-purpose,--who, recking nothing of the historical method, obey only the
-high method of their own hearts,--what may a man not gain of courage
-and confidence in the right way of politics?
-
-It is your direct, unhesitating, intent, headlong man, who has his
-sources in the mountains, who digs deep channels for himself in the
-soil of his times and expands into the mighty river, to become a
-landmark forever; and not your “broad” man, sprung from the schools,
-who spreads his shallow, extended waters over the wide surfaces of
-learning, to leave rich deposits, it may be, for other men’s crops to
-grow in, but to be himself dried up by a few score summer noons. The
-man thrown early upon his own resources, and already become a conqueror
-of success before being thrown with the literary talkers; the man grown
-to giant’s stature in some rural library, and become exercised there
-in a giant’s prerogatives before ever he has been laughingly told, to
-his heart’s confusion, of scores of other giants dead and forgotten
-long ago; the man grounded in hope and settled in conviction ere he has
-discovered how many hopes time has seen buried, how many convictions
-cruelly given the lie direct by fate; the man who has carried his youth
-into middle age before going into the chill atmosphere of _blasé_
-sentiment; the quiet, stern man who has cultivated literature on a
-little oatmeal before thrusting himself upon the great world as a
-prophet and seer; the man who pronounces new eloquence in the rich
-dialect in which he was bred; the man come up to the capital from the
-provinces,--these are the men who people the world’s mind with new
-creations, and give to the sophisticated learned of the next generation
-new names to conjure with.
-
-If you have a candid and well-informed friend among city lawyers, ask
-him where the best masters of his profession are bred,--in the city or
-in the country. He will reply without hesitation, “In the country.”
-You will hardly need to have him state the reason. The country lawyer
-has been obliged to study all parts of the law alike, and he has known
-no reason why he should not do so. He has not had the chance to make
-himself a specialist in any one branch of the law, as is the fashion
-among city practitioners, and he has not coveted the opportunity to
-do it. There would not have been enough special cases to occupy or
-remunerate him if he had coveted it. He has dared attempt the task
-of knowing the whole law, and yet without any sense of daring, but as
-a matter of course. In his own little town, in the midst of his own
-small library of authorities, it has not seemed to him an impossible
-task to explore all the topics that engage his profession; the guiding
-principles, at any rate, of all branches of the great subject were
-open to him in a few books. And so it often happens that when he has
-found his sea legs on the sequestered inlets at home, and ventures,
-as he sometimes will, upon the great, troublous, and much-frequented
-waters of city practice in search of more work and larger fees, the
-country lawyer will once and again confound his city-bred brethren by
-discovering to them the fact that the law is a many-sided thing of
-principles, and not altogether a one-sided thing of technical rule and
-arbitrary precedent.
-
-It would seem to be necessary that the author who is to stand as a
-distinct and imperative individual among the company of those who
-express the world’s thought should come to a hard crystallization
-before subjecting himself to the tense strain of cities, the corrosive
-acids of critical circles. The ability to see for one’s self is
-attainable, not by mixing with crowds and ascertaining how they look
-at things, but by a certain aloofness and self-containment. The
-solitariness of some genius is not accidental; it is characteristic
-and essential. To the constructive imagination there are some immortal
-feats which are possible only in seclusion. The man must heed first and
-most of all the suggestions of his own spirit; and the world can be
-seen from windows overlooking the street better than from the street
-itself.
-
-Literature grows rich, various, full-voiced largely through the
-re-discovery of truth, by thinking re-thought, by stories re-told, by
-songs re-sung. The song of human experience grows richer and richer
-in its harmonies, and must grow until the full accord and melody are
-come. If too soon subjected to the tense strain of the city, a man
-cannot expand; he is beaten out of his natural shape by the incessant
-impact and press of men and affairs. It will often turn out that the
-unsophisticated man will display not only more force, but more literary
-skill even, than the trained _littérateur_. For one thing, he will
-probably have enjoyed a fresher contact with old literature. He reads
-not for the sake of a critical acquaintance with this or that author,
-with no thought of going through all his writings and “working him up,”
-but as he would ride a spirited horse, for love of the life and motion
-of it.
-
-A general impression seems to have gained currency that the last of
-the bullying, omniscient critics was buried in the grave of Francis
-Jeffrey; and it is becoming important to correct the misapprehension.
-There never was a time when there was more superior knowledge, more
-specialist omniscience, among reviewers than there is to-day; not
-pretended superior knowledge, but real. Jeffrey’s was very real of
-its kind. For those who write books, one of the special, inestimable
-advantages of lacking a too intimate knowledge of the “world of
-letters” consists in not knowing all that is known by those who review
-books, in ignorance of the fashions among those who construct canons
-of taste. The modern critic is a leader of fashion. He carries with
-him the air of a literary worldliness. If your book be a novel, your
-reviewer will know all previous plots, all former, all possible,
-motives and situations. You cannot write anything absolutely new for
-him, and why should you desire to do again what has been done already?
-If it be a poem, the reviewer’s head already rings with the whole gamut
-of the world’s metrical music; he can recognize any simile, recall all
-turns of phrase, match every sentiment; why seek to please him anew
-with old things? If it concern itself with the philosophy of politics,
-he can and will set himself to test it by the whole history of its
-kind from Plato down to Benjamin Kidd. How can it but spoil your
-sincerity to know that your critic will know everything? Will you not
-be tempted of the devil to anticipate his judgment or his pretensions
-by pretending to know as much as he?
-
-The literature of creation naturally falls into two kinds: that which
-interprets nature or human action, and that which interprets self. Both
-of these may have the flavor of immortality, but neither unless it be
-free from self-consciousness. No man, therefore, can create after the
-best manner in either of these kinds who is an _habitué_ of the circles
-made so delightful by those interesting men, the modern _literati_,
-sophisticated in all the fashions, ready in all the catches of the
-knowing literary world which centres in the city and the university. He
-cannot always be simple and straightforward. He cannot be always and
-without pretension himself, bound by no other man’s canons of taste in
-speech or conduct. In the judgment of such circles there is but one
-thing for you to do if you would gain distinction: you must “beat the
-record;” you must do certain definite literary feats better than they
-have yet been done. You are pitted against the literary “field.” You
-are hastened into the paralysis of comparing yourself with others,
-and thus away from the health of unhesitating self-expression and
-directness of first-hand vision.
-
-It would be not a little profitable if we could make correct analysis
-of the proper relations of learning--learning of the critical, accurate
-sort--to origination, of learning’s place in literature. Although
-learning is never the real parent of literature, but only sometimes its
-foster-father, and although the native promptings of soul and sense are
-its best and freshest sources, there is always the danger that learning
-will claim, in every court of taste which pretends to jurisdiction,
-exclusive and preëminent rights as the guardian and preceptor of
-authors. An effort is constantly being made to create and maintain
-standards of literary worldliness, if I may coin such a phrase. The
-thorough man of the world affects to despise natural feeling; does at
-any rate actually despise all displays of it. He has an eye always
-on his world’s best manners, whether native or imported, and is at
-continual pains to be master of the conventions of society; he will
-mortify the natural man as much as need be in order to be in good form.
-What learned criticism essays to do is to create a similar literary
-worldliness, to establish fashions and conventions in letters.
-
-I have an odd friend in one of the northern counties of Georgia,--a
-county set off by itself among the mountains, but early found out by
-refined people in search of summer refuge from the unhealthful air of
-the southern coast. He belongs to an excellent family of no little
-culture, but he was surprised in the midst of his early schooling by
-the coming on of the war; and education given pause in such wise seldom
-begins again in the schools. He was left, therefore, to “finish” his
-mind as best he might in the companionship of the books in his uncle’s
-library. These books were of the old sober sort: histories, volumes of
-travels, treatises on laws and constitutions, theologies, philosophies
-more fanciful than the romances encased in neighbor volumes on another
-shelf. But they were books which were used to being taken down and
-read; they had been daily companions to the rest of the family, and
-they became familiar companions to my friend’s boyhood. He went to
-them day after day, because theirs was the only society offered him in
-the lonely days when uncle and brothers were at the war, and the women
-were busy about the tasks of the home. How literally did he make those
-delightful old volumes his familiars, his cronies! He never dreamed the
-while, however, that he was becoming learned; it never seemed to occur
-to him that everybody else did not read just as he did, in just such
-a library. He found out afterwards, of course, that he had kept much
-more of such company than had the men with whom he loved to chat at
-the post-office or around the fire in the village shops, the habitual
-resorts of all who were socially inclined; but he attributed that to
-lack of time on their part, or to accident, and has gone on thinking
-until now that all the books that come within his reach are the natural
-intimates of man. And so you shall hear him, in his daily familiar
-talk with his neighbors, draw upon his singular stores of wise, quaint
-learning with the quiet colloquial assurance, “They tell me,” as if
-books contained current rumor; and quote the poets with the easy
-unaffectedness with which others cite a common maxim of the street! He
-has been heard to refer to Dr. Arnold of Rugby as “that school teacher
-over there in England.”
-
-Surely one may treasure the image of this simple, genuine man of
-learning as the image of a sort of masterpiece of Nature in her own
-type of erudition, a perfect sample of the kind of learning that might
-beget the very highest sort of literature; the literature, namely, of
-authentic individuality. It is only under one of two conditions that
-learning will not dull the edge of individuality: first, if one never
-suspect that it is creditable and a matter of pride to be learned, and
-so never become learned for the sake of becoming so; or, second, if
-it never suggest to one that investigation is better than reflection.
-Learned investigation leads to many good things, but one of these is
-not great literature, because learned investigation commands, as the
-first condition of its success, the repression of individuality.
-
-His mind is a great comfort to every man who has one; but a heart is
-not often to be so conveniently possessed. Hearts frequently give
-trouble; they are straightforward and impulsive, and can seldom be
-induced to be prudent. They must be schooled before they will become
-insensible; they must be coached before they can be made to care first
-and most for themselves: and in all cases the mind must be their
-schoolmaster and coach. They are irregular forces; but the mind may
-be trained to observe all points of circumstance and all motives of
-occasion.
-
-No doubt it is considerations of this nature that must be taken to
-explain the fact that our universities are erected entirely for the
-service of the tractable mind, while the heart’s only education must be
-gotten from association with its neighbor heart, and in the ordinary
-courses of the world. Life is its only university. Mind is monarch,
-whose laws claim supremacy in those lands which boast the movements
-of civilization, and it must command all the instrumentalities of
-education. At least such is the theory of the constitution of the
-modern world. It is to be suspected that, as a matter of fact, mind
-is one of those modern monarchs who reign, but do not govern. That
-old House of Commons, that popular chamber in which the passions, the
-prejudices, the inborn, unthinking affections long ago repudiated by
-mind, have their full representation, controls much the greater part
-of the actual conduct of affairs. To come out of the figure, reasoned
-thought is, though perhaps the presiding, not yet the regnant force in
-the world. In life and in literature it is subordinate. The future may
-belong to it; but the present and past do not. Faith and virtue do not
-wear its livery; friendship, loyalty, patriotism, do not derive their
-motives from it. It does not furnish the material for those masses of
-habit, of unquestioned tradition, and of treasured belief which are
-the ballast of every steady ship of state, enabling it to spread its
-sails safely to the breezes of progress, and even to stand before the
-storms of revolution. And this is a fact which has its reflection in
-literature. There is a literature of reasoned thought; but by far the
-greater part of those writings which we reckon worthy of that great
-name is the product, not of reasoned thought, but of the imagination
-and of the spiritual vision of those who see,--writings winged, not
-with knowledge, but with sympathy, with sentiment, with heartiness.
-Even the literature of reasoned thought gets its life, not from its
-logic, but from the spirit, the insight, and the inspiration which
-are the vehicle of its logic. Thought presides, but sentiment has the
-executive powers; the motive functions belong to feeling.
-
-“Many people give many theories of literary composition,” says the most
-natural and stimulating of English critics, “and Dr. Blair, whom we
-will read, is sometimes said to have exhausted the subject; but, unless
-he has proved the contrary, we believe that the knack in style is to
-write like a human being. Some think they must be wise, some elaborate,
-some concise; Tacitus wrote like a pair of stays; some startle us, as
-Thomas Carlyle, or a comet, inscribing with his tail. But legibility
-is given to those who neglect these notions, and are willing to be
-themselves, to write their own thoughts in their own words, in the
-simplest words, in the words wherein they were thought.... Books are
-for various purposes,--tracts to teach, almanacs to sell, poetry to
-make pastry; but this is the rarest sort of a book,--a book to read. As
-Dr. Johnson said, ‘Sir, a good book is one you can hold in your hand,
-and take to the fire.’ Now there are extremely few books which can,
-with any propriety, be so treated. When a great author, as Grote or
-Gibbon, has devoted a whole life of horrid industry to the composition
-of a large history, one feels one ought not to touch it with a mere
-hand,--it is not respectful. The idea of slavery hovers over the
-Decline and Fall. Fancy a stiffly dressed gentleman, in a stiff chair,
-slowly writing that stiff compilation in a stiff hand; it is enough to
-stiffen you for life.”
-
-It is devoutly to be wished that we might learn to prepare the best
-soils for mind, the best associations and companionships, the least
-possible sophistication. We are busy enough nowadays finding out
-the best ways of fertilizing and stimulating mind; but that is not
-quite the same thing as discovering the best soils for it, and the
-best atmospheres. Our culture is, by erroneous preference, of the
-reasoning faculty, as if that were all of us. Is it not the instinctive
-discontent of readers seeking stimulating contact with authors that
-has given us the present almost passionately spoken dissent from the
-standards set themselves by the realists in fiction, dissatisfaction
-with mere recording or observation? And is not realism working out upon
-itself the revenge its enemies would fain compass? Must not all April
-Hopes exclude from their number the hope of immortality?
-
-The rule for every man is, not to depend on the education which other
-men prepare for him,--not even to consent to it; but to strive to
-see things as they are, and to be himself as he is. Defeat lies in
-self-surrender.
-
-
-
-
-III.
-
-ON AN AUTHOR’S CHOICE OF COMPANY.
-
-
-Once and again, it would seem, a man is born into the world belated.
-Strayed out of a past age, he comes among us like an alien, lives
-removed and singular, and dies a stranger. There was a touch of this
-strangeness in Charles Lamb. Much as he was loved and befriended, he
-was not much understood; for he drew aloof in his studies, affected a
-“self-pleasing quaintness” in his style, took no pains to hit the taste
-of his day, wandered at sweet liberty in an age which could scarcely
-have bred such another. “Hang the age!” he cried. “I will write for
-antiquity.” And he did. He wrote as if it were still Shakespeare’s day;
-made the authors of that spacious time his constant companions and
-study; and deliberately became himself “the last of the Elizabethans.”
-When a new book came out, he said, he always read an old one.
-
-The case ought, surely, to put us occasionally upon reflecting. May an
-author not, in some degree, by choosing his literary company, choose
-also his literary character, and so, when he comes to write, write
-himself back to his masters? May he not, by examining his own tastes
-and yielding himself obedient to his natural affinities, join what
-congenial group of writers he will? The question can be argued very
-strongly in the affirmative, and that not alone because of Charles
-Lamb’s case. It might be said that Lamb was antique only in the forms
-of his speech; that he managed very cleverly to hit the taste of his
-age in the substance of what he wrote, for all the phraseology had so
-strong a flavor of quaintness and was not at all in the mode of the
-day. It would not be easy to prove that; but it really does not matter.
-In his tastes, certainly, Lamb was an old author, not a new one; a
-“modern antique,” as Hood called him. He wrote for his own age, of
-course, because there was no other age at hand to write for, and the
-age he liked best was past and gone; but he wrote what he fancied the
-great generations gone by would have liked, and what, as it has turned
-out in the generosity of fortune, subsequent ages have warmly loved and
-reverently canonized him for writing; as if there were a casual taste
-that belongs to a day and generation, and also a permanent taste which
-is without date, and he had hit the latter.
-
-Great authors are not often men of fashion. Fashion is always a
-harness and restraint, whether it be fashion in dress or fashion
-in vice or fashion in literary art; and a man who is bound by it is
-caught and formed in a fleeting mode. The great writers are always
-innovators; for they are always frank, natural, and downright, and
-frankness and naturalness always disturb, when they do not wholly break
-down, the fixed and complacent order of fashion. No genuine man can
-be deliberately in the fashion, indeed, in what he says, if he have
-any movement of thought or individuality in him. He remembers what
-Aristotle says, or if he does not, his own pride and manliness fill
-him with the thought instead. The very same action that is noble if
-done for the satisfaction of one’s own sense of right or purpose of
-self-development, said the Stagirite, may, if done to satisfy others,
-become menial and slavish. “It is the object of any action or study
-that is all-important,” and if the author’s chief object be to please
-he is condemned already. The true spirit of authorship is a spirit of
-liberty which scorns the slave’s trick of imitation. It is a masterful
-spirit of conquest within the sphere of ideas and of artistic form,--an
-impulse of empire and origination.
-
-Of course a man may choose, if he will, to be less than a free
-author. He may become a reporter; for there is such a thing as
-reporting for books as well as reporting for newspapers, and there
-have been reporters so amazingly clever that their very aptness and
-wit constitute them a sort of immortals. You have proof of this in
-Horace Walpole, at whose hands gossip and compliment receive a sort
-of apotheosis. Such men hold the secret of a kind of alchemy by which
-things trivial and temporary may be transmuted into literature. But
-they are only inspired reporters, after all; and while a man was
-wishing, he might wish to be more, and climb to better company.
-
-Every man must, of course, whether he will or not, feel the spirit
-of the age in which he lives and thinks and does his work; and the
-mere contact will direct and form him more or less. But to wish to
-serve the spirit of the age at any sacrifice of individual naturalness
-or conviction, however small, is to harbor the germ of a destroying
-disease. Every man who writes ought to write for immortality, even
-though he be of the multitude that die at their graves; and the
-standards of immortality are of no single age. There are many qualities
-and causes that give permanency to a book, but universal vogue during
-the author’s lifetime is not one of them. Many authors now immortal
-have enjoyed the applause of their own generations; many authors now
-universally admired will, let us hope, pass on to an easy immortality.
-The praise of your own day is no absolute disqualification; but it may
-be if it be given for qualities which your friends are the first to
-admire, for ’tis likely they will also be the last. There is a greater
-thing than the spirit of the age, and that is the spirit of the ages.
-It is present in your own day; it is even dominant then, with a sort of
-accumulated power and mastery. If you can strike it, you will strike,
-as it were, into the upper air of your own time, where the forces are
-which run from age to age. Lower down, where you breathe, is the more
-inconstant air of opinion, inhaled, exhaled, from day to day,--the
-variant currents, the forces that will carry you, not forward, but
-hither and thither.
-
-We write nowadays a great deal with our eyes circumspectly upon the
-tastes of our neighbors, but very little with our attention bent upon
-our own natural, self-speaking thoughts and the very truth of the
-matter whereof we are discoursing. Now and again, it is true, we are
-startled to find how the age relishes still an old-fashioned romance,
-if written with a new-fashioned vigor and directness; how quaint and
-simple and lovely things, as well as what is altogether modern and
-analytic and painful, bring our most judicious friends crowding,
-purses in hand, to the book-stalls; and for a while we are puzzled to
-see worn-out styles and past modes revived. But we do not let these
-things seriously disturb our study of prevailing fashions. These books
-of adventure are not at all, we assure ourselves, in the true spirit of
-the age, with its realistic knowledge of what men really do think and
-purpose, and the taste for them must be only for the moment or in jest.
-We need not let our surprise at occasional flurries and variations in
-the literary market cloud or discredit our analysis of the real taste
-of the day, or suffer ourselves to be betrayed into writing romances,
-however much we might rejoice to be delivered from the drudgery of
-sociological study, and made free to go afield with our imaginations
-upon a joyous search for hidden treasure or knightly adventure.
-
-And yet it is quite likely, after all, that the present age is
-transient. Past ages have been. It is probable that the objects and
-interests now so near us, looming dominant in all the foreground of our
-day, will sometime be shifted and lose their place in the perspective.
-That has happened with the near objects and exaggerated interests of
-other days, so violently sometimes as to submerge and thrust out of
-sight whole libraries of books. It will not do to reckon upon the
-persistence of new things. ’Twere best to give them time to make trial
-of the seasons. The old things of art and taste and thought are the
-permanent things. We know that they are because they have lasted long
-enough to grow old; and we deem it safe to assess the spirit of the age
-by the same test. No age adds a great deal to what it received from
-the age that went before it; no time gets an air all its own. The same
-atmosphere holds from age to age; it is only the little movements of
-the air that are new. In the intervals when the trades do not blow,
-fleeting cross-winds venture abroad, the which if a man wait for he may
-lose his voyage.
-
-No man who has anything to say need stop and bethink himself whom he
-may please or displease in the saying of it. He has but one day to
-write in, and that is his own. He need not fear that he will too much
-ignore it. He will address the men he knows when he writes, whether he
-be conscious of it or not; he may dismiss all fear on that score and
-use his liberty to the utmost. There are some things that can have no
-antiquity and must ever be without date, and genuineness and spirit
-are of their number. A man who has these must ever be “timely,” and
-at the same time fit to last, if he can get his qualities into what
-he writes. He may freely read, too, what he will that is congenial,
-and form himself by companionships that are chosen simply because
-they are to his taste; that is, if he be genuine and in very truth a
-man of independent spirit. Lamb would have written “for antiquity”
-with a vengeance had his taste for the quaint writers of an elder day
-been an affectation, or the authors he liked men themselves affected
-and ephemeral. No age this side antiquity would ever have vouchsafed
-him a glance or a thought. But it was not an affectation, and the men
-he preferred were as genuine and as spirited as he was. He was simply
-obeying an affinity and taking cheer after his own kind. A man born
-into the real patriciate of letters may take his pleasure in what
-company he will without taint or loss of caste; may go confidently
-abroad in the free world of books and choose his comradeships without
-fear of offense.
-
-More than that, there is no other way in which he can form himself, if
-he would have his power transcend a single age. He belittles himself
-who takes from the world no more than he can get from the speech of his
-own generation. The only advantage of books over speech is that they
-may hold from generation to generation, and reach, not a small group
-merely, but a multitude of men; and a man who writes without being a
-man of letters is curtailed of his heritage. It is in this world of
-old and new that he must form himself if he would in the end belong to
-it and increase its bulk of treasure. If he has conned the new theories
-of society, but knows nothing of Burke; the new notions about fiction,
-and has not read his Scott and his Richardson; the new criminology, and
-wots nothing of the old human nature; the new religions, and has never
-felt the power and sanctity of the old, it is much the same as if he
-had read Ibsen and Maeterlinck, and had never opened Shakespeare. How
-is he to know wholesome air from foul, good company from bad, visions
-from nightmares? He has framed himself for the great art and handicraft
-of letters only when he has taken all the human parts of literature as
-if they were without date, and schooled himself in a catholic sanity of
-taste and judgment.
-
-Then he may very safely choose what company his own work shall be done
-in,--in what manner, and under what masters. He cannot choose amiss
-for himself or for his generation if he choose like a man, without
-light whim or weak affectation; not like one who chooses a costume,
-but like one who chooses a character. What is it, let him ask himself,
-that renders a bit of writing a “piece of literature”? It is reality.
-A “wood-note wild,” sung unpremeditated and out of the heart; a
-description written as if with an undimmed and seeing eye upon the very
-object described; an exposition that lays bare the very soul of the
-matter; a motive truly revealed; anger that is righteous and justly
-spoken; mirth that has its sources pure; phrases to find the heart
-of a thing, and a heart seen in things for the phrases to find; an
-unaffected meaning set out in language that is its own,--such are the
-realities of literature. Nothing else is of the kin. Phrases used for
-their own sake; borrowed meanings which the borrower does not truly
-care for; an affected manner; an acquired style; a hollow reason; words
-that are not fit; things which do not live when spoken,--these are its
-falsities, which die in the handling.
-
-The very top breed of what is unreal is begotten by imitation.
-Imitators succeed sometimes, and flourish, even while a breath may
-last; but “imitate and be damned” is the inexorable threat and prophecy
-of fate with regard to the permanent fortunes of literature. That has
-been notorious this long time past. It is more worth noting, lest some
-should not have observed it, that there are other and subtler ways of
-producing what is unreal. There are the mixed kinds of writing, for
-example. Argument is real if it come vital from the mind; narrative
-is real if the thing told have life and the narrator unaffectedly
-see it while he speaks; but to narrate and argue in the same breath
-is naught. Take, for instance, the familiar example of the early
-history of Rome. Make up your mind what was the truth of the matter,
-and then, out of the facts as you have disentangled them, construct
-a firmly touched narrative, and the thing you create is real, has
-the confidence and consistency of life. But mix the narrative with
-critical comment upon other writers and their variant versions of the
-tale, show by a nice elaboration of argument the whole conjectural
-basis of the story, set your reader the double task of doubting and
-accepting, rejecting and constructing, and at once you have touched
-the whole matter with unreality. The narrative by itself might have
-had an objective validity; the argument by itself an intellectual
-firmness, sagacity, vigor, that would have sufficed to make and keep
-it potent; but together they confound each other, destroy each other’s
-atmosphere, make a double miscarriage. The story is rendered unlikely,
-and the argument obscure. This is the taint which has touched all our
-recent historical writing. The critical discussion and assessment of
-the sources of information, which used to be a thing for the private
-mind of the writer, now so encroach upon the open text that the story,
-for the sake of which we would believe the whole thing was undertaken,
-is oftentimes fain to sink away into the foot-notes. The process has
-ceased to be either pure exegesis or straightforward narrative, and
-history has ceased to be literature.
-
-Nor is this our only sort of mixed writing. Our novels have become
-sociological studies, our poems vehicles of criticism, our sermons
-political manifestos. We have confounded all processes in a common use,
-and do not know what we would be at. We can find no better use for
-Pegasus than to carry our vulgar burdens, no higher key for song than
-questionings and complainings. Fancy pulls in harness with intellectual
-doubt; enthusiasm walks apologetically alongside science. We try to
-make our very dreams engines of social reform. It is a parlous state
-of things for literature, and it is high time authors should take
-heed what company they keep. The trouble is, they all want to be “in
-society,” overwhelmed with invitations from the publishers, well known
-and talked about at the clubs, named every day in the newspapers,
-photographed for the news-stalls; and it is so hard to distinguish
-between fashion and form, costume and substance, convention and truth,
-the things that show well and the things that last well; so hard to
-draw away from the writers that are new and talked about and note those
-who are old and walk apart, to distinguish the tones which are merely
-loud from the tones that are genuine, to get far enough away from the
-press and the hubbub to see and judge the movements of the crowd!
-
-Some will do it. Choice spirits will arise and make conquest of us,
-not “in society,” but with what will seem a sort of outlawry. The
-great growths of literature spring up in the open, where the air is
-free and they can be a law unto themselves. The law of life, here as
-elsewhere, is the law of nourishment: with what was the earth laden,
-and the atmosphere? Literatures are renewed, as they are originated,
-by uncontrived impulses of nature, as if the sap moved unbidden in the
-mind. Once conceive the matter so, and Lamb’s quaint saying assumes a
-sort of gentle majesty. A man should “write for antiquity” as a tree
-grows into the ancient air,--this old air that has moved upon the face
-of the world ever since the day of creation, which has set the law of
-life to all things, which has nurtured the forests and won the flowers
-to their perfection, which has fed men’s lungs with life, sped their
-craft upon the seas, borne abroad their songs and their cries, blown
-their forges to flame, and buoyed up whatever they have contrived. ’Tis
-a common medium, though a various life; and the figure may serve the
-author for instruction.
-
-The breeding of authors is no doubt a very occult thing, and no man can
-set the rules of it; but at least the sort of “ampler ether” in which
-they are best brought to maturity is known. Writers have liked to speak
-of the Republic of Letters, as if to mark their freedom and equality;
-but there is a better phrase, namely, the Community of Letters; for
-that means intercourse and comradeship and a life in common. Some take
-up their abode in it as if they had made no search for a place to dwell
-in, but had come into the freedom of it by blood and birthright. Others
-buy the freedom with a great price, and seek out all the sights and
-privileges of the place with an eager thoroughness and curiosity. Still
-others win their way into it with a certain grace and aptitude, next
-best to the ease and dignity of being born to the right. But for all it
-is a bonny place to be. Its comradeships are a liberal education. Some,
-indeed, even there, live apart; but most run always in the market-place
-to know what all the rest have said. Some keep special company, while
-others keep none at all. But all feel the atmosphere and life of the
-place in their several degrees.
-
-No doubt there are national groups, and Shakespeare is king among
-the English, as Homer is among the Greeks, and sober Dante among his
-gay countrymen. But their thoughts all have in common, though speech
-divide them; and sovereignty does not exclude comradeship or embarrass
-freedom. No doubt there is many a willful, ungoverned fellow endured
-there without question, and many a churlish cynic, because he possesses
-that patent of genuineness or of a wit which strikes for the heart of
-things, which, without further test, secures citizenship in that free
-company. What a gift of tongues is there, and of prophecy! What strains
-of good talk, what counsel of good judgment, what cheer of good tales,
-what sanctity of silent thought! The sight-seers who pass through from
-day to day, the press of voluble men at the gates, the affectation of
-citizenship by mere sojourners, the folly of those who bring new styles
-or affect old ones, the procession of the generations, disturb the calm
-of that serene community not a whit. They will entertain a man a whole
-decade, if he happen to stay so long, though they know all the while he
-can have no permanent place among them.
-
-’T would be a vast gain to have the laws of that community better
-known than they are. Even the first principles of its constitution
-are singularly unfamiliar. It is not a community of writers, but a
-community of letters. One gets admission, not because he writes,--write
-he never so cleverly, like a gentleman and a man of wit,--but because
-he is literate, a true initiate into the secret craft and mystery of
-letters. What that secret is a man may know, even though he cannot
-practice or appropriate it. If a man can see the permanent element
-in things,--the true sources of laughter, the real fountains of
-tears, the motives that strike along the main lines of conduct, the
-acts which display the veritable characters of men, the trifles that
-are significant, the details that make the mass,--if he know these
-things, and can also choose words with a like knowledge of their power
-to illuminate and reveal, give color to the eye and passion to the
-thought, the secret is his, and an entrance to that immortal communion.
-
-It may be that some learn the mystery of that insight without tutors;
-but most must put themselves under governors and earn their initiation.
-While a man lives, at any rate, he can keep the company of the
-masters whose words contain the mystery and open it to those who can
-see, almost with every accent; and in such company it may at last be
-revealed to him,--so plainly that he may, if he will, still linger in
-such comradeship when he is dead.
-
-It would seem that there are two tests which admit to that company, and
-that they are conclusive. The one is, Are you individual? the other,
-Are you conversable? “I beg pardon,” said a grave wag, coming face
-to face with a small person of most consequential air, and putting
-glass to eye in calm scrutiny--“I beg pardon; but are you anybody
-in particular?” Such is very much the form of initiation into the
-permanent communion of the realm of letters. Tell them, No, but that
-you have done much better--you have caught the tone of a great age,
-studied taste, divined opportunity, courted and won a vast public,
-been most timely and most famous; and you shall be pained to find them
-laughing in your face. Tell them you are earnest, sincere, consecrate
-to a cause, an apostle and reformer, and they will still ask you, “But
-are you anybody in particular?” They will mean, “Were you your own man
-in what you thought, and not a puppet? Did you speak with an individual
-note and distinction that marked you able to think as well as to
-speak,--to be yourself in thoughts and in words also?” “Very well,
-then; you are welcome enough.”
-
-“That is, if you be also conversable.” It is plain enough what they
-mean by that, too. They mean, if you have spoken in such speech and
-spirit as can be understood from age to age, and not in the pet terms
-and separate spirit of a single day and generation. Can the old authors
-understand you, that you would associate with them? Will men be able to
-take your meaning in the differing days to come? Or is it perishable
-matter of the day that you deal in--little controversies that carry no
-lasting principle at their heart; experimental theories of life and
-science, put forth for their novelty and with no test of their worth;
-pictures in which fashion looms very large, but human nature shows very
-small; things that please everybody, but instruct no one; mere fancies
-that are an end in themselves? Be you never so clever an artist in
-words and in ideas, if they be not the words that wear and mean the
-same thing, and that a thing intelligible, from age to age, the ideas
-that shall hold valid and luminous in whatever day or company, you may
-clamor at the gate till your lungs fail and get never an answer.
-
-For that to what you seek admission is a veritable “community.” In it
-you must be able to be, and to remain, conversable. How are you to test
-your preparation meanwhile, unless you look to your comradeships now
-while yet it is time to learn? Frequent the company in which you may
-learn the speech and the manner which are fit to last. Take to heart
-the admirable example you shall see set you there of using speech and
-manner to speak your real thought and be genuinely and simply yourself.
-
-
-
-
-IV.
-
-A LITERARY POLITICIAN.
-
-
-“Literary politician” is not a label much in vogue, and may need first
-of all a justification, lest even the man of whom I am about to speak
-should decline it from his very urn. I do not mean a politician who
-affects literature; who seems to appreciate the solemn moral purpose
-of Wordsworth’s Happy Warrior, and yet is opposed to ballot reform.
-Neither do I mean a literary man who affects politics; who earns his
-victories through the publishers, and his defeats at the hands of the
-men who control the primaries. I mean the man who has the genius to see
-deep into affairs, and the discretion to keep out of them,--the man to
-whom, by reason of knowledge and imagination and sympathetic insight,
-governments and policies are as open books, but who, instead of trying
-to put haphazard characters of his own into those books, wisely prefers
-to read their pages aloud to others. A man this who knows polities, and
-yet does not handle policies.
-
-There is, no doubt, a very widespread skepticism as to the existence of
-such a man. Many people would ask you to prove him as well as define
-him; and that, as they assume, upon a very obvious principle. It is
-a rule of universal acceptance in theatrical circles that no one can
-write a good play who has no practical acquaintance with the stage.
-A knowledge of greenroom possibilities and of stage machinery, it is
-held, must go before all successful attempts to put either passion
-or humor into action on the boards, if pit and gallery are to get a
-sense of reality from the performance. No wonder that Sheridan’s plays
-were effective, for Sheridan was both author and actor; but abundant
-wonder that simple Goldsmith succeeded with his exquisite “She Stoops
-to Conquer,”--unless we are to suppose that an Irishman of the last
-century, like the Irishman of this, had some sixth sense which enabled
-him to understand other people’s business better than his own; for poor
-Goldsmith could not act (even off the stage), and his only connection
-with the theatre seems to have been his acquaintance with Garrick.
-Lytton, we know, had Macready constantly at his elbow, to give and
-enforce suggestions calculated to render plays playable. And in our
-own day, the authors of what we indulgently call “dramatic literature”
-find themselves constantly obliged to turn tragedies into comedies,
-comedies into farces, to satisfy the managers; for managers know the
-stage, and pretend to know all possible audiences also. The writer for
-the stage must be playwright first, author second.
-
-Similar principles of criticism are not a little affected by those
-who play the parts, great and small, on the stage of politics. There
-is on that stage, too, it is said, a complex machinery of action and
-scene-shifting, a greenroom tradition and practice as to costume and
-make-up, as to entry and exit, necessities of concession to footlights
-and of appeal to the pit, quite as rigorous and quite as proper for
-study as are the concomitants of that other art which we frankly call
-acting. This is an idea, indeed, accepted in some quarters outside
-the political playhouse as well as within it. Mr. Sydney Colvin, for
-example, declares very rightly that:--
-
-“Men of letters and of thought are habitually too much given to
-declaiming at their ease against the delinquencies of men of action
-and affairs. The inevitable friction of practical politics,” he
-argues, “generates heat enough already, and the office of the thinker
-and critic should be to supply not heat, but light. The difficulties
-which attend his own unmolested task--the task of seeking after and
-proclaiming salutary truths--should teach him to make allowance for
-the far more urgent difficulties which beset the politician; the man
-obliged, amidst the clash of interests and temptations, to practice
-from hand to mouth, and at his peril, the most uncertain and at the
-same time the most indispensable of the experimental arts.”
-
-Mr. Colvin is himself of the class of men of letters and of thought; he
-accordingly puts the case against his class much more mildly than the
-practical politician would desire to see it put. Practical politicians
-are wont to regard closeted writers upon politics with a certain
-condescension, dashed with slight traces of uneasy concern. “Literary
-men can say strong things of their age,” observes Mr. Bagehot, “for no
-one expects that they will go out and act on them. They are a kind of
-ticket-of-leave lunatics, from whom no harm is for the moment expected;
-who seem quiet, but on whose vagaries a practical public must have its
-eye.” I suppose that the really serious, practical man in politics
-would see nothing of satirical humor in such a description. He would
-have you note that, although traced with a sharp point of wit, the
-picture is nevertheless true. He can cite you a score of instances
-illustrative of the danger of putting faith in the political judgments
-of those who are not politicians bred in the shrewd and moving world of
-political management.
-
-The genuine practical politician, such as (even our enemies being the
-witnesses) we must be acknowledged to produce in great numbers and
-perfection in this country, reserves his acidest contempt for the
-literary man who assumes to utter judgments touching public affairs
-and political institutions. If he be a reading man, as will sometimes
-happen, he is able to point you, in illustration of what you are to
-expect in such cases, to the very remarkable essays of the late Mr.
-Matthew Arnold on parliamentary policy and the Irish question. If he
-be not a reading man, as sometimes happens, he is able to ask, much to
-your confusion, “What does a fellow who lives inside a library know
-about politics, anyhow?” You have to admit, if you are candid, that
-most fellows who live in libraries know little enough. You remember
-Macaulay, and acknowledge that, although he made admirable speeches in
-Parliament, held high political office, and knew all the considerable
-public men of his time, he did imagine the creation to have been made
-in accordance with Whig notions; did hope to find the judgments of
-Lord Somers some day answering mankind as standards for all possible
-times and circumstances. You recall Gibbon, and allow, to your own
-thought at least, that, had he not remained silent in his seat, a
-very few of his sentences would probably have sufficed to freeze the
-House of Commons stiff. The ordinary literary man, even though he be
-an eminent historian, is ill enough fitted to be a mentor in affairs
-of government. For, it must be admitted, things are for the most part
-very simple in books, and in practical life very complex. Not all the
-bindings of a library inclose the various world of circumstance.
-
-But the practical politician should discriminate. Let him find a
-man with an imagination which, though it stands aloof, is yet quick
-to conceive the very things in the thick of which the politician
-struggles. To that man he should resort for instruction. And that there
-is occasionally such a man we have proof in Bagehot, the man who first
-clearly distinguished the facts of the English constitution from its
-theory.
-
-Walter Bagehot is a name known to not a few of those who have a zest
-for the juiciest things of literature, for the wit that illuminates
-and the knowledge that refreshes. But his fame is still singularly
-disproportioned to his charm; and one feels once and again like
-publishing him, at least to all spirits of his own kind. It would be
-a most agreeable good fortune to introduce Bagehot to men who have
-not read him! To ask your friend to know Bagehot is like inviting him
-to seek pleasure. Occasionally, a man is born into the world whose
-mission it evidently is to clarify the thought of his generation,
-and to vivify it; to give it speed where it is slow, vision where it
-is blind, balance where it is out of poise, saving humor where it is
-dry,--and such a man was Walter Bagehot. When he wrote of history, he
-made it seem human and probable; when he wrote of political economy,
-he made it seem credible, entertaining,--nay, engaging even; when he
-wrote criticism, he wrote sense. You have in him a man who can jest to
-your instruction, who will beguile you into being informed beyond your
-wont and wise beyond your birthright. Full of manly, straightforward
-meaning, earnest to find the facts that guide and strengthen conduct, a
-lover of good men and seers, full of knowledge and a consuming desire
-for it, he is yet genial withal, with the geniality of a man of wit,
-and alive in every fibre of him, with a life he can communicate to
-you. One is constrained to agree, almost, with the verdict of a witty
-countryman of his, who happily still lives to cheer us, that when
-Bagehot died he “carried away into the next world more originality of
-thought than is now to be found in the three Estates of the Realm.”
-
-An epitome of Bagehot’s life can be given very briefly. He was born in
-February, 1826, and died in March, 1877,--the month in which one would
-prefer to die. Between those two dates he had much quaint experience as
-a boy, and much sober business experience as a man. He wrote essays on
-poets, prose writers, statesmen, whom he would, with abundant insight,
-but without too much respect of persons; also books on banking, on
-the early development of society, and on English politics, kindling a
-flame of interest with these dry materials such as made men stare who
-had often described the facts of society themselves, but who had never
-dreamed of applying fire to them, as Bagehot did, to make them give
-forth light and wholesome heat. He set the minds of a few fortunate
-friends aglow with the delights of the very wonderful tongue which
-nature had given him through his mother. And then he died, while his
-power was yet young. Not a life of event or adventure, but a life
-of deep interest, none the less, because a life in which those two
-things of our modern life, commonly deemed incompatible, business and
-literature, namely, were combined without detriment to either; and from
-which, more interesting still, politics gained a profound expounder in
-one who was no politician and no party man, but, as he himself said,
-“between sizes in politics.”
-
-Mr. Bagehot was born in the centre of Somersetshire, that southwestern
-county of old England whose coast towns look across Bristol Channel to
-the highlands of Wales: a county of small farms, and pastures that keep
-their promise of fatness to many generous milkers; a county broken into
-abrupt hills, and sodden moors hardly kept from the inroads of the sea,
-as well as rural valleys open to the sun; a county visited by mists
-from the sea, and bathed in a fine soft atmosphere all its own; visited
-also by people of fashion, for it contains Bath; visited now also by
-those who have read Lorna Doone, for within it lies part of that Exmoor
-Forest in which stalwart John Ridd lived and wrought his mighty deeds
-of strength and love: a land which the Celts kept for long against both
-Saxon and Roman, but which Christianity easily conquered, building
-Wells Cathedral and the monastery at Glastonbury. Nowhere else, in days
-of travel, could Bagehot find a land of so great delight save in the
-northwest corner of Spain, where a golden light lay upon everything,
-where the sea shone with a rare, soft lustre, and where there was a
-like varied coast-line to that he knew and loved at home. He called it
-“a sort of better Devonshire:” and Devonshire is Somersetshire,--only
-more so! The atmospheric effects of his county certainly entered the
-boy Bagehot, and colored the nature of the man. He had its glow, its
-variety, its richness, and its imaginative depth.
-
-But better than a fair county is a good parentage, and that, too,
-Bagehot had; just the parentage one would wish to have who desired
-to be a force in the world’s thought. His father, Thomas Watson
-Bagehot, was for thirty years managing director and vice-president of
-Stuckey’s Banking Company, one of the oldest and best of those sturdy
-joint-stock companies which have for so many years stood stoutly up
-alongside the Bank of England as managers of the vast English fortune.
-But he was something more than a banker. He was a man of mind, of
-strong liberal convictions in politics, and of an abundant knowledge
-of English history wherewith to back up his opinions. He was one of
-the men who think, and who think in straight lines; who see, and
-see things. His mother was a Miss Stuckey, a niece of the founder
-of the banking company. But it was not her connection with bankers
-that made her an invaluable mother. She had, besides beauty, a most
-lively and stimulating wit; such a mind as we most desire to see in
-a woman,--a mind that stirs without irritating you, that rouses but
-does not belabor, amuses and yet subtly instructs. She could preside
-over the young life of her son in such a way as at once to awaken his
-curiosity and set him in the way of satisfying it. She was brilliant
-company for a boy, and rewarding for a man. She had suggestive people,
-besides, among her kinsmen, into whose companionship she could bring
-her son. Bagehot had that for which no university can ever offer an
-equivalent,--the constant and intelligent sympathy of both his parents
-in his studies, and their companionship in his tastes. To his father’s
-strength his mother added vivacity. He would have been wise, perhaps,
-without her; but he would not have been wise so delightfully.
-
-Bagehot got his schooling in Bristol, his university training in
-London. In Bristol lived Dr. Prichard, his mother’s brother-in-law,
-and author of a notable book on the Physical History of Men. From him
-Bagehot unquestionably got his bent towards the study of race origins
-and development. In London, Cobden and Bright were carrying on an
-important part of their great agitation for the repeal of the corn
-laws, and were making such speeches as it stirred and bettered young
-men to hear. Bagehot had gone to University Hall, London, rather than
-to Oxford or Cambridge, because his father was a Unitarian, and would
-not have his son submit to the religious tests then required at the
-great universities. But there can be no doubt that there was more to be
-had at University Hall in that day than at either Oxford or Cambridge.
-Oxford and Cambridge were still dragging the very heavy chains of a
-hindering tradition; the faculty of University Hall contained many
-thorough and some eminent scholars; what was more, University Hall was
-in London, and London itself was a quickening and inspiring teacher for
-a lad in love with both books and affairs, as Bagehot was. He could
-ask penetrating questions of his professors, and he could also ask
-questions of London, seek out her secrets of history, and so experience
-to the full the charm of her abounding life. In after years, though
-he loved Somersetshire and clung to it with a strong home-keeping
-affection, he could never stay away from London for more than six weeks
-at a time. Eventually he made it his place of permanent residence.
-
-His university career over, Bagehot did what so many thousands of
-young graduates before him had done,--he studied for the bar; and
-then, having prepared himself to practice law, followed another large
-body of young men in deciding to abandon it. He joined his father in
-his business as ship-owner and banker in Somersetshire, and in due
-time took his place among the directors of Stuckey’s Company. For the
-rest of his life, this man, whom the world knows as a man of letters,
-was first of all a man of business. In his later years, however,
-he identified himself with what may be called the literary side of
-business by becoming editor of that great financial authority, the
-“London Economist.” He had, so to say, married into this position.
-His wife was the daughter of the Rt. Hon. James Wilson, who was
-the mind and manager, as well as the founder of the “Economist.”
-Wilson’s death seemed to leave the great financial weekly by natural
-succession to Bagehot; and certainly natural selection never made a
-better choice. It was under Bagehot that the “Economist” became a
-sort of financial providence for business men on both sides of the
-Atlantic. Its sagacious prescience constituted Bagehot himself a sort
-of supplementary chancellor of the exchequer, the chancellors of
-both parties resorting to him with equal confidence and solicitude.
-His constant contact with London, and with the leaders of politics
-and opinion there, of course materially assisted him also to those
-penetrating judgments touching the structure and working of English
-institutions which have made his volume on the English Constitution and
-his essays on Bolingbroke and Brougham and Peel, on Mr. Gladstone and
-Sir George Cornewall Lewis, the admiration and despair of all who read
-them.
-
-Those who know Bagehot only as the writer of some of the most
-delightful and suggestive literary criticisms in the language wonder
-that he should have been an authority on practical politics; those who
-used to regard the “London Economist” as omniscient, and who knew him
-only as the editor of it, marvel that he dabbled in literary criticism,
-and incline to ask themselves, when they learn of his vagaries in that
-direction, whether he can have been so safe a guide as they deemed him,
-after all; those who know him through his political writings alone
-venture upon the perusal of his miscellaneous essays with not a little
-surprise and misgiving that their master should wander so far afield.
-And yet the whole Bagehot is the only Bagehot. Each part of the man
-is incomplete, not only, but a trifle incomprehensible, also, without
-the other parts. What delights us most in his literary essays is their
-broad practical sagacity, so uniquely married as it is with pure taste
-and the style of a rapid artist in words. What makes his financial and
-political writings whole and sound is the scope of his mind outside
-finance and politics, the validity of his observation all around the
-circle of thought and affairs. He was the better critic for being a
-competent man of business and a trusted financial authority. He was the
-more sure-footed in his political judgments because of his play of mind
-in other and supplementary spheres of human activity.
-
-The very appearance of the man was a sort of outer index to the
-singular variety of capacity that has made him so notable a figure in
-the literary annals of England. A mass of black, wavy hair; a dark eye,
-with depths full of slumberous, playful fire; a ruddy skin that bespoke
-active blood, quick in its rounds; the lithe figure of an excellent
-horseman; a nostril full, delicate, quivering, like that of a blooded
-racer,--such were the fitting outward marks of a man in whom life and
-thought and fancy abounded; the aspect of a man of unflagging vivacity,
-of wholesome, hearty humor, of a ready intellectual sympathy, of wide
-and penetrative observation. It is no narrow, logical shrewdness or
-cold penetration that looks forth at you through that face, even if a
-bit of mockery does lurk in the privatest corner of the eye. Among the
-qualities which he seeks out for special praise in Shakespeare is a
-broad tolerance and sympathy for illogical and common minds. It seems
-to him an evidence of size in Shakespeare that he was not vexed with
-smallness, but was patient, nay, sympathetic even, in his portrayal
-of it. “If every one were logical and literary,” he exclaims, “how
-would there be scavengers, or watchmen, or caulkers, or coopers? A
-patient sympathy, a kindly fellow-feeling for the narrow intelligence
-necessarily induced by narrow circumstances,--a narrowness which, in
-some degrees, seems to be inevitable, and is perhaps more serviceable
-than most things to the wise conduct of life,--this, though quick and
-half-bred minds may despise it, seems to be a necessary constituent
-in the composition of manifold genius. ‘How shall the world be
-served?’ asks the host in Chaucer. We must have cart-horses as well as
-race-horses, draymen as well as poets. It is no bad thing, after all,
-to be a slow man and to have one idea a year. You don’t make a figure,
-perhaps, in argumentative society, which requires a quicker species of
-thought, but is that the worse?”
-
-One of the things which strike us most in Bagehot himself is his
-capacity to understand inferior minds; and there can be no better test
-of sound genius. He stood in the midst of affairs, and knew the dull
-duty and humdrum fidelity which make up the equipment of the ordinary
-mind for business, for the business which keeps the world steady in its
-grooves and makes it fit for habitation. He perceived quite calmly,
-though with an odd, sober amusement, that the world is under the
-dominion, in most things, of the average man, and the average man he
-knows. He is, he explains, with his characteristic covert humor, “a
-cool, common person, with a considerate air, with figures in his mind,
-with his own business to attend to, with a set of ordinary opinions
-arising from and suited to ordinary life. He can’t bear novelty or
-originalities. He says, ‘Sir, I never heard such a thing before in my
-life;’ and he thinks this a _reductio ad absurdum_. You may see his
-taste by the reading of which he approves. Is there a more splendid
-monument of talent and industry than the ‘Times’? No wonder that
-the average man--that any one--believes in it.... But did you ever
-see anything there you had never seen before?... Where are the deep
-theories, and the wise axioms, and the everlasting sentiments which the
-writers of the most influential publication in the world have been the
-first to communicate to an ignorant species? Such writers are far too
-shrewd.... The purchaser desires an article which he can appreciate
-at sight, which he can lay down and say, ‘An excellent article, very
-excellent; exactly my own sentiments.’ Original theories give trouble;
-besides, a grave man on the Coal Exchange does not desire to be an
-apostle of novelties among the contemporaneous dealers in fuel; he
-wants to be provided with remarks he can make on the topics of the
-day which will not be known not to be his, that are not too profound,
-which he can fancy the paper only reminded him of. And just in the
-same way,”--thus he proceeds with the sagacious moral,--“precisely as
-the most popular political paper is not that which is abstractedly the
-best or most instructive, but that which most exactly takes up the
-minds of men where it finds them, catches the floating sentiment of
-society, puts it in such a form as society can fancy would convince
-another society which did not believe, so the most influential of
-constitutional statesmen is the one who most felicitously expresses
-the creed of the moment, who administers it, who embodies it in laws
-and institutions, who gives it the highest life it is capable of, who
-induces the average man to think, ‘I could not have done it any better
-if I had had time myself.’”
-
-See how his knowledge of politics proceeds out of his knowledge of men.
-“You may talk of the tyranny of Nero and Tiberius,” he exclaims, “but
-the real tyranny is the tyranny of your next-door neighbor. What law is
-so cruel as the law of doing what he does? What yoke is so galling as
-the necessity of being like him? What espionage of despotism comes to
-your door so effectually as the eye of the man who lives at your door?
-Public opinion is a permeating influence, and it exacts obedience to
-itself; it requires us to think other men’s thoughts, to speak other
-men’s words, to follow other men’s habits. Of course, if we do not, no
-formal ban issues, no corporeal pain, the coarse penalty of a barbarous
-society, is inflicted on the offender, but we are called ‘eccentric;’
-there is a gentle murmur of ‘most unfortunate ideas,’ ‘singular young
-man,’ ‘well intentioned, I dare say, but unsafe, sir, quite unsafe.’
-The prudent, of course, conform.”
-
-There is, no doubt, a touch of mockery in all this, but there is
-unquestionable insight in it, too, and a sane knowledge also of the
-fact that dull, common judgments are, after all, the cement of society.
-It is Bagehot who says somewhere that it is only dull nations, like the
-Romans and the English, who can become or remain for any length of time
-self-governing nations, because it is only among them that duty is done
-through lack of knowledge sufficient or imagination enough to suggest
-anything else to do: only among them that the stability of slow habit
-can be had.
-
-It would be superficial criticism to put forward Bagehot’s political
-opinions as themselves the proof of his extraordinary power as a
-student and analyst of institutions. His life, his broad range of
-study, his quick versatility, his shrewd appreciation of common
-men, his excursions through all the fields that men traverse in
-their thought of one another and in their contact with the world’s
-business,--these are the soil out of which his political judgments
-spring, from which they get their sap and bloom. In order to know
-institutions, you must know men; you must be able to imagine histories,
-to appreciate characters radically unlike your own, to see into
-the heart of society and assess its notions, great and small. Your
-average critic, it must be acknowledged, would be the worst possible
-commentator on affairs. He has all the movements of intelligence
-without any of its reality. But a man who sees authors with a
-Chaucerian insight into them as men, who knows literature as a realm of
-vital thought conceived by real men, of actual motive felt by concrete
-persons, this is a man whose opinions you may confidently ask, if not
-on current politics, at any rate on all that concerns the permanent
-relations of men in society.
-
-It is for such reasons that one must first make known the most masterly
-of the critics of English political institutions as a man of catholic
-tastes and attainments, shrewdly observant of many kinds of men and
-affairs. Know him once in this way, and his mastery in political
-thought is explained. If I were to make choice, therefore, of extracts
-from his works with a view to recommend him as a politician, I should
-choose those passages which show him a man of infinite capacity to
-see and understand men of all kinds, past and present. By showing in
-his case the equipment of a mind open on all sides to the life and
-thought of society, and penetrative of human secrets of many sorts, I
-should authenticate his credentials as a writer upon politics, which is
-nothing else than the public and organic life of society.
-
-Examples may be taken almost at random. There is the passage on Sydney
-Smith, in the essay on the First Edinburgh Reviewers. We have all
-laughed with that great-hearted clerical wit; but it is questionable
-whether we have all appreciated him as a man who wrote and wrought
-wisdom. Indeed, Sydney Smith may be made a very delicate test of sound
-judgment, the which to apply to friends of whom you are suspicious.
-There was a man beneath those excellent witticisms, a big, wholesome,
-thinking man; but none save men of like wholesome natures can see and
-value his manhood and his mind at their real worth.
-
-“Sydney Smith was an after-dinner writer. His words have a flow, a
-vigor, an expression, which is not given to hungry mortals.... There
-is little trace of labor in his composition; it is poured forth like an
-unceasing torrent, rejoicing daily to run its course. And what courage
-there is in it! There is as much variety of pluck in writing across a
-sheet as in riding across a country. Cautious men ... go tremulously,
-like a timid rider; they turn hither and thither; they do not go
-straight across a subject, like a masterly mind. A few sentences are
-enough for a master of sentences. The writing of Sydney Smith is suited
-to the broader kind of important questions. For anything requiring fine
-nicety of speculation, long elaborateness of deduction, evanescent
-sharpness of distinction, neither his style nor his mind was fit. He
-had no patience for long argument, no acuteness for delicate precision,
-no fangs for recondite research. Writers, like teeth, are divided into
-incisors and grinders. Sydney Smith was a molar. He did not run a long,
-sharp argument into the interior of a question; he did not, in the
-common phrase, go deeply into it; but he kept it steadily under the
-contract of a strong, capable, jawlike understanding,--pressing its
-surface, effacing its intricacies, grinding it down. Yet this is done
-without toil. The play of the molar is instinctive and placid; he could
-not help it; it would seem that he had an enjoyment in it.”
-
-One reads this with a feeling that Bagehot both knows and likes
-Sydney Smith, and heartily appreciates him as an engine of Whig
-thought; and with the conviction that Bagehot himself, knowing thus
-and enjoying Smith’s freehand method of writing, could have done the
-like himself,--could himself have made English ring to all the old
-Whig tunes, like an anvil under the hammer. And yet you have only to
-turn back a page in the same essay to find quite another Bagehot,--a
-Bagehot such as Sydney Smith could not have been. He is speaking of
-that other militant Edinburgh reviewer, Lord Jeffrey, and is recalling,
-as every one recalls, Jeffrey’s review of Wordsworth’s “Excursion.”
-The first words of that review, as everybody remembers, were, “This
-will never do;” and there followed upon those words, though not a
-little praise of the poetical beauties of the poem, a thoroughly
-meant condemnation of the school of poets of which Wordsworth was the
-greatest representative. Very celebrated in the world of literature is
-the leading case of Jeffrey _v._ Wordsworth. It is in summing up this
-case that Bagehot gives us a very different taste of his quality:--
-
-“The world has given judgment. Both Mr. Wordsworth and Lord Jeffrey
-have received their reward. The one had his own generation, the
-laughter of men, the applause of drawing-rooms, the concurrence of
-the crowd; the other a succeeding age, the fond enthusiasm of secret
-students, the lonely rapture of lonely minds. And each has received
-according to his kind. If all cultivated men speak differently because
-of the existence of Wordsworth and Coleridge; if not a thoughtful
-English book has appeared for forty years without some trace for good
-or evil of their influence; if sermon-writers subsist upon their
-thoughts; if ‘sacred poets’ thrive by translating their weaker portions
-into the speech of women; if, when all this is over, some sufficient
-part of their writing will ever be found fitting food for wild musing
-and solitary meditation, surely this is because they possessed the
-inner nature,--‘an intense and glowing mind,’ ‘the vision and the
-faculty divine.’ But if, perchance, in their weaker moments, the great
-authors of the ‘Lyrical Ballads’ did ever imagine that the world was
-to pause because of their verses, that ‘Peter Bell’ would be popular
-in drawing-rooms, that ‘Christabel’ would be perused in the city, that
-people of fashion would make a handbook of ‘The Excursion,’ it was well
-for them to be told at once that this was not so. Nature ingeniously
-prepared a shrill artificial voice, which spoke in season and out of
-season, enough and more than enough, what will ever be the idea of
-the cities of the plain concerning those who live alone among the
-mountains, of the frivolous concerning the grave, of the gregarious
-concerning the recluse, of those who laugh concerning those who laugh
-not, of the common concerning the uncommon, of those who lend on usury
-concerning those who lend not; the notion of the world of those whom it
-will not reckon among the righteous,--it said, ‘This won’t do!’ And so
-in all time will the lovers of polished Liberalism speak concerning the
-intense and lonely prophet.”
-
-This is no longer the Bagehot who could “write across a sheet” with
-Sydney Smith. It is now a Bagehot whose heart is turned away from the
-cudgeling Whigs to see such things as are hidden from the bearers of
-cudgels, and revealed only to those who can await in the sanctuary of a
-quiet mind the coming of the vision.
-
-Single specimens of such a man’s writing do not suffice, of course,
-even as specimens. They need their context to show their appositeness,
-the full body of the writing from which they are taken to show the mass
-and system of the thought. Even separated pieces of his matter prepare
-us, nevertheless, for finding in Bagehot keener, juster estimates of
-difficult historical and political characters than it is given the
-merely exact historian, with his head full of facts and his heart
-purged of all imagination, to speak. There is his estimate of the
-cavalier, for example: “A cavalier is always young. The buoyant life
-arises before us, rich in hope, strong in vigor, irregular in action:
-men young and ardent, ‘framed in the prodigality of nature;’ open
-to every enjoyment, alive to every passion, eager, impulsive; brave
-without discipline, noble without principle; prizing luxury, despising
-danger; capable of high sentiment, but in each of whom the
-
-          ‘addiction was to courses vain;
-    His companies unlettered, rude, and shallow;
-    His hours filled up with riots, banquets, sports,
-    And never noted in him any study,
-    Any retirement, any sequestration
-    From open haunts and popularity.’
-
-The political sentiment is part of the character; the essence of
-Toryism is enjoyment.... The way to keep up old customs is to enjoy old
-customs; the way to be satisfied with the present state of things is to
-enjoy the present state of things. Over the cavalier mind this world
-passes with a thrill of delight; there is an exultation in a daily
-event, zest in the ‘regular thing,’ joy at an old feast.”
-
-Is it not most natural that the writer of a passage like that should
-have been a consummate critic of politics, seeing institutions through
-men, the only natural way? It was as necessary that he should be able
-to enjoy Sydney Smith and recognize the seer in Wordsworth as that he
-should be able to conceive the cavalier life and point of view; and
-in each perception there is the same power. He is as little at fault
-in understanding men of his own day. What would you wish better than
-his celebrated character of a “constitutional statesman,” for example?
-“A constitutional statesman is a man of common opinions and uncommon
-abilities.” Peel is his example. “His opinions resembled the daily
-accumulating insensible deposits of a rich alluvial soil. The great
-stream of time flows on with all things on its surface; and slowly,
-grain by grain, a mould of wise experience is unconsciously left on the
-still, extended intellect.... The stealthy accumulating words of Peel
-seem like the quiet leavings of some outward tendency, which brought
-these, but might as well have brought others. There is no peculiar
-stamp, either, on the ideas. They might have been any one’s ideas. They
-belong to the general diffused stock of observations which are to be
-found in the civilized world.... He insensibly takes in and imbibes the
-ideas of those around him. If he were left in a vacuum, he would have
-no ideas.”
-
-What strikes one most, perhaps, in all these passages, is the realizing
-imagination which illuminates them. And it is an imagination with a
-practical character all its own. It is not a creating, but a conceiving
-imagination; not the imagination of the fancy, but the imagination
-of the understanding. Conceiving imaginations, however, are of two
-kinds. For the one kind the understanding serves as a lamp of guidance;
-upon the other the understanding acts as an electric excitant, a
-keen irritant. Bagehot’s was evidently of the first kind; Carlyle’s,
-conspicuously of the second. There is something in common between the
-minds of these two men as they conceive society. Both have a capital
-grip upon the actual; both can conceive without confusion the complex
-phenomena of society; both send humorous glances of searching insight
-into the hearts of men. But it is the difference between them that most
-arrests our attention. Bagehot has the scientific imagination, Carlyle
-the passionate. Bagehot is the embodiment of witty common sense; all
-the movements of his mind illustrate that vivacious sanity which he
-has himself called “animated moderation.” Carlyle, on the other hand,
-conceives men and their motives too often with a hot intolerance;
-there is heat in his imagination,--a heat that sometimes scorches
-and consumes. Life is for him dramatic, full of fierce, imperative
-forces. Even when the world rings with laughter, it is laughter which,
-in his ears, is succeeded by an echo of mockery; laughter which is
-but a defiance of tears. The actual which you touch in Bagehot is the
-practical, operative actual of a world of workshops and parliaments,--a
-world of which workshops and parliaments are the natural and desirable
-products. Carlyle flouts at modern legislative assemblies as “talking
-shops,” and yearns for action such as is commanded by masters of
-action; preaches the doctrine of work and silence in some thirty
-volumes octavo. Bagehot points out that prompt, crude action is the
-instinct and practice of the savage; that talk, the deliberation of
-assemblies, the slow concert of masses of men, is the cultivated fruit
-of civilization, nourishing to all the powers of right action in a
-society which is not simple and primitive, but advanced and complex.
-He is no more imposed upon by parliamentary debates than Carlyle is.
-He knows that they are stupid, and, so far as wise utterance goes, in
-large part futile, too. But he is not irritated, as Carlyle is, for,
-to say the fact, he sees more than Carlyle sees. He sees the force
-and value of the stupidity. He is wise, along with Burke, in regarding
-prejudice as the cement of society. He knows that slow thought is
-the ballast of a self-governing state. Stanch, knitted timbers are
-as necessary to the ship as sails. Unless the hull is conservative
-in holding stubbornly together in the face of every argument of sea
-weather, there’ll be lives and fortunes lost. Bagehot can laugh at
-unreasoning bias. It brings a merry twinkle into his eye to undertake
-the good sport of dissecting stolid stupidity. But he would not for the
-world abolish bias and stupidity. He would much rather have society
-hold together; much rather see it grow than undertake to reconstruct
-it. “You remember my joke against you about the moon,” writes Sydney
-Smith to Jeffrey; “d--n the solar system--bad light--planets too
-distant--pestered with comets--feeble contrivance; could make a better
-with great ease.” There was nothing of this in Bagehot. He was inclined
-to be quite tolerant of the solar system. He understood that society
-was more quickly bettered by sympathy than by antagonism.
-
-Bagehot’s limitations, though they do not obtrude themselves upon
-your attention as his excellencies do, are in truth as sharp-cut and
-clear as his thought itself. It would not be just the truth to say
-that his power is that of critical analysis only, for he can and does
-construct thought concerning antique and obscure systems of political
-life and social action. But it is true that he does not construct for
-the future. You receive stimulation from him and a certain feeling of
-elation. There is a fresh air stirring in all his utterances that is
-unspeakably refreshing. You open your mind to the fine influence, and
-feel younger for having been in such an atmosphere. It is an atmosphere
-clarified and bracing almost beyond example elsewhere. But you know
-what you lack in Bagehot if you have read Burke. You miss the deep
-eloquence which awakens purpose. You are not in contact with systems of
-thought or with principles that dictate action, but only with a perfect
-explanation.
-
-You would go to Burke, not to Bagehot, for inspiration in the infinite
-tasks of self-government; though you would, if you were wise, go to
-Bagehot rather than to Burke if you wished to realize just what were
-the practical daily conditions under which those tasks were to be
-worked out.
-
-Moreover, there is a deeper lack in Bagehot. He has no sympathy with
-the voiceless body of the people, with the “mass of unknown men.” He
-conceives the work of government to be a work which is possible only
-to the instructed few. He would have the mass served, and served with
-devotion, but he would trouble to see them attempt to serve themselves.
-He has not the stout fibre and the unquestioning faith in the right
-and capacity of inorganic majorities which make the democrat. He has
-none of the heroic boldness necessary for faith in wholesale political
-aptitude and capacity. He takes democracy in detail in his thought, and
-to take it in detail makes it look very awkward indeed.
-
-And yet surely it would not occur to the veriest democrat that ever
-vociferated the “sovereignty of the people” to take umbrage at anything
-Bagehot might chance to say in dissection of democracy. What he says is
-seldom provokingly true. There is something in it all that is better
-than a “saving clause,” and that is a saving humor. Humor ever keeps
-the whole of his matter sound; it is an excellent salt that keeps sweet
-the sharpest of his sayings. Indeed, Bagehot’s wit is so prominent
-among his gifts that I am tempted here to enter a general plea for
-wit as fit company for high thoughts and weighty subjects. Wit does
-not make a subject light; it simply beats it into shape to be handled
-readily. For my part, I make free acknowledgment that no man seems
-to me master of his subject who cannot take liberties with it; who
-cannot slap his propositions on the back and be hail-fellow well met
-with them. Suspect a man of shallowness who always takes himself and
-all that he thinks seriously. For light on a dark subject commend me
-to a ray of wit. Most of your solemn explanations are mere farthing
-candles in the great expanse of a difficult question. Wit is not, I
-admit, a steady light, but ah! its flashes give you sudden glimpses of
-unsuspected things such as you will never see without it. It is the
-summer lightning, which will bring more to your startled eye in an
-instant, out of the hiding of the night, than you will ever be at the
-pains to observe in the full blaze of noon.
-
-Wit is movement, is play of mind; and the mind cannot get play without
-a sufficient playground. Without movement outside the world of books,
-it is impossible a man should see aught but the very neatly arranged
-phenomena of that world. But it is possible for a man’s thought to be
-instructed by the world of affairs without the man himself becoming a
-part of it. Indeed, it is exceedingly hard for one who is in and of
-it to hold the world of affairs off at arm’s length and observe it.
-He has no vantage-ground. He had better for a while seek the distance
-of books, and get his perspective. The literary politician, let it be
-distinctly said, is a very fine, a very superior species of the man
-thoughtful. He reads books as he would listen to men talk. He stands
-apart, and looks on, with humorous, sympathetic smile, at the play of
-policies. He will tell you for the asking what the players are thinking
-about. He divines at once how the parts are cast. He knows beforehand
-what each act is to discover. He might readily guess what the dialogue
-is to contain. Were you short of scene-shifters, he could serve you
-admirably in an emergency. And he is a better critic of the play than
-the players.
-
-Had I command of the culture of men, I should wish to raise up for
-the instruction and stimulation of my nation more than one sane,
-sagacious, penetrative critic of men and affairs like Walter Bagehot.
-But that, of course. The proper thesis to draw from his singular
-genius is this: It is not the constitutional lawyer, nor the student
-of the mere machinery and legal structure of institutions, nor the
-politician, a mere handler of that machinery, who is competent to
-understand and expound government; but the man who finds the materials
-for his thought far and wide, in everything that reveals character and
-circumstance and motive. It is necessary to stand with the poets as
-well as with lawgivers; with the fathers of the race as well as with
-your neighbor of to-day; with those who toil and are sick at heart as
-well as with those who prosper and laugh and take their pleasure; with
-the merchant and the manufacturer as well as with the closeted student;
-with the schoolmaster and with those whose only school is life; with
-the orator and with the men who have wrought always in silence; in the
-midst of thought and also in the midst of affairs, if you would really
-comprehend those great wholes of history and of character which are the
-vital substance of politics.
-
-
-
-
-V.
-
-THE INTERPRETER OF ENGLISH LIBERTY.
-
-
-In the middle of the last century two Irish adventurers crossed over
-into England in search of their fortunes. Rare fellows they were,
-bringing treasure with them; but finding it somehow hard to get upon
-the market: traders with a curious cargo, offering edification in
-exchange for a living, and concealing the best of English under a rich
-brogue. They were Edmund Burke and Oliver Goldsmith.
-
-They did not cross over together: ’twas no joint venture. They had
-been fellow students at Trinity College, Dublin; but they had not,
-so far as we can learn, known each other there. Each went his own
-way till they became comrades in the reign of Samuel Johnson at the
-Turk’s Head Tavern. Burke stepped very boldly forth into the exposed
-paths of public life; Goldsmith plunged into the secret ways about
-Grub Street. The one gave us essays upon public questions incomparable
-for their reach of view and their splendid power of expression; the
-other gave us writings so exquisite for their delicacy, purity, and
-finish as to incline us to love him almost as much as those who knew
-him loved him. We could not easily have forgiven Ireland if she had
-_not_ given us these men. The one had grave faults of temper; the other
-was a reckless, roystering fellow, with a most irrepressible Irish
-disposition; but how much less we should have known without Burke, how
-much less we should have enjoyed without Goldsmith! They have conquered
-places for themselves in English literature from which we neither can
-nor would dislodge them. For their sakes alone we can afford to forgive
-Ireland all the trouble she has caused us.
-
-There is no man anywhere to be found in the annals of Parliament who
-seems more thoroughly to belong to England than does Edmund Burke,
-indubitable Irishman though he was. His words, now that they have cast
-off their brogue, ring out the authentic voice of the best political
-thought of the English race. “If any man ask me,” he cries, “what a
-free government is, I answer, that, for any practical purpose, it is
-what the people think so,--and that they, and not I, are the natural,
-lawful, and competent judges of the matter.” “Abstract liberty, like
-other mere abstractions, is not to be found. Liberty adheres in
-some sensible object; and every nation has formed to itself some
-favorite point, which by way of eminence becomes the criterion of
-their happiness.” These sentences, taken from his writings on American
-affairs, might serve as a sort of motto of the practical spirit of our
-race in affairs of government. Look further, and you shall see how his
-imagination presently illuminates and suffuses his maxims of practical
-sagacity with a fine blaze of insight, a keen glow of feeling, in which
-you recognize that other masterful quality of the race, its intense
-and elevated conviction. “My hold on the colonies,” he declares, “is
-in the close affection which grows from common names, from kindred
-blood, from similar privileges, and equal protection. These are the
-ties which, though light as air, are as strong as links of iron. Let
-the colonies always keep the idea of their civil rights associated with
-your government,--they will cling and grapple to you, and no force
-under heaven will be of power to tear them from their allegiance. But
-let it once be understood that your government may be one thing and
-their privileges another, that these two things may exist without any
-mutual relation,--and the cement is gone, the cohesion is loosened, and
-everything hastens to decay and dissolution. So long as you have the
-wisdom to keep the sovereign power of this country as the sanctuary of
-liberty, the sacred temple consecrated to our common faith, wherever
-the chosen race and sons of England worship freedom, they will turn
-their faces towards you.” “We cannot, I fear,” he says proudly of the
-colonies, “we cannot falsify the pedigree of this fierce people, and
-persuade them that they are not sprung from a nation in whose veins
-the blood of freedom circulates. The language in which they would hear
-you tell them this tale would detect the imposition; your speech would
-betray you. An Englishman is the unfittest person on earth to argue
-another Englishman into slavery.” Does not your blood stir at these
-passages? And is it not because, besides loving what is nobly written,
-you feel that every word strikes towards the heart of the things that
-have made your blood what it has proved to be in the history of our
-race?
-
-These passages, it should be remembered, are taken from a speech in
-Parliament and from a letter written by Burke to his constituents
-in Bristol. He had no thought to make them permanent sentences of
-political philosophy. They were meant only to serve an immediate
-purpose in the advancement of contemporaneous policy. They were framed
-for the circumstances of the time. They speak out spontaneously amidst
-matter of the moment: and they could be matched everywhere throughout
-his pamphlets and public utterances. No other similar productions that
-I know of have this singular, and as it were inevitable, quality of
-permanency. They have emerged from the mass of political writings put
-forth in their time with their freshness untouched, their significance
-unobscured, their splendid vigor unabated. It is this that we marvel
-at, that they should remain modern and timely, purged of every element
-and seed of decay. The man who could do this must needs arrest our
-attention and challenge our inquiry. We wish to account for him as we
-should wish to penetrate the secrets of the human spirit and know the
-springs of genius.
-
-Of the public life of Burke we know all that we could wish. He became
-so prominent a figure in the great affairs of his day that even the
-casual observer cannot fail to discern the main facts of his career;
-while the close student can follow him year by year through every
-step of his service. But his private life was withdrawn from general
-scrutiny in an unusual degree. He manifested always a marked reserve
-about his individual and domestic affairs, deliberately, it would seem,
-shielding them from impertinent inquiry. He loved the privacy of life
-in a great city, where one may escape notice in the crowd and enjoy
-a grateful “freedom from remark and petty censure.” “Though I have
-the honor to represent Bristol,” he said to Boswell, “I should not
-like to live there; I should be obliged to be _so much upon my good
-behavior_. In London a man may live in splendid society at one time,
-and in frugal retirement at another, without animadversion. There, and
-there alone, a man’s house is truly his _castle_, in which he can be
-in perfect safety from intrusion whenever he pleases. I never shall
-forget how well this was expressed to me one day by Mr. Meynell: ‘The
-chief advantage of London,’ he said, ‘is, that a man is always _so
-near his burrow_.’” Burke took to his burrow often enough to pique
-our curiosity sorely. This singular, high-minded adventurer had some
-queer companions, we know: questionable fellows, whose life he shared,
-perhaps with a certain Bohemian relish, without sharing their morals
-or their works. It seems as incongruous that such wisdom and public
-spirit as breathe through his writings should have come to his thought
-in such company as that an exquisite idyll like Goldsmith’s “Vicar of
-Wakefield” should have been conceived and written in squalid garrets.
-But neither Burke nor Goldsmith had been born into such comradeships
-or such surroundings. Doubtless, as sometimes happens, their minds
-kept their first freshness, taking no taint from the world that touched
-them on every hand in their manhood, after their minds had been
-formed. Goldsmith, as everybody knows, remained an innocent all his
-life, a naïf and pettish boy amidst sophisticated men; and Burke too,
-notwithstanding his dignity and commanding intellectual habit, shows
-sometimes a touch of the same simplicity, a like habit of unguarded
-self-revelation. ’Twas their form, no doubt, of that impulsive and
-ingenuous quality which we observe in all Irishmen, and which we often
-mistake for simplicity. ’Twas a flavor of their native soil. It was
-also something more and better than that, however. Not every Irishman
-displays such hospitality for direct and simple images of truth as
-these men showed, for that is characteristic only of the open and
-unsophisticated mind,--the mind that has kept pure and open eyes. Not
-that Burke always sees the truth; he is even deeply prejudiced often,
-and there are some things that he cannot see. But the passion that
-dominates him when he is wrong, as when he is right, is a natural
-passion, born with him, not acquired from a disingenuous world that
-mistakes interest for justice. His nature tells in everything. It is
-stock of his character which he contributes to the subjects his mind
-handles. He is trading always with the original treasure he brought
-over with him at the first. He has never impaired his genuineness, or
-damaged his principles.
-
-Just where Burke got his generous constitution and predisposition to
-enlightened ways of thinking it is not easy to see. Certainly Richard
-Burke, his brother, the only other member of the family whose character
-we discern distinctly, had a quite opposite bent. The father was a
-steady Dublin attorney, a Protestant, and a man, so far as we know, of
-solid but not brilliant parts. The mother had been a Miss Nagle, of
-a Roman Catholic family, which had multiplied exceedingly in County
-Cork. Of the home and its life we know singularly little. We are told
-that many children were born to the good attorney, but we hear of only
-four of them that grew to maturity, Garret, Edmund, Richard, and a
-sister best known to Edmund’s biographers as Mrs. French. Edmund, the
-second son, was born on the twelfth of January, 1729, in the second
-year of the reign of George II., Robert Walpole being chief minister
-of the Crown. How he fared or what sort of lad he was for the first
-twelve years of his life we have no idea. We only know that in the
-year 1741, being then twelve years old, he was sent with his brothers
-Garret and Richard to the school of one Abraham Shackleton, a most
-capable and exemplary Quaker, at Ballytore, County Kildare, to get, in
-some two years’ time, what he himself always accounted the best part
-of his education. The character of the good master at Ballytore told
-upon the sensitive boy, who all his life through had an eye for such
-elevation and calm force of quiet rectitude as are to be seen in the
-best Quakers; and with Richard Shackleton, the master’s son, he formed
-a friendship from which no vicissitude of his subsequent career ever
-loosened his heart a whit. All his life long the ardent, imaginative
-statesman, deeply stirred as he was by the momentous agitation of
-affairs,--swept away as he was from other friends,--retained his love
-for the grave, retired, almost austere, but generous and constant man
-who had been his favorite schoolfellow. It is but another evidence of
-his unfailing regard for whatever was steady, genuine, and open to the
-day in character and conduct.
-
-At fourteen he left Ballytore and was entered at Trinity College,
-Dublin. Those were days when youths went to college tender, before they
-had become too tough to take impressions readily. But Burke, even at
-that callow age, cannot be said to have been teachable. He learned a
-vast deal, indeed, but he did not learn much of it from his nominal
-masters at Trinity. Apparently Master Shackleton, at Ballytore, had
-enabled him to find his own mind. His four years at college were years
-of wide and eager reading, but not years of systematic and disciplinary
-study. With singular, if not exemplary, self-confidence, he took his
-education into his own hands. He got at the heart of books through
-their spirit, it would seem, rather than through their grammar. He
-sought them out for what they could yield him in thought, rather than
-for what they could yield him in the way of exact scholarship. That
-this boy should have had such an appetite for the world’s literature,
-old and new, need not surprise us. Other lads before and since have
-found big libraries all too small for them. What should arrest our
-attention is, the law of mind disclosed in the habits of such lads:
-the quick and various curiosity of original minds, and particularly
-of imaginative minds. They long for matter to expand themselves upon:
-they will climb any dizzy height from which an exciting prospect is
-promised: it is their joy by some means to see the world of men and
-affairs. Burke set out as a boy to see the world that is contained
-in books; and in his journeyings he met a man after his own heart in
-Cicero, the copious orator and versatile man of affairs,--the only man
-at all like Burke for richness, expansiveness, and variety of mind in
-all the ancient world. Cicero he conned as his master and model. And
-then, having had his fill for the time of discursive study and having
-completed also his four years of routine, he was graduated, taking his
-degree in the spring of 1748.
-
-His father had entered him as a student at the Middle Temple in 1747,
-meaning that he should seek the prizes of his profession in England
-rather than in the little world at home; but he did not take up his
-residence in London until 1750, by which time he had attained his
-majority. What he did with the intervening two years, his biographers
-do not at all know, and it is idle to speculate, being confident, as we
-must, that he quite certainly did whatever he pleased. He did the same
-when he went up to London to live his terms at the Temple. “The law,”
-he declared to Parliament more than twenty years afterwards, “is, in
-my opinion, one of the first and noblest of human sciences,--a science
-which does more to quicken and invigorate the understanding than all
-other kinds of learning put together; but it is not apt, except in
-persons very happily born, to open and to liberalize the mind exactly
-in the same proportion;” and, although himself a person “very happily
-born” in respect of all natural powers, he felt that the life of a
-lawyer would inevitably confine his roving mind within intolerably
-narrow limits. He learned the law, as he learned everything else, with
-an eye to discovering its points of contact with affairs, its intimate
-connections with the structure and functions of human society; and,
-studying it thus, he made his way to so many of its secrets, won so
-firm a mastery of its central principles, as always to command the
-respect and even the admiration of lawyers. But the good attorney in
-Dublin was sorely disappointed. This was not what he had wanted. The
-son in whom he had centred his hopes preferred the life of the town
-to systematic study in his chambers; wrote for the papers instead of
-devoting himself to the special profession he had been sent to master.
-“Of his leisure time,” said the “Annual Register” just after his death,
-“of his leisure time much was spent in the company of Mrs. Woffington,
-a celebrated actress, whose conversation was not less sought by men of
-wit and genius than by men of pleasure.”
-
-We know very little about the life of Burke for the ten years,
-1750–60, his first ten years in England,--except that he did _not_
-diligently apply himself to his nominal business, the study of the
-law; and between the years 1752 and 1757 his biographers can show
-hardly one authentic trace of his real life. They know neither his
-whereabouts nor his employments. Only one scrap of his correspondence
-remains from those years to give us any hint of the time. Even Richard
-Shackleton, his invariable confidant and bosom friend, hears never a
-word from him during that period, and is told afterwards only that
-his correspondent has been “sometimes in London, sometimes in remote
-parts of the country, sometimes in France,” and will “shortly, please
-God, be in America.” He disappears a poor law student, under suspicion
-of his father for systematic neglect of duty; when he reappears he is
-married to the daughter of a worthy physician and is author of two
-philosophical works which are attracting a great deal of attention. We
-have reason to believe that, in the mean time, he did as much writing
-as they would take for the booksellers; we know that he frequented the
-London theatres and several of the innumerable debating clubs with
-which nether London abounded, whetting his faculties, it is said, upon
-those of a certain redoubtable baker. He haunted the galleries and
-lobbies of the House of Commons. His health showed signs of breaking,
-and Dr. Nugent took him from his lodgings in the Temple to his own
-house and allowed him to fall in love with his daughter. Partly for
-the sake of his health, perhaps, but more particularly, no doubt, for
-the sake of satisfying an eager mind and a restless habit, he wandered
-off to “remote parts of the country” and to France, with one William
-Burke for company, a man either related to him or not related to him,
-he did not himself know which. In 1755, a long-suffering patience at
-length exhausted, his father shut the home treasury against him; and
-then,--’twas the next year,--he published two philosophical works and
-married Miss Nugent.
-
-One might say, no doubt, that this is an intelligible enough account of
-a young fellow’s life between twenty and thirty: and that we can fill
-in the particulars for ourselves. We have known other young Irishmen
-of restless and volatile natures, and need make no mystery of this
-one. Goldsmith, too, disappeared, we remember, in that same decade,
-making show of studying medicine in Edinburgh, but not really studying
-it, and then wandering off to the Continent, and going it afoot in
-light-hearted, happy-go-lucky fashion through the haunts both of the
-gay Latin races and the sad Teutonic, greatly to the delectation, no
-doubt, of the natives,--for all the world loves an innocent Irishman,
-with his heart upon his sleeve. ’Twould all be very plain indeed if
-we found in Burke that light-hearted vein. But we do not. The fellow
-is sober and strenuous from the first, studying the things he was not
-sent to study with even too intent application, to the damage of his
-health, and looking through the pleasures of the town to the heart of
-the nation’s affairs. He was a grave youth, evidently, gratifying his
-mind rather than his senses in the pleasures he sought; and when he
-emerges from obscurity it is first to give us a touch of his quality in
-the matter of intellectual amusement, and then to turn at once to the
-serious business of the discussion of affairs to which the rest of his
-life was to be devoted.
-
-The two books which he gave the world in 1756 were “A Vindication of
-Natural Society,” a satirical piece in the manner of Bolingbroke,
-and “A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the
-Sublime and Beautiful,” which he had begun when he was nineteen and
-had since reconsidered and revised. Bolingbroke, not finding revealed
-religion to his taste, had written a “Vindication of Natural Religion”
-which his vigorous and elevated style and skillful dialectic had
-done much to make plausible. Burke put forth his “Vindication of
-Natural Society” as a posthumous work of the late noble lord, and so
-skillfully veiled the satirical character of the imitation as wholly
-to deceive some very grave critics, who thought they could discern
-Bolingbroke’s flavor upon the tasting. For the style, too, they took to
-be unmistakably Bolingbroke’s own. It had all his grandeur and air of
-distinction: it had his vocabulary and formal outline of phrase. The
-imitation was perfect. And yet if you will scrutinize it, the style
-is not Bolingbroke’s, except in a trick or two, but Burke’s. It seems
-Bolingbroke’s rather because it is cold and without Burke’s usual moral
-fervor than because it is rich and majestic and various. There is no
-great formal difference between Burke’s style and Bolingbroke’s: but
-there is a great moral and intellectual difference. When Burke is not
-in earnest there is perhaps no important difference at all. And in the
-“Vindication of Natural Society” Burke is not in earnest. The book is
-not, indeed, a parody, and its satirical quality is much too covert
-to make it a successful satire. Much that Burke urges against civil
-society he could urge in good faith, and his mind works soberly upon
-it. It is only the main thesis that he does not seriously mean. The
-rest he might have meant as Bolingbroke would have meant it.
-
-The essay on The Sublime and Beautiful, though much admired by so great
-a master as Lessing, has not worn very well as philosophy. It is full,
-however, of acute and interesting observations, and is adorned in
-parts with touches of rich color put on with the authentic strokes of a
-master. We preserve it, perhaps, only because Burke wrote it; and yet
-when we read it we feel inclined to pronounce it worth keeping for its
-own sake.
-
-Both these essays were apprentice work. Burke was trying his hand. They
-make us the more curious about the conditions of what must have been
-a notable apprenticeship. Young Burke must have gone to school to the
-world in a way worth knowing. But we cannot know, and that’s the end on
-’t. Probably even William Burke, Edmund’s companion, could give us no
-very satisfactory account of the matter. The explanation lay in what he
-thought and not in what he did as he knocked about the world.
-
-The company Burke kept was as singular as his talents, though scarcely
-so eminent. _We_ speak of “Burke,” but the London of his day spoke of
-“the Burkes,” meaning William, who may or may not have been Edmund’s
-kinsman, Edmund himself, and Richard, Edmund’s younger brother, who
-had followed him to London to become, to say truth, an adventurer
-emphatically not of the elevated sort. Edmund was destined to become
-the leader of England’s thought in more than one great matter of
-policy, and has remained a master among all who think profoundly
-upon public affairs; but William was for long the leader and master
-of “the Burkes.” He was English born; had been in Westminster School;
-and had probably just come out from Christ Church, Oxford, when he
-became the companion of Edmund’s wanderings. He was a man of intellect
-and literary power enough to be deemed the possible author of the
-“Letters of Junius;” he was born moreover with an eye for the ways of
-the world, and could push his own fortunes with an unhesitating hand.
-It was he who first got public office, and it was he who formed the
-influential connections which got Edmund into Parliament. He himself
-entered the House at the same time, and remained there, a useful party
-member, for some eight years. He made those from whom he sought favors
-dislike him for his audacity in demanding the utmost, and more than
-the utmost, that he could possibly hope to get; but he seems to have
-made those whom he served love him with a very earnest attachment. He
-was self-seeking; but he was capable of generosity, to the point of
-self-sacrifice even, when he wished to help his friend. He early formed
-a partnership with Richard Burke in immense stock-jobbing speculations
-in the securities of the East India Company; but he also formed a
-literary partnership with Edmund in the preparation of a sketch of the
-European settlements in America, and made himself respected as a strong
-party writer in various pamphlets on questions of the day. He could
-unite the two brothers by speculating with the one and thinking with
-the other.
-
-Such were “the Burkes.” Edmund’s home was always the home also of the
-other two, whenever they wished to make it so; the strongest personal
-affection, avowed always by Edmund with his characteristic generous
-warmth, bound the three men together; their purses they had in common.
-Edmund was not expected, apparently, to take part in the speculations
-which held William and Richard together; something held him aloof to
-which they consented,--some natural separateness of mind and character
-which they evidently accepted and respected. There can hardly be said
-to have been any aloofness of _disposition_ on Edmund’s part. There
-is something in an Irishman,--even in an Irishman who holds himself
-to the strictest code of upright conduct,--which forbids his acting
-as moral censor upon others. He can love a man none the less for
-generous and manly qualities because that man does what he himself
-would not do. Burke, moreover, had an easy standard all his life
-about accepting money favors. He seems to have felt somehow that his
-intense and whole-hearted devotion to his friends justified gifts and
-forgiven loans of money from them. He shared the prosperity of his
-kinsmen without compunction, using what he got most liberally for the
-assistance of others; and when their fortunes came to a sudden ruin,
-he helped them with what he had. We ought long ago to have learned
-that the purest motives and the most elevated standards of conduct
-may go along with a singular laxness of moral detail in some men; and
-that such characters will often constrain us to love them to the point
-of justifying everything that they ever did. Edmund Burke’s close
-union with William and Richard does not present the least obstacle to
-our admiration for the noble qualities of mind and heart which he so
-conspicuously possessed, or make us for a moment doubt the thorough
-disinterestedness of his great career.
-
-Burke’s marriage was a very happy one. Mrs. Burke’s thoroughly sweet
-temperament acted as a very grateful and potent charm to soothe her
-husband’s mind when shaken by the agitations of public affairs; her
-quiet capacity for domestic management relieved him of many small cares
-which might have added to his burdens. Her affection satisfied his
-ardent nature. He speaks of her in his will as “my entirely beloved
-and incomparable wife,” and every glimpse we get of their home life
-confirms the estimate. After his marriage the most serious part of
-his intellectual life begins; the commanding passion of his mind is
-disclosed. He turns away from philosophical amusements to public
-affairs. In 1757 appeared “An Account of the European Settlements in
-America,” which William Burke had doubtless written, but which Edmund
-had almost certainly radically revised; and Edmund himself published
-the first part of “An Abridgment of the History of England” which
-he never completed. In 1758, he proposed to Dodsley, the publisher,
-a yearly volume, to be known as the “Annual Register,” which should
-chronicle and discuss the affairs of England and the Continent. It was
-the period of the Seven Years’ War, which meant for England a sharp and
-glorious contest with France for the possession of America. Burke was
-willing to write the annals of the critical year 1758 for a hundred
-pounds; and so, in 1759, the first volume of the “Annual Register”
-appeared; and the plan then so wisely conceived has yielded its annual
-volume to the present day. Burke never acknowledged his connection
-with this great work,--he never publicly recognized anything he had
-done upon contract for the publishers,--but it is quite certain that
-for very many years his was the presiding and planning mind in the
-production of the “Register.” For the first few years of its life he
-probably wrote the whole of the record of events with his own hand.
-It was a more useful apprenticeship than that in philosophy. It gave
-him an intimate acquaintance with affairs which must have served as a
-direct preparation for the great contributions he was destined to make
-to the mind and policy of the Whig party.
-
-But this, even in addition to other hack work for the booksellers, did
-not keep Burke out of pecuniary straits. He sought, but failed to get,
-an appointment as consul at Madrid, using the interest of Dr. Markham,
-William’s master at Westminster School; and then he engaged himself as
-a sort of private secretary or literary attendant to William Gerard
-Hamilton, whom he served, apparently to the almost entire exclusion of
-all other employments, for some four years, going with him for a season
-to Ireland, where Hamilton for a time held the appointment of Secretary
-to the Lord Lieutenant. Hamilton is described by one of Burke’s friends
-as “a sullen, vain, proud, selfish, cankered-hearted, envious reptile,”
-and Mr. Morley says that there is “not a word too many nor too strong
-in the description.” At any rate, Burke’s proud spirit presently
-revolted from further service, and he threw up a pension of three
-hundred pounds which Hamilton had obtained for him rather than retain
-any connection with the man, or remain under any sort of obligation to
-him. In the mean time, however, his relations with Hamilton had put him
-in the way of meeting many public men of weight and influence, and he
-had gotten his first direct introduction to the world of affairs.
-
-It was 1764 when he shook himself free from this connection. 1764 is
-a year to be marked in English literary annals. It was in the spring
-of that year that that most celebrated of literary clubs was formed at
-the Turk’s Head Tavern, Gerrard Street, Soho, by notable good company:
-Dr. Johnson, Garrick, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Goldsmith, Sheridan, Gibbon,
-Dr. Barnard, Beauclerk, Langton,--we know them all; for has not Boswell
-given us the freedom of the Club and made us delighted participants in
-its conversations and diversions? Into this company Burke was taken at
-once. His writings had immediately attracted the attention of such men
-as these, and had promptly procured him an introduction into literary
-society. His powers told nowhere more brilliantly than in conversation.
-“It is when you come close to a man in conversation,” said Dr. Johnson,
-“that you discover what his real abilities are. To make a speech in
-an assembly is a sort of knack. Now I honor Thurlow; Thurlow is a fine
-fellow, he fairly puts his mind to yours.” There can be no disputing
-the dictum of the greatest master of conversation: and the admirer of
-Burke must be willing to accept it, at any rate for the nonce, for
-Johnson admitted that Burke invariably put him on his mettle. “That
-fellow,” he exclaimed, “calls forth all my powers!” “Burke’s talk,” he
-said, “is the ebullition of his mind; he does not talk from a desire
-of distinction, but because his mind is full; he is never humdrum,
-never unwilling to talk, nor in haste to leave off.” The redoubtable
-doctor loved a worthy antagonist in the great game of conversation,
-and he always gave Burke his ungrudging admiration. When he lay dying,
-Burke visited his bedside, and, finding Johnson very weak, anxiously
-expressed the hope that his presence cost him no inconvenience. “I must
-be in a wretched state indeed,” cried the great-hearted old man, “when
-your company would not be a delight to me.” It was short work for Burke
-to get the admiration of the company at the Turk’s Head. But he did
-much more than that: he won their devoted affection. Goldsmith said
-that Burke wound his way into a subject like a serpent; but he made his
-way straight into the hearts of his friends. His powers are all of a
-piece: his heart is inextricably mixed up with his mind: his opinions
-are immediately transmuted into convictions: he does not talk for
-distinction, because he does not use his mind for the mere intellectual
-pleasure of it, but because he also deeply feels what he thinks. He
-speaks without calculation, almost impulsively.
-
-That is the reason why we can be so sure of the essential purity of
-his nature from the character of his writings. They are not purely
-intellectual productions: there is no page of abstract reasoning to be
-found in Burke. His mind works upon concrete objects, and he speaks
-always with a certain passion, as if his affections were involved. He
-is irritated by opposition, because opposition in the field of affairs,
-in which his mind operates, touches some interest that is dear to him.
-Noble generalizations, it is true, everywhere broaden his matter: there
-is no more philosophical writer in English in the field of politics
-than Burke. But look, and you shall see that his generalizations are
-never derived from abstract premises. The reasoning is upon familiar
-matter of to-day. He is simply taking questions of the moment to the
-light, holding them up to be seen where great principles of conduct
-may shine upon them from the general experience of the race. He is
-not constructing systems of thought, but simply stripping thought of
-its accidental features. He is even deeply impatient of abstractions
-in political reasoning, so passionately is he devoted to what is
-practicable, and fit for wise men to do. To know such a man is to
-experience all the warmer forces of the mind, to feel the generous and
-cheering heat of character; and all noble natures will love such a
-man, because of kinship of quality. All noble natures that came close
-to Burke did love him and cherish their knowledge of him. They loaned
-him money without stint, and then forgave him the loans, as if it were
-a privilege to help him, and no way unnatural that he should never
-return what he received, finding his spirit made for fraternal, not for
-commercial relations.
-
-It is pleasing, as it is also a little touching, to see how his
-companions thus freely accorded to Burke the immunities and
-prerogatives of a prince amongst them. No one failed to perceive how
-large and imperial he was, alike in natural gifts and in the wonderful
-range of his varied acquirements. Sir James Mackintosh, though he
-very earnestly combated some of Burke’s views, intensely admired his
-greatness. He declared that Gibbon “might have been taken from a
-corner of Burke’s mind without ever being missed.” “A wit said, of
-Gibbon’s ‘Autobiography’ that he did not know the difference between
-himself and the Roman Empire. He has narrated his ‘progressions from
-London to Buriton and from Buriton to London’ in the same monotonous,
-majestic periods that he recorded the fall of states and empires.”
-And we certainly feel a sense of incongruity: the two subjects, we
-perceive, are hardly commensurable. Perhaps in Burke’s case we should
-have felt differently,--we _do_ feel differently. In that extraordinary
-“Letter to a Noble Lord,” in which he defends his pension so proudly
-against the animadversions of the Duke of Bedford, how magnificently
-he speaks of his services to the country; how proud and majestic a
-piece of autobiography it is! How insignificant does the ancient house
-of Bedford seem, with all its long generations, as compared with this
-single and now lonely man, without distinguished ancestry or hope of
-posterity! He speaks grandly about himself, as about everything; and
-yet I see no disparity between the subject and the manner!
-
-Outside the small circle of those who knew and loved him, his
-generation did not wholly perceive this. There seemed a touch of
-pretension in this proud tone taken by a man who had never held high
-office or exercised great power. He had made great speeches, indeed,
-no one denied that; he had written great party pamphlets,--that
-everybody knew; his had been the intellectual force within the group of
-Whigs that followed Lord Rockingham,--that, too, the world in general
-perceived and acknowledged; and when he died, England knew the man who
-had gone to be a great man. But, for all that, his tone must, in his
-generation, have seemed disproportioned to the part he had played. His
-great authority is over us rather than over the men of his own day.
-
-Burke had the thoughts of a great statesman, and uttered them with
-unapproachable nobility; but he never wielded the power of a great
-statesman. He was kept always in the background in active politics,
-in minor posts, and employed upon subordinate functions. This would
-be a singular circumstance, if there were any novelty in it; but
-the practice of keeping men of insignificant birth out of the great
-offices was a practice which had “broadened down from precedent to
-precedent” until it had become too strong for even Burke to breast or
-stem. Perhaps, too, there were faults of temper which rendered Burke
-unfit to exercise authority in directing the details, and determining
-the practical measures, of public policy:--but we shall look into that
-presently.
-
-In July, 1765, the Marquis of Rockingham became prime minister
-of England, and Burke became his private secretary. He owed his
-introduction to Lord Rockingham, as usual, to the good offices of
-William Burke, who seems to have found means of knowing everybody
-it was to the interest of “the Burkes” to know. A more fortunate
-connection could hardly have been made. Lord Rockingham, though not
-a man of original powers, was a man of the greatest simplicity and
-nobleness of character, and, like most upright men, knew how to trust
-other men. He gave Burke immediate proof of his manly qualities. The
-scheming old Duke of Newcastle, who ought to have been a connoisseur
-in low men, mistook Burke for one. Shocked that this obscurely born
-and unknown fellow should be accorded confidential relations by Lord
-Rockingham, he hurried to his lordship with an assortment of hastily
-selected slanders against Burke. His real name, he reported, was
-O’Bourke; he was an Irish adventurer without character, and a rank
-Papist to boot; it would ruin the administration to have such a man
-connected with the First Lord of the Treasury. Rockingham, with great
-good sense and frankness, took the whole matter at once to Burke; was
-entirely satisfied by Burke’s denials; and admitted him immediately to
-intimate relations of warm personal friendship which only death broke
-off. William Burke obtained for himself an Undersecretaryship of State
-and arranged with Lord Verney, at that time his partner in East India
-speculations, that two of his lordship’s parliamentary boroughs should
-be put at his and Edmund’s disposal. Edmund Burke, accordingly, entered
-Parliament for the borough of Wendover on the 14th of January, 1766, at
-the age of thirty-seven, and in the first vigor of his powers.
-
-“Now we who know Burke,” announced Dr. Johnson, “know that he will
-be one of the first men in the country.” Burke promptly fulfilled
-the prediction. He made a speech before he had been in the House two
-weeks; a speech that made him at once a marked man. His health was
-now firmly established; he had a commanding physique; his figure was
-tall and muscular, and his bearing full of a dignity which had a touch
-almost of haughtiness in it. Although his action was angular and
-awkward, his extraordinary richness and fluency of utterance drew the
-attention away from what he was doing to what he was saying. His voice
-was harsh, and did not harmonize with the melodious measures in which
-his words poured forth; but it was of unusual compass, and carried
-in it a sense of confidence and power. His utterance was too rapid,
-his thought bore him too impulsively forward, but the pregnant matter
-he spoke “filled the town with wonder.” The House was excited by new
-sensations. Members were astonished to recognize a broad philosophy
-of politics running through this ardent man’s speeches. They felt the
-refreshment of the wide outlook he gave them, and were conscious of
-catching glimpses of excellent matter for reflection at every turn of
-his hurrying thought. They wearied of it, indeed, after a while: the
-pace was too hard for most of his hearers, and they finally gave over
-following him when the novelty and first excitement of the exercise had
-worn off. He too easily lost sight of his audience in his search for
-principles, and they resented his neglect of them, his indifference
-to their tastes. They felt his lofty style of reasoning as a sort of
-rebuke, and deemed his discursive wisdom out of place amidst their own
-thoughts of imperative personal and party interest. He had, before
-very long, to accustom himself, therefore, to speak to an empty House
-and subsequent generations. His opponents never, indeed, managed to
-feel quite easy under his attacks: his arrows sought out their weak
-places to the quick, and they winced even when they coughed or seemed
-indifferent; but they comforted themselves with the thought that the
-orator was also tedious and irritating to his own friends, teasing them
-too with keen rebukes and vexatious admonitions. The high and wise sort
-of speaking must always cause uneasiness in a political assembly. The
-more equal and balanced it is, the more must both parties be threatened
-with reproof.
-
-I would not be understood as saying that Burke’s speeches were
-impartial. They were not. He had preferences which amounted to
-prejudices. He was always an intense party man. But then he was a
-party man with a difference. He believed that the interests of England
-were bound up with the fortunes of the Rockingham Wings; but he did
-not separate the interests of his party and the interests of his
-country. He cherished party connections because he conceived them to be
-absolutely necessary for effective public service. “Where men are not
-acquainted with each other’s principles,” he said, “nor experienced in
-each other’s talents, nor at all practiced in their mutual habitudes
-or dispositions by joint efforts in business; no personal confidence,
-no friendship, no common interest, subsisting among them; it is
-evidently impossible that they can act a public part with uniformity,
-perseverance, or efficacy. In a connection, the most inconsiderable
-man, by adding to the weight of the whole, has his value, and his
-use; out of it, the greatest talents are wholly unserviceable to the
-public.” “When bad men combine, the good must associate.” “It is not
-enough in a situation of trust in the commonwealth, that a man means
-well to his country; it is not enough that in his single person he
-never did an evil act, but always voted according to his conscience,
-and even harangued against every design which he apprehended to be
-prejudicial to the interests of his country.... Duty demands and
-requires, that what is right should not only be made known, but made
-prevalent; that what is evil should not only be detected, but defeated.
-When the public man omits to put himself in a situation of doing his
-duty with effect, it is an omission that frustrates the purposes of
-his trust almost as much as if he had formally betrayed it.” Burke
-believed the Rockingham Whigs to be a combination of good men, and he
-felt that he ought to sacrifice something to keep himself in their
-connection. He regarded them as men who “believed private honor to
-be the foundation of public trust; that friendship was no mean step
-towards patriotism; that he who, in the common intercourse of life,
-showed he regarded somebody besides himself, when he came to act in
-a public situation, might probably consult some other interest than
-his own.” He admitted that such confederacies had often “a narrow,
-bigoted, and prescriptive spirit;” “but, where duty renders a critical
-situation a necessary one,” he said, “it is our business to keep free
-from the evils attendant upon it; and not to fly from the situation
-itself. If a fortress is seated in an unwholesome air, an officer of
-the garrison is obliged to be attentive to his health, but he must
-not desert his station.” “A party,” he declared, “is a body of men
-united for promoting by their joint endeavors the national interest
-upon some particular principle in which they are all agreed.” “Men
-thinking freely, will,” he very well knew, “in particular instances,
-think differently. But still as the greater part of the measures which
-arise in the course of public business are related to, or dependent on,
-some great, _leading, general principles in government_, a man must be
-peculiarly unfortunate in the choice of his political company, if he
-does not agree with them at least nine times in ten. If he does not
-concur in these general principles upon which the party is founded,
-and which necessarily draw on a concurrence in their application, he
-ought from the beginning to have chosen some other, more conformable to
-his opinions. When the question is in its nature doubtful, or not very
-material, the modesty which becomes an individual, and that partiality
-which becomes a well-chosen friendship, will frequently bring on an
-acquiescence in the general sentiment. Thus the disagreement will
-naturally be rare; it will be only enough to indulge freedom, without
-violating concord, or disturbing arrangement.”
-
-Certainly there were no party prizes for Burke. During much the greater
-part of his career the party to which he adhered was in opposition; and
-even when in office it had only small favors for him. Even his best
-friends advised against his appointment to any of the great offices
-of state, deeming him too intemperate and unpractical. And yet the
-intensity of his devotion to his party never abated a jot. Assuredly
-there was never a less selfish allegiance. His devotion was for the
-principles of his party, as he conceived and constructed them. It was
-a moral and intellectual devotion. He had embarked all his spirit’s
-fortunes in the enterprise. Faults he unquestionably had, which seemed
-very grave. He was passionate sometimes beyond all bounds: he seriously
-frightened cautious and practical men by his haste and vehemence in
-pressing his views for acceptance. He was capable of falling, upon
-occasion, into a very frenzy of excitement in the midst of debate, when
-he would often shock moderate men by the ungoverned license of his
-language. But his friends were as much to blame for these outbreaks as
-he was. They cut him to the quick by the way in which they criticised
-and misunderstood him. His heart was maddened by the pain of their
-neglect of his just claims to their confidence. They seemed often to
-use him without trusting him, and their slights were intolerable to his
-proud spirit. Practically, and upon a narrow scale of expediency, they
-may have been right: perhaps he was _not_ circumspect enough to be made
-a responsible head of administration. Unquestionably, too, they loved
-him and meant him no unkindness. But it was none the less tragical to
-treat such a man in such a fashion. They may possibly have temporarily
-served their country by denying to Burke full public acknowledgment of
-his great services; but they cruelly wounded a great spirit, and they
-hardly served mankind.
-
-They did Burke an injustice, moreover. They greatly underrated his
-practical powers. In such offices as he was permitted to hold he showed
-in actual administration the same extraordinary mastery of masses
-of detail which was the foundation of his unapproachable mastery of
-general principles in his thinking. His thought was always immersed
-in matter, and concrete detail did not confuse him when he touched
-it any more than it did when he meditated upon it. Immediate contact
-with affairs always steadied his judgment. He was habitually temperate
-in the conduct of business. It was only in speech and when debating
-matters that stirred the depths of his nature that he gave way to
-uncalculating fervor. He was intemperate in his emotions, but seldom
-in his actions. He could, and did, write calm state papers in the very
-midst and heat of parliamentary affairs that subjected him to the
-fiercest excitements. He was eminently capable of counsel as well as of
-invective.
-
-He served his party in no servile fashion, for all he adhered to it
-with such devotion. He sacrificed his intellectual independence as
-little as his personality in taking intimate part in its counsels. He
-gave it principles, indeed, quite as often as he accepted principles
-from it. In the final efforts of his life, when he engaged every
-faculty of his mind in the contest that he waged with such magnificent
-wrath against the French revolutionary spirit, he gave tone to all
-English thought, and direction to many of the graver issues of
-international policy. Rejected oftentimes by his party, he has at
-length been accepted by the world.
-
-His habitual identification with opposition rather than with the
-government gave him a certain advantage. It relaxed party discipline
-and indulged his independence. It gave leave, too, to the better
-efforts of his genius: for in opposition it is principles that tell,
-and Burke was first and last a master of principles. Government
-is a matter of practical detail, as well as of general measures;
-but the criticism of government very naturally becomes a matter of
-the application of general principles, as standards rather than as
-practical means of policy.
-
-Four questions absorbed the energies of Burke’s life and must always
-be associated with his fame. These were, the American war for
-independence; administrative reform in the English home government;
-reform in the government of India; and the profound political
-agitations which attended the French Revolution. Other questions he
-studied, deeply pondered, and greatly illuminated, but upon these
-four he expended the full strength of his magnificent powers. There
-is in his treatment of these subjects a singular consistency, a very
-admirable simplicity of standard. It has been said, and it is true,
-that Burke had no system of political philosophy. He was afraid of
-abstract system in political thought, for he perceived that questions
-of government are moral questions, and that questions of morals cannot
-always be squared with the rules of logic, but run through as many
-ranges of variety as the circumstances of life itself. “Man acts
-from adequate motives relative to his interest,” he said, “and not on
-metaphysical speculations. Aristotle, the great master of reasoning,
-cautions us, and with great weight and propriety, against this species
-of delusive geometrical accuracy in moral arguments, as the most
-fallacious of all sophistry.” And yet Burke unquestionably had a very
-definite and determinable system of thought, which was none the less a
-system for being based upon concrete, and not upon abstract premises.
-It is said by some writers (even by so eminent a writer as Buckle)
-that in his later years Burke’s mind lost its balance and that he
-reasoned as if he were insane; and the proof assigned is, that he, a
-man who loved liberty, violently condemned, not the terrors only,--that
-of course,--but the very principles of the French Revolution. But to
-reason thus is to convict one’s self of an utter lack of comprehension
-of Burke’s mind and motives: as a very brief examination of his course
-upon the four great questions I have mentioned will show.
-
-From first to last Burke’s thought is conservative. Let his attitude
-with regard to America serve as an example. He took his stand, as
-everybody knows, with the colonies, against the mother country; but
-his object was not revolutionary. He did not deny the legal right
-of England to tax the colonies (_we_ no longer deny it ourselves),
-but he wished to preserve the empire, and he saw that to insist upon
-the right of taxation would be irrevocably to break up the empire,
-when dealing with such a people as the Americans. He pointed out the
-strong and increasing numbers of the colonists, their high spirit in
-enterprise, their jealous love of liberty, and the indulgence England
-had hitherto accorded them in the matter of self-government, permitting
-them in effect to become an independent people in respect of all their
-internal affairs; and he declared the result matter for just pride.
-“Whilst we follow them among the tumbling mountains of ice, and behold
-them penetrating into the deepest frozen recesses of Hudson’s Bay and
-Davis’s Straits,” he exclaimed, in a famous passage of his incomparable
-speech on Conciliation with America, “whilst we are looking for them
-beneath the arctic circle, we hear that they have pierced into the
-opposite region of polar cold, that they are at the antipodes, and
-engaged under the frozen serpent of the South. Falkland Island, which
-seemed too remote and romantic an object for the grasp of national
-ambition, is but a stage and resting place in the progress of their
-victorious industry. Nor is the equinoctial heat more discouraging
-to them than the accumulated winter of both the poles. We know that
-whilst some of them draw the line and strike the harpoon on the coast
-of Africa, others run the longitude, and pursue their gigantic game
-along the coast of Brazil. No sea but what is vexed by their fisheries.
-No climate that is not witness to their toils. Neither the perseverance
-of Holland, nor the activity of France, nor the dexterous and firm
-sagacity of English enterprise, ever carried this most perilous mode of
-hardy industry to the extent to which it has been pushed by this recent
-people,--a people who are still, as it were, but in the gristle, and
-not yet hardened into the bone of manhood. When I contemplate these
-things,--when I know that the colonies in general owe little or nothing
-to any care of ours, and that they are not squeezed into this happy
-form by the constraints of watchful and suspicious government, but
-that, through a wise and salutary neglect, a generous nature has been
-suffered to take her own way to perfection,--when I reflect upon these
-effects, when I see how profitable they have been to us, I feel all the
-pride of power sink, and all the presumption in the wisdom of human
-contrivances melt and die away within me,--my rigor relents,--I pardon
-something to the spirit of liberty.”
-
-“I think it necessary,” he insisted, “to consider distinctly the true
-nature and the peculiar circumstances of the object we have before
-us: because, after all our struggle, whether we will or not, we must
-govern America according to that nature and those circumstances, and
-not according to our own imaginations, not according to abstract ideas
-of right, by no means according to mere general theories of government,
-the resort to which appears to me, in our present situation, no
-better than arrant trifling.” To attempt to force such a people would
-be a course of idle folly. Force, he declared, would not only be an
-odious “but a feeble instrument, for preserving a people so numerous,
-so active, so growing, so spirited as this, in a profitable and
-subordinate connection with” England.
-
-“First, Sir,” he cried, “permit me to observe, that the use of force
-alone is but _temporary_. It may subdue for a moment; but it does not
-remove the necessity of subduing again: and a nation is not governed
-which is perpetually to be conquered.
-
-“My next objection is its _uncertainty_. Terror is not always the
-effect of force, and an armament is not a victory. If you do not
-succeed, you are without resource: for, conciliation failing, force
-remains; but, force failing, no further hope of reconciliation is left.
-Power and authority are sometimes bought by kindness; but they can
-never be begged as alms by an impoverished and defeated violence.
-
-“A further objection to force is, that you _impair the object_ by your
-very endeavors to preserve it. The thing you fought for is not the
-thing you recover, but depreciated, sunk, wasted, and consumed in the
-contest. Nothing less will content me than _whole America_. I do not
-choose to consume its strength along with our own; for in all parts it
-is the British strength I consume.... Let me add, that I do not choose
-wholly to break the American spirit; because it is the spirit that has
-made the country.
-
-“Lastly, we have no sort of _experience_ in favor of force as an
-instrument in the rule of our colonies. Their growth and their utility
-has been owing to methods altogether different. Our ancient indulgence
-has been said to be pursued to a fault. It may be so; but we know, if
-feeling is evidence, that our fault was more tolerable than our attempt
-to mend it, and our sin far more salutary than our penitence.”
-
-“Obedience is what makes government,” “freedom, and not servitude, is
-the cure of anarchy,” and you cannot insist upon one rule of obedience
-for Englishmen in America while you jealously maintain another for
-Englishmen in England. “For, in order to prove that the Americans have
-no right to their liberties, we are every day endeavoring to subvert
-the maxims which preserve the whole spirit of our own. To prove that
-the Americans ought not to be free, we are obliged to depreciate the
-value of freedom itself; and we never seem to gain a paltry advantage
-over them in debate, without attacking some of those principles, or
-deriding some of those feelings, for which our ancestors have shed
-their blood.” “The question with me is, not whether you have a right
-to render your people miserable, but whether it is not your interest
-to make them happy. It is not what a lawyer tells me I _may_ do, but
-what humanity, reason, and justice tell me I _ought_ to do.... Such
-is steadfastly my opinion of the absolute necessity of keeping up the
-concord of this empire by a unity of spirit, though in a diversity
-of operations, that, if I were sure that the colonists had, at their
-leaving this country, sealed a regular compact of servitude, that they
-had solemnly abjured all the rights of citizens, that they had made a
-vow to renounce all ideas of liberty for them and their posterity to
-all generations, yet I should hold myself obliged to conform to the
-temper I found universally prevalent in my own day, and to govern two
-million of men, impatient of servitude, on the principles of freedom.
-I am not determining a point of law; I am restoring tranquillity: and
-the general character and situation of a people must determine what
-sort of government is fitted for them. That point nothing else can or
-ought to determine.” “All government, indeed every human benefit and
-enjoyment, every virtue and every prudent act, is founded on compromise
-and barter. We balance inconveniences; we give and take; we remit some
-rights, that we may enjoy others; and we choose rather to be happy
-citizens than subtle disputants.” “Magnanimity in politics is not
-seldom the truest wisdom; and a great empire and little minds go ill
-together.”
-
-Here you have the whole spirit of the man, and in part a view of his
-eminently practical system of thought. The view is completed when you
-advance with him to other subjects of policy. He pressed with all his
-energy for radical reforms in administration, but he earnestly opposed
-every change that might touch the structure of the constitution itself.
-He sought to secure the integrity of Parliament, not by changing the
-system of representation, but by cutting out all roots of corruption.
-He pressed forward with the most ardent in all plans of just reform,
-but he held back with the most conservative from all propositions of
-radical change. “To innovate is not to reform,” he declared, and there
-is “a marked distinction between change and reformation. The former
-alters the substance of the objects themselves, and gets rid of all
-their essential good as well as of all the accidental evil annexed to
-them. Change is novelty; and whether it is to operate any one of the
-effects of reformation at all, or whether it may not contradict the
-very principle upon which reformation is desired, cannot certainly
-be known beforehand. Reform is not a change in the substance or in
-the primary modification of the object, but a direct application of a
-remedy to the grievance complained of. So far as that is removed, all
-is sure. It stops there; and if it fails, the substance which underwent
-the operation, at the very worst, is but where it was.” This is the
-governing motive of his immense labors to accomplish radical economical
-reform in the administration of the government. He was not seeking
-economy merely; to husband the resources of the country was no more
-than a means to an end, and that end was, to preserve the constitution
-in its purity. He believed that Parliament was not truly representative
-of the people because so many place-men found seats in it, and because
-so many members who might have been independent were bought by the too
-abundant favors of the Court. Cleanse Parliament of this corruption,
-and it would be restored to something like its pristine excellence as
-an instrument of liberty.
-
-He dreaded to see the franchise extended and the House of Commons
-radically made over in its constitution. It had never been intended
-to be merely the people’s House. It had been intended to hold all
-the elements of the state that were not to be found in the House of
-Lords or the Court. He conceived it to be the essential object of the
-constitution to establish a balanced and just intercourse between
-the several forces of an ancient society, and it was well that that
-balance should be preserved even in the House of Commons, rather than
-give perilous sweep to a single set of interests. “These opposed
-and conflicting interests,” he said to his French correspondent,
-“which you considered as so great a blemish in your old and in our
-present Constitution, interpose a salutary check to all precipitate
-resolutions. They render deliberation a matter, not of choice, but
-of necessity; they make all change a subject of _compromise_, which
-naturally begets moderation; they produce _temperaments_, preventing
-the sore evil of harsh, crude, unqualified reformations, and rendering
-all the headlong exertions of arbitrary power, in the few or in the
-many, forever impracticable. Through that diversity of members and
-interests, general liberty had as many securities as there are separate
-views in the several orders; whilst by pressing down the whole by
-the weight of a real monarchy, the separate parts would have been
-prevented from warping and starting from their allotted places.” “_We_
-wish,” he said, “to derive all we possess _as an inheritance from our
-forefathers_. Upon that body and stock of experience we have taken
-care not to inoculate any scion alien to the nature of the original
-plant.” “This idea of a liberal descent inspires us with a sense of
-habitual native dignity, which prevents that upstart insolence almost
-inevitably adhering to and disgracing those who are the first acquirers
-of any distinction. By this means our liberty becomes a noble freedom.
-It carries an imposing and majestic aspect. It has a pedigree and
-illustrating ancestors. It has its bearings and its ensigns armorial.
-It has its gallery of portraits, its monumental inscriptions, its
-records, evidences, and titles. We procure reverence to our civil
-institutions on the principle upon which Nature teaches us to revere
-individual men: on account of their age, and on account of those from
-whom they are descended.”
-
-“When the useful parts of an old establishment are kept, and what
-is superadded is to be fitted to what is retained, a vigorous mind,
-steady, persevering attention, various powers of comparison and
-combination, and the resources of an understanding fruitful in
-expedients are to be exercised; they are to be exercised in a continued
-conflict with the combined force of opposite vices, with the obstinacy
-that rejects all improvement, and the levity that is fatigued and
-disgusted with everything of which it is in possession.... Political
-arrangement, as it is a work for social ends, is to be only wrought
-by social means. There mind must conspire with mind. Time is required
-to produce that union of minds which alone can produce all the good
-we aim at. Our patience will achieve more than our force. If I might
-venture to appeal to what is so much out of fashion in Paris,--I mean
-to experience,--I should tell you that in my course I have known, and,
-according to my measure, have coöperated with great men; and I have
-never yet seen any plan which has not been mended by the observations
-of those who were much inferior in understanding to the person who took
-the lead in the business. By a slow, but well sustained progress, the
-effect of each step is watched; the good or ill success of the first
-gives light to us in the second; and so, from light to light, we are
-conducted with safety, through the whole series.... We are enabled to
-unite into a consistent whole the various anomalies and contending
-principles that are found in the minds and affairs of men. From hence
-arises, not an excellence in simplicity, but one far superior, an
-excellence in composition. Where the great interests of mankind are
-concerned through a long succession of generations, that succession
-ought to be admitted into some share in the counsels which are so
-deeply to affect them.”
-
-It is not possible to escape deep conviction of the wisdom of these
-reflections. They penetrate to the heart of all practicable methods of
-reform. Burke was doubtless too timid, and in practical judgment often
-mistaken. Measures which in reality would operate only as salutary and
-needed reformations he feared because of the element of change that
-was in them. He erred when he supposed that progress can in all its
-stages be made without changes which seem to go even to the substance.
-But, right or wrong, his philosophy did not come to him of a sudden and
-only at the end of his life, when he found France desolated and England
-threatened with madness for love of revolutionary principles of change.
-It is the key to his thought everywhere, and through all his life.
-
-It is the key (which many of his critics have never found) to his
-position with regard to the revolution in France. He was roused to that
-fierce energy of opposition in which so many have thought that they
-detected madness, not so much because of his deep disgust to see brutal
-and ignorant men madly despoil an ancient and honorable monarchy, as
-because he saw the spirit of these men cross the Channel and find
-lodgment in England, even among statesmen like Fox, who had been his
-own close friends and companions in thought and policy; not so much
-because he loved France as because he feared for England. For England
-he had Shakespeare’s love:
-
-   “That fortress built by nature for herself
-    _Against infection and the hand of war_;
-    That happy breed of men, that little world,
-    That precious stone set in the silver sea,
-    Which serves it in the office of a wall,
-    Or as a moat defensive to a house,
-    _Against the envy of less happier lands_;
-    That blessed plot, that earth, that realm, that England.”
-
-’T was to keep out infection and to preserve such precious stores
-of manly tradition as had made that little world “the envy of less
-happier lands” that Burke sounded so effectually that extraordinary
-alarm against the revolutionary spirit that was racking France from
-throne to cottage. Let us admit, if you will, that with reference
-to France herself he was mistaken. Let us say that when he admired
-the institutions which she was then sweeping away he was yielding to
-sentiment, and imagining France as perfect as the beauty of the sweet
-queen he had seen in her radiant youth. Let us concede that he did
-not understand the condition of France, and therefore did not see how
-inevitable that terrible revolution was: that in this case, too, the
-wages of sin was death. He was not defending France, if you look to
-the bottom of it; he was defending England:--and the things he hated
-are truly hateful. He hated the French revolutionary philosophy and
-deemed it unfit for free men. And that philosophy is in fact radically
-evil and corrupting. No state can ever be conducted on its principles.
-For it holds that government is a matter of contract and deliberate
-arrangement, whereas in fact it is an institute of habit, bound
-together by innumerable threads of association, scarcely one of which
-has been deliberately placed. It holds that the object of government
-is liberty, whereas the true object of government is justice; not
-the advantage of one class, even though that class constitute the
-majority, but right equity in the adjustment of the interests of all
-classes. It assumes that government can be made over at will, but
-assumes it without the slightest historical foundation. For governments
-have never been successfully and permanently changed except by slow
-modification operating from generation to generation. It contradicted
-every principle that had been so laboriously brought to light in the
-slow stages of the growth of liberty in the only land in which liberty
-had then grown to great proportions. The history of England is a
-continuous thesis against revolution; and Burke would have been no true
-Englishman, had he not roused himself, even fanatically, if there were
-need, to keep such puerile doctrine out.
-
-If you think his fierceness was madness, look how he conducted the
-trial against Warren Hastings during those same years: with what
-patience, with what steadiness in business, with what temper, with
-what sane and balanced attention to detail, with what statesmanlike
-purpose! Note, likewise, that his thesis is the same in the one
-undertaking as in the other. He was applying the same principles to
-the case of France and to the case of India that he had applied to the
-case of the colonies. He meant to save the empire, not by changing
-its constitution, as was the method in France, and so shaking every
-foundation in order to dislodge an abuse, but by administering it
-uprightly and in a liberal spirit. He was persuaded “that government
-was a practical thing, made for the happiness of mankind, and not
-to furnish out a spectacle of uniformity to gratify the schemes of
-visionary politicians. Our business,” he said, “was to rule, not to
-wrangle; and it would be a poor compensation that we had triumphed in a
-dispute, whilst we had lost an empire.” The monarchy must be saved and
-the constitution vindicated by keeping the empire pure in all parts,
-even in the remotest provinces. Hastings must be crushed in order
-that the world might know that no English governor could afford to be
-unjust. Good government, like all virtue, he deemed to be a practical
-habit of conduct, and not a matter of constitutional structure. It is a
-great ideal, a thoroughly English ideal; and it constitutes the leading
-thought of all Burke’s career.
-
-In short, as I began by saying, this man, an Irishman, speaks the
-best English thought upon the essential questions of politics. He is
-thoroughly, characteristically, and to the bottom English in all his
-flunking. He is more liberal than Englishmen in his treatment of Irish
-questions, of course; for he understands them, as no Englishman of his
-generation did. But for all that he remains the chief spokesman for
-England in the utterance of the fundamental ideals which have governed
-the action of Englishmen in politics. “All the ancient, honest,
-juridical principles and institutions of England,” such was his idea,
-“are so many clogs to check and retard the headlong course of violence
-and oppression. They were invented for this one good purpose, that what
-was not _just_ should not be _convenient_.” This is fundamental English
-doctrine. English liberty has consisted in making it unpleasant for
-those who were unjust, and thus getting them in the habit of being just
-for the sake of a _modus vivendi_. Burke is the apostle of the great
-English gospel of Expediency.
-
-The politics of English-speaking peoples has never been speculative;
-it has always been profoundly practical and utilitarian. Speculative
-politics treats men and situations as they are supposed to be;
-practical politics treats them (upon no general plan, but in detail) as
-they are found to be at the moment of actual contact. With reference
-to America Burke argues: No matter what your legal right in the case,
-it is not _expedient_ to treat America as you propose: a numerous and
-spirited people like the colonists will not submit; and your experiment
-will cost you your colonies. In the case of administrative reform,
-again, it is the higher sort of expediency he urges: If you wish to
-keep your government from revolution, keep it from corruption, and by
-making it pure render it permanent. To the French he says, It is not
-_expedient_ to destroy thus recklessly these ancient parts of your
-constitution. How will you replace them? How will you conduct affairs
-at all after you shall have deprived yourselves of all balance and of
-all old counsel? It is both better and easier to reform than to tear
-down and reconstruct.
-
-This is unquestionably the message of Englishmen to the world, and
-Burke utters it with incomparable eloquence. A man of sensitive
-imagination and elevated moral sense, of a wide knowledge and capacity
-for affairs, he stood in the midst of the English nation speaking
-its moral judgments upon affairs, its character in political action,
-its purposes of freedom, equity, wide and equal progress. It is the
-immortal charm of his speech and manner that gives permanence to
-his works. Though his life was devoted to affairs with a constant
-and unalterable passion, the radical features of Burke’s mind were
-literary. He was a man of books, without being under the dominance
-of what others had written. He got knowledge out of books and the
-abundance of matter his mind craved to work its constructive and
-imaginative effects upon. It is singular how devoid of all direct
-references to books his writings are. The materials of his thought
-never reappear in the same form in which he obtained them. They
-have been smelted and recoined. They have come under the drill and
-inspiration of a great constructive mind, have caught life and taken
-structure from it. Burke is not literary because he takes from books,
-but because he makes books, transmuting what he writes upon into
-literature. It is this inevitable literary quality, this sure mastery
-of style, that mark the man, as much as his thought itself. He is a
-master in the use of the great style. Every sentence, too, is steeped
-in the colors of an extraordinary imagination. The movement takes your
-breath and quickens your pulses. The glow and power of the matter
-rejuvenate your faculties.
-
-And yet the thought, too, is quite as imperishable as its incomparable
-vehicle.
-
-   “The deepest, plainest, highest, clearest pen;
-    The voice most echoed by consenting men;
-    The soul which answered best to all well said
-    By others, and which most requital made;
-    Tuned to the highest key of ancient Rome,
-    Returning all her music with his own;
-    In whom, with nature, study claimed a part,
-    And yet who to himself owed all his art.”
-
-
-
-
-VI.
-
-THE TRUTH OF THE MATTER.
-
-
-“Give us the facts, and nothing but the facts,” is the sharp injunction
-of our age to its historians. Upon the face of it, an eminently
-reasonable requirement. To tell the truth simply, openly, without
-reservation, is the unimpeachable first principle of all right dealing;
-and historians have no license to be quit of it. Unquestionably they
-must tell us the truth, or else get themselves enrolled among a very
-undesirable class of persons, not often frankly named in polite
-society. But the thing is by no means so easy as it looks. The truth
-of history is a very complex and very occult matter. It consists of
-things which are invisible as well as of things which are visible. It
-is full of secret motives, and of a chance interplay of trivial and yet
-determining circumstances; it is shot through with transient passions,
-and broken athwart here and there by what seem cruel accidents; it
-cannot all be reduced to statistics or newspaper items or official
-recorded statements. And so it turns out, when the actual test of
-experiment is made, that the historian must have something more than a
-good conscience, must be something more than a good man. He must have
-an eye to see the truth; and nothing but a very catholic imagination
-will serve to illuminate his matter for him: nothing less than keen
-and steady insight will make even illumination yield him the truth
-of what he looks upon. Even when he has seen the truth, only half
-his work is done, and that not the more difficult half. He must then
-make others see it just as he does: only when he has done that has he
-told the truth. What an art of penetrative phrase and just selection
-must he have to take others into the light in which he stands! Their
-dullness, their ignorance, their prepossessions, are to be overcome
-and driven in, like a routed troop, upon the truth. The thing is
-infinitely difficult. The skill and strategy of it cannot be taught.
-And so historians take another way, which is easier: they tell part of
-the truth,--the part most to their taste, or most suitable to their
-talents,--and obtain readers to their liking among those of similar
-tastes and talents to their own.
-
-We have our individual preferences in history, as in every other sort
-of literature. And there are histories to every taste: histories full
-of the piquant details of personal biography, histories that blaze
-with the splendors of courts and resound with drum and trumpet, and
-histories that run upon the humbler but greater levels of the life
-of the people; colorless histories, so passionless and so lacking
-in distinctive mark or motive that they might have been set up out
-of a dictionary without the intervention of an author, and partisan
-histories, so warped and violent in every judgment that no reader not
-of the historian’s own party can stomach them; histories of economic
-development, and histories that speak only of politics; those that tell
-nothing but what it is pleasant and interesting to know, and those that
-tell nothing at all that one cares to remember. One must be of a new
-and unheard of taste not to be suited among them all.
-
-The trouble is, after all, that men do not invariably find the truth
-to their taste, and will often deny it when they hear it; and the
-historian has to do much more than keep his own eyes clear: he has
-also to catch and hold the eye of his reader. ’Tis a nice art, as much
-intellectual as moral. How shall he take the palate of his reader at
-unawares, and get the unpalatable facts down his throat along with the
-palatable? Is there no way in which all the truth may be made to hold
-together in a narrative so strongly knit and so harmoniously colored
-that no reader will have either the wish or the skill to tear its
-patterns asunder, and men will take it all, unmarred and as it stands,
-rather than miss the zest of it?
-
-It is evident the thing cannot be done by the “dispassionate” annalist.
-The old chroniclers, whom we relish, were not dispassionate. We love
-some of them for their sweet quaintness, some for their childlike
-credulity, some for their delicious inconsequentiality. But our modern
-chroniclers are not so. They are, above all things else, knowing,
-thoroughly informed, subtly sophisticated. They would not for the world
-contribute any spice of their own to the narrative; and they are much
-too watchful, circumspect, and dutiful in their care to keep their
-method pure and untouched by any thought of theirs to let us catch so
-much as a glimpse of the chronicler underneath the chronicle. Their
-purpose is to give simply the facts, eschewing art, and substituting a
-sort of monumental index and table of the world’s events.
-
-The trouble is that men refuse to be made any wiser by such means.
-Though they will readily enough let their eyes linger upon a monument
-of art, they will heedlessly pass by a mere monument of industry. It
-suggests nothing to them. The materials may be suitable enough, but
-the handling of them leaves them dead and commonplace. An interesting
-circumstance thus comes to light. It is nothing less than this, that
-the facts do not of themselves constitute the truth. The truth is
-abstract, not concrete. It is the just idea, the right revelation of
-what things mean. It is evoked only by such arrangements and orderings
-of facts as suggest interpretations. The chronological arrangement
-of events, for example, may or may not be the arrangement which most
-surely brings the truth of the narrative to light; and the best
-arrangement is always that which displays, not the facts themselves,
-but the subtle and else invisible forces that lurk in the events and
-in the minds of men,--forces for which events serve only as lasting
-and dramatic words of utterance. Take an instance. How are you to
-enable men to know the truth with regard to a period of revolution?
-Will you give them simply a calm statement of recorded events, simply
-a quiet, unaccentuated narrative of what actually happened, written
-in a monotone, and verified by quotations from authentic documents of
-the time? You may save yourself the trouble. As well make a pencil
-sketch in outline of a raging conflagration; write upon one portion
-of it “flame,” upon another “smoke;” here “town hall, where the fire
-started,” and there “spot where fireman was killed.” It is a chart, not
-a picture. Even if you made a veritable picture of it, you could give
-only part of the truth so long as you confined yourself to black and
-white. Where would be all the wild and terrible colors of the scene:
-the red and tawny flame; the masses of smoke, carrying the dull glare
-of the fire to the very skies, like a great signal banner thrown to
-the winds; the hot and frightened faces of the crowd; the crimsoned
-gables down the street, with the faint light of a lamp here and there
-gleaming white from some hastily opened casement? Without the colors
-your picture is not true. No inventory of items will even represent
-the truth: the fuller and more minute you make your inventory, the
-more will the truth be obscured. The little details will take up as
-much space in the statement as the great totals into which they are
-summed up; and, the proportions being false, the whole is false. Truth,
-fortunately, takes its own revenge. No one is deceived. The reader
-of the chronicle lays it aside. It lacks verisimilitude. He cannot
-realize how any of the things spoken of can have happened. He goes
-elsewhere to find, if he may, a real picture of the time, and perhaps
-finds one that is wholly fictitious. No wonder the grave and monk-like
-chronicler sighs. He of course wrote to be read, and not merely for the
-manual exercise of it; and when he sees readers turn away his heart
-misgives him for his fellow-men. Is it as it always was, that they do
-not wish to know the truth? Alas! good eremite, men do not seek the
-truth as they should; but do you know what the truth is? It is a thing
-ideal, displayed by the just proportion of events, revealed in form and
-color, dumb till facts be set in syllables, articulated into words,
-put together into sentences, swung with proper tone and cadence. It is
-not revolutions only that have color. Nothing in human life is without
-it. In a monochrome you can depict nothing but a single incident; in a
-monotone you cannot often carry truth beyond a single sentence. Only by
-art in all its variety can you depict as it is the various face of life.
-
-Yes; but what sort of art? There is here a wide field of choice. Shall
-we go back to the art of which Macaulay was so great a master? We could
-do worse. It must be a great art that can make men lay aside the novel
-and take up the history, to find there, in very fact, the movement and
-drama of life. What Macaulay does well he does incomparably. Who else
-can mass the details as he does, and yet not mar or obscure, but only
-heighten, the effect of the picture as a whole? Who else can bring
-so amazing a profusion of knowledge within the strait limits of a
-simple plan, nowhere encumbered, everywhere free and obvious in its
-movement? How sure the strokes, and how bold and vivid the result! Yet
-when we have laid the book aside, when the charm and the excitement
-of the telling narrative have worn off, when we have lost step with
-the swinging gait at which the style goes, when the details have faded
-from our recollection, and we sit removed and thoughtful, with only the
-greater outlines of the story sharp upon our minds, a deep misgiving
-and dissatisfaction take possession of us. We are no longer young, and
-we are chagrined that we should have been so pleased and taken with the
-glitter and color and mere life of the picture. Let boys be cajoled by
-rhetoric, we cry; men must look deeper. What of the judgment of this
-facile and eloquent man? Can we agree with him, when he is not talking
-and the charm is gone? What shall we say of his assessment of men and
-measures? Is he just? Is he himself in possession of the whole truth?
-Does he open the matter to us as it was? Does he not, rather, ride us
-like an advocate, and make himself master of our judgments?
-
-Then it is that we become aware that there were two Macaulays: Macaulay
-the artist, with an exquisite gift for telling a story, filling his
-pages with little vignettes it is impossible to forget, fixing these
-with an inimitable art upon the surface of a narrative that did not
-need the ornament they gave it, so strong and large and adequate was
-it; and Macaulay the Whig, subtly turning narrative into argument, and
-making history the vindication of a party. The mighty narrative is a
-great engine of proof. It is not told for its own sake. It is evidence
-summed up in order to justify a judgment. We detect the tone of the
-advocate, and though if we are just we must deem him honest, we cannot
-deem him safe. The great story-teller is discredited; and, willingly or
-unwillingly, we reject the guide who takes it upon himself to determine
-for us what we shall see. That, we feel sure, cannot be true which
-makes of so complex a history so simple a thesis for the judgment.
-There is art here; but it is the art of special pleading, misleading
-even to the pleader.
-
-If not Macaulay, what master shall we follow? Shall our historian not
-have his convictions, and enforce them? Shall he not be our guide, and
-speak, if he can, to our spirits as well as to our understandings?
-Readers are a poor jury. They need enlightenment as well as
-information; the matter must be interpreted to them as well as related.
-There are moral facts as well as material, and the one sort must be as
-plainly told as the other. Of what service is it that the historian
-should have insight if we are not to know how the matter stands in his
-view? If he refrain from judgment, he may deceive us as much as he
-would were his judgment wrong; for we must have enlightenment,--that
-is his function. We would not set him up merely to tell us tales, but
-also to display to us characters, to open to us the moral and intent of
-the matter. Were the men sincere? Was the policy righteous? We have but
-just now seen that the “facts” lie deeper than the mere visible things
-that took place, that they involve the moral and motive of the play.
-Shall not these, too, be brought to light?
-
-Unquestionably every sentence of true history must hold a judgment
-in solution. All cannot be told. If it were possible to tell all, it
-would take as long to write history as to enact it, and we should have
-to postpone the reading of it to the leisure of the next world. A few
-facts must be selected for the narrative, the great majority left
-unnoted. But the selection--for what purpose it is to be made? For the
-purpose of conveying _an impression_ of the truth. Where shall you
-find a more radical process of judgment? The “essential” facts taken,
-the “unessential” left out! Why, you may make the picture what you
-will, and in any case it must be the express image of the historian’s
-fundamental judgments. It is his purpose, or should be, to give a
-true impression of his theme as a whole,--to show it, not lying upon
-his page in an open and dispersed analysis, but set close in intimate
-synthesis, every line, every stroke, every bulk even, omitted which
-does not enter of very necessity into a single and unified image of the
-truth.
-
-It is in this that the writing of history differs, and differs very
-radically, from the statement of the results of original research. The
-writing of history must be based upon original research and authentic
-record, but it can no more be directly constructed by the piecing
-together of bits of original research than by the mere reprinting
-together of state documents. Individual research furnishes us, as it
-were, with the private documents and intimate records without which the
-public archives are incomplete and unintelligible. But by themselves
-these are wholly out of perspective. It is the consolation of those
-who produce them to make them so. They would lose heart were they
-forbidden to regard all facts as of equal importance. It is facts they
-are after, and only facts,--facts for their own sake, and without
-regard to their several importance. These are their ore,--very precious
-ore,--which they are concerned to get out, not to refine. They have
-no direct concern with what may afterwards be done at the mint or in
-the goldsmith’s shop. They will even boast that they care not for the
-beauty of the ore, and are indifferent how, or in what shape, it may
-become an article of commerce. Much of it is thrown away in the nice
-processes of manufacture, and you shall not distinguish the product of
-the several mines in the coin, or the cup, or the salver.
-
-The historian must, indeed, himself be an investigator. He must know
-good ore from bad; must distinguish fineness, quality, genuineness;
-must stop to get out of the records for himself what he lacks for the
-perfection of his work. But for all that, he must know and stand ready
-to do every part of his task like a master workman, recognizing and
-testing every bit of stuff he uses. Standing sure, a man of science as
-well as an artist, he must take and use all of his equipment for the
-sake of his art,--not to display his materials, but to subordinate and
-transform them in his effort to make, by every touch and cunning of
-hand and tool, the perfect image of what he sees, the very truth of his
-seer’s vision of the world. The true historian works always for the
-whole impression, the truth with unmarred proportions, unexaggerated
-parts, undistorted visage. He has no favorite parts of the story which
-he boasts are bits of his own, but loves only the whole of it, the full
-and unspoiled image of the day of which he writes, the crowded and
-yet consistent details which carry, without obtrusion of themselves,
-the large features of the time. Any exaggeration of the parts makes
-all the picture false, and the work is to do over. “Test every bit of
-material,” runs the artist’s rule, “and then forget the material;”
-forget its origin and the dross from which it has been freed, and think
-only and always of the great thing you would make of it, the pattern
-and form in which you would lose and merge it. That is its only high
-use.
-
-’Tis a pity to see how even the greatest minds will often lack the
-broad and catholic vision with which the just historian must look upon
-men and affairs. There is Carlyle, with his shrewd and seeing eye,
-his unmatched capacity to assess strong men and set the scenery for
-tragedy or intrigue, his breathless ardor for great events, his amazing
-flashes of insight, and his unlooked-for steady light of occasional
-narrative. The whole matter of what he writes is too dramatic. Surely
-history was not all enacted so hotly, or with so passionate a rush of
-men upon the stage. Its quiet scenes must have been longer, not mere
-pauses and interludes while the tragic parts were being made up. There
-is not often ordinary sunlight upon the page. The lights burn now wan,
-now lurid. Men are seen disquieted and turbulent, and may be heard in
-husky cries or rude, untimely jests. We do not recognize our own world,
-but seem to see another such as ours might become if peopled by like
-uneasy Titans. Incomparable to tell of days of storm and revolution,
-speaking like an oracle and familiar of destiny and fate, searching the
-hearts of statesmen and conquerors with an easy insight in every day of
-action, this peasant seer cannot give us the note of piping times of
-peace, or catch the tone of slow industry; watches ships come and go at
-the docks, hears freight-vans thunder along the iron highways of the
-modern world, and loaded trucks lumber heavily through the crowded city
-streets, with a hot disdain of commerce, prices current, the haggling
-of the market, the smug ease of material comfort bred in a trading
-age. There is here no broad and catholic vision, no wise tolerance, no
-various power to know, to sympathize, to interpret. The great seeing
-imagination of the man lacks that pure radiance in which things are
-seen steadily and seen whole.
-
-It is not easy, to say truth, to find actual examples when you are
-constructing the ideal historian, the man with the vision and the
-faculty divine to see affairs justly and tell of them completely. If
-you are not satisfied with this passionate and intolerant seer of
-Chelsea, whom will you choose? Shall it be Gibbon, whom all praise,
-but so few read? He, at any rate, is passionless, it would appear. But
-who could write epochal history with passion? All hot humors of the
-mind must, assuredly, cool when spread at large upon so vast a surface.
-One must feel like a sort of minor providence in traversing that great
-tract of world history, and catch in spite of one’s self the gait and
-manner of a god. This stately procession of generations moves on remote
-from the ordinary levels of our human sympathy. ’Tis a wide view of
-nations and peoples and dynasties, and a world shaken by the travail of
-new births. There is here no scale by which to measure the historian
-of the sort we must look to see handle the ordinary matter of national
-history. The “Decline and Fall” stands impersonal, like a monument. We
-shall reverence it, but we shall not imitate it.
-
-If we look away from Gibbon, exclude Carlyle, and question Macaulay;
-if we put the investigators on one side as not yet historians, and
-the deliberately picturesque and entertaining _raconteurs_ as not yet
-investigators, we naturally turn, I suppose, to such a man as John
-Richard Green, at once the patient scholar,--who shall adequately say
-how nobly patient?--and the rare artist, working so like a master in
-the difficult stuffs of a long national history. The very life of the
-man is as beautiful as the moving sentences he wrote with so subtle
-a music in the cadence. We know whence the fine moral elevation of
-tone came that sounds through all the text of his great narrative.
-True, not everybody is satisfied with our _doctor angelicus_. Some
-doubt he is too ornate. Others are troubled that he should sometimes
-be inaccurate. Some are willing to use his history as a manual; while
-others cannot deem him satisfactory for didactic uses, hesitate
-how they shall characterize him, and quit the matter vaguely with
-saying that what he wrote is “at any rate literature.” Can there be
-something lacking in Green, too, notwithstanding he was impartial, and
-looked with purged and open eyes upon the whole unbroken life of his
-people,--notwithstanding he saw the truth and had the art and mastery
-to make others see it as he did, in all its breadth and multiplicity?
-
-Perhaps even this great master of narrative lacks variety--as who does
-not? His method, whatever the topic, is ever the same. His sentences,
-his paragraphs, his chapters are pitched one and all in the same key.
-It is a very fine and moving key. Many an elevated strain and rich
-harmony commend it alike to the ear and to the imagination. It is
-employed with an easy mastery, and is made to serve to admiration a
-wide range of themes. But it is always the same key, and some themes it
-will not serve. An infinite variety plays through all history. Every
-scene has its own air and singularity. Incidents cannot all be rightly
-set in the narrative if all be set alike. As the scene shifts, the tone
-of the narrative must change: the narrator’s choice of incident and his
-choice of words; the speed and method of his sentence; his own thought,
-even, and point of view. Surely his battle pages must resound with the
-tramp of armies and the fearful din and rush of war. In peace he must
-catch by turns the hum of industry, the bustle of the street, the calm
-of the country-side, the tone of parliamentary debate, the fancy, the
-ardor, the argument of poets and seers and quiet students. Snatches of
-song run along with sober purpose and strenuous endeavor through every
-nation’s story. Coarse men and refined, mobs and ordered assemblies,
-science and mad impulse, storm and calm, are all alike ingredients of
-the various life. It is not all epic. There is rough comedy and brutal
-violence. The drama can scarce be given any strict, unbroken harmony
-of incident, any close logical sequence of act or nice unity of scene.
-To pitch it all in one key, therefore, is to mistake the significance
-of the infinite play of varied circumstance that makes up the yearly
-movement of a people’s life.
-
-It would be less than just to say that Green’s pages do not reveal
-the variety of English life the centuries through. It is his glory,
-indeed, as all the world knows, to have broadened and diversified the
-whole scale of English history. Nowhere else within the compass of
-a single book can one find so many sides of the great English story
-displayed with so deep and just an appreciation of them all, or of the
-part of each in making up the whole. Green is the one man among English
-historians who has restored the great fabric of the nation’s history
-where its architecture was obscure, and its details were likely to be
-lost or forgotten. Once more, because of him, the vast Gothic structure
-stands complete, its majesty and firm grace enhanced at every point by
-the fine tracery of its restored details.
-
-Where so much is done, it is no doubt unreasonable to ask for more. But
-the very architectural symmetry of this great book imposes a limitation
-upon it. It is full of a certain sort of variety; but it is only the
-variety of a great plan’s detail, not the variety of English life. The
-noble structure obeys its own laws rather than the laws of a people’s
-fortunes. It is a monument conceived and reared by a consummate
-artist, and it wears upon its every line some part of the image it was
-meant to bear, of a great, complex, aspiring national existence. But,
-though it symbolizes, it does not contain that life. It has none of
-the irregularity of the actual experiences of men and communities. It
-explains, but it does not contain, their variety. The history of every
-nation has certainly a plan which the historian must see and reproduce;
-but he must reconstruct the people’s life, not merely expound it. The
-scope of his method must be as great as the variety of his subject; it
-must change with each change of mood, respond to each varying impulse
-in the great process of events. No rigor of a stately style must be
-suffered to exclude the lively touches of humor or the rude sallies of
-strength that mark it everywhere. The plan of the telling must answer
-to the plan of the fact,--must be as elastic as the topics are mobile.
-The matter should rule the plan, not the plan the matter.
-
-The ideal is infinitely difficult, if, indeed, it be possible to any
-man not Shakespearean; but the difficulty of attaining it is often
-unnecessarily enhanced. Ordinarily the historian’s preparation for
-his task is such as to make it unlikely he will perform it naturally.
-He goes first, with infinite and admirable labor, through all the
-labyrinth of document and detail that lies up and down his subject;
-collects masses of matter great and small, for substance, verification,
-illustration; piles his notes volumes high; reads far and wide upon
-the tracks of his matter, and makes page upon page of references; and
-then, thoroughly stuffed and sophisticated, turns back and begins his
-narrative. ’Tis impossible then that he should begin naturally. He sees
-the end from the beginning, and all the intermediate way from beginning
-to end; he has made up his mind about too many things; uses his details
-with a too free and familiar mastery, not like one who tells a story
-so much as like one who dissects a cadaver. Having swept his details
-together beforehand, like so much scientific material, he discourses
-upon them like a demonstrator,--thinks too little in subjection to
-them. They no longer make a fresh impression upon him. They are his
-tools, not his objects of vision.
-
-It is not by such a process that a narrative is made vital and true.
-It does not do to lose the point of view of the first listener to
-the tale, or to rearrange the matter too much out of the order of
-nature. You must instruct your reader as the events themselves would
-have instructed him, had he been able to note them as they passed. The
-historian must not lose his own fresh view of the scene as it passed
-and changed more and more from year to year and from age to age. He
-must keep with the generation of which he writes, not be too quick to
-be wiser than they were or look back upon them in his narrative with
-head over shoulder. He must write of them always in the atmosphere they
-themselves breathed, not hastening to judge them, but striving only to
-realize them at every turn of the story, to make their thoughts his
-own, and call their lives back again, rebuilding the very stage upon
-which they played their parts. Bring the end of your story to mind
-while you set about telling its beginning, and it seems to have no
-parts: beginning, middle, end, are all as one,--are merely like parts
-of a pattern which you see as a single thing stamped upon the stuff
-under your hand.
-
-Try the method with the history of our own land and people. How
-will you begin? Will you start with a modern map and a careful
-topographical description of the continent? And then, having made
-your nineteenth-century framework for the narrative, will you ask
-your reader to turn back and see the seventeenth century, and those
-lonely ships coming in at the capes of the Chesapeake? He will never
-see them so long as you compel him to stand here at the end of the
-nineteenth century and look at them as if through a long retrospect.
-The attention both of the narrator and of the reader, if history is
-to be seen aright, must look forward, not backward. It must see with
-a contemporaneous eye. Let the historian, if he be wise, know no more
-of the history as he writes than might have been known in the age and
-day of which he is writing. A trifle too much knowledge will undo him.
-It will break the spell for his imagination. It will spoil the magic
-by which he may raise again the image of days that are gone. He must
-of course know the large lines of his story; it must lie as a whole
-in his mind. His very art demands that, in order that he may know and
-keep its proportions. But the details, the passing incidents of day and
-year, must come fresh into his mind, unreasoned upon as yet, untouched
-by theory, with their first look upon them. It is here that original
-documents and fresh research will serve him. He must look far and wide
-upon every detail of the time, see it at first hand, and paint as he
-looks; selecting, as the artist must, but selecting while the vision
-is fresh, and not from old sketches laid away in his notes,--selecting
-from the life itself.
-
-Let him remember that his task is radically different from the task of
-the investigator. The investigator must display his materials, but the
-historian must convey his impressions. He must stand in the presence
-of life, and reproduce it in his narrative; must recover a past age;
-make dead generations live again and breathe their own air; show them
-native and at home upon his page. To do this, his own impressions must
-be as fresh as those of an unlearned reader, his own curiosity as keen
-and young at every stage. It may easily be so as his reading thickens,
-and the atmosphere of the age comes stealthily into his thought, if
-only he take care to push forward the actual writing of his narrative
-at an equal pace with his reading, painting thus always direct from
-the image itself. His knowledge of the great outlines and bulks of the
-picture will be his sufficient guide and restraint the while, will give
-proportion to the individual strokes of his work. But it will not check
-his zest, or sophisticate his fresh recovery of the life that is in the
-crowding colors of the canvas.
-
-A nineteenth-century plan laid like a standard and measure upon a
-seventeenth-century narrative will infallibly twist it and make it
-false. Lay a modern map before the first settlers at Jamestown and
-Plymouth, and then bid them discover and occupy the continent. With how
-superior a nineteenth-century wonder and pity will you see them grope,
-and stumble, and falter! How like children they will seem to you, and
-how simple their age, and ignorant! As stalwart men as you they were
-in fact; mayhap wiser and braver too; as fit to occupy a continent as
-you are to draw it upon paper. If you would know them, go back to their
-age; breed yourself a pioneer and woodsman; look to find the South Sea
-up the nearest northwest branch of the spreading river at your feet;
-discover and occupy the wilderness with them; dream what may be beyond
-the near hills, and long all day to see a sail upon the silent sea; go
-back to them and see them in their habit as they lived.
-
-The picturesque writers of history have all along been right in
-theory: they have been wrong only in practice. It is a picture of the
-past we want--its express image and feature; but we want the true
-picture and not simply the theatrical matter,--the manner of Rembrandt
-rather than of Rubens. All life may be pictured, but not all of
-life is picturesque. No great, no true historian would put false or
-adventitious colors into his narrative, or let a glamour rest where in
-fact it never was. The writers who select an incident merely because
-it is striking or dramatic are shallow fellows. They see only with the
-eye’s retina, not with that deep vision whose images lie where thought
-and reason sit. The real drama of life is disclosed only with the whole
-picture; and that only the deep and fervid student will see, whose mind
-goes daily fresh to the details, whose narrative runs always in the
-authentic colors of nature, whose art it is to see, and to paint what
-he sees.
-
-It is thus and only thus we shall have the truth of the matter: by
-art,--by the most difficult of all arts; by fresh study and first-hand
-vision; at the mouths of men who stand in the midst of old letters and
-dusty documents and neglected records, not like antiquarians, but like
-those who see a distant country and a far-away people before their very
-eyes, as real, as full of life and hope and incident, as the day in
-which they themselves live. Let us have done with humbug and come to
-plain speech. The historian needs an imagination quite as much as he
-needs scholarship, and consummate literary art as much as candor and
-common honesty. Histories are written in order that the bulk of men may
-read and realize; and it is as bad to bungle the telling of the story
-as to lie, as fatal to lack a vocabulary as to lack knowledge. In no
-case can you do more than convey an impression, so various and complex
-is the matter. If you convey a false impression, what difference
-does it make how you convey it? In the whole process there is a nice
-adjustment of means to ends which only the artist can manage. There
-is an art of lying;--there is equally an art,--an infinitely more
-difficult art,--of telling the truth.
-
-
-
-
-VII.
-
-A CALENDAR OF GREAT AMERICANS.
-
-
-Before a calendar of great Americans can be made out, a valid canon
-of Americanism must first be established. Not every great man born
-and bred in America was a great “American.” Some of the notable men
-born among us were simply great Englishmen; others had in all the
-habits of their thought and life the strong flavor of a peculiar
-region, and were great New Englanders or great Southerners; others,
-masters in the fields of science or of pure thought, showed nothing
-either distinctively national or characteristically provincial, and
-were simply great men; while a few displayed odd cross-strains of
-blood or breeding. The great Englishmen bred in America, like Hamilton
-and Madison; the great provincials, like John Adams and Calhoun; the
-authors of such thought as might have been native to any clime, like
-Asa Gray and Emerson; and the men of mixed breed, like Jefferson and
-Benton,--must be excluded from our present list. We must pick out men
-who have created or exemplified a distinctively American standard and
-type of greatness.
-
-To make such a selection is not to create an artificial standard of
-greatness, or to claim that greatness is in any case hallowed or
-exalted merely because it is American. It is simply to recognize a
-peculiar stamp of character, a special make-up of mind and faculties,
-as the specific product of our national life, not displacing or
-eclipsing talents of a different kind, but supplementing them, and
-so adding to the world’s variety. There is an American type of man,
-and those who have exhibited this type with a certain unmistakable
-distinction and perfection have been great “Americans.” It has required
-the utmost variety of character and energy to establish a great nation,
-with a polity at once free and firm, upon this continent, and no sound
-type of manliness could have been dispensed with in the effort. We
-could no more have done without our great Englishmen, to keep the past
-steadily in mind and make every change conservative of principle, than
-we could have done without the men whose whole impulse was forward,
-whose whole genius was for origination, natural masters of the art of
-subduing a wilderness.
-
-Certainly one of the greatest figures in our history is the figure of
-Alexander Hamilton. American historians, though compelled always to
-admire him, often in spite of themselves, have been inclined, like the
-mass of men in his own day, to look at him askance. They hint, when
-they do not plainly say, that he was not “American.” He rejected, if
-he did not despise, democratic principles; advocated a government as
-strong, almost, as a monarchy; and defended the government which was
-actually set up, like the skilled advocate he was, only because it was
-the strongest that could be had under the circumstances. He believed
-in authority, and he had no faith in the aggregate wisdom of masses of
-men. He had, it is true, that deep and passionate love of liberty, and
-that steadfast purpose in the maintenance of it, that mark the best
-Englishmen everywhere; but his ideas of government stuck fast in the
-old-world politics, and his statesmanship was of Europe rather than of
-America. And yet the genius and the steadfast spirit of this man were
-absolutely indispensable to us. No one less masterful, no one less
-resolute than he to drill the minority, if necessary, to have their way
-against the majority, could have done the great work of organization by
-which he established the national credit, and with the national credit
-the national government itself. A pliant, popular, optimistic man would
-have failed utterly in the task. A great radical mind in his place
-would have brought disaster upon us: only a great conservative genius
-could have succeeded. It is safe to say that, without men of Hamilton’s
-cast of mind, building the past into the future with a deep passion
-for order and old wisdom, our national life would have miscarried at
-the very first. This tried English talent for conservation gave to our
-fibre at the very outset the stiffness of maturity.
-
-James Madison, too, we may be said to have inherited. His invaluable
-gifts of counsel were of the sort so happily imparted to us with our
-English blood at the first planting of the States which formed the
-Union. A grave and prudent man, and yet brave withal when new counsel
-was to be taken, he stands at the beginning of our national history,
-even in his young manhood, as he faced and led the constitutional
-convention, a type of the slow and thoughtful English genius for
-affairs. He held old and tested convictions of the uses of liberty;
-he was competently read in the history of government; processes of
-revolution were in his thought no more than processes of adaptation:
-exigencies were to be met by modification, not by experiment. His
-reasonable spirit runs through all the proceedings of the great
-convention that gave us the Constitution, and that noble instrument
-seems the product of character like his. For all it is so American
-in its content, it is in its method a thoroughly English production,
-so full is it of old principles, so conservative of experience, so
-carefully compounded of compromises, of concessions made and accepted.
-Such men are of a stock so fine as to need no titles to make it noble,
-and yet so old and so distinguished as actually to bear the chief
-titles of English liberty. Madison came of the long line of English
-constitutional statesmen.
-
-There is a type of genius which closely approaches this in character,
-but which is, nevertheless, distinctively American. It is to be seen
-in John Marshall and in Daniel Webster. In these men a new set of
-ideas find expression, ideas which all the world has received as
-American. Webster was not an English but an American constitutional
-statesman. For the English statesman constitutional issues are issues
-of policy rather than issues of law. He constantly handles questions
-of change: his constitution is always a-making. He must at every
-turn construct, and he is deemed conservative if only his rule be
-consistency and continuity with the past. He will search diligently
-for precedent, but he is content if the precedent contain only a germ
-of the policy he proposes. His standards are set him, not by law, but
-by opinion: his constitution is an ideal of cautious and orderly
-change. Its fixed element is the conception of political liberty: a
-conception which, though steeped in history, must ever be added to
-and altered by social change. The American constitutional statesman,
-on the contrary, constructs policies like a lawyer. The standard with
-which he must square his conduct is set him by a document upon whose
-definite sentences the whole structure of the government directly
-rests. That document, moreover, is the concrete embodiment of a
-peculiar theory of government. That theory is, that definitive laws,
-selected by a power outside the government, are the structural iron
-of the entire fabric of politics, and that nothing which cannot be
-constructed upon this stiff framework is a safe or legitimate part of
-policy. Law is, in his conception, creative of states, and they live
-only by such permissions as they can extract from it. The functions
-of the judge and the functions of the man of affairs have, therefore,
-been very closely related in our history, and John Marshall, scarcely
-less than Daniel Webster, was a constitutional statesman. With all
-Madison’s conservative temper and wide-eyed prudence in counsel, the
-subject-matter of thought for both of these men was not English liberty
-or the experience of men everywhere in self-government, but the
-meaning stored up in the explicit sentences of a written fundamental
-law. They taught men the new--the American--art of extracting life
-out of the letter, not of statutes merely (that art was not new), but
-of statute-built institutions and documented governments: the art of
-saturating politics with law without grossly discoloring law with
-politics. Other nations have had written constitutions, but no other
-nation has ever filled a written constitution with this singularly
-compounded content, of a sound legal conscience and a strong national
-purpose. It would have been easy to deal with our Constitution like
-subtle dialecticians; but Webster and Marshall did much more and
-much better than that. They viewed the fundamental law as a great
-organic product, a vehicle of life as well as a charter of authority;
-in disclosing its life they did not damage its tissue; and in thus
-expanding the law without impairing its structure or authority they
-made great contributions alike to statesmanship and to jurisprudence.
-Our notable literature of decision and commentary in the field of
-constitutional law is America’s distinctive gift to the history and
-the science of law. John Marshall wrought out much of its substance;
-Webster diffused its great body of principles throughout national
-policy, mediating between the law and affairs. The figures of the two
-men must hold the eye of the world as the figures of two great national
-representatives, as the figures of two great Americans.
-
-The representative national greatness and function of these men appear
-more clearly still when they are contrasted with men like John Adams
-and John C. Calhoun, whose greatness was not national. John Adams
-represented one element of our national character, and represented it
-nobly, with a singular force and greatness. He was an eminent Puritan
-statesman, and the Puritan ingredient has colored all our national
-life. We have got strength and persistency and some part of our steady
-moral purpose from it. But in the quick growth and exuberant expansion
-of the nation it has been only one element among many. The Puritan
-blood has mixed with many another strain. The stiff Puritan character
-has been mellowed by many a transfusion of gentler and more hopeful
-elements. So soon as the Adams fashion of man became more narrow,
-intense, acidulous, intractable, according to the tendencies of its
-nature, in the person of John Quincy Adams, it lost the sympathy, lost
-even the tolerance, of the country, and the national choice took its
-reckless leap from a Puritan President to Andrew Jackson, a man cast
-in the rough original pattern of American life at the heart of the
-continent. John Adams had not himself been a very acceptable President.
-He had none of the national optimism, and could not understand those
-who did have it. He had none of the characteristic adaptability of the
-delocalized American, and was just a bit ridiculous in his stiffness at
-the Court of St. James, for all he was so honorable and so imposing.
-His type,--be it said without disrespect,--was provincial. Unmistakably
-a great man, his greatness was of the commonwealth, not of the empire.
-
-Calhoun, too, was a great provincial. Although a giant, he had no heart
-to use his great strength for national purposes. In his youth, it is
-true, he did catch some of the generous ardor for national enterprise
-which filled the air in his day; and all his life through, with a truly
-pathetic earnestness, he retained his affection for his first ideal.
-But when the rights and interests of his section were made to appear
-incompatible with a liberal and boldly constructive interpretation of
-the Constitution, he fell out of national counsels and devoted all the
-strength of his extraordinary mind to holding the nation’s thought and
-power back within the strait limits of a literal construction of the
-law. In powers of reasoning his mind deserves to rank with Webster’s
-and Marshall’s: he handled questions of law like a master, as they did.
-He had, moreover, a keen insight into the essential principles and
-character of liberty. His thought moved eloquently along some of the
-oldest and safest lines of English thought in the field of government.
-He made substantive contributions to the permanent philosophy of
-politics. His reasoning has been discredited, not so much because it
-was not theoretically sound within its limits, as because its practical
-outcome was a negation which embarrassed the whole movement of national
-affairs. He would have held the nation still, in an old equipoise,
-at one time normal enough, but impossible to maintain. Webster and
-Marshall gave leave to the energy of change inherent in all the
-national life, making law a rule, but not an interdict; a living guide,
-but not a blind and rigid discipline. Calhoun sought to fix law as a
-barrier across the path of policy, commanding the life of the nation
-to stand still. The strength displayed in the effort, the intellectual
-power and address, abundantly entitle him to be called great; but his
-purpose was not national. It regarded only a section of the country,
-and marked him,--again be it said with all respect,--a great provincial.
-
-Jefferson was not a thorough American because of the strain of French
-philosophy that permeated and weakened all his thought. Benton was
-altogether American so far as the natural strain of his blood was
-concerned, but he had encumbered his natural parts and inclinations
-with a mass of undigested and shapeless learning. Bred in the West,
-where everything was new, he had filled his head with the thought
-of books (evidently very poor books) which exhibited the ideals of
-communities in which everything was old. He thought of the Roman Senate
-when he sat in the Senate of the United States. He paraded classical
-figures whenever he spoke, upon a stage where both their costume and
-their action seemed grotesque. A pedantic frontiersman, he was a living
-and a pompous antinomy. Meant by nature to be an American, he spoiled
-the plan by applying a most unsuitable gloss of shallow and irrelevant
-learning. Jefferson was of course an almost immeasurably greater man
-than Benton, but he was un-American in somewhat the same way. He
-brought a foreign product of thought to a market where no natural or
-wholesome demand for it could exist. There were not two incompatible
-parts in him, as in Benton’s case: he was a philosophical radical by
-nature as well as by acquirement; his reading and his temperament went
-suitably together. The man is homogeneous throughout. The American
-shows in him very plainly, too, notwithstanding the strong and inherent
-dash of what was foreign in his make-up. He was a natural leader and
-manager of men, not because he was imperative or masterful, but because
-of a native shrewdness, tact, and sagacity, an inborn art and aptness
-for combination, such as no Frenchman ever displayed in the management
-of common men. Jefferson had just a touch of rusticity about him,
-besides; and it was not pretense on his part or merely a love of power
-that made him democratic. His indiscriminate hospitality, his almost
-passionate love for the simple equality of country life, his steady
-devotion to what he deemed to be the cause of the people, all mark him
-a genuine democrat, a nature native to America. It is his speculative
-philosophy that is exotic, and that runs like a false and artificial
-note through all his thought. It was un-American in being abstract,
-sentimental, rationalistic, rather than practical. That he held it
-sincerely need not be doubted; but the more sincerely he accepted it so
-much the more thoroughly was he un-American. His writings lack hard and
-practical sense. Liberty, among us, is not a sentiment, but a product
-of experience; its derivation is not rationalistic, but practical.
-It is a hard-headed spirit of independence, not the conclusion of a
-syllogism. The very aërated quality of Jefferson’s principles gives
-them an air of insincerity, which attaches to them rather because they
-do not suit the climate of the country and the practical aspect of
-affairs than because they do not suit the character of Jefferson’s mind
-and the atmosphere of abstract philosophy. It is because both they and
-the philosophical system of which they form a part do seem suitable to
-his mind and character, that we must pronounce him, though a great man,
-not a great American.
-
-It is by the frank consideration of such concrete cases that we
-may construct, both negatively and affirmatively, our canons of
-Americanism. The American spirit is something more than the old, the
-immemorial Saxon spirit of liberty from which it sprung. It has been
-bred by the conditions attending the great task which we have all the
-century been carrying forward: the task, at once material and ideal,
-of subduing a wilderness and covering all the wide stretches of a vast
-continent with a single free and stable polity. It is, accordingly,
-above all things, a hopeful and confident spirit. It is progressive,
-optimistically progressive, and ambitious of objects of national
-scope and advantage. It is unpedantic, unprovincial, unspeculative,
-unfastidious; regardful of law, but as using it, not as being used
-by it or dominated by any formalism whatever; in a sense unrefined,
-because full of rude force; but prompted by large and generous motives,
-and often as tolerant as it is resolute. No one man, unless it be
-Lincoln, has ever proved big or various enough to embody this active
-and full-hearted spirit in all its qualities; and the men who have been
-too narrow or too speculative or too pedantic to represent it have,
-nevertheless, added to the strong and stirring variety of our national
-life, making it fuller and richer in motive and energy; but its several
-aspects are none the less noteworthy as they separately appear in
-different men.
-
-One of the first men to exhibit this American spirit with an
-unmistakable touch of greatness and distinction was Benjamin Franklin.
-It was characteristic of America that this self-made man should become
-a philosopher, a founder of philosophical societies, an authoritative
-man of science; that his philosophy of life should be so homely and so
-practical in its maxims, and uttered with so shrewd a wit; that one
-region should be his birthplace and another his home; that he should
-favor effective political union among the colonies from the first, and
-should play a sage and active part in the establishment of national
-independence and the planning of a national organization; and that
-he should represent his countrymen in diplomacy abroad. They could
-have had no spokesman who represented more sides of their character.
-Franklin was a sort of multiple American. He was versatile without
-lacking solidity; he was a practical statesman without ceasing to be a
-sagacious philosopher. He came of the people, and was democratic; but
-he had raised himself out of the general mass of unnamed men, and so
-stood for the democratic law, not of equality, but of self-selection
-in endeavor. One can feel sure that Franklin would have succeeded
-in any part of the national life that it might have fallen to his
-lot to take part in. He will stand the final and characteristic
-test of Americanism: he would unquestionably have made a successful
-frontiersman, capable at once of wielding the axe and of administering
-justice from the fallen trunk.
-
-Washington hardly seems an American, as most of his biographers depict
-him. He is too colorless, too cold, too prudent. He seems more like
-a wise and dispassionate Mr. Alworthy, advising a nation as he would
-a parish, than like a man building states and marshaling a nation in
-a wilderness. But the real Washington was as thoroughly an American
-as Jackson or Lincoln. What we take for lack of passion in him was
-but the reserve and self-mastery natural to a man of his class and
-breeding in Virginia. He was no parlor politician, either. He had seen
-the frontier, and far beyond it where the French forts lay. He knew
-the rough life of the country as few other men could. His thoughts
-did not live at Mount Vernon. He knew difficulty as intimately and
-faced it always with as quiet a mastery as William the Silent. This
-calm, straightforward, high-spirited man, making charts of the western
-country, noting the natural land and water routes into the heart of
-the continent, marking how the French power lay, conceiving the policy
-which should dispossess it, and the engineering achievements which
-should make the utmost resources of the land our own; counseling
-Braddock how to enter the forest, but not deserting him because he
-would not take advice; planning step by step, by patient correspondence
-with influential men everywhere, the meetings, conferences, common
-resolves which were finally to bring the great constitutional
-convention together; planning, too, always for the country as well
-as for Virginia; and presiding at last over the establishment and
-organization of the government of the Union: he certainly--the most
-suitable instrument of the national life at every moment of crisis--is
-a great American. Those noble words which he uttered amidst the first
-doubtings of the constitutional convention might serve as a motto for
-the best efforts of liberty wherever free men strive: “Let us raise a
-standard to which the wise and honest can repair; the event is in the
-hand of God.”
-
-In Henry Clay we have an American of a most authentic pattern. There
-was no man of his generation who represented more of America than
-he did. The singular, almost irresistible attraction he had for men
-of every class and every temperament came, not from the arts of
-the politician, but from the instant sympathy established between
-him and every fellow-countryman of his. He does not seem to have
-exercised the same fascination upon foreigners. They felt toward him
-as some New Englanders did: he seemed to them plausible merely, too
-indiscriminately open and cordial to be sincere,--a bit of a charlatan.
-No man who really takes the trouble to understand Henry Clay, or who
-has quick enough parts to sympathize with him, can deem him false. It
-is the odd combination of two different elements in him that makes
-him seem irregular and inconstant. His nature was of the West, blown
-through with quick winds of ardor and aggression, a bit reckless and
-defiant; but his art was of the East, ready with soft and placating
-phrases, reminiscent of old and reverenced ideals, thoughtful of
-compromise and accommodation. He had all the address of the trained
-and sophisticated politician, bred in an old and sensitive society;
-but his purposes ran free of cautious restraints, and his real ideals
-were those of the somewhat bumptious Americanism which was pushing
-the frontier forward in the West, which believed itself capable
-of doing anything it might put its hand to, despised conventional
-restraints, and followed a vague but resplendent “manifest destiny”
-with lusty hurrahs. His purposes were sincere, even if often crude
-and uninstructed; it was only because the subtle arts of politics
-seemed inconsistent with the direct dash and bold spirit of the man
-that they sat upon him like an insincerity. He thoroughly, and by mere
-unconscious sympathy, represented the double America of his day, made
-up of a West which hurried and gave bold strokes, and of an East which
-held back, fearing the pace, thoughtful and mindful of the instructive
-past. The one part had to be served without offending the other: and
-that was Clay’s mediatorial function.
-
-Andrew Jackson was altogether of the West. Of his sincerity nobody
-has ever had any real doubt; and his Americanism is now at any rate
-equally unimpeachable. He was like Clay with the social imagination of
-the orator and the art and sophistication of the Eastern politician
-left out. He came into our national politics like a cyclone from off
-the Western prairies. Americans of the present day perceptibly shudder
-at the very recollection of Jackson. He seems to them a great Vandal,
-playing fast and loose alike with institutions and with tested and
-established policy, debauching politics like a modern spoilsman.
-But whether we would accept him as a type of ourselves or not, the
-men of his own day accepted him with enthusiasm. He did not need to
-be explained to them. They crowded to his standard like men free at
-last, after long and tedious restraint, to make their own choice,
-follow their own man. There can be no mistaking the spontaneity of the
-thoroughgoing support he received. His was the new type of energy and
-self-confidence bred by life outside the States that had been colonies.
-It was a terrible energy, threatening sheer destruction to many a
-carefully wrought arrangement handed on to us from the past; it was
-a perilous self-confidence, founded in sheer strength rather than in
-wisdom. The government did not pass through the throes of that signal
-awakening of the new national spirit without serious rack and damage.
-But it was no disease. It was only an incautious, abounding, madcap
-strength which proved so dangerous in its readiness for every rash
-endeavor. It was necessary that the West should be let into the play:
-it was even necessary that she should assert her right to the leading
-rôle. It was done without good taste, but that does not condemn it. We
-have no doubt refined and schooled the hoyden influences of that crude
-time, and they are vastly safer now than then, when they first came
-bounding in; but they mightily stirred and enriched our blood from the
-first. Now that we have thoroughly suffered this Jackson change and it
-is over, we are ready to recognize it as quite as radically American as
-anything in all our history.
-
-Lincoln, nevertheless, rather than Jackson, was the supreme American
-of our history. In Clay, East and West were mixed without being fused
-or harmonized: he seems like two men. In Jackson there was not even
-a mixture; he was all of a piece, and altogether unacceptable to
-some parts of the country,--a frontier statesman. But in Lincoln the
-elements were combined and harmonized. The most singular thing about
-the wonderful career of the man is the way in which he steadily grew
-into a national stature. He began an amorphous, unlicked cub, bred
-in the rudest of human lairs; but, as he grew, everything formed,
-informed, transformed him. The process was slow but unbroken. He was
-not fit to be President until he actually became President. He was fit
-then because, learning everything as he went, he had found out how much
-there was to learn, and had still an infinite capacity for learning.
-The quiet voices of sentiment and murmurs of resolution that went
-whispering through the land, his ear always caught, when others could
-hear nothing but their own words. He never ceased to be a common man:
-that was his source of strength. But he was a common man with genius,
-a genius for things American, for insight into the common thought, for
-mastery of the fundamental things of politics that inhere in human
-nature and cast hardly more than their shadows on constitutions; for
-the practical niceties of affairs; for judging men and assessing
-arguments. Jackson had no social imagination: no unfamiliar community
-made any impression on him. His whole fibre stiffened young, and
-nothing afterward could modify or even deeply affect it. But Lincoln
-was always a-making; he would have died unfinished if the terrible
-storms of the war had not stung him to learn in those four years
-what no other twenty could have taught him. And, as he stands there
-in his complete manhood, at the most perilous helm in Christendom,
-what a marvelous composite figure he is! The whole country is summed
-up in him: the rude Western strength, tempered with shrewdness and a
-broad and humane wit; the Eastern conservatism, regardful of law and
-devoted to fixed standards of duty. He even understood the South, as
-no other Northern man of his generation did. He respected, because he
-comprehended, though he could not hold, its view of the Constitution;
-he appreciated the inexorable compulsions of its past in respect of
-slavery; he would have secured it once more, and speedily if possible,
-in its right to self-government, when the fight was fought out. To the
-Eastern politicians he seemed like an accident; but to history he must
-seem like a providence.
-
-Grant was Lincoln’s suitable instrument, a great American general,
-the appropriate product of West Point. A Western man, he had no
-thought of commonwealths politically separate, and was instinctively
-for the Union; a man of the common people, he deemed himself always
-an instrument, never a master, and did his work, though ruthlessly,
-without malice; a sturdy, hard-willed, taciturn man, a sort of
-Lincoln the Silent in thought and spirit. He does not appeal to the
-imagination very deeply; there is a sort of common greatness about
-him, great gifts combined singularly with a great mediocrity; but such
-peculiarities seem to make him all the more American,--national in
-spirit, thoroughgoing in method, masterful in purpose.
-
-And yet it is no contradiction to say that Robert E. Lee also was a
-great American. He fought on the opposite side, but he fought in the
-same spirit, and for a principle which is in a sense scarcely less
-American than the principle of Union. He represented the idea of the
-inherent--the essential--separateness of self-government. This was
-not the principle of secession: that principle involved the separate
-right of the several self-governing units of the federal system to
-judge of national questions independently, and as a check upon the
-federal government,--to adjudge the very objects of the Union. Lee did
-not believe in secession, but he did believe in the local rootage of
-all government. This is at the bottom, no doubt, an English idea; but
-it has had a characteristic American development. It is the reverse
-side of the shield which bears upon its obverse the devices of the
-Union, a side too much overlooked and obscured since the war. It
-conceives the individual State a community united by the most intimate
-associations, the first home and foster-mother of every man born into
-the citizenship of the nation. Lee considered himself a member of one
-of these great families; he could not conceive of the nation apart from
-the State: above all, he could not live in the nation divorced from his
-neighbors. His own community should decide his political destiny and
-duty.
-
-This was also the spirit of Patrick Henry and of Sam Houston,--men
-much alike in the cardinal principle of their natures. Patrick Henry
-resisted the formation of the Union only because he feared to disturb
-the local rootage of self-government, to disperse power so widely
-that neighbors could not control it. It was not a disloyal or a
-separatist spirit, but only a jealous spirit of liberty. Sam Houston,
-too, deemed the character a community should give itself so great a
-matter that the community, once made, ought itself to judge of the
-national associations most conducive to its liberty and progress.
-Without liberty of this intensive character there could have been no
-vital national liberty; and Sam Houston, Patrick Henry, and Robert E.
-Lee are none the less great Americans because they represented only
-one cardinal principle of the national life. Self-government has its
-intrinsic antinomies as well as its harmonies.
-
-Among men of letters Lowell is doubtless most typically American,
-though Curtis must find an eligible place in the list. Lowell was
-self-conscious, though the truest greatness is not; he was a trifle too
-“smart,” besides, and there is no “smartness” in great literature. But
-both the self-consciousness and the smartness must be admitted to be
-American; and Lowell was so versatile, so urbane, of so large a spirit,
-and so admirable in the scope of his sympathies, that he must certainly
-go on the calendar.
-
-There need be no fear that we shall be obliged to stop with Lowell in
-literature, or with any of the men who have been named in the field
-of achievement. We shall not in the future have to take one type
-of Americanism at a time. The frontier is gone: it has reached the
-Pacific. The country grows rapidly homogeneous. With the same pace it
-grows various, and multiform in all its life. The man of the simple or
-local type cannot any longer deal in the great manner with any national
-problem. The great men of our future must be of the composite type
-of greatness: sound-hearted, hopeful, confident of the validity of
-liberty, tenacious of the deeper principles of American institutions,
-but with the old rashness schooled and sobered, and instinct tempered
-by instruction. They must be wise with an adult, not with an
-adolescent wisdom. Some day we shall be of one mind, our ideals fixed,
-our purposes harmonized, our nationality complete and consentaneous:
-then will come our great literature and our greatest men.
-
-
-
-
-VIII.
-
-THE COURSE OF AMERICAN HISTORY.[1]
-
-    [1] An address delivered before the New Jersey Historical Society.
-
-
-In the field of history, learning should be deemed to stand among the
-people and in the midst of life. Its function there is not one of
-pride merely: to make complaisant record of deeds honorably done and
-plans nobly executed in the past. It has also a function of guidance:
-to build high places whereon to plant the clear and flaming lights of
-experience, that they may shine alike upon the roads already traveled
-and upon the paths not yet attempted. The historian is also a sort
-of prophet. Our memories direct us. They give us knowledge of our
-character, alike in its strength and in its weakness: and it is so we
-get our standards for endeavor,--our warnings and our gleams of hope.
-It is thus we learn what manner of nation we are of, and divine what
-manner of people we should be.
-
-And this is not in national records merely. Local history is the
-ultimate substance of national history. There could be no epics were
-pastorals not also true,--no patriotism, were there no homes, no
-neighbors, no quiet round of civic duty; and I, for my part, do not
-wonder that scholarly men have been found not a few who, though they
-might have shone upon a larger field, where all eyes would have seen
-them win their fame, yet chose to pore all their lives long upon the
-blurred and scattered records of a country-side, where there was
-nothing but an old church or an ancient village. The history of a
-nation is only the history of its villages written large. I only marvel
-that these local historians have not seen more in the stories they
-have sought to tell. Surely here, in these old hamlets that antedate
-the cities, in these little communities that stand apart and yet give
-their young life to the nation, is to be found the very authentic stuff
-of romance for the mere looking. There is love and courtship and eager
-life and high devotion up and down all the lines of every genealogy.
-What strength, too, and bold endeavor in the cutting down of forests
-to make the clearings; what breath of hope and discovery in scaling
-for the first time the nearest mountains; what longings ended or begun
-upon the coming in of ships into the harbor; what pride of earth in the
-rivalries of the village; what thoughts of heaven in the quiet of the
-rural church! What forces of slow and steadfast endeavor there were
-in the building of a great city upon the foundations of a hamlet: and
-how the plot broadens and thickens and grows dramatic as communities
-widen into states! Here, surely, sunk deep in the very fibre of the
-stuff, are the colors of the great story of men,--the lively touches of
-reality and the striking images of life.
-
-It must be admitted, I know, that local history can be made deadly dull
-in the telling. The men who reconstruct it seem usually to build with
-kiln-dried stuff,--as if with a purpose it should last. But that is
-not the fault of the subject. National history may be written almost
-as ill, if due pains be taken to dry it out. It is a trifle more
-difficult: because merely to speak of national affairs is to give hint
-of great forces and of movements blown upon by all the airs of the wide
-continent. The mere largeness of the scale lends to the narrative a
-certain dignity and spirit. But some men will manage to be dull though
-they should speak of creation. In writing of local history the thing
-is fatally easy. For there is some neighborhood history that lacks any
-large significance, which is without horizon or outlook. There are
-details in the history of every community which it concerns no man to
-know again when once they are past and decently buried in the records:
-and these are the very details, no doubt, which it is easiest to find
-upon a casual search. It is easier to make out a list of county clerks
-than to extract the social history of the county from the records
-they have kept,--though it is not so important: and it is easier to
-make a catalogue of anything than to say what of life and purpose the
-catalogue stands for. This is called collecting facts “for the sake of
-the facts themselves;” but if I wished to do aught for the sake of the
-facts themselves I think I should serve them better by giving their
-true biographies than by merely displaying their faces.
-
-The right and vital sort of local history is the sort which may be
-written with lifted eyes,--the sort which has an horizon and an outlook
-upon the world. Sometimes it may happen, indeed, that the annals of a
-neighborhood disclose some singular adventure which had its beginning
-and its ending there: some unwonted bit of fortune which stands unique
-and lonely amidst the myriad transactions of the world of affairs,
-and deserves to be told singly and for its own sake. But usually the
-significance of local history is, that it is part of a greater whole. A
-spot of local history is like an inn upon a highway: it is a stage upon
-a far journey: it is a place the national history has passed through.
-There mankind has stopped and lodged by the way. Local history is thus
-less than national history only as the part is less than the whole. The
-whole could not dispense with the part, would not exist without it,
-could not be understood unless the part also were understood. Local
-history is subordinate to national only in the sense in which each
-leaf of a book is subordinate to the volume itself. Upon no single
-page will the whole theme of the book be found; but each page holds
-a part of the theme. Even were the history of each locality exactly
-like the history of every other (which it cannot be), it would deserve
-to be written,--if only to corroborate the history of the rest, and
-verify it as an authentic part of the record of the race and nation.
-The common elements of a nation’s life are the great elements of its
-life, the warp and woof of the fabric. They cannot be too much or too
-substantially verified and explicated. It is so that history is made
-solid and fit for use and wear.
-
-Our national history, of course, has its own great and spreading
-pattern, which can be seen in its full form and completeness only when
-the stuff of our national life is laid before us in broad surfaces and
-upon an ample scale. But the detail of the pattern, the individual
-threads of the great fabric, are to be found only in local history.
-There is all the intricate weaving, all the delicate shading, all
-the nice refinement of the pattern,--gold thread mixed with fustian,
-fine thread laid upon coarse, shade combined with shade. Assuredly
-it is this that gives to local history its life and importance. The
-idea, moreover, furnishes a nice criterion of interest. The life of
-some localities is, obviously, more completely and intimately a part
-of the national pattern than the life of other localities, which are
-more separate and, as it were, put upon the border of the fabric. To
-come at once and very candidly to examples, the local history of the
-Middle States,--New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania,--is much more
-structurally a part of the characteristic life of the nation as a whole
-than is the history of the New England communities or of the several
-States and regions of the South. I know that such a heresy will sound
-very rank in the ears of some: for I am speaking against accepted
-doctrine. But acceptance, be it never so general, does not make a
-doctrine true.
-
-Our national history has been written for the most part by New England
-men. All honor to them! Their scholarship and their characters alike
-have given them an honorable enrollment amongst the great names of our
-literary history; and no just man would say aught to detract, were it
-never so little, from their well-earned fame. They have written our
-history, nevertheless, from but a single point of view. From where they
-sit, the whole of the great development looks like an Expansion of New
-England. Other elements but play along the sides of the great process
-by which the Puritan has worked out the development of nation and
-polity. It is he who has gone out and possessed the land: the man of
-destiny, the type and impersonation of a chosen people. To the Southern
-writer, too, the story looks much the same, if it be but followed to
-its culmination,--to its final storm and stress and tragedy in the
-great war. It is the history of the Suppression of the South. Spite of
-all her splendid contributions to the steadfast accomplishment of the
-great task of building the nation; spite of the long leadership of her
-statesmen in the national counsels; spite of her joint achievements in
-the conquest and occupation of the West, the South was at last turned
-upon on every hand, rebuked, proscribed, defeated. The history of the
-United States, we have learned, was, from the settlement at Jamestown
-to the surrender at Appomattox, a long-drawn contest for mastery
-between New England and the South,--and the end of the contest we
-know. All along the parallels of latitude ran the rivalry, in those
-heroical days of toil and adventure during which population crossed
-the continent, like an army advancing its encampments. Up and down the
-great river of the continent, too, and beyond, up the slow incline of
-the vast steppes that lift themselves toward the crowning towers of the
-Rockies,--beyond that, again, in the gold-fields and upon the green
-plains of California, the race for ascendency struggled on,--till at
-length there was a final coming face to face, and the masterful folk
-who had come from the loins of New England won their consummate victory.
-
-It is a very dramatic form for the story. One almost wishes it were
-true. How fine a unity it would give our epic! But perhaps, after all,
-the real truth is more interesting. The life of the nation cannot
-be reduced to these so simple terms. These two great forces, of the
-North and of the South, unquestionably existed,--were unquestionably
-projected in their operation out upon the great plane of the continent,
-there to combine or repel, as circumstances might determine. But
-the people that went out from the North were not an unmixed people;
-they came from the great Middle States as well as from New England.
-Their transplantation into the West was no more a reproduction of New
-England or New York or Pennsylvania or New Jersey than Massachusetts
-was a reproduction of old England, or New Netherland a reproduction
-of Holland. The Southern people, too, whom they met by the western
-rivers and upon the open prairies, were transformed, as they themselves
-were, by the rough fortunes of the frontier. A mixture of peoples,
-a modification of mind and habit, a new round of experiment and
-adjustment amidst the novel life of the baked and unfilled plain, and
-the far valleys with the virgin forests still thick upon them: a new
-temper, a new spirit of adventure, a new impatience of restraint, a new
-license of life,--these are the characteristic notes and measures of
-the time when the nation spread itself at large upon the continent, and
-was transformed from a group of colonies into a family of States.
-
-The passes of these eastern mountains were the arteries of the
-nation’s life. The real breath of our growth and manhood came into our
-nostrils when first, like Governor Spotswood and that gallant company
-of Virginian gentlemen that rode with him in the far year 1716, the
-Knights of the Order of the Golden Horseshoe, our pioneers stood upon
-the ridges of the eastern hills and looked down upon those reaches of
-the continent where lay the untrodden paths of the westward migration.
-There, upon the courses of the distant rivers that gleamed before them
-in the sun, down the farther slopes of the hills beyond, out upon the
-broad fields that lay upon the fertile banks of the “Father of Waters,”
-up the long tilt of the continent to the vast hills that looked out
-upon the Pacific--there were the regions in which, joining with people
-from every race and clime under the sun, they were to make the great
-compounded nation whose liberty and mighty works of peace were to
-cause all the world to stand at gaze. Thither were to come Frenchmen,
-Scandinavians, Celts, Dutch, Slavs,--men of the Latin races and of the
-races of the Orient, as well as men, a great host, of the first stock
-of the settlements: English, Scots, Scots-Irish,--like New England men,
-but touched with the salt of humor, hard, and yet neighborly too. For
-this great process of growth by grafting, of modification no less than
-of expansion, the colonies,--the original thirteen States,--were only
-preliminary studies and first experiments. But the experiments that
-most resembled the great methods by which we peopled the continent
-from side to side and knit a single polity across all its length and
-breadth, were surely the experiments made from the very first in the
-Middle States of our Atlantic seaboard.
-
-Here from the first were mixture of population, variety of element,
-combination of type, as if of the nation itself in small. Here was
-never a simple body, a people of but a single blood and extraction, a
-polity and a practice brought straight from one motherland. The life of
-these States was from the beginning like the life of the country: they
-have always shown the national pattern. In New England and the South it
-was very different. There some of the great elements of the national
-life were long in preparation: but separately and with an individual
-distinction; without mixture,--for long almost without movement. That
-the elements thus separately prepared were of the greatest importance,
-and run everywhere like chief threads of the pattern through all our
-subsequent life, who can doubt? They give color and tone to every part
-of the figure. The very fact that they are so distinct and separately
-evident throughout, the very emphasis of individuality they carry with
-them, but proves their distinct origin. The other elements of our life,
-various though they be, and of the very fibre, giving toughness and
-consistency to the fabric, are merged in its texture, united, confused,
-almost indistinguishable, so thoroughly are they mixed, intertwined,
-interwoven, like the essential strands of the stuff itself: but these
-of the Puritan and the Southerner, though they run everywhere with the
-rest and seem upon a superficial view themselves the body of the cloth,
-in fact modify rather than make it.
-
-What in fact has been the course of American history? How is it to be
-distinguished from European history? What features has it of its own,
-which give it its distinctive plan and movement? We have suffered, it
-is to be feared, a very serious limitation of view until recent years
-by having all our history written in the East. It has smacked strongly
-of a local flavor. It has concerned itself too exclusively with the
-origins and Old-World derivations of our story. Our historians have
-made their march from the sea with their heads over shoulder, their
-gaze always backward upon the landing-places and homes of the first
-settlers. In spite of the steady immigration, with its persistent tide
-of foreign blood, they have chosen to speak often and to think always
-of our people as sprung after all from a common stock, bearing a family
-likeness in every branch, and following all the while old, familiar,
-family ways. The view is the more misleading because it is so large a
-part of the truth without being all of it. The common British stock
-did first make the country, and has always set the pace. There were
-common institutions up and down the coast; and these had formed and
-hardened for a persistent growth before the great westward migration
-began which was to re-shape and modify every element of our life. The
-national government itself was set up and made strong by success while
-yet we lingered for the most part upon the eastern coast and feared a
-too distant frontier.
-
-But, the beginnings once safely made, change set in apace. Not only
-so: there had been slow change from the first. We have no frontier
-now, we are told,--except a broken fragment, it may be, here and there
-in some barren corner of the western lands, where some inhospitable
-mountain still shoulders us out, or where men are still lacking to
-break the baked surface of the plains and occupy them in the very teeth
-of hostile nature. But at first it was all frontier,--a mere strip of
-settlements stretched precariously upon the sea-edge of the wilds: an
-untouched continent in front of them, and behind them an unfrequented
-sea that almost never showed so much as the momentary gleam of a sail.
-Every step in the slow process of settlement was but a step of the
-same kind as the first, an advance to a new frontier like the old. For
-long we lacked, it is true, that new breed of frontiersmen born in
-after years beyond the mountains. Those first frontiersmen had still
-a touch of the timidity of the Old World in their blood: they lacked
-the frontier heart. They were “Pilgrims” in very fact,--exiled, not at
-home. Fine courage they had: and a steadfastness in their bold design
-which it does a faint-hearted age good to look back upon. There was
-no thought of drawing back. Steadily, almost calmly, they extended
-their seats. They built homes, and deemed it certain their children
-would live there after them. But they did not love the rough, uneasy
-life for its own sake. How long did they keep, if they could, within
-sight of the sea! The wilderness was their refuge; but how long before
-it became their joy and hope! Here was their destiny cast; but their
-hearts lingered and held back. It was only as generations passed and
-the work widened about them that their thought also changed, and a new
-thrill sped along their blood. Their life had been new and strange
-from their first landing in the wilderness. Their houses, their food,
-their clothing, their neighborhood dealings were all such as only the
-frontier brings. Insensibly they were themselves changed. The strange
-life became familiar; their adjustment to it was at length unconscious
-and without effort; they had no plans which were not inseparably a part
-and a product of it. But, until they had turned their backs once for
-all upon the sea; until they saw their western borders cleared of the
-French; until the mountain passes had grown familiar, and the lands
-beyond the central and constant theme of their hope, the goal and dream
-of their young men, they did not become an American people.
-
-When they did, the great determining movement of our history began. The
-very visages of the people changed. That alert movement of the eye,
-that openness to every thought of enterprise or adventure, that nomadic
-habit which knows no fixed home and has plans ready to be carried any
-whither,--all the marks of the authentic type of the “American” as we
-know him came into our life. The crack of the whip and the song of the
-teamster, the heaving chorus of boatmen poling their heavy rafts upon
-the rivers, the laughter of the camp, the sound of bodies of men in the
-still forests, became the characteristic notes in our air. A roughened
-race, embrowned in the sun, hardened in manner by a coarse life of
-change and danger, loving the rude woods and the crack of the rifle,
-living to begin something new every day, striking with the broad and
-open hand, delicate in nothing but the touch of the trigger, leaving
-cities in its track as if by accident rather than design, settling
-again to the steady ways of a fixed life only when it must: such was
-the American people whose achievement it was to be to take possession
-of their continent from end to end ere their national government was
-a single century old. The picture is a very singular one! Settled
-life and wild side by side: civilization frayed at the edges,--taken
-forward in rough and ready fashion, with a song and a swagger,--not by
-statesmen, but by woodsmen and drovers, with axes and whips and rifles
-in their hands, clad in buckskin, like huntsmen.
-
-It has been said that we have here repeated some of the first processes
-of history; that the life and methods of our frontiersmen take us
-back to the fortunes and hopes of the men who crossed Europe when her
-forests, too, were still thick upon her. But the difference is really
-very fundamental, and much more worthy of remark than the likeness.
-Those shadowy masses of men whom we see moving upon the face of the
-earth in the far-away, questionable days when states were forming: even
-those stalwart figures we see so well as they emerge from the deep
-forests of Germany, to displace the Roman in all his western provinces
-and set up the states we know and marvel upon at this day, show us
-men working their new work at their own level. They do not turn back
-a long cycle of years from the old and settled states, the ordered
-cities, the tilled fields, and the elaborated governments of an ancient
-civilization, to begin as it were once more at the beginning. They
-carry alike their homes and their states with them in the camp and upon
-the ordered march of the host. They are men of the forest, or else
-men hardened always to take the sea in open boats. They live no more
-roughly in the new lands than in the old. The world has been frontier
-for them from the first. They may go forward with their life in these
-new seats from where they left off in the old. How different the
-circumstances of our first settlement and the building of new states on
-this side the sea! Englishmen, bred in law and ordered government ever
-since the Norman lawyers were followed a long five hundred years ago
-across the narrow seas by those masterful administrators of the strong
-Plantagenet race, leave an ancient realm and come into a wilderness
-where states have never been; leave a land of art and letters, which
-saw but yesterday “the spacious times of great Elizabeth,” where
-Shakespeare still lives in the gracious leisure of his closing days at
-Stratford, where cities teem with trade and men go bravely dight in
-cloth of gold, and turn back six centuries,--nay, a thousand years and
-more,--to the first work of building states in a wilderness! They bring
-the steadied habits and sobered thoughts of an ancient realm into the
-wild air of an untouched continent. The weary stretches of a vast sea
-lie, like a full thousand years of time, between them and the life
-in which till now all their thought was bred. Here they stand, as it
-were, with all their tools left behind, centuries struck out of their
-reckoning, driven back upon the long dormant instincts and forgotten
-craft of their race, not used this long age. Look how singular a
-thing: the work of a primitive race, the thought of a civilized! Hence
-the strange, almost grotesque groupings of thought and affairs in
-that first day of our history. Subtle politicians speak the phrases
-and practice the arts of intricate diplomacy from council chambers
-placed within log huts within a clearing. Men in ruffs and lace and
-polished shoe-buckles thread the lonely glades of primeval forests.
-The microscopical distinctions of the schools, the thin notes of a
-metaphysical theology are woven in and out through the labyrinths of
-grave sermons that run hours long upon the still air of the wilderness.
-Belief in dim refinements of dogma is made the test for man or woman
-who seeks admission to a company of pioneers. When went there by an
-age since the great flood when so singular a thing was seen as this:
-thousands of civilized men suddenly rusticated and bade do the work of
-primitive peoples,--Europe _frontiered_!
-
-Of course there was a deep change wrought, if not in these men, at any
-rate in their children; and every generation saw the change deepen. It
-must seem to every thoughtful man a notable thing how, while the change
-was wrought, the simplest of things complex were revealed in the clear
-air of the New World: how all accidentals seemed to fall away from the
-structure of government, and the simple first principles were laid bare
-that abide always; how social distinctions were stripped off, shown
-to be the mere cloaks and masks they were, and every man brought once
-again to a clear realization of his actual relations to his fellows!
-It was as if trained and sophisticated men had been rid of a sudden
-of their sophistication and of all the theory of their life, and left
-with nothing but their discipline of faculty, a schooled and sobered
-instinct. And the fact that we kept always, for close upon three
-hundred years, a like element in our life, a frontier people always in
-our van, is, so far, the central and determining fact of our national
-history. “East” and “West,” an ever-changing line, but an unvarying
-experience and a constant leaven of change working always within
-the body of our folk. Our political, our economic, our social life
-has felt this potent influence from the wild border all our history
-through. The “West” is the great word of our history. The “Westerner”
-has been the type and master of our American life. Now at length, as I
-have said, we have lost our frontier: our front lies almost unbroken
-along all the great coast line of the western sea. The Westerner, in
-some day soon to come, will pass out of our life, as he so long ago
-passed out of the life of the Old World. Then a new epoch will open for
-us. Perhaps it has opened already. Slowly we shall grow old, compact
-our people, study the delicate adjustments of an intricate society,
-and ponder the niceties, as we have hitherto pondered the bulks and
-structural framework, of government. Have we not, indeed, already come
-to these things? But the past we know. We can “see it steady and see it
-whole;” and its central movement and motive are gross and obvious to
-the eye.
-
-Till the first century of the Constitution is rounded out we stand all
-the while in the presence of that stupendous westward movement which
-has filled the continent: so vast, so various, at times so tragical, so
-swept by passion. Through all the long time there has been a line of
-rude settlements along our front wherein the same tests of power and
-of institutions were still being made that were made first upon the
-sloping banks of the rivers of old Virginia and within the long sweep
-of the Bay of Massachusetts. The new life of the West has reacted all
-the while--who shall say how powerfully?--upon the older life of the
-East; and yet the East has moulded the West as if she sent forward to
-it through every decade of the long process the chosen impulses and
-suggestions of history. The West has taken strength, thought, training,
-selected aptitudes out of the old treasures of the East,--as if out
-of a new Orient; while the East has itself been kept fresh, vital,
-alert, originative by the West, her blood quickened all the while, her
-youth through every age renewed. Who can say in a word, in a sentence,
-in a volume, what destinies have been variously wrought, with what
-new examples of growth and energy, while, upon this unexampled scale,
-community has passed beyond community across the vast reaches of this
-great continent!
-
-The great process is the more significant because it has been
-distinctively a national process. Until the Union was formed and we
-had consciously set out upon a separate national career, we moved
-but timidly across the nearer hills. Our most remote settlements lay
-upon the rivers and in the open glades of Tennessee and Kentucky. It
-was in the years that immediately succeeded the war of 1812 that
-the movement into the West began to be a mighty migration. Till then
-our eyes had been more often in the East than in the West. Not only
-were foreign questions to be settled and our standing among the
-nations to be made good, but we still remained acutely conscious
-and deliberately conservative of our Old-World connections. For all
-we were so new a people and lived so simple and separate a life, we
-had still the sobriety and the circumspect fashions of action that
-belong to an old society. We were, in government and manners, but a
-disconnected part of the world beyond the seas. Its thought and habit
-still set us our standards of speech and action. And this, not because
-of imitation, but because of actual and long abiding political and
-social connection with the mother country. Our statesmen,--strike but
-the names of Samuel Adams and Patrick Henry from the list, together
-with all like untutored spirits, who stood for the new, unreverencing
-ardor of a young democracy,--our statesmen were such men as might
-have taken their places in the House of Commons or in the Cabinet at
-home as naturally and with as easy an adjustment to their place and
-task as in the Continental Congress or in the immortal Constitutional
-Convention. Think of the stately ways and the grand air and the
-authoritative social understandings of the generation that set the new
-government afoot,--the generation of Washington and John Adams. Think,
-too, of the conservative tradition that guided all the early history
-of that government: that early line of gentlemen Presidents: that
-steady “cabinet succession to the Presidency” which came at length to
-seem almost like an oligarchy to the impatient men who were shut out
-from it. The line ended, with a sort of chill, in stiff John Quincy
-Adams, too cold a man to be a people’s prince after the old order of
-Presidents; and the year 1829, which saw Jackson come in, saw the old
-order go out.
-
-The date is significant. Since the war of 1812, undertaken as if to
-set us free to move westward, seven States had been admitted to the
-Union: and the whole number of States was advanced to twenty-four.
-Eleven new States had come into partnership with the old thirteen. The
-voice of the West rang through all our counsels; and, in Jackson, the
-new partners took possession of the Government. It is worth while to
-remember how men stood amazed at the change: how startled, chagrined,
-dismayed the conservative States of the East were at the revolution
-they saw effected, the riot of change they saw set in; and no man who
-has once read the singular story can forget how the eight years Jackson
-reigned saw the Government, and politics themselves, transformed. For
-long,--the story being written in the regions where the shock and
-surprise of the change was greatest,--the period of this momentous
-revolution was spoken of amongst us as a period of degeneration, the
-birth-time of a deep and permanent demoralization in our politics.
-But we see it differently now. Whether we have any taste or stomach
-for that rough age or not, however much we may wish that the old
-order might have stood, the generation of Madison and Adams have been
-prolonged, and the good tradition of the early days handed on unbroken
-and unsullied, we now know that what the nation underwent in that day
-of change was not degeneration, great and perilous as were the errors
-of the time, but regeneration. The old order was changed, once and for
-all. A new nation stepped, with a touch of swagger, upon the stage,--a
-nation which had broken alike with the traditions and with the wisely
-wrought experience of the Old World, and which, with all the haste and
-rashness of youth, was minded to work out a separate policy and destiny
-of its own. It was a day of hazards, but there was nothing sinister
-at the heart of the new plan. It was a wasteful experiment, to fling
-out, without wise guides, upon untried ways; but an abounding continent
-afforded enough and to spare even for the wasteful. It was sure to
-be so with a nation that came out of the secluded vales of a virgin
-continent. It was the bold frontier voice of the West sounding in
-affairs. The timid shivered, but the robust waxed strong and rejoiced,
-in the tonic air of the new day.
-
-It was then we swung out into the main paths of our history. The new
-voices that called us were first silvery, like the voice of Henry
-Clay, and spoke old familiar words of eloquence. The first spokesmen
-of the West even tried to con the classics, and spoke incongruously
-in the phrases of politics long dead and gone to dust, as Benton did.
-But presently the tone changed, and it was the truculent and masterful
-accents of the real frontiersman that rang dominant above the rest,
-harsh, impatient, and with an evident dash of temper. The East slowly
-accustomed itself to the change; caught the movement, though it
-grumbled and even trembled at the pace; and managed most of the time
-to keep in the running. But it was always henceforth to be the West
-that set the pace. There is no mistaking the questions that have ruled
-our spirits as a nation during the present century. The public land
-question, the tariff question, and the question of slavery,--these
-dominate from first to last. It was the West that made each one of
-these the question that it was. Without the free lands to which every
-man who chose might go, there would not have been that easy prosperity
-of life and that high standard of abundance which seemed to render
-it necessary that, if we were to have manufactures and a diversified
-industry at all, we should foster new undertakings by a system of
-protection which would make the profits of the factory as certain and
-as abundant as the profits of the farm. It was the constant movement
-of the population, the constant march of wagon trains into the West,
-that made it so cardinal a matter of policy whether the great national
-domain should _be_ free land or not: and that was the land question.
-It was the settlement of the West that transformed slavery from an
-accepted institution into passionate matter of controversy.
-
-Slavery within the States of the Union stood sufficiently protected
-by every solemn sanction the Constitution could afford. No man could
-touch it there, think, or hope, or purpose what he might. But where new
-States were to be made it was not so. There at every step choice must
-be made: slavery or no slavery?--a new choice for every new State: a
-fresh act of origination to go with every fresh act of organization.
-Had there been no Territories, there could have been no slavery
-question, except by revolution and contempt of fundamental law. But
-with a continent to be peopled, the choice thrust itself insistently
-forward at every step and upon every hand. This was the slavery
-question: not what should be done to reverse the past, but what should
-be done to redeem the future. It was so men of that day saw it,--and
-so also must historians see it. We must not mistake the programme of
-the Anti-Slavery Society for the platform of the Republican party, or
-forget that the very war itself was begun ere any purpose of abolition
-took shape amongst those who were statesmen and in authority. It was
-a question, not of freeing men, but of preserving a Free Soil. Kansas
-showed us what the problem was, not South Carolina: and it was the
-Supreme Court, not the slave-owners, who formulated the matter for our
-thought and purpose.
-
-And so, upon every hand and throughout every national question, was
-the commerce between East and West made up: that commerce and exchange
-of ideas, inclinations, purposes, and principles which has constituted
-the moving force of our life as a nation. Men illustrate the operation
-of these singular forces better than questions can: and no man
-illustrates it better than Abraham Lincoln.
-
-   “Great captains with their guns and drums
-    Disturb our judgment for the hour;
-    But at last silence comes:
-    These all are gone, and, standing like a tower,
-    Our children shall behold his fame,
-    The kindly-earnest, brave, foreseeing man,
-    Sagacious, patient, dreading praise not blame,
-    New birth of our new soil, the first American.”
-
-It is a poet’s verdict; but it rings in the authentic tone of the
-seer. It must be also the verdict of history. He would be a rash man
-who should say he understood Abraham Lincoln. No doubt natures deep
-as his, and various almost to the point of self-contradiction, can
-be sounded only by the judgment of men of a like sort,--if any such
-there be. But some things we all may see and judge concerning him.
-You have in him the type and flower of our growth. It is as if Nature
-had made a typical American, and then had added with liberal hand the
-royal quality of genius, to show us what the type could be. Lincoln
-owed nothing to his birth, everything to his growth: had no training
-save what he gave himself; no nurture, but only a wild and native
-strength. His life was his schooling, and every day of it gave to his
-character a new touch of development. His manhood not only, but his
-perception also, expanded with his life. His eyes, as they looked more
-and more abroad, beheld the national life, and comprehended it: and
-the lad who had been so rough-cut a provincial became, when grown to
-manhood, the one leader in all the nation who held the whole people
-singly in his heart:--held even the Southern people there, and would
-have won them back. And so we have in him what we must call the perfect
-development of native strength, the rounding out and nationalization of
-the provincial. Andrew Jackson was a type, not of the nation, but of
-the West. For all the tenderness there was in the stormy heart of the
-masterful man, and staunch and simple loyalty to all who loved him, he
-learned nothing in the East; kept always the flavor of the rough school
-in which he had been bred; was never more than a frontier soldier and
-gentleman. Lincoln differed from Jackson by all the length of his
-unmatched capacity to learn. Jackson could understand only men of his
-own kind; Lincoln could understand men of all sorts and from every
-region of the land: seemed himself, indeed, to be all men by turns, as
-mood succeeded mood in his strange nature. He never ceased to stand, in
-his bony angles, the express image of the ungainly frontiersman. His
-mind never lost the vein of coarseness that had marked him grossly
-when a youth. And yet how he grew and strengthened in the real stuff
-of dignity and greatness: how nobly he could bear himself without the
-aid of grace! He kept always the shrewd and seeing eye of the woodsman
-and the hunter, and the flavor of wild life never left him: and yet
-how easily his view widened to great affairs; how surely he perceived
-the value and the significance of whatever touched him and made him
-neighbor to itself!
-
-Lincoln’s marvelous capacity to extend his comprehension to the measure
-of what he had in hand is the one distinguishing mark of the man: and
-to study the development of that capacity in him is little less than to
-study, where it is as it were perfectly registered, the national life
-itself. This boy lived his youth in Illinois when it was a frontier
-State. The youth of the State was coincident with his own: and man
-and State kept equal pace in their striding advance to maturity. The
-frontier population was an intensely political population. It felt
-to the quick the throb of the nation’s life,--for the nation’s life
-ran through it, going its eager way to the westward. The West was not
-separate from the East. Its communities were every day receiving fresh
-members from the East, and the fresh impulse of direct suggestion.
-Their blood flowed to them straight from the warmest veins of the
-older communities. More than that, elements which were separated in the
-East were mingled in the West: which displayed to the eye as it were a
-sort of epitome of the most active and permanent forces of the national
-life. In such communities as these Lincoln mixed daily from the first
-with men of every sort and from every quarter of the country. With them
-he discussed neighborhood politics, the politics of the State, the
-politics of the nation,--and his mind became traveled as he talked.
-How plainly amongst such neighbors, there in Illinois, must it have
-become evident that national questions were centring more and more in
-the West as the years went by: coming as it were to meet them. Lincoln
-went twice down the Mississippi, upon the slow rafts that carried wares
-to its mouth, and saw with his own eyes, so used to look directly and
-point-blank upon men and affairs, characteristic regions of the South.
-He worked his way slowly and sagaciously, with that larger sort of
-sagacity which so marked him all his life, into the active business
-of state politics; sat twice in the state legislature, and then for a
-term in Congress,--his sensitive and seeing mind open all the while to
-every turn of fortune and every touch of nature in the moving affairs
-he looked upon. All the while, too, he continued to canvass, piece
-by piece, every item of politics, as of old, with his neighbors,
-familiarly around the stove, or upon the corners of the street, or
-more formally upon the stump; and kept always in direct contact with
-the ordinary views of ordinary men. Meanwhile he read, as nobody else
-around him read, and sought to gain a complete mastery over speech,
-with the conscious purpose to prevail in its use; derived zest from the
-curious study of mathematical proof, and amusement as well as strength
-from the practice of clean and naked statements of truth. It was all
-irregularly done, but strenuously, with the same instinct throughout,
-and with a steady access of facility and power. There was no sudden
-leap for this man, any more than for other men, from crudeness to
-finished power, from an understanding of the people of Illinois to an
-understanding of the people of the United States. And thus he came
-at last, with infinite pains and a wonder of endurance, to his great
-national task with a self-trained capacity which no man could match,
-and made upon a scale as liberal as the life of the people. You could
-not then set this athlete a pace in learning or in perceiving that was
-too hard for him. He knew the people and their life as no other man did
-or could: and now stands in his place singular in all the annals of
-mankind, the “brave, sagacious, foreseeing, patient man” of the people,
-“new birth of our new soil, the first American.”
-
-We have here a national man presiding over sectional men. Lincoln
-understood the East better than the East understood him or the
-people from whom he sprung: and this is every way a very noteworthy
-circumstance. For my part, I read a lesson in the singular career of
-this great man. Is it possible the East remains sectional while the
-West broadens to a wider view?
-
-   “Be strong-backed, brown-handed, upright as your pines;
-    By the scale of a hemisphere shape your designs,”
-
-is an inspiring programme for the woodsman and the pioneer; but how
-are you to be brown-handed in a city office? What if you never see
-the upright pines? How are you to have so big a purpose on so small a
-part of the hemisphere? As it has grown old, unquestionably, the East
-has grown sectional. There is no suggestion of the prairie in its city
-streets, or of the embrowned ranchman and farmer in its well-dressed
-men. Its ports teem with shipping from Europe and the Indies. Its
-newspapers run upon the themes of an Old World. It hears of the great
-plains of the continent as of foreign parts, which it may never think
-to see except from a car window. Its life is self-centred and selfish.
-The West, save where special interests centre (as in those pockets of
-silver where men’s eyes catch as it were an eager gleam from the very
-ore itself): the West is in less danger of sectionalization. Who shall
-say in that wide country where one region ends and another begins, or,
-in that free and changing society, where one class ends and another
-begins?
-
-This, surely, is the moral of our history. The East has spent and been
-spent for the West: has given forth her energy, her young men and
-her substance, for the new regions that have been a-making all the
-century through. But has she learned as much as she has taught, or
-taken as much as she has given? Look what it is that has now at last
-taken place. The westward march has stopped, upon the final slopes of
-the Pacific; and now the plot thickens. Populations turn upon their
-old paths; fill in the spaces they passed by neglected in their first
-journey in search of a land of promise; settle to a life such as the
-East knows as well as the West,--nay, much better. With the change, the
-pause, the settlement, our people draw into closer groups, stand face
-to face, to know each other and be known: and the time has come for the
-East to learn in her turn; to broaden her understanding of political
-and economic conditions to the scale of a hemisphere, as her own poet
-bade. Let us be sure that we get the national temperament; send our
-minds abroad upon the continent, become neighbors to all the people
-that live upon it, and lovers of them all, as Lincoln was.
-
-Read but your history aright, and you shall not find the task too
-hard. Your own local history, look but deep enough, tells the tale
-you must take to heart. Here upon our own seaboard, as truly as ever
-in the West, was once a national frontier, with an elder East beyond
-the seas. Here, too, various peoples combined, and elements separated
-elsewhere effected a tolerant and wholesome mixture. Here, too, the
-national stream flowed full and strong, bearing a thousand things upon
-its currents. Let us resume and keep the vision of that time; know
-ourselves, our neighbors, our destiny, with lifted and open eyes; see
-our history truly, in its great proportions; be ourselves liberal as
-the great principles we profess; and so be the people who might have
-again the heroic adventures and do again the heroic work of the past.
-’Tis thus we shall renew our youth and secure our age against decay.
-
-
-
-
-Transcriber’s Notes
-
-
-Simple typographical errors were corrected.
-
-Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a
-predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they
-were not changed.
-
-
-
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-<p style='text-align:center; font-size:1.2em; font-weight:bold'>The Project Gutenberg eBook of Mere Literature and Other Essays, by Woodrow Wilson</p>
-<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
-most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
-whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
-of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
-at <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org">www.gutenberg.org</a>. If you
-are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the
-country where you are located before using this eBook.
-</div>
-
-<p style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:1em; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Title: Mere Literature and Other Essays</p>
-  <p style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:0; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Author: Woodrow Wilson</p>
-<p style='display:block; text-indent:0; margin:1em 0'>Release Date: August 17, 2021 [eBook #66074]</p>
-<p style='display:block; text-indent:0; margin:1em 0'>Language: English</p>
-  <p style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:0; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em; text-align:left'>Produced by: Charlene Taylor, Charlie Howard, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)</p>
-<div style='margin-top:2em; margin-bottom:4em'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MERE LITERATURE AND OTHER ESSAYS ***</div>
-
-<div class="bbox">
-<p class="bold center">Books by Woodrow Wilson</p>
-
-<hr class="narrow" />
-
-<div class="blockquot hang">
-
-<p>CONGRESSIONAL GOVERNMENT. A Study in
-American Politics. 16mo, $1.25.</p>
-
-<p>MERE LITERATURE, and Other Essays. 12mo,
-$1.50.</p>
-</div>
-
-<p class="p1 center">
-HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY<br />
-<span class="smcap">Boston and New York</span>
-</p>
-</div>
-
-<div class="newpage p4 center wspace">
-<h1>
-MERE LITERATURE</h1>
-
-<p class="p2 large"><i>AND OTHER ESSAYS</i></p>
-
-<p class="p2"><span class="smaller">BY</span><br />
-
-WOODROW WILSON</p>
-
-<div id="if_logo" class="figcenter" style="max-width: 7em;">
-  <img style="width: 7em;" src="images/logo.png" width="366" height="474" alt="" />
-</div>
-
-<p class="p2 smaller">BOSTON AND NEW YORK<br />
-HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY<br />
-<span class="bold">The Riverside Press, Cambridge</span>
-</p>
-</div>
-
-<hr />
-
-<p class="newpage p4 center small">
-Copyright, 1896,<br />
-<span class="smcap">By</span> WOODROW WILSON</p>
-
-<p class="p1 small center"><i>All rights reserved.</i></p>
-
-<hr />
-
-<p class="newpage p4 center vspace">
-TO<br />
-<span class="larger">STOCKTON AXSON<br /></span></p>
-
-<p class="center smaller vspace">BY EVERY GIFT OF MIND A CRITIC<br />
-AND LOVER OF LETTERS<br />
-BY EVERY GIFT OF HEART A FRIEND<br />
-THIS LITTLE VOLUME<br />
-IS AFFECTIONATELY<br />
-DEDICATED
-</p>
-
-<hr />
-
-<div class="chapter">
-<h2 class="nobreak" id="CONTENTS">CONTENTS.</h2>
-</div>
-
-<table id="toc" summary="Contents">
-<tr class="small">
-  <td colspan="2"> </td>
-  <td class="tdr">PAGE</td>
-</tr>
-<tr>
-  <td class="tdr top">I.</td>
-  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Mere Literature</span></td>
-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#toclink_1">1</a></td>
-</tr>
-<tr>
-  <td class="tdr top">II.</td>
-  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Author Himself</span></td>
-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#toclink_28">28</a></td>
-</tr>
-<tr>
-  <td class="tdr top">III.</td>
-  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">On an Author’s Choice of Company</span></td>
-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#toclink_50">50</a></td>
-</tr>
-<tr>
-  <td class="tdr top">IV.</td>
-  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">A Literary Politician</span></td>
-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#toclink_69">69</a></td>
-</tr>
-<tr>
-  <td class="tdr top">V.</td>
-  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Interpreter of English Liberty</span></td>
-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#toclink_104">104</a></td>
-</tr>
-<tr>
-  <td class="tdr top">VI.</td>
-  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Truth of the Matter</span></td>
-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#toclink_161">161</a></td>
-</tr>
-<tr>
-  <td class="tdr top">VII.</td>
-  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">A Calendar of Great Americans</span></td>
-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#toclink_187">187</a></td>
-</tr>
-<tr>
-  <td class="tdr top">VIII.</td>
-  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Course of American History</span></td>
-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#toclink_213">213</a></td>
-</tr>
-</table>
-
-<p class="p2 narrow"><span class="small">⁂</span> All but one of the essays brought together in this volume
-have already been printed, either in the <i>Atlantic Monthly</i>, the
-<i>Century Magazine</i>, or the <i>Forum</i>. The essay on Burke appears
-here for the first time in print.</p>
-
-<hr />
-
-<div id="toclink_1" class="chapter">
-<h2 class="nobreak" id="MERE_LITERATURE"><span class="larger">MERE LITERATURE.</span></h2>
-</div>
-
-<hr class="narrow" />
-
-<h2 class="nobreak p1" id="I">I.<br />
-
-<span class="subhead">“MERE LITERATURE.”</span></h2>
-
-<p><span class="firstword">A singular</span> phrase this, “mere literature,”—the
-irreverent invention of a scientific age. Literature
-we know, but “mere” literature? We are
-not to read it as if it meant <em>sheer</em> literature, literature
-in the essence, stripped of all accidental or
-ephemeral elements, and left with nothing but its
-immortal charm and power. “Mere literature” is
-a serious sneer, conceived in all honesty by the
-scientific mind, which despises things that do not
-fall within the categories of demonstrable knowledge.
-It means <em>nothing but literature</em>, as who
-should say, “mere talk,” “mere fabrication,”
-“mere pastime.” The scientist, with his head
-comfortably and excusably full of knowable things,
-takes nothing seriously and with his hat off, except
-human knowledge. The creations of the human
-spirit are, from his point of view, incalculable
-vagaries, irresponsible phenomena, to be regarded<span class="pagenum" id="Page_2">2</span>
-only as play, and, for the mind’s good, only as
-recreation,—to be used to while away the tedium
-of a railway journey, or to amuse a period of rest
-or convalescence; mere byplay, mere make-believe.</p>
-
-<p>And so very whimsical things sometimes happen,
-because of this scientific and positivist spirit of the
-age, when the study of the literature of any language
-is made part of the curriculum of our colleges.
-The more delicate and subtle purposes of
-the study are put quite out of countenance, and
-literature is commanded to assume the phrases and
-the methods of science. It would be very painful
-if it should turn out that schools and universities
-were agencies of Philistinism; but there are some
-things which should prepare us for such a discovery.
-Our present plans for teaching everybody
-involve certain unpleasant things quite inevitably.
-It is obvious that you cannot have universal education
-without restricting your teaching to such things
-as can be universally understood. It is plain that
-you cannot impart “university methods” to thousands,
-or create “investigators” by the score,
-unless you confine your university education to
-matters which dull men can investigate, your laboratory
-training to tasks which mere plodding diligence
-and submissive patience can compass. Yet,
-if you do so limit and constrain what you teach,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_3">3</span>
-you thrust taste and insight and delicacy of perception
-out of the schools, exalt the obvious and
-the merely useful above the things which are only
-imaginatively or spiritually conceived, make education
-an affair of tasting and handling and smelling,
-and so create Philistia, that country in which they
-speak of “mere literature.” I suppose that in
-Nirvana one would speak in like wise of “mere
-life.”</p>
-
-<p>The fear, at any rate, that such things may happen
-cannot fail to set us anxiously pondering certain
-questions about the systematic teaching of
-literature in our schools and colleges. How are we
-to impart classical writings to the children of the
-general public? “Beshrew the general public!”
-cries Mr. Birrell. “What in the name of the
-Bodleian has the general public got to do with
-literature?” Unfortunately, it has a great deal to
-do with it; for are we not complacently forcing the
-general public into our universities, and are we not
-arranging that all its sons shall be instructed how
-they may themselves master and teach our literature?
-You have nowadays, it is believed, only to
-heed the suggestions of pedagogics in order to know
-how to impart Burke or Browning, Dryden or Swift.
-There are certain practical difficulties, indeed; but
-there are ways of overcoming them. You must<span class="pagenum" id="Page_4">4</span>
-have strength if you would handle with real mastery
-the firm fibre of these men; you must have a
-heart, moreover, to feel their warmth, an eye to see
-what they see, an imagination to keep them company,
-a pulse to experience their delights. But if
-you have none of these things, you may make shift
-to do without them. You may count the words
-they use, instead, note the changes of phrase they
-make in successive revisions, put their rhythm into
-a scale of feet, run their allusions—particularly
-their female allusions—to cover, detect them in
-their previous reading. Or, if none of these things
-please you, or you find the big authors difficult
-or dull, you may drag to light all the minor writers
-of their time, who are easy to understand. By setting
-an example in such methods you render great
-services in certain directions. You make the higher
-degrees of our universities available for the large
-number of respectable men who can count, and
-measure, and search diligently; and that may prove
-no small matter. You divert attention from thought,
-which is not always easy to get at, and fix attention
-upon language, as upon a curious mechanism, which
-can be perceived with the bodily eye, and which is
-worthy to be studied for its own sake, quite apart
-from anything it may mean. You encourage the
-examination of forms, grammatical and metrical,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_5">5</span>
-which can be quite accurately determined and quite
-exhaustively catalogued. You bring all the visible
-phenomena of writing to light and into ordered
-system. You go further, and show how to make
-careful literal identification of stories somewhere
-told ill and without art with the same stories told
-over again by the masters, well and with the transfiguring
-effect of genius. You thus broaden the
-area of science; for you rescue the concrete phenomena
-of the expression of thought—the necessary
-syllabification which accompanies it, the inevitable
-juxtaposition of words, the constant use of
-particles, the habitual display of roots, the inveterate
-repetition of names, the recurrent employment
-of meanings heard or read—from their confusion
-with the otherwise unclassifiable manifestations of
-what had hitherto been accepted, without critical
-examination, under the lump term “literature,”
-simply for the pleasure and spiritual edification to
-be got from it.</p>
-
-<p>An instructive differentiation ensues. In contrast
-with the orderly phenomena of speech and
-writing, which are amenable to scientific processes
-of examination and classification, and which take
-rank with the orderly successions of change in
-nature, we have what, for want of a more exact
-term, we call “mere literature,”—the literature<span class="pagenum" id="Page_6">6</span>
-which is not an expression of form, but an expression
-of spirit. This is a fugitive and troublesome
-thing, and perhaps does not belong in well-conceived
-plans of universal instruction; for it offers
-many embarrassments to pedagogic method. It
-escapes all scientific categories. It is not pervious
-to research. It is too wayward to be brought under
-the discipline of exposition. It is an attribute of
-so many different substances at one and the same
-time, that the consistent scientific man must needs
-put it forth from his company, as without responsible
-connections. By “mere literature” he means
-mere evanescent color, wanton trick of phrase, perverse
-departures from categorical statement,—something
-<em>all</em> personal equation, such stuff as
-dreams are made of.</p>
-
-<p>We must not all, however, be impatient of this
-truant child of fancy. When the schools cast her
-out, she will stand in need of friendly succor, and
-we must train our spirits for the function. We
-must be free-hearted in order to make her
-happy, for she will accept entertainment from no
-sober, prudent fellow who shall counsel her to mend
-her ways. She has always made light of hardship,
-and she has never loved or obeyed any, save those
-who were of her own mind,—those who were indulgent
-to her humors, responsive to her ways of<span class="pagenum" id="Page_7">7</span>
-thought, attentive to her whims, content with her
-“mere” charms. She already has her small following
-of devotees, like all charming, capricious
-mistresses. There are some still who think that
-to know her is better than a liberal education.</p>
-
-<p>There is but one way in which you can take
-mere literature as an education, and that is directly,
-at first hand. Almost any media except her own
-language and touch and tone are non-conducting.
-A descriptive catalogue of a collection of paintings
-is no substitute for the little areas of color and
-form themselves. You do not want to hear about
-a beautiful woman, simply,—how she was dressed,
-how she bore herself, how the fine color flowed
-sweetly here and there upon her cheeks, how her
-eyes burned and melted, how her voice thrilled
-through the ears of those about her. If you have
-ever seen a woman, these things but tantalize and
-hurt you, if you cannot see her. You want to be
-in her presence. You know that only your own
-eyes can give you direct knowledge of her. Nothing
-but her presence contains her life. ’Tis
-the same with the authentic products of literature.
-You can never get their beauty at second hand, or
-feel their power except by direct contact with them.</p>
-
-<p>It is a strange and occult thing how this quality
-of “mere literature” enters into one book, and is<span class="pagenum" id="Page_8">8</span>
-absent from another; but no man who has once
-felt it can mistake it. I was reading the other
-day a book about Canada. It is written in what
-the reviewers have pronounced to be an “admirable,
-spirited style.” By this I take them to mean
-that it is grammatical, orderly, and full of strong
-adjectives. But these reviewers would have known
-more about the style in which it is written if they
-had noted what happens on page 84. There a
-quotation from Burke occurs. “There is,” says
-Burke, “but one healing, catholic principle of
-toleration which ought to find favor in this house.
-It is wanted not only in our colonies, but here. The
-thirsty earth of our own country is gasping and
-gaping and crying out for that healing shower from
-heaven. The noble lord has told you of the right
-of those people by treaty; but I consider the right
-of conquest so little, and the right of human nature
-so much, that the former has very little consideration
-with me. I look upon the people of Canada
-as coming by the dispensation of God under the
-British government. I would have us govern it in
-the same manner as the all—wise disposition of
-Providence would govern it. We know he suffers
-the sun to shine upon the righteous and the
-unrighteous; and we ought to suffer all classes to
-enjoy equally the right of worshiping God according<span class="pagenum" id="Page_9">9</span>
-to the light he has been pleased to give them.”
-The peculiarity of such a passage as that is, that it
-needs no context. Its beauty seems almost independent
-of its subject matter. It comes on that
-eighty-fourth page like a burst of music in the
-midst of small talk,—a tone of sweet harmony
-heard amidst a rattle of phrases. The mild noise
-was unobjectionable enough until the music came.
-There is a breath and stir of life in those sentences
-of Burke’s which is to be perceived in nothing else
-in that volume. Your pulses catch a quicker
-movement from them, and are stronger on their
-account.</p>
-
-<p>It is so with all essential literature. It has a
-quality to move you, and you can never mistake it,
-if you have any blood in you. And it has also a
-power to instruct you which is as effective as it is
-subtle, and which no research or systematic method
-can ever rival. ’Tis a sore pity if that power cannot
-be made available in the classroom. It is not
-merely that it quickens your thought and fills your
-imagination with the images that have illuminated
-the choicer minds of the race. It does indeed exercise
-the faculties in this wise, bringing them into
-the best atmosphere, and into the presence of the
-men of greatest charm and force; but it does a
-great deal more than that. It acquaints the mind,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_10">10</span>
-by direct contact, with the forces which really govern
-and modify the world from generation to generation.
-There is more of a nation’s politics to be
-got out of its poetry than out of all its systematic
-writers upon public affairs and constitutions. Epics
-are better mirrors of manners than chronicles;
-dramas oftentimes let you into the secrets of statutes;
-orations stirred by a deep energy of emotion
-or resolution, passionate pamphlets that survive their
-mission because of the direct action of their style
-along permanent lines of thought, contain more
-history than parliamentary journals. It is not
-knowledge that moves the world, but ideals, convictions,
-the opinions or fancies that have been held
-or followed; and whoever studies humanity ought
-to study it alive, practice the vivisection of reading
-literature, and acquaint himself with something
-more than anatomies which are no longer in use by
-spirits.</p>
-
-<p>There are some words of Thibaut, the great
-jurist, which have long seemed to me singularly
-penetrative of one of the secrets of the intellectual
-life. “I told him,” he says,—he is speaking of
-an interview with Niebuhr,—“I told him that I
-owed my gayety and vigor, in great part, to my
-love for the classics of all ages, even those outside
-the domain of jurisprudence.” Not only the gayety<span class="pagenum" id="Page_11">11</span>
-and vigor of his hale old age, surely, but also his
-insight into the meaning and purpose of laws and
-institutions. The jurist who does not love the
-classics of all ages is like a post-mortem doctor presiding
-at a birth, a maker of manikins prescribing
-for a disease of the blood, a student of masks setting
-up for a connoisseur in smiles and kisses. In
-narrating history, you are speaking of what was
-done by men; in discoursing of laws, you are seeking
-to show what courses of action, and what manner
-of dealing with one another, men have adopted.
-You can neither tell the story nor conceive the law
-till you know how the men you speak of regarded
-themselves and one another; and I know of no way
-of learning this but by reading the stories they have
-told of themselves, the songs they have sung, the
-heroic adventures they have applauded. I must
-know what, if anything, they revered; I must hear
-their sneers and gibes; must learn in what accents
-they spoke love within the family circle; with what
-grace they obeyed their superiors in station; how
-they conceived it politic to live, and wise to die;
-how they esteemed property, and what they deemed
-privilege; when they kept holiday, and why; when
-they were prone to resist oppression, and wherefore,—I
-must see things with their eyes, before I
-can comprehend their law books. Their jural relationships<span class="pagenum" id="Page_12">12</span>
-are not independent of their way of living,
-and their way of thinking is the mirror of their
-way of living.</p>
-
-<p>It is doubtless due to the scientific spirit of the
-age that these plain, these immemorial truths are
-in danger of becoming obscured. Science, under
-the influence of the conception of evolution, devotes
-itself to the study of forms, of specific differences,
-of the manner in which the same principle of life
-manifests itself variously under the compulsions of
-changes of environment. It is thus that it has become
-“scientific” to set forth the manner in which
-man’s nature submits to man’s circumstances;
-scientific to disclose morbid moods, and the conditions
-which produce them; scientific to regard
-man, not as the centre or source of power, but as
-subject to power, a register of external forces instead
-of an originative soul, and character as a
-product of man’s circumstances rather than a sign
-of man’s mastery over circumstance. It is thus
-that it has become “scientific” to analyze language
-as itself a commanding element in man’s life.
-The history of word-roots, their modification under
-the influences of changes wrought in the vocal
-organs by habit or by climate, the laws of phonetic
-change to which they are obedient, and their persistence
-under all disguises of dialect, as if they<span class="pagenum" id="Page_13">13</span>
-were full of a self-originated life, a self-directed
-energy of influence, is united with the study of
-grammatical forms in the construction of scientific
-conceptions of the evolution and uses of human
-speech. The impression is created that literature
-is only the chosen vessel of these forms, disclosing
-to us their modification in use and structure from
-age to age. Such vitality as the masterpieces of
-genius possess comes to seem only a dramatization
-of the fortunes of words. Great writers construct
-for the adventures of language their appropriate
-epics. Or, if it be not the words themselves that
-are scrutinized, but the style of their use, that style
-becomes, instead of a fine essence of personality, a
-matter of cadence merely, or of grammatical and
-structural relationships. Science is the study of
-the forces of the world of matter, the adjustments,
-the apparatus, of the universe; and the scientific
-study of literature has likewise become a study of
-apparatus,—of the forms in which men utter
-thought, and the forces by which those forms have
-been and still are being modified, rather than of
-thought itself.</p>
-
-<p>The essences of literature of course remain the
-same under all forms, and the true study of literature
-is the study of these essences,—a study, not
-of forms or of differences, but of likenesses,—likenesses<span class="pagenum" id="Page_14">14</span>
-of spirit and intent under whatever varieties
-of method, running through all forms of speech
-like the same music along the chords of various instruments.
-There is a sense in which literature is
-independent of form, just as there is a sense in
-which music is independent of its instrument. It
-is my cherished belief that Apollo’s pipe contained
-as much eloquent music as any modern orchestra.
-Some books live; many die: wherein is the secret
-of immortality? Not in beauty of form, nor even
-in force of passion. We might say of literature
-what Wordsworth said of poetry, the most easily
-immortal part of literature: it is “the impassioned
-expression which is in the countenance of all science;
-it is the breath of the finer spirit of all knowledge.”
-Poetry has the easier immortality because it has
-the sweeter accent when it speaks, because its
-phrases linger in our ears to delight them, because
-its truths are also melodies. Prose has much to
-overcome,—its plainness of visage, its less musical
-accents, its homelier turns of phrase. But it also
-may contain the immortal essence of truth and
-seriousness and high thought. It too may clothe
-conviction with the beauty that must make it shine
-forever. Let a man but have beauty in his heart,
-and, believing something with his might, put it
-forth arrayed as he sees it, the lights and shadows<span class="pagenum" id="Page_15">15</span>
-falling upon it on his page as they fall upon it in
-his heart, and he may die assured that that beauty
-will not pass away out of the world.</p>
-
-<p>Biographers have often been puzzled by the contrast
-between certain men as they lived and as they
-wrote. Schopenhauer’s case is one of the most
-singular. A man of turbulent life, suffering himself
-to be cut to exasperation by the petty worries
-of his lot, he was nevertheless calm and wise when
-he wrote, as if the Muse had rebuked him. He
-wrote at a still elevation, where small and temporary
-things did not come to disturb him. ’Tis a
-pity that for some men this elevation is so far to
-seek. They lose permanency by not finding it.
-Could there be a deliberate regimen of life for the
-author, it is plain enough how he ought to live, not
-as seeking fame, but as deserving it.</p>
-
-<div class="poetry-container">
-<div class="poetry">
-  <div class="stanza">
-    <div class="verse indentq">“Fame, like a wayward girl, will still be coy</div>
-    <div class="verse indent0">To those who woo her with too slavish knees;</div>
-    <div class="verse indent0">But makes surrender to some thoughtless boy,</div>
-    <div class="verse indent0">And dotes the more upon a heart at ease.</div>
-  </div>
-
-  <div class="tb">* * * * *</div>
-
-  <div class="stanza">
-    <div class="verse indentq">“Ye love-sick bards, repay her scorn with scorn;</div>
-    <div class="verse indent0">Ye love-sick artists, madmen that ye are,</div>
-    <div class="verse indent0">Make your best bow to her and bid adieu;</div>
-    <div class="verse indent0">Then, if she likes it, she will follow you.”</div>
-  </div>
-</div>
-</div>
-
-<p>It behooves all minor authors to realize the possibility
-of their being discovered some day, and<span class="pagenum" id="Page_16">16</span>
-exposed to the general scrutiny. They ought to
-live as if conscious of the risk. They ought to
-purge their hearts of everything that is not genuine
-and capable of lasting the world a century, at least,
-if need be. Mere literature is made of spirit. The
-difficulties of style are the artist’s difficulties with
-his tools. The spirit that is in the eye, in the pose,
-in mien or gesture, the painter must find in his
-color-box; as he must find also the spirit that
-nature displays upon the face of the fields or in the
-hidden places of the forest. The writer has less
-obvious means. Word and spirit do not easily
-consort. The language which the philologists set
-out before us with such curious erudition is of very
-little use as a vehicle for the essences of the human
-spirit. It is too sophisticated and self-conscious.
-What you need is, not a critical knowledge of
-language, but a quick feeling for it. You must
-recognize the affinities between your spirit and its
-idioms. You must immerse your phrase in your
-thought, your thought in your phrase, till each becomes
-saturated with the other. Then what you
-produce is as necessarily fit for permanency as if it
-were incarnated spirit.</p>
-
-<p>And you must produce in color, with the touch
-of imagination which lifts what you write away
-from the dull levels of mere exposition. Black-and-white<span class="pagenum" id="Page_17">17</span>
-sketches may serve some purposes of the
-artist, but very little of actual nature is in mere
-black-and-white. The imagination never works
-thus with satisfaction. Nothing is ever conceived
-completely when conceived so grayly, without suffusion
-of real light. The mind creates, as great
-Nature does, in colors, with deep chiaroscuro and
-burning lights. This is true not only of poetry
-and essentially imaginative writing, but also of the
-writing which seeks nothing more than to penetrate
-the meaning of actual affairs,—the writing of
-the greatest historians and philosophers, the utterances
-of orators and of the great masters of political
-exposition. Their narratives, their analyses,
-their appeals, their conceptions of principle, are all
-dipped deep in the colors of the life they expound.
-Their minds respond only to realities, their eyes see
-only actual circumstance. Their sentences quiver
-and are quick with visions of human affairs,—how
-minds are bent or governed, how action is shaped
-or thwarted. The great “constructive” minds, as
-we call them, are of this sort. They “construct”
-by seeing what others have not imagination enough
-to see. They do not always know more, but they
-always realize more. Let the singular reconstruction
-of Roman history and institutions by Theodor
-Mommsen serve as an illustration. Safe men distrust<span class="pagenum" id="Page_18">18</span>
-this great master. They cannot find what he
-finds in the documents. They will draw you
-truncated figures of the antique Roman state, and
-tell you the limbs cannot be found, the features of
-the face have nowhere been unearthed. They will
-cite you fragments such as remain, and show you
-how far these can be pieced together toward the
-making of a complete description of private life
-and public function in those first times when the
-Roman commonwealth was young; but what the
-missing sentences were they can only weakly conjecture.
-Their eyes cannot descry those distant
-days with no other aids than these. Only the
-greatest are dissatisfied, and go on to paint that
-ancient life with the materials that will render it
-lifelike,—the materials of the constructive imagination.
-They have other sources of information.
-They see living men in the old documents. Give
-them but the torso, and they will supply head and
-limbs, bright and animate as they must have been.
-If Mommsen does not quite do that, another man,
-with Mommsen’s eye and a touch more of color on
-his brush, might have done it,—may yet do it.</p>
-
-<p>It is in this way that we get some glimpse of the
-only relations that scholarship bears to literature.
-Literature can do without exact scholarship, or
-any scholarship at all, though it may impoverish<span class="pagenum" id="Page_19">19</span>
-itself thereby; but scholarship cannot do without
-literature. It needs literature to float it, to
-set it current, to authenticate it to the race, to get
-it out of closets, and into the brains of men who
-stir abroad. It will adorn literature, no doubt;
-literature will be the richer for its presence; but
-it will not, it cannot, of itself create literature.
-Rich stuffs from the East do not create a king, nor
-warlike trappings a conqueror. There is, indeed,
-a natural antagonism, let it be frankly said, between
-the standards of scholarship and the standards
-of literature. Exact scholarship values
-things in direct proportion as they are verifiable;
-but literature knows nothing of such tests. The
-truths which it seeks are the truths of self-expression.
-It is a thing of convictions, of insights, of
-what is felt and seen and heard and hoped for. Its
-meanings lurk behind nature, not in the facts of
-its phenomena. It speaks of things as the man
-who utters it saw them, not necessarily as God
-made them. The personality of the speaker runs
-throughout all the sentences of real literature. That
-personality may not be the personality of a poet:
-it may be only the personality of the penetrative
-seer. It may not have the atmosphere in which
-visions are seen, but only that in which men and
-affairs look keenly cut in outline, boldly massed<span class="pagenum" id="Page_20">20</span>
-in bulk, consummately grouped in detail, to the
-reader as to the writer. Sentences of perfectly
-clarified wisdom may be literature no less than
-stanzas of inspired song, or the intense utterances
-of impassioned feeling. The personality of the
-sunlight is in the keen lines of light that run
-along the edges of a sword no less than in the burning
-splendor of the rose or the radiant kindlings of
-a woman’s eye. You may feel the power of one
-master of thought playing upon your brain as you
-may feel that of another playing upon your heart.</p>
-
-<p>Scholarship gets into literature by becoming
-part of the originating individuality of a master of
-thought. No man is a master of thought without
-being also a master of its vehicle and instrument,
-style, that subtle medium of all its evasive effects
-of light and shade. Scholarship is material; it
-is not life. It becomes immortal only when it is
-worked upon by conviction, by schooled and chastened
-imagination, by thought that runs alive out
-of the inner fountains of individual insight and
-purpose. Colorless, or without suffusion of light
-from some source of light, it is dead, and will not
-twice be looked at; but made part of the life of a
-great mind, subordinated, absorbed, put forth with
-authentic stamp of currency on it, minted at some
-definite mint and bearing some sovereign image, it<span class="pagenum" id="Page_21">21</span>
-will even outlast the time when it shall have ceased
-to deserve the acceptance of scholars,—when it
-shall, in fact, have become “mere literature.”</p>
-
-<p>Scholarship is the realm of nicely adjusted opinion.
-It is the business of scholars to assess evidence
-and test conclusions, to discriminate values
-and reckon probabilities. Literature is the realm
-of conviction and vision. Its points of view are as
-various as they are oftentimes unverifiable. It
-speaks individual faiths. Its groundwork is not
-erudition, but reflection and fancy. Your thoroughgoing
-scholar dare not reflect. To reflect is to let
-himself in on his material; whereas what he wants
-is to keep himself apart, and view his materials in
-an air that does not color or refract. To reflect is
-to throw an atmosphere about what is in your
-mind,—an atmosphere which holds all the colors
-of your life. Reflection summons all associations,
-and they so throng and move that they dominate
-the mind’s stage at once. The plot is in their
-hands. Scholars, therefore, do not reflect; they
-label, group kind with kind, set forth in schemes,
-expound with dispassionate method. Their minds
-are not stages, but museums; nothing is done
-there, but very curious and valuable collections are
-kept there. If literature use scholarship, it is only
-to fill it with fancies or shape it to new standards,
-of which of itself it can know nothing.</p>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_22">22</span></p>
-
-<p>True, there are books reckoned primarily books
-of science and of scholarship which have nevertheless
-won standing as literature; books of science
-such as Newton wrote, books of scholarship such
-as Gibbon’s. But science was only the vestibule
-by which such a man as Newton entered the temple
-of nature, and the art he practiced was not the art
-of exposition, but the art of divination. He was
-not only a scientist, but also a seer; and we shall not
-lose sight of Newton because we value what he was
-more than what he knew. If we continue Gibbon
-in his fame, it will be for love of his art, not for
-worship of his scholarship. We some of us, nowadays,
-know the period of which he wrote better
-even than he did; but which one of us shall build
-so admirable a monument to ourselves, as artists,
-out of what we know? The scholar finds his immortality
-in the form he gives to his work. It is
-a hard saying, but the truth of it is inexorable: be
-an artist, or prepare for oblivion. You may write
-a chronicle, but you will not serve yourself thereby.
-You will only serve some fellow who shall come
-after you, possessing, what you did not have, an
-ear for the words you could not hit upon; an eye
-for the colors you could not see; a hand for the
-strokes you missed.</p>
-
-<p>Real literature you can always distinguish by its<span class="pagenum" id="Page_23">23</span>
-form, and yet it is not possible to indicate the
-form it should have. It is easy to say that it
-should have a form suitable to its matter; but how
-suitable? Suitable to set the matter off, adorn,
-embellish it, or suitable simply to bring it directly,
-quick and potent, to the apprehension of the reader?
-This is the question of style, about which many
-masters have had many opinions; upon which you
-can make up no safe generalization from the practice
-of those who have unquestionably given to the
-matter of their thought immortal form, an accent
-or a countenance never to be forgotten. Who shall
-say how much of Burke’s splendid and impressive
-imagery is part and stuff of his thought, or tell
-why even that part of Newman’s prose which is devoid
-of ornament, stripped to its shining skin, and
-running bare and lithe and athletic to carry its
-tidings to men, should promise to enjoy as certain
-an immortality? Why should Lamb go so quaintly
-and elaborately to work upon his critical essays,
-taking care to perfume every sentence, if possible,
-with the fine savor of an old phrase, if the same
-business could be as effectively done in the plain
-and even cadences of Mr. Matthew Arnold’s prose?
-Why should Gibbon be so formal, so stately, so
-elaborate, when he had before his eyes the example
-of great Tacitus, whose direct, sententious style had<span class="pagenum" id="Page_24">24</span>
-outlived by so many hundred years the very language
-in which he wrote? In poetry, who shall
-measure the varieties of style lavished upon similar
-themes? The matter of vital thought is not separable
-from the thinker; its forms must suit his
-handling as well as fit his conception. Any style
-is author’s stuff which is suitable to his purpose and
-his fancy. He may use rich fabrics with which to
-costume his thoughts, or he may use simple stone
-from which to sculpture them, and leave them
-bare. His only limits are those of art. He may
-not indulge a taste for the merely curious or fantastic.
-The quaint writers have quaint thoughts;
-their material is suitable. They do not merely
-satisfy themselves as virtuosi, with collections of
-odd phrases and obsolete meanings. They needed
-twisted words to fit the eccentric patterns of their
-thought. The great writer has always dignity, restraint,
-propriety, adequateness; what time he
-loses these qualities he ceases to be great. His
-style neither creaks nor breaks under his passion,
-but carries the strain with unshaken strength. It
-is not trivial or mean, but speaks what small meanings
-fall in its way with simplicity, as conscious of
-their smallness. Its playfulness is within bounds;
-its laugh never bursts too boisterously into a
-guffaw. A great style always knows what it would<span class="pagenum" id="Page_25">25</span>
-be at, and does the thing appropriately, with the
-larger sort of taste.</p>
-
-<p>This is the condemnation of tricks of phrase, devices
-to catch the attention, exaggerations and loud
-talk to hold it. No writer can afford to strive
-after effect, if his striving is to be apparent. For
-just and permanent effect is missed altogether
-unless it be so completely attained as to seem like
-some touch of sunlight, perfect, natural, inevitable,
-wrought without effort and without deliberate purpose
-to be effective. Mere audacity of attempt
-can, of course, never win the wished for result;
-and if the attempt be successful, it is not audacious.
-What we call audacity in a great writer
-has no touch of temerity, sauciness, or arrogance in
-it. It is simply high spirit, a dashing and splendid
-display of strength. Boldness is ridiculous
-unless it be impressive, and it can be impressive
-only when backed by solid forces of character and
-attainment. Your plebeian hack cannot afford the
-showy paces; only the full-blooded Arabian has
-the sinew and proportion to lend them perfect
-grace and propriety. The art of letters eschews
-the bizarre as rigidly as does every other fine art.
-It mixes its colors with brains, and is obedient to
-great Nature’s sane standards of right adjustment
-in all that it attempts.</p>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_26">26</span></p>
-
-<p>You can make no catalogue of these features of
-great writing; there is no science of literature.
-Literature in its essence is mere spirit, and you
-must experience it rather than analyze it too formally.
-It is the door to nature and to ourselves.
-It opens our hearts to receive the experiences of
-great men and the conceptions of great races. It
-awakens us to the significance of action and to the
-singular power of mental habit. It airs our souls
-in the wide atmosphere of contemplation. “In
-these bad days, when it is thought more educationally
-useful to know the principle of the common
-pump than Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn,” as
-Mr. Birrell says, we cannot afford to let one single
-precious sentence of “mere literature” go by us
-unread or unpraised. If this free people to which
-we belong is to keep its fine spirit, its perfect temper
-amidst affairs, its high courage in the face of
-difficulties, its wise temperateness and wide-eyed
-hope, it must continue to drink deep and often
-from the old wells of English undefiled, quaff the
-keen tonic of its best ideals, keep its blood warm
-with all the great utterances of exalted purpose
-and pure principle of which its matchless literature
-is full. The great spirits of the past must
-command us in the tasks of the future. Mere
-literature will keep us pure and keep us strong.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_27">27</span>
-Even though it puzzle or altogether escape scientific
-method, it may keep our horizon clear for us,
-and our eyes glad to look bravely forth upon the
-world.</p>
-
-<hr />
-
-<div id="toclink_28" class="chapter">
-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_28">28</span></p>
-
-<h2 class="nobreak" id="II">II.<br />
-
-<span class="subhead">THE AUTHOR HIMSELF.</span></h2>
-</div>
-
-<p><span class="firstword">Who</span> can help wondering, concerning the modern
-multitude of books, where all these companions of
-his reading hours will be buried when they die;
-which will have monuments erected to them; which
-escape the envy of time and live? It is pathetic
-to think of the number that must be forgotten,
-after having been removed from the good places to
-make room for their betters.</p>
-
-<p>Much the most pathetic thought about books,
-however, is that excellence will not save them.
-Their fates will be as whimsical as those of the
-humankind which produces them. Knaves find it
-as easy to get remembered as good men. It is not
-right living or learning or kind offices, simply and
-of themselves, but—something else that gives
-immortality of fame. Be a book never so scholarly,
-it may die; be it never so witty, or never so
-full of good feeling and of an honest statement
-of truth, it may not live.</p>
-
-<p>When once a book has become immortal, we
-think that we can see why it became so. It contained,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_29">29</span>
-we perceive, a casting of thought which could not
-but arrest and retain men’s attention; it said some
-things once and for all because it gave them their
-best expression. Or else it spoke with a grace or
-with a fire of imagination, with a sweet cadence
-of phrase and a full harmony of tone, which have
-made it equally dear to all generations of those
-who love the free play of fancy or the incomparable
-music of perfected human speech. Or perhaps it
-uttered with candor and simplicity some universal
-sentiment; perchance pictured something in the
-tragedy or the comedy of man’s life as it was never
-pictured before, and must on that account be read
-and read again as not to be superseded. There
-must be something special, we judge, either in its
-form or in its substance, to account for its unwonted
-fame and fortune.</p>
-
-<p>This upon first analysis, taking one book at a
-time. A look deeper into the heart of the matter
-enables us to catch at least a glimpse of a single
-and common source of immortality. The world is
-attracted by books as each man is attracted by his
-several friends. You recommend that capital fellow
-So-and-So to the acquaintance of others because
-of his discriminating and diverting powers of observation:
-the very tones and persons—it would
-seem the very selves—of every type of man live<span class="pagenum" id="Page_30">30</span>
-again in his mimicries and descriptions. He is the
-dramatist of your circle; you can never forget him,
-nor can any one else; his circle of acquaintances can
-never grow smaller. Could he live on and retain
-perennially that wonderful freshness and vivacity
-of his, he must become the most famous guest and
-favorite of the world. Who that has known a man
-quick and shrewd to see dispassionately the inner
-history, the reason and the ends, of the combinations
-of society, and at the same time eloquent to tell of
-them, with a hold on the attention gained by a certain
-quaint force and sagacity resident in no other
-man, can find it difficult to understand why we
-still resort to Montesquieu? Possibly there are
-circles favored of the gods who have known some
-fellow of infinite store of miscellaneous and curious
-learning, who has greatly diverted both himself
-and his friends by a way peculiar to himself of giving
-it out upon any and all occasions, item by item,
-as if it were all homogeneous and of a piece, and
-by his odd skill in making unexpected application
-of it to out-of-the-way, unpromising subjects, as if
-there were in his view of things mental no such disintegrating
-element as incongruity. Such a circle
-would esteem it strange were Burton not beloved
-of the world. And so of those, if any there be,
-who have known men of simple, calm, transparent<span class="pagenum" id="Page_31">31</span>
-natures, untouched by storm or perplexity, whose
-talk was full of such serious, placid reflection as
-seemed to mirror their own reverent hearts,—talk
-often prosy, but more often touchingly beautiful,
-because of its nearness to nature and the solemn
-truth of life. There may be those, also, who have
-felt the thrill of personal contact with some stormy
-peasant nature full of strenuous, unsparing speech
-concerning men and affairs. These have known
-why a Wordsworth or a Carlyle must be read by
-all generations of those who love words of first-hand
-inspiration. In short, in every case of literary
-immortality originative personality is present.
-Not origination simply,—that may be mere invention,
-which in literature has nothing immortal about
-it; but origination which takes its stamp and character
-from the originator, which is his spirit given
-to the world, which is himself outspoken.</p>
-
-<p>Individuality does not consist in the use of the
-very personal pronoun, <em>I</em>: it consists in tone, in
-method, in attitude, in point of view; it consists in
-saying things in such a way that you will yourself
-be recognized as a force in saying them. Do we
-not at once know Lamb when he speaks? And
-even more formal Addison, does not his speech bewray
-and endear him to us? His personal charm
-is less distinct, much less fascinating, than that<span class="pagenum" id="Page_32">32</span>
-which goes with what Lamb speaks, but a charm he
-has sufficient for immortality. In Steele the matter
-is more impersonal, more mortal. Some of Dr.
-Johnson’s essays, you feel, might have been written
-by a dictionary. It is impersonal matter that is
-dead matter. Are you asked who fathered a certain
-brilliant, poignant bit of political analysis?
-You say, Why, only Bagehot could have written
-that. Does a wittily turned verse make you hesitate
-between laughter at its hit and grave thought
-because of its deeper, covert meaning? Do you
-not know that only Lowell could do that? Do
-you catch a strain of pure Elizabethan music and
-doubt whether to attribute it to Shakespeare or to
-another? Do you not <em>know</em> the authors who still
-live?</p>
-
-<p>Now, the noteworthy thing about such individuality
-is that it will not develop under every star, or
-in one place just as well as in another; there is an
-atmosphere which kills it, and there is an atmosphere
-which fosters it. The atmosphere which
-kills it is the atmosphere of sophistication, where
-cleverness and fashion and knowingness thrive:
-cleverness, which is froth, not strong drink; fashion,
-which is a thing assumed, not a thing of
-nature; and knowingness, which is naught.</p>
-
-<p>Of course there are born, now and again, as<span class="pagenum" id="Page_33">33</span>
-tokens of some rare mood of Nature, men of so
-intense and individual a cast that circumstance and
-surroundings affect them little more than friction
-affects an express train. They command their own
-development without even the consciousness that to
-command costs strength. These cannot be sophisticated;
-for sophistication is subordination to the
-ways of your world. But these are the very greatest
-and the very rarest; and it is not the greatest
-and the rarest alone who shape the world and its
-thought. That is done also by the great and the
-merely extraordinary. There is a rank and file in
-literature, even in the literature of immortality, and
-these must go much to school to the people about
-them.</p>
-
-<p>It is by the number and charm of the individualities
-which it contains that the literature of any
-country gains distinction. We turn anywhither to
-know men. The best way to foster literature, if it
-may be fostered, is to cultivate the author himself,—a
-plant of such delicate and precarious growth
-that special soils are needed to produce it in its full
-perfection. The conditions which foster individuality
-are those which foster simplicity, thought and
-action which are direct, naturalness, spontaneity.
-What are these conditions?</p>
-
-<p>In the first place, a certain helpful ignorance.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_34">34</span>
-It is best for the author to be born away from literary
-centres, or to be excluded from their ruling
-set if he be born in them. It is best that he start
-out with his thinking, not knowing how much has
-been thought and said about everything. A certain
-amount of ignorance will insure his sincerity, will
-increase his boldness and shelter his genuineness,
-which is his hope of power. Not ignorance of life,
-but life may be learned in any neighborhood;—not
-ignorance of the greater laws which govern
-human affairs, but they may be learned without a
-library of historians and commentators, by imaginative
-sense, by seeing better than by reading;—not
-ignorance of the infinitudes of human circumstance,
-but these may be perceived without the intervention
-of universities;—not ignorance of one’s self and
-of one’s neighbor; but innocence of the sophistications
-of learning, its research without love, its knowledge
-without inspiration, its method without grace;
-freedom from its shame at trying to know many
-things as well as from its pride of trying to know
-but one thing; ignorance of that faith in small confounding
-facts which is contempt for large reassuring
-principles.</p>
-
-<p>Our present problem is not how to clarify our
-reasonings and perfect our analyses, but how to
-reënrich and reënergize our literature. That literature<span class="pagenum" id="Page_35">35</span>
-is suffering, not from ignorance, but from
-sophistication and self-consciousness; and it is suffering
-hardly less from excess of logical method.
-Ratiocination does not keep us pure, render us
-earnest, or make us individual and specific forces
-in the world. Those inestimable results are accomplished
-by whatever implants principle and
-conviction, whatever quickens with inspiration,
-fills with purpose and courage, gives outlook, and
-makes character. Reasoned thinking does indeed
-clear the mind’s atmospheres and lay open to its
-view fields of action; but it is loving and believing,
-sometimes hating and distrusting, often
-prejudice and passion, always the many things
-which we call the one thing, character, which
-create and shape our acting. Life quite overtowers
-logic. Thinking and erudition alone will not equip
-for the great tasks and triumphs of life and literature:
-the persuading of other men’s purposes, the
-entrance into other men’s minds to possess them
-forever. Culture broadens and sweetens literature,
-but native sentiment and unmarred individuality
-create it. Not all of mental power lies in the processes
-of thinking. There is power also in passion,
-in personality, in simple, native, uncritical conviction,
-in unschooled feeling. The power of
-science, of system, is executive, not stimulative. I<span class="pagenum" id="Page_36">36</span>
-do not find that I derive inspiration, but only information,
-from the learned historians and analysts
-of liberty; but from the sonneteers, the poets, who,
-speak its spirit and its exalted purpose,—who,
-recking nothing of the historical method, obey only
-the high method of their own hearts,—what may
-a man not gain of courage and confidence in the
-right way of politics?</p>
-
-<p>It is your direct, unhesitating, intent, headlong
-man, who has his sources in the mountains, who
-digs deep channels for himself in the soil of his
-times and expands into the mighty river, to become
-a landmark forever; and not your “broad” man,
-sprung from the schools, who spreads his shallow,
-extended waters over the wide surfaces of learning,
-to leave rich deposits, it may be, for other men’s
-crops to grow in, but to be himself dried up by a
-few score summer noons. The man thrown early
-upon his own resources, and already become a conqueror
-of success before being thrown with the
-literary talkers; the man grown to giant’s stature
-in some rural library, and become exercised there
-in a giant’s prerogatives before ever he has been
-laughingly told, to his heart’s confusion, of scores
-of other giants dead and forgotten long ago; the
-man grounded in hope and settled in conviction
-ere he has discovered how many hopes time has<span class="pagenum" id="Page_37">37</span>
-seen buried, how many convictions cruelly given
-the lie direct by fate; the man who has carried
-his youth into middle age before going into the
-chill atmosphere of <i xml:lang="fr" lang="fr">blasé</i> sentiment; the quiet,
-stern man who has cultivated literature on a little
-oatmeal before thrusting himself upon the great
-world as a prophet and seer; the man who pronounces
-new eloquence in the rich dialect in which
-he was bred; the man come up to the capital
-from the provinces,—these are the men who people
-the world’s mind with new creations, and give
-to the sophisticated learned of the next generation
-new names to conjure with.</p>
-
-<p>If you have a candid and well-informed friend
-among city lawyers, ask him where the best masters
-of his profession are bred,—in the city or in
-the country. He will reply without hesitation,
-“In the country.” You will hardly need to have
-him state the reason. The country lawyer has
-been obliged to study all parts of the law alike, and
-he has known no reason why he should not do so.
-He has not had the chance to make himself a
-specialist in any one branch of the law, as is the
-fashion among city practitioners, and he has not
-coveted the opportunity to do it. There would not
-have been enough special cases to occupy or remunerate
-him if he had coveted it. He has dared<span class="pagenum" id="Page_38">38</span>
-attempt the task of knowing the whole law, and
-yet without any sense of daring, but as a matter of
-course. In his own little town, in the midst of his
-own small library of authorities, it has not seemed
-to him an impossible task to explore all the topics
-that engage his profession; the guiding principles,
-at any rate, of all branches of the great subject
-were open to him in a few books. And so it often
-happens that when he has found his sea legs on
-the sequestered inlets at home, and ventures, as
-he sometimes will, upon the great, troublous, and
-much-frequented waters of city practice in search
-of more work and larger fees, the country lawyer
-will once and again confound his city-bred brethren
-by discovering to them the fact that the law is a
-many-sided thing of principles, and not altogether
-a one-sided thing of technical rule and arbitrary
-precedent.</p>
-
-<p>It would seem to be necessary that the author
-who is to stand as a distinct and imperative individual
-among the company of those who express
-the world’s thought should come to a hard crystallization
-before subjecting himself to the tense strain
-of cities, the corrosive acids of critical circles.
-The ability to see for one’s self is attainable, not
-by mixing with crowds and ascertaining how they
-look at things, but by a certain aloofness and self-containment.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_39">39</span>
-The solitariness of some genius is
-not accidental; it is characteristic and essential.
-To the constructive imagination there are some immortal
-feats which are possible only in seclusion.
-The man must heed first and most of all the suggestions
-of his own spirit; and the world can be
-seen from windows overlooking the street better
-than from the street itself.</p>
-
-<p>Literature grows rich, various, full-voiced largely
-through the re-discovery of truth, by thinking re-thought,
-by stories re-told, by songs re-sung. The
-song of human experience grows richer and richer
-in its harmonies, and must grow until the full accord
-and melody are come. If too soon subjected
-to the tense strain of the city, a man cannot expand;
-he is beaten out of his natural shape by the
-incessant impact and press of men and affairs. It
-will often turn out that the unsophisticated man
-will display not only more force, but more literary
-skill even, than the trained <i xml:lang="fr" lang="fr">littérateur</i>. For one
-thing, he will probably have enjoyed a fresher contact
-with old literature. He reads not for the sake
-of a critical acquaintance with this or that author,
-with no thought of going through all his writings
-and “working him up,” but as he would ride a
-spirited horse, for love of the life and motion of it.</p>
-
-<p>A general impression seems to have gained currency<span class="pagenum" id="Page_40">40</span>
-that the last of the bullying, omniscient
-critics was buried in the grave of Francis Jeffrey;
-and it is becoming important to correct the misapprehension.
-There never was a time when there
-was more superior knowledge, more specialist
-omniscience, among reviewers than there is to-day;
-not pretended superior knowledge, but real. Jeffrey’s
-was very real of its kind. For those who
-write books, one of the special, inestimable advantages
-of lacking a too intimate knowledge of the
-“world of letters” consists in not knowing all that
-is known by those who review books, in ignorance
-of the fashions among those who construct canons
-of taste. The modern critic is a leader of fashion.
-He carries with him the air of a literary worldliness.
-If your book be a novel, your reviewer will
-know all previous plots, all former, all possible,
-motives and situations. You cannot write anything
-absolutely new for him, and why should you
-desire to do again what has been done already?
-If it be a poem, the reviewer’s head already rings
-with the whole gamut of the world’s metrical music;
-he can recognize any simile, recall all turns of
-phrase, match every sentiment; why seek to please
-him anew with old things? If it concern itself
-with the philosophy of politics, he can and will set
-himself to test it by the whole history of its kind<span class="pagenum" id="Page_41">41</span>
-from Plato down to Benjamin Kidd. How can it
-but spoil your sincerity to know that your critic
-will know everything? Will you not be tempted
-of the devil to anticipate his judgment or his pretensions
-by pretending to know as much as he?</p>
-
-<p>The literature of creation naturally falls into two
-kinds: that which interprets nature or human action,
-and that which interprets self. Both of these
-may have the flavor of immortality, but neither
-unless it be free from self-consciousness. No man,
-therefore, can create after the best manner in either
-of these kinds who is an <i xml:lang="fr" lang="fr">habitué</i> of the circles
-made so delightful by those interesting men, the
-modern <em>literati</em>, sophisticated in all the fashions,
-ready in all the catches of the knowing literary
-world which centres in the city and the university.
-He cannot always be simple and straightforward.
-He cannot be always and without pretension himself,
-bound by no other man’s canons of taste in
-speech or conduct. In the judgment of such circles
-there is but one thing for you to do if you
-would gain distinction: you must “beat the record;”
-you must do certain definite literary feats
-better than they have yet been done. You are
-pitted against the literary “field.” You are hastened
-into the paralysis of comparing yourself with
-others, and thus away from the health of unhesitating<span class="pagenum" id="Page_42">42</span>
-self-expression and directness of first-hand
-vision.</p>
-
-<p>It would be not a little profitable if we could
-make correct analysis of the proper relations of
-learning—learning of the critical, accurate sort—to
-origination, of learning’s place in literature.
-Although learning is never the real parent of literature,
-but only sometimes its foster-father, and although
-the native promptings of soul and sense are
-its best and freshest sources, there is always the
-danger that learning will claim, in every court of
-taste which pretends to jurisdiction, exclusive and
-preëminent rights as the guardian and preceptor
-of authors. An effort is constantly being made to
-create and maintain standards of literary worldliness,
-if I may coin such a phrase. The thorough
-man of the world affects to despise natural feeling;
-does at any rate actually despise all displays of
-it. He has an eye always on his world’s best manners,
-whether native or imported, and is at continual
-pains to be master of the conventions of society;
-he will mortify the natural man as much as need
-be in order to be in good form. What learned
-criticism essays to do is to create a similar literary
-worldliness, to establish fashions and conventions in
-letters.</p>
-
-<p>I have an odd friend in one of the northern counties<span class="pagenum" id="Page_43">43</span>
-of Georgia,—a county set off by itself among
-the mountains, but early found out by refined people
-in search of summer refuge from the unhealthful
-air of the southern coast. He belongs to an excellent
-family of no little culture, but he was surprised
-in the midst of his early schooling by the
-coming on of the war; and education given pause
-in such wise seldom begins again in the schools.
-He was left, therefore, to “finish” his mind as
-best he might in the companionship of the books in
-his uncle’s library. These books were of the old
-sober sort: histories, volumes of travels, treatises
-on laws and constitutions, theologies, philosophies
-more fanciful than the romances encased in neighbor
-volumes on another shelf. But they were books
-which were used to being taken down and read;
-they had been daily companions to the rest of the
-family, and they became familiar companions to my
-friend’s boyhood. He went to them day after day,
-because theirs was the only society offered him in
-the lonely days when uncle and brothers were at
-the war, and the women were busy about the tasks
-of the home. How literally did he make those
-delightful old volumes his familiars, his cronies!
-He never dreamed the while, however, that he was
-becoming learned; it never seemed to occur to him
-that everybody else did not read just as he did, in just<span class="pagenum" id="Page_44">44</span>
-such a library. He found out afterwards, of course,
-that he had kept much more of such company than
-had the men with whom he loved to chat at the
-post-office or around the fire in the village shops,
-the habitual resorts of all who were socially inclined;
-but he attributed that to lack of time on
-their part, or to accident, and has gone on thinking
-until now that all the books that come within his
-reach are the natural intimates of man. And so
-you shall hear him, in his daily familiar talk with
-his neighbors, draw upon his singular stores of wise,
-quaint learning with the quiet colloquial assurance,
-“They tell me,” as if books contained current
-rumor; and quote the poets with the easy unaffectedness
-with which others cite a common maxim of
-the street! He has been heard to refer to Dr.
-Arnold of Rugby as “that school teacher over there
-in England.”</p>
-
-<p>Surely one may treasure the image of this
-simple, genuine man of learning as the image of a
-sort of masterpiece of Nature in her own type of
-erudition, a perfect sample of the kind of learning
-that might beget the very highest sort of literature;
-the literature, namely, of authentic individuality. It
-is only under one of two conditions that learning
-will not dull the edge of individuality: first, if one
-never suspect that it is creditable and a matter of<span class="pagenum" id="Page_45">45</span>
-pride to be learned, and so never become learned
-for the sake of becoming so; or, second, if it never
-suggest to one that investigation is better than
-reflection. Learned investigation leads to many
-good things, but one of these is not great literature,
-because learned investigation commands, as
-the first condition of its success, the repression of
-individuality.</p>
-
-<p>His mind is a great comfort to every man who
-has one; but a heart is not often to be so conveniently
-possessed. Hearts frequently give trouble;
-they are straightforward and impulsive, and can
-seldom be induced to be prudent. They must be
-schooled before they will become insensible; they
-must be coached before they can be made to care
-first and most for themselves: and in all cases the
-mind must be their schoolmaster and coach. They
-are irregular forces; but the mind may be trained
-to observe all points of circumstance and all motives
-of occasion.</p>
-
-<p>No doubt it is considerations of this nature that
-must be taken to explain the fact that our universities
-are erected entirely for the service of the
-tractable mind, while the heart’s only education
-must be gotten from association with its neighbor
-heart, and in the ordinary courses of the world.
-Life is its only university. Mind is monarch,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_46">46</span>
-whose laws claim supremacy in those lands which
-boast the movements of civilization, and it must
-command all the instrumentalities of education.
-At least such is the theory of the constitution of
-the modern world. It is to be suspected that, as a
-matter of fact, mind is one of those modern monarchs
-who reign, but do not govern. That old House of
-Commons, that popular chamber in which the passions,
-the prejudices, the inborn, unthinking affections
-long ago repudiated by mind, have their full
-representation, controls much the greater part of
-the actual conduct of affairs. To come out of the
-figure, reasoned thought is, though perhaps the presiding,
-not yet the regnant force in the world. In
-life and in literature it is subordinate. The future
-may belong to it; but the present and past do not.
-Faith and virtue do not wear its livery; friendship,
-loyalty, patriotism, do not derive their motives from
-it. It does not furnish the material for those masses
-of habit, of unquestioned tradition, and of treasured
-belief which are the ballast of every steady ship of
-state, enabling it to spread its sails safely to the
-breezes of progress, and even to stand before the
-storms of revolution. And this is a fact which
-has its reflection in literature. There is a literature
-of reasoned thought; but by far the greater
-part of those writings which we reckon worthy of<span class="pagenum" id="Page_47">47</span>
-that great name is the product, not of reasoned
-thought, but of the imagination and of the spiritual
-vision of those who see,—writings winged, not
-with knowledge, but with sympathy, with sentiment,
-with heartiness. Even the literature of reasoned
-thought gets its life, not from its logic, but from
-the spirit, the insight, and the inspiration which
-are the vehicle of its logic. Thought presides, but
-sentiment has the executive powers; the motive
-functions belong to feeling.</p>
-
-<p>“Many people give many theories of literary
-composition,” says the most natural and stimulating
-of English critics, “and Dr. Blair, whom we
-will read, is sometimes said to have exhausted the
-subject; but, unless he has proved the contrary,
-we believe that the knack in style is to write like a
-human being. Some think they must be wise,
-some elaborate, some concise; Tacitus wrote like a
-pair of stays; some startle us, as Thomas Carlyle,
-or a comet, inscribing with his tail. But legibility
-is given to those who neglect these notions, and are
-willing to be themselves, to write their own thoughts
-in their own words, in the simplest words, in the
-words wherein they were thought.... Books are
-for various purposes,—tracts to teach, almanacs to
-sell, poetry to make pastry; but this is the rarest sort
-of a book,—a book to read. As Dr. Johnson<span class="pagenum" id="Page_48">48</span>
-said, ‘Sir, a good book is one you can hold in your
-hand, and take to the fire.’ Now there are extremely
-few books which can, with any propriety,
-be so treated. When a great author, as Grote or
-Gibbon, has devoted a whole life of horrid industry
-to the composition of a large history, one feels one
-ought not to touch it with a mere hand,—it is not
-respectful. The idea of slavery hovers over the
-Decline and Fall. Fancy a stiffly dressed gentleman,
-in a stiff chair, slowly writing that stiff compilation
-in a stiff hand; it is enough to stiffen you for life.”</p>
-
-<p>It is devoutly to be wished that we might learn to
-prepare the best soils for mind, the best associations
-and companionships, the least possible sophistication.
-We are busy enough nowadays finding
-out the best ways of fertilizing and stimulating
-mind; but that is not quite the same thing as discovering
-the best soils for it, and the best atmospheres.
-Our culture is, by erroneous preference,
-of the reasoning faculty, as if that were all of us.
-Is it not the instinctive discontent of readers seeking
-stimulating contact with authors that has given
-us the present almost passionately spoken dissent
-from the standards set themselves by the realists in
-fiction, dissatisfaction with mere recording or observation?
-And is not realism working out upon
-itself the revenge its enemies would fain compass?<span class="pagenum" id="Page_49">49</span>
-Must not all April Hopes exclude from their number
-the hope of immortality?</p>
-
-<p>The rule for every man is, not to depend on the
-education which other men prepare for him,—not
-even to consent to it; but to strive to see things as
-they are, and to be himself as he is. Defeat lies
-in self-surrender.</p>
-
-<hr />
-
-<div id="toclink_50" class="chapter">
-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_50">50</span></p>
-
-<h2 class="nobreak" id="III">III.<br />
-
-<span class="subhead">ON AN AUTHOR’S CHOICE OF COMPANY.</span></h2>
-</div>
-
-<p><span class="firstword">Once</span> and again, it would seem, a man is born into
-the world belated. Strayed out of a past age, he
-comes among us like an alien, lives removed and
-singular, and dies a stranger. There was a touch
-of this strangeness in Charles Lamb. Much as he
-was loved and befriended, he was not much understood;
-for he drew aloof in his studies, affected
-a “self-pleasing quaintness” in his style, took no
-pains to hit the taste of his day, wandered at sweet
-liberty in an age which could scarcely have bred
-such another. “Hang the age!” he cried. “I
-will write for antiquity.” And he did. He wrote
-as if it were still Shakespeare’s day; made the
-authors of that spacious time his constant companions
-and study; and deliberately became himself
-“the last of the Elizabethans.” When a new book
-came out, he said, he always read an old one.</p>
-
-<p>The case ought, surely, to put us occasionally
-upon reflecting. May an author not, in some degree,
-by choosing his literary company, choose also
-his literary character, and so, when he comes to<span class="pagenum" id="Page_51">51</span>
-write, write himself back to his masters? May he
-not, by examining his own tastes and yielding himself
-obedient to his natural affinities, join what congenial
-group of writers he will? The question can
-be argued very strongly in the affirmative, and
-that not alone because of Charles Lamb’s case. It
-might be said that Lamb was antique only in the
-forms of his speech; that he managed very cleverly
-to hit the taste of his age in the substance of
-what he wrote, for all the phraseology had so strong
-a flavor of quaintness and was not at all in the
-mode of the day. It would not be easy to prove
-that; but it really does not matter. In his tastes,
-certainly, Lamb was an old author, not a new one;
-a “modern antique,” as Hood called him. He
-wrote for his own age, of course, because there was
-no other age at hand to write for, and the age he
-liked best was past and gone; but he wrote what
-he fancied the great generations gone by would
-have liked, and what, as it has turned out in the
-generosity of fortune, subsequent ages have warmly
-loved and reverently canonized him for writing; as
-if there were a casual taste that belongs to a day and
-generation, and also a permanent taste which is
-without date, and he had hit the latter.</p>
-
-<p>Great authors are not often men of fashion.
-Fashion is always a harness and restraint, whether<span class="pagenum" id="Page_52">52</span>
-it be fashion in dress or fashion in vice or fashion
-in literary art; and a man who is bound by it is
-caught and formed in a fleeting mode. The great
-writers are always innovators; for they are always
-frank, natural, and downright, and frankness and
-naturalness always disturb, when they do not wholly
-break down, the fixed and complacent order of
-fashion. No genuine man can be deliberately in
-the fashion, indeed, in what he says, if he have any
-movement of thought or individuality in him. He
-remembers what Aristotle says, or if he does not,
-his own pride and manliness fill him with the
-thought instead. The very same action that is
-noble if done for the satisfaction of one’s own sense
-of right or purpose of self-development, said the
-Stagirite, may, if done to satisfy others, become
-menial and slavish. “It is the object of any action
-or study that is all-important,” and if the author’s
-chief object be to please he is condemned already.
-The true spirit of authorship is a spirit of liberty
-which scorns the slave’s trick of imitation. It is a
-masterful spirit of conquest within the sphere of
-ideas and of artistic form,—an impulse of empire
-and origination.</p>
-
-<p>Of course a man may choose, if he will, to be
-less than a free author. He may become a reporter;
-for there is such a thing as reporting for books as<span class="pagenum" id="Page_53">53</span>
-well as reporting for newspapers, and there have
-been reporters so amazingly clever that their very
-aptness and wit constitute them a sort of immortals.
-You have proof of this in Horace Walpole,
-at whose hands gossip and compliment receive a
-sort of apotheosis. Such men hold the secret of
-a kind of alchemy by which things trivial and temporary
-may be transmuted into literature. But
-they are only inspired reporters, after all; and
-while a man was wishing, he might wish to be more,
-and climb to better company.</p>
-
-<p>Every man must, of course, whether he will or
-not, feel the spirit of the age in which he lives and
-thinks and does his work; and the mere contact
-will direct and form him more or less. But to wish
-to serve the spirit of the age at any sacrifice of individual
-naturalness or conviction, however small,
-is to harbor the germ of a destroying disease.
-Every man who writes ought to write for immortality,
-even though he be of the multitude that die
-at their graves; and the standards of immortality
-are of no single age. There are many qualities
-and causes that give permanency to a book, but
-universal vogue during the author’s lifetime is not
-one of them. Many authors now immortal have
-enjoyed the applause of their own generations;
-many authors now universally admired will, let us<span class="pagenum" id="Page_54">54</span>
-hope, pass on to an easy immortality. The praise
-of your own day is no absolute disqualification;
-but it may be if it be given for qualities which
-your friends are the first to admire, for ’tis likely
-they will also be the last. There is a greater
-thing than the spirit of the age, and that is the
-spirit of the ages. It is present in your own day;
-it is even dominant then, with a sort of accumulated
-power and mastery. If you can strike it,
-you will strike, as it were, into the upper air of
-your own time, where the forces are which run
-from age to age. Lower down, where you breathe,
-is the more inconstant air of opinion, inhaled, exhaled,
-from day to day,—the variant currents, the
-forces that will carry you, not forward, but hither
-and thither.</p>
-
-<p>We write nowadays a great deal with our eyes
-circumspectly upon the tastes of our neighbors, but
-very little with our attention bent upon our own
-natural, self-speaking thoughts and the very truth
-of the matter whereof we are discoursing. Now
-and again, it is true, we are startled to find how
-the age relishes still an old-fashioned romance, if
-written with a new-fashioned vigor and directness;
-how quaint and simple and lovely things, as well
-as what is altogether modern and analytic and
-painful, bring our most judicious friends crowding,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_55">55</span>
-purses in hand, to the book-stalls; and for a while
-we are puzzled to see worn-out styles and past
-modes revived. But we do not let these things
-seriously disturb our study of prevailing fashions.
-These books of adventure are not at all, we assure
-ourselves, in the true spirit of the age, with its
-realistic knowledge of what men really do think
-and purpose, and the taste for them must be only
-for the moment or in jest. We need not let our
-surprise at occasional flurries and variations in the
-literary market cloud or discredit our analysis of
-the real taste of the day, or suffer ourselves to be
-betrayed into writing romances, however much we
-might rejoice to be delivered from the drudgery of
-sociological study, and made free to go afield with
-our imaginations upon a joyous search for hidden
-treasure or knightly adventure.</p>
-
-<p>And yet it is quite likely, after all, that the
-present age is transient. Past ages have been. It
-is probable that the objects and interests now so
-near us, looming dominant in all the foreground
-of our day, will sometime be shifted and lose their
-place in the perspective. That has happened with
-the near objects and exaggerated interests of other
-days, so violently sometimes as to submerge and
-thrust out of sight whole libraries of books. It
-will not do to reckon upon the persistence of new<span class="pagenum" id="Page_56">56</span>
-things. ’Twere best to give them time to make
-trial of the seasons. The old things of art and
-taste and thought are the permanent things. We
-know that they are because they have lasted long
-enough to grow old; and we deem it safe to assess
-the spirit of the age by the same test. No age
-adds a great deal to what it received from the age
-that went before it; no time gets an air all its
-own. The same atmosphere holds from age to age;
-it is only the little movements of the air that are
-new. In the intervals when the trades do not
-blow, fleeting cross-winds venture abroad, the which
-if a man wait for he may lose his voyage.</p>
-
-<p>No man who has anything to say need stop and
-bethink himself whom he may please or displease
-in the saying of it. He has but one day to write
-in, and that is his own. He need not fear that he
-will too much ignore it. He will address the men
-he knows when he writes, whether he be conscious
-of it or not; he may dismiss all fear on that score
-and use his liberty to the utmost. There are some
-things that can have no antiquity and must ever be
-without date, and genuineness and spirit are of
-their number. A man who has these must ever
-be “timely,” and at the same time fit to last, if he
-can get his qualities into what he writes. He may
-freely read, too, what he will that is congenial, and<span class="pagenum" id="Page_57">57</span>
-form himself by companionships that are chosen
-simply because they are to his taste; that is, if he
-be genuine and in very truth a man of independent
-spirit. Lamb would have written “for antiquity”
-with a vengeance had his taste for the quaint
-writers of an elder day been an affectation, or
-the authors he liked men themselves affected and
-ephemeral. No age this side antiquity would ever
-have vouchsafed him a glance or a thought. But
-it was not an affectation, and the men he preferred
-were as genuine and as spirited as he was.
-He was simply obeying an affinity and taking
-cheer after his own kind. A man born into the
-real patriciate of letters may take his pleasure in
-what company he will without taint or loss of
-caste; may go confidently abroad in the free
-world of books and choose his comradeships without
-fear of offense.</p>
-
-<p>More than that, there is no other way in which
-he can form himself, if he would have his power
-transcend a single age. He belittles himself who
-takes from the world no more than he can get
-from the speech of his own generation. The only
-advantage of books over speech is that they may
-hold from generation to generation, and reach, not
-a small group merely, but a multitude of men;
-and a man who writes without being a man of<span class="pagenum" id="Page_58">58</span>
-letters is curtailed of his heritage. It is in this
-world of old and new that he must form himself if
-he would in the end belong to it and increase its
-bulk of treasure. If he has conned the new theories
-of society, but knows nothing of Burke; the
-new notions about fiction, and has not read his
-Scott and his Richardson; the new criminology,
-and wots nothing of the old human nature; the new
-religions, and has never felt the power and sanctity
-of the old, it is much the same as if he had
-read Ibsen and Maeterlinck, and had never opened
-Shakespeare. How is he to know wholesome air
-from foul, good company from bad, visions from
-nightmares? He has framed himself for the great
-art and handicraft of letters only when he has
-taken all the human parts of literature as if they
-were without date, and schooled himself in a catholic
-sanity of taste and judgment.</p>
-
-<p>Then he may very safely choose what company
-his own work shall be done in,—in what manner,
-and under what masters. He cannot choose amiss
-for himself or for his generation if he choose like a
-man, without light whim or weak affectation; not
-like one who chooses a costume, but like one who
-chooses a character. What is it, let him ask himself,
-that renders a bit of writing a “piece of
-literature”? It is reality. A “wood-note wild,”<span class="pagenum" id="Page_59">59</span>
-sung unpremeditated and out of the heart; a description
-written as if with an undimmed and
-seeing eye upon the very object described; an
-exposition that lays bare the very soul of the
-matter; a motive truly revealed; anger that is
-righteous and justly spoken; mirth that has its
-sources pure; phrases to find the heart of a thing,
-and a heart seen in things for the phrases to find;
-an unaffected meaning set out in language that is
-its own,—such are the realities of literature.
-Nothing else is of the kin. Phrases used for their
-own sake; borrowed meanings which the borrower
-does not truly care for; an affected manner; an
-acquired style; a hollow reason; words that are
-not fit; things which do not live when spoken,—these
-are its falsities, which die in the handling.</p>
-
-<p>The very top breed of what is unreal is begotten
-by imitation. Imitators succeed sometimes,
-and flourish, even while a breath may last; but
-“imitate and be damned” is the inexorable
-threat and prophecy of fate with regard to the
-permanent fortunes of literature. That has been
-notorious this long time past. It is more worth
-noting, lest some should not have observed it, that
-there are other and subtler ways of producing
-what is unreal. There are the mixed kinds of
-writing, for example. Argument is real if it come<span class="pagenum" id="Page_60">60</span>
-vital from the mind; narrative is real if the thing
-told have life and the narrator unaffectedly see it
-while he speaks; but to narrate and argue in the
-same breath is naught. Take, for instance, the
-familiar example of the early history of Rome.
-Make up your mind what was the truth of the
-matter, and then, out of the facts as you have disentangled
-them, construct a firmly touched narrative,
-and the thing you create is real, has the confidence
-and consistency of life. But mix the narrative
-with critical comment upon other writers and their
-variant versions of the tale, show by a nice elaboration
-of argument the whole conjectural basis of
-the story, set your reader the double task of doubting
-and accepting, rejecting and constructing, and
-at once you have touched the whole matter with
-unreality. The narrative by itself might have had
-an objective validity; the argument by itself an
-intellectual firmness, sagacity, vigor, that would
-have sufficed to make and keep it potent; but
-together they confound each other, destroy each
-other’s atmosphere, make a double miscarriage.
-The story is rendered unlikely, and the argument
-obscure. This is the taint which has touched all
-our recent historical writing. The critical discussion
-and assessment of the sources of information,
-which used to be a thing for the private mind of<span class="pagenum" id="Page_61">61</span>
-the writer, now so encroach upon the open text
-that the story, for the sake of which we would believe
-the whole thing was undertaken, is oftentimes
-fain to sink away into the foot-notes. The
-process has ceased to be either pure exegesis or
-straightforward narrative, and history has ceased
-to be literature.</p>
-
-<p>Nor is this our only sort of mixed writing.
-Our novels have become sociological studies, our
-poems vehicles of criticism, our sermons political
-manifestos. We have confounded all processes in
-a common use, and do not know what we would be
-at. We can find no better use for Pegasus than
-to carry our vulgar burdens, no higher key for
-song than questionings and complainings. Fancy
-pulls in harness with intellectual doubt; enthusiasm
-walks apologetically alongside science. We
-try to make our very dreams engines of social reform.
-It is a parlous state of things for literature,
-and it is high time authors should take heed what
-company they keep. The trouble is, they all want
-to be “in society,” overwhelmed with invitations
-from the publishers, well known and talked about
-at the clubs, named every day in the newspapers,
-photographed for the news-stalls; and it is so hard
-to distinguish between fashion and form, costume
-and substance, convention and truth, the things<span class="pagenum" id="Page_62">62</span>
-that show well and the things that last well; so
-hard to draw away from the writers that are new
-and talked about and note those who are old and
-walk apart, to distinguish the tones which are
-merely loud from the tones that are genuine, to
-get far enough away from the press and the hubbub
-to see and judge the movements of the crowd!</p>
-
-<p>Some will do it. Choice spirits will arise and
-make conquest of us, not “in society,” but with
-what will seem a sort of outlawry. The great
-growths of literature spring up in the open, where
-the air is free and they can be a law unto themselves.
-The law of life, here as elsewhere, is the
-law of nourishment: with what was the earth
-laden, and the atmosphere? Literatures are renewed,
-as they are originated, by uncontrived impulses
-of nature, as if the sap moved unbidden in
-the mind. Once conceive the matter so, and
-Lamb’s quaint saying assumes a sort of gentle
-majesty. A man should “write for antiquity” as
-a tree grows into the ancient air,—this old air
-that has moved upon the face of the world ever
-since the day of creation, which has set the law of
-life to all things, which has nurtured the forests
-and won the flowers to their perfection, which has
-fed men’s lungs with life, sped their craft upon the
-seas, borne abroad their songs and their cries,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_63">63</span>
-blown their forges to flame, and buoyed up whatever
-they have contrived. ’Tis a common medium,
-though a various life; and the figure may serve
-the author for instruction.</p>
-
-<p>The breeding of authors is no doubt a very
-occult thing, and no man can set the rules of it;
-but at least the sort of “ampler ether” in which
-they are best brought to maturity is known. Writers
-have liked to speak of the Republic of Letters,
-as if to mark their freedom and equality; but
-there is a better phrase, namely, the Community
-of Letters; for that means intercourse and comradeship
-and a life in common. Some take up
-their abode in it as if they had made no search for
-a place to dwell in, but had come into the freedom
-of it by blood and birthright. Others buy the
-freedom with a great price, and seek out all the
-sights and privileges of the place with an eager
-thoroughness and curiosity. Still others win their
-way into it with a certain grace and aptitude, next
-best to the ease and dignity of being born to the
-right. But for all it is a bonny place to be. Its
-comradeships are a liberal education. Some, indeed,
-even there, live apart; but most run always
-in the market-place to know what all the rest have
-said. Some keep special company, while others
-keep none at all. But all feel the atmosphere and
-life of the place in their several degrees.</p>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_64">64</span></p>
-
-<p>No doubt there are national groups, and Shakespeare
-is king among the English, as Homer is
-among the Greeks, and sober Dante among his
-gay countrymen. But their thoughts all have in
-common, though speech divide them; and sovereignty
-does not exclude comradeship or embarrass
-freedom. No doubt there is many a willful, ungoverned
-fellow endured there without question,
-and many a churlish cynic, because he possesses
-that patent of genuineness or of a wit which
-strikes for the heart of things, which, without
-further test, secures citizenship in that free company.
-What a gift of tongues is there, and of
-prophecy! What strains of good talk, what counsel
-of good judgment, what cheer of good tales,
-what sanctity of silent thought! The sight-seers
-who pass through from day to day, the press of
-voluble men at the gates, the affectation of citizenship
-by mere sojourners, the folly of those who
-bring new styles or affect old ones, the procession
-of the generations, disturb the calm of that serene
-community not a whit. They will entertain a
-man a whole decade, if he happen to stay so long,
-though they know all the while he can have no
-permanent place among them.</p>
-
-<p>’T would be a vast gain to have the laws of that
-community better known than they are. Even the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_65">65</span>
-first principles of its constitution are singularly
-unfamiliar. It is not a community of writers, but
-a community of letters. One gets admission, not
-because he writes,—write he never so cleverly, like
-a gentleman and a man of wit,—but because he is
-literate, a true initiate into the secret craft and
-mystery of letters. What that secret is a man
-may know, even though he cannot practice or appropriate
-it. If a man can see the permanent element
-in things,—the true sources of laughter, the
-real fountains of tears, the motives that strike
-along the main lines of conduct, the acts which display
-the veritable characters of men, the trifles that
-are significant, the details that make the mass,—if
-he know these things, and can also choose words
-with a like knowledge of their power to illuminate
-and reveal, give color to the eye and passion to the
-thought, the secret is his, and an entrance to that
-immortal communion.</p>
-
-<p>It may be that some learn the mystery of that
-insight without tutors; but most must put themselves
-under governors and earn their initiation.
-While a man lives, at any rate, he can keep the
-company of the masters whose words contain the
-mystery and open it to those who can see, almost
-with every accent; and in such company it may at
-last be revealed to him,—so plainly that he may,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_66">66</span>
-if he will, still linger in such comradeship when he
-is dead.</p>
-
-<p>It would seem that there are two tests which
-admit to that company, and that they are conclusive.
-The one is, Are you individual? the other,
-Are you conversable? “I beg pardon,” said a
-grave wag, coming face to face with a small person
-of most consequential air, and putting glass to
-eye in calm scrutiny—“I beg pardon; but are you
-anybody in particular?” Such is very much the
-form of initiation into the permanent communion
-of the realm of letters. Tell them, No, but that
-you have done much better—you have caught the
-tone of a great age, studied taste, divined opportunity,
-courted and won a vast public, been most
-timely and most famous; and you shall be pained
-to find them laughing in your face. Tell them you
-are earnest, sincere, consecrate to a cause, an
-apostle and reformer, and they will still ask you,
-“But are you anybody in particular?” They will
-mean, “Were you your own man in what you
-thought, and not a puppet? Did you speak with
-an individual note and distinction that marked you
-able to think as well as to speak,—to be yourself
-in thoughts and in words also?” “Very well,
-then; you are welcome enough.”</p>
-
-<p>“That is, if you be also conversable.” It is<span class="pagenum" id="Page_67">67</span>
-plain enough what they mean by that, too. They
-mean, if you have spoken in such speech and spirit
-as can be understood from age to age, and not in
-the pet terms and separate spirit of a single day
-and generation. Can the old authors understand
-you, that you would associate with them? Will
-men be able to take your meaning in the differing
-days to come? Or is it perishable matter of the
-day that you deal in—little controversies that
-carry no lasting principle at their heart; experimental
-theories of life and science, put forth for
-their novelty and with no test of their worth; pictures
-in which fashion looms very large, but human
-nature shows very small; things that please everybody,
-but instruct no one; mere fancies that are
-an end in themselves? Be you never so clever an
-artist in words and in ideas, if they be not the
-words that wear and mean the same thing, and
-that a thing intelligible, from age to age, the ideas
-that shall hold valid and luminous in whatever day
-or company, you may clamor at the gate till your
-lungs fail and get never an answer.</p>
-
-<p>For that to what you seek admission is a veritable
-“community.” In it you must be able to be,
-and to remain, conversable. How are you to test
-your preparation meanwhile, unless you look to
-your comradeships now while yet it is time to<span class="pagenum" id="Page_68">68</span>
-learn? Frequent the company in which you may
-learn the speech and the manner which are fit to
-last. Take to heart the admirable example you
-shall see set you there of using speech and manner
-to speak your real thought and be genuinely and
-simply yourself.</p>
-
-<hr />
-
-<div id="toclink_69" class="chapter">
-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_69">69</span></p>
-
-<h2 class="nobreak" id="IV">IV.<br />
-
-<span class="subhead">A LITERARY POLITICIAN.</span></h2>
-</div>
-
-<p><span class="firstword">“Literary</span> politician” is not a label much in
-vogue, and may need first of all a justification, lest
-even the man of whom I am about to speak should
-decline it from his very urn. I do not mean a
-politician who affects literature; who seems to appreciate
-the solemn moral purpose of Wordsworth’s
-Happy Warrior, and yet is opposed to ballot reform.
-Neither do I mean a literary man who
-affects politics; who earns his victories through
-the publishers, and his defeats at the hands of the
-men who control the primaries. I mean the man
-who has the genius to see deep into affairs, and the
-discretion to keep out of them,—the man to whom,
-by reason of knowledge and imagination and sympathetic
-insight, governments and policies are as
-open books, but who, instead of trying to put haphazard
-characters of his own into those books,
-wisely prefers to read their pages aloud to others.
-A man this who knows polities, and yet does not
-handle policies.</p>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_70">70</span></p>
-
-<p>There is, no doubt, a very widespread skepticism
-as to the existence of such a man. Many people
-would ask you to prove him as well as define him;
-and that, as they assume, upon a very obvious
-principle. It is a rule of universal acceptance in
-theatrical circles that no one can write a good play
-who has no practical acquaintance with the stage.
-A knowledge of greenroom possibilities and of
-stage machinery, it is held, must go before all successful
-attempts to put either passion or humor
-into action on the boards, if pit and gallery are to
-get a sense of reality from the performance. No
-wonder that Sheridan’s plays were effective, for
-Sheridan was both author and actor; but abundant
-wonder that simple Goldsmith succeeded with
-his exquisite “She Stoops to Conquer,”—unless
-we are to suppose that an Irishman of the last century,
-like the Irishman of this, had some sixth
-sense which enabled him to understand other people’s
-business better than his own; for poor Goldsmith
-could not act (even off the stage), and his
-only connection with the theatre seems to have been
-his acquaintance with Garrick. Lytton, we know,
-had Macready constantly at his elbow, to give and
-enforce suggestions calculated to render plays playable.
-And in our own day, the authors of what
-we indulgently call “dramatic literature” find<span class="pagenum" id="Page_71">71</span>
-themselves constantly obliged to turn tragedies into
-comedies, comedies into farces, to satisfy the managers;
-for managers know the stage, and pretend to
-know all possible audiences also. The writer for
-the stage must be playwright first, author second.</p>
-
-<p>Similar principles of criticism are not a little
-affected by those who play the parts, great and small,
-on the stage of politics. There is on that stage,
-too, it is said, a complex machinery of action and
-scene-shifting, a greenroom tradition and practice
-as to costume and make-up, as to entry and exit,
-necessities of concession to footlights and of appeal
-to the pit, quite as rigorous and quite as proper for
-study as are the concomitants of that other art
-which we frankly call acting. This is an idea,
-indeed, accepted in some quarters outside the political
-playhouse as well as within it. Mr. Sydney
-Colvin, for example, declares very rightly <span class="locked">that:—</span></p>
-
-<p>“Men of letters and of thought are habitually
-too much given to declaiming at their ease against
-the delinquencies of men of action and affairs. The
-inevitable friction of practical politics,” he argues,
-“generates heat enough already, and the office of
-the thinker and critic should be to supply not heat,
-but light. The difficulties which attend his own
-unmolested task—the task of seeking after and
-proclaiming salutary truths—should teach him to<span class="pagenum" id="Page_72">72</span>
-make allowance for the far more urgent difficulties
-which beset the politician; the man obliged, amidst
-the clash of interests and temptations, to practice
-from hand to mouth, and at his peril, the most uncertain
-and at the same time the most indispensable
-of the experimental arts.”</p>
-
-<p>Mr. Colvin is himself of the class of men of letters
-and of thought; he accordingly puts the case
-against his class much more mildly than the practical
-politician would desire to see it put. Practical
-politicians are wont to regard closeted writers upon
-politics with a certain condescension, dashed with
-slight traces of uneasy concern. “Literary men
-can say strong things of their age,” observes Mr.
-Bagehot, “for no one expects that they will go out
-and act on them. They are a kind of ticket-of-leave
-lunatics, from whom no harm is for the moment
-expected; who seem quiet, but on whose
-vagaries a practical public must have its eye.”
-I suppose that the really serious, practical man
-in politics would see nothing of satirical humor in
-such a description. He would have you note that,
-although traced with a sharp point of wit, the picture
-is nevertheless true. He can cite you a score
-of instances illustrative of the danger of putting
-faith in the political judgments of those who are
-not politicians bred in the shrewd and moving
-world of political management.</p>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_73">73</span></p>
-
-<p>The genuine practical politician, such as (even
-our enemies being the witnesses) we must be acknowledged
-to produce in great numbers and perfection
-in this country, reserves his acidest contempt
-for the literary man who assumes to utter
-judgments touching public affairs and political institutions.
-If he be a reading man, as will sometimes
-happen, he is able to point you, in illustration
-of what you are to expect in such cases, to the very
-remarkable essays of the late Mr. Matthew Arnold
-on parliamentary policy and the Irish question. If
-he be not a reading man, as sometimes happens, he
-is able to ask, much to your confusion, “What
-does a fellow who lives inside a library know about
-politics, anyhow?” You have to admit, if you are
-candid, that most fellows who live in libraries know
-little enough. You remember Macaulay, and
-acknowledge that, although he made admirable
-speeches in Parliament, held high political office,
-and knew all the considerable public men of his
-time, he did imagine the creation to have been made
-in accordance with Whig notions; did hope to find
-the judgments of Lord Somers some day answering
-mankind as standards for all possible times and
-circumstances. You recall Gibbon, and allow, to
-your own thought at least, that, had he not remained
-silent in his seat, a very few of his sentences would<span class="pagenum" id="Page_74">74</span>
-probably have sufficed to freeze the House of Commons
-stiff. The ordinary literary man, even though
-he be an eminent historian, is ill enough fitted to be
-a mentor in affairs of government. For, it must
-be admitted, things are for the most part very simple
-in books, and in practical life very complex.
-Not all the bindings of a library inclose the various
-world of circumstance.</p>
-
-<p>But the practical politician should discriminate.
-Let him find a man with an imagination
-which, though it stands aloof, is yet quick to conceive
-the very things in the thick of which the politician
-struggles. To that man he should resort for
-instruction. And that there is occasionally such
-a man we have proof in Bagehot, the man who
-first clearly distinguished the facts of the English
-constitution from its theory.</p>
-
-<p>Walter Bagehot is a name known to not a few
-of those who have a zest for the juiciest things of
-literature, for the wit that illuminates and the
-knowledge that refreshes. But his fame is still
-singularly disproportioned to his charm; and one
-feels once and again like publishing him, at least
-to all spirits of his own kind. It would be a most
-agreeable good fortune to introduce Bagehot to men
-who have not read him! To ask your friend to
-know Bagehot is like inviting him to seek pleasure.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_75">75</span>
-Occasionally, a man is born into the world whose
-mission it evidently is to clarify the thought of
-his generation, and to vivify it; to give it speed
-where it is slow, vision where it is blind, balance
-where it is out of poise, saving humor where it is
-dry,—and such a man was Walter Bagehot.
-When he wrote of history, he made it seem human
-and probable; when he wrote of political economy,
-he made it seem credible, entertaining,—nay, engaging
-even; when he wrote criticism, he wrote
-sense. You have in him a man who can jest to
-your instruction, who will beguile you into being
-informed beyond your wont and wise beyond your
-birthright. Full of manly, straightforward meaning,
-earnest to find the facts that guide and
-strengthen conduct, a lover of good men and seers,
-full of knowledge and a consuming desire for it,
-he is yet genial withal, with the geniality of a man
-of wit, and alive in every fibre of him, with a life
-he can communicate to you. One is constrained to
-agree, almost, with the verdict of a witty countryman
-of his, who happily still lives to cheer us, that
-when Bagehot died he “carried away into the next
-world more originality of thought than is now to
-be found in the three Estates of the Realm.”</p>
-
-<p>An epitome of Bagehot’s life can be given very
-briefly. He was born in February, 1826, and<span class="pagenum" id="Page_76">76</span>
-died in March, 1877,—the month in which one
-would prefer to die. Between those two dates he had
-much quaint experience as a boy, and much sober
-business experience as a man. He wrote essays
-on poets, prose writers, statesmen, whom he would,
-with abundant insight, but without too much respect
-of persons; also books on banking, on the
-early development of society, and on English politics,
-kindling a flame of interest with these dry
-materials such as made men stare who had often described
-the facts of society themselves, but who had
-never dreamed of applying fire to them, as Bagehot
-did, to make them give forth light and wholesome
-heat. He set the minds of a few fortunate friends
-aglow with the delights of the very wonderful tongue
-which nature had given him through his mother.
-And then he died, while his power was yet young.
-Not a life of event or adventure, but a life of deep
-interest, none the less, because a life in which those
-two things of our modern life, commonly deemed
-incompatible, business and literature, namely, were
-combined without detriment to either; and from
-which, more interesting still, politics gained a profound
-expounder in one who was no politician and
-no party man, but, as he himself said, “between
-sizes in politics.”</p>
-
-<p>Mr. Bagehot was born in the centre of Somersetshire,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_77">77</span>
-that southwestern county of old England
-whose coast towns look across Bristol Channel to
-the highlands of Wales: a county of small farms,
-and pastures that keep their promise of fatness to
-many generous milkers; a county broken into abrupt
-hills, and sodden moors hardly kept from the
-inroads of the sea, as well as rural valleys open to
-the sun; a county visited by mists from the sea,
-and bathed in a fine soft atmosphere all its own;
-visited also by people of fashion, for it contains
-Bath; visited now also by those who have read
-Lorna Doone, for within it lies part of that Exmoor
-Forest in which stalwart John Ridd lived
-and wrought his mighty deeds of strength and
-love: a land which the Celts kept for long against
-both Saxon and Roman, but which Christianity
-easily conquered, building Wells Cathedral and
-the monastery at Glastonbury. Nowhere else, in
-days of travel, could Bagehot find a land of so
-great delight save in the northwest corner of Spain,
-where a golden light lay upon everything, where
-the sea shone with a rare, soft lustre, and where
-there was a like varied coast-line to that he knew
-and loved at home. He called it “a sort of better
-Devonshire:” and Devonshire is Somersetshire,—only
-more so! The atmospheric effects of his
-county certainly entered the boy Bagehot, and<span class="pagenum" id="Page_78">78</span>
-colored the nature of the man. He had its
-glow, its variety, its richness, and its imaginative
-depth.</p>
-
-<p>But better than a fair county is a good parentage,
-and that, too, Bagehot had; just the parentage
-one would wish to have who desired to be a force
-in the world’s thought. His father, Thomas Watson
-Bagehot, was for thirty years managing director
-and vice-president of Stuckey’s Banking Company,
-one of the oldest and best of those sturdy joint-stock
-companies which have for so many years stood
-stoutly up alongside the Bank of England as
-managers of the vast English fortune. But he
-was something more than a banker. He was a man
-of mind, of strong liberal convictions in politics,
-and of an abundant knowledge of English history
-wherewith to back up his opinions. He was one
-of the men who think, and who think in straight
-lines; who see, and see things. His mother
-was a Miss Stuckey, a niece of the founder of
-the banking company. But it was not her connection
-with bankers that made her an invaluable
-mother. She had, besides beauty, a most lively
-and stimulating wit; such a mind as we most desire
-to see in a woman,—a mind that stirs without
-irritating you, that rouses but does not belabor,
-amuses and yet subtly instructs. She could<span class="pagenum" id="Page_79">79</span>
-preside over the young life of her son in such a way
-as at once to awaken his curiosity and set him in
-the way of satisfying it. She was brilliant company
-for a boy, and rewarding for a man. She
-had suggestive people, besides, among her kinsmen,
-into whose companionship she could bring her son.
-Bagehot had that for which no university can ever
-offer an equivalent,—the constant and intelligent
-sympathy of both his parents in his studies, and
-their companionship in his tastes. To his father’s
-strength his mother added vivacity. He would
-have been wise, perhaps, without her; but he would
-not have been wise so delightfully.</p>
-
-<p>Bagehot got his schooling in Bristol, his university
-training in London. In Bristol lived Dr.
-Prichard, his mother’s brother-in-law, and author
-of a notable book on the Physical History of Men.
-From him Bagehot unquestionably got his bent towards
-the study of race origins and development.
-In London, Cobden and Bright were carrying on
-an important part of their great agitation for the
-repeal of the corn laws, and were making such
-speeches as it stirred and bettered young men to
-hear. Bagehot had gone to University Hall, London,
-rather than to Oxford or Cambridge, because
-his father was a Unitarian, and would not have his
-son submit to the religious tests then required at<span class="pagenum" id="Page_80">80</span>
-the great universities. But there can be no doubt
-that there was more to be had at University Hall
-in that day than at either Oxford or Cambridge.
-Oxford and Cambridge were still dragging the very
-heavy chains of a hindering tradition; the faculty
-of University Hall contained many thorough and
-some eminent scholars; what was more, University
-Hall was in London, and London itself was a
-quickening and inspiring teacher for a lad in love
-with both books and affairs, as Bagehot was. He
-could ask penetrating questions of his professors,
-and he could also ask questions of London, seek
-out her secrets of history, and so experience to the
-full the charm of her abounding life. In after
-years, though he loved Somersetshire and clung to
-it with a strong home-keeping affection, he could
-never stay away from London for more than six
-weeks at a time. Eventually he made it his place
-of permanent residence.</p>
-
-<p>His university career over, Bagehot did what so
-many thousands of young graduates before him
-had done,—he studied for the bar; and then,
-having prepared himself to practice law, followed
-another large body of young men in deciding to
-abandon it. He joined his father in his business
-as ship-owner and banker in Somersetshire, and
-in due time took his place among the directors of<span class="pagenum" id="Page_81">81</span>
-Stuckey’s Company. For the rest of his life, this
-man, whom the world knows as a man of letters,
-was first of all a man of business. In his later
-years, however, he identified himself with what may
-be called the literary side of business by becoming
-editor of that great financial authority, the
-“London Economist.” He had, so to say, married
-into this position. His wife was the daughter of
-the Rt. Hon. James Wilson, who was the mind
-and manager, as well as the founder of the “Economist.”
-Wilson’s death seemed to leave the great
-financial weekly by natural succession to Bagehot;
-and certainly natural selection never made a better
-choice. It was under Bagehot that the “Economist”
-became a sort of financial providence for
-business men on both sides of the Atlantic. Its
-sagacious prescience constituted Bagehot himself a
-sort of supplementary chancellor of the exchequer,
-the chancellors of both parties resorting to him
-with equal confidence and solicitude. His constant
-contact with London, and with the leaders of politics
-and opinion there, of course materially assisted
-him also to those penetrating judgments touching
-the structure and working of English institutions
-which have made his volume on the English
-Constitution and his essays on Bolingbroke and
-Brougham and Peel, on Mr. Gladstone and Sir<span class="pagenum" id="Page_82">82</span>
-George Cornewall Lewis, the admiration and despair
-of all who read them.</p>
-
-<p>Those who know Bagehot only as the writer of
-some of the most delightful and suggestive literary
-criticisms in the language wonder that he should
-have been an authority on practical politics; those
-who used to regard the “London Economist” as
-omniscient, and who knew him only as the editor
-of it, marvel that he dabbled in literary criticism,
-and incline to ask themselves, when they learn of
-his vagaries in that direction, whether he can have
-been so safe a guide as they deemed him, after all;
-those who know him through his political writings
-alone venture upon the perusal of his miscellaneous
-essays with not a little surprise and misgiving that
-their master should wander so far afield. And yet
-the whole Bagehot is the only Bagehot. Each
-part of the man is incomplete, not only, but a trifle
-incomprehensible, also, without the other parts.
-What delights us most in his literary essays is
-their broad practical sagacity, so uniquely married
-as it is with pure taste and the style of a rapid
-artist in words. What makes his financial and
-political writings whole and sound is the scope of
-his mind outside finance and politics, the validity
-of his observation all around the circle of thought
-and affairs. He was the better critic for being a<span class="pagenum" id="Page_83">83</span>
-competent man of business and a trusted financial
-authority. He was the more sure-footed in his
-political judgments because of his play of mind in
-other and supplementary spheres of human activity.</p>
-
-<p>The very appearance of the man was a sort of
-outer index to the singular variety of capacity that
-has made him so notable a figure in the literary
-annals of England. A mass of black, wavy hair;
-a dark eye, with depths full of slumberous, playful
-fire; a ruddy skin that bespoke active blood, quick
-in its rounds; the lithe figure of an excellent horseman;
-a nostril full, delicate, quivering, like that of
-a blooded racer,—such were the fitting outward
-marks of a man in whom life and thought and
-fancy abounded; the aspect of a man of unflagging
-vivacity, of wholesome, hearty humor, of a ready
-intellectual sympathy, of wide and penetrative observation.
-It is no narrow, logical shrewdness or
-cold penetration that looks forth at you through
-that face, even if a bit of mockery does lurk in the
-privatest corner of the eye. Among the qualities
-which he seeks out for special praise in Shakespeare
-is a broad tolerance and sympathy for illogical
-and common minds. It seems to him an evidence
-of size in Shakespeare that he was not vexed
-with smallness, but was patient, nay, sympathetic
-even, in his portrayal of it. “If every one were<span class="pagenum" id="Page_84">84</span>
-logical and literary,” he exclaims, “how would there
-be scavengers, or watchmen, or caulkers, or coopers?
-A patient sympathy, a kindly fellow-feeling for the
-narrow intelligence necessarily induced by narrow
-circumstances,—a narrowness which, in some degrees,
-seems to be inevitable, and is perhaps more
-serviceable than most things to the wise conduct of
-life,—this, though quick and half-bred minds may
-despise it, seems to be a necessary constituent in
-the composition of manifold genius. ‘How shall
-the world be served?’ asks the host in Chaucer.
-We must have cart-horses as well as race-horses,
-draymen as well as poets. It is no bad thing, after
-all, to be a slow man and to have one idea a year.
-You don’t make a figure, perhaps, in argumentative
-society, which requires a quicker species of thought,
-but is that the worse?”</p>
-
-<p>One of the things which strike us most in Bagehot
-himself is his capacity to understand inferior
-minds; and there can be no better test of sound
-genius. He stood in the midst of affairs, and knew
-the dull duty and humdrum fidelity which make up
-the equipment of the ordinary mind for business,
-for the business which keeps the world steady in
-its grooves and makes it fit for habitation. He
-perceived quite calmly, though with an odd, sober
-amusement, that the world is under the dominion,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_85">85</span>
-in most things, of the average man, and the average
-man he knows. He is, he explains, with his
-characteristic covert humor, “a cool, common person,
-with a considerate air, with figures in his
-mind, with his own business to attend to, with a
-set of ordinary opinions arising from and suited to
-ordinary life. He can’t bear novelty or originalities.
-He says, ‘Sir, I never heard such a thing
-before in my life;’ and he thinks this a <i xml:lang="la" lang="la">reductio
-ad absurdum</i>. You may see his taste by the reading
-of which he approves. Is there a more splendid
-monument of talent and industry than the
-‘Times’? No wonder that the average man—that
-any one—believes in it.... But did you ever
-see anything there you had never seen before?...
-Where are the deep theories, and the wise axioms,
-and the everlasting sentiments which the writers of
-the most influential publication in the world have
-been the first to communicate to an ignorant species?
-Such writers are far too shrewd.... The
-purchaser desires an article which he can appreciate
-at sight, which he can lay down and say, ‘An
-excellent article, very excellent; exactly my own
-sentiments.’ Original theories give trouble; besides,
-a grave man on the Coal Exchange does
-not desire to be an apostle of novelties among the
-contemporaneous dealers in fuel; he wants to be<span class="pagenum" id="Page_86">86</span>
-provided with remarks he can make on the topics
-of the day which will not be known not to be his,
-that are not too profound, which he can fancy the
-paper only reminded him of. And just in the
-same way,”—thus he proceeds with the sagacious
-moral,—“precisely as the most popular political
-paper is not that which is abstractedly the best or
-most instructive, but that which most exactly takes
-up the minds of men where it finds them, catches
-the floating sentiment of society, puts it in such a
-form as society can fancy would convince another
-society which did not believe, so the most influential
-of constitutional statesmen is the one who most
-felicitously expresses the creed of the moment, who
-administers it, who embodies it in laws and institutions,
-who gives it the highest life it is capable
-of, who induces the average man to think, ‘I could
-not have done it any better if I had had time myself.’”</p>
-
-<p>See how his knowledge of politics proceeds out
-of his knowledge of men. “You may talk of the
-tyranny of Nero and Tiberius,” he exclaims, “but
-the real tyranny is the tyranny of your next-door
-neighbor. What law is so cruel as the law of doing
-what he does? What yoke is so galling as the
-necessity of being like him? What espionage of
-despotism comes to your door so effectually as the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_87">87</span>
-eye of the man who lives at your door? Public
-opinion is a permeating influence, and it exacts
-obedience to itself; it requires us to think other
-men’s thoughts, to speak other men’s words, to follow
-other men’s habits. Of course, if we do not,
-no formal ban issues, no corporeal pain, the coarse
-penalty of a barbarous society, is inflicted on the
-offender, but we are called ‘eccentric;’ there is a
-gentle murmur of ‘most unfortunate ideas,’ ‘singular
-young man,’ ‘well intentioned, I dare say, but
-unsafe, sir, quite unsafe.’ The prudent, of course,
-conform.”</p>
-
-<p>There is, no doubt, a touch of mockery in all
-this, but there is unquestionable insight in it, too,
-and a sane knowledge also of the fact that dull,
-common judgments are, after all, the cement of
-society. It is Bagehot who says somewhere that it
-is only dull nations, like the Romans and the
-English, who can become or remain for any length
-of time self-governing nations, because it is only
-among them that duty is done through lack of
-knowledge sufficient or imagination enough to suggest
-anything else to do: only among them that
-the stability of slow habit can be had.</p>
-
-<p>It would be superficial criticism to put forward
-Bagehot’s political opinions as themselves the proof
-of his extraordinary power as a student and analyst<span class="pagenum" id="Page_88">88</span>
-of institutions. His life, his broad range of study,
-his quick versatility, his shrewd appreciation of
-common men, his excursions through all the fields
-that men traverse in their thought of one another
-and in their contact with the world’s business,—these
-are the soil out of which his political judgments
-spring, from which they get their sap and
-bloom. In order to know institutions, you must
-know men; you must be able to imagine histories,
-to appreciate characters radically unlike your own,
-to see into the heart of society and assess its
-notions, great and small. Your average critic, it
-must be acknowledged, would be the worst possible
-commentator on affairs. He has all the movements
-of intelligence without any of its reality. But a
-man who sees authors with a Chaucerian insight
-into them as men, who knows literature as a realm
-of vital thought conceived by real men, of actual
-motive felt by concrete persons, this is a man whose
-opinions you may confidently ask, if not on current
-politics, at any rate on all that concerns the permanent
-relations of men in society.</p>
-
-<p>It is for such reasons that one must first make
-known the most masterly of the critics of English
-political institutions as a man of catholic tastes and
-attainments, shrewdly observant of many kinds of
-men and affairs. Know him once in this way, and<span class="pagenum" id="Page_89">89</span>
-his mastery in political thought is explained. If I
-were to make choice, therefore, of extracts from
-his works with a view to recommend him as a
-politician, I should choose those passages which
-show him a man of infinite capacity to see and understand
-men of all kinds, past and present. By
-showing in his case the equipment of a mind open
-on all sides to the life and thought of society, and
-penetrative of human secrets of many sorts, I
-should authenticate his credentials as a writer upon
-politics, which is nothing else than the public and
-organic life of society.</p>
-
-<p>Examples may be taken almost at random.
-There is the passage on Sydney Smith, in the essay
-on the First Edinburgh Reviewers. We have all
-laughed with that great-hearted clerical wit; but
-it is questionable whether we have all appreciated
-him as a man who wrote and wrought wisdom.
-Indeed, Sydney Smith may be made a very delicate
-test of sound judgment, the which to apply to
-friends of whom you are suspicious. There was
-a man beneath those excellent witticisms, a big,
-wholesome, thinking man; but none save men of
-like wholesome natures can see and value his manhood
-and his mind at their real worth.</p>
-
-<p>“Sydney Smith was an after-dinner writer.
-His words have a flow, a vigor, an expression,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_90">90</span>
-which is not given to hungry mortals.... There
-is little trace of labor in his composition; it is
-poured forth like an unceasing torrent, rejoicing
-daily to run its course. And what courage there
-is in it! There is as much variety of pluck in
-writing across a sheet as in riding across a country.
-Cautious men ... go tremulously, like a timid
-rider; they turn hither and thither; they do not
-go straight across a subject, like a masterly mind.
-A few sentences are enough for a master of sentences.
-The writing of Sydney Smith is suited to
-the broader kind of important questions. For anything
-requiring fine nicety of speculation, long elaborateness
-of deduction, evanescent sharpness of
-distinction, neither his style nor his mind was fit.
-He had no patience for long argument, no acuteness
-for delicate precision, no fangs for recondite
-research. Writers, like teeth, are divided into incisors
-and grinders. Sydney Smith was a molar.
-He did not run a long, sharp argument into the
-interior of a question; he did not, in the common
-phrase, go deeply into it; but he kept it steadily
-under the contract of a strong, capable, jawlike
-understanding,—pressing its surface, effacing its
-intricacies, grinding it down. Yet this is done
-without toil. The play of the molar is instinctive
-and placid; he could not help it; it would seem
-that he had an enjoyment in it.”</p>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_91">91</span></p>
-
-<p>One reads this with a feeling that Bagehot both
-knows and likes Sydney Smith, and heartily appreciates
-him as an engine of Whig thought; and
-with the conviction that Bagehot himself, knowing
-thus and enjoying Smith’s freehand method of
-writing, could have done the like himself,—could
-himself have made English ring to all the old Whig
-tunes, like an anvil under the hammer. And yet
-you have only to turn back a page in the same
-essay to find quite another Bagehot,—a Bagehot
-such as Sydney Smith could not have been. He
-is speaking of that other militant Edinburgh reviewer,
-Lord Jeffrey, and is recalling, as every one
-recalls, Jeffrey’s review of Wordsworth’s “Excursion.”
-The first words of that review, as everybody
-remembers, were, “This will never do;” and
-there followed upon those words, though not a
-little praise of the poetical beauties of the poem, a
-thoroughly meant condemnation of the school of
-poets of which Wordsworth was the greatest representative.
-Very celebrated in the world of literature
-is the leading case of Jeffrey <i>v.</i> Wordsworth.
-It is in summing up this case that Bagehot gives
-us a very different taste of his <span class="locked">quality:—</span></p>
-
-<p>“The world has given judgment. Both Mr.
-Wordsworth and Lord Jeffrey have received their
-reward. The one had his own generation, the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_92">92</span>
-laughter of men, the applause of drawing-rooms,
-the concurrence of the crowd; the other a succeeding
-age, the fond enthusiasm of secret students, the
-lonely rapture of lonely minds. And each has received
-according to his kind. If all cultivated men
-speak differently because of the existence of Wordsworth
-and Coleridge; if not a thoughtful English
-book has appeared for forty years without some
-trace for good or evil of their influence; if sermon-writers
-subsist upon their thoughts; if ‘sacred
-poets’ thrive by translating their weaker portions
-into the speech of women; if, when all this is over,
-some sufficient part of their writing will ever be
-found fitting food for wild musing and solitary meditation,
-surely this is because they possessed the
-inner nature,—‘an intense and glowing mind,’
-‘the vision and the faculty divine.’ But if, perchance,
-in their weaker moments, the great authors
-of the ‘Lyrical Ballads’ did ever imagine that the
-world was to pause because of their verses, that
-‘Peter Bell’ would be popular in drawing-rooms,
-that ‘Christabel’ would be perused in the city, that
-people of fashion would make a handbook of ‘The
-Excursion,’ it was well for them to be told at
-once that this was not so. Nature ingeniously
-prepared a shrill artificial voice, which spoke in
-season and out of season, enough and more than<span class="pagenum" id="Page_93">93</span>
-enough, what will ever be the idea of the cities of
-the plain concerning those who live alone among the
-mountains, of the frivolous concerning the grave, of
-the gregarious concerning the recluse, of those who
-laugh concerning those who laugh not, of the common
-concerning the uncommon, of those who lend
-on usury concerning those who lend not; the notion
-of the world of those whom it will not reckon
-among the righteous,—it said, ‘This won’t do!’
-And so in all time will the lovers of polished Liberalism
-speak concerning the intense and lonely
-prophet.”</p>
-
-<p>This is no longer the Bagehot who could “write
-across a sheet” with Sydney Smith. It is now
-a Bagehot whose heart is turned away from the
-cudgeling Whigs to see such things as are hidden
-from the bearers of cudgels, and revealed only to
-those who can await in the sanctuary of a quiet
-mind the coming of the vision.</p>
-
-<p>Single specimens of such a man’s writing do not
-suffice, of course, even as specimens. They need
-their context to show their appositeness, the full
-body of the writing from which they are taken to
-show the mass and system of the thought. Even
-separated pieces of his matter prepare us, nevertheless,
-for finding in Bagehot keener, juster estimates
-of difficult historical and political characters<span class="pagenum" id="Page_94">94</span>
-than it is given the merely exact historian, with
-his head full of facts and his heart purged of all
-imagination, to speak. There is his estimate of
-the cavalier, for example: “A cavalier is always
-young. The buoyant life arises before us, rich in
-hope, strong in vigor, irregular in action: men
-young and ardent, ‘framed in the prodigality of
-nature;’ open to every enjoyment, alive to every
-passion, eager, impulsive; brave without discipline,
-noble without principle; prizing luxury, despising
-danger; capable of high sentiment, but in each
-of whom the</p>
-
-<div class="poetry-container">
-<div class="poetry">
-  <div class="stanza">
-    <div class="verse indent6">‘addiction was to courses vain;</div>
-    <div class="verse indent0">His companies unlettered, rude, and shallow;</div>
-    <div class="verse indent0">His hours filled up with riots, banquets, sports,</div>
-    <div class="verse indent0">And never noted in him any study,</div>
-    <div class="verse indent0">Any retirement, any sequestration</div>
-    <div class="verse indent0">From open haunts and popularity.’</div>
-  </div>
-</div>
-</div>
-
-<p class="in0">The political sentiment is part of the character;
-the essence of Toryism is enjoyment.... The way
-to keep up old customs is to enjoy old customs;
-the way to be satisfied with the present state of
-things is to enjoy the present state of things. Over
-the cavalier mind this world passes with a thrill of
-delight; there is an exultation in a daily event,
-zest in the ‘regular thing,’ joy at an old feast.”</p>
-
-<p>Is it not most natural that the writer of a passage<span class="pagenum" id="Page_95">95</span>
-like that should have been a consummate
-critic of politics, seeing institutions through men,
-the only natural way? It was as necessary that
-he should be able to enjoy Sydney Smith and recognize
-the seer in Wordsworth as that he should
-be able to conceive the cavalier life and point of
-view; and in each perception there is the same
-power. He is as little at fault in understanding
-men of his own day. What would you wish better
-than his celebrated character of a “constitutional
-statesman,” for example? “A constitutional
-statesman is a man of common opinions and uncommon
-abilities.” Peel is his example. “His
-opinions resembled the daily accumulating insensible
-deposits of a rich alluvial soil. The great
-stream of time flows on with all things on its surface;
-and slowly, grain by grain, a mould of wise
-experience is unconsciously left on the still, extended
-intellect.... The stealthy accumulating
-words of Peel seem like the quiet leavings of some
-outward tendency, which brought these, but might
-as well have brought others. There is no peculiar
-stamp, either, on the ideas. They might have
-been any one’s ideas. They belong to the general
-diffused stock of observations which are to be
-found in the civilized world.... He insensibly
-takes in and imbibes the ideas of those around him.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_96">96</span>
-If he were left in a vacuum, he would have no
-ideas.”</p>
-
-<p>What strikes one most, perhaps, in all these
-passages, is the realizing imagination which illuminates
-them. And it is an imagination with a
-practical character all its own. It is not a creating,
-but a conceiving imagination; not the imagination
-of the fancy, but the imagination of the understanding.
-Conceiving imaginations, however, are
-of two kinds. For the one kind the understanding
-serves as a lamp of guidance; upon the other the
-understanding acts as an electric excitant, a keen
-irritant. Bagehot’s was evidently of the first kind;
-Carlyle’s, conspicuously of the second. There is
-something in common between the minds of these
-two men as they conceive society. Both have a
-capital grip upon the actual; both can conceive
-without confusion the complex phenomena of society;
-both send humorous glances of searching insight
-into the hearts of men. But it is the difference
-between them that most arrests our attention.
-Bagehot has the scientific imagination, Carlyle the
-passionate. Bagehot is the embodiment of witty
-common sense; all the movements of his mind
-illustrate that vivacious sanity which he has himself
-called “animated moderation.” Carlyle, on the
-other hand, conceives men and their motives too<span class="pagenum" id="Page_97">97</span>
-often with a hot intolerance; there is heat in his
-imagination,—a heat that sometimes scorches and
-consumes. Life is for him dramatic, full of fierce,
-imperative forces. Even when the world rings
-with laughter, it is laughter which, in his ears, is
-succeeded by an echo of mockery; laughter which
-is but a defiance of tears. The actual which you
-touch in Bagehot is the practical, operative actual
-of a world of workshops and parliaments,—a
-world of which workshops and parliaments are the
-natural and desirable products. Carlyle flouts at
-modern legislative assemblies as “talking shops,”
-and yearns for action such as is commanded by
-masters of action; preaches the doctrine of work
-and silence in some thirty volumes octavo. Bagehot
-points out that prompt, crude action is the
-instinct and practice of the savage; that talk, the
-deliberation of assemblies, the slow concert of
-masses of men, is the cultivated fruit of civilization,
-nourishing to all the powers of right action
-in a society which is not simple and primitive, but
-advanced and complex. He is no more imposed
-upon by parliamentary debates than Carlyle is.
-He knows that they are stupid, and, so far as wise
-utterance goes, in large part futile, too. But he is
-not irritated, as Carlyle is, for, to say the fact, he
-sees more than Carlyle sees. He sees the force<span class="pagenum" id="Page_98">98</span>
-and value of the stupidity. He is wise, along with
-Burke, in regarding prejudice as the cement of
-society. He knows that slow thought is the ballast
-of a self-governing state. Stanch, knitted timbers
-are as necessary to the ship as sails. Unless the
-hull is conservative in holding stubbornly together
-in the face of every argument of sea weather,
-there’ll be lives and fortunes lost. Bagehot can
-laugh at unreasoning bias. It brings a merry
-twinkle into his eye to undertake the good sport
-of dissecting stolid stupidity. But he would not
-for the world abolish bias and stupidity. He would
-much rather have society hold together; much
-rather see it grow than undertake to reconstruct it.
-“You remember my joke against you about the
-moon,” writes Sydney Smith to Jeffrey; “d—n
-the solar system—bad light—planets too distant—pestered
-with comets—feeble contrivance;
-could make a better with great ease.” There was
-nothing of this in Bagehot. He was inclined to be
-quite tolerant of the solar system. He understood
-that society was more quickly bettered by sympathy
-than by antagonism.</p>
-
-<p>Bagehot’s limitations, though they do not obtrude
-themselves upon your attention as his excellencies
-do, are in truth as sharp-cut and clear
-as his thought itself. It would not be just the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_99">99</span>
-truth to say that his power is that of critical analysis
-only, for he can and does construct thought
-concerning antique and obscure systems of political
-life and social action. But it is true that he does
-not construct for the future. You receive stimulation
-from him and a certain feeling of elation.
-There is a fresh air stirring in all his utterances
-that is unspeakably refreshing. You open your
-mind to the fine influence, and feel younger for having
-been in such an atmosphere. It is an atmosphere
-clarified and bracing almost beyond example elsewhere.
-But you know what you lack in Bagehot if
-you have read Burke. You miss the deep eloquence
-which awakens purpose. You are not in contact
-with systems of thought or with principles that
-dictate action, but only with a perfect explanation.</p>
-
-<p>You would go to Burke, not to Bagehot, for
-inspiration in the infinite tasks of self-government;
-though you would, if you were wise, go to Bagehot
-rather than to Burke if you wished to realize just
-what were the practical daily conditions under
-which those tasks were to be worked out.</p>
-
-<p>Moreover, there is a deeper lack in Bagehot.
-He has no sympathy with the voiceless body of the
-people, with the “mass of unknown men.” He
-conceives the work of government to be a work
-which is possible only to the instructed few. He<span class="pagenum" id="Page_100">100</span>
-would have the mass served, and served with devotion,
-but he would trouble to see them attempt
-to serve themselves. He has not the stout fibre
-and the unquestioning faith in the right and capacity
-of inorganic majorities which make the democrat.
-He has none of the heroic boldness necessary
-for faith in wholesale political aptitude and capacity.
-He takes democracy in detail in his thought, and
-to take it in detail makes it look very awkward
-indeed.</p>
-
-<p>And yet surely it would not occur to the veriest
-democrat that ever vociferated the “sovereignty of
-the people” to take umbrage at anything Bagehot
-might chance to say in dissection of democracy.
-What he says is seldom provokingly true. There
-is something in it all that is better than a “saving
-clause,” and that is a saving humor. Humor ever
-keeps the whole of his matter sound; it is an excellent
-salt that keeps sweet the sharpest of his sayings.
-Indeed, Bagehot’s wit is so prominent among
-his gifts that I am tempted here to enter a general
-plea for wit as fit company for high thoughts and
-weighty subjects. Wit does not make a subject
-light; it simply beats it into shape to be handled
-readily. For my part, I make free acknowledgment
-that no man seems to me master of his subject
-who cannot take liberties with it; who cannot<span class="pagenum" id="Page_101">101</span>
-slap his propositions on the back and be hail-fellow
-well met with them. Suspect a man of shallowness
-who always takes himself and all that he thinks
-seriously. For light on a dark subject commend
-me to a ray of wit. Most of your solemn explanations
-are mere farthing candles in the great expanse
-of a difficult question. Wit is not, I admit,
-a steady light, but ah! its flashes give you sudden
-glimpses of unsuspected things such as you will
-never see without it. It is the summer lightning,
-which will bring more to your startled eye in an
-instant, out of the hiding of the night, than you
-will ever be at the pains to observe in the full blaze
-of noon.</p>
-
-<p>Wit is movement, is play of mind; and the
-mind cannot get play without a sufficient playground.
-Without movement outside the world of
-books, it is impossible a man should see aught but
-the very neatly arranged phenomena of that world.
-But it is possible for a man’s thought to be instructed
-by the world of affairs without the man
-himself becoming a part of it. Indeed, it is exceedingly
-hard for one who is in and of it to hold
-the world of affairs off at arm’s length and observe
-it. He has no vantage-ground. He had better for
-a while seek the distance of books, and get his perspective.
-The literary politician, let it be distinctly<span class="pagenum" id="Page_102">102</span>
-said, is a very fine, a very superior species of the
-man thoughtful. He reads books as he would listen
-to men talk. He stands apart, and looks on,
-with humorous, sympathetic smile, at the play of
-policies. He will tell you for the asking what the
-players are thinking about. He divines at once
-how the parts are cast. He knows beforehand
-what each act is to discover. He might readily
-guess what the dialogue is to contain. Were you
-short of scene-shifters, he could serve you admirably
-in an emergency. And he is a better critic of
-the play than the players.</p>
-
-<p>Had I command of the culture of men, I should
-wish to raise up for the instruction and stimulation
-of my nation more than one sane, sagacious, penetrative
-critic of men and affairs like Walter Bagehot.
-But that, of course. The proper thesis to
-draw from his singular genius is this: It is not the
-constitutional lawyer, nor the student of the mere
-machinery and legal structure of institutions, nor
-the politician, a mere handler of that machinery,
-who is competent to understand and expound government;
-but the man who finds the materials for
-his thought far and wide, in everything that reveals
-character and circumstance and motive. It is
-necessary to stand with the poets as well as with
-lawgivers; with the fathers of the race as well as<span class="pagenum" id="Page_103">103</span>
-with your neighbor of to-day; with those who toil
-and are sick at heart as well as with those who
-prosper and laugh and take their pleasure; with
-the merchant and the manufacturer as well as with
-the closeted student; with the schoolmaster and
-with those whose only school is life; with the
-orator and with the men who have wrought always
-in silence; in the midst of thought and also in the
-midst of affairs, if you would really comprehend
-those great wholes of history and of character
-which are the vital substance of politics.</p>
-
-<hr />
-
-<div id="toclink_104" class="chapter">
-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_104">104</span></p>
-
-<h2 class="nobreak" id="V">V.<br />
-
-<span class="subhead">THE INTERPRETER OF ENGLISH LIBERTY.</span></h2>
-</div>
-
-<p><span class="firstword">In</span> the middle of the last century two Irish
-adventurers crossed over into England in search of
-their fortunes. Rare fellows they were, bringing
-treasure with them; but finding it somehow hard
-to get upon the market: traders with a curious
-cargo, offering edification in exchange for a living,
-and concealing the best of English under a rich
-brogue. They were Edmund Burke and Oliver
-Goldsmith.</p>
-
-<p>They did not cross over together: ’twas no joint
-venture. They had been fellow students at Trinity
-College, Dublin; but they had not, so far as we
-can learn, known each other there. Each went
-his own way till they became comrades in the reign
-of Samuel Johnson at the Turk’s Head Tavern.
-Burke stepped very boldly forth into the exposed
-paths of public life; Goldsmith plunged into the
-secret ways about Grub Street. The one gave us
-essays upon public questions incomparable for their
-reach of view and their splendid power of expression;<span class="pagenum" id="Page_105">105</span>
-the other gave us writings so exquisite for
-their delicacy, purity, and finish as to incline us to
-love him almost as much as those who knew him
-loved him. We could not easily have forgiven
-Ireland if she had <em>not</em> given us these men. The
-one had grave faults of temper; the other was a
-reckless, roystering fellow, with a most irrepressible
-Irish disposition; but how much less we should have
-known without Burke, how much less we should
-have enjoyed without Goldsmith! They have conquered
-places for themselves in English literature
-from which we neither can nor would dislodge
-them. For their sakes alone we can afford to forgive
-Ireland all the trouble she has caused us.</p>
-
-<p>There is no man anywhere to be found in the
-annals of Parliament who seems more thoroughly
-to belong to England than does Edmund Burke,
-indubitable Irishman though he was. His words,
-now that they have cast off their brogue, ring out
-the authentic voice of the best political thought of
-the English race. “If any man ask me,” he cries,
-“what a free government is, I answer, that, for any
-practical purpose, it is what the people think so,—and
-that they, and not I, are the natural, lawful,
-and competent judges of the matter.” “Abstract
-liberty, like other mere abstractions, is not to be
-found. Liberty adheres in some sensible object;<span class="pagenum" id="Page_106">106</span>
-and every nation has formed to itself some favorite
-point, which by way of eminence becomes the criterion
-of their happiness.” These sentences, taken
-from his writings on American affairs, might serve
-as a sort of motto of the practical spirit of our race
-in affairs of government. Look further, and you
-shall see how his imagination presently illuminates
-and suffuses his maxims of practical sagacity with
-a fine blaze of insight, a keen glow of feeling, in
-which you recognize that other masterful quality of
-the race, its intense and elevated conviction. “My
-hold on the colonies,” he declares, “is in the close
-affection which grows from common names, from
-kindred blood, from similar privileges, and equal
-protection. These are the ties which, though light
-as air, are as strong as links of iron. Let the
-colonies always keep the idea of their civil rights
-associated with your government,—they will cling
-and grapple to you, and no force under heaven will
-be of power to tear them from their allegiance.
-But let it once be understood that your government
-may be one thing and their privileges another, that
-these two things may exist without any mutual
-relation,—and the cement is gone, the cohesion is
-loosened, and everything hastens to decay and dissolution.
-So long as you have the wisdom to keep
-the sovereign power of this country as the sanctuary<span class="pagenum" id="Page_107">107</span>
-of liberty, the sacred temple consecrated to our
-common faith, wherever the chosen race and sons
-of England worship freedom, they will turn their
-faces towards you.” “We cannot, I fear,” he says
-proudly of the colonies, “we cannot falsify the
-pedigree of this fierce people, and persuade them
-that they are not sprung from a nation in whose
-veins the blood of freedom circulates. The language
-in which they would hear you tell them this
-tale would detect the imposition; your speech
-would betray you. An Englishman is the unfittest
-person on earth to argue another Englishman into
-slavery.” Does not your blood stir at these passages?
-And is it not because, besides loving what
-is nobly written, you feel that every word strikes
-towards the heart of the things that have made
-your blood what it has proved to be in the history
-of our race?</p>
-
-<p>These passages, it should be remembered, are
-taken from a speech in Parliament and from a
-letter written by Burke to his constituents in
-Bristol. He had no thought to make them permanent
-sentences of political philosophy. They were
-meant only to serve an immediate purpose in the
-advancement of contemporaneous policy. They
-were framed for the circumstances of the time.
-They speak out spontaneously amidst matter of the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_108">108</span>
-moment: and they could be matched everywhere
-throughout his pamphlets and public utterances.
-No other similar productions that I know of have
-this singular, and as it were inevitable, quality of
-permanency. They have emerged from the mass
-of political writings put forth in their time with
-their freshness untouched, their significance unobscured,
-their splendid vigor unabated. It is this
-that we marvel at, that they should remain modern
-and timely, purged of every element and seed of
-decay. The man who could do this must needs
-arrest our attention and challenge our inquiry.
-We wish to account for him as we should wish to
-penetrate the secrets of the human spirit and know
-the springs of genius.</p>
-
-<p>Of the public life of Burke we know all that we
-could wish. He became so prominent a figure in
-the great affairs of his day that even the casual
-observer cannot fail to discern the main facts of
-his career; while the close student can follow him
-year by year through every step of his service.
-But his private life was withdrawn from general
-scrutiny in an unusual degree. He manifested
-always a marked reserve about his individual and
-domestic affairs, deliberately, it would seem, shielding
-them from impertinent inquiry. He loved the
-privacy of life in a great city, where one may escape<span class="pagenum" id="Page_109">109</span>
-notice in the crowd and enjoy a grateful “freedom
-from remark and petty censure.” “Though I
-have the honor to represent Bristol,” he said to
-Boswell, “I should not like to live there; I should
-be obliged to be <em>so much upon my good behavior</em>.
-In London a man may live in splendid society at
-one time, and in frugal retirement at another,
-without animadversion. There, and there alone, a
-man’s house is truly his <em>castle</em>, in which he can
-be in perfect safety from intrusion whenever he
-pleases. I never shall forget how well this was
-expressed to me one day by Mr. Meynell: ‘The
-chief advantage of London,’ he said, ‘is, that a
-man is always <em>so near his burrow</em>.’” Burke took
-to his burrow often enough to pique our curiosity
-sorely. This singular, high-minded adventurer had
-some queer companions, we know: questionable
-fellows, whose life he shared, perhaps with a certain
-Bohemian relish, without sharing their morals or
-their works. It seems as incongruous that such
-wisdom and public spirit as breathe through his
-writings should have come to his thought in such
-company as that an exquisite idyll like Goldsmith’s
-“Vicar of Wakefield” should have been conceived
-and written in squalid garrets. But neither Burke
-nor Goldsmith had been born into such comradeships
-or such surroundings. Doubtless, as sometimes<span class="pagenum" id="Page_110">110</span>
-happens, their minds kept their first freshness,
-taking no taint from the world that touched them
-on every hand in their manhood, after their minds
-had been formed. Goldsmith, as everybody knows,
-remained an innocent all his life, a naïf and pettish
-boy amidst sophisticated men; and Burke too, notwithstanding
-his dignity and commanding intellectual
-habit, shows sometimes a touch of the same
-simplicity, a like habit of unguarded self-revelation.
-’Twas their form, no doubt, of that impulsive and
-ingenuous quality which we observe in all Irishmen,
-and which we often mistake for simplicity. ’Twas
-a flavor of their native soil. It was also something
-more and better than that, however. Not every
-Irishman displays such hospitality for direct and
-simple images of truth as these men showed, for
-that is characteristic only of the open and unsophisticated
-mind,—the mind that has kept pure
-and open eyes. Not that Burke always sees the
-truth; he is even deeply prejudiced often, and
-there are some things that he cannot see. But the
-passion that dominates him when he is wrong, as
-when he is right, is a natural passion, born with
-him, not acquired from a disingenuous world that
-mistakes interest for justice. His nature tells in
-everything. It is stock of his character which he
-contributes to the subjects his mind handles. He<span class="pagenum" id="Page_111">111</span>
-is trading always with the original treasure he
-brought over with him at the first. He has never
-impaired his genuineness, or damaged his principles.</p>
-
-<p>Just where Burke got his generous constitution
-and predisposition to enlightened ways of thinking
-it is not easy to see. Certainly Richard Burke,
-his brother, the only other member of the family
-whose character we discern distinctly, had a quite
-opposite bent. The father was a steady Dublin
-attorney, a Protestant, and a man, so far as we
-know, of solid but not brilliant parts. The mother
-had been a Miss Nagle, of a Roman Catholic
-family, which had multiplied exceedingly in County
-Cork. Of the home and its life we know singularly
-little. We are told that many children were
-born to the good attorney, but we hear of only four
-of them that grew to maturity, Garret, Edmund,
-Richard, and a sister best known to Edmund’s biographers
-as Mrs. French. Edmund, the second
-son, was born on the twelfth of January, 1729, in
-the second year of the reign of George II., Robert
-Walpole being chief minister of the Crown. How
-he fared or what sort of lad he was for the first
-twelve years of his life we have no idea. We only
-know that in the year 1741, being then twelve
-years old, he was sent with his brothers Garret and<span class="pagenum" id="Page_112">112</span>
-Richard to the school of one Abraham Shackleton,
-a most capable and exemplary Quaker, at Ballytore,
-County Kildare, to get, in some two years’ time,
-what he himself always accounted the best part of
-his education. The character of the good master
-at Ballytore told upon the sensitive boy, who all
-his life through had an eye for such elevation and
-calm force of quiet rectitude as are to be seen in
-the best Quakers; and with Richard Shackleton,
-the master’s son, he formed a friendship from which
-no vicissitude of his subsequent career ever loosened
-his heart a whit. All his life long the ardent,
-imaginative statesman, deeply stirred as he was by
-the momentous agitation of affairs,—swept away
-as he was from other friends,—retained his love
-for the grave, retired, almost austere, but generous
-and constant man who had been his favorite
-schoolfellow. It is but another evidence of his unfailing
-regard for whatever was steady, genuine,
-and open to the day in character and conduct.</p>
-
-<p>At fourteen he left Ballytore and was entered at
-Trinity College, Dublin. Those were days when
-youths went to college tender, before they had become
-too tough to take impressions readily. But
-Burke, even at that callow age, cannot be said to
-have been teachable. He learned a vast deal, indeed,
-but he did not learn much of it from his<span class="pagenum" id="Page_113">113</span>
-nominal masters at Trinity. Apparently Master
-Shackleton, at Ballytore, had enabled him to find
-his own mind. His four years at college were
-years of wide and eager reading, but not years of
-systematic and disciplinary study. With singular,
-if not exemplary, self-confidence, he took his
-education into his own hands. He got at the
-heart of books through their spirit, it would seem,
-rather than through their grammar. He sought
-them out for what they could yield him in thought,
-rather than for what they could yield him in the
-way of exact scholarship. That this boy should
-have had such an appetite for the world’s literature,
-old and new, need not surprise us. Other lads before
-and since have found big libraries all too small
-for them. What should arrest our attention is,
-the law of mind disclosed in the habits of such lads:
-the quick and various curiosity of original minds,
-and particularly of imaginative minds. They long
-for matter to expand themselves upon: they will
-climb any dizzy height from which an exciting
-prospect is promised: it is their joy by some means
-to see the world of men and affairs. Burke set
-out as a boy to see the world that is contained in
-books; and in his journeyings he met a man after
-his own heart in Cicero, the copious orator and
-versatile man of affairs,—the only man at all like<span class="pagenum" id="Page_114">114</span>
-Burke for richness, expansiveness, and variety of
-mind in all the ancient world. Cicero he conned
-as his master and model. And then, having had
-his fill for the time of discursive study and having
-completed also his four years of routine, he was
-graduated, taking his degree in the spring of 1748.</p>
-
-<p>His father had entered him as a student at the
-Middle Temple in 1747, meaning that he should
-seek the prizes of his profession in England rather
-than in the little world at home; but he did not take
-up his residence in London until 1750, by which
-time he had attained his majority. What he did
-with the intervening two years, his biographers do
-not at all know, and it is idle to speculate, being
-confident, as we must, that he quite certainly did
-whatever he pleased. He did the same when he
-went up to London to live his terms at the Temple.
-“The law,” he declared to Parliament more than
-twenty years afterwards, “is, in my opinion, one
-of the first and noblest of human sciences,—a
-science which does more to quicken and invigorate
-the understanding than all other kinds of learning
-put together; but it is not apt, except in persons
-very happily born, to open and to liberalize the
-mind exactly in the same proportion;” and, although
-himself a person “very happily born” in
-respect of all natural powers, he felt that the life<span class="pagenum" id="Page_115">115</span>
-of a lawyer would inevitably confine his roving
-mind within intolerably narrow limits. He learned
-the law, as he learned everything else, with an eye
-to discovering its points of contact with affairs,
-its intimate connections with the structure and
-functions of human society; and, studying it thus,
-he made his way to so many of its secrets, won so
-firm a mastery of its central principles, as always
-to command the respect and even the admiration
-of lawyers. But the good attorney in Dublin
-was sorely disappointed. This was not what he
-had wanted. The son in whom he had centred
-his hopes preferred the life of the town to systematic
-study in his chambers; wrote for the papers
-instead of devoting himself to the special profession
-he had been sent to master. “Of his leisure
-time,” said the “Annual Register” just after his
-death, “of his leisure time much was spent in the
-company of Mrs. Woffington, a celebrated actress,
-whose conversation was not less sought by men of
-wit and genius than by men of pleasure.”</p>
-
-<p>We know very little about the life of Burke for
-the ten years, 1750–60, his first ten years in England,—except
-that he did <em>not</em> diligently apply
-himself to his nominal business, the study of the
-law; and between the years 1752 and 1757 his
-biographers can show hardly one authentic trace of<span class="pagenum" id="Page_116">116</span>
-his real life. They know neither his whereabouts
-nor his employments. Only one scrap of his correspondence
-remains from those years to give us any
-hint of the time. Even Richard Shackleton, his
-invariable confidant and bosom friend, hears never
-a word from him during that period, and is told
-afterwards only that his correspondent has been
-“sometimes in London, sometimes in remote parts
-of the country, sometimes in France,” and will
-“shortly, please God, be in America.” He disappears
-a poor law student, under suspicion of his
-father for systematic neglect of duty; when he reappears
-he is married to the daughter of a worthy
-physician and is author of two philosophical works
-which are attracting a great deal of attention. We
-have reason to believe that, in the mean time, he
-did as much writing as they would take for the
-booksellers; we know that he frequented the London
-theatres and several of the innumerable debating
-clubs with which nether London abounded,
-whetting his faculties, it is said, upon those of a certain
-redoubtable baker. He haunted the galleries
-and lobbies of the House of Commons. His health
-showed signs of breaking, and Dr. Nugent took him
-from his lodgings in the Temple to his own house
-and allowed him to fall in love with his daughter.
-Partly for the sake of his health, perhaps, but more<span class="pagenum" id="Page_117">117</span>
-particularly, no doubt, for the sake of satisfying an
-eager mind and a restless habit, he wandered off to
-“remote parts of the country” and to France,
-with one William Burke for company, a man either
-related to him or not related to him, he did not
-himself know which. In 1755, a long-suffering
-patience at length exhausted, his father shut the
-home treasury against him; and then,—’twas the
-next year,—he published two philosophical works
-and married Miss Nugent.</p>
-
-<p>One might say, no doubt, that this is an intelligible
-enough account of a young fellow’s life between
-twenty and thirty: and that we can fill in
-the particulars for ourselves. We have known
-other young Irishmen of restless and volatile natures,
-and need make no mystery of this one.
-Goldsmith, too, disappeared, we remember, in that
-same decade, making show of studying medicine in
-Edinburgh, but not really studying it, and then
-wandering off to the Continent, and going it afoot
-in light-hearted, happy-go-lucky fashion through
-the haunts both of the gay Latin races and the
-sad Teutonic, greatly to the delectation, no doubt,
-of the natives,—for all the world loves an innocent
-Irishman, with his heart upon his sleeve.
-’Twould all be very plain indeed if we found in
-Burke that light-hearted vein. But we do not.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_118">118</span>
-The fellow is sober and strenuous from the first,
-studying the things he was not sent to study
-with even too intent application, to the damage of
-his health, and looking through the pleasures of
-the town to the heart of the nation’s affairs. He
-was a grave youth, evidently, gratifying his mind
-rather than his senses in the pleasures he sought;
-and when he emerges from obscurity it is first to
-give us a touch of his quality in the matter of intellectual
-amusement, and then to turn at once to
-the serious business of the discussion of affairs to
-which the rest of his life was to be devoted.</p>
-
-<p>The two books which he gave the world in 1756
-were “A Vindication of Natural Society,” a satirical
-piece in the manner of Bolingbroke, and “A Philosophical
-Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of
-the Sublime and Beautiful,” which he had begun
-when he was nineteen and had since reconsidered
-and revised. Bolingbroke, not finding revealed religion
-to his taste, had written a “Vindication of
-Natural Religion” which his vigorous and elevated
-style and skillful dialectic had done much to
-make plausible. Burke put forth his “Vindication
-of Natural Society” as a posthumous work of
-the late noble lord, and so skillfully veiled the
-satirical character of the imitation as wholly to
-deceive some very grave critics, who thought they<span class="pagenum" id="Page_119">119</span>
-could discern Bolingbroke’s flavor upon the tasting.
-For the style, too, they took to be unmistakably
-Bolingbroke’s own. It had all his grandeur and
-air of distinction: it had his vocabulary and formal
-outline of phrase. The imitation was perfect.
-And yet if you will scrutinize it, the style is
-not Bolingbroke’s, except in a trick or two, but
-Burke’s. It seems Bolingbroke’s rather because
-it is cold and without Burke’s usual moral fervor
-than because it is rich and majestic and various.
-There is no great formal difference between
-Burke’s style and Bolingbroke’s: but there
-is a great moral and intellectual difference. When
-Burke is not in earnest there is perhaps no important
-difference at all. And in the “Vindication
-of Natural Society” Burke is not in earnest. The
-book is not, indeed, a parody, and its satirical
-quality is much too covert to make it a successful
-satire. Much that Burke urges against civil
-society he could urge in good faith, and his mind
-works soberly upon it. It is only the main thesis
-that he does not seriously mean. The rest he might
-have meant as Bolingbroke would have meant it.</p>
-
-<p>The essay on The Sublime and Beautiful, though
-much admired by so great a master as Lessing, has
-not worn very well as philosophy. It is full, however,
-of acute and interesting observations, and is<span class="pagenum" id="Page_120">120</span>
-adorned in parts with touches of rich color put on
-with the authentic strokes of a master. We preserve
-it, perhaps, only because Burke wrote it;
-and yet when we read it we feel inclined to pronounce
-it worth keeping for its own sake.</p>
-
-<p>Both these essays were apprentice work. Burke
-was trying his hand. They make us the more
-curious about the conditions of what must have
-been a notable apprenticeship. Young Burke
-must have gone to school to the world in a way
-worth knowing. But we cannot know, and that’s
-the end on ’t. Probably even William Burke,
-Edmund’s companion, could give us no very satisfactory
-account of the matter. The explanation
-lay in what he thought and not in what he did as
-he knocked about the world.</p>
-
-<p>The company Burke kept was as singular as his
-talents, though scarcely so eminent. <em>We</em> speak of
-“Burke,” but the London of his day spoke of “the
-Burkes,” meaning William, who may or may not
-have been Edmund’s kinsman, Edmund himself,
-and Richard, Edmund’s younger brother, who had
-followed him to London to become, to say truth, an
-adventurer emphatically not of the elevated sort.
-Edmund was destined to become the leader of England’s
-thought in more than one great matter of
-policy, and has remained a master among all who<span class="pagenum" id="Page_121">121</span>
-think profoundly upon public affairs; but William
-was for long the leader and master of “the Burkes.”
-He was English born; had been in Westminster
-School; and had probably just come out from
-Christ Church, Oxford, when he became the companion
-of Edmund’s wanderings. He was a man
-of intellect and literary power enough to be deemed
-the possible author of the “Letters of Junius;” he
-was born moreover with an eye for the ways of
-the world, and could push his own fortunes with an
-unhesitating hand. It was he who first got public
-office, and it was he who formed the influential
-connections which got Edmund into Parliament.
-He himself entered the House at the same time,
-and remained there, a useful party member, for
-some eight years. He made those from whom he
-sought favors dislike him for his audacity in demanding
-the utmost, and more than the utmost, that he
-could possibly hope to get; but he seems to have
-made those whom he served love him with a very
-earnest attachment. He was self-seeking; but he
-was capable of generosity, to the point of self-sacrifice
-even, when he wished to help his friend. He
-early formed a partnership with Richard Burke in
-immense stock-jobbing speculations in the securities
-of the East India Company; but he also formed a
-literary partnership with Edmund in the preparation<span class="pagenum" id="Page_122">122</span>
-of a sketch of the European settlements in
-America, and made himself respected as a strong
-party writer in various pamphlets on questions of
-the day. He could unite the two brothers by speculating
-with the one and thinking with the other.</p>
-
-<p>Such were “the Burkes.” Edmund’s home was
-always the home also of the other two, whenever
-they wished to make it so; the strongest personal
-affection, avowed always by Edmund with his characteristic
-generous warmth, bound the three men
-together; their purses they had in common. Edmund
-was not expected, apparently, to take part
-in the speculations which held William and Richard
-together; something held him aloof to which
-they consented,—some natural separateness of
-mind and character which they evidently accepted
-and respected. There can hardly be said to have
-been any aloofness of <em>disposition</em> on Edmund’s
-part. There is something in an Irishman,—even
-in an Irishman who holds himself to the strictest
-code of upright conduct,—which forbids his acting
-as moral censor upon others. He can love a
-man none the less for generous and manly qualities
-because that man does what he himself would not
-do. Burke, moreover, had an easy standard all
-his life about accepting money favors. He seems
-to have felt somehow that his intense and whole-hearted<span class="pagenum" id="Page_123">123</span>
-devotion to his friends justified gifts and
-forgiven loans of money from them. He shared
-the prosperity of his kinsmen without compunction,
-using what he got most liberally for the assistance
-of others; and when their fortunes came to a sudden
-ruin, he helped them with what he had. We
-ought long ago to have learned that the purest motives
-and the most elevated standards of conduct
-may go along with a singular laxness of moral detail
-in some men; and that such characters will
-often constrain us to love them to the point of justifying
-everything that they ever did. Edmund
-Burke’s close union with William and Richard
-does not present the least obstacle to our admiration
-for the noble qualities of mind and heart
-which he so conspicuously possessed, or make us
-for a moment doubt the thorough disinterestedness
-of his great career.</p>
-
-<p>Burke’s marriage was a very happy one. Mrs.
-Burke’s thoroughly sweet temperament acted as a
-very grateful and potent charm to soothe her husband’s
-mind when shaken by the agitations of public
-affairs; her quiet capacity for domestic management
-relieved him of many small cares which might
-have added to his burdens. Her affection satisfied
-his ardent nature. He speaks of her in his will as
-“my entirely beloved and incomparable wife,” and<span class="pagenum" id="Page_124">124</span>
-every glimpse we get of their home life confirms the
-estimate. After his marriage the most serious part
-of his intellectual life begins; the commanding passion
-of his mind is disclosed. He turns away from
-philosophical amusements to public affairs. In
-1757 appeared “An Account of the European Settlements
-in America,” which William Burke had
-doubtless written, but which Edmund had almost
-certainly radically revised; and Edmund himself
-published the first part of “An Abridgment of the
-History of England” which he never completed. In
-1758, he proposed to Dodsley, the publisher, a yearly
-volume, to be known as the “Annual Register,”
-which should chronicle and discuss the affairs of
-England and the Continent. It was the period of
-the Seven Years’ War, which meant for England a
-sharp and glorious contest with France for the possession
-of America. Burke was willing to write
-the annals of the critical year 1758 for a hundred
-pounds; and so, in 1759, the first volume of the
-“Annual Register” appeared; and the plan then
-so wisely conceived has yielded its annual volume
-to the present day. Burke never acknowledged his
-connection with this great work,—he never publicly
-recognized anything he had done upon contract
-for the publishers,—but it is quite certain that for
-very many years his was the presiding and planning<span class="pagenum" id="Page_125">125</span>
-mind in the production of the “Register.” For
-the first few years of its life he probably wrote the
-whole of the record of events with his own hand.
-It was a more useful apprenticeship than that in
-philosophy. It gave him an intimate acquaintance
-with affairs which must have served as a direct
-preparation for the great contributions he was destined
-to make to the mind and policy of the Whig
-party.</p>
-
-<p>But this, even in addition to other hack work
-for the booksellers, did not keep Burke out of pecuniary
-straits. He sought, but failed to get, an
-appointment as consul at Madrid, using the interest
-of Dr. Markham, William’s master at Westminster
-School; and then he engaged himself as a sort of
-private secretary or literary attendant to William
-Gerard Hamilton, whom he served, apparently to
-the almost entire exclusion of all other employments,
-for some four years, going with him for a
-season to Ireland, where Hamilton for a time held
-the appointment of Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant.
-Hamilton is described by one of Burke’s
-friends as “a sullen, vain, proud, selfish, cankered-hearted,
-envious reptile,” and Mr. Morley says that
-there is “not a word too many nor too strong in
-the description.” At any rate, Burke’s proud
-spirit presently revolted from further service, and<span class="pagenum" id="Page_126">126</span>
-he threw up a pension of three hundred pounds
-which Hamilton had obtained for him rather than
-retain any connection with the man, or remain
-under any sort of obligation to him. In the mean
-time, however, his relations with Hamilton had put
-him in the way of meeting many public men of
-weight and influence, and he had gotten his first
-direct introduction to the world of affairs.</p>
-
-<p>It was 1764 when he shook himself free from
-this connection. 1764 is a year to be marked in
-English literary annals. It was in the spring of
-that year that that most celebrated of literary clubs
-was formed at the Turk’s Head Tavern, Gerrard
-Street, Soho, by notable good company: Dr. Johnson,
-Garrick, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Goldsmith,
-Sheridan, Gibbon, Dr. Barnard, Beauclerk, Langton,—we
-know them all; for has not Boswell
-given us the freedom of the Club and made us delighted
-participants in its conversations and diversions?
-Into this company Burke was taken at
-once. His writings had immediately attracted the
-attention of such men as these, and had promptly
-procured him an introduction into literary society.
-His powers told nowhere more brilliantly than in
-conversation. “It is when you come close to a
-man in conversation,” said Dr. Johnson, “that you
-discover what his real abilities are. To make a<span class="pagenum" id="Page_127">127</span>
-speech in an assembly is a sort of knack. Now
-I honor Thurlow; Thurlow is a fine fellow, he
-fairly puts his mind to yours.” There can be no
-disputing the dictum of the greatest master of conversation:
-and the admirer of Burke must be willing
-to accept it, at any rate for the nonce, for
-Johnson admitted that Burke invariably put him
-on his mettle. “That fellow,” he exclaimed, “calls
-forth all my powers!” “Burke’s talk,” he said,
-“is the ebullition of his mind; he does not talk
-from a desire of distinction, but because his mind
-is full; he is never humdrum, never unwilling to
-talk, nor in haste to leave off.” The redoubtable
-doctor loved a worthy antagonist in the great game
-of conversation, and he always gave Burke his ungrudging
-admiration. When he lay dying, Burke
-visited his bedside, and, finding Johnson very
-weak, anxiously expressed the hope that his presence
-cost him no inconvenience. “I must be in a
-wretched state indeed,” cried the great-hearted old
-man, “when your company would not be a delight
-to me.” It was short work for Burke to get the
-admiration of the company at the Turk’s Head.
-But he did much more than that: he won their devoted
-affection. Goldsmith said that Burke wound
-his way into a subject like a serpent; but he made
-his way straight into the hearts of his friends.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_128">128</span>
-His powers are all of a piece: his heart is inextricably
-mixed up with his mind: his opinions are
-immediately transmuted into convictions: he does
-not talk for distinction, because he does not use his
-mind for the mere intellectual pleasure of it, but
-because he also deeply feels what he thinks. He
-speaks without calculation, almost impulsively.</p>
-
-<p>That is the reason why we can be so sure of the
-essential purity of his nature from the character of
-his writings. They are not purely intellectual productions:
-there is no page of abstract reasoning
-to be found in Burke. His mind works upon concrete
-objects, and he speaks always with a certain
-passion, as if his affections were involved. He is
-irritated by opposition, because opposition in the
-field of affairs, in which his mind operates, touches
-some interest that is dear to him. Noble generalizations,
-it is true, everywhere broaden his matter:
-there is no more philosophical writer in English
-in the field of politics than Burke. But look, and
-you shall see that his generalizations are never derived
-from abstract premises. The reasoning is
-upon familiar matter of to-day. He is simply taking
-questions of the moment to the light, holding
-them up to be seen where great principles of conduct
-may shine upon them from the general experience
-of the race. He is not constructing<span class="pagenum" id="Page_129">129</span>
-systems of thought, but simply stripping thought
-of its accidental features. He is even deeply impatient
-of abstractions in political reasoning, so
-passionately is he devoted to what is practicable,
-and fit for wise men to do. To know such a man
-is to experience all the warmer forces of the mind,
-to feel the generous and cheering heat of character;
-and all noble natures will love such a man, because
-of kinship of quality. All noble natures that came
-close to Burke did love him and cherish their
-knowledge of him. They loaned him money without
-stint, and then forgave him the loans, as if it
-were a privilege to help him, and no way unnatural
-that he should never return what he received, finding
-his spirit made for fraternal, not for commercial
-relations.</p>
-
-<p>It is pleasing, as it is also a little touching, to
-see how his companions thus freely accorded to
-Burke the immunities and prerogatives of a prince
-amongst them. No one failed to perceive how
-large and imperial he was, alike in natural gifts
-and in the wonderful range of his varied acquirements.
-Sir James Mackintosh, though he very
-earnestly combated some of Burke’s views, intensely
-admired his greatness. He declared that
-Gibbon “might have been taken from a corner of
-Burke’s mind without ever being missed.” “A wit<span class="pagenum" id="Page_130">130</span>
-said, of Gibbon’s ‘Autobiography’ that he did not
-know the difference between himself and the Roman
-Empire. He has narrated his ‘progressions from
-London to Buriton and from Buriton to London’
-in the same monotonous, majestic periods that he
-recorded the fall of states and empires.” And
-we certainly feel a sense of incongruity: the two
-subjects, we perceive, are hardly commensurable.
-Perhaps in Burke’s case we should have felt differently,—we
-<em>do</em> feel differently. In that extraordinary
-“Letter to a Noble Lord,” in which he defends
-his pension so proudly against the animadversions
-of the Duke of Bedford, how magnificently he speaks
-of his services to the country; how proud and majestic
-a piece of autobiography it is! How insignificant
-does the ancient house of Bedford seem,
-with all its long generations, as compared with this
-single and now lonely man, without distinguished
-ancestry or hope of posterity! He speaks grandly
-about himself, as about everything; and yet I see
-no disparity between the subject and the manner!</p>
-
-<p>Outside the small circle of those who knew and
-loved him, his generation did not wholly perceive
-this. There seemed a touch of pretension in this
-proud tone taken by a man who had never held
-high office or exercised great power. He had made
-great speeches, indeed, no one denied that; he had<span class="pagenum" id="Page_131">131</span>
-written great party pamphlets,—that everybody
-knew; his had been the intellectual force within
-the group of Whigs that followed Lord Rockingham,—that,
-too, the world in general perceived
-and acknowledged; and when he died, England
-knew the man who had gone to be a great man.
-But, for all that, his tone must, in his generation,
-have seemed disproportioned to the part he had
-played. His great authority is over us rather than
-over the men of his own day.</p>
-
-<p>Burke had the thoughts of a great statesman,
-and uttered them with unapproachable nobility;
-but he never wielded the power of a great statesman.
-He was kept always in the background in
-active politics, in minor posts, and employed upon
-subordinate functions. This would be a singular
-circumstance, if there were any novelty in it; but
-the practice of keeping men of insignificant birth
-out of the great offices was a practice which had
-“broadened down from precedent to precedent”
-until it had become too strong for even Burke to
-breast or stem. Perhaps, too, there were faults of
-temper which rendered Burke unfit to exercise
-authority in directing the details, and determining
-the practical measures, of public policy:—but we
-shall look into that presently.</p>
-
-<p>In July, 1765, the Marquis of Rockingham<span class="pagenum" id="Page_132">132</span>
-became prime minister of England, and Burke
-became his private secretary. He owed his introduction
-to Lord Rockingham, as usual, to the good
-offices of William Burke, who seems to have found
-means of knowing everybody it was to the interest
-of “the Burkes” to know. A more fortunate connection
-could hardly have been made. Lord Rockingham,
-though not a man of original powers, was
-a man of the greatest simplicity and nobleness of
-character, and, like most upright men, knew how
-to trust other men. He gave Burke immediate
-proof of his manly qualities. The scheming old
-Duke of Newcastle, who ought to have been a
-connoisseur in low men, mistook Burke for one.
-Shocked that this obscurely born and unknown fellow
-should be accorded confidential relations by
-Lord Rockingham, he hurried to his lordship with
-an assortment of hastily selected slanders against
-Burke. His real name, he reported, was O’Bourke;
-he was an Irish adventurer without character, and
-a rank Papist to boot; it would ruin the administration
-to have such a man connected with the
-First Lord of the Treasury. Rockingham, with
-great good sense and frankness, took the whole
-matter at once to Burke; was entirely satisfied by
-Burke’s denials; and admitted him immediately
-to intimate relations of warm personal friendship<span class="pagenum" id="Page_133">133</span>
-which only death broke off. William Burke obtained
-for himself an Undersecretaryship of State
-and arranged with Lord Verney, at that time his
-partner in East India speculations, that two of his
-lordship’s parliamentary boroughs should be put
-at his and Edmund’s disposal. Edmund Burke,
-accordingly, entered Parliament for the borough
-of Wendover on the 14th of January, 1766, at
-the age of thirty-seven, and in the first vigor of
-his powers.</p>
-
-<p>“Now we who know Burke,” announced Dr.
-Johnson, “know that he will be one of the first
-men in the country.” Burke promptly fulfilled
-the prediction. He made a speech before he had
-been in the House two weeks; a speech that made
-him at once a marked man. His health was now
-firmly established; he had a commanding physique;
-his figure was tall and muscular, and his bearing
-full of a dignity which had a touch almost of haughtiness
-in it. Although his action was angular and
-awkward, his extraordinary richness and fluency of
-utterance drew the attention away from what he
-was doing to what he was saying. His voice was
-harsh, and did not harmonize with the melodious
-measures in which his words poured forth; but it
-was of unusual compass, and carried in it a sense
-of confidence and power. His utterance was too<span class="pagenum" id="Page_134">134</span>
-rapid, his thought bore him too impulsively forward,
-but the pregnant matter he spoke “filled the
-town with wonder.” The House was excited by
-new sensations. Members were astonished to recognize
-a broad philosophy of politics running
-through this ardent man’s speeches. They felt the
-refreshment of the wide outlook he gave them, and
-were conscious of catching glimpses of excellent
-matter for reflection at every turn of his hurrying
-thought. They wearied of it, indeed, after a while:
-the pace was too hard for most of his hearers, and
-they finally gave over following him when the
-novelty and first excitement of the exercise had
-worn off. He too easily lost sight of his audience
-in his search for principles, and they resented his
-neglect of them, his indifference to their tastes.
-They felt his lofty style of reasoning as a sort of
-rebuke, and deemed his discursive wisdom out of
-place amidst their own thoughts of imperative personal
-and party interest. He had, before very
-long, to accustom himself, therefore, to speak to an
-empty House and subsequent generations. His
-opponents never, indeed, managed to feel quite
-easy under his attacks: his arrows sought out their
-weak places to the quick, and they winced even
-when they coughed or seemed indifferent; but they
-comforted themselves with the thought that the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_135">135</span>
-orator was also tedious and irritating to his own
-friends, teasing them too with keen rebukes and
-vexatious admonitions. The high and wise sort of
-speaking must always cause uneasiness in a political
-assembly. The more equal and balanced it is, the
-more must both parties be threatened with reproof.</p>
-
-<p>I would not be understood as saying that Burke’s
-speeches were impartial. They were not. He had
-preferences which amounted to prejudices. He
-was always an intense party man. But then he
-was a party man with a difference. He believed
-that the interests of England were bound up with
-the fortunes of the Rockingham Wings; but he
-did not separate the interests of his party and the
-interests of his country. He cherished party connections
-because he conceived them to be absolutely
-necessary for effective public service. “Where
-men are not acquainted with each other’s principles,”
-he said, “nor experienced in each other’s
-talents, nor at all practiced in their mutual habitudes
-or dispositions by joint efforts in business;
-no personal confidence, no friendship, no common
-interest, subsisting among them; it is evidently
-impossible that they can act a public part with
-uniformity, perseverance, or efficacy. In a connection,
-the most inconsiderable man, by adding to
-the weight of the whole, has his value, and his use;<span class="pagenum" id="Page_136">136</span>
-out of it, the greatest talents are wholly unserviceable
-to the public.” “When bad men combine,
-the good must associate.” “It is not enough in a
-situation of trust in the commonwealth, that a man
-means well to his country; it is not enough that in
-his single person he never did an evil act, but
-always voted according to his conscience, and even
-harangued against every design which he apprehended
-to be prejudicial to the interests of his
-country.... Duty demands and requires, that
-what is right should not only be made known, but
-made prevalent; that what is evil should not only
-be detected, but defeated. When the public man
-omits to put himself in a situation of doing his
-duty with effect, it is an omission that frustrates
-the purposes of his trust almost as much as if he
-had formally betrayed it.” Burke believed the
-Rockingham Whigs to be a combination of good
-men, and he felt that he ought to sacrifice something
-to keep himself in their connection. He
-regarded them as men who “believed private honor
-to be the foundation of public trust; that friendship
-was no mean step towards patriotism; that he
-who, in the common intercourse of life, showed he
-regarded somebody besides himself, when he came
-to act in a public situation, might probably consult
-some other interest than his own.” He admitted<span class="pagenum" id="Page_137">137</span>
-that such confederacies had often “a narrow, bigoted,
-and prescriptive spirit;” “but, where duty
-renders a critical situation a necessary one,” he
-said, “it is our business to keep free from the evils
-attendant upon it; and not to fly from the situation
-itself. If a fortress is seated in an unwholesome
-air, an officer of the garrison is obliged to be
-attentive to his health, but he must not desert his
-station.” “A party,” he declared, “is a body of
-men united for promoting by their joint endeavors
-the national interest upon some particular principle
-in which they are all agreed.” “Men thinking
-freely, will,” he very well knew, “in particular instances,
-think differently. But still as the greater
-part of the measures which arise in the course of
-public business are related to, or dependent on,
-some great, <em>leading, general principles in government</em>,
-a man must be peculiarly unfortunate in the
-choice of his political company, if he does not agree
-with them at least nine times in ten. If he does
-not concur in these general principles upon which
-the party is founded, and which necessarily draw
-on a concurrence in their application, he ought
-from the beginning to have chosen some other,
-more conformable to his opinions. When the
-question is in its nature doubtful, or not very
-material, the modesty which becomes an individual,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_138">138</span>
-and that partiality which becomes a well-chosen
-friendship, will frequently bring on an acquiescence
-in the general sentiment. Thus the disagreement
-will naturally be rare; it will be only enough to
-indulge freedom, without violating concord, or disturbing
-arrangement.”</p>
-
-<p>Certainly there were no party prizes for Burke.
-During much the greater part of his career the
-party to which he adhered was in opposition; and
-even when in office it had only small favors for
-him. Even his best friends advised against his
-appointment to any of the great offices of state,
-deeming him too intemperate and unpractical.
-And yet the intensity of his devotion to his party
-never abated a jot. Assuredly there was never a
-less selfish allegiance. His devotion was for the
-principles of his party, as he conceived and constructed
-them. It was a moral and intellectual
-devotion. He had embarked all his spirit’s fortunes
-in the enterprise. Faults he unquestionably
-had, which seemed very grave. He was passionate
-sometimes beyond all bounds: he seriously frightened
-cautious and practical men by his haste and
-vehemence in pressing his views for acceptance.
-He was capable of falling, upon occasion, into a
-very frenzy of excitement in the midst of debate,
-when he would often shock moderate men by the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_139">139</span>
-ungoverned license of his language. But his friends
-were as much to blame for these outbreaks as he
-was. They cut him to the quick by the way in
-which they criticised and misunderstood him. His
-heart was maddened by the pain of their neglect
-of his just claims to their confidence. They seemed
-often to use him without trusting him, and their
-slights were intolerable to his proud spirit. Practically,
-and upon a narrow scale of expediency,
-they may have been right: perhaps he was <em>not</em> circumspect
-enough to be made a responsible head of
-administration. Unquestionably, too, they loved
-him and meant him no unkindness. But it was
-none the less tragical to treat such a man in such
-a fashion. They may possibly have temporarily
-served their country by denying to Burke full public
-acknowledgment of his great services; but they
-cruelly wounded a great spirit, and they hardly
-served mankind.</p>
-
-<p>They did Burke an injustice, moreover. They
-greatly underrated his practical powers. In such
-offices as he was permitted to hold he showed in
-actual administration the same extraordinary mastery
-of masses of detail which was the foundation
-of his unapproachable mastery of general principles
-in his thinking. His thought was always immersed
-in matter, and concrete detail did not confuse him<span class="pagenum" id="Page_140">140</span>
-when he touched it any more than it did when he
-meditated upon it. Immediate contact with affairs
-always steadied his judgment. He was habitually
-temperate in the conduct of business. It was only
-in speech and when debating matters that stirred
-the depths of his nature that he gave way to uncalculating
-fervor. He was intemperate in his emotions,
-but seldom in his actions. He could, and
-did, write calm state papers in the very midst and
-heat of parliamentary affairs that subjected him to
-the fiercest excitements. He was eminently capable
-of counsel as well as of invective.</p>
-
-<p>He served his party in no servile fashion, for all
-he adhered to it with such devotion. He sacrificed
-his intellectual independence as little as his personality
-in taking intimate part in its counsels. He
-gave it principles, indeed, quite as often as he
-accepted principles from it. In the final efforts of
-his life, when he engaged every faculty of his mind
-in the contest that he waged with such magnificent
-wrath against the French revolutionary spirit, he
-gave tone to all English thought, and direction to
-many of the graver issues of international policy.
-Rejected oftentimes by his party, he has at length
-been accepted by the world.</p>
-
-<p>His habitual identification with opposition rather
-than with the government gave him a certain advantage.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_141">141</span>
-It relaxed party discipline and indulged
-his independence. It gave leave, too, to the better
-efforts of his genius: for in opposition it is principles
-that tell, and Burke was first and last a master
-of principles. Government is a matter of practical
-detail, as well as of general measures; but the
-criticism of government very naturally becomes a
-matter of the application of general principles, as
-standards rather than as practical means of policy.</p>
-
-<p>Four questions absorbed the energies of Burke’s
-life and must always be associated with his fame.
-These were, the American war for independence;
-administrative reform in the English home government;
-reform in the government of India; and the
-profound political agitations which attended the
-French Revolution. Other questions he studied,
-deeply pondered, and greatly illuminated, but upon
-these four he expended the full strength of his
-magnificent powers. There is in his treatment of
-these subjects a singular consistency, a very admirable
-simplicity of standard. It has been said, and
-it is true, that Burke had no system of political
-philosophy. He was afraid of abstract system in
-political thought, for he perceived that questions
-of government are moral questions, and that questions
-of morals cannot always be squared with the
-rules of logic, but run through as many ranges of<span class="pagenum" id="Page_142">142</span>
-variety as the circumstances of life itself. “Man
-acts from adequate motives relative to his interest,”
-he said, “and not on metaphysical speculations.
-Aristotle, the great master of reasoning, cautions
-us, and with great weight and propriety, against
-this species of delusive geometrical accuracy in
-moral arguments, as the most fallacious of all
-sophistry.” And yet Burke unquestionably had a
-very definite and determinable system of thought,
-which was none the less a system for being based
-upon concrete, and not upon abstract premises.
-It is said by some writers (even by so eminent a
-writer as Buckle) that in his later years Burke’s
-mind lost its balance and that he reasoned as if he
-were insane; and the proof assigned is, that he, a
-man who loved liberty, violently condemned, not
-the terrors only,—that of course,—but the very
-principles of the French Revolution. But to reason
-thus is to convict one’s self of an utter lack of comprehension
-of Burke’s mind and motives: as a very
-brief examination of his course upon the four great
-questions I have mentioned will show.</p>
-
-<p>From first to last Burke’s thought is conservative.
-Let his attitude with regard to America
-serve as an example. He took his stand, as everybody
-knows, with the colonies, against the mother
-country; but his object was not revolutionary.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_143">143</span>
-He did not deny the legal right of England to tax
-the colonies (<em>we</em> no longer deny it ourselves), but
-he wished to preserve the empire, and he saw that
-to insist upon the right of taxation would be irrevocably
-to break up the empire, when dealing with
-such a people as the Americans. He pointed out
-the strong and increasing numbers of the colonists,
-their high spirit in enterprise, their jealous love of
-liberty, and the indulgence England had hitherto
-accorded them in the matter of self-government,
-permitting them in effect to become an independent
-people in respect of all their internal affairs;
-and he declared the result matter for just pride.
-“Whilst we follow them among the tumbling
-mountains of ice, and behold them penetrating into
-the deepest frozen recesses of Hudson’s Bay and
-Davis’s Straits,” he exclaimed, in a famous passage
-of his incomparable speech on Conciliation with
-America, “whilst we are looking for them beneath
-the arctic circle, we hear that they have pierced
-into the opposite region of polar cold, that they are
-at the antipodes, and engaged under the frozen
-serpent of the South. Falkland Island, which
-seemed too remote and romantic an object for the
-grasp of national ambition, is but a stage and resting
-place in the progress of their victorious industry.
-Nor is the equinoctial heat more discouraging to<span class="pagenum" id="Page_144">144</span>
-them than the accumulated winter of both the poles.
-We know that whilst some of them draw the line
-and strike the harpoon on the coast of Africa,
-others run the longitude, and pursue their gigantic
-game along the coast of Brazil. No sea but what
-is vexed by their fisheries. No climate that is not
-witness to their toils. Neither the perseverance of
-Holland, nor the activity of France, nor the dexterous
-and firm sagacity of English enterprise,
-ever carried this most perilous mode of hardy
-industry to the extent to which it has been pushed
-by this recent people,—a people who are still, as
-it were, but in the gristle, and not yet hardened
-into the bone of manhood. When I contemplate
-these things,—when I know that the colonies in
-general owe little or nothing to any care of ours,
-and that they are not squeezed into this happy
-form by the constraints of watchful and suspicious
-government, but that, through a wise and salutary
-neglect, a generous nature has been suffered to
-take her own way to perfection,—when I reflect
-upon these effects, when I see how profitable they
-have been to us, I feel all the pride of power sink,
-and all the presumption in the wisdom of human
-contrivances melt and die away within me,—my
-rigor relents,—I pardon something to the spirit
-of liberty.”</p>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_145">145</span></p>
-
-<p>“I think it necessary,” he insisted, “to consider
-distinctly the true nature and the peculiar circumstances
-of the object we have before us: because,
-after all our struggle, whether we will or not, we
-must govern America according to that nature and
-those circumstances, and not according to our own
-imaginations, not according to abstract ideas of
-right, by no means according to mere general
-theories of government, the resort to which appears
-to me, in our present situation, no better than
-arrant trifling.” To attempt to force such a people
-would be a course of idle folly. Force, he declared,
-would not only be an odious “but a feeble instrument,
-for preserving a people so numerous, so
-active, so growing, so spirited as this, in a profitable
-and subordinate connection with” England.</p>
-
-<p>“First, Sir,” he cried, “permit me to observe,
-that the use of force alone is but <em>temporary</em>. It
-may subdue for a moment; but it does not remove
-the necessity of subduing again: and a nation is
-not governed which is perpetually to be conquered.</p>
-
-<p>“My next objection is its <em>uncertainty</em>. Terror
-is not always the effect of force, and an armament
-is not a victory. If you do not succeed, you are
-without resource: for, conciliation failing, force
-remains; but, force failing, no further hope of
-reconciliation is left. Power and authority are<span class="pagenum" id="Page_146">146</span>
-sometimes bought by kindness; but they can never
-be begged as alms by an impoverished and defeated
-violence.</p>
-
-<p>“A further objection to force is, that you <em>impair
-the object</em> by your very endeavors to preserve it.
-The thing you fought for is not the thing you
-recover, but depreciated, sunk, wasted, and consumed
-in the contest. Nothing less will content
-me than <em>whole America</em>. I do not choose to consume
-its strength along with our own; for in all
-parts it is the British strength I consume....
-Let me add, that I do not choose wholly to break
-the American spirit; because it is the spirit that
-has made the country.</p>
-
-<p>“Lastly, we have no sort of <em>experience</em> in favor
-of force as an instrument in the rule of our colonies.
-Their growth and their utility has been owing to
-methods altogether different. Our ancient indulgence
-has been said to be pursued to a fault. It
-may be so; but we know, if feeling is evidence,
-that our fault was more tolerable than our attempt
-to mend it, and our sin far more salutary than our
-penitence.”</p>
-
-<p>“Obedience is what makes government,” “freedom,
-and not servitude, is the cure of anarchy,”
-and you cannot insist upon one rule of obedience
-for Englishmen in America while you jealously<span class="pagenum" id="Page_147">147</span>
-maintain another for Englishmen in England.
-“For, in order to prove that the Americans have
-no right to their liberties, we are every day endeavoring
-to subvert the maxims which preserve
-the whole spirit of our own. To prove that the
-Americans ought not to be free, we are obliged to
-depreciate the value of freedom itself; and we
-never seem to gain a paltry advantage over them
-in debate, without attacking some of those principles,
-or deriding some of those feelings, for which
-our ancestors have shed their blood.” “The question
-with me is, not whether you have a right to
-render your people miserable, but whether it is not
-your interest to make them happy. It is not what
-a lawyer tells me I <em>may</em> do, but what humanity,
-reason, and justice tell me I <em>ought</em> to do....
-Such is steadfastly my opinion of the absolute
-necessity of keeping up the concord of this empire
-by a unity of spirit, though in a diversity of operations,
-that, if I were sure that the colonists had, at
-their leaving this country, sealed a regular compact
-of servitude, that they had solemnly abjured
-all the rights of citizens, that they had made a vow
-to renounce all ideas of liberty for them and their
-posterity to all generations, yet I should hold myself
-obliged to conform to the temper I found universally
-prevalent in my own day, and to govern<span class="pagenum" id="Page_148">148</span>
-two million of men, impatient of servitude, on the
-principles of freedom. I am not determining a
-point of law; I am restoring tranquillity: and the
-general character and situation of a people must
-determine what sort of government is fitted for
-them. That point nothing else can or ought to
-determine.” “All government, indeed every human
-benefit and enjoyment, every virtue and every
-prudent act, is founded on compromise and barter.
-We balance inconveniences; we give and take;
-we remit some rights, that we may enjoy others;
-and we choose rather to be happy citizens than
-subtle disputants.” “Magnanimity in politics is
-not seldom the truest wisdom; and a great empire
-and little minds go ill together.”</p>
-
-<p>Here you have the whole spirit of the man, and
-in part a view of his eminently practical system of
-thought. The view is completed when you advance
-with him to other subjects of policy. He pressed
-with all his energy for radical reforms in administration,
-but he earnestly opposed every change that
-might touch the structure of the constitution itself.
-He sought to secure the integrity of Parliament,
-not by changing the system of representation, but
-by cutting out all roots of corruption. He pressed
-forward with the most ardent in all plans of just
-reform, but he held back with the most conservative<span class="pagenum" id="Page_149">149</span>
-from all propositions of radical change. “To
-innovate is not to reform,” he declared, and there
-is “a marked distinction between change and reformation.
-The former alters the substance of the
-objects themselves, and gets rid of all their essential
-good as well as of all the accidental evil annexed
-to them. Change is novelty; and whether it is to
-operate any one of the effects of reformation at all,
-or whether it may not contradict the very principle
-upon which reformation is desired, cannot certainly
-be known beforehand. Reform is not a
-change in the substance or in the primary modification
-of the object, but a direct application of a
-remedy to the grievance complained of. So far as
-that is removed, all is sure. It stops there; and
-if it fails, the substance which underwent the operation,
-at the very worst, is but where it was.” This
-is the governing motive of his immense labors to
-accomplish radical economical reform in the administration
-of the government. He was not seeking
-economy merely; to husband the resources of
-the country was no more than a means to an end,
-and that end was, to preserve the constitution in its
-purity. He believed that Parliament was not truly
-representative of the people because so many place-men
-found seats in it, and because so many members
-who might have been independent were bought<span class="pagenum" id="Page_150">150</span>
-by the too abundant favors of the Court. Cleanse
-Parliament of this corruption, and it would be restored
-to something like its pristine excellence as
-an instrument of liberty.</p>
-
-<p>He dreaded to see the franchise extended and
-the House of Commons radically made over in its
-constitution. It had never been intended to be
-merely the people’s House. It had been intended
-to hold all the elements of the state that were not
-to be found in the House of Lords or the Court.
-He conceived it to be the essential object of the
-constitution to establish a balanced and just intercourse
-between the several forces of an ancient
-society, and it was well that that balance should be
-preserved even in the House of Commons, rather
-than give perilous sweep to a single set of interests.
-“These opposed and conflicting interests,” he said
-to his French correspondent, “which you considered
-as so great a blemish in your old and in our present
-Constitution, interpose a salutary check to all
-precipitate resolutions. They render deliberation
-a matter, not of choice, but of necessity; they
-make all change a subject of <em>compromise</em>, which
-naturally begets moderation; they produce <em>temperaments</em>,
-preventing the sore evil of harsh, crude,
-unqualified reformations, and rendering all the
-headlong exertions of arbitrary power, in the few<span class="pagenum" id="Page_151">151</span>
-or in the many, forever impracticable. Through
-that diversity of members and interests, general
-liberty had as many securities as there are separate
-views in the several orders; whilst by pressing
-down the whole by the weight of a real monarchy,
-the separate parts would have been prevented from
-warping and starting from their allotted places.”
-“<em>We</em> wish,” he said, “to derive all we possess <em>as
-an inheritance from our forefathers</em>. Upon that
-body and stock of experience we have taken care
-not to inoculate any scion alien to the nature of the
-original plant.” “This idea of a liberal descent
-inspires us with a sense of habitual native dignity,
-which prevents that upstart insolence almost inevitably
-adhering to and disgracing those who are
-the first acquirers of any distinction. By this
-means our liberty becomes a noble freedom. It
-carries an imposing and majestic aspect. It has a
-pedigree and illustrating ancestors. It has its
-bearings and its ensigns armorial. It has its gallery
-of portraits, its monumental inscriptions, its
-records, evidences, and titles. We procure reverence
-to our civil institutions on the principle upon
-which Nature teaches us to revere individual men:
-on account of their age, and on account of those
-from whom they are descended.”</p>
-
-<p>“When the useful parts of an old establishment<span class="pagenum" id="Page_152">152</span>
-are kept, and what is superadded is to be fitted to
-what is retained, a vigorous mind, steady, persevering
-attention, various powers of comparison
-and combination, and the resources of an understanding
-fruitful in expedients are to be exercised;
-they are to be exercised in a continued conflict
-with the combined force of opposite vices, with the
-obstinacy that rejects all improvement, and the
-levity that is fatigued and disgusted with everything
-of which it is in possession.... Political
-arrangement, as it is a work for social ends, is to
-be only wrought by social means. There mind
-must conspire with mind. Time is required to
-produce that union of minds which alone can produce
-all the good we aim at. Our patience will
-achieve more than our force. If I might venture
-to appeal to what is so much out of fashion in
-Paris,—I mean to experience,—I should tell you
-that in my course I have known, and, according to
-my measure, have coöperated with great men; and
-I have never yet seen any plan which has not been
-mended by the observations of those who were
-much inferior in understanding to the person who
-took the lead in the business. By a slow, but well
-sustained progress, the effect of each step is
-watched; the good or ill success of the first gives
-light to us in the second; and so, from light to light,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_153">153</span>
-we are conducted with safety, through the whole
-series.... We are enabled to unite into a consistent
-whole the various anomalies and contending
-principles that are found in the minds and affairs
-of men. From hence arises, not an excellence in
-simplicity, but one far superior, an excellence in
-composition. Where the great interests of mankind
-are concerned through a long succession of
-generations, that succession ought to be admitted
-into some share in the counsels which are so deeply
-to affect them.”</p>
-
-<p>It is not possible to escape deep conviction of
-the wisdom of these reflections. They penetrate to
-the heart of all practicable methods of reform.
-Burke was doubtless too timid, and in practical
-judgment often mistaken. Measures which in
-reality would operate only as salutary and needed
-reformations he feared because of the element of
-change that was in them. He erred when he supposed
-that progress can in all its stages be made
-without changes which seem to go even to the substance.
-But, right or wrong, his philosophy did
-not come to him of a sudden and only at the end
-of his life, when he found France desolated and
-England threatened with madness for love of revolutionary
-principles of change. It is the key to
-his thought everywhere, and through all his life.</p>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_154">154</span></p>
-
-<p>It is the key (which many of his critics have
-never found) to his position with regard to the
-revolution in France. He was roused to that
-fierce energy of opposition in which so many have
-thought that they detected madness, not so much
-because of his deep disgust to see brutal and
-ignorant men madly despoil an ancient and honorable
-monarchy, as because he saw the spirit of
-these men cross the Channel and find lodgment
-in England, even among statesmen like Fox, who
-had been his own close friends and companions in
-thought and policy; not so much because he loved
-France as because he feared for England. For
-England he had Shakespeare’s love:</p>
-
-<div class="poetry-container">
-<div class="poetry">
-  <div class="stanza">
-    <div class="verse indentq">“That fortress built by nature for herself</div>
-    <div class="verse indent0"><em>Against infection and the hand of war</em>;</div>
-    <div class="verse indent0">That happy breed of men, that little world,</div>
-    <div class="verse indent0">That precious stone set in the silver sea,</div>
-    <div class="verse indent0">Which serves it in the office of a wall,</div>
-    <div class="verse indent0">Or as a moat defensive to a house,</div>
-    <div class="verse indent0"><em>Against the envy of less happier lands</em>;</div>
-    <div class="verse indent0">That blessed plot, that earth, that realm, that England.”</div>
-  </div>
-</div>
-</div>
-
-<p class="in0">’T was to keep out infection and to preserve such
-precious stores of manly tradition as had made that
-little world “the envy of less happier lands” that
-Burke sounded so effectually that extraordinary
-alarm against the revolutionary spirit that was
-racking France from throne to cottage. Let us<span class="pagenum" id="Page_155">155</span>
-admit, if you will, that with reference to France
-herself he was mistaken. Let us say that when he
-admired the institutions which she was then sweeping
-away he was yielding to sentiment, and imagining
-France as perfect as the beauty of the sweet
-queen he had seen in her radiant youth. Let us
-concede that he did not understand the condition
-of France, and therefore did not see how inevitable
-that terrible revolution was: that in this case, too,
-the wages of sin was death. He was not defending
-France, if you look to the bottom of it; he
-was defending England:—and the things he
-hated are truly hateful. He hated the French revolutionary
-philosophy and deemed it unfit for
-free men. And that philosophy is in fact radically
-evil and corrupting. No state can ever be
-conducted on its principles. For it holds that
-government is a matter of contract and deliberate
-arrangement, whereas in fact it is an institute of
-habit, bound together by innumerable threads of
-association, scarcely one of which has been deliberately
-placed. It holds that the object of government
-is liberty, whereas the true object of government
-is justice; not the advantage of one class, even
-though that class constitute the majority, but right
-equity in the adjustment of the interests of all
-classes. It assumes that government can be made<span class="pagenum" id="Page_156">156</span>
-over at will, but assumes it without the slightest
-historical foundation. For governments have
-never been successfully and permanently changed
-except by slow modification operating from generation
-to generation. It contradicted every principle
-that had been so laboriously brought to light in
-the slow stages of the growth of liberty in the only
-land in which liberty had then grown to great proportions.
-The history of England is a continuous
-thesis against revolution; and Burke would have
-been no true Englishman, had he not roused himself,
-even fanatically, if there were need, to keep
-such puerile doctrine out.</p>
-
-<p>If you think his fierceness was madness, look
-how he conducted the trial against Warren Hastings
-during those same years: with what patience,
-with what steadiness in business, with what temper,
-with what sane and balanced attention to detail,
-with what statesmanlike purpose! Note, likewise,
-that his thesis is the same in the one undertaking
-as in the other. He was applying the same principles
-to the case of France and to the case of India
-that he had applied to the case of the colonies.
-He meant to save the empire, not by changing its
-constitution, as was the method in France, and so
-shaking every foundation in order to dislodge an
-abuse, but by administering it uprightly and in a<span class="pagenum" id="Page_157">157</span>
-liberal spirit. He was persuaded “that government
-was a practical thing, made for the happiness
-of mankind, and not to furnish out a spectacle of
-uniformity to gratify the schemes of visionary politicians.
-Our business,” he said, “was to rule, not
-to wrangle; and it would be a poor compensation
-that we had triumphed in a dispute, whilst we had
-lost an empire.” The monarchy must be saved
-and the constitution vindicated by keeping the
-empire pure in all parts, even in the remotest
-provinces. Hastings must be crushed in order
-that the world might know that no English governor
-could afford to be unjust. Good government,
-like all virtue, he deemed to be a practical
-habit of conduct, and not a matter of constitutional
-structure. It is a great ideal, a thoroughly English
-ideal; and it constitutes the leading thought of all
-Burke’s career.</p>
-
-<p>In short, as I began by saying, this man, an
-Irishman, speaks the best English thought upon the
-essential questions of politics. He is thoroughly,
-characteristically, and to the bottom English in all
-his flunking. He is more liberal than Englishmen
-in his treatment of Irish questions, of course; for
-he understands them, as no Englishman of his
-generation did. But for all that he remains the
-chief spokesman for England in the utterance of<span class="pagenum" id="Page_158">158</span>
-the fundamental ideals which have governed the
-action of Englishmen in politics. “All the ancient,
-honest, juridical principles and institutions of England,”
-such was his idea, “are so many clogs to
-check and retard the headlong course of violence
-and oppression. They were invented for this one
-good purpose, that what was not <em>just</em> should not be
-<em>convenient</em>.” This is fundamental English doctrine.
-English liberty has consisted in making it unpleasant
-for those who were unjust, and thus getting
-them in the habit of being just for the sake of a
-<i xml:lang="la" lang="la">modus vivendi</i>. Burke is the apostle of the great
-English gospel of Expediency.</p>
-
-<p>The politics of English-speaking peoples has
-never been speculative; it has always been profoundly
-practical and utilitarian. Speculative politics
-treats men and situations as they are supposed
-to be; practical politics treats them (upon no general
-plan, but in detail) as they are found to be at
-the moment of actual contact. With reference to
-America Burke argues: No matter what your legal
-right in the case, it is not <em>expedient</em> to treat
-America as you propose: a numerous and spirited
-people like the colonists will not submit; and your
-experiment will cost you your colonies. In the
-case of administrative reform, again, it is the
-higher sort of expediency he urges: If you wish<span class="pagenum" id="Page_159">159</span>
-to keep your government from revolution, keep it
-from corruption, and by making it pure render it
-permanent. To the French he says, It is not <em>expedient</em>
-to destroy thus recklessly these ancient parts
-of your constitution. How will you replace them?
-How will you conduct affairs at all after you shall
-have deprived yourselves of all balance and of all
-old counsel? It is both better and easier to reform
-than to tear down and reconstruct.</p>
-
-<p>This is unquestionably the message of Englishmen
-to the world, and Burke utters it with incomparable
-eloquence. A man of sensitive imagination
-and elevated moral sense, of a wide knowledge and
-capacity for affairs, he stood in the midst of the
-English nation speaking its moral judgments upon
-affairs, its character in political action, its purposes
-of freedom, equity, wide and equal progress. It is
-the immortal charm of his speech and manner that
-gives permanence to his works. Though his life
-was devoted to affairs with a constant and unalterable
-passion, the radical features of Burke’s mind
-were literary. He was a man of books, without
-being under the dominance of what others had
-written. He got knowledge out of books and the
-abundance of matter his mind craved to work its
-constructive and imaginative effects upon. It is
-singular how devoid of all direct references to<span class="pagenum" id="Page_160">160</span>
-books his writings are. The materials of his
-thought never reappear in the same form in which
-he obtained them. They have been smelted and
-recoined. They have come under the drill and
-inspiration of a great constructive mind, have
-caught life and taken structure from it. Burke is
-not literary because he takes from books, but because
-he makes books, transmuting what he writes
-upon into literature. It is this inevitable literary
-quality, this sure mastery of style, that mark the
-man, as much as his thought itself. He is a master
-in the use of the great style. Every sentence, too,
-is steeped in the colors of an extraordinary imagination.
-The movement takes your breath and
-quickens your pulses. The glow and power of the
-matter rejuvenate your faculties.</p>
-
-<p>And yet the thought, too, is quite as imperishable
-as its incomparable vehicle.</p>
-
-<div class="poetry-container">
-<div class="poetry">
-  <div class="stanza">
-    <div class="verse indentq">“The deepest, plainest, highest, clearest pen;</div>
-    <div class="verse indent0">The voice most echoed by consenting men;</div>
-    <div class="verse indent0">The soul which answered best to all well said</div>
-    <div class="verse indent0">By others, and which most requital made;</div>
-    <div class="verse indent0">Tuned to the highest key of ancient Rome,</div>
-    <div class="verse indent0">Returning all her music with his own;</div>
-    <div class="verse indent0">In whom, with nature, study claimed a part,</div>
-    <div class="verse indent0">And yet who to himself owed all his art.”</div>
-  </div>
-</div>
-</div>
-
-<hr />
-
-<div id="toclink_161" class="chapter">
-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_161">161</span></p>
-<h2 class="nobreak" id="VI">VI.<br />
-
-<span class="subhead">THE TRUTH OF THE MATTER.</span></h2>
-</div>
-
-<p><span class="firstword">“Give</span> us the facts, and nothing but the facts,”
-is the sharp injunction of our age to its historians.
-Upon the face of it, an eminently reasonable requirement.
-To tell the truth simply, openly, without
-reservation, is the unimpeachable first principle
-of all right dealing; and historians have no license
-to be quit of it. Unquestionably they must tell us
-the truth, or else get themselves enrolled among a
-very undesirable class of persons, not often frankly
-named in polite society. But the thing is by no
-means so easy as it looks. The truth of history is
-a very complex and very occult matter. It consists
-of things which are invisible as well as of things
-which are visible. It is full of secret motives, and
-of a chance interplay of trivial and yet determining
-circumstances; it is shot through with transient
-passions, and broken athwart here and there by
-what seem cruel accidents; it cannot all be reduced
-to statistics or newspaper items or official recorded
-statements. And so it turns out, when the actual
-test of experiment is made, that the historian must<span class="pagenum" id="Page_162">162</span>
-have something more than a good conscience, must
-be something more than a good man. He must
-have an eye to see the truth; and nothing but a
-very catholic imagination will serve to illuminate
-his matter for him: nothing less than keen and
-steady insight will make even illumination yield
-him the truth of what he looks upon. Even when
-he has seen the truth, only half his work is done,
-and that not the more difficult half. He must
-then make others see it just as he does: only when
-he has done that has he told the truth. What an
-art of penetrative phrase and just selection must
-he have to take others into the light in which he
-stands! Their dullness, their ignorance, their prepossessions,
-are to be overcome and driven in, like
-a routed troop, upon the truth. The thing is infinitely
-difficult. The skill and strategy of it cannot
-be taught. And so historians take another way,
-which is easier: they tell part of the truth,—the
-part most to their taste, or most suitable to their
-talents,—and obtain readers to their liking among
-those of similar tastes and talents to their own.</p>
-
-<p>We have our individual preferences in history,
-as in every other sort of literature. And there are
-histories to every taste: histories full of the piquant
-details of personal biography, histories that blaze
-with the splendors of courts and resound with<span class="pagenum" id="Page_163">163</span>
-drum and trumpet, and histories that run upon the
-humbler but greater levels of the life of the people;
-colorless histories, so passionless and so lacking in
-distinctive mark or motive that they might have
-been set up out of a dictionary without the intervention
-of an author, and partisan histories, so
-warped and violent in every judgment that no
-reader not of the historian’s own party can stomach
-them; histories of economic development, and histories
-that speak only of politics; those that tell
-nothing but what it is pleasant and interesting to
-know, and those that tell nothing at all that one
-cares to remember. One must be of a new and
-unheard of taste not to be suited among them all.</p>
-
-<p>The trouble is, after all, that men do not invariably
-find the truth to their taste, and will often
-deny it when they hear it; and the historian has to
-do much more than keep his own eyes clear: he
-has also to catch and hold the eye of his reader.
-’Tis a nice art, as much intellectual as moral.
-How shall he take the palate of his reader at unawares,
-and get the unpalatable facts down his
-throat along with the palatable? Is there no way
-in which all the truth may be made to hold together
-in a narrative so strongly knit and so harmoniously
-colored that no reader will have either the wish or
-the skill to tear its patterns asunder, and men will<span class="pagenum" id="Page_164">164</span>
-take it all, unmarred and as it stands, rather than
-miss the zest of it?</p>
-
-<p>It is evident the thing cannot be done by the
-“dispassionate” annalist. The old chroniclers,
-whom we relish, were not dispassionate. We love
-some of them for their sweet quaintness, some for
-their childlike credulity, some for their delicious
-inconsequentiality. But our modern chroniclers
-are not so. They are, above all things else, knowing,
-thoroughly informed, subtly sophisticated.
-They would not for the world contribute any spice
-of their own to the narrative; and they are much
-too watchful, circumspect, and dutiful in their care
-to keep their method pure and untouched by any
-thought of theirs to let us catch so much as a
-glimpse of the chronicler underneath the chronicle.
-Their purpose is to give simply the facts, eschewing
-art, and substituting a sort of monumental index
-and table of the world’s events.</p>
-
-<p>The trouble is that men refuse to be made any
-wiser by such means. Though they will readily
-enough let their eyes linger upon a monument of
-art, they will heedlessly pass by a mere monument
-of industry. It suggests nothing to them. The
-materials may be suitable enough, but the handling
-of them leaves them dead and commonplace. An
-interesting circumstance thus comes to light. It<span class="pagenum" id="Page_165">165</span>
-is nothing less than this, that the facts do not of
-themselves constitute the truth. The truth is abstract,
-not concrete. It is the just idea, the right
-revelation of what things mean. It is evoked only
-by such arrangements and orderings of facts as
-suggest interpretations. The chronological arrangement
-of events, for example, may or may not be
-the arrangement which most surely brings the
-truth of the narrative to light; and the best arrangement
-is always that which displays, not the
-facts themselves, but the subtle and else invisible
-forces that lurk in the events and in the minds of
-men,—forces for which events serve only as lasting
-and dramatic words of utterance. Take an instance.
-How are you to enable men to know the truth
-with regard to a period of revolution? Will you
-give them simply a calm statement of recorded
-events, simply a quiet, unaccentuated narrative of
-what actually happened, written in a monotone,
-and verified by quotations from authentic documents
-of the time? You may save yourself the
-trouble. As well make a pencil sketch in outline
-of a raging conflagration; write upon one portion
-of it “flame,” upon another “smoke;” here “town
-hall, where the fire started,” and there “spot where
-fireman was killed.” It is a chart, not a picture.
-Even if you made a veritable picture of it, you<span class="pagenum" id="Page_166">166</span>
-could give only part of the truth so long as you
-confined yourself to black and white. Where
-would be all the wild and terrible colors of the
-scene: the red and tawny flame; the masses of
-smoke, carrying the dull glare of the fire to the
-very skies, like a great signal banner thrown to the
-winds; the hot and frightened faces of the crowd;
-the crimsoned gables down the street, with the
-faint light of a lamp here and there gleaming
-white from some hastily opened casement? Without
-the colors your picture is not true. No inventory
-of items will even represent the truth: the
-fuller and more minute you make your inventory,
-the more will the truth be obscured. The little
-details will take up as much space in the statement
-as the great totals into which they are summed up;
-and, the proportions being false, the whole is false.
-Truth, fortunately, takes its own revenge. No one
-is deceived. The reader of the chronicle lays it
-aside. It lacks verisimilitude. He cannot realize
-how any of the things spoken of can have happened.
-He goes elsewhere to find, if he may, a
-real picture of the time, and perhaps finds one that
-is wholly fictitious. No wonder the grave and
-monk-like chronicler sighs. He of course wrote to
-be read, and not merely for the manual exercise of
-it; and when he sees readers turn away his heart<span class="pagenum" id="Page_167">167</span>
-misgives him for his fellow-men. Is it as it always
-was, that they do not wish to know the truth?
-Alas! good eremite, men do not seek the truth as
-they should; but do you know what the truth is?
-It is a thing ideal, displayed by the just proportion
-of events, revealed in form and color, dumb till
-facts be set in syllables, articulated into words, put
-together into sentences, swung with proper tone
-and cadence. It is not revolutions only that have
-color. Nothing in human life is without it. In a
-monochrome you can depict nothing but a single
-incident; in a monotone you cannot often carry
-truth beyond a single sentence. Only by art in all
-its variety can you depict as it is the various face
-of life.</p>
-
-<p>Yes; but what sort of art? There is here a
-wide field of choice. Shall we go back to the art
-of which Macaulay was so great a master? We
-could do worse. It must be a great art that can
-make men lay aside the novel and take up the history,
-to find there, in very fact, the movement and
-drama of life. What Macaulay does well he does
-incomparably. Who else can mass the details as
-he does, and yet not mar or obscure, but only
-heighten, the effect of the picture as a whole?
-Who else can bring so amazing a profusion of
-knowledge within the strait limits of a simple plan,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_168">168</span>
-nowhere encumbered, everywhere free and obvious
-in its movement? How sure the strokes, and how
-bold and vivid the result! Yet when we have laid
-the book aside, when the charm and the excitement
-of the telling narrative have worn off, when we
-have lost step with the swinging gait at which the
-style goes, when the details have faded from our
-recollection, and we sit removed and thoughtful,
-with only the greater outlines of the story sharp
-upon our minds, a deep misgiving and dissatisfaction
-take possession of us. We are no longer
-young, and we are chagrined that we should have
-been so pleased and taken with the glitter and
-color and mere life of the picture. Let boys be
-cajoled by rhetoric, we cry; men must look deeper.
-What of the judgment of this facile and eloquent
-man? Can we agree with him, when he is not
-talking and the charm is gone? What shall we
-say of his assessment of men and measures? Is
-he just? Is he himself in possession of the whole
-truth? Does he open the matter to us as it was?
-Does he not, rather, ride us like an advocate, and
-make himself master of our judgments?</p>
-
-<p>Then it is that we become aware that there were
-two Macaulays: Macaulay the artist, with an exquisite
-gift for telling a story, filling his pages with
-little vignettes it is impossible to forget, fixing<span class="pagenum" id="Page_169">169</span>
-these with an inimitable art upon the surface of
-a narrative that did not need the ornament they
-gave it, so strong and large and adequate was it;
-and Macaulay the Whig, subtly turning narrative
-into argument, and making history the vindication
-of a party. The mighty narrative is a great engine
-of proof. It is not told for its own sake. It is
-evidence summed up in order to justify a judgment.
-We detect the tone of the advocate, and
-though if we are just we must deem him honest,
-we cannot deem him safe. The great story-teller
-is discredited; and, willingly or unwillingly, we
-reject the guide who takes it upon himself to determine
-for us what we shall see. That, we feel
-sure, cannot be true which makes of so complex a
-history so simple a thesis for the judgment. There
-is art here; but it is the art of special pleading,
-misleading even to the pleader.</p>
-
-<p>If not Macaulay, what master shall we follow?
-Shall our historian not have his convictions, and
-enforce them? Shall he not be our guide, and
-speak, if he can, to our spirits as well as to our
-understandings? Readers are a poor jury. They
-need enlightenment as well as information; the
-matter must be interpreted to them as well as related.
-There are moral facts as well as material,
-and the one sort must be as plainly told as the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_170">170</span>
-other. Of what service is it that the historian
-should have insight if we are not to know how the
-matter stands in his view? If he refrain from
-judgment, he may deceive us as much as he
-would were his judgment wrong; for we must
-have enlightenment,—that is his function. We
-would not set him up merely to tell us tales, but
-also to display to us characters, to open to us the
-moral and intent of the matter. Were the men
-sincere? Was the policy righteous? We have but
-just now seen that the “facts” lie deeper than the
-mere visible things that took place, that they involve
-the moral and motive of the play. Shall
-not these, too, be brought to light?</p>
-
-<p>Unquestionably every sentence of true history
-must hold a judgment in solution. All cannot be
-told. If it were possible to tell all, it would take
-as long to write history as to enact it, and we should
-have to postpone the reading of it to the leisure
-of the next world. A few facts must be selected
-for the narrative, the great majority left unnoted.
-But the selection—for what purpose it is to be
-made? For the purpose of conveying <em>an impression</em>
-of the truth. Where shall you find a more radical
-process of judgment? The “essential” facts taken,
-the “unessential” left out! Why, you may make
-the picture what you will, and in any case it must<span class="pagenum" id="Page_171">171</span>
-be the express image of the historian’s fundamental
-judgments. It is his purpose, or should be, to give
-a true impression of his theme as a whole,—to
-show it, not lying upon his page in an open and
-dispersed analysis, but set close in intimate synthesis,
-every line, every stroke, every bulk even,
-omitted which does not enter of very necessity into
-a single and unified image of the truth.</p>
-
-<p>It is in this that the writing of history differs,
-and differs very radically, from the statement of
-the results of original research. The writing of
-history must be based upon original research and
-authentic record, but it can no more be directly
-constructed by the piecing together of bits of
-original research than by the mere reprinting together
-of state documents. Individual research
-furnishes us, as it were, with the private documents
-and intimate records without which the public
-archives are incomplete and unintelligible. But
-by themselves these are wholly out of perspective.
-It is the consolation of those who produce them to
-make them so. They would lose heart were they
-forbidden to regard all facts as of equal importance.
-It is facts they are after, and only facts,—facts
-for their own sake, and without regard to their
-several importance. These are their ore,—very
-precious ore,—which they are concerned to get<span class="pagenum" id="Page_172">172</span>
-out, not to refine. They have no direct concern
-with what may afterwards be done at the mint or
-in the goldsmith’s shop. They will even boast that
-they care not for the beauty of the ore, and are
-indifferent how, or in what shape, it may become
-an article of commerce. Much of it is thrown
-away in the nice processes of manufacture, and you
-shall not distinguish the product of the several
-mines in the coin, or the cup, or the salver.</p>
-
-<p>The historian must, indeed, himself be an investigator.
-He must know good ore from bad; must
-distinguish fineness, quality, genuineness; must stop
-to get out of the records for himself what he lacks
-for the perfection of his work. But for all that,
-he must know and stand ready to do every part of
-his task like a master workman, recognizing and
-testing every bit of stuff he uses. Standing sure,
-a man of science as well as an artist, he must take
-and use all of his equipment for the sake of his
-art,—not to display his materials, but to subordinate
-and transform them in his effort to make, by
-every touch and cunning of hand and tool, the perfect
-image of what he sees, the very truth of his
-seer’s vision of the world. The true historian
-works always for the whole impression, the truth
-with unmarred proportions, unexaggerated parts,
-undistorted visage. He has no favorite parts of<span class="pagenum" id="Page_173">173</span>
-the story which he boasts are bits of his own, but
-loves only the whole of it, the full and unspoiled
-image of the day of which he writes, the crowded
-and yet consistent details which carry, without obtrusion
-of themselves, the large features of the
-time. Any exaggeration of the parts makes all
-the picture false, and the work is to do over.
-“Test every bit of material,” runs the artist’s rule,
-“and then forget the material;” forget its origin
-and the dross from which it has been freed, and
-think only and always of the great thing you
-would make of it, the pattern and form in which
-you would lose and merge it. That is its only
-high use.</p>
-
-<p>’Tis a pity to see how even the greatest minds
-will often lack the broad and catholic vision with
-which the just historian must look upon men and
-affairs. There is Carlyle, with his shrewd and seeing
-eye, his unmatched capacity to assess strong
-men and set the scenery for tragedy or intrigue, his
-breathless ardor for great events, his amazing flashes
-of insight, and his unlooked-for steady light of occasional
-narrative. The whole matter of what he
-writes is too dramatic. Surely history was not all
-enacted so hotly, or with so passionate a rush of
-men upon the stage. Its quiet scenes must have
-been longer, not mere pauses and interludes while<span class="pagenum" id="Page_174">174</span>
-the tragic parts were being made up. There is not
-often ordinary sunlight upon the page. The lights
-burn now wan, now lurid. Men are seen disquieted
-and turbulent, and may be heard in husky cries or
-rude, untimely jests. We do not recognize our
-own world, but seem to see another such as ours
-might become if peopled by like uneasy Titans.
-Incomparable to tell of days of storm and revolution,
-speaking like an oracle and familiar of destiny
-and fate, searching the hearts of statesmen
-and conquerors with an easy insight in every day of
-action, this peasant seer cannot give us the note of
-piping times of peace, or catch the tone of slow
-industry; watches ships come and go at the docks,
-hears freight-vans thunder along the iron highways
-of the modern world, and loaded trucks lumber
-heavily through the crowded city streets, with a
-hot disdain of commerce, prices current, the haggling
-of the market, the smug ease of material
-comfort bred in a trading age. There is here no
-broad and catholic vision, no wise tolerance, no
-various power to know, to sympathize, to interpret.
-The great seeing imagination of the man lacks that
-pure radiance in which things are seen steadily and
-seen whole.</p>
-
-<p>It is not easy, to say truth, to find actual examples
-when you are constructing the ideal historian,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_175">175</span>
-the man with the vision and the faculty divine
-to see affairs justly and tell of them completely.
-If you are not satisfied with this passionate and
-intolerant seer of Chelsea, whom will you choose?
-Shall it be Gibbon, whom all praise, but so few
-read? He, at any rate, is passionless, it would
-appear. But who could write epochal history
-with passion? All hot humors of the mind must,
-assuredly, cool when spread at large upon so vast
-a surface. One must feel like a sort of minor
-providence in traversing that great tract of world
-history, and catch in spite of one’s self the gait and
-manner of a god. This stately procession of generations
-moves on remote from the ordinary levels of
-our human sympathy. ’Tis a wide view of nations
-and peoples and dynasties, and a world shaken by
-the travail of new births. There is here no scale
-by which to measure the historian of the sort we
-must look to see handle the ordinary matter of
-national history. The “Decline and Fall” stands
-impersonal, like a monument. We shall reverence
-it, but we shall not imitate it.</p>
-
-<p>If we look away from Gibbon, exclude Carlyle,
-and question Macaulay; if we put the investigators
-on one side as not yet historians, and the deliberately
-picturesque and entertaining <i xml:lang="fr" lang="fr">raconteurs</i> as
-not yet investigators, we naturally turn, I suppose,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_176">176</span>
-to such a man as John Richard Green, at once the
-patient scholar,—who shall adequately say how
-nobly patient?—and the rare artist, working so
-like a master in the difficult stuffs of a long national
-history. The very life of the man is as beautiful
-as the moving sentences he wrote with so subtle
-a music in the cadence. We know whence the
-fine moral elevation of tone came that sounds
-through all the text of his great narrative. True,
-not everybody is satisfied with our <em>doctor angelicus</em>.
-Some doubt he is too ornate. Others are troubled
-that he should sometimes be inaccurate. Some are
-willing to use his history as a manual; while others
-cannot deem him satisfactory for didactic uses,
-hesitate how they shall characterize him, and quit
-the matter vaguely with saying that what he wrote
-is “at any rate literature.” Can there be something
-lacking in Green, too, notwithstanding he
-was impartial, and looked with purged and open
-eyes upon the whole unbroken life of his people,—notwithstanding
-he saw the truth and had the art
-and mastery to make others see it as he did, in all
-its breadth and multiplicity?</p>
-
-<p>Perhaps even this great master of narrative
-lacks variety—as who does not? His method,
-whatever the topic, is ever the same. His sentences,
-his paragraphs, his chapters are pitched<span class="pagenum" id="Page_177">177</span>
-one and all in the same key. It is a very fine and
-moving key. Many an elevated strain and rich
-harmony commend it alike to the ear and to the
-imagination. It is employed with an easy mastery,
-and is made to serve to admiration a wide range
-of themes. But it is always the same key, and
-some themes it will not serve. An infinite variety
-plays through all history. Every scene has its
-own air and singularity. Incidents cannot all be
-rightly set in the narrative if all be set alike. As
-the scene shifts, the tone of the narrative must
-change: the narrator’s choice of incident and his
-choice of words; the speed and method of his sentence;
-his own thought, even, and point of view.
-Surely his battle pages must resound with the
-tramp of armies and the fearful din and rush of
-war. In peace he must catch by turns the hum of
-industry, the bustle of the street, the calm of the
-country-side, the tone of parliamentary debate, the
-fancy, the ardor, the argument of poets and seers
-and quiet students. Snatches of song run along
-with sober purpose and strenuous endeavor through
-every nation’s story. Coarse men and refined,
-mobs and ordered assemblies, science and mad impulse,
-storm and calm, are all alike ingredients of
-the various life. It is not all epic. There is rough
-comedy and brutal violence. The drama can scarce<span class="pagenum" id="Page_178">178</span>
-be given any strict, unbroken harmony of incident,
-any close logical sequence of act or nice unity of
-scene. To pitch it all in one key, therefore, is to
-mistake the significance of the infinite play of
-varied circumstance that makes up the yearly
-movement of a people’s life.</p>
-
-<p>It would be less than just to say that Green’s
-pages do not reveal the variety of English life the
-centuries through. It is his glory, indeed, as all
-the world knows, to have broadened and diversified
-the whole scale of English history. Nowhere else
-within the compass of a single book can one find
-so many sides of the great English story displayed
-with so deep and just an appreciation of them all,
-or of the part of each in making up the whole.
-Green is the one man among English historians
-who has restored the great fabric of the nation’s
-history where its architecture was obscure, and its
-details were likely to be lost or forgotten. Once
-more, because of him, the vast Gothic structure
-stands complete, its majesty and firm grace enhanced
-at every point by the fine tracery of its
-restored details.</p>
-
-<p>Where so much is done, it is no doubt unreasonable
-to ask for more. But the very architectural
-symmetry of this great book imposes a limitation
-upon it. It is full of a certain sort of variety; but<span class="pagenum" id="Page_179">179</span>
-it is only the variety of a great plan’s detail, not
-the variety of English life. The noble structure
-obeys its own laws rather than the laws of a people’s
-fortunes. It is a monument conceived and
-reared by a consummate artist, and it wears upon
-its every line some part of the image it was meant
-to bear, of a great, complex, aspiring national existence.
-But, though it symbolizes, it does not contain
-that life. It has none of the irregularity of
-the actual experiences of men and communities.
-It explains, but it does not contain, their variety.
-The history of every nation has certainly a plan
-which the historian must see and reproduce; but
-he must reconstruct the people’s life, not merely
-expound it. The scope of his method must be as
-great as the variety of his subject; it must change
-with each change of mood, respond to each varying
-impulse in the great process of events. No rigor
-of a stately style must be suffered to exclude the
-lively touches of humor or the rude sallies of
-strength that mark it everywhere. The plan of
-the telling must answer to the plan of the fact,—must
-be as elastic as the topics are mobile. The
-matter should rule the plan, not the plan the matter.</p>
-
-<p>The ideal is infinitely difficult, if, indeed, it be
-possible to any man not Shakespearean; but the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_180">180</span>
-difficulty of attaining it is often unnecessarily enhanced.
-Ordinarily the historian’s preparation for
-his task is such as to make it unlikely he will
-perform it naturally. He goes first, with infinite
-and admirable labor, through all the labyrinth of
-document and detail that lies up and down his
-subject; collects masses of matter great and small,
-for substance, verification, illustration; piles his
-notes volumes high; reads far and wide upon the
-tracks of his matter, and makes page upon page
-of references; and then, thoroughly stuffed and
-sophisticated, turns back and begins his narrative.
-’Tis impossible then that he should begin naturally.
-He sees the end from the beginning, and all the intermediate
-way from beginning to end; he has made
-up his mind about too many things; uses his details
-with a too free and familiar mastery, not like one
-who tells a story so much as like one who dissects a
-cadaver. Having swept his details together beforehand,
-like so much scientific material, he discourses
-upon them like a demonstrator,—thinks too little
-in subjection to them. They no longer make a
-fresh impression upon him. They are his tools,
-not his objects of vision.</p>
-
-<p>It is not by such a process that a narrative is
-made vital and true. It does not do to lose the
-point of view of the first listener to the tale, or to<span class="pagenum" id="Page_181">181</span>
-rearrange the matter too much out of the order of
-nature. You must instruct your reader as the
-events themselves would have instructed him, had
-he been able to note them as they passed. The
-historian must not lose his own fresh view of the
-scene as it passed and changed more and more
-from year to year and from age to age. He must
-keep with the generation of which he writes, not
-be too quick to be wiser than they were or look
-back upon them in his narrative with head over
-shoulder. He must write of them always in the
-atmosphere they themselves breathed, not hastening
-to judge them, but striving only to realize them at
-every turn of the story, to make their thoughts
-his own, and call their lives back again, rebuilding
-the very stage upon which they played their parts.
-Bring the end of your story to mind while you set
-about telling its beginning, and it seems to have
-no parts: beginning, middle, end, are all as one,—are
-merely like parts of a pattern which you see as
-a single thing stamped upon the stuff under your
-hand.</p>
-
-<p>Try the method with the history of our own land
-and people. How will you begin? Will you start
-with a modern map and a careful topographical
-description of the continent? And then, having
-made your nineteenth-century framework for the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_182">182</span>
-narrative, will you ask your reader to turn back
-and see the seventeenth century, and those lonely
-ships coming in at the capes of the Chesapeake?
-He will never see them so long as you compel him
-to stand here at the end of the nineteenth century
-and look at them as if through a long retrospect.
-The attention both of the narrator and of the
-reader, if history is to be seen aright, must look
-forward, not backward. It must see with a contemporaneous
-eye. Let the historian, if he be
-wise, know no more of the history as he writes
-than might have been known in the age and day
-of which he is writing. A trifle too much knowledge
-will undo him. It will break the spell for
-his imagination. It will spoil the magic by which
-he may raise again the image of days that are
-gone. He must of course know the large lines of
-his story; it must lie as a whole in his mind. His
-very art demands that, in order that he may know
-and keep its proportions. But the details, the
-passing incidents of day and year, must come fresh
-into his mind, unreasoned upon as yet, untouched
-by theory, with their first look upon them. It is
-here that original documents and fresh research
-will serve him. He must look far and wide upon
-every detail of the time, see it at first hand, and
-paint as he looks; selecting, as the artist must, but<span class="pagenum" id="Page_183">183</span>
-selecting while the vision is fresh, and not from
-old sketches laid away in his notes,—selecting
-from the life itself.</p>
-
-<p>Let him remember that his task is radically
-different from the task of the investigator. The
-investigator must display his materials, but the
-historian must convey his impressions. He must
-stand in the presence of life, and reproduce it in
-his narrative; must recover a past age; make dead
-generations live again and breathe their own air;
-show them native and at home upon his page. To
-do this, his own impressions must be as fresh as
-those of an unlearned reader, his own curiosity as
-keen and young at every stage. It may easily be
-so as his reading thickens, and the atmosphere of
-the age comes stealthily into his thought, if only
-he take care to push forward the actual writing of
-his narrative at an equal pace with his reading,
-painting thus always direct from the image itself.
-His knowledge of the great outlines and bulks of
-the picture will be his sufficient guide and restraint
-the while, will give proportion to the individual
-strokes of his work. But it will not check his zest,
-or sophisticate his fresh recovery of the life that is
-in the crowding colors of the canvas.</p>
-
-<p>A nineteenth-century plan laid like a standard
-and measure upon a seventeenth-century narrative<span class="pagenum" id="Page_184">184</span>
-will infallibly twist it and make it false. Lay a
-modern map before the first settlers at Jamestown
-and Plymouth, and then bid them discover and
-occupy the continent. With how superior a nineteenth-century
-wonder and pity will you see them
-grope, and stumble, and falter! How like children
-they will seem to you, and how simple their age,
-and ignorant! As stalwart men as you they were
-in fact; mayhap wiser and braver too; as fit to
-occupy a continent as you are to draw it upon
-paper. If you would know them, go back to their
-age; breed yourself a pioneer and woodsman; look
-to find the South Sea up the nearest northwest
-branch of the spreading river at your feet; discover
-and occupy the wilderness with them; dream what
-may be beyond the near hills, and long all day to
-see a sail upon the silent sea; go back to them and
-see them in their habit as they lived.</p>
-
-<p>The picturesque writers of history have all along
-been right in theory: they have been wrong only
-in practice. It is a picture of the past we want—its
-express image and feature; but we want the
-true picture and not simply the theatrical matter,—the
-manner of Rembrandt rather than of Rubens.
-All life may be pictured, but not all of life is picturesque.
-No great, no true historian would put
-false or adventitious colors into his narrative, or<span class="pagenum" id="Page_185">185</span>
-let a glamour rest where in fact it never was.
-The writers who select an incident merely because
-it is striking or dramatic are shallow fellows.
-They see only with the eye’s retina, not with that
-deep vision whose images lie where thought and
-reason sit. The real drama of life is disclosed
-only with the whole picture; and that only the
-deep and fervid student will see, whose mind goes
-daily fresh to the details, whose narrative runs
-always in the authentic colors of nature, whose art
-it is to see, and to paint what he sees.</p>
-
-<p>It is thus and only thus we shall have the truth
-of the matter: by art,—by the most difficult of all
-arts; by fresh study and first-hand vision; at the
-mouths of men who stand in the midst of old letters
-and dusty documents and neglected records,
-not like antiquarians, but like those who see a distant
-country and a far-away people before their
-very eyes, as real, as full of life and hope and incident,
-as the day in which they themselves live. Let
-us have done with humbug and come to plain
-speech. The historian needs an imagination quite
-as much as he needs scholarship, and consummate
-literary art as much as candor and common honesty.
-Histories are written in order that the bulk of men
-may read and realize; and it is as bad to bungle
-the telling of the story as to lie, as fatal to lack a<span class="pagenum" id="Page_186">186</span>
-vocabulary as to lack knowledge. In no case can
-you do more than convey an impression, so various
-and complex is the matter. If you convey a false
-impression, what difference does it make how you
-convey it? In the whole process there is a nice
-adjustment of means to ends which only the artist
-can manage. There is an art of lying;—there is
-equally an art,—an infinitely more difficult art,—of
-telling the truth.</p>
-
-<hr />
-
-<div id="toclink_187" class="chapter">
-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_187">187</span></p>
-
-<h2 class="nobreak" id="VII">VII.<br />
-
-<span class="subhead">A CALENDAR OF GREAT AMERICANS.</span></h2>
-</div>
-
-<p><span class="firstword">Before</span> a calendar of great Americans can be
-made out, a valid canon of Americanism must first
-be established. Not every great man born and
-bred in America was a great “American.” Some
-of the notable men born among us were simply
-great Englishmen; others had in all the habits of
-their thought and life the strong flavor of a peculiar
-region, and were great New Englanders or
-great Southerners; others, masters in the fields of
-science or of pure thought, showed nothing either
-distinctively national or characteristically provincial,
-and were simply great men; while a few displayed
-odd cross-strains of blood or breeding. The great
-Englishmen bred in America, like Hamilton and
-Madison; the great provincials, like John Adams
-and Calhoun; the authors of such thought as might
-have been native to any clime, like Asa Gray and
-Emerson; and the men of mixed breed, like Jefferson
-and Benton,—must be excluded from our
-present list. We must pick out men who have<span class="pagenum" id="Page_188">188</span>
-created or exemplified a distinctively American
-standard and type of greatness.</p>
-
-<p>To make such a selection is not to create an artificial
-standard of greatness, or to claim that greatness
-is in any case hallowed or exalted merely
-because it is American. It is simply to recognize
-a peculiar stamp of character, a special make-up of
-mind and faculties, as the specific product of our
-national life, not displacing or eclipsing talents of
-a different kind, but supplementing them, and so
-adding to the world’s variety. There is an American
-type of man, and those who have exhibited this
-type with a certain unmistakable distinction and
-perfection have been great “Americans.” It has
-required the utmost variety of character and energy
-to establish a great nation, with a polity at once
-free and firm, upon this continent, and no sound
-type of manliness could have been dispensed with
-in the effort. We could no more have done without
-our great Englishmen, to keep the past steadily
-in mind and make every change conservative
-of principle, than we could have done without
-the men whose whole impulse was forward, whose
-whole genius was for origination, natural masters
-of the art of subduing a wilderness.</p>
-
-<p>Certainly one of the greatest figures in our history
-is the figure of Alexander Hamilton. American<span class="pagenum" id="Page_189">189</span>
-historians, though compelled always to admire
-him, often in spite of themselves, have been inclined,
-like the mass of men in his own day, to look
-at him askance. They hint, when they do not
-plainly say, that he was not “American.” He rejected,
-if he did not despise, democratic principles;
-advocated a government as strong, almost, as a
-monarchy; and defended the government which
-was actually set up, like the skilled advocate he
-was, only because it was the strongest that could
-be had under the circumstances. He believed in
-authority, and he had no faith in the aggregate
-wisdom of masses of men. He had, it is true, that
-deep and passionate love of liberty, and that steadfast
-purpose in the maintenance of it, that mark
-the best Englishmen everywhere; but his ideas of
-government stuck fast in the old-world politics, and
-his statesmanship was of Europe rather than of
-America. And yet the genius and the steadfast
-spirit of this man were absolutely indispensable to
-us. No one less masterful, no one less resolute
-than he to drill the minority, if necessary, to have
-their way against the majority, could have done the
-great work of organization by which he established
-the national credit, and with the national credit the
-national government itself. A pliant, popular,
-optimistic man would have failed utterly in the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_190">190</span>
-task. A great radical mind in his place would
-have brought disaster upon us: only a great conservative
-genius could have succeeded. It is safe
-to say that, without men of Hamilton’s cast of
-mind, building the past into the future with a deep
-passion for order and old wisdom, our national life
-would have miscarried at the very first. This tried
-English talent for conservation gave to our fibre at
-the very outset the stiffness of maturity.</p>
-
-<p>James Madison, too, we may be said to have inherited.
-His invaluable gifts of counsel were of
-the sort so happily imparted to us with our English
-blood at the first planting of the States which
-formed the Union. A grave and prudent man,
-and yet brave withal when new counsel was to be
-taken, he stands at the beginning of our national
-history, even in his young manhood, as he faced
-and led the constitutional convention, a type of
-the slow and thoughtful English genius for affairs.
-He held old and tested convictions of the uses of
-liberty; he was competently read in the history
-of government; processes of revolution were in his
-thought no more than processes of adaptation: exigencies
-were to be met by modification, not by
-experiment. His reasonable spirit runs through all
-the proceedings of the great convention that gave
-us the Constitution, and that noble instrument<span class="pagenum" id="Page_191">191</span>
-seems the product of character like his. For all it
-is so American in its content, it is in its method a
-thoroughly English production, so full is it of old
-principles, so conservative of experience, so carefully
-compounded of compromises, of concessions
-made and accepted. Such men are of a stock so
-fine as to need no titles to make it noble, and yet
-so old and so distinguished as actually to bear the
-chief titles of English liberty. Madison came of
-the long line of English constitutional statesmen.</p>
-
-<p>There is a type of genius which closely approaches
-this in character, but which is, nevertheless,
-distinctively American. It is to be seen in
-John Marshall and in Daniel Webster. In these
-men a new set of ideas find expression, ideas which
-all the world has received as American. Webster
-was not an English but an American constitutional
-statesman. For the English statesman constitutional
-issues are issues of policy rather than issues
-of law. He constantly handles questions of change:
-his constitution is always a-making. He must at
-every turn construct, and he is deemed conservative
-if only his rule be consistency and continuity with
-the past. He will search diligently for precedent,
-but he is content if the precedent contain only a
-germ of the policy he proposes. His standards are
-set him, not by law, but by opinion: his constitution<span class="pagenum" id="Page_192">192</span>
-is an ideal of cautious and orderly change.
-Its fixed element is the conception of political
-liberty: a conception which, though steeped in
-history, must ever be added to and altered by
-social change. The American constitutional statesman,
-on the contrary, constructs policies like a
-lawyer. The standard with which he must square
-his conduct is set him by a document upon whose
-definite sentences the whole structure of the government
-directly rests. That document, moreover,
-is the concrete embodiment of a peculiar theory of
-government. That theory is, that definitive laws,
-selected by a power outside the government, are
-the structural iron of the entire fabric of politics,
-and that nothing which cannot be constructed
-upon this stiff framework is a safe or legitimate
-part of policy. Law is, in his conception, creative
-of states, and they live only by such permissions
-as they can extract from it. The functions of the
-judge and the functions of the man of affairs have,
-therefore, been very closely related in our history,
-and John Marshall, scarcely less than Daniel
-Webster, was a constitutional statesman. With
-all Madison’s conservative temper and wide-eyed
-prudence in counsel, the subject-matter of thought
-for both of these men was not English liberty or
-the experience of men everywhere in self-government,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_193">193</span>
-but the meaning stored up in the explicit
-sentences of a written fundamental law. They
-taught men the new—the American—art of
-extracting life out of the letter, not of statutes
-merely (that art was not new), but of statute-built
-institutions and documented governments: the art
-of saturating politics with law without grossly discoloring
-law with politics. Other nations have
-had written constitutions, but no other nation has
-ever filled a written constitution with this singularly
-compounded content, of a sound legal conscience
-and a strong national purpose. It would have
-been easy to deal with our Constitution like subtle
-dialecticians; but Webster and Marshall did much
-more and much better than that. They viewed
-the fundamental law as a great organic product, a
-vehicle of life as well as a charter of authority; in
-disclosing its life they did not damage its tissue;
-and in thus expanding the law without impairing
-its structure or authority they made great contributions
-alike to statesmanship and to jurisprudence.
-Our notable literature of decision and commentary
-in the field of constitutional law is America’s
-distinctive gift to the history and the science of
-law. John Marshall wrought out much of its substance;
-Webster diffused its great body of principles
-throughout national policy, mediating between<span class="pagenum" id="Page_194">194</span>
-the law and affairs. The figures of the two men
-must hold the eye of the world as the figures of
-two great national representatives, as the figures
-of two great Americans.</p>
-
-<p>The representative national greatness and function
-of these men appear more clearly still when
-they are contrasted with men like John Adams
-and John C. Calhoun, whose greatness was not
-national. John Adams represented one element of
-our national character, and represented it nobly,
-with a singular force and greatness. He was an
-eminent Puritan statesman, and the Puritan ingredient
-has colored all our national life. We have
-got strength and persistency and some part of our
-steady moral purpose from it. But in the quick
-growth and exuberant expansion of the nation it
-has been only one element among many. The
-Puritan blood has mixed with many another strain.
-The stiff Puritan character has been mellowed by
-many a transfusion of gentler and more hopeful
-elements. So soon as the Adams fashion of man
-became more narrow, intense, acidulous, intractable,
-according to the tendencies of its nature, in the
-person of John Quincy Adams, it lost the sympathy,
-lost even the tolerance, of the country, and
-the national choice took its reckless leap from a
-Puritan President to Andrew Jackson, a man cast<span class="pagenum" id="Page_195">195</span>
-in the rough original pattern of American life at
-the heart of the continent. John Adams had not
-himself been a very acceptable President. He had
-none of the national optimism, and could not understand
-those who did have it. He had none of
-the characteristic adaptability of the delocalized
-American, and was just a bit ridiculous in his stiffness
-at the Court of St. James, for all he was so
-honorable and so imposing. His type,—be it said
-without disrespect,—was provincial. Unmistakably
-a great man, his greatness was of the commonwealth,
-not of the empire.</p>
-
-<p>Calhoun, too, was a great provincial. Although
-a giant, he had no heart to use his great strength
-for national purposes. In his youth, it is true, he
-did catch some of the generous ardor for national
-enterprise which filled the air in his day; and all
-his life through, with a truly pathetic earnestness,
-he retained his affection for his first ideal. But
-when the rights and interests of his section were
-made to appear incompatible with a liberal and
-boldly constructive interpretation of the Constitution,
-he fell out of national counsels and devoted
-all the strength of his extraordinary mind to holding
-the nation’s thought and power back within
-the strait limits of a literal construction of the law.
-In powers of reasoning his mind deserves to rank<span class="pagenum" id="Page_196">196</span>
-with Webster’s and Marshall’s: he handled questions
-of law like a master, as they did. He had,
-moreover, a keen insight into the essential principles
-and character of liberty. His thought moved
-eloquently along some of the oldest and safest lines
-of English thought in the field of government.
-He made substantive contributions to the permanent
-philosophy of politics. His reasoning has
-been discredited, not so much because it was not
-theoretically sound within its limits, as because its
-practical outcome was a negation which embarrassed
-the whole movement of national affairs.
-He would have held the nation still, in an old
-equipoise, at one time normal enough, but impossible
-to maintain. Webster and Marshall gave leave
-to the energy of change inherent in all the national
-life, making law a rule, but not an interdict;
-a living guide, but not a blind and rigid discipline.
-Calhoun sought to fix law as a barrier across the
-path of policy, commanding the life of the nation
-to stand still. The strength displayed in the effort,
-the intellectual power and address, abundantly entitle
-him to be called great; but his purpose was
-not national. It regarded only a section of the
-country, and marked him,—again be it said with
-all respect,—a great provincial.</p>
-
-<p>Jefferson was not a thorough American because<span class="pagenum" id="Page_197">197</span>
-of the strain of French philosophy that permeated
-and weakened all his thought. Benton was altogether
-American so far as the natural strain of his
-blood was concerned, but he had encumbered his
-natural parts and inclinations with a mass of undigested
-and shapeless learning. Bred in the West,
-where everything was new, he had filled his head
-with the thought of books (evidently very poor
-books) which exhibited the ideals of communities
-in which everything was old. He thought of the
-Roman Senate when he sat in the Senate of the
-United States. He paraded classical figures whenever
-he spoke, upon a stage where both their
-costume and their action seemed grotesque. A
-pedantic frontiersman, he was a living and a
-pompous antinomy. Meant by nature to be an
-American, he spoiled the plan by applying a most
-unsuitable gloss of shallow and irrelevant learning.
-Jefferson was of course an almost immeasurably
-greater man than Benton, but he was un-American
-in somewhat the same way. He brought a foreign
-product of thought to a market where no natural
-or wholesome demand for it could exist. There
-were not two incompatible parts in him, as in Benton’s
-case: he was a philosophical radical by nature
-as well as by acquirement; his reading and his
-temperament went suitably together. The man is<span class="pagenum" id="Page_198">198</span>
-homogeneous throughout. The American shows in
-him very plainly, too, notwithstanding the strong
-and inherent dash of what was foreign in his
-make-up. He was a natural leader and manager
-of men, not because he was imperative or masterful,
-but because of a native shrewdness, tact, and
-sagacity, an inborn art and aptness for combination,
-such as no Frenchman ever displayed in the management
-of common men. Jefferson had just a
-touch of rusticity about him, besides; and it was
-not pretense on his part or merely a love of power
-that made him democratic. His indiscriminate
-hospitality, his almost passionate love for the simple
-equality of country life, his steady devotion to
-what he deemed to be the cause of the people, all
-mark him a genuine democrat, a nature native to
-America. It is his speculative philosophy that is
-exotic, and that runs like a false and artificial note
-through all his thought. It was un-American in
-being abstract, sentimental, rationalistic, rather
-than practical. That he held it sincerely need not
-be doubted; but the more sincerely he accepted it
-so much the more thoroughly was he un-American.
-His writings lack hard and practical sense. Liberty,
-among us, is not a sentiment, but a product
-of experience; its derivation is not rationalistic,
-but practical. It is a hard-headed spirit of independence,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_199">199</span>
-not the conclusion of a syllogism. The
-very aërated quality of Jefferson’s principles gives
-them an air of insincerity, which attaches to them
-rather because they do not suit the climate of the
-country and the practical aspect of affairs than because
-they do not suit the character of Jefferson’s
-mind and the atmosphere of abstract philosophy.
-It is because both they and the philosophical
-system of which they form a part do seem suitable
-to his mind and character, that we must pronounce
-him, though a great man, not a great American.</p>
-
-<p>It is by the frank consideration of such concrete
-cases that we may construct, both negatively and
-affirmatively, our canons of Americanism. The
-American spirit is something more than the old,
-the immemorial Saxon spirit of liberty from which
-it sprung. It has been bred by the conditions
-attending the great task which we have all the
-century been carrying forward: the task, at once
-material and ideal, of subduing a wilderness and
-covering all the wide stretches of a vast continent
-with a single free and stable polity. It is, accordingly,
-above all things, a hopeful and confident
-spirit. It is progressive, optimistically progressive,
-and ambitious of objects of national scope and
-advantage. It is unpedantic, unprovincial, unspeculative,
-unfastidious; regardful of law, but as using<span class="pagenum" id="Page_200">200</span>
-it, not as being used by it or dominated by any
-formalism whatever; in a sense unrefined, because
-full of rude force; but prompted by large and generous
-motives, and often as tolerant as it is resolute.
-No one man, unless it be Lincoln, has ever
-proved big or various enough to embody this active
-and full-hearted spirit in all its qualities; and the
-men who have been too narrow or too speculative
-or too pedantic to represent it have, nevertheless,
-added to the strong and stirring variety of our
-national life, making it fuller and richer in motive
-and energy; but its several aspects are none the
-less noteworthy as they separately appear in different
-men.</p>
-
-<p>One of the first men to exhibit this American
-spirit with an unmistakable touch of greatness and
-distinction was Benjamin Franklin. It was characteristic
-of America that this self-made man should
-become a philosopher, a founder of philosophical
-societies, an authoritative man of science; that his
-philosophy of life should be so homely and so practical
-in its maxims, and uttered with so shrewd a
-wit; that one region should be his birthplace and
-another his home; that he should favor effective
-political union among the colonies from the first,
-and should play a sage and active part in the
-establishment of national independence and the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_201">201</span>
-planning of a national organization; and that he
-should represent his countrymen in diplomacy
-abroad. They could have had no spokesman who
-represented more sides of their character. Franklin
-was a sort of multiple American. He was versatile
-without lacking solidity; he was a practical statesman
-without ceasing to be a sagacious philosopher.
-He came of the people, and was democratic; but
-he had raised himself out of the general mass of
-unnamed men, and so stood for the democratic law,
-not of equality, but of self-selection in endeavor.
-One can feel sure that Franklin would have succeeded
-in any part of the national life that it might
-have fallen to his lot to take part in. He will
-stand the final and characteristic test of Americanism:
-he would unquestionably have made a successful
-frontiersman, capable at once of wielding the
-axe and of administering justice from the fallen
-trunk.</p>
-
-<p>Washington hardly seems an American, as most
-of his biographers depict him. He is too colorless,
-too cold, too prudent. He seems more like a wise
-and dispassionate Mr. Alworthy, advising a nation
-as he would a parish, than like a man building
-states and marshaling a nation in a wilderness.
-But the real Washington was as thoroughly an
-American as Jackson or Lincoln. What we take<span class="pagenum" id="Page_202">202</span>
-for lack of passion in him was but the reserve and
-self-mastery natural to a man of his class and
-breeding in Virginia. He was no parlor politician,
-either. He had seen the frontier, and far beyond
-it where the French forts lay. He knew the rough
-life of the country as few other men could. His
-thoughts did not live at Mount Vernon. He knew
-difficulty as intimately and faced it always with as
-quiet a mastery as William the Silent. This calm,
-straightforward, high-spirited man, making charts
-of the western country, noting the natural land
-and water routes into the heart of the continent,
-marking how the French power lay, conceiving the
-policy which should dispossess it, and the engineering
-achievements which should make the utmost
-resources of the land our own; counseling Braddock
-how to enter the forest, but not deserting him
-because he would not take advice; planning step
-by step, by patient correspondence with influential
-men everywhere, the meetings, conferences, common
-resolves which were finally to bring the great
-constitutional convention together; planning, too,
-always for the country as well as for Virginia; and
-presiding at last over the establishment and organization
-of the government of the Union: he certainly—the
-most suitable instrument of the national life
-at every moment of crisis—is a great American.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_203">203</span>
-Those noble words which he uttered amidst the
-first doubtings of the constitutional convention
-might serve as a motto for the best efforts of liberty
-wherever free men strive: “Let us raise a
-standard to which the wise and honest can repair;
-the event is in the hand of God.”</p>
-
-<p>In Henry Clay we have an American of a most
-authentic pattern. There was no man of his
-generation who represented more of America than
-he did. The singular, almost irresistible attraction
-he had for men of every class and every temperament
-came, not from the arts of the politician, but
-from the instant sympathy established between him
-and every fellow-countryman of his. He does not
-seem to have exercised the same fascination upon
-foreigners. They felt toward him as some New
-Englanders did: he seemed to them plausible
-merely, too indiscriminately open and cordial to be
-sincere,—a bit of a charlatan. No man who really
-takes the trouble to understand Henry Clay, or
-who has quick enough parts to sympathize with
-him, can deem him false. It is the odd combination
-of two different elements in him that makes
-him seem irregular and inconstant. His nature
-was of the West, blown through with quick winds
-of ardor and aggression, a bit reckless and defiant;
-but his art was of the East, ready with soft and<span class="pagenum" id="Page_204">204</span>
-placating phrases, reminiscent of old and reverenced
-ideals, thoughtful of compromise and accommodation.
-He had all the address of the trained and
-sophisticated politician, bred in an old and sensitive
-society; but his purposes ran free of cautious restraints,
-and his real ideals were those of the somewhat
-bumptious Americanism which was pushing
-the frontier forward in the West, which believed
-itself capable of doing anything it might put its
-hand to, despised conventional restraints, and
-followed a vague but resplendent “manifest destiny”
-with lusty hurrahs. His purposes were sincere,
-even if often crude and uninstructed; it was
-only because the subtle arts of politics seemed inconsistent
-with the direct dash and bold spirit of
-the man that they sat upon him like an insincerity.
-He thoroughly, and by mere unconscious sympathy,
-represented the double America of his day,
-made up of a West which hurried and gave bold
-strokes, and of an East which held back, fearing
-the pace, thoughtful and mindful of the instructive
-past. The one part had to be served without
-offending the other: and that was Clay’s mediatorial
-function.</p>
-
-<p>Andrew Jackson was altogether of the West.
-Of his sincerity nobody has ever had any real
-doubt; and his Americanism is now at any rate<span class="pagenum" id="Page_205">205</span>
-equally unimpeachable. He was like Clay with
-the social imagination of the orator and the art
-and sophistication of the Eastern politician left out.
-He came into our national politics like a cyclone
-from off the Western prairies. Americans of the
-present day perceptibly shudder at the very recollection
-of Jackson. He seems to them a great
-Vandal, playing fast and loose alike with institutions
-and with tested and established policy, debauching
-politics like a modern spoilsman. But
-whether we would accept him as a type of ourselves
-or not, the men of his own day accepted him with
-enthusiasm. He did not need to be explained to
-them. They crowded to his standard like men
-free at last, after long and tedious restraint, to
-make their own choice, follow their own man.
-There can be no mistaking the spontaneity of the
-thoroughgoing support he received. His was the
-new type of energy and self-confidence bred by
-life outside the States that had been colonies. It
-was a terrible energy, threatening sheer destruction
-to many a carefully wrought arrangement handed
-on to us from the past; it was a perilous self-confidence,
-founded in sheer strength rather than in
-wisdom. The government did not pass through
-the throes of that signal awakening of the new
-national spirit without serious rack and damage.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_206">206</span>
-But it was no disease. It was only an incautious,
-abounding, madcap strength which proved so dangerous
-in its readiness for every rash endeavor. It
-was necessary that the West should be let into the
-play: it was even necessary that she should assert
-her right to the leading rôle. It was done without
-good taste, but that does not condemn it. We
-have no doubt refined and schooled the hoyden
-influences of that crude time, and they are vastly
-safer now than then, when they first came bounding
-in; but they mightily stirred and enriched our
-blood from the first. Now that we have thoroughly
-suffered this Jackson change and it is over, we are
-ready to recognize it as quite as radically American
-as anything in all our history.</p>
-
-<p>Lincoln, nevertheless, rather than Jackson, was
-the supreme American of our history. In Clay,
-East and West were mixed without being fused or
-harmonized: he seems like two men. In Jackson
-there was not even a mixture; he was all of a piece,
-and altogether unacceptable to some parts of the
-country,—a frontier statesman. But in Lincoln
-the elements were combined and harmonized. The
-most singular thing about the wonderful career of
-the man is the way in which he steadily grew into
-a national stature. He began an amorphous, unlicked
-cub, bred in the rudest of human lairs;<span class="pagenum" id="Page_207">207</span>
-but, as he grew, everything formed, informed,
-transformed him. The process was slow but unbroken.
-He was not fit to be President until he
-actually became President. He was fit then
-because, learning everything as he went, he had
-found out how much there was to learn, and had
-still an infinite capacity for learning. The quiet
-voices of sentiment and murmurs of resolution
-that went whispering through the land, his ear
-always caught, when others could hear nothing but
-their own words. He never ceased to be a common
-man: that was his source of strength. But he
-was a common man with genius, a genius for things
-American, for insight into the common thought,
-for mastery of the fundamental things of politics
-that inhere in human nature and cast hardly more
-than their shadows on constitutions; for the practical
-niceties of affairs; for judging men and assessing
-arguments. Jackson had no social imagination:
-no unfamiliar community made any impression on
-him. His whole fibre stiffened young, and nothing
-afterward could modify or even deeply affect it.
-But Lincoln was always a-making; he would have
-died unfinished if the terrible storms of the war
-had not stung him to learn in those four years
-what no other twenty could have taught him.
-And, as he stands there in his complete manhood,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_208">208</span>
-at the most perilous helm in Christendom, what a
-marvelous composite figure he is! The whole
-country is summed up in him: the rude Western
-strength, tempered with shrewdness and a broad
-and humane wit; the Eastern conservatism, regardful
-of law and devoted to fixed standards of duty.
-He even understood the South, as no other Northern
-man of his generation did. He respected, because
-he comprehended, though he could not hold, its
-view of the Constitution; he appreciated the inexorable
-compulsions of its past in respect of
-slavery; he would have secured it once more, and
-speedily if possible, in its right to self-government,
-when the fight was fought out. To the Eastern
-politicians he seemed like an accident; but to history
-he must seem like a providence.</p>
-
-<p>Grant was Lincoln’s suitable instrument, a great
-American general, the appropriate product of West
-Point. A Western man, he had no thought of
-commonwealths politically separate, and was instinctively
-for the Union; a man of the common
-people, he deemed himself always an instrument,
-never a master, and did his work, though ruthlessly,
-without malice; a sturdy, hard-willed, taciturn
-man, a sort of Lincoln the Silent in thought
-and spirit. He does not appeal to the imagination
-very deeply; there is a sort of common greatness<span class="pagenum" id="Page_209">209</span>
-about him, great gifts combined singularly with a
-great mediocrity; but such peculiarities seem to
-make him all the more American,—national in
-spirit, thoroughgoing in method, masterful in
-purpose.</p>
-
-<p>And yet it is no contradiction to say that Robert
-E. Lee also was a great American. He fought on
-the opposite side, but he fought in the same spirit,
-and for a principle which is in a sense scarcely less
-American than the principle of Union. He represented
-the idea of the inherent—the essential—separateness
-of self-government. This was not
-the principle of secession: that principle involved
-the separate right of the several self-governing
-units of the federal system to judge of national
-questions independently, and as a check upon the
-federal government,—to adjudge the very objects
-of the Union. Lee did not believe in secession,
-but he did believe in the local rootage of all government.
-This is at the bottom, no doubt, an
-English idea; but it has had a characteristic American
-development. It is the reverse side of the
-shield which bears upon its obverse the devices of
-the Union, a side too much overlooked and obscured
-since the war. It conceives the individual
-State a community united by the most intimate
-associations, the first home and foster-mother of<span class="pagenum" id="Page_210">210</span>
-every man born into the citizenship of the nation.
-Lee considered himself a member of one of these
-great families; he could not conceive of the nation
-apart from the State: above all, he could not live
-in the nation divorced from his neighbors. His
-own community should decide his political destiny
-and duty.</p>
-
-<p>This was also the spirit of Patrick Henry and of
-Sam Houston,—men much alike in the cardinal
-principle of their natures. Patrick Henry resisted
-the formation of the Union only because he feared
-to disturb the local rootage of self-government, to disperse
-power so widely that neighbors could not control
-it. It was not a disloyal or a separatist spirit,
-but only a jealous spirit of liberty. Sam Houston,
-too, deemed the character a community should give
-itself so great a matter that the community, once
-made, ought itself to judge of the national associations
-most conducive to its liberty and progress.
-Without liberty of this intensive character there
-could have been no vital national liberty; and Sam
-Houston, Patrick Henry, and Robert E. Lee are
-none the less great Americans because they represented
-only one cardinal principle of the national
-life. Self-government has its intrinsic antinomies
-as well as its harmonies.</p>
-
-<p>Among men of letters Lowell is doubtless most<span class="pagenum" id="Page_211">211</span>
-typically American, though Curtis must find an
-eligible place in the list. Lowell was self-conscious,
-though the truest greatness is not; he was
-a trifle too “smart,” besides, and there is no
-“smartness” in great literature. But both the
-self-consciousness and the smartness must be admitted
-to be American; and Lowell was so versatile,
-so urbane, of so large a spirit, and so admirable
-in the scope of his sympathies, that he must certainly
-go on the calendar.</p>
-
-<p>There need be no fear that we shall be obliged to
-stop with Lowell in literature, or with any of the
-men who have been named in the field of achievement.
-We shall not in the future have to take
-one type of Americanism at a time. The frontier
-is gone: it has reached the Pacific. The country
-grows rapidly homogeneous. With the same pace
-it grows various, and multiform in all its life.
-The man of the simple or local type cannot any
-longer deal in the great manner with any national
-problem. The great men of our future must be of
-the composite type of greatness: sound-hearted,
-hopeful, confident of the validity of liberty, tenacious
-of the deeper principles of American institutions,
-but with the old rashness schooled and
-sobered, and instinct tempered by instruction.
-They must be wise with an adult, not with an<span class="pagenum" id="Page_212">212</span>
-adolescent wisdom. Some day we shall be of one
-mind, our ideals fixed, our purposes harmonized,
-our nationality complete and consentaneous: then
-will come our great literature and our greatest
-men.</p>
-
-<hr />
-
-<div id="toclink_213" class="chapter">
-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_213">213</span></p>
-
-<h2 class="nobreak" id="VIII">VIII.<br />
-
-<span class="subhead">THE COURSE OF AMERICAN HISTORY.<a id="FNanchor_1" href="#Footnote_1" class="fnanchor smaller">1</a></span></h2>
-</div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a id="Footnote_1" href="#FNanchor_1" class="fnanchor">1</a> An address delivered before the New Jersey Historical Society.</p>
-
-</div>
-
-<p>In the field of history, learning should be deemed
-to stand among the people and in the midst of life.
-Its function there is not one of pride merely: to
-make complaisant record of deeds honorably done
-and plans nobly executed in the past. It has also a
-function of guidance: to build high places whereon
-to plant the clear and flaming lights of experience,
-that they may shine alike upon the roads already
-traveled and upon the paths not yet attempted.
-The historian is also a sort of prophet. Our
-memories direct us. They give us knowledge of
-our character, alike in its strength and in its weakness:
-and it is so we get our standards for endeavor,—our
-warnings and our gleams of hope. It is
-thus we learn what manner of nation we are of,
-and divine what manner of people we should be.</p>
-
-<p>And this is not in national records merely.
-Local history is the ultimate substance of national
-history. There could be no epics were pastorals<span class="pagenum" id="Page_214">214</span>
-not also true,—no patriotism, were there no homes,
-no neighbors, no quiet round of civic duty; and I,
-for my part, do not wonder that scholarly men
-have been found not a few who, though they might
-have shone upon a larger field, where all eyes
-would have seen them win their fame, yet chose
-to pore all their lives long upon the blurred and
-scattered records of a country-side, where there was
-nothing but an old church or an ancient village.
-The history of a nation is only the history of its
-villages written large. I only marvel that these
-local historians have not seen more in the stories
-they have sought to tell. Surely here, in these old
-hamlets that antedate the cities, in these little
-communities that stand apart and yet give their
-young life to the nation, is to be found the very
-authentic stuff of romance for the mere looking.
-There is love and courtship and eager life and
-high devotion up and down all the lines of every
-genealogy. What strength, too, and bold endeavor
-in the cutting down of forests to make the clearings;
-what breath of hope and discovery in scaling
-for the first time the nearest mountains; what
-longings ended or begun upon the coming in of
-ships into the harbor; what pride of earth in the
-rivalries of the village; what thoughts of heaven
-in the quiet of the rural church! What forces of<span class="pagenum" id="Page_215">215</span>
-slow and steadfast endeavor there were in the
-building of a great city upon the foundations of a
-hamlet: and how the plot broadens and thickens
-and grows dramatic as communities widen into
-states! Here, surely, sunk deep in the very fibre
-of the stuff, are the colors of the great story of
-men,—the lively touches of reality and the striking
-images of life.</p>
-
-<p>It must be admitted, I know, that local history
-can be made deadly dull in the telling. The men
-who reconstruct it seem usually to build with kiln-dried
-stuff,—as if with a purpose it should last.
-But that is not the fault of the subject. National
-history may be written almost as ill, if due pains
-be taken to dry it out. It is a trifle more difficult:
-because merely to speak of national affairs is to
-give hint of great forces and of movements blown
-upon by all the airs of the wide continent. The
-mere largeness of the scale lends to the narrative
-a certain dignity and spirit. But some men will
-manage to be dull though they should speak of
-creation. In writing of local history the thing
-is fatally easy. For there is some neighborhood
-history that lacks any large significance, which is
-without horizon or outlook. There are details in
-the history of every community which it concerns
-no man to know again when once they are past<span class="pagenum" id="Page_216">216</span>
-and decently buried in the records: and these are
-the very details, no doubt, which it is easiest to
-find upon a casual search. It is easier to make
-out a list of county clerks than to extract the social
-history of the county from the records they have
-kept,—though it is not so important: and it is
-easier to make a catalogue of anything than to say
-what of life and purpose the catalogue stands for.
-This is called collecting facts “for the sake of the
-facts themselves;” but if I wished to do aught for
-the sake of the facts themselves I think I should
-serve them better by giving their true biographies
-than by merely displaying their faces.</p>
-
-<p>The right and vital sort of local history is the
-sort which may be written with lifted eyes,—the
-sort which has an horizon and an outlook upon
-the world. Sometimes it may happen, indeed,
-that the annals of a neighborhood disclose some
-singular adventure which had its beginning and its
-ending there: some unwonted bit of fortune which
-stands unique and lonely amidst the myriad transactions
-of the world of affairs, and deserves to be
-told singly and for its own sake. But usually the
-significance of local history is, that it is part of a
-greater whole. A spot of local history is like an
-inn upon a highway: it is a stage upon a far
-journey: it is a place the national history has<span class="pagenum" id="Page_217">217</span>
-passed through. There mankind has stopped and
-lodged by the way. Local history is thus less than
-national history only as the part is less than the
-whole. The whole could not dispense with the
-part, would not exist without it, could not be
-understood unless the part also were understood.
-Local history is subordinate to national only in the
-sense in which each leaf of a book is subordinate
-to the volume itself. Upon no single page will the
-whole theme of the book be found; but each page
-holds a part of the theme. Even were the history
-of each locality exactly like the history of every
-other (which it cannot be), it would deserve to be
-written,—if only to corroborate the history of the
-rest, and verify it as an authentic part of the
-record of the race and nation. The common elements
-of a nation’s life are the great elements of
-its life, the warp and woof of the fabric. They
-cannot be too much or too substantially verified and
-explicated. It is so that history is made solid
-and fit for use and wear.</p>
-
-<p>Our national history, of course, has its own great
-and spreading pattern, which can be seen in its
-full form and completeness only when the stuff of
-our national life is laid before us in broad surfaces
-and upon an ample scale. But the detail of the
-pattern, the individual threads of the great fabric,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_218">218</span>
-are to be found only in local history. There is all
-the intricate weaving, all the delicate shading, all
-the nice refinement of the pattern,—gold thread
-mixed with fustian, fine thread laid upon coarse,
-shade combined with shade. Assuredly it is this
-that gives to local history its life and importance.
-The idea, moreover, furnishes a nice criterion of
-interest. The life of some localities is, obviously,
-more completely and intimately a part of the
-national pattern than the life of other localities,
-which are more separate and, as it were, put upon
-the border of the fabric. To come at once and
-very candidly to examples, the local history of the
-Middle States,—New York, New Jersey, and
-Pennsylvania,—is much more structurally a part
-of the characteristic life of the nation as a whole
-than is the history of the New England communities
-or of the several States and regions of the South.
-I know that such a heresy will sound very rank in
-the ears of some: for I am speaking against accepted
-doctrine. But acceptance, be it never so
-general, does not make a doctrine true.</p>
-
-<p>Our national history has been written for the
-most part by New England men. All honor to
-them! Their scholarship and their characters alike
-have given them an honorable enrollment amongst
-the great names of our literary history; and no<span class="pagenum" id="Page_219">219</span>
-just man would say aught to detract, were it never
-so little, from their well-earned fame. They have
-written our history, nevertheless, from but a single
-point of view. From where they sit, the whole of
-the great development looks like an Expansion of
-New England. Other elements but play along the
-sides of the great process by which the Puritan has
-worked out the development of nation and polity.
-It is he who has gone out and possessed the land:
-the man of destiny, the type and impersonation of
-a chosen people. To the Southern writer, too, the
-story looks much the same, if it be but followed to
-its culmination,—to its final storm and stress and
-tragedy in the great war. It is the history of the
-Suppression of the South. Spite of all her splendid
-contributions to the steadfast accomplishment
-of the great task of building the nation; spite of
-the long leadership of her statesmen in the national
-counsels; spite of her joint achievements in the
-conquest and occupation of the West, the South
-was at last turned upon on every hand, rebuked,
-proscribed, defeated. The history of the United
-States, we have learned, was, from the settlement
-at Jamestown to the surrender at Appomattox, a
-long-drawn contest for mastery between New England
-and the South,—and the end of the contest
-we know. All along the parallels of latitude ran<span class="pagenum" id="Page_220">220</span>
-the rivalry, in those heroical days of toil and adventure
-during which population crossed the continent,
-like an army advancing its encampments.
-Up and down the great river of the continent, too,
-and beyond, up the slow incline of the vast steppes
-that lift themselves toward the crowning towers of
-the Rockies,—beyond that, again, in the gold-fields
-and upon the green plains of California, the
-race for ascendency struggled on,—till at length
-there was a final coming face to face, and the masterful
-folk who had come from the loins of New
-England won their consummate victory.</p>
-
-<p>It is a very dramatic form for the story. One
-almost wishes it were true. How fine a unity it
-would give our epic! But perhaps, after all, the
-real truth is more interesting. The life of the
-nation cannot be reduced to these so simple terms.
-These two great forces, of the North and of the
-South, unquestionably existed,—were unquestionably
-projected in their operation out upon the
-great plane of the continent, there to combine or
-repel, as circumstances might determine. But the
-people that went out from the North were not an
-unmixed people; they came from the great Middle
-States as well as from New England. Their
-transplantation into the West was no more a
-reproduction of New England or New York or<span class="pagenum" id="Page_221">221</span>
-Pennsylvania or New Jersey than Massachusetts
-was a reproduction of old England, or New Netherland
-a reproduction of Holland. The Southern
-people, too, whom they met by the western rivers
-and upon the open prairies, were transformed, as
-they themselves were, by the rough fortunes of the
-frontier. A mixture of peoples, a modification of
-mind and habit, a new round of experiment and
-adjustment amidst the novel life of the baked and
-unfilled plain, and the far valleys with the virgin
-forests still thick upon them: a new temper, a new
-spirit of adventure, a new impatience of restraint,
-a new license of life,—these are the characteristic
-notes and measures of the time when the nation
-spread itself at large upon the continent, and was
-transformed from a group of colonies into a family
-of States.</p>
-
-<p>The passes of these eastern mountains were the
-arteries of the nation’s life. The real breath of
-our growth and manhood came into our nostrils
-when first, like Governor Spotswood and that gallant
-company of Virginian gentlemen that rode
-with him in the far year 1716, the Knights of the
-Order of the Golden Horseshoe, our pioneers stood
-upon the ridges of the eastern hills and looked
-down upon those reaches of the continent where
-lay the untrodden paths of the westward migration.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_222">222</span>
-There, upon the courses of the distant rivers that
-gleamed before them in the sun, down the farther
-slopes of the hills beyond, out upon the broad fields
-that lay upon the fertile banks of the “Father of
-Waters,” up the long tilt of the continent to the
-vast hills that looked out upon the Pacific—there
-were the regions in which, joining with people
-from every race and clime under the sun, they
-were to make the great compounded nation whose
-liberty and mighty works of peace were to cause
-all the world to stand at gaze. Thither were to
-come Frenchmen, Scandinavians, Celts, Dutch,
-Slavs,—men of the Latin races and of the races
-of the Orient, as well as men, a great host, of the
-first stock of the settlements: English, Scots, Scots-Irish,—like
-New England men, but touched with
-the salt of humor, hard, and yet neighborly too.
-For this great process of growth by grafting, of
-modification no less than of expansion, the colonies,—the
-original thirteen States,—were only preliminary
-studies and first experiments. But the
-experiments that most resembled the great methods
-by which we peopled the continent from side to
-side and knit a single polity across all its length
-and breadth, were surely the experiments made
-from the very first in the Middle States of our
-Atlantic seaboard.</p>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_223">223</span></p>
-
-<p>Here from the first were mixture of population,
-variety of element, combination of type, as if of
-the nation itself in small. Here was never a
-simple body, a people of but a single blood and
-extraction, a polity and a practice brought straight
-from one motherland. The life of these States was
-from the beginning like the life of the country:
-they have always shown the national pattern. In
-New England and the South it was very different.
-There some of the great elements of the national
-life were long in preparation: but separately and
-with an individual distinction; without mixture,—for
-long almost without movement. That the elements
-thus separately prepared were of the greatest
-importance, and run everywhere like chief threads
-of the pattern through all our subsequent life, who
-can doubt? They give color and tone to every
-part of the figure. The very fact that they are so
-distinct and separately evident throughout, the
-very emphasis of individuality they carry with
-them, but proves their distinct origin. The other
-elements of our life, various though they be, and
-of the very fibre, giving toughness and consistency
-to the fabric, are merged in its texture, united,
-confused, almost indistinguishable, so thoroughly
-are they mixed, intertwined, interwoven, like the
-essential strands of the stuff itself: but these of<span class="pagenum" id="Page_224">224</span>
-the Puritan and the Southerner, though they run
-everywhere with the rest and seem upon a superficial
-view themselves the body of the cloth, in fact
-modify rather than make it.</p>
-
-<p>What in fact has been the course of American
-history? How is it to be distinguished from European
-history? What features has it of its own,
-which give it its distinctive plan and movement?
-We have suffered, it is to be feared, a very serious
-limitation of view until recent years by having all
-our history written in the East. It has smacked
-strongly of a local flavor. It has concerned itself
-too exclusively with the origins and Old-World
-derivations of our story. Our historians have
-made their march from the sea with their heads
-over shoulder, their gaze always backward upon the
-landing-places and homes of the first settlers. In
-spite of the steady immigration, with its persistent
-tide of foreign blood, they have chosen to speak
-often and to think always of our people as sprung
-after all from a common stock, bearing a family
-likeness in every branch, and following all the while
-old, familiar, family ways. The view is the more
-misleading because it is so large a part of the truth
-without being all of it. The common British
-stock did first make the country, and has always
-set the pace. There were common institutions up<span class="pagenum" id="Page_225">225</span>
-and down the coast; and these had formed and
-hardened for a persistent growth before the great
-westward migration began which was to re-shape
-and modify every element of our life. The national
-government itself was set up and made strong by
-success while yet we lingered for the most part
-upon the eastern coast and feared a too distant
-frontier.</p>
-
-<p>But, the beginnings once safely made, change
-set in apace. Not only so: there had been slow
-change from the first. We have no frontier now,
-we are told,—except a broken fragment, it may
-be, here and there in some barren corner of the
-western lands, where some inhospitable mountain
-still shoulders us out, or where men are still lacking
-to break the baked surface of the plains and occupy
-them in the very teeth of hostile nature. But at
-first it was all frontier,—a mere strip of settlements
-stretched precariously upon the sea-edge of
-the wilds: an untouched continent in front of
-them, and behind them an unfrequented sea that
-almost never showed so much as the momentary
-gleam of a sail. Every step in the slow process of
-settlement was but a step of the same kind as the
-first, an advance to a new frontier like the old.
-For long we lacked, it is true, that new breed of
-frontiersmen born in after years beyond the mountains.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_226">226</span>
-Those first frontiersmen had still a touch of
-the timidity of the Old World in their blood: they
-lacked the frontier heart. They were “Pilgrims”
-in very fact,—exiled, not at home. Fine courage
-they had: and a steadfastness in their bold design
-which it does a faint-hearted age good to look back
-upon. There was no thought of drawing back.
-Steadily, almost calmly, they extended their seats.
-They built homes, and deemed it certain their children
-would live there after them. But they did not
-love the rough, uneasy life for its own sake. How
-long did they keep, if they could, within sight of
-the sea! The wilderness was their refuge; but
-how long before it became their joy and hope!
-Here was their destiny cast; but their hearts lingered
-and held back. It was only as generations
-passed and the work widened about them that their
-thought also changed, and a new thrill sped along
-their blood. Their life had been new and strange
-from their first landing in the wilderness. Their
-houses, their food, their clothing, their neighborhood
-dealings were all such as only the frontier
-brings. Insensibly they were themselves changed.
-The strange life became familiar; their adjustment
-to it was at length unconscious and without effort;
-they had no plans which were not inseparably a part
-and a product of it. But, until they had turned<span class="pagenum" id="Page_227">227</span>
-their backs once for all upon the sea; until they
-saw their western borders cleared of the French;
-until the mountain passes had grown familiar, and
-the lands beyond the central and constant theme
-of their hope, the goal and dream of their young
-men, they did not become an American people.</p>
-
-<p>When they did, the great determining movement
-of our history began. The very visages of the
-people changed. That alert movement of the eye,
-that openness to every thought of enterprise or adventure,
-that nomadic habit which knows no fixed
-home and has plans ready to be carried any whither,—all
-the marks of the authentic type of the
-“American” as we know him came into our life.
-The crack of the whip and the song of the teamster,
-the heaving chorus of boatmen poling their
-heavy rafts upon the rivers, the laughter of the
-camp, the sound of bodies of men in the still forests,
-became the characteristic notes in our air. A
-roughened race, embrowned in the sun, hardened
-in manner by a coarse life of change and danger,
-loving the rude woods and the crack of the rifle,
-living to begin something new every day, striking
-with the broad and open hand, delicate in nothing
-but the touch of the trigger, leaving cities in its
-track as if by accident rather than design, settling
-again to the steady ways of a fixed life only when<span class="pagenum" id="Page_228">228</span>
-it must: such was the American people whose
-achievement it was to be to take possession of their
-continent from end to end ere their national government
-was a single century old. The picture is a
-very singular one! Settled life and wild side by
-side: civilization frayed at the edges,—taken forward
-in rough and ready fashion, with a song and
-a swagger,—not by statesmen, but by woodsmen
-and drovers, with axes and whips and rifles in their
-hands, clad in buckskin, like huntsmen.</p>
-
-<p>It has been said that we have here repeated
-some of the first processes of history; that the
-life and methods of our frontiersmen take us back
-to the fortunes and hopes of the men who crossed
-Europe when her forests, too, were still thick upon
-her. But the difference is really very fundamental,
-and much more worthy of remark than the likeness.
-Those shadowy masses of men whom we see
-moving upon the face of the earth in the far-away,
-questionable days when states were forming:
-even those stalwart figures we see so well as they
-emerge from the deep forests of Germany, to displace
-the Roman in all his western provinces and
-set up the states we know and marvel upon at this
-day, show us men working their new work at their
-own level. They do not turn back a long cycle of
-years from the old and settled states, the ordered<span class="pagenum" id="Page_229">229</span>
-cities, the tilled fields, and the elaborated governments
-of an ancient civilization, to begin as it were
-once more at the beginning. They carry alike
-their homes and their states with them in the camp
-and upon the ordered march of the host. They
-are men of the forest, or else men hardened always
-to take the sea in open boats. They live no more
-roughly in the new lands than in the old. The
-world has been frontier for them from the first.
-They may go forward with their life in these new
-seats from where they left off in the old. How
-different the circumstances of our first settlement
-and the building of new states on this side the
-sea! Englishmen, bred in law and ordered government
-ever since the Norman lawyers were followed
-a long five hundred years ago across the narrow
-seas by those masterful administrators of the strong
-Plantagenet race, leave an ancient realm and come
-into a wilderness where states have never been;
-leave a land of art and letters, which saw but yesterday
-“the spacious times of great Elizabeth,”
-where Shakespeare still lives in the gracious leisure
-of his closing days at Stratford, where cities teem
-with trade and men go bravely dight in cloth of
-gold, and turn back six centuries,—nay, a thousand
-years and more,—to the first work of building
-states in a wilderness! They bring the steadied<span class="pagenum" id="Page_230">230</span>
-habits and sobered thoughts of an ancient realm
-into the wild air of an untouched continent. The
-weary stretches of a vast sea lie, like a full thousand
-years of time, between them and the life in which
-till now all their thought was bred. Here they
-stand, as it were, with all their tools left behind,
-centuries struck out of their reckoning, driven back
-upon the long dormant instincts and forgotten craft
-of their race, not used this long age. Look how
-singular a thing: the work of a primitive race, the
-thought of a civilized! Hence the strange, almost
-grotesque groupings of thought and affairs in that
-first day of our history. Subtle politicians speak
-the phrases and practice the arts of intricate diplomacy
-from council chambers placed within log huts
-within a clearing. Men in ruffs and lace and
-polished shoe-buckles thread the lonely glades of
-primeval forests. The microscopical distinctions
-of the schools, the thin notes of a metaphysical
-theology are woven in and out through the labyrinths
-of grave sermons that run hours long upon
-the still air of the wilderness. Belief in dim refinements
-of dogma is made the test for man or woman
-who seeks admission to a company of pioneers.
-When went there by an age since the great flood
-when so singular a thing was seen as this: thousands
-of civilized men suddenly rusticated and<span class="pagenum" id="Page_231">231</span>
-bade do the work of primitive peoples,—Europe
-<em>frontiered</em>!</p>
-
-<p>Of course there was a deep change wrought, if
-not in these men, at any rate in their children;
-and every generation saw the change deepen. It
-must seem to every thoughtful man a notable thing
-how, while the change was wrought, the simplest
-of things complex were revealed in the clear air of
-the New World: how all accidentals seemed to
-fall away from the structure of government, and
-the simple first principles were laid bare that abide
-always; how social distinctions were stripped off,
-shown to be the mere cloaks and masks they were,
-and every man brought once again to a clear realization
-of his actual relations to his fellows! It
-was as if trained and sophisticated men had been
-rid of a sudden of their sophistication and of all
-the theory of their life, and left with nothing but
-their discipline of faculty, a schooled and sobered
-instinct. And the fact that we kept always, for
-close upon three hundred years, a like element in
-our life, a frontier people always in our van, is, so
-far, the central and determining fact of our national
-history. “East” and “West,” an ever-changing
-line, but an unvarying experience and a constant
-leaven of change working always within the body
-of our folk. Our political, our economic, our social<span class="pagenum" id="Page_232">232</span>
-life has felt this potent influence from the wild
-border all our history through. The “West” is
-the great word of our history. The “Westerner”
-has been the type and master of our American life.
-Now at length, as I have said, we have lost our
-frontier: our front lies almost unbroken along all
-the great coast line of the western sea. The Westerner,
-in some day soon to come, will pass out of
-our life, as he so long ago passed out of the life of
-the Old World. Then a new epoch will open for
-us. Perhaps it has opened already. Slowly we
-shall grow old, compact our people, study the delicate
-adjustments of an intricate society, and ponder
-the niceties, as we have hitherto pondered the bulks
-and structural framework, of government. Have
-we not, indeed, already come to these things? But
-the past we know. We can “see it steady and
-see it whole;” and its central movement and motive
-are gross and obvious to the eye.</p>
-
-<p>Till the first century of the Constitution is
-rounded out we stand all the while in the presence
-of that stupendous westward movement which has
-filled the continent: so vast, so various, at times
-so tragical, so swept by passion. Through all the
-long time there has been a line of rude settlements
-along our front wherein the same tests of power
-and of institutions were still being made that were<span class="pagenum" id="Page_233">233</span>
-made first upon the sloping banks of the rivers of
-old Virginia and within the long sweep of the Bay
-of Massachusetts. The new life of the West has
-reacted all the while—who shall say how powerfully?—upon
-the older life of the East; and yet
-the East has moulded the West as if she sent forward
-to it through every decade of the long process
-the chosen impulses and suggestions of history.
-The West has taken strength, thought, training,
-selected aptitudes out of the old treasures of the
-East,—as if out of a new Orient; while the East
-has itself been kept fresh, vital, alert, originative
-by the West, her blood quickened all the while, her
-youth through every age renewed. Who can say in
-a word, in a sentence, in a volume, what destinies
-have been variously wrought, with what new examples
-of growth and energy, while, upon this unexampled
-scale, community has passed beyond community
-across the vast reaches of this great continent!</p>
-
-<p>The great process is the more significant because
-it has been distinctively a national process. Until
-the Union was formed and we had consciously set
-out upon a separate national career, we moved but
-timidly across the nearer hills. Our most remote
-settlements lay upon the rivers and in the open
-glades of Tennessee and Kentucky. It was in the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_234">234</span>
-years that immediately succeeded the war of 1812
-that the movement into the West began to be a
-mighty migration. Till then our eyes had been
-more often in the East than in the West. Not
-only were foreign questions to be settled and our
-standing among the nations to be made good, but
-we still remained acutely conscious and deliberately
-conservative of our Old-World connections. For
-all we were so new a people and lived so simple and
-separate a life, we had still the sobriety and the
-circumspect fashions of action that belong to an old
-society. We were, in government and manners,
-but a disconnected part of the world beyond the
-seas. Its thought and habit still set us our standards
-of speech and action. And this, not because
-of imitation, but because of actual and long abiding
-political and social connection with the mother
-country. Our statesmen,—strike but the names
-of Samuel Adams and Patrick Henry from the list,
-together with all like untutored spirits, who stood
-for the new, unreverencing ardor of a young democracy,—our
-statesmen were such men as might
-have taken their places in the House of Commons
-or in the Cabinet at home as naturally and with as
-easy an adjustment to their place and task as in
-the Continental Congress or in the immortal Constitutional
-Convention. Think of the stately ways<span class="pagenum" id="Page_235">235</span>
-and the grand air and the authoritative social
-understandings of the generation that set the new
-government afoot,—the generation of Washington
-and John Adams. Think, too, of the conservative
-tradition that guided all the early history of that
-government: that early line of gentlemen Presidents:
-that steady “cabinet succession to the Presidency”
-which came at length to seem almost like
-an oligarchy to the impatient men who were shut
-out from it. The line ended, with a sort of chill,
-in stiff John Quincy Adams, too cold a man to be
-a people’s prince after the old order of Presidents;
-and the year 1829, which saw Jackson come in,
-saw the old order go out.</p>
-
-<p>The date is significant. Since the war of 1812,
-undertaken as if to set us free to move westward,
-seven States had been admitted to the Union: and
-the whole number of States was advanced to
-twenty-four. Eleven new States had come into
-partnership with the old thirteen. The voice of
-the West rang through all our counsels; and, in
-Jackson, the new partners took possession of the
-Government. It is worth while to remember how
-men stood amazed at the change: how startled,
-chagrined, dismayed the conservative States of the
-East were at the revolution they saw effected, the
-riot of change they saw set in; and no man who<span class="pagenum" id="Page_236">236</span>
-has once read the singular story can forget how
-the eight years Jackson reigned saw the Government,
-and politics themselves, transformed. For
-long,—the story being written in the regions
-where the shock and surprise of the change was
-greatest,—the period of this momentous revolution
-was spoken of amongst us as a period of
-degeneration, the birth-time of a deep and permanent
-demoralization in our politics. But we see it
-differently now. Whether we have any taste or
-stomach for that rough age or not, however much
-we may wish that the old order might have stood,
-the generation of Madison and Adams have been
-prolonged, and the good tradition of the early days
-handed on unbroken and unsullied, we now know
-that what the nation underwent in that day of
-change was not degeneration, great and perilous as
-were the errors of the time, but regeneration.
-The old order was changed, once and for all. A
-new nation stepped, with a touch of swagger, upon
-the stage,—a nation which had broken alike with
-the traditions and with the wisely wrought experience
-of the Old World, and which, with all the
-haste and rashness of youth, was minded to work
-out a separate policy and destiny of its own. It
-was a day of hazards, but there was nothing sinister
-at the heart of the new plan. It was a wasteful<span class="pagenum" id="Page_237">237</span>
-experiment, to fling out, without wise guides, upon
-untried ways; but an abounding continent afforded
-enough and to spare even for the wasteful. It was
-sure to be so with a nation that came out of the
-secluded vales of a virgin continent. It was the
-bold frontier voice of the West sounding in affairs.
-The timid shivered, but the robust waxed strong
-and rejoiced, in the tonic air of the new day.</p>
-
-<p>It was then we swung out into the main paths
-of our history. The new voices that called us were
-first silvery, like the voice of Henry Clay, and
-spoke old familiar words of eloquence. The first
-spokesmen of the West even tried to con the classics,
-and spoke incongruously in the phrases of
-politics long dead and gone to dust, as Benton did.
-But presently the tone changed, and it was the
-truculent and masterful accents of the real frontiersman
-that rang dominant above the rest, harsh,
-impatient, and with an evident dash of temper.
-The East slowly accustomed itself to the change;
-caught the movement, though it grumbled and
-even trembled at the pace; and managed most of
-the time to keep in the running. But it was
-always henceforth to be the West that set the
-pace. There is no mistaking the questions that
-have ruled our spirits as a nation during the present
-century. The public land question, the tariff<span class="pagenum" id="Page_238">238</span>
-question, and the question of slavery,—these dominate
-from first to last. It was the West that
-made each one of these the question that it was.
-Without the free lands to which every man who
-chose might go, there would not have been that
-easy prosperity of life and that high standard of
-abundance which seemed to render it necessary
-that, if we were to have manufactures and a diversified
-industry at all, we should foster new undertakings
-by a system of protection which would
-make the profits of the factory as certain and as
-abundant as the profits of the farm. It was the
-constant movement of the population, the constant
-march of wagon trains into the West, that made it
-so cardinal a matter of policy whether the great
-national domain should <em>be</em> free land or not: and
-that was the land question. It was the settlement
-of the West that transformed slavery from an
-accepted institution into passionate matter of controversy.</p>
-
-<p>Slavery within the States of the Union stood
-sufficiently protected by every solemn sanction the
-Constitution could afford. No man could touch it
-there, think, or hope, or purpose what he might.
-But where new States were to be made it was not
-so. There at every step choice must be made:
-slavery or no slavery?—a new choice for every<span class="pagenum" id="Page_239">239</span>
-new State: a fresh act of origination to go with
-every fresh act of organization. Had there been
-no Territories, there could have been no slavery
-question, except by revolution and contempt of
-fundamental law. But with a continent to be peopled,
-the choice thrust itself insistently forward at
-every step and upon every hand. This was the
-slavery question: not what should be done to reverse
-the past, but what should be done to redeem
-the future. It was so men of that day saw it,—and
-so also must historians see it. We must not
-mistake the programme of the Anti-Slavery Society
-for the platform of the Republican party,
-or forget that the very war itself was begun ere
-any purpose of abolition took shape amongst those
-who were statesmen and in authority. It was a
-question, not of freeing men, but of preserving a
-Free Soil. Kansas showed us what the problem
-was, not South Carolina: and it was the Supreme
-Court, not the slave-owners, who formulated the
-matter for our thought and purpose.</p>
-
-<p>And so, upon every hand and throughout every
-national question, was the commerce between East
-and West made up: that commerce and exchange
-of ideas, inclinations, purposes, and principles which
-has constituted the moving force of our life as a
-nation. Men illustrate the operation of these singular<span class="pagenum" id="Page_240">240</span>
-forces better than questions can: and no
-man illustrates it better than Abraham Lincoln.</p>
-
-<div class="poetry-container">
-<div class="poetry">
-  <div class="stanza">
-    <div class="verse indentq">“Great captains with their guns and drums</div>
-    <div class="verse indent0">Disturb our judgment for the hour;</div>
-    <div class="verse indent0">But at last silence comes:</div>
-    <div class="verse indent0">These all are gone, and, standing like a tower,</div>
-    <div class="verse indent0">Our children shall behold his fame,</div>
-    <div class="verse indent0">The kindly-earnest, brave, foreseeing man,</div>
-    <div class="verse indent0">Sagacious, patient, dreading praise not blame,</div>
-    <div class="verse indent0">New birth of our new soil, the first American.”</div>
-  </div>
-</div>
-</div>
-
-<p class="in0">It is a poet’s verdict; but it rings in the authentic
-tone of the seer. It must be also the verdict of
-history. He would be a rash man who should say
-he understood Abraham Lincoln. No doubt natures
-deep as his, and various almost to the point
-of self-contradiction, can be sounded only by the
-judgment of men of a like sort,—if any such there
-be. But some things we all may see and judge
-concerning him. You have in him the type and
-flower of our growth. It is as if Nature had made
-a typical American, and then had added with liberal
-hand the royal quality of genius, to show us
-what the type could be. Lincoln owed nothing to
-his birth, everything to his growth: had no training
-save what he gave himself; no nurture, but only a
-wild and native strength. His life was his schooling,
-and every day of it gave to his character a
-new touch of development. His manhood not only,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_241">241</span>
-but his perception also, expanded with his life.
-His eyes, as they looked more and more abroad,
-beheld the national life, and comprehended it: and
-the lad who had been so rough-cut a provincial
-became, when grown to manhood, the one leader in
-all the nation who held the whole people singly in
-his heart:—held even the Southern people there,
-and would have won them back. And so we have
-in him what we must call the perfect development
-of native strength, the rounding out and nationalization
-of the provincial. Andrew Jackson was a
-type, not of the nation, but of the West. For all
-the tenderness there was in the stormy heart of
-the masterful man, and staunch and simple loyalty
-to all who loved him, he learned nothing in the
-East; kept always the flavor of the rough school in
-which he had been bred; was never more than a
-frontier soldier and gentleman. Lincoln differed
-from Jackson by all the length of his unmatched
-capacity to learn. Jackson could understand only
-men of his own kind; Lincoln could understand
-men of all sorts and from every region of the land:
-seemed himself, indeed, to be all men by turns, as
-mood succeeded mood in his strange nature. He
-never ceased to stand, in his bony angles, the
-express image of the ungainly frontiersman. His
-mind never lost the vein of coarseness that had<span class="pagenum" id="Page_242">242</span>
-marked him grossly when a youth. And yet how
-he grew and strengthened in the real stuff of dignity
-and greatness: how nobly he could bear himself
-without the aid of grace! He kept always the
-shrewd and seeing eye of the woodsman and the
-hunter, and the flavor of wild life never left him:
-and yet how easily his view widened to great
-affairs; how surely he perceived the value and the
-significance of whatever touched him and made
-him neighbor to itself!</p>
-
-<p>Lincoln’s marvelous capacity to extend his comprehension
-to the measure of what he had in hand
-is the one distinguishing mark of the man: and to
-study the development of that capacity in him is
-little less than to study, where it is as it were perfectly
-registered, the national life itself. This boy
-lived his youth in Illinois when it was a frontier
-State. The youth of the State was coincident with
-his own: and man and State kept equal pace in
-their striding advance to maturity. The frontier
-population was an intensely political population.
-It felt to the quick the throb of the nation’s life,—for
-the nation’s life ran through it, going its
-eager way to the westward. The West was not
-separate from the East. Its communities were
-every day receiving fresh members from the East,
-and the fresh impulse of direct suggestion. Their<span class="pagenum" id="Page_243">243</span>
-blood flowed to them straight from the warmest
-veins of the older communities. More than that,
-elements which were separated in the East were
-mingled in the West: which displayed to the eye
-as it were a sort of epitome of the most active and
-permanent forces of the national life. In such
-communities as these Lincoln mixed daily from the
-first with men of every sort and from every quarter
-of the country. With them he discussed neighborhood
-politics, the politics of the State, the politics
-of the nation,—and his mind became traveled as
-he talked. How plainly amongst such neighbors,
-there in Illinois, must it have become evident that
-national questions were centring more and more in
-the West as the years went by: coming as it were
-to meet them. Lincoln went twice down the
-Mississippi, upon the slow rafts that carried wares
-to its mouth, and saw with his own eyes, so used
-to look directly and point-blank upon men and
-affairs, characteristic regions of the South. He
-worked his way slowly and sagaciously, with that
-larger sort of sagacity which so marked him all his
-life, into the active business of state politics; sat
-twice in the state legislature, and then for a term
-in Congress,—his sensitive and seeing mind open
-all the while to every turn of fortune and every
-touch of nature in the moving affairs he looked<span class="pagenum" id="Page_244">244</span>
-upon. All the while, too, he continued to canvass,
-piece by piece, every item of politics, as of old,
-with his neighbors, familiarly around the stove, or
-upon the corners of the street, or more formally
-upon the stump; and kept always in direct contact
-with the ordinary views of ordinary men. Meanwhile
-he read, as nobody else around him read,
-and sought to gain a complete mastery over speech,
-with the conscious purpose to prevail in its use;
-derived zest from the curious study of mathematical
-proof, and amusement as well as strength from
-the practice of clean and naked statements of
-truth. It was all irregularly done, but strenuously,
-with the same instinct throughout, and with
-a steady access of facility and power. There was
-no sudden leap for this man, any more than for
-other men, from crudeness to finished power, from
-an understanding of the people of Illinois to an
-understanding of the people of the United States.
-And thus he came at last, with infinite pains and a
-wonder of endurance, to his great national task
-with a self-trained capacity which no man could
-match, and made upon a scale as liberal as the life
-of the people. You could not then set this athlete
-a pace in learning or in perceiving that was too
-hard for him. He knew the people and their life
-as no other man did or could: and now stands in<span class="pagenum" id="Page_245">245</span>
-his place singular in all the annals of mankind, the
-“brave, sagacious, foreseeing, patient man” of the
-people, “new birth of our new soil, the first
-American.”</p>
-
-<p>We have here a national man presiding over
-sectional men. Lincoln understood the East better
-than the East understood him or the people from
-whom he sprung: and this is every way a very
-noteworthy circumstance. For my part, I read a
-lesson in the singular career of this great man. Is
-it possible the East remains sectional while the
-West broadens to a wider view?</p>
-
-<div class="poetry-container">
-<div class="poetry">
-  <div class="stanza">
-    <div class="verse indentq">“Be strong-backed, brown-handed, upright as your pines;</div>
-    <div class="verse indent0">By the scale of a hemisphere shape your designs,”</div>
-  </div>
-</div>
-</div>
-
-<p class="in0">is an inspiring programme for the woodsman and
-the pioneer; but how are you to be brown-handed
-in a city office? What if you never see the upright
-pines? How are you to have so big a purpose on
-so small a part of the hemisphere? As it has
-grown old, unquestionably, the East has grown
-sectional. There is no suggestion of the prairie in
-its city streets, or of the embrowned ranchman and
-farmer in its well-dressed men. Its ports teem with
-shipping from Europe and the Indies. Its newspapers
-run upon the themes of an Old World. It
-hears of the great plains of the continent as of foreign
-parts, which it may never think to see except<span class="pagenum" id="Page_246">246</span>
-from a car window. Its life is self-centred and
-selfish. The West, save where special interests
-centre (as in those pockets of silver where men’s
-eyes catch as it were an eager gleam from the very
-ore itself): the West is in less danger of sectionalization.
-Who shall say in that wide country where
-one region ends and another begins, or, in that free
-and changing society, where one class ends and
-another begins?</p>
-
-<p>This, surely, is the moral of our history. The
-East has spent and been spent for the West: has
-given forth her energy, her young men and her substance,
-for the new regions that have been a-making
-all the century through. But has she learned as
-much as she has taught, or taken as much as she
-has given? Look what it is that has now at last
-taken place. The westward march has stopped,
-upon the final slopes of the Pacific; and now the
-plot thickens. Populations turn upon their old
-paths; fill in the spaces they passed by neglected
-in their first journey in search of a land of promise;
-settle to a life such as the East knows as well as
-the West,—nay, much better. With the change,
-the pause, the settlement, our people draw into
-closer groups, stand face to face, to know each other
-and be known: and the time has come for the East
-to learn in her turn; to broaden her understanding<span class="pagenum" id="Page_247">247</span>
-of political and economic conditions to the scale of
-a hemisphere, as her own poet bade. Let us be
-sure that we get the national temperament; send
-our minds abroad upon the continent, become
-neighbors to all the people that live upon it, and
-lovers of them all, as Lincoln was.</p>
-
-<p>Read but your history aright, and you shall not
-find the task too hard. Your own local history,
-look but deep enough, tells the tale you must take
-to heart. Here upon our own seaboard, as truly as
-ever in the West, was once a national frontier, with
-an elder East beyond the seas. Here, too, various
-peoples combined, and elements separated elsewhere
-effected a tolerant and wholesome mixture. Here,
-too, the national stream flowed full and strong, bearing
-a thousand things upon its currents. Let us
-resume and keep the vision of that time; know
-ourselves, our neighbors, our destiny, with lifted
-and open eyes; see our history truly, in its great
-proportions; be ourselves liberal as the great principles
-we profess; and so be the people who might
-have again the heroic adventures and do again the
-heroic work of the past. ’Tis thus we shall renew
-our youth and secure our age against decay.</p>
-
-<div class="chapter"><div class="transnote">
-<h2 class="nobreak" id="Transcribers_Notes">Transcriber’s Notes</h2>
-
-<p>Simple typographical errors were corrected.</p>
-
-<p>Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made
-consistent when a predominant preference was found
-in the original book; otherwise they were not changed.</p>
-</div></div>
-
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