Title: Mere Literature and Other Essays
Author: Wilson, Woodrow
Language: English
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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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