Franklin, Washington, Lincoln

THE season has brought us a distinct reminder of the great American triumvirate of fame in three notable biographic works. No one of the three can be called a great book ; the subject of each dwarfs the narrative; nor can we assure ourselves that either is likely to prove a classic ; but they are all likely to hold a place not merely till better biographies push them aside, but probably long after writers of greater skill or more abundant opportunity have contributed fresh estimates.

I he problem which confronts one who would set Franklin forth is a peculiar one. There are three tolerably distinct Franklins. There is the man whom Priestley knew, there is the friend of Sally Stevenson and Madame Brillon, and there is the diplomat whom Vergennes encountered. Yet what could these accomplished men and women of England and France know of the runaway apprentice and the Philadelphia neighbor ? Mr. McMaster has found enough to say about Franklin as a man of letters ; Mr. Morse has included him in his series of American Statesmen ;¹ if the new Riverside Science Series is to include biographies, there could be no fitter subject than Franklin; and if American Religious Leaders is comprehensive enough to take in men who have been eminent as philanthropists or who have strongly affected the moral sense of Americans, there would be no impropriety in placing Franklin in a group which holds Jonathan Edwards and Theodore Parker.

Mr. Morse recognizes this comprehensiveness of Franklin, and the limitations under which he presents him. “ Mr. Parton,” he says, “ has given us such an admirable biography, so exhaustive and so remarkably happy in setting the real man vividly before the reader, that I feel that I must give something between a reason and an apology for the existence of this volume. The fact is simply this : without a life of Franklin this series would have appeared as absurdly imperfect as a library of English fiction with Scott or Thackeray absent from the shelves. The volume was a necessity ; and since Mr. Parton’s work, even if it could be borrowed or stolen, would not fit the space, this little book has been written. No poor genie of Oriental magic was ever squeezed into more disproportionately narrow quarters than is Franklin in these four hundred pages; but again necessity must bear the burden of responsibility.” It is very clear to the reader that Mr. Morse frankly accepted the conditions under which he was compelled to work. He was not writing a life of Benjamin Franklin; he was answering the question, What part did Franklin play as a statesman, both on the stage of the colonial development and in the broader theatre of international politics ? He has compressed into fifty pages all the interesting period of Franklin’s history which to the general biographer is peculiarly important, — the period of formation of character and of incipient public life; and more than once he is obliged, with manifest regret, to forego the pleasure of following Franklin’s course minutely, because the subject is not intimately connected with Franklin’s statesmanship. He has even generously condensed his account of the final treaty operations in Paris, out of regard for the writer who is engaged upon Jay in the Statesmen Series.

Although Mr. Morse has been faithful thus to the strict demands of his theme, he has by no means produced a fragmentary work. He has recognized very clearly the necessity of showing the foundation upon which were built the great structure of Franklin’s public life; and his early chapters, in which he deals with the conditions of Franklin’s growth and with the fundamental qualities of character, are admirable for their compact, forcible presentation of this important part of his subject. Moreover, his free, sensible view of statesmanship as something more than officialism has led him to regard Franklin’s general influence over his countrymen as an integral part of his theme, so that after all the only Franklin who is conspicuously absent from the book is Franklin the physicist. The narrative gains in vigor by the necessity of compression, and Mr. Morse’s attitude is one of such frank yet impartial admiration as to give the reader an agreeable confidence in his candor and fairness.

The book is a vigorous one, and will materially help the student in American history to understand the very important part of the struggle for nationality which was going on at Paris during the time when Englishmen were fighting each other in America. Mr. Morse says, with great force : “ We read about the horrors of the winter camp at Valley Forge, and we shudder at all the details of the vivid picture. The anxiety, the toil, the humiliation, which Franklin endured for many winters and many summers in Paris, in sustaining the national credit, do not make a picture, do not furnish material for a readable chapter in history; yet many a man would far rather have faced Washington’s lot than Franklin’s.”

Mr. Lodge may be said to have had somewhat the same problem before him, and to have indulged his personal taste a little more in the work which he has written on George Washington ² for the Statesmen Series. It would not be just to say that Washington as a statesman occupies one of the two volumes devoted to him, and Washington as a soldier the other, but it is quite evident that if Mr. Lodge had been willing to confine himself to a study of Washington as a statesman be could have compressed his work into a single volume. We think such a course would not only have made his book a fitter member of a series, but would have enhanced its value; for it would have enabled the author to expend his strength upon that part of his subject where his work is strongest, and where he comes least into comparison with writers of general history. A large part of Mr. Lodge’s first volume is necessarily a recapitulation of familiar facts in the history of the war for independence.

Dismissing, however, all consideration of the book which Mr. Lodge did not choose to write, and asking only how far he has succeeded in writing a deliberate life of Washington, independent of any series, we can take genuine pleasure in so spirited a piece of work. It can scarcely be called a critical biography. There is little evidence that Mr. Lodge has searched for his material beyond the nearest and most tangible documents. It is rather the work of a man at home in the general field of American history, who is impressed with the importance of this single figure, and finds the subject a convenient one also for carrying more or less comment on politics in general. He sets about his task, moreover, with an apostolic zeal which detracts from his power as a biographer. His position would have been stronger if he had not felt it necessary to divest his readers of possible false views respecting Washington. We doubt if the persons who take up his book will, as a rule, bring to the reading an artificial conception of Washington; and Mr. Lodge, by the fervor with which he continually sets up the ninepins of false Washingtons in order to bowl them over, may leave in the minds of some an uneasy apprehension lest his hero was as priggish, as cold, as hard, and as unlovable as so-called popular notions make him out to be. He doth protest too much. If Mr. Lodge, assuming a tolerably common acquaintance with the history in which Washington was so commanding a figure, had expended his strength in setting Washington forth clearly and humanly, ignoring the necessity of combating false views in set terms, he might have made a book less like a tractate, and more like a piece of literature.

In saying this we are simply expressing the superiority of constructive biography over polemical treatises. Mr. Lodge shows so clearly that he understands Washington, he has so acute a judgment when dealing with the public questions by which Washington was tested, that he might easily have rested his case upon a luminous statement of the situation; the strength of his position would have been such, and he would have been so sure of the general sympathy of his readers, that the laborious defense which he makes might well have been spared. Much that he says again and again and reiterates in a summary is interesting, but somewhat superfluous. The conclusions which he reaches should have been the conclusions of his years of study, and have formed the reason for his book : lying in his mind, they might have given point to his interpretation of Washington’s life ; published, they tend to draw the reader away from Washington to a consideration of what Mr. Lodge thinks about Washington. Washington is a very great subject, — too great to serve as a saddle for a rider.

For current reading, however, this work is unmistakably interesting, and as criticism which is necessarily temporary it will serve most excellent ends. In fact, it is so close to the time that the reader fresh from recent political lessons will occasionally read passages which serve as footnotes to contemporary history. How capital, for example, is this characterization of party methods in the early days of the republic ! “ Jefferson knew that Hamilton and all who fought with him were as sincerely in favor of a republic as he himself was; but his unerring genius in political management told him that he could never raise a party or make a party-cry out of the statement that, while he favored a democratic republic, the men to whom he was opposed preferred one of a more aristocratic caste. It was necessary to have something much more highly seasoned than this. So he took the ground that his opponents were monarchists, bent on establishing a monarchy in this country, and were backed by a ‘ corrupt squadron ’ in Congress in the pay of the treasury. This was of course utter rubbish, but it served its purpose admirably. Jefferson, indeed, shouted these cries so much that he almost came to believe in them, and sympathetic writers of this day repeat them as if they had reality, instead of having been mere noise to frighten the unwary.” Mr. Lodge could not have written more to the point if he had been describing the tactics of extreme party men of this day when screaming “free-trade” and “British gold ” at every one who thinks it time to overhaul the war-tariff. And when one comes upon such a passage as this : “ He [Washington] was as far removed as possible from that highly virtuous and very ineffective class of persons who will not support anything that is not perfect, and who generally contrive to do more harm than all the avowed enemies of sound government,” — rather odd result to proceed from a “ very ineffective ” class — one, pleased with the subtleties of historical research, might set himself to calculating the date when Mr. Lodge penned the sentence. We wish, by the way, that while he was engaged in annotating 1789 with 1889 he had had more to say about Washington’s views on office-seekers and appointments to office. There is a letter of the President’s which cannot be quoted too often. It will be long before it is hackneyed.

We are disposed to think that the most valuable contribution which Mr. Lodge has made to the Washington literature is in the interpretation which he has made of the facts of our history which throw light upon the personality of Washington. His account, for example, of the Virginian aristocracy is altogether admirable, and helps to an appreciation of the elements which combined in the education of Washington. He could not be called a man of the people in the sense that Jackson was, or Lincoln ; and this, we suspect, lies at the bottom of the loose statements, which Mr. Lodge controverts with good reason and some heat, that Washington was an English country gentleman rather than an American. He belonged in the governing class, and in that division of the class which had come to its fullest maturity. When America broke away from the British Empire, there were in the chief towns representatives of the British governing class ; but in Virginia a governing class had been formed on the soil out of the conditions of life, unaffected to any considerable degree by the direct interposition of British influence. It was therefore a native, and not a foreign element in American life. The foreign aristocratic element broke off from America when the schism came : the Boston and New York Tories went to Halifax and to England when they could ; the native aristocratic element was and remained sturdily American.

Mr. Lodge is led to assert the Americanism of Washington in reply to statements that Lincoln was the first American, and the passage is interesting to us here and now, because it brings together the three names before us. He has been quoting Mr. Clarence King’s prefatory note to Hay and Nicolay’s Life of Lincoln, in which occurs the sentence : " Abraham Lincoln was the first American to reach the lonely height of immortal fame. Before him, within the narrow compass of our history, were but two preëminent names, — Columbus the discoverer, and Washington the founder ; the one an Italian seer, the other an English country gentleman.” His reply is worth giving at some length : —

«In order to point his sentence and prove his first postulate, Mr. King is obliged not only to dispose of Washington, but to introduce Columbus, who never was imagined in the wildest fantasy to be an American, and to omit Franklin. The omission of itself is fatal to Mr. King’s case. Franklin has certainly a ‘ preëminent name. He has, too, ‘ immortal fame,’ although of course of a widely different character from that of either Washington or Lincoln, but he was a great man in the broad sense of a world-wide reputation. Yet no one has ever ventured to call Benjamin Franklin an Englishman. He was a colonial American, of course, but he was as intensely an American as any man who has lived on this continent before or since. A man of the people, he was American by the character of his genius, by his versatility, the vivacity of his intellect, and his mental dexterity. In his abilities, his virtues, and his defects he was an American, and so plainly one as to be beyond the reach of doubt or question. . . . Unless one is prepared to set Franklin down as an Englishman, which would be as reasonable as to say that Daniel Webster was a fine example of the Slavic race, it must be admitted that it was possible for the colonies to produce in the eighteenth century a genuine American who won immortal fame. If they could produce one of one type, they could produce a second of another type, and there was, therefore, nothing inherently impossible in existing conditions to prevent Washington from being an American. Lincoln was undoubtedly the first great American of his type, but that is not the only type of American. It is one which, as bodied forth in Abraham Lincoln, commands the love and veneration of the people of the United States, and the admiration of the world wherever his name is known. To the noble and towering greatness of his mind and character it does not add one hair’sbreadth to say that he was the first American, or that he was of a common or uncommon type. Greatness like Lincoln’s is far beyond such qualifications, and least of all is it necessary to his fame to push Washington from his birthright.”

Mr. Lodge’s stout defense of Washington’s Americanism is accented throughout the book by a bitterness of tone toward England, as if one could not be a good American without hating England. Our criticism upon this feature is that it comes perilously near personal feeling, and the sympathies or antipathies of an historical writer regarding a great nation are of no importance to his readers. The personal feeling which we can value and which counts in the work is that which the author has for his subject, and it is refreshing to find so hearty and loyal an admiration as Mr. Lodge has for Washington. An impassive, scientific judgment would have gone far toward corroborating the opinions of those who have regarded Washington as a dull, cold man. When a biographer like Mr. Lodge is stirred by his subject, he has won half the battle in persuading his readers that Washington inspired his contemporaries with personal affection and admiration.

The life of Lincoln ³ which Mr. Herndon has prepared, with Mr. Weik’s aid, is by no means so satisfactory a piece of work as either of the two books which we have been considering, but its very absence of form will strike the reader as an evidence of its genuineness ; and as a contribution to history it is more important than Mr. Morse’s Franklin or Mr. Lodge’s Washington, since the establishment of a true conception of an historic figure is of more consequence than the careful re-statement of a received view or the correction of popular errors. We think we are not mistaken in looking upon Herndon’s Lincoln as a most timely and valuable contribution to a just understanding of that great man, even though much of it in a preliminary form appears to have found a place originally in Lamon’s Life. Considered only as a mémoire pour servir, it is of unmistakable service. it bears the marks of patient and painstaking labor in gathering all the facts regarding Lincoln’s origin and early years; and when the reader considers that Mr. Herndon was Lincoln’s law partner for twenty years ; that he made his acquaintance as far back as 1837 ; that he lived amongst Lincoln’s early companions, and, so to speak, spoke the Illinois language, it is easy to see how important may be his testimony. In addition, the open-minded reader can scarcely read this artless book without feeling a growing confidence in Mr. Herndon’s honesty and accuracy. The very offenses against good taste show him to be a good witness, and we. do not see how any student of Lincoln’s character, and especially any one who undertakes hereafter to set Lincoln forth, can avoid being strongly affected by this work. That the book is likely to have a general circulation, unless among the President’s old neighbors, we are not quite ready to believe, though it will have many charms for educated readers through the very homeliness of the narrative. Nor is it the homeliness alone, but often a graphic touch, which will arrest the attention. Here is a passage, for instance, relating to Lincoln’s loneliness in domestic life : —

“ Mr. Lincoln never had a confidant, and therefore never unbosomed himself to others. He never spoke of his trials to me, or, so far as I knew, to any of his friends. It was a great burden to carry, but he bore it sadly enough and without a murmur. I could always realize when he was in distress, without being told. He was not exactly an early riser, — that is, he never usually appeared at the office till about nine o’clock in the morning. I usually preceded him an hour. Sometimes, however, he would come down as early as seven o’clock, — in fact, on one occasion I remember he came down before daylight. If, on arriving at the office, I found him in, I knew instantly that a breeze had sprung up over the domestic sea, and that the waters were troubled. He would either be lying on the lounge, looking skyward, or doubled up in a chair, with his feet resting on the sill of a back window. He would not look up on my entering, and only answered my ‘Good-morning’ with a grunt. I at once busied myself with pen and paper, or ran through the leaves of some book; but the evidence of his melancholy and distress was so plain, and his silence so significant, that I would grow restless myself, and, finding some excuse to go to the court-house or elsewhere, would leave the room.

“ The door of the office opening into a narrow hallway was half glass, with a curtain on it working on brass rings strung on wire. As I passed out on these occasions I would draw the curtain across the glass, and before I reached the bottom of the stairs I could hear the key turn in the lock, and Lincoln was alone in the gloom. An hour in the clerk’s office at the court-house, an hour longer in a neighboring store, having passed, I would return. By that time either a client had dropped in, and Lincoln was propounding the law, or else the cloud of despondency had passed away, and lie was busy in the recital of an Indiana story to whistle off the recollections of the morning’s gloom. Noon having arrived, I would depart homeward for my dinner. Returning within an hour, I would find him still in the office, — although his house stood but a few squares away, — lunching on a slice of cheese and a handful of crackers, which, in my absence, he had brought up from a store below. Separating for the day at five or six o’clock in the evening, I would still leave him behind, either sitting on a box at the foot of the stairway, entertaining a few loungers, or killing time in the same way on the court-house steps. A light in the office after dark attested his presence there till late along in the night, when, after all the world had gone to sleep, the tall form of the man destined to be the nation’s President could have been seen strolling along in the shadows of trees and buildings, and quietly slipping in through the door of a modest frame house, which it pleased the world, in a conventional way, to call his home.”

Some of the incidents in this life will not be pleasant reading to those who have already constructed a Lincoln after their own imagination, and are loath to give up the shadow for the reality. But to those who wish to know the truth, at whatever cost to illusions, this work will come laden with many suggestions. It will play a large part, we are confident, in the future construction of Lincoln in the minds of men, and we suspect that it will have one significant effect. There is a disposition, expressed by Mr. Lodge, to speak of Lincoln as a typical American, or a typical Western American. Mr. Herndon’s report will go far toward accenting those characteristics of Lincoln which set him by himself, and bring into high relief his marked personality, his uniqueness.

We do not suppose the time will ever come when new lives of Franklin, Washington, and Lincoln will not be offered to American readers: a few new facts will come to light, the point of view will shift, the audience will change, new forms of biographic writing and new manners in literature will arise; but, above all, these three names will always contain an inspiration, and so long as a nation lives its interest in the great characters it has produced will be undying. Buildings crumble, battlefields become populated, but art in letters and character in persons survive. And of these two, character is the more indestructible; so that it is even possible to care for Emerson’s genius in his poems because of our admiration for his fine personality, while some later poet may speak a language more intelligible and more harmonious. We can understand through these men how a people relying on tradition, and not on historical records, can come to elevate their heroes into demigods, and invest them with attributes taken from the entire series of events with which they were identified. Franklin thus becomes the personification of an optimistic shrewdness, a large, healthy nature, as of a young people gathering its strength and feeling its broadening power; Washington is the serene hero, undismayed by the failure of the hour, always confident in the success of the event; Lincoln, the sacrifice for national sin, and thus the briuger-in of national regeneration. But the clear light of a truth perpetually made more free from misconception is better than the most highly imagined myth, when character is in question; and every new historical writer who bends his endeavor to get at the exact truth regarding Franklin, Washington, or Lincoln is contributing to the slow building of just conceptions regarding men who are at once the highest product of national forces and the deepest foundation of national character.

The most interesting outcome of the celebration of Washington’s inauguration, last spring, was the evidence that it elicited of the power which Washington’s name possessed. No one need despair of the republic so long as that name can be uttered as a rebuke and instantly arrest the public attention. Mr. Lodge may disabuse his mind of the fear that an artificial Washington has been constructed in the popular imagination. The figure which rises to the mind is both lofty and human. Thus, too, physiologists may refer Lincoln’s melancholy to a disordered liver, and Mr. Herndon may weakly imagine that he was forever brooding over his obscure origin; but the mournful, sadeyed man who represented the nation in the hour of its agony has become too well known in the hearts of Americans to recede into narrower limits. With equal justice the people have learned to accept Franklin for what he was; not to ignore or disregard the complacency with which he looked back upon the mean morality of his youth, but to value the cheerfulness of his philosophy, and to see in his good citizenship the essential basis of that broad love of one’s neighbor which a democratic republic always must regard as a prime requisite in its members.