It is the misfortune of American biography that it must needs be more or
less provincial, and that, contrary to what might have been predicted,
this quality in it predominates in proportion as the country grows
larger. Wanting any great and acknowledged centre of national life and
thought, our expansion has hitherto been rather aggregation than growth;
reputations must be hammered out thin to cover so wide a surface, and
the substance of most hardly holds out to the boundaries of a single
State. Our very history wants unity, and down to the Revolution the
attention is wearied and confused by having to divide itself among
thirteen parallel threads, instead of being concentred on a single clew.
A sense of remoteness and seclusion comes over us as we read, and we
cannot help asking ourselves, “Were _not_ these things done in a
corner?” Notoriety may be achieved in a narrow sphere, but fame demands
for its evidence a more distant and prolonged reverberation. To the
world at large we were but a short column of figures in the corner of a
blue-book, New England exporting so much salt-fish, timber, and Medford
rum, Virginia so many hogsheads of tobacco, and buying with the proceeds
a certain amount of English manufactures. The story of our early
colonization had a certain moral interest, to be sure, but was
altogether inferior in picturesque fascination to that of Mexico or
Peru. The lives of our worthies, like that of our nation, are bare of
those foregone and far-reaching associations with names, the
divining-rods of fancy, which the soldiers and civilians of the Old
World get for nothing by the mere accident of birth. Their historians
and biographers have succeeded to the good-will, as well as to the
long-established stand, of the shop of glory. Time is, after all, the
greatest of poets, and the sons of Memory stand a better chance of being
the heirs of Fame. The philosophic poet may find a proud solace in
saying,
“Avia Pieridum peragro loca nullius ante
Trita solo”;
but all the while he has the splendid centuries of Greece and Rome
behind him, and can begin his poem with invoking a goddess from whom
legend derived the planter of his race. His eyes looked out on a
landscape saturated with glorious recollections; he had seen Cæsar, and
heard Cicero. But who shall conjure with Saugus or Cato Four
Corners,--with Israel Putnam or Return Jonathan Meigs? We have been
transplanted, and for us the long hierarchical succession of history is
broken. The Past has not laid its venerable hands upon us in
consecration, conveying to us that mysterious influence whose force is
in its continuity. We are to Europe as the Church of England to her of
Rome. The latter old lady may be the Scarlet Woman, or the Beast with
ten horns, if you will, but hers are all the heirlooms, hers that vast
spiritual estate of tradition, nowhere yet everywhere, whose revenues
are none the less fruitful for being levied on the imagination. We may
claim that England’s history is also ours, but it is a _de jure_, and
not a _de facto_ property that we have in it,--something that may be
proved indeed, yet is a merely intellectual satisfaction, and does not
savor of the realty. Have we not seen the mockery crown and sceptre of
the exiled Stuarts in St. Peter’s? the medal struck so lately as 1784
with its legend, HEN IX MAG BRIT ET HIB REX, whose contractions but
faintly typify the scantness of the fact?
As the novelist complains that our society wants that sharp contrast of
character and costume which comes of caste, so in the narrative of our
historians we miss what may be called background and perspective, as if
the events and the actors in them failed of that cumulative interest
which only a long historical entail can give. Relatively, the crusade of
Sir William Pepperell was of more consequence than that of St. Louis,
and yet forgive us, injured shade of the second American baronet, if we
find the narrative of Joinville more interesting than your despatches to
Governor Shirley. Relatively, the insurrection of that Daniel whose
Irish patronymic Shea was euphonized into Shays, as a set-off for the
debasing of French chaise into shay, was more dangerous than that of
Charles Edward; but for some reason or other (as vice sometimes has the
advantage of virtue) the latter is more enticing to the imagination, and
the least authentic relic of it in song or story has a relish denied to
the painful industry of Minot. Our events seem to fall short of that
colossal proportion which befits the monumental style. Look grave as we
will, there is something ludicrous in Counsellor Keane’s pig being the
pivot of a revolution. We are of yesterday, and it is to no purpose that
our political augurs divine from the flight of our eagles that to-morrow
shall be ours, and flatter us with an all-hail hereafter. Things do
really gain in greatness by being acted on a great and cosmopolitan
stage, because there is inspiration in the thronged audience, and the
nearer match that puts men on their mettle. Webster was more largely
endowed by nature than Fox, and Fisher Ames not much below Burke as a
talker; but what a difference in the intellectual training, in the
literary culture and associations, in the whole social outfit, of the
men who were their antagonists and companions! It should seem that, if
it be collision with other minds and with events that strikes or draws
the fire from a man, then the quality of those might have something to
do with the quality of the fire,--whether it shall be culinary or
electric. We have never known the varied stimulus, the inexorable
criticism, the many-sided opportunity of a great metropolis, the
inspiring reinforcement of an undivided national consciousness. In
everything but trade we have missed the invigoration of foreign rivalry.
We may prove that we are this and that and the other,--our
Fourth-of-July orators have proved it time and again,--the census has
proved it; but the Muses are women, and have no great fancy for
statistics, though easily silenced by them. We are great, we are rich,
we are all kinds of good things; but did it never occur to you that
somehow we are not interesting, except as a phenomenon? It may safely be
affirmed that for one cultivated man in this country who studies
American, there are fifty who study European history, ancient or modern.
Till within a year or two we have been as distant and obscure to the
eyes of Europe as Ecuador to our own. Every day brings us nearer,
enables us to see the Old World more clearly, and by inevitable
comparison to judge ourselves with some closer approach to our real
value. This has its advantage so long as our culture is, as for a long
time it must be, European; for we shall be little better than apes and
parrots till we are forced to measure our muscle with the trained and
practised champions of that elder civilization. We have at length
established our claim to the noblesse of the sword, the first step still
of every nation that would make its entry into the best society of
history. To maintain ourselves there, we must achieve an equality in
the more exclusive circle of culture, and to that end must submit
ourselves to the European standard of intellectual weights and
measures--That we have made the hitherto biggest gun might excite
apprehension (were there a dearth of iron), but can never exact respect.
That our pianos and patent reapers have won medals does but confirm us
in our mechanic and material measure of merit. We must contribute
something more than mere contrivances for the saving of labor, which we
have been only too ready to misapply in the domain of thought and the
higher kinds of invention. In those Olympic games where nations contend
for truly immortal wreaths, it may well be questioned whether a
mowing-machine would stand much chance in the chariot-races,--whether a
piano, though made by a chevalier, could compete successfully for the
prize of music.
We shall have to be content for a good while yet with our provincialism,
and must strive to make the best of it. In it lies the germ of
nationality, and that is, after all, the prime condition of all
thorough-bred greatness of character. To this choicest fruit of a
healthy life, well rooted in native soil, and drawing prosperous juices
thence, nationality gives the keenest flavor. Mr. Lincoln was an
original man, and in so far a great man; yet it was the Americanism of
his every thought, word, and act which not only made his influence
equally at home in East and West, but drew the eyes of the outside
world, and was the pedestal that lifted him where he could be seen by
them. Lincoln showed that native force may transcend local boundaries,
but the growth of such nationality is hindered and hampered by our
division into so many half-independent communities, each with its
objects of county ambition, and its public men great to the borders of
their district. In this way our standard of greatness is insensibly
debased. To receive any national appointment, a man must have gone
through precisely the worst training for it; he must have so far
narrowed and belittled himself with State politics as to be acceptable
at home. In this way a man may become chairman of the Committee on
Foreign Affairs, because he knows how to pack a caucus in Catawampus
County, or be sent ambassador to Barataria, because he has drunk bad
whiskey with every voter in Wildcat City. Should we ever attain to a
conscious nationality, it will have the advantage of lessening the
number of our great men, and widening our appreciation to the larger
scale of the two or three that are left,--if there should be so many.
Meanwhile we offer a premium to the production of great men in a small
way, by inviting each State to set up the statues of two of its
immortals in the Capitol. What a niggardly percentage! Already we are
embarrassed, not to find the two, but to choose among the crowd of
candidates. Well, seventy-odd heroes in about as many years is pretty
well for a young nation. We do not envy most of them their eternal
martyrdom in marble, their pillory of indiscrimination. We fancy even
native tourists pausing before the greater part of the effigies, and,
after reading the names, asking desperately, “Who was _he_?” Nay, if
they should say, “Who the devil was _he_?” it were a pardonable
invocation, for none so fit as the Prince of Darkness to act as
_cicerone_ among such palpable obscurities. We recall the court-yard of
the Uffizj at Florence. That also is not free of parish celebrities; but
Dante, Galileo, Michael Angelo, Macchiavelli,--shall the inventor of the
sewing-machine, even with the button-holing improvement, let us say,
match with these, or with far lesser than these? Perhaps he was more
practically useful than any one of these, or all of them together, but
the soul is sensible of a sad difference somewhere. These also were
citizens of a provincial capital; so were the greater part of
Plutarch’s heroes. Did they have a better chance than we moderns,--than
we Americans? At any rate they have the start of us, and we must confess
that
“By bed and table they lord it o’er us,
Our elder brothers, but one in blood.”
Yes, one in blood; that is the hardest part of it. Is our provincialism
then in some great measure due to our absorption in the practical, as we
politely call it, meaning the material,--to our habit of estimating
greatness by the square mile and the hundred weight? Even during our
war, in the midst of that almost unrivalled stress of soul, were not our
speakers and newspapers so enslaved to the vulgar habit as to boast ten
times of the thousands of square miles it covered with armed men, for
once that they alluded to the motive that gave it all its meaning and
its splendor? Perhaps it was as well that they did not exploit that
passion of patriotism as an advertisement in the style of Barnum or
Perham. “I scale one hundred and eighty pounds, but when I’m mad I weigh
two ton,” said the Kentuckian, with a true notion of moral avoirdupois.
That ideal kind of weight is wonderfully increased by a national
feeling, whereby one man is conscious that thirty millions of men go
into the balance with him. The Roman in ancient, and the Englishman in
modern times, have been most conscious of this representative solidity,
and wherever one of them went there stood Rome or England in his shoes.
We have made some advance in the right direction. Our civil war, by the
breadth of its proportions and the implacability of its demands, forced
us to admit a truer valuation, and gave us, in our own despite, great
soldiers and sailors, allowed for such by all the world. The harder
problems it has left behind may in time compel us to have great
statesmen, with views capable of reaching beyond the next election. The
criticism of Europe alone can rescue us from the provincialism of an
over or false estimate of ourselves. Let us be thankful, and not angry,
that we must accept it as our touchstone. Our stamp has so often been
impressed upon base metal, that we cannot expect it to be taken on
trust, but we may be sure that true gold will be equally persuasive the
world over. Real manhood and honest achievement are nowhere provincial,
but enter the select society of all time on an even footing.
Spanish America might be a good glass for us to look into. Those
Catharine-wheel republics, always in revolution while the powder lasts,
and sure to burn the fingers of whoever attempts intervention, have also
their great men, as placidly ignored by us as our own by jealous Europe.
The following passage from the life of Don Simon Bolivar might allay
many _motus animorum_, if rightly pondered. Bolivar, then a youth, was
travelling in Italy, and his biographer tells us that “near Castiglione
he was present at the grand review made by Napoleon of the columns
defiling into the plain large enough to contain sixty thousand men. The
throne was situated on an eminence that overlooked the plain, and
Napoleon on several occasions looked through a glass at Bolivar and his
companions, who were at the base of the hill. The hero Cæsar could not
imagine that he beheld the liberator of the world of Columbus!” And
small blame to him, one would say. We are not, then, it seems, the only
foundling of Columbus, as we are so apt to take for granted. The great
Genoese did not, as we supposed, draw that first star-guided furrow
across the vague of waters with a single eye to the future greatness of
the United States. And have we not sometimes, like the enthusiastic
biographer, fancied the Old World staring through all its telescopes at
us, and wondered that it did not recognize in us what we were fully
persuaded we were _going_ to be and do?
Our American life is dreadfully barren of those elements of the social
picturesque which give piquancy to anecdote. And without anecdote, what
is biography, or even history, which is only biography on a larger
scale? Clio, though she take airs on herself, and pretend to be
“philosophy teaching by example,” is, after all, but a gossip who has
borrowed Fame’s speaking-trumpet, and should be figured with a tea-cup
instead of a scroll in her hand. How much has she not owed of late to
the tittle-tattle of her gillflirt sister Thalia? In what gutters has
not Macaulay raked for the brilliant bits with which he has put together
his admirable mosaic picture of England under the last two Stuarts? Even
Mommsen himself, who dislikes Plutarch’s method as much as Montaigne
loved it, cannot get or give a lively notion of ancient Rome, without
running to the comic poets and the anecdote-mongers. He gives us the
very beef-tea of history, nourishing and even palatable enough,
excellently portable for a memory that must carry her own packs, and can
afford little luggage; but for our own part, we prefer a full,
old-fashioned meal, with its side-dishes of spicy gossip, and its last
relish, the Stilton of scandal, so it be not too high. One volume of
contemporary memoirs, stuffed though it be with lies, (for lies to be
good for anything must have a potential probability, must even be true
so far as their moral and social setting is concerned,) will throw more
light into the dark backward of time than the gravest Camden or Thuanus.
If St. Simon is not accurate, is he any the less essentially _true_? No
history gives us so clear an understanding of the moral condition of
average men after the restoration of the Stuarts as the unconscious
blabbings of the Puritan tailor’s son, with his two consciences, as it
were,--an inward, still sensitive in spots, though mostly toughened to
India-rubber, and good rather for rubbing out old scores than retaining
them, and an outward, alert, and termagantly effective in Mrs. Pepys.
But we can have no St. Simons or Pepyses till we have a Paris or London
to delocalize our gossip and give it historic breadth. All our capitals
are fractional, merely greater or smaller gatherings of men, centres of
business rather than of action or influence. Each contains so many
souls, but is not, as the word “capital” implies, the true head of a
community and seat of its common soul.
Has not life itself perhaps become a little more prosaic than it once
was? As the clearing away of the woods scants the streams, may not our
civilization have dried up some feeders that helped to swell the current
of individual and personal force? We have sometimes thought that the
stricter definition and consequent seclusion from each other of the
different callings in modern times, as it narrowed the chance of
developing and giving variety to character, lessened also the interest
of biography. Formerly arts and arms were not divided by so impassable a
barrier as now. There was hardly such a thing as a _pékin_. Cæsar gets
up from writing his Latin Grammar to conquer Gaul, change the course of
history, and make so many things possible,--among the rest our English
language and Shakespeare. Horace had been a colonel; and from Æschylus,
who fought at Marathon, to Ben Jonson, who trailed a pike in the Low
Countries, the list of martial civilians is a long one. A man’s
education seems more complete who has smelt hostile powder from a less
æsthetic distance than Goethe. It raises our confidence in Sir Kenelm
Digby as a physicist, that he is able to illustrate some theory of
acoustics in his Treatise of Bodies by instancing the effect of his
guns in a sea-fight off Scanderoon. One would expect the proportions of
character to be enlarged by such variety and contrast of experience.
Perhaps it will by and by appear that our own Civil War has done
something for us in this way. Colonel Higginson comes down from his
pulpit to draw on his jack-boots, and thenceforth rides in our
imagination alongside of John Bunyan and Bishop Compton. To have stored
moral capital enough to meet the drafts of Death at sight, must be an
unmatched tonic. We saw our light-hearted youth come back with the
modest gravity of age, as if they had learned to throw out pickets
against a surprise of any weak point in their temperament. Perhaps that
American shiftiness, so often complained of, may not be so bad a thing,
if, by bringing men acquainted with every humor of fortune and human
nature, it puts them in fuller possession of themselves.
But with whatever drawbacks in special circumstances, the main interest
of biography must always lie in the amount of character or essential
manhood which the subject of it reveals to us, and events are of import
only as means to that end. It is true that lofty and far-seen exigencies
may give greater opportunity to some men, whose energy is more sharply
spurred by the shout of a multitude than by the grudging _Well done!_ of
conscience. Some theorists have too hastily assumed that, as the power
of public opinion increases, the force of private character, or what we
call originality, is absorbed into and diluted by it. But we think
Horace was right in putting tyrant and mob on a level as the trainers
and tests of a man’s solid quality. The amount of resistance of which
one is capable to whatever lies outside the conscience, is of more
consequence than all other faculties together; and democracy, perhaps,
tries this by pressure in more directions, and with a more continuous
strain, than any other form of society. In Josiah Quincy we have an
example of character trained and shaped, under the nearest approach to a
pure democracy the world has ever seen, to a firmness, unity, and
self-centred poise that recall the finer types of antiquity, in whom the
public and private man were so wholly of a piece that they were truly
everywhere at home, for the same sincerity of nature that dignified the
hearth carried also a charm of homeliness into the forum. The phrase “a
great public character,” once common, seems to be going out of fashion,
perhaps because there are fewer examples of the thing. It fits Josiah
Quincy exactly. Active in civic and academic duties till beyond the
ordinary period of man, at fourscore and ten his pen, voice, and
venerable presence were still efficient in public affairs. A score of
years after the energies of even vigorous men are declining or spent,
his mind and character made themselves felt as in their prime. A true
pillar of house and state, he stood unflinchingly upright under whatever
burden might be laid upon him. The French Revolutionists aped what was
itself but a parody of the elder republic, with their hair _à la_ Brutus
and their pedantic moralities _à la_ Cato Minor, but this man
unconsciously was the antique Roman they laboriously went about to be.
Others have filled places more conspicuous, few have made the place they
filled so conspicuous by an exact and disinterested performance of duty.
In the biography of Mr. Quincy by his son there is something of the
provincialism of which we have spoken as inherent in most American works
of the kind. His was a Boston life in the strictest sense. But
provincialism is relative, and where it has a flavor of its own, as in
Scotland, it is often agreeable in proportion to its very intensity. The
Massachusetts in which Mr. Quincy’s habits of thought were acquired was
a very different Massachusetts from that in which we of later
generations have been bred. Till after he had passed middle life, Boston
was more truly a capital than any other city in America, before or
since, except possibly Charleston. The acknowledged head of New England,
with a population of wellnigh purely English descent, mostly derived
from the earlier emigration, with ancestral traditions and inspiring
memories of its own, it had made its name familiar in both worlds, and
was both historically and politically more important than at any later
period. The Revolution had not interrupted, but rather given a freer
current to the tendencies of its past. Both by its history and position,
the town had what the French call a solidarity, an almost personal
consciousness, rare anywhere, rare especially in America, and more than
ever since our enormous importation of fellow-citizens to whom America
means merely shop, or meat three times a day. Boston has been called the
“American Athens.” Æsthetically, the comparison is ludicrous, but
politically it was more reasonable. Its population was homogeneous, and
there were leading families; while the form of government by
town-meeting, and the facility of social and civic intercourse, gave
great influence to popular personal qualities and opportunity to new
men. A wide commerce, while it had insensibly softened the asperities of
Puritanism and imported enough foreign refinement to humanize, not
enough foreign luxury to corrupt, had not essentially qualified the
native tone of the town. Retired sea-captains (true brothers of
Chaucer’s Shipman), whose exploits had kindled the imagination of Burke,
added a not unpleasant savor of salt to society. They belonged to the
old school of Gilbert, Hawkins, Frobisher, and Drake, parcel-soldiers
all of them, who had commanded armed ships and had tales to tell of
gallant fights with privateers or pirates, truest representatives of
those Vikings who, if trade in lumber or peltry was dull, would make
themselves Dukes of Dublin or Earls of Orkney. If trade pinches the
mind, commerce liberalizes it; and Boston was also advantaged with the
neighborhood of the country’s oldest College, which maintained the
wholesome traditions of culture,--where Homer and Horace are familiar
there is a certain amount of cosmopolitanism,--and would not allow
bigotry to become despotism. Manners were more self-respectful, and
therefore more respectful of others, and personal sensitiveness was
fenced with more of that ceremonial with which society armed itself when
it surrendered the ruder protection of the sword. We had not then seen a
Governor in his chamber at the State-House with his hat on, a cigar in
his mouth, and his feet upon the stove. Domestic service, in spite of
the proverb, was not seldom an inheritance, nor was household peace
dependent on the whim of a foreign armed neutrality in the kitchen.
Servant and master were of one stock; there was decent authority and
becoming respect; the tradition of the Old World lingered after its
superstition had passed away. There was an aristocracy such as is
healthful in a well-ordered community, founded on public service, and
hereditary so long as the virtue which was its patent was not escheated.
The clergy, no longer hedged by the reverence exacted by sacerdotal
caste, were more than repaid by the consideration willingly paid to
superior culture. What changes, many of them for the better, some of
them surely for the worse, and all of them inevitable, did not Josiah
Quincy see in that wellnigh secular life which linked the war of
independence to the war of nationality! We seemed to see a type of them
the other day in a colored man standing with an air of comfortable
self-possession while his boots were brushed by a youth of catholic
neutral tint, but whom nature had planned for white. The same eyes that
had looked on Gage’s red-coats, saw Colonel Shaw’s negro regiment march
out of Boston in the national blue. Seldom has a life, itself actively
associated with public affairs, spanned so wide a chasm for the
imagination. Oglethorpe’s offers a parallel,--the aide-de-camp of Prince
Eugene calling on John Adams, American Ambassador to England. Most long
lives resemble those threads of gossamer, the nearest approach to
nothing unmeaningly prolonged, scarce visible pathway of some worm from
his cradle to his grave; but Quincy’s was strung with seventy active
years, each one a rounded bead of usefulness and service.
Mr. Quincy was a Bostonian of the purest type. Since the settlement of
the town, there had been a colonel of the Boston regiment in every
generation of his family. He lived to see a grandson brevetted with the
same title for gallantry in the field. Only child of one among the most
eminent advocates of the Revolution, and who but for his untimely death
would have been a leading actor in it, his earliest recollections
belonged to the heroic period in the history of his native town. With
that history his life was thenceforth intimately united by offices of
public trust, as Representative in Congress, State Senator, Mayor, and
President of the University, to a period beyond the ordinary span of
mortals. Even after he had passed ninety, he would not claim to be
_emeritus_, but came forward to brace his townsmen with a courage and
warm them with a fire younger than their own. The legend of Colonel
Goffe at Deerfield became a reality to the eyes of this generation. The
New England breed is running out, we are told! This was in all ways a
beautiful and fortunate life,--fortunate in the goods of this
world,--fortunate, above all, in the force of character which makes
fortune secondary and subservient. We are fond in this country of what
are called self-made men (as if real success could ever be other); and
this is all very well, provided they make something worth having of
themselves. Otherwise it is not so well, and the examples of such are at
best but stuff for the Alnaschar dreams of a false democracy. The gist
of the matter is, not where a man starts from, but where he comes out.
We are glad to have the biography of one who, beginning as a gentleman,
kept himself such to the end,--who, with no necessity of labor, left
behind him an amount of thoroughly done work such as few have
accomplished with the mighty help of hunger. Some kind of pace may be
got out of the veriest jade by the near prospect of oats; but the
thorough-bred has the spur in his blood.
Mr. Edmund Quincy has told the story of his father’s life with the skill
and good taste that might have been expected from the author of
“Wensley.” Considering natural partialities, he has shown a discretion
of which we are oftener reminded by missing than by meeting it. He has
given extracts enough from speeches to show their bearing and
quality,--from letters, to recall bygone modes of thought and indicate
many-sided friendly relations with good and eminent men; above all, he
has lost no opportunity to illustrate that life of the past, near in
date, yet alien in manners, whose current glides so imperceptibly from
one generation into another that we fail to mark the shiftings of its
bed or the change in its nature wrought by the affluents that discharge
into it on all sides,--here a stream bred in the hills to sweeten, there
the sewerage of some great city to corrupt. We cannot but lament that
Mr. Quincy did not earlier begin to keep a diary. “Miss not the
discourses of the elders,” though put now in the Apocrypha, is a wise
precept, but incomplete unless we add, “Nor cease from recording
whatsoever thing thou hast gathered therefrom,”--so ready is Oblivion
with her fatal shears. The somewhat greasy heap of a literary
rag-and-bone-picker, like Athenæus, is turned to gold by time. Even the
_Virgilium vidi tantum_ of Dryden about Milton, and of Pope again about
Dryden, is worth having, and gives a pleasant fillip to the fancy. There
is much of this quality in Mr. Edmund Quincy’s book, enough to make us
wish there were more. We get a glimpse of President Washington, in 1795,
who reminded Mr. Quincy “of the gentlemen who used to come to Boston in
those days to attend the General Court from Hampden or Franklin County,
in the western part of the State. A little stiff in his person, not a
little formal in his manners, not particularly at ease in the presence
of strangers. He had the air of a country-gentleman not accustomed to
mix much in society, perfectly polite, but not easy in his address and
conversation, and not graceful in his gait and movements.” Our figures
of Washington have been so long equestrian, that it is pleasant to meet
him dismounted for once. In the same way we get a card of invitation to
a dinner of sixty covers at John Hancock’s, and see the rather
light-weighted great man wheeled round the room (for he had adopted Lord
Chatham’s convenient trick of the gout) to converse with his guests. In
another place we are presented, with Mr. Merry, the English Minister, to
Jefferson, whom we find in an unofficial costume of studied
slovenliness, intended as a snub to haughty Albion. Slippers down at the
heel and a dirty shirt become weapons of diplomacy and threaten more
serious war. Thus many a door into the past, long irrevocably shut upon
us, is set ajar, and we of the younger generation on the landing catch
peeps of distinguished men, and bits of their table-talk. We drive in
from Mr. Lyman’s beautiful seat at Waltham (unique at that day in its
stately swans and half-shy, half-familiar deer) with John Adams, who
tells us that Dr. Priestley looked on the French monarchy as the tenth
horn of the Beast in Revelation,--a horn that has set more sober wits
dancing than that of Huon of Bordeaux. Those were days, we are inclined
to think, of more solid and elegant hospitality than our own,--the
elegance of manners, at once more courtly and more frugal, of men who
had better uses for wealth than merely to display it. Dinners have more
courses now, and, like the Gascon in the old story, who could not see
the town for the houses, we miss the real dinner in the multiplicity of
its details. We might seek long before we found so good cheer, so good
company, or so good talk as our fathers had at Lieutenant-Governor
Winthrop’s or Senator Cabot’s.
We shall not do Mr. Edmund Quincy the wrong of picking out in advance
all the plums in his volume, leaving to the reader only the less savory
mixture that held them together,--a kind of filling unavoidable in books
of this kind, and too apt to be what boys at boarding-school call
_stick-jaw_, but of which there is no more than could not be helped
here, and that light and palatable. But here and there is a passage
where we cannot refrain, for there is a smack of Jack Horner in all of
us, and a reviewer were nothing without it. Josiah Quincy was born in
1772. His father, returning from a mission to England, died in sight of
the dear New England shore three years later. His young widow was worthy
of him, and of the son whose character she was to have so large a share
in forming. There is something very touching and beautiful in this
little picture of her which Mr. Quincy drew in his extreme old age.
“My mother imbibed, as was usual with the women of the period, the
spirit of the times. Patriotism was not then a profession, but an
energetic principle beating in the heart and active in the life. The
death of my father, under circumstances now the subject of history, had
overwhelmed her with grief. She viewed him as a victim in the cause of
freedom, and cultivated his memory with veneration, regarding him as a
martyr, falling, as did his friend Warren, in the defence of the
liberties of his country. These circumstances gave a pathos and
vehemence to her grief, which, after the first violence of passion had
subsided, sought consolation in earnest and solicitous fulfilment of
duty to the representative of his memory and of their mutual affections.
Love and reverence for the memory of his father was early impressed on
the mind of her son, and worn into his heart by her sadness and tears.
She cultivated the memory of my father in my heart and affections, even
in my earliest childhood, by reading to me passages from the poets, and
obliging me to learn by heart and repeat such as were best adapted to
her own circumstances and feelings. Among others, the whole leave-taking
of Hector and Andromache, in the sixth book of Pope’s Homer, was one of
her favorite lessons, which she made me learn and frequently repeat. Her
imagination, probably, found consolation in the repetition of lines
which brought to mind and seemed to typify her own great bereavement.
‘And think’st thou not how wretched we shall be,--
A widow I, a helpless orphan he?’
These lines, and the whole tenor of Andromache’s address and
circumstances, she identified with her own sufferings, which seemed
relieved by the tears my repetition of them drew from her.”
Pope’s Homer is not Homer, perhaps; but how many noble natures have felt
its elation, how many bruised spirits the solace of its bracing, if
monotonous melody! To us there is something inexpressibly tender in this
instinct of the widowed mother to find consolation in the idealization
of her grief by mingling it with those sorrows which genius has turned
into the perennial delight of mankind. This was a kind of sentiment that
was healthy for her boy, refining without unnerving, and associating his
father’s memory with a noble company unassailable by time. It was
through this lady, whose image looks down on us out of the past, so full
of sweetness and refinement, that Mr. Quincy became of kin with Mr.
Wendell Phillips, so justly eminent as a speaker. There is something
nearer than cater-cousinship in a certain impetuous audacity of temper
common to them both.
When six years old, Mr. Quincy was sent to Phillips Academy at Andover,
where he remained till he entered college. His form-fellow here was a
man of thirty, who had been a surgeon in the Continental Army, and whose
character and adventures might almost seem borrowed from a romance of
Smollett. Under Principal Pearson, the lad, though a near relative of
the founder of the school, seems to have endured all that severity of
the old _a posteriori_ method of teaching which still smarted in
Tusser’s memory when he sang,
“From Paul’s I went, to Eton sent,
To learn straightways the Latin phrase,
Where fifty-three stripes given to me
At once I had.”
The young victim of the wisdom of Solomon was boarded with the parish
minister, in whose kindness he found a lenitive for the scholastic
discipline he underwent. This gentleman had been a soldier in the
Colonial service, and Mr. Quincy afterwards gave as a reason for his
mildness, that, “while a sergeant at Castle William, he had seen
something of mankind.” This, no doubt, would be a better preparative for
successful dealing with the young than is generally thought. However,
the birch was then the only classic tree, and every round in the ladder
of learning was made of its inspiring wood. Dr. Pearson, perhaps,
thought he was only doing justice to his pupil’s claims of kindred by
giving him a larger share of the educational advantages which the
neighboring forest afforded. The vividness with which this system is
always remembered by those who have been subjected to it would seem to
show that it really enlivened the attention, and thereby invigorated the
memory, nay, might even raise some question as to what part of the
person is chosen by the mother of the Muses for her residence. With an
appetite for the classics quickened by “Cheever’s Accidence,” and such
other preliminary whets as were then in vogue, young Quincy entered
college, where he spent the usual four years, and was graduated with the
highest honors of his class. The amount of Latin and Greek imparted to
the students of that day was not very great. They were carried through
Horace, Sallust, and the _De Oratoribus_ of Cicero, and read portions of
Livy, Xenophon, and Homer. Yet the chief end of classical studies was
perhaps as often reached then as now, in giving young men a love for
something apart from and above the more vulgar associations of life. Mr.
Quincy, at least, retained to the last a fondness for certain Latin
authors. While he was President of the College, he told a gentleman,
from whom we received the story, that, “if he were imprisoned, and
allowed to choose one book for his amusement, that should be Horace.”
In 1797 Mr. Quincy was married to Miss Eliza Susan Morton of New York, a
union which lasted in unbroken happiness for more than fifty years. His
case might be cited among the leading ones in support of the old poet’s
axiom, that
“He never loved, that loved not at first sight”;
for he saw, wooed, and won in a week. In later life he tried in a most
amusing way to account for this rashness, and to find reasons of settled
gravity for the happy inspiration of his heart. He cites the evidence of
Judge Sedgwick, of Mr. and Mrs. Oliver Wolcott, of the Rev. Dr. Smith,
and others, to the wisdom of his choice. But it does not appear that he
consulted them beforehand. If love were not too cunning for that, what
would become of the charming idyl, renewed in all its wonder and
freshness for every generation? Let us be thankful that in every man’s
life there is a holiday of romance, an illumination of the senses by the
soul, that makes him a poet while it lasts. Mr. Quincy caught the
enchantment through his ears, a song of Burns heard from the next room
conveying the infection,--a fact still inexplicable to him after
lifelong meditation thereon, as he “was not very impressible by music”!
To us there is something very characteristic in this rapid energy of Mr.
Quincy, something very delightful in his naïve account of the affair. It
needs the magic of no Dr. Heidegger to make these dried roses, that drop
from between the leaves of a volume shut for seventy years, bloom again
in all their sweetness. Mr. Edmund Quincy tells us that his mother was
“not handsome”; but those who remember the gracious dignity of her old
age will hardly agree with him. She must always have had that highest
kind of beauty which grows more beautiful with years, and keeps the eyes
young, as if with the partial connivance of Time.
We do not propose to follow Mr. Quincy closely through his whole public
life, which, beginning with his thirty-second, ended with his
seventy-third year. He entered Congress as the representative of a party
privately the most respectable, publicly the least sagacious, among all
those which under different names have divided the country. The
Federalists were the only proper tories our politics have ever produced,
whose conservatism truly represented an idea, and not a mere selfish
interest,--men who honestly distrusted democracy, and stood up for
experience, or the tradition which they believed for such, against
empiricism. During his Congressional career, the government was little
more than an _attaché_ of the French legation, and the opposition to
which he belonged a helpless _revenant_ from the dead and buried
Colonial past. There are some questions whose interest dies the moment
they are settled; others, into which a moral element enters that hinders
them from being settled, though they may be decided. It is hard to
revive any enthusiasm about the _Embargo_, though it once could inspire
the boyish Muse of Bryant, or in the impressment quarrel, though the
Trent difficulty for a time rekindled its old animosities. The stars in
their courses fought against Mr. Quincy’s party, which was not in
sympathy with the instincts of the people, groping about for some
principle of nationality, and finding a substitute for it in hatred of
England. But there are several things which still make his career in
Congress interesting to us, because they illustrate the personal
character of the man. He prepared himself honestly for his duties, by a
thorough study of whatever could make him efficient in them. It was not
enough that he could make a good speech; he wished also to have
something to say. In Congress, as everywhere else, _quod voluit valde
voluit_; and he threw a fervor into the most temporary topic, as if his
eternal salvation depended upon it. He had not merely, as the French
say, the courage of his opinions, but his opinions became principles,
and gave him that gallantry of fanaticism which made him always ready to
head a forlorn hope,--the more ready, perhaps, that it was a forlorn
hope. This is not the humor of a statesman,--no, unless he holds a
position like that of Pitt, and can charge a whole people with his own
enthusiasm, and then we call it genius. Mr. Quincy had the moral
firmness which enabled him to decline a duel without any loss of
personal _prestige_. His opposition to the Louisiana purchase
illustrates that Roman quality in him to which we have alluded. He would
not conclude the purchase till each of the old thirteen States had
signified its assent. He was reluctant to endow a Sabine city with the
privilege of Roman citizenship. It is worth noting, that while in
Congress, and afterwards in the State Senate, many of his phrases became
the catch-words of party politics. He always dared to say what others
deemed it more prudent only to think, and whatever he said he
intensified with the whole ardor of his temperament. It is this which
makes Mr. Quincy’s speeches good reading still, even when the topics
they discussed were ephemeral. In one respect he is distinguished from
the politicians, and must rank with the far-seeing statesmen of his
time. He early foresaw and denounced the political danger with which the
Slave Power threatened the Union. His fears, it is true, were aroused
for the balance of power between the old States, rather than by any
moral sensitiveness, which would, indeed, have been an anachronism at
that time. But the Civil War justified his prescience.
It was as Mayor of his native city that his remarkable qualities as an
administrator were first called into requisition and adequately
displayed. He organized the city government, and put it in working
order. To him we owe many reforms in police, in the management of the
poor, and other kindred matters,--much in the way of cure, still more in
that of prevention. The place demanded a man of courage and firmness,
and found those qualities almost superabundantly in him. His virtues
lost him his office, as such virtues are only too apt to do in peaceful
times, where they are felt more as a restraint than a protection. His
address on laying down the mayoralty is very characteristic. We quote
the concluding sentences:--
“And now, gentlemen, standing as I do in this relation for the last time
in your presence and that of my fellow-citizens, about to surrender
forever a station full of difficulty, of labor and temptation, in which
I have been called to very arduous duties, affecting the rights,
property, and at times the liberty of others; concerning which the
perfect line of rectitude--though desired--was not always to be clearly
discerned; in which great interests have been placed within my control,
under circumstances in which it would have been easy to advance private
ends and sinister projects;--under these circumstances, I inquire, as I
have a right to inquire,--for in the recent contest insinuations have
been cast against my integrity,--in this long management of your
affairs, whatever errors have been committed,--and doubtless there have
been many,--have you found in me anything selfish, anything personal,
anything mercenary? In the simple language of an ancient seer, I say,
‘Behold, here I am; witness against me. Whom have I defrauded? Whom have
I oppressed? At whose hands have I received any bribe?’
“Six years ago, when I had the honor first to address the City Council,
in anticipation of the event which has now occurred, the following
expressions were used: ‘In administering the police, in executing the
laws, in protecting the rights and promoting the prosperity of the city,
its first officer will be necessarily beset and assailed by individual
interests, by rival projects, by personal influences, by party passions.
The more firm and inflexible he is in maintaining the rights and in
pursuing the interests of the city, the greater is the probability of
his becoming obnoxious to the censure of all whom he causes to be
prosecuted or punished, of all whose passions he thwarts, of all whose
interests he opposes.’
“The day and the event have come. I retire--as in that first address I
told my fellow-citizens, ‘If, in conformity with the experience of other
republics, faithful exertions should be followed by loss of favor and
confidence,’ I should retire--‘rejoicing, not, indeed, with a public and
patriotic, but with a private and individual joy’; for I shall retire
with a consciousness weighed against which all _human suffrages_ are but
as the light dust of the balance.”
Of his mayoralty we have another anecdote quite Roman in color. He was
in the habit of riding early in the morning through the various streets
that he might look into everything with his own eyes. He was once
arrested on a malicious charge of violating the city ordinance against
fast driving. He might have resisted, but he appeared in court and paid
the fine, because it would serve as a good example “that no citizen was
above the law.”
Hardly had Mr. Quincy given up the government of the city, when he was
called to that of the College. It is here that his stately figure is
associated most intimately and warmly with the recollections of the
greater number who hold his memory dear. Almost everybody looks back
regretfully to the days of some Consul Plancus. Never were eyes so
bright, never had wine so much wit and good-fellowship in it, never were
we ourselves so capable of the various great things we have never done.
Nor is it merely the sunset of life that casts such a ravishing light on
the past, and makes the western windows of those homes of fancy we have
left forever tremble with a sentiment of such sweet regret. We set
great store by what we had, and cannot have again, however indifferent
in itself, and what is past is infinitely past. This is especially true
of college life, when we first assume the titles without the
responsibilities of manhood, and the President of our year is apt to
become our Plancus very early. Popular or not while in office, an
ex-president is always sure of enthusiastic cheers at every college
festival. Mr. Quincy had many qualities calculated to win favor with the
young,--that one above all which is sure to do it, indomitable pluck.
With him the dignity was in the man, not in the office. He had some of
those little oddities, too, which afford amusement without contempt, and
which rather tend to heighten than diminish personal attachment to
superiors in station. His punctuality at prayers, and in dropping asleep
there, his forgetfulness of names, his singular inability to make even
the shortest off-hand speech to the students,--all the more singular in
a practised orator,--his occasional absorption of mind, leading him to
hand you his sand-box instead of the leave of absence he had just dried
with it,--the old-fashioned courtesy of his, “Sir, your servant,” as he
bowed you out of his study,--all tended to make him popular. He had also
a little of what is somewhat contradictorily called dry humor, not
without influence in his relations with the students. In taking leave of
the graduating class, he was in the habit of paying them whatever honest
compliment he could. Who, of a certain year which shall be nameless,
will ever forget the gravity with which he assured them that they were
“the _best-dressed_ class that had passed through college during his
administration”? How sincerely kind he was, how considerate of youthful
levity, will always be gratefully remembered by whoever had occasion to
experience it. A visitor not long before his death found him burning
some memoranda of college peccadilloes, lest they should ever rise up in
judgment against the men eminent in Church and State who had been guilty
of them. One great element of his popularity with the students was his
_esprit de corps_. However strict in discipline, he was always on _our_
side as respected the outside world. Of his efficiency, no higher
testimony could be asked than that of his successor, Dr. Walker. Here
also many reforms date from his time. He had that happiest combination
for a wise vigor in the conduct of affairs,--he was a conservative with
an open mind.
One would be apt to think that, in the various offices which Mr. Quincy
successively filled, he would have found enough to do. But his
indefatigable activity overflowed. Even as a man of letters, he occupies
no inconsiderable place. His “History of Harvard College” is a valuable
and entertaining treatment of a subject not wanting in natural dryness.
His “Municipal History of Boston,” his “History of the Boston Athenæum,”
and his “Life of Colonel Shaw” have permanent interest and value. All
these were works demanding no little labor and research, and the
thoroughness of their workmanship makes them remarkable as the
by-productions of a busy man. Having consented, when more than eighty,
to write a memoir of John Quincy Adams, to be published in the
“Proceedings” of the Massachusetts Historical Society, he was obliged to
excuse himself. On account of his age? Not at all, but because the work
had grown to be a volume under his weariless hand. _Ohne Hast ohne
Rast_, was as true of him as of Goethe. We find the explanation of his
accomplishing so much in a rule of life which he gave, when President,
to a young man employed as his secretary, and who was a little
behindhand with his work: “When you have a number of duties to perform,
always do the most disagreeable one first.” No advice could have been
more in character, and it is perhaps better than the great German’s, “Do
the duty that lies nearest thee.”
Perhaps the most beautiful part of Mr. Quincy’s life was his old age.
What in most men is decay, was in him but beneficent prolongation and
adjournment. His interest in affairs unabated, his judgment undimmed,
his fire unchilled, his last years were indeed “lovely as a Lapland
night.” Till within a year or two of its fall, there were no signs of
dilapidation in that stately edifice. Singularly felicitous was Mr.
Winthrop’s application to him of Wordsworth’s verses:--
“The monumental pomp of age
Was in that goodly personage.”
Everything that Macbeth foreboded the want of, he had in deserved
abundance,--the love, the honor, the obedience, the troops of friends.
His equanimity was beautiful. He loved life, as men of large vitality
always do, but he did not fear to lose life by changing the scene of it.
Visiting him in his ninetieth year with a friend, he said to us, among
other things: “I have no desire to die, but also no reluctance. Indeed,
I have a considerable curiosity about the other world. I have never been
to Europe, you know.” Even in his extreme senescence there was an April
mood somewhere in his nature “that put a spirit of youth in everything.”
He seemed to feel that he could draw against an unlimited credit of
years. When eighty-two, he said smilingly to a young man just returned
from a foreign tour, “Well, well, I mean to go myself when I am old
enough to profit by it.” We have seen many old men whose lives were mere
waste and desolation, who made longevity disreputable by their untimely
persistence in it; but in Mr. Quincy’s length of years there was nothing
that was not venerable. To him it was fulfilment, not deprivation; the
days were marked to the last for what they brought, not for what they
took away.
The memory of what Mr. Quincy did will be lost in the crowd of newer
activities; it is the memory of what he was that is precious to us.
_Bonum virum facile crederes, magnum libenter._ If John Winthrop be the
highest type of the men who shaped New England, we can find no better
one of those whom New England has shaped than Josiah Quincy. It is a
figure that we can contemplate with more than satisfaction,--a figure of
admirable example in a democracy as that of a model citizen. His courage
and high-mindedness were personal to him; let us believe that his
integrity, his industry, his love of letters, his devotion to duty, go
in some sort to the credit of the society which gave him birth and
formed his character. In one respect he is especially interesting to us,
as belonging to a class of men of whom he was the last representative,
and whose like we shall never see again. Born and bred in an age of
greater social distinctions than ours, he was an aristocrat in a sense
that is good even in a republic. He had the sense of a certain personal
dignity _inherent_ in him, and which could not be alienated by any whim
of the popular will. There is no stouter buckler than this for
independence of spirit, no surer guaranty of that courtesy which, in its
consideration of others, is but paying a debt of self-respect. During
his presidency, Mr. Quincy was once riding to Cambridge in a crowded
omnibus. A colored woman got in, and could nowhere find a seat. The
President instantly gave her his own, and stood the rest of the way, a
silent rebuke of the general rudeness. He was a man of quality in the
true sense,--of quality not hereditary, but personal. Position might be
taken from him, but _he_ remained where he was. In what he valued most,
his sense of personal worth, the world’s opinion could neither help nor
hinder. We do not mean that this was conscious in him; if it had been,
it would have been a weakness. It was an instinct, and acted with the
force and promptitude proper to such. Let us hope that the scramble of
democracy will give us something as good; anything of so classic dignity
we shall not look to see again.
Josiah Quincy was no seeker of office; from first to last he and it were
drawn together by the mutual attraction of need and fitness, and it
clung to him as most men cling to it. The people often make blunders in
their choice; they are apt to mistake presence of speech for presence of
mind; they love so to help a man rise from the ranks, that they will
spoil a good demagogue to make a bad general; a great many faults may be
laid at their door, but they are not fairly to be charged with
fickleness. They are constant to whoever is constant to his real self,
to the best manhood that is in him, and not to the mere selfishness, the
_antica lupa_ so cunning to hide herself in the sheep’s fleece even from
ourselves. It is true, the contemporary world is apt to be the gull of
brilliant parts, and the maker of a lucky poem or picture or statue, the
winner of a lucky battle, gets perhaps more than is due to the solid
result of his triumph. It is time that fit honor should be paid also to
him who shows a genius for public usefulness, for the achievement of
character, who shapes his life to a certain classic proportion, and
comes off conqueror on those inward fields where something more than
mere talent is demanded for victory. The memory of such men should be
cherished as the most precious inheritance which one generation can
bequeath to the next. However it might be with popular favor, public
respect followed Mr. Quincy unwaveringly for seventy years, and it was
because he had never forfeited his own. In this, it appears to us, lies
the lesson of his life, and his claim upon our grateful recollection. It
is this which makes him an example, while the careers of so many of our
prominent men are only useful for warning. As regards history, his
greatness was narrowly provincial; but if the measure of deeds be the
spirit in which they are done, that fidelity to instant duty, which,
according to Herbert, makes an action fine, then his length of years
should be very precious to us for its lesson. Talleyrand, whose life may
be compared with his for the strange vicissitude which it witnessed,
carried with him out of the world the respect of no man, least of all
his own; and how many of our own public men have we seen whose old age
but accumulated a disregard which they would gladly have exchanged for
oblivion! In Quincy the public fidelity was loyal to the private, and
the withdrawal of his old age was into a sanctuary,--a diminution of
publicity with addition of influence.
“Conclude we, then, felicity consists
Not in exterior fortunes....
Sacred felicity doth ne’er extend
Beyond itself....
The swelling of an outward fortune can
Create a prosperous, not a happy man.”