The English have a distinctly higher and better opinion of Washington
than is held in this country. Washington, if he could have a choice
in the matter, would indubitably prefer his position in the minds of
educated Englishmen to the one that he holds “in the hearts of his
countrymen”—not the one that he is said to hold. The superior validity
of the English view is due to the better view-point. It is remote, as
the American will be when several more generations shall have passed
and Americans are devoid (as Englishmen are devoid now) of passions
and prejudices engendered in the heat of our “Revolution.” We should
remember that it was not to the English a revolution, but a small and
distant squabble, which cut no great figure in the larger affairs in
which they were engaged; and the very memory of it was nearly effaced
in that of the next generation by the stupendous events of the French
Revolution and the Napoleonic wars. To ears filled with the thunders
of Waterloo, the crepitating echoes of the spat at Bunker Hill were
inaudible.
No benign personage in the calendar of secular saints is really less
loved than Washington. The romancing historians and biographers have
adorned him with a thousand impossible virtues, naturally, and in so
dehumanizing him have set him beyond and above the longest reach of
human sympathies. His character, as it pleased them to create it,
is like nothing that we know about and care for. He is a monster of
goodness and wisdom, with about as much of light and fire as the
snow Adam of the small boy playing at creation on the campus of a
public school. The Washington-making Frankensteins have done their
work so badly that their creature is an insupportable bore, diffusing
an infectious dejection. Try to fancy an historical novel or drama
with him for hero—a poem with him for subject! Possibly such have
been written; I do not recall any at the moment, and the proposition
is hardly thinkable. The ideal Washington is a soulless conception,
absolutely without power on the imagination. Within the area of his
gelid efflation the flowers of fancy open only to wither, and any
sentiment endeavoring to transgress the boundary of that desolate
domain falls frosted in its flight.
Some one—Colonel Ingersoll, I fancy—has said that Washington is a steel
engraving. That is hardly an adequate conception, being derived from
the sense of sight only; the ear has something to say in the matter,
and there is much in a name. Before my studies of his character had
effaced my childish impression I used always to picture him in the act
of bending over a tub.
There are two George Washingtons—the natural and the artificial. They
are now equally “great,” but the former was choke-full of the old Adam.
He swore like “our army in Flanders,” loved a bottle like a brother
and had an inter-colonial reputation as a lady-killer. He was, indeed,
a singularly interesting and magnetic old boy—one whom any sane and
honest lover of the picturesque in life and character would deem it
an honor and an education to have known in the flesh. He is now known
to but few; you must dig pretty deeply into the tumulus of rubbishy
panegyric—scan pretty closely the inedited annals of his time, in order
to see him as he was. Criss-crossed upon these failing parchments of
the past are the lines of the sleek Philistine, the smug patriot
and the lessoning moraler, making a palimpsest whereof all that is
legible is false and all that is honest is blotted out. The detestable
anthropolater of the biographical gift has pushed his glowing pen
across the page, to the unspeakable darkening of counsel. In short,
Washington’s countrymen see him through a glass dirtily. The image is
unlovely and unloved. You can no more love and revere the memory of the
biographical George Washington than you can an isosceles triangle or a
cubic foot of interstellar space.
The portrait-painters began it—Gilbert Stuart and the rest of them.
They idealized all the humanity out of the poor patriot’s face and
passed him down to the engravers as a rather sleepy-looking butcher’s
block. There is not a portrait of Washington extant which a man of
taste and knowledge would suffer to hang on the wall of his stable.
Then the historians jumped in, raping all the laurels from the brows of
the man’s great contemporaries and piling them in confusion upon his
pate. They made him a god in wisdom, and a giant in arms; whereas, in
point of ability and service, he was but little, if at all, superior to
any one of a half-dozen of his now over-shadowed but once illustrious
co-workers in council and camp, and in no way comparable with Hamilton.
He towers above his fellows because he stands upon a pile of books.
The supreme indignity to the memory of this really worthy man has been
performed by the Sunday-scholiasts, the pietaries, the truly good, the
example-to-American-youth folk. These canting creatures have managed to
nake him of his last remaining rag of flesh and drain out his ultimate
red corpuscle of human blood. In order that he may be acceptable to
themselves they have made him a bore to everyone else. To give him
value as an “example” to the unripe intelligences of their following
they have whitewashed him an inch thick, draped him, fig-leafed him
and gilded him out of all semblance to man. To prepare his character
for the juvenile moral tooth they have boned it, and to make it
digestible to the juvenile moral paunch, unsalted it by maceration in
the milk-and-water of their own minds. And so we have him to-day. In a
single century the great-hearted gentleman of history has become the
good boy of literature—the public prig. Washington is the capon of our
barnyard Pantheon—revised and edited for the table.