No More Learning

I had hung up my claes to dry on a
peak o' the cliff — for it was ane o' thae lang midsummer nichts,
a


## p. 16042 (#388) ##########################################

16042
JOHN WILSON
when the sea-air itself fans ye wi' as warm a sugh as that
frae a leddy's fan when you're sittin' side by side wi' her in an
arbor -
Tickler — O James, you fox —
Shepherd — Sae that I was as naked as either you or me, Mr.
Tickler, at this blessed moment; and when I felt mysel' enveloped
in the hauns, paws, fins, scales, tail, and maw o' the mermaid o'
a monster, I grued till the verra roof o' the cave let doun drap,
drap, drap upon us - me and the mermaid -- and I gied mysel' up
—
for lost.
Tickler — Worse than Venus and Adonis, my dear Shepherd.
Shepherd — I began mutterin' the Lord's Prayer, and the Creed,
and the hundred and nineteenth Psalm — but a' wudna do. The
mermaid held the grup; and while I was splutterin' out her kisses,
and convulsed waur than I ever was under the warst nichtmare
that ever sat on my stamach, wi' ae desperate wallop we baith
gaed tapsalteerie - frae ae sliddery ledge to anither - till, wi'
accelerated velocity, like twa stanes, increasin' accordin' to the
squares o' the distances, we played plunge like porpusses into
the sea, a thousan' fadom deep- and hoo I gat rid o' the briny
Beastliness nae man kens till this day: for there was I sittin'
in the cave, chitterin' like a drookit cock, and nae mermaid to be
seen or heard; although, wad ye believe me, the cave had the
smell o' crabs, and labsters, and oysters, and skate, and fish in
general, aneuch to turn the stamach o' a whale or a sea-lion.
Tickler — Ship ahoy! Let us change our position, James.
Shall we board the steamer ?
Shepherd-Only look at the waves, --- hoo they gang welterin'
frae 'her prow and sides, and widen in her wake for miles aff!
Gin venture ony nearer, we'll
wear breeks mair.
Mercy on us! she's bearin' doun upon us. Let us soom fast, and
passing across her bows, we shall bear up to windward out o' a'
the commotion. — Captain Bain! Captain Bain! it's me and Mr.
Tickler, takin' a soom for an appeteet ! — stop the ingine till we
get past the bowsprit!
Tickler — Heavens, James, what a bevy of ladies on deck!
Let us dive.
Shepherd – You may dive — for you swim improperly high;
but as for me, I seem in the water to be a mere Head, like a
cherub on a church. A boat, captain - a boat!
we
never


## p. 16043 (#389) ##########################################

JOHN WILSON
16043
Tickler – James, you aren't mad, sure? Who ever boarded a
steamer in our plight? There will be fainting from stem to
stern, in cabin and steerage.
Shepherd - I ken that leddy in the straw-bannet and green
veil and ruby sarsnet, wi' the glass at her ee. Ye ho— Miss-
Tickler — James, remember how exceedingly delicate a thing
is a young lady's reputation. See, she turns away in confus-
ion.
Shepherd — Captain, I say, what news frae London ?
Captain Bain [through a speaking-trumpet) - Lord Welling-
ton's amendment on the bonding clause in the Corn Bill again
carried against Ministers by 133 to 122. Sixty-six shillings!
Tickler — What says your friend M'Culloch to that, captain ?
Shepherd — Wha cares a bodle about corn bills in our situa-
tion ? What's the captain routin' about noo o' his speakin'-
trumpet ? But he may just as weel haud his tongue, for I never
understand ae word out o' the mouth o' a trumpet.
Tickler – He says the general opinion in London is that the
Administration will stand - that Canning and Brougham -
Shepherd— Canning and Brougham, indeed! Do you think,
sir, if Canning and Brougham had been soomin' in the sea, and
that Canning had ta’en the cramp in the cauf o' his richt leg,-
as you either did, or said you did, a short while sin' syne, -
that Brougham wad hae safed him as I safed you? Faith, no he
indeed! Hairy wad hae thocht naething o' watchin' till George
showed the croon o' his head aboon water, and then hittin' him
on the temples.
Tickler — No, no, James. They would mutually risk lives for
each other's sake. But no politics at present: we're getting into
the swell, and will have our work to do to beat back into smooth
water. James, that was a facer.
Shepherd — Dog on it, ane wad need to be a sea-maw, or kitty.
wake, or stormy petrel, or some ither ane o' Bewick's birds -
Tickler - Keep your mouth shut, James, till we're out of the
swell.
Sepherd-Em-hem-umph – humph-whoo-whoo-whurr-
whurr - herrachvacherach!
Tickler — Whsy – whsy – whsy — whugh — whugh — shugh -
-
–
shugh-prugh-ptsugh — prgugh!
Shepherd — It's lang sin' I've drank sae muckle saut water
at ae sittin'— at ae soomin', I mean as I hae dune, sir, sin'


## p. 16044 (#390) ##########################################

16044
JOHN WILSON
that steamboat gaed by. She does indeed kick up a deevil o' a
rumpus.
Tickler – Whoo - whoo — whoof -- whro0 — whroo — whroof —
proof — ptroof — sprtf!
Shepherd - Ae thing I maun tell you, sir, and that's, gin you
tak the cramp the noo, you maunna expeck ony assistance frae
me — no, gin you were my ain faither. This bates a' the swalls!
Confoun' the James Watt, quoth I.
Tickler-Nay, nay, James. She is worthy of her name
and a better seaman than Captain Bain never boxed the compass.
He never comes below except at meal-times, and a pleasanter
person cannot be at the foot of the table. All night long he is
on deck looking out for squalls.
Shepherd — I declare to you, sir, that just noo in the trough
o the sea, I didna see the top o' the steamer's chimley. See,
Mr. Tickler - see, Mr. Tickler - only look here - only look here -
HERE'S BRONTE! - Mr. North's GREAT NEWFUNLAN' BRONTE!
Tickler — Capital — capital. He has been paying his father a
visit at the gallant Admiral's, and come across our steps on the
sands.
Shepherd — Puir fallow - gran' fallow — did ye think we
droonin'?
Bronte Bow – bow — bow — bow, wow, wow – bow, wow,
WOW.
Tickler His oratory is like that of Bristol Hunt versus Sir
Thomas Lethbridge.
Shepherd — Sir, you're tired, sir. You had better tak haud o'
his tail.
Tickler - No bad idea, James. But let me just put one arm
round his neck. There we go. Bronte, my boy, you swim strong
as a rhinoceros!
Bronte Bow, wow, wow
bow, wow,
wow.
Tickler — Why, I think, James, he speaks uncommonly well.
Few of our Scotch members speak better. He might lead the
Opposition.
Shepherd — What for will ye aye be introducin' politics, sir ?
But really, I hae fund his tail very useful in that swall; and let's
leave him to himsel' noo, for twa men on ae dowg's a sair doun-
draucht.
Tickler — With what a bold, kind eye the noble animal keeps
swimming between us, like a Christian!
was


## p. 16045 (#391) ##########################################

JOHN WILSON
16045
.
Shepherd — I hae never been able to persuade my heart and
my understandin' that dowgs haena immortal sowls. See how he
steers himsel', — first a wee towarts me, and then a wee towarts
you, wi' his tail like a rudder. His sowl maun be immortal.
Tickler -- I am sure, James, that if it be, I shall be extremely
happy to meet Bronte in any future society.
Shepherd — The minister wad ca’ that no orthodox. But the
mystery o’life canna gang out like the pluff o' a cawnle. · Per-
haps the verra bit bonny glitterin' insecks that we ca' ephemeral,
because they dance out but ae single day, never dee, but keep for
ever and aye openin' and shuttin' their wings in mony million
atmospheres, and may do sae through a' eternity. The universe
is aiblins wide aneuch.
Tickler - Eyes right! James, a boatful of ladies — with um-
brellas and parasols extended to catch the breeze. Let us lie on
our oars, and they will never observe us.
Bronte — Bow, wow, wow — bow, wow, wow.
(Female alarms heard from the pleasure-boat. A gentleman in the stern
rises with an oar, and stands in a threatening attitude. ]
Tickler - Ease off to the east, James -- Bronte, hush!
Shepherd --I howp they've nae fooling-pieces, for they may
tak us for gulls, and pepper us wi' swan-shot or slugs. I'll dive
at the flash. Yon's no a gun that chiel has in his haun?
Tickler — He lets fall his oar into the water, and the “boatie
- the boatie rows. ” Hark, a song!
rows
(Song from the retiring boat. ]
Shepherd – A very gude sang, and very well sung — jolly com-
panions every one.
Tickler - The fair authors of the Odd Volume'!
Shepherd — What's their names ?
Tickler — They choose to be anonymous, James; and that be-
ing the case, no gentleman is entitled to withdraw the veil.
Shepherd — They're sweet singers, howsomever; and the words
o their sang are capital. Baith Odd Volumes are maist ingen-
ious, well written, and amusing.
Tickler — The public thinks so; and they sell like wildfire.
Shepherd - I'm beginning to get maist desparat thursty and
hungry baith. What a denner wull we make! How mony miles
do you think we hae swom ?


## p. 16046 (#392) ##########################################

16046
JOHN WILSON
((
Tickler — Three — in, or over. Let me sound. Why, James,
my toe scrapes the sand. By the nail, six ! »
. "
Shepherd — I'm glad o't. It 'ill be a bonny bizziness, gif ony
ne'er-do-weels hae ran aff wi' our claes out o' the machines. But
gif they hae, Bronte 'ill sune grup them wunna ye, Bronte ?
Bronte — Bow, wow, wow — bow, wow, wow.
Shepherd - Now, Tickler, that our feet touch the grun', I'll rin
you 'a race to the machines for anither jug.
Tickler - Done — but let us have a fair start. Once, twice,
thrice!
[ Tickler and the Shepherd start, with Bronte in the van, amid loud accla-
mations from the shore. -- Scene closes. ]


## p. 16047 (#393) ##########################################

16047
WOODROW WILSON
(1856–)
MONG the younger American writers on historical and politi-
cal subjects, Woodrow Wilson is conspicuous for his literary
touch, suggestive thought, and thorough knowledge. His
studies of contemporary politics and institutions have won wide atten-
tion for their thoughtful and searching analysis, presented in a style
of exceptional attraction, and inspired by a sincere desire to inter-
pret and promote the good in American methods. His more general
essays upon topics historical or literary
have, by their decided charm, made Pro-
fessor Wilson known to a far larger audi-
ence than a professional teacher or writer
upon such themes usually reaches.
Woodrow Wilson is one of the brilliant
scholars whose training has been broad and
sufficient. He is a Southerner; was born in
Staunton, Virginia, on October 28th, 1856,
and educated first at Davidson College,
North Carolina, and then at Princeton,
whence he was graduated in 1879. He
studied law at the University of Virginia;
practiced it in Atlanta, Georgia; then went WOODROW WILSON
to Johns Hopkins University to study his-
tory and political economy, holding a fellowship there. He has occu-
pied the chair of History at Bryn Mawr and Wesleyan University
successively, and since 1890 that of Jurisprudence at Princeton. He
received in 1887 the appointment of lecturer upon that subject at
Johns Hopkins University. His publications began in 1885 with
Congressional Government,' his doctor's thesis at Johns Hopkins; a
study in American politics, which, while criticized by some parlia-
mentarians, attracted attention at home and abroad for its brilliancy
of presentation and freshness and independence of view. In 1889
appeared 'The State, an able text-book on comparative institutional
history and administration. For the series called 'Epochs of Ameri-
can History, he wrote a book on Division and Reunion (1893), in
which the disintegrating influences of the Civil War and the subse-
quent process of recovery are traced. From 1893 also dates An Old



## p. 16048 (#394) ##########################################

16048
WOODROW WILSON
Master, and Other Political Essays, containing a delightful apprecia-
tion of Adam Smith, and further papers developing the author's views
upon political principles and forms. The volume Mere Literature )
(1896) displayed his ability as an essayist in the wider sense, upon
themes calling for a synthetic literary handling. An admirable sketch
of George Washington, clearly and sympathetically delineating his
characteristics on the social and domestic side, appeared in 1897.
In the present tendency to adopt the scientific method in writing
on politics and history, and to deify the accumulation and parade
of material, scholars of Professor Wilson's type are needed and wel.
He not only insists in his writings upon the necessity and
value of the literary method in such studies (see the excerpt below),
but in his own person illustrates his meaning. He is a student who
makes past and present vivid by his interpretation of the raw stuff
of facts and records.
come.
THE TRUTH OF THE MATTER
From Mere Literature, and Other Essays. Copyright 1896, by Woodrow Wil-
son. Reprinted by permission of Houghton, Mifflin & Co. , publishers
(
"G
IVE 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 pas-
sions, 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


## p. 16049 (#395) ##########################################

WOODROW WILSON
16049
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 can-
not 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, his-
tories 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 interven-
tion 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 ?
XXVII-1004


## p. 16050 (#396) ##########################################

16050
WOODROW WILSON
>>
It is evident the thing cannot be done by the “dispassionate
annalist. The old chroniclers, whom we relish, were not dispas-
sionate. We love some of them for their sweet quaintness, some
for their childlike credulity, some for their delicious inconse-
quentiality. But our modern chroniclers are not so. They are,
above all things else, knowing, thoroughly informed, subtly so-
phisticated. 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 substitut-
ing 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 ma-
terials 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 or-
derings 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 utter-
ance. 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 veri-
table picture of it, you could give only part of the truth so long


## p. 16051 (#397) ##########################################

WOODROW WILSON
16051
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 ? With-
out the colors your picture is not true. No inventory of items
will ever 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 with-
out 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 ?
a whole? Who else


## p. 16052 (#398) ##########################################

16052
WOODROW WILSON
can bring so amazing a profusion of knowledge within the strait
limits of a simple plan, nowhere incumbered, 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 narra-
tive 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, rule us like an advocate, and make himself master
of our judgments ?
Then it is that we become aware that there were two Mac-
aulays: 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 vindi-
cation 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


## p. 16053 (#399) ##########################################

WOODROW WILSON
16053
as to our understandings ? Readers are a poor jury. They need
enlightenment as well as information; the matter must be inter-
preted 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 nar-
rative, the great majority left unnoted. But the selection - for
what purpose is it 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 “unessen-
tial” 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. Indi.
vidual research furnishes us, as it were, with the private docu-
ments and intimate records without which the public archives
are incomplete and unintelligible. But by themselves these are


## p. 16054 (#400) ##########################################

16054
WOODROW WILSON
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 after-
wards 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
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, un-
exaggerated 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.
uses.


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THE WEST IN AMERICAN HISTORY
From Mere Literature, and Other Essays. Copyright 1896, by Woodrow
Wilson. Reprinted by permission of Houghton, Mifflin & Co. , pub-
lishers.
S
-
INCE 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 govern-
ment. 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 demor-
alization in our politics. But we see it differently now. Whether
we have any taste or stomach for that rough age or not, -how-
ever 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 unsul-
lied, - 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 swag-
ger, 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 fing
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.


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16056
WOODROW WILSON
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 move-
ment 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 pro-
tected 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 Ter-
ritories, there could have been no slavery question, except by
revolution and contempt of fundamental law. But with a conti-
nent 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


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16057
done to redeem the future. It was so men of that day saw it,-
and so also must historians see it. We inust 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 ques-
tion, 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 train-
ing 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


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WOODROW WILSON
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 devel-
opment of native strength, the rounding out and nationaliza-
tion 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 stanch 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 inore than a frontier soldier and gentle-
man. 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 woods-
man 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 popula-
tion 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 sep-
arate from the East. Its communities were every day receiving
fresh members from the East, and the fresh impulse of direct


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16059
suggestion. Their blood flowed to them straight from the warm-
est 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 aird 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 among such neighbors, there in Illi-
nois, 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 busi-
ness 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.
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 em-
browned ranchman and farmer in its well-dressed men.
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
Its ports


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WOODROW WILSON
think to see except from a car-window. Its life is self-centred
and selfish. The West, save where special interest centres (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.