But some things we all
may see and judge concerning him.
may see and judge concerning him.
Warner - World's Best Literature - v26 to v30 - Tur to Zor and Index
, 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) ##########################################
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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) ##########################################
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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.
## p. 16055 (#401) ##########################################
WOODROW WILSON
16055
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.
## p. 16056 (#402) ##########################################
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
## p. 16057 (#403) ##########################################
WOODROW WILSON
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
## p. 16058 (#404) ##########################################
16058
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
## p. 16059 (#405) ##########################################
WOODROW WILSON
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
## p. 16060 (#406) ##########################################
16обо
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. Who shall say in that wide country
where one region ends and another begins, or in that free and
changing society where one class ends and another begins ?
This, surely, is the moral of our history. The East has spent
and been spent for the West; has given forth her energy, her
young men and her substance, for the new regions that have
been a-making all the century through. But has she learned
as much as she has taught, or taken as much as she has given ?
Look what it is that has now at last taken place. The westward
march has stopped upon the final slopes of the Pacific; and now
the plot thickens. Populations turn upon their old paths; fill
in the spaces they passed by neglected, in their first journey in
search of a land of promise; settle to a life such as the East
knows as well as the West, - nay, much better. With the change,
the pause, the settlement, our people draw into closer groups,
stand face to face, to know each other and be known: and the
time has come for the East to learn in her turn; to broaden her
understanding of political and economic conditions to the scale
of a hemisphere, as her own poet bade. Let us be sure that we
get the national temperament; send our minds abroad upon the
continent, become neighbors to all the people that live upon it,
and lovers of them all, as Lincoln was.
Read but your history aright, and you shall not find the task
too hard. Your own local history, look but deep enough, tells
the tale you must take to heart. Here upon our own seaboard,
as truly as ever in the West, was once a national frontier, with
an elder East beyond the seas. Here, too, various peoples com-
bined, and elements separated elsewhere effected a tolerant and
wholesome mixture. Here, too, the national stream flowed full
and strong, bearing a thousand things upon its currents. Let
us resume and keep the vision of that time; know ourselves, our
neighbors, our destiny, with lifted and open eyes; see our history
truly, in its great proportions; be ourselves liberal as the great
principles we profess: and so be the people who might have
again the heroic adventures and do again the heroic work of the
past. 'Tis thus we shall renew our youth and secure our age
against decay.
## p. 16061 (#407) ##########################################
16061
WILLIAM WINTER
(1 836-)
M
ILLIAM WINTER is a graceful poet and essayist, and a dramatic
critic who is conspicuous in his profession in the United
States. His work in the latter capacity has been marked
for a long term of years for its literary eloquence, and its insistence
upon ideal standards. And in his more general contributions to belles-
lettres, whether in prose or verse, the qualities of sympathy and im-
agination have always been apparent. Mr. Winter, as a writer upon
the drama, past or contemporaneous, brings philosophic principles and
a wide knowledge of literature to bear upon
his judgments of actors and the art of act-
ing; and this gives his critiques perspective
and atmosphere. He has strong prejudices;
but no one can question his earnestness and
honesty, or misunderstand his position as a
student of the practical drama, who claims
that in all which pertains to dramaturgy,
moral health is as important as artistic
merit.
Mr. Winter is a New-Englander; drawing
thence, perhaps, his tendency to “moral on
the time. He was born at Gloucester, Mas-
sachusetts, July 15th, 1836; was educated in William WINTER
Boston, and is a graduate of the Harvard
Law School. In 1859 he went to New York, and did book reviewing
for the Sunday Press, and other writing for Vanity Fair, the Albion,
and the Weekly Review. In 1865 he became the dramatic critic of
the New York Tribune, a position he has held for over thirty years.
A number of his books, studying the personalities or events of the
current drama, have been drawn from or based upon his contribu-
tions to that newspaper.
Mr. Winter began to publish poetry in 1854, with the maiden volume
(The Convent and Other Poems'; and half a dozen books of verse
have come from his pen. The latest collection, Wanderers,' in 1888,
contains what he deems most worthy of preservation. These poems,
in purity of diction and form, suggest the influence of the standard
older singers, and outbreathe a sweet and true lyric spirit. They
deal with friendship and love, with the bitter-sweet of life and death.
## p. 16062 (#408) ##########################################
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WILLIAM WINTER
Many are elegiac or commemorative, and these are among the most
felicitous. Mr. Winter, in a preface to this latest volume, expresses
the hope that his verse may prove “a not altogether unworthy addition
to that old school of English Lyrical Poetry, of which gentleness is
the soul and simplicity the garment,” — and this describes not ill his
accomplishment as well as his aim in poetry.
His prose falls into two main classes: the biographies and studies
of stage celebrities, and the essays in which his wanderings in the
storied British islands are chronicled. Of the latter, English Rambles,
'Gray Days and Gold, Old Shrines and Ivy,' and 'Shakespeare's
England,' are representative. Winter writes these sketches pictur-
esquely, mingling fact and sentiment in a way to make very pleasant
and stimulating reading. To the critical studies belong carefully
wrought sketches of Booth, Jefferson, Mary Anderson, and Henry
Irving, and briefer appreciations of many other noteworthy players.
In these critiques, Mr. Winter's views on the technique of the actor's
art are set forth interestingly, with much of literary attraction. In
his daily dramatic criticism, he often indulges in trenchant satire
when attacking what he considers the latter-day fads of the drama, -
the problem play, the Ibsen craze, and the like; and is never more
vigorous and amusing, though hardly fair to some of the newer liter-
ary forces. But Mr. Winter's preaching is both sane and wholesome,
and no doubt it is needed in a day of so much literary confusion.
Altogether, he may be described as a versatile, charming, high-
motived writer, whose influence in his sphere has been decided and
salutary.
JEFFERSON'S RIP VAN WINKLE
From Life and Art of Joseph Jefferson. Copyright 1893, by Macmillan & Co.
E
VERY reader of Washington Irving knows the story of Rip
Van Winkle's adventure on the Catskill Mountains, - that
delightful, romantic idyl, in which character, humor, and
fancy are so delicately blended. Under the spell of Jefferson's
acting the spectator was transported into the past, and made to
see, as with bodily eyes, the orderly Dutch civilization as it crept
up the borders of the Hudson: the quaint villages; the stout
Hollanders, with their pipes and schnapps; the loves and troubles
of an elder generation. It is a calmer life than ours; yet the
same elements compose it. Here is a mean and cruel schemer
making a heedless man his victim, and thriving on the weakness
that he well knows how to betray. Here is parental love, tried,
## p. 16063 (#409) ##########################################
WILLIAM WINTER
1бобз
ease, but
as it often is, by. sad cares; and here the love of young and
hopeful hearts, blooming amid flowers, sunshine, music, and hap-
piness. Rip Van Winkle never seemed so lovable as in the
form of this great actor, standing in poetic relief against the
background of actual life. Jefferson has made him our familiar
friend We see that Rip is a dreamer, fond of his bottle and his
beneath all his rags and tatters, of character as well
as raiment - essentially good. We understand why the children
love him, why the dogs run after him with joy, and why the
jolly boys at the tavern welcome his song and story and genial
companionship. He has wasted his fortune and impoverished
his wife and child, and we know that he is much to blame. He
knows it too; and his talk with the children shows how keenly
he feels the consequence of a weakness which yet he is unable
to discard. It is in those minute touches that Jefferson denoted
his sympathetic study of human nature, - his intuitive perception,
looking quite through the hearts and thoughts of men. The
observer saw this in the struggle of Rip's long-submerged but
only dormant spirit of manliness, when his wife turns him from
their home, in night and storm and abandoned degradation. Still
more vividly was it shown in his pathetic bewilderment, -- his
touching embodiment of the anguish of lonely age bowed down
by sorrow and doubt, — when he comes back from his sleep of
twenty years. His disclosure of himself to his daughter marked
the climax of pathos; and every heart was melted by those
imploring looks of mute suspense, those broken accents of love
that almost fears an utterance. Perhaps the perfection of Jeffer-
son's acting was seen in the weird interview with the ghosts.
That situation is one of the best ever devised for the stage; and
the actor devised it. Midnight on the highest peak of the Cats-
kill, dimly lighted by the moon. No one speaks but Rip. The
ghosts cluster around him. The grim shade of Hudson proffers
a cup of drink to the mortal intruder, already dazed by supernat-
ural surroundings. Rip, almost shuddering in the awful silence,
pledges the ghosts in their liquor. Then suddenly the spell is
broken: the moon is lost in struggling clouds; the spectres glide
away and slowly vanish; and Rip Van Winkle, with the drowsy,
piteous murmur, "Don't leave me, boys," falls into his mystic
sleep.
The idle, dram-drinking Dutch spendthrift — so perfectly re-
produced, yet so exalted by ideal treatment is not a heroic
## p. 16064 (#410) ##########################################
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WILLIAM WINTER
figure, and cannot be said to possess an exemplary significance
either in himself or his experience. Yet his temperament has
the fine fibre that everybody loves; and everybody, accordingly,
has a good feeling for him, although nobody may have a good
word for his way of life. All observers know that order of man.
He is generally poor. He never did a bad action in all his life.
He is continually cheering the weak and lowly. He always wears
a smile the reflex of a gentle heart. Ambition does not trouble
him. His wants are few. He has no care, except when, now
and then, he feels that he may have wasted time and talent, or
when the sorrow of others falls darkly on his heart. This, how-
ever, is rare; for at most times he is “bright as light and clear
as wind. ” Nature has established with him a kind of kindred
that she allows with only a chosen few. In him Shakespeare's
rosy ideal is suggested:
Suppose the singing birds musicians:
The grass whereon thou tread'st, the presence strewed;
The flowers fair ladies; and thy steps, no more
Than a delightful measure, or a dance. ”
Nobody would dream of setting up Jefferson's Rip as a model,
but everybody is glad that he exists. Most persons are so full
of care and trouble, so weighed down with the sense of duty, so
anxious to regulate the world, that contact with a nature which
is careless in the stress and din of toil, dwells in an atmosphere
of sunshine idleness, and is the embodiment of careless mirth,
brings a positive relief. This is the feeling that Jefferson's act-
ing inspired. The halo of genius was all around it. Sincerity,
humor, pathos, imagination, -- the glamour of wild flowers and
woodland brooks, slumberous, slow-drifting summer clouds, and
soft music heard upon the waters, in starlit nights of June, –
those are the springs of the actor's art.
There are
a hundred
beauties of method in it which satisfy the judgment and fasci-
nate the sense of symmetry; but underlying those beauties there
is a magical sweetness of temperament, a delicate blending of
emotion, gentleness, quaintness, and dream-like repose, which
awakens the most affectionate sympathy. Art could not supply
that subtle, potent charm. It is the divine fire.
In his embodiment of Rip Van Winkle, Jefferson delineates an
individual character, through successive stages of growth, till the
story of a life is completely told. If the student of acting would
## p. 16065 (#411) ##########################################
WILLIAM WINTER
16065
appreciate the fineness and force of the dramatic art that is dis-
played in the work, let him consider the complexity and depth of
the effect, as contrasted with the simplicity of the means that are
used to produce it. The sense of beauty is satisfied, because the
object that it apprehends is beautiful. The heart is deeply and
surely touched, for the simple and sufficient reason that the char-
acter and experience revealed to it are lovely and pathetic. For
Rip Van Winkle's goodness exists as an oak exists, and is not de-
pendent on principle, precept, or purpose. However he may drift,
he cannot drift away from human affection. Weakness was never
punished with more sorrowful misfortune than his. Dear to us
for what he is, he becomes dearer still for what he suffers; and
in the acting of Jefferson, for the manner in which he suffers it.
That manner, arising out of complete identification with the part,
informed by intuitive and liberal knowledge of human nature, and
guided by an unerring instinct of taste, is unfettered, graceful,
free from effort; and it shows with delicate precision the grad-
ual, natural changes of the character, as wrought by the pressure
of experience. Its result is the winning embodiment of a rare
type of human nature and mystical experience, embellished by
the hues of romance, and exalted by the atmosphere of poetry;
and no person of imagination and sensibility can see it without
being charmed by its humor, thrilled by its spiritual beauty, and
beneath the spell of its humanity, made deeply conscious that life
is worthless, however its ambition may be rewarded, unless it is
hallowed by love.
There will be, as there have been, many performers of Rip
Van Winkle; there is but one Jefferson. For him it was reserved
to idealize the subject; to elevate a prosaic type of good-natured
indolence into an emblem of poetical freedom; to construct and
translate, in the world of fact, the Arcadian vagabond of the
world of dreams. In the presence of his fascinating embodiment
of that droll, gentle, drifting human creature,-to whom trees
and brooks and flowers are familiar companions, to whom spir-
its appear, and for whom the mysterious voices of the lonely
midnight forest have a meaning and a charm, - the observer
feels that poetry is no longer restricted to canvas and marble, but
walks forth crystallized in a human form, spangled with the dia-
mond light of morning, mysterious with spiritual intimations,
lovely with rustic freedom, and fragrant with the incense of the
woods.
XXVII-1005
## p. 16066 (#412) ##########################################
16066
WILLIAM WINTER
-
Jefferson's acting is an education as well as a delight. It
especially teaches the imperative importance, in dramatic art, of a
thorough and perfect plan; which yet, by freshness of spirit and
spontaneity of execution, shall be made to seem free and care.
less. Jefferson's embodiment of Rip has been prominently be-
fore the public for thirty years; yet it is not hackneyed, and it
does not grow tiresome. The secret of its vitality is its poetry.
A thriftless, commonplace sot, as drawn by Washington Irving,
becomes a poetic vagabond, as transfigured and embodied by the
actor; and the dignity of his artistic work is augmented rather
than diminished from the fact that he plays in a drama through-
out which the expedient of inebriety, as a motive of action, is
exaggerated. Boucicault, working under explicit information as
to Jefferson's views and wishes with reference to the part, cer-
tainly improved the old piece; but as certainly, the scheme to
show the sunny sweetness and indolent temperament of Rip is
clumsily planned, while the text is devoid of literary excellence
and intellectual character, - attributes which, though not dra-
matic, are desirable. The actor is immensely superior to the
play, and may indeed be said to make it. The obvious goodness
of his heart, the deep sincerity of his moral purpose, the poten-
tial force of his sense of beauty, the supremacy in him of what
Voltaire was the first to call the "faculty of taste," the inces-
sant charm of his temperament, — those are the means, ruled and
guided by clear vision and strong will, and made to animate an
artistic figure possessing both symmetry and luxuriant wildness,
that make the greatness of Jefferson's embodiment of Rip. He
has created a character that everybody will continue to love, not-
withstanding weakness of nature and indolent conduct. Jefferson
never had the purpose to extol improvidence, or extenuate the
wrong and misery of inebriety. The opportunity that he dis-
cerned and has brilliantly improved was that of showing a lovely
nature, set free from the shackles of conventionality, and cir-
cumscribed with picturesque, romantic surroundings, during a
momentous experience of spiritual life, and of the mutability of
the world. The obvious defects in the structure are an undue
emphasis upon the bottle, as poor Rip's failing, and an undue
exaggeration of the virago quality in Gretchen. It would be
easy, taking the prosy tone of the temperance lecturer, to look at
Jefferson's design as a matter of fact, and not of poetry; and by
dwelling on the impediments of his subject rather than the spirit
## p. 16067 (#413) ##########################################
WILLIAM WINTER
16067
.
of his art and the beauty of his execution, to set his beautiful
and elevating achievement in a degraded and degrading light.
But fortunately the heart has its logic as well as the head,
and all observers are not without imagination. The heart and
imagination of our age know what Jefferson means in Rip, and
have accepted him therefore into the sanctuary of affection.
The world does not love Rip Van Winkle because of his
faults, but in spite of them. Underneath his defects the human
nature is sound and bright; and it is out of this interior beauty
that the charm of Jefferson's personation arises. The conduct of
Rip Van Winkle is the result of his character, not of his drams.
At the sacrifice of comicality, here and there, the element of
inebriety might be left out of his experience, and he would still
act in the same way, and possess the same fascination. The
drink is only an expedient to involve the hero in domestic strife,
and open the way for his ghostly adventure and his pathetic
resuscitation. The machinery is clumsy; but that does not inval-
idate either the beauty of the character or the supernatural thrill
and mortal anguish of the experience. Those elements make the
soul of this great work; which, while it captivates the heart, also
enthralls the imagination, — lifting us above the storms of life, its
sorrows, its losses, and its fret, till we rest at last on Nature's
bosom, children once more, and once more happy.
Most persons who have seen Jefferson as Rip would probably
name that achievement as essentially the most natural piece of
acting ever presented within their observation. In its effect it
is natural; in its method, in the process by which it is wrought,
it is absolutely artificial. In that method not forgetting the
soul within that method - will be found the secret of its power;
in the art with which genius transfigures and interprets actual
life: and in that, furthermore, dwells the secret of all good
acting. If you would produce the effect of nature in dramatic
art, you must not be natural; you must be artificial, but you
must seem to be natural. The same step, the same gesture, the
same tone of voice, the same force of facial expression that you
involuntarily use in the proceedings of actual, every-day life, will
not upon the stage prove adequate. They may indicate your
meaning, but they will not convey it. Their result will be
tame, narrow, and insufficient. Your step must be lengthened;
your tone must be elevated; your facial muscles must be allowed
a freer play; the sound with which you intend to produce the
## p. 16068 (#414) ##########################################
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WILLIAM WINTER
-
effect of a sigh must leave your lips as a sob. The actor who
is exactly natural in his demeanor and speech upon the stage -
who acts and speaks precisely as he would act and speak in a
room - wearies his audience, because he falls short of his object,
and is indefinite and commonplace. Jefferson, as Rip, has to
present, among other aspects of human nature, a temperament
that to some extent is swayed by an infirmity,- the appetite for
intoxicant liquor. That, in actual life, is offensive; but that, as
shown by Jefferson, when it reaches his auditors, reaches them
only as the token or suggestion of an amiable weakness; and
that weakness, and not the symptom of it, is the spring of the
whole character and action. The hiccough with which Rip looks
in at the window of the cottage where the offended Gretchen is
waiting for him, is not the obnoxious hiccough of a sot, but the
playful hiccough of an artist who is only suggesting a sot. The
effect is natural. The process is artificial. Jefferson constantly
addresses the imagination, and he uses imagination with which
to address it. In actual life the garments worn by Rip would
be soiled. In Jefferson's artistic scheme the studied shabbiness
and carefully selected tatters are scrupulously clean; and they
are made not only harmonious in color,- and thus so pleasing to
the eye that they attract no especial attention, but accordant
with the sweet drollery and listless, indolent, drifting spirit of
the character. No idea could easily be suggested more incongru-
ous with probability, more unnatural and fantastic, than the idea
of a tipsy vagabond encircled by a ring of Dutch ghosts, on the
top of a mountain, in the middle of the night; but when Jeffer-
son — by the deep feeling and affluent imagination with which
he fills the scene, and by the vigilant, firm, unerring, technical
skill with which he controls his forces and guides them to effect
— has made that idea a living fact, no spectator of the weird,
thrilling, pathetic picture ever thinks of it as unnatural.
(
"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) ##########################################
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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.
## p. 16055 (#401) ##########################################
WOODROW WILSON
16055
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.
## p. 16056 (#402) ##########################################
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
## p. 16057 (#403) ##########################################
WOODROW WILSON
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
## p. 16058 (#404) ##########################################
16058
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
## p. 16059 (#405) ##########################################
WOODROW WILSON
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
## p. 16060 (#406) ##########################################
16обо
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. Who shall say in that wide country
where one region ends and another begins, or in that free and
changing society where one class ends and another begins ?
This, surely, is the moral of our history. The East has spent
and been spent for the West; has given forth her energy, her
young men and her substance, for the new regions that have
been a-making all the century through. But has she learned
as much as she has taught, or taken as much as she has given ?
Look what it is that has now at last taken place. The westward
march has stopped upon the final slopes of the Pacific; and now
the plot thickens. Populations turn upon their old paths; fill
in the spaces they passed by neglected, in their first journey in
search of a land of promise; settle to a life such as the East
knows as well as the West, - nay, much better. With the change,
the pause, the settlement, our people draw into closer groups,
stand face to face, to know each other and be known: and the
time has come for the East to learn in her turn; to broaden her
understanding of political and economic conditions to the scale
of a hemisphere, as her own poet bade. Let us be sure that we
get the national temperament; send our minds abroad upon the
continent, become neighbors to all the people that live upon it,
and lovers of them all, as Lincoln was.
Read but your history aright, and you shall not find the task
too hard. Your own local history, look but deep enough, tells
the tale you must take to heart. Here upon our own seaboard,
as truly as ever in the West, was once a national frontier, with
an elder East beyond the seas. Here, too, various peoples com-
bined, and elements separated elsewhere effected a tolerant and
wholesome mixture. Here, too, the national stream flowed full
and strong, bearing a thousand things upon its currents. Let
us resume and keep the vision of that time; know ourselves, our
neighbors, our destiny, with lifted and open eyes; see our history
truly, in its great proportions; be ourselves liberal as the great
principles we profess: and so be the people who might have
again the heroic adventures and do again the heroic work of the
past. 'Tis thus we shall renew our youth and secure our age
against decay.
## p. 16061 (#407) ##########################################
16061
WILLIAM WINTER
(1 836-)
M
ILLIAM WINTER is a graceful poet and essayist, and a dramatic
critic who is conspicuous in his profession in the United
States. His work in the latter capacity has been marked
for a long term of years for its literary eloquence, and its insistence
upon ideal standards. And in his more general contributions to belles-
lettres, whether in prose or verse, the qualities of sympathy and im-
agination have always been apparent. Mr. Winter, as a writer upon
the drama, past or contemporaneous, brings philosophic principles and
a wide knowledge of literature to bear upon
his judgments of actors and the art of act-
ing; and this gives his critiques perspective
and atmosphere. He has strong prejudices;
but no one can question his earnestness and
honesty, or misunderstand his position as a
student of the practical drama, who claims
that in all which pertains to dramaturgy,
moral health is as important as artistic
merit.
Mr. Winter is a New-Englander; drawing
thence, perhaps, his tendency to “moral on
the time. He was born at Gloucester, Mas-
sachusetts, July 15th, 1836; was educated in William WINTER
Boston, and is a graduate of the Harvard
Law School. In 1859 he went to New York, and did book reviewing
for the Sunday Press, and other writing for Vanity Fair, the Albion,
and the Weekly Review. In 1865 he became the dramatic critic of
the New York Tribune, a position he has held for over thirty years.
A number of his books, studying the personalities or events of the
current drama, have been drawn from or based upon his contribu-
tions to that newspaper.
Mr. Winter began to publish poetry in 1854, with the maiden volume
(The Convent and Other Poems'; and half a dozen books of verse
have come from his pen. The latest collection, Wanderers,' in 1888,
contains what he deems most worthy of preservation. These poems,
in purity of diction and form, suggest the influence of the standard
older singers, and outbreathe a sweet and true lyric spirit. They
deal with friendship and love, with the bitter-sweet of life and death.
## p. 16062 (#408) ##########################################
16062
WILLIAM WINTER
Many are elegiac or commemorative, and these are among the most
felicitous. Mr. Winter, in a preface to this latest volume, expresses
the hope that his verse may prove “a not altogether unworthy addition
to that old school of English Lyrical Poetry, of which gentleness is
the soul and simplicity the garment,” — and this describes not ill his
accomplishment as well as his aim in poetry.
His prose falls into two main classes: the biographies and studies
of stage celebrities, and the essays in which his wanderings in the
storied British islands are chronicled. Of the latter, English Rambles,
'Gray Days and Gold, Old Shrines and Ivy,' and 'Shakespeare's
England,' are representative. Winter writes these sketches pictur-
esquely, mingling fact and sentiment in a way to make very pleasant
and stimulating reading. To the critical studies belong carefully
wrought sketches of Booth, Jefferson, Mary Anderson, and Henry
Irving, and briefer appreciations of many other noteworthy players.
In these critiques, Mr. Winter's views on the technique of the actor's
art are set forth interestingly, with much of literary attraction. In
his daily dramatic criticism, he often indulges in trenchant satire
when attacking what he considers the latter-day fads of the drama, -
the problem play, the Ibsen craze, and the like; and is never more
vigorous and amusing, though hardly fair to some of the newer liter-
ary forces. But Mr. Winter's preaching is both sane and wholesome,
and no doubt it is needed in a day of so much literary confusion.
Altogether, he may be described as a versatile, charming, high-
motived writer, whose influence in his sphere has been decided and
salutary.
JEFFERSON'S RIP VAN WINKLE
From Life and Art of Joseph Jefferson. Copyright 1893, by Macmillan & Co.
E
VERY reader of Washington Irving knows the story of Rip
Van Winkle's adventure on the Catskill Mountains, - that
delightful, romantic idyl, in which character, humor, and
fancy are so delicately blended. Under the spell of Jefferson's
acting the spectator was transported into the past, and made to
see, as with bodily eyes, the orderly Dutch civilization as it crept
up the borders of the Hudson: the quaint villages; the stout
Hollanders, with their pipes and schnapps; the loves and troubles
of an elder generation. It is a calmer life than ours; yet the
same elements compose it. Here is a mean and cruel schemer
making a heedless man his victim, and thriving on the weakness
that he well knows how to betray. Here is parental love, tried,
## p. 16063 (#409) ##########################################
WILLIAM WINTER
1бобз
ease, but
as it often is, by. sad cares; and here the love of young and
hopeful hearts, blooming amid flowers, sunshine, music, and hap-
piness. Rip Van Winkle never seemed so lovable as in the
form of this great actor, standing in poetic relief against the
background of actual life. Jefferson has made him our familiar
friend We see that Rip is a dreamer, fond of his bottle and his
beneath all his rags and tatters, of character as well
as raiment - essentially good. We understand why the children
love him, why the dogs run after him with joy, and why the
jolly boys at the tavern welcome his song and story and genial
companionship. He has wasted his fortune and impoverished
his wife and child, and we know that he is much to blame. He
knows it too; and his talk with the children shows how keenly
he feels the consequence of a weakness which yet he is unable
to discard. It is in those minute touches that Jefferson denoted
his sympathetic study of human nature, - his intuitive perception,
looking quite through the hearts and thoughts of men. The
observer saw this in the struggle of Rip's long-submerged but
only dormant spirit of manliness, when his wife turns him from
their home, in night and storm and abandoned degradation. Still
more vividly was it shown in his pathetic bewilderment, -- his
touching embodiment of the anguish of lonely age bowed down
by sorrow and doubt, — when he comes back from his sleep of
twenty years. His disclosure of himself to his daughter marked
the climax of pathos; and every heart was melted by those
imploring looks of mute suspense, those broken accents of love
that almost fears an utterance. Perhaps the perfection of Jeffer-
son's acting was seen in the weird interview with the ghosts.
That situation is one of the best ever devised for the stage; and
the actor devised it. Midnight on the highest peak of the Cats-
kill, dimly lighted by the moon. No one speaks but Rip. The
ghosts cluster around him. The grim shade of Hudson proffers
a cup of drink to the mortal intruder, already dazed by supernat-
ural surroundings. Rip, almost shuddering in the awful silence,
pledges the ghosts in their liquor. Then suddenly the spell is
broken: the moon is lost in struggling clouds; the spectres glide
away and slowly vanish; and Rip Van Winkle, with the drowsy,
piteous murmur, "Don't leave me, boys," falls into his mystic
sleep.
The idle, dram-drinking Dutch spendthrift — so perfectly re-
produced, yet so exalted by ideal treatment is not a heroic
## p. 16064 (#410) ##########################################
16064
WILLIAM WINTER
figure, and cannot be said to possess an exemplary significance
either in himself or his experience. Yet his temperament has
the fine fibre that everybody loves; and everybody, accordingly,
has a good feeling for him, although nobody may have a good
word for his way of life. All observers know that order of man.
He is generally poor. He never did a bad action in all his life.
He is continually cheering the weak and lowly. He always wears
a smile the reflex of a gentle heart. Ambition does not trouble
him. His wants are few. He has no care, except when, now
and then, he feels that he may have wasted time and talent, or
when the sorrow of others falls darkly on his heart. This, how-
ever, is rare; for at most times he is “bright as light and clear
as wind. ” Nature has established with him a kind of kindred
that she allows with only a chosen few. In him Shakespeare's
rosy ideal is suggested:
Suppose the singing birds musicians:
The grass whereon thou tread'st, the presence strewed;
The flowers fair ladies; and thy steps, no more
Than a delightful measure, or a dance. ”
Nobody would dream of setting up Jefferson's Rip as a model,
but everybody is glad that he exists. Most persons are so full
of care and trouble, so weighed down with the sense of duty, so
anxious to regulate the world, that contact with a nature which
is careless in the stress and din of toil, dwells in an atmosphere
of sunshine idleness, and is the embodiment of careless mirth,
brings a positive relief. This is the feeling that Jefferson's act-
ing inspired. The halo of genius was all around it. Sincerity,
humor, pathos, imagination, -- the glamour of wild flowers and
woodland brooks, slumberous, slow-drifting summer clouds, and
soft music heard upon the waters, in starlit nights of June, –
those are the springs of the actor's art.
There are
a hundred
beauties of method in it which satisfy the judgment and fasci-
nate the sense of symmetry; but underlying those beauties there
is a magical sweetness of temperament, a delicate blending of
emotion, gentleness, quaintness, and dream-like repose, which
awakens the most affectionate sympathy. Art could not supply
that subtle, potent charm. It is the divine fire.
In his embodiment of Rip Van Winkle, Jefferson delineates an
individual character, through successive stages of growth, till the
story of a life is completely told. If the student of acting would
## p. 16065 (#411) ##########################################
WILLIAM WINTER
16065
appreciate the fineness and force of the dramatic art that is dis-
played in the work, let him consider the complexity and depth of
the effect, as contrasted with the simplicity of the means that are
used to produce it. The sense of beauty is satisfied, because the
object that it apprehends is beautiful. The heart is deeply and
surely touched, for the simple and sufficient reason that the char-
acter and experience revealed to it are lovely and pathetic. For
Rip Van Winkle's goodness exists as an oak exists, and is not de-
pendent on principle, precept, or purpose. However he may drift,
he cannot drift away from human affection. Weakness was never
punished with more sorrowful misfortune than his. Dear to us
for what he is, he becomes dearer still for what he suffers; and
in the acting of Jefferson, for the manner in which he suffers it.
That manner, arising out of complete identification with the part,
informed by intuitive and liberal knowledge of human nature, and
guided by an unerring instinct of taste, is unfettered, graceful,
free from effort; and it shows with delicate precision the grad-
ual, natural changes of the character, as wrought by the pressure
of experience. Its result is the winning embodiment of a rare
type of human nature and mystical experience, embellished by
the hues of romance, and exalted by the atmosphere of poetry;
and no person of imagination and sensibility can see it without
being charmed by its humor, thrilled by its spiritual beauty, and
beneath the spell of its humanity, made deeply conscious that life
is worthless, however its ambition may be rewarded, unless it is
hallowed by love.
There will be, as there have been, many performers of Rip
Van Winkle; there is but one Jefferson. For him it was reserved
to idealize the subject; to elevate a prosaic type of good-natured
indolence into an emblem of poetical freedom; to construct and
translate, in the world of fact, the Arcadian vagabond of the
world of dreams. In the presence of his fascinating embodiment
of that droll, gentle, drifting human creature,-to whom trees
and brooks and flowers are familiar companions, to whom spir-
its appear, and for whom the mysterious voices of the lonely
midnight forest have a meaning and a charm, - the observer
feels that poetry is no longer restricted to canvas and marble, but
walks forth crystallized in a human form, spangled with the dia-
mond light of morning, mysterious with spiritual intimations,
lovely with rustic freedom, and fragrant with the incense of the
woods.
XXVII-1005
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WILLIAM WINTER
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Jefferson's acting is an education as well as a delight. It
especially teaches the imperative importance, in dramatic art, of a
thorough and perfect plan; which yet, by freshness of spirit and
spontaneity of execution, shall be made to seem free and care.
less. Jefferson's embodiment of Rip has been prominently be-
fore the public for thirty years; yet it is not hackneyed, and it
does not grow tiresome. The secret of its vitality is its poetry.
A thriftless, commonplace sot, as drawn by Washington Irving,
becomes a poetic vagabond, as transfigured and embodied by the
actor; and the dignity of his artistic work is augmented rather
than diminished from the fact that he plays in a drama through-
out which the expedient of inebriety, as a motive of action, is
exaggerated. Boucicault, working under explicit information as
to Jefferson's views and wishes with reference to the part, cer-
tainly improved the old piece; but as certainly, the scheme to
show the sunny sweetness and indolent temperament of Rip is
clumsily planned, while the text is devoid of literary excellence
and intellectual character, - attributes which, though not dra-
matic, are desirable. The actor is immensely superior to the
play, and may indeed be said to make it. The obvious goodness
of his heart, the deep sincerity of his moral purpose, the poten-
tial force of his sense of beauty, the supremacy in him of what
Voltaire was the first to call the "faculty of taste," the inces-
sant charm of his temperament, — those are the means, ruled and
guided by clear vision and strong will, and made to animate an
artistic figure possessing both symmetry and luxuriant wildness,
that make the greatness of Jefferson's embodiment of Rip. He
has created a character that everybody will continue to love, not-
withstanding weakness of nature and indolent conduct. Jefferson
never had the purpose to extol improvidence, or extenuate the
wrong and misery of inebriety. The opportunity that he dis-
cerned and has brilliantly improved was that of showing a lovely
nature, set free from the shackles of conventionality, and cir-
cumscribed with picturesque, romantic surroundings, during a
momentous experience of spiritual life, and of the mutability of
the world. The obvious defects in the structure are an undue
emphasis upon the bottle, as poor Rip's failing, and an undue
exaggeration of the virago quality in Gretchen. It would be
easy, taking the prosy tone of the temperance lecturer, to look at
Jefferson's design as a matter of fact, and not of poetry; and by
dwelling on the impediments of his subject rather than the spirit
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WILLIAM WINTER
16067
.
of his art and the beauty of his execution, to set his beautiful
and elevating achievement in a degraded and degrading light.
But fortunately the heart has its logic as well as the head,
and all observers are not without imagination. The heart and
imagination of our age know what Jefferson means in Rip, and
have accepted him therefore into the sanctuary of affection.
The world does not love Rip Van Winkle because of his
faults, but in spite of them. Underneath his defects the human
nature is sound and bright; and it is out of this interior beauty
that the charm of Jefferson's personation arises. The conduct of
Rip Van Winkle is the result of his character, not of his drams.
At the sacrifice of comicality, here and there, the element of
inebriety might be left out of his experience, and he would still
act in the same way, and possess the same fascination. The
drink is only an expedient to involve the hero in domestic strife,
and open the way for his ghostly adventure and his pathetic
resuscitation. The machinery is clumsy; but that does not inval-
idate either the beauty of the character or the supernatural thrill
and mortal anguish of the experience. Those elements make the
soul of this great work; which, while it captivates the heart, also
enthralls the imagination, — lifting us above the storms of life, its
sorrows, its losses, and its fret, till we rest at last on Nature's
bosom, children once more, and once more happy.
Most persons who have seen Jefferson as Rip would probably
name that achievement as essentially the most natural piece of
acting ever presented within their observation. In its effect it
is natural; in its method, in the process by which it is wrought,
it is absolutely artificial. In that method not forgetting the
soul within that method - will be found the secret of its power;
in the art with which genius transfigures and interprets actual
life: and in that, furthermore, dwells the secret of all good
acting. If you would produce the effect of nature in dramatic
art, you must not be natural; you must be artificial, but you
must seem to be natural. The same step, the same gesture, the
same tone of voice, the same force of facial expression that you
involuntarily use in the proceedings of actual, every-day life, will
not upon the stage prove adequate. They may indicate your
meaning, but they will not convey it. Their result will be
tame, narrow, and insufficient. Your step must be lengthened;
your tone must be elevated; your facial muscles must be allowed
a freer play; the sound with which you intend to produce the
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WILLIAM WINTER
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effect of a sigh must leave your lips as a sob. The actor who
is exactly natural in his demeanor and speech upon the stage -
who acts and speaks precisely as he would act and speak in a
room - wearies his audience, because he falls short of his object,
and is indefinite and commonplace. Jefferson, as Rip, has to
present, among other aspects of human nature, a temperament
that to some extent is swayed by an infirmity,- the appetite for
intoxicant liquor. That, in actual life, is offensive; but that, as
shown by Jefferson, when it reaches his auditors, reaches them
only as the token or suggestion of an amiable weakness; and
that weakness, and not the symptom of it, is the spring of the
whole character and action. The hiccough with which Rip looks
in at the window of the cottage where the offended Gretchen is
waiting for him, is not the obnoxious hiccough of a sot, but the
playful hiccough of an artist who is only suggesting a sot. The
effect is natural. The process is artificial. Jefferson constantly
addresses the imagination, and he uses imagination with which
to address it. In actual life the garments worn by Rip would
be soiled. In Jefferson's artistic scheme the studied shabbiness
and carefully selected tatters are scrupulously clean; and they
are made not only harmonious in color,- and thus so pleasing to
the eye that they attract no especial attention, but accordant
with the sweet drollery and listless, indolent, drifting spirit of
the character. No idea could easily be suggested more incongru-
ous with probability, more unnatural and fantastic, than the idea
of a tipsy vagabond encircled by a ring of Dutch ghosts, on the
top of a mountain, in the middle of the night; but when Jeffer-
son — by the deep feeling and affluent imagination with which
he fills the scene, and by the vigilant, firm, unerring, technical
skill with which he controls his forces and guides them to effect
— has made that idea a living fact, no spectator of the weird,
thrilling, pathetic picture ever thinks of it as unnatural.
