No benign personage in the calendar of secular saints is really less loved than Washington. The romancing historians and biographers have adorned him with a thousand impossible virtues, naturally, and in so dehumanizing him have set him beyond and above the longest reach of human sympathies. His character, as it pleased them to create it, is like nothing that we know about and care for. He is a monster of goodness and wisdom, with about as much of light and fire as the snow Adam of the small boy playing at creation on the campus of a public school. The Washington-making Frankensteins have done their work so badly that their creature is an insupportable bore, diffusing an infectious dejection. Try to fancy an historical novel or drama with him for hero—a poem with him for subject! Possibly such have been written; I do not recall any at the moment, and the proposition is hardly thinkable. The ideal Washington is a soulless conception, absolutely without power on the imagination. Within the area of his gelid efflation the flowers of fancy open only to wither, and any sentiment endeavoring to transgress the boundary of that desolate domain falls frosted in its flight.
Some one—Colonel Ingersoll, I fancy—has said that Washington is a steel engraving. That is hardly an adequate conception, being derived from the sense of sight only; the ear has something to say in the matter, and there is much in a name. Before my studies of his character had effaced my childish impression I used always to picture him in the act of bending over a tub.
There are two George Washingtons—the natural and the artificial. They are now equally “great,” but the former was chokefull of the old Adam. He swore like “our army in Flanders,” loved a bottle like a brother and had an inter-colonial reputation as a lady-killer. He was, indeed, a singularly interesting and magnetic old boy—one whom any sane and honest lover of the picturesque in life and character would deem it an honor and an education to have known in the flesh. He is now known to but few; you must dig pretty deeply into the tumulus of rubbishy panegyric—scan pretty closely the inedited annals of his time, in order to see him as he was. Criss-crossed upon these failing parchments of the past are the lines of the sleek Philistine, the smug patriot and the lessoning moraler, making a palimpsest whereof all that is legible is false and all that is honest is blotted out. The detestable anthropolater of the biographical gift has pushed his glowing pen across the page, to the unspeakable darkening of counsel. In short, Washington’s countrymen see him through a glass dirtily. The image is unlovely and unloved. You can no more love and revere the memory of the biographical George Washington than you can an isosceles triangle or a cubic foot of interstellar space.
The portrait-painters began it—Gilbert Stuart and the rest of them. They idealized all the humanity out of the poor patriot’s face and passed him down to the engravers as a rather sleepy-looking butcher’s block. There is not a portrait of Washington extant which a man of taste and knowledge would suffer to hang on the wall of his stable. Then the historians jumped in, raping all the laurels from the brows of the man’s great contemporaries and piling them in confusion upon his pate. They made him a god in wisdom, and a giant in arms; whereas, in point of ability and service, he was but little, if at all, superior to any one of a half-dozen of his now over-shadowed but once illustrious co-workers in council and camp, and in no way comparable with Hamilton. He towers above his fellows because he stands upon a pile of books.
The supreme indignity to the memory of this really worthy man has been performed by the Sunday-scholiasts, the pietaries, the truly good, the example-to-American-youth folk. These canting creatures have managed to nake him of his last remaining rag of flesh and drain out his ultimate red corpuscle of human blood. In order that he may be acceptable to themselves they have made him a bore to everyone else. To give him value as an “example” to the unripe intelligences of their following they have whitewashed him an inch thick, draped him, fig-leafed him and gilded him out of all semblance to man. To prepare his character for the juvenile moral tooth they have boned it, and to make it digestible to the juvenile moral paunch, unsalted it by maceration in the milk-and-water of their own minds. And so we have him to-day. In a single century the great-hearted gentleman of history has become the good boy of literature—the public prig. Washington is the capon of our barnyard Pantheon—revised and edited for the table.
JOHN SMITH’S ANCESTORS
READER mine, wisest of mortals that you are, do you feel sure that you know how to deal with a proposition, which is at the same time unquestionable and impossible—which must be true, yet can not be true? Do you know just what degree of intellectual hospitality to give to such a proposition—whether to receive and entertain it (and if so how) or cast it from you, and how to do that? Possibly you were never consciously at bay before a proposition of that kind, and therefore lack the advantage of skill in its disposal. Attend, then, O child of mortality—consider and be wise:
You have, or have had, two parents—whom God prosper if they live and rest if dead. Each of them had two parents; in other words, you had at some time and somewhere four grandparents, and right worthy persons they were, I’ll be sworn, albeit you may not be able to name them without stopping to take thought. Of great-grandparents you surely had no fewer than eight—that is to say, no further away than three generations your ancestors numbered eight persons, now in heaven. In countries which are pleased to call themselves civilized and enlightened “a generation” means about thirty-four years. Not long ago it meant thirty-three, but improved methods of distribution, sanitation and so forth have added a year to the average duration of human life, though they have not pointed out any profitable use to make of the addition. All this amounts to saying (acceptably, I trust) that at each remove of thirty-four years back toward Adam and his time you double the number of your ancestors. Among so many some, naturally, were truly modest persons, and I don’t know that you would care to have so much said about them as I shall have to say; so, if you please, we will speak of Mr. John Smith’s instead.
John Smith, then, whom I know very well, and greatly esteem, and who is approaching middle age, had, about 34 years ago, two ancestors. About 102 years ago, say in the year of grace 1792, he had eight—though he did not have himself. You can do the rest of the figuring yourself if you care to go on and are unwilling to take my word for what follows—the astonishing state of things which I am about to thrust upon your attention. Just keep doubling the number of John Smith’s ancestors until you get the number 1,073,741,824. Now when do you suppose it was that Mr. Smith had that number of living ancestors? Make your calculation, allowing 34 years for each time that you have multiplied by two, and you will find that it was about the year 879. It seems a rather modern date and a goodish number of persons to be concerning themselves, however unconsciously, in the begetting of Neighbor John, but that is not “where it hurts.” The point is that the number of his ancestors, so far as we have gone, is about the number of the earth’s inhabitants at that date—little and big; white, black, brown, yellow and blue; males, females and girls. I do not care to point out Mr. Smith’s presumption in professing himself an Anglo-Saxon—with all that mixed blood in the veins of him; perhaps he has never made this calculation and does not know from just what stock he has the honor to have descended, though truly this distinguished scion of an illustrious race might seem to be justified in calling himself a Son of Earth.