Franklin’s plain language about love and marriage and his very frank descriptions of his own shortcomings in these matters seem to have surprised many people. I might have explained this more fully in the first edition, but to any one who knows the age in which Franklin lived there is nothing that need cause surprise.
It was an age of frank autobiographies and plain, detailed, introspective statements about love affairs. Rousseau flourished in those days, also Gozzi and Madame Roland; and Casanova began writing his most extraordinary memoirs just about the time of Franklin’s death. Anyone who is at all familiar with these authors will readily understand why Franklin wrote his “Advice on the Choice of a Mistress.” His “Speech of Polly Baker” was of the same sort. It had a most extraordinary circulation because people were then looking at these matters from that point of view. The philosophic thought of that age was somewhat inclining to the opinion, since then much developed by German theorists like Nietzche, that religion had made love impure. Franklin, as at page 106, was also inclining that way.
Such things must be mentioned and given their proper position and importance in a book calling itself “The True Benjamin Franklin.” There are many books describing the false Franklin, the impossible Franklin, the Franklin that never existed, and could not in the nature of things exist, and to these books those who do not like the truth are referred.
Preface
This analysis of the life and character of Franklin has in view a similar object to that of the volume entitled “The True George Washington,” which was prepared for the publishers by Mr. Paul Leicester Ford and issued a year or two ago.
Washington sadly needed to be humanized, to be rescued from the myth-making process which had been destroying all that was lovable in his character and turning him into a mere bundle of abstract qualities which it was piously supposed would be wholesome examples for the American people. This assumption that our people are children who must not be told the eternal truths of human nature, but deceived into goodness by wooden heroes and lay figures, seems, fortunately, to be passing away, and in a few years it will be a strange phase to look back upon.
So thorough and systematic has been the expurgating during the last century that some of its details are very curious. It is astonishing how easily an otherwise respectable editor or biographer can get himself into a state of complete intellectual dishonesty. It is interesting to follow one of these literary criminals and see the minute care with which he manufactures an entirely new and imaginary being out of the real man who has been placed in his hands. He will not allow his victim to say even a single word which he considers unbecoming. The story is told that Washington wrote in one of his letters that a certain movement of the enemy would not amount to a flea-bite; but one of his editors struck out the passage as unfit to be printed. He thought, I suppose, that Washington could not take care of his own dignity.
Franklin in his Autobiography tells us that when working as a journeyman printer in London he drank nothing but water, and his fellow-workmen, in consequence, called him the “Water-American;” but Weems in his version of the Autobiography makes him say that they called him the “American Aquatic,” an expression which the vile taste of that time was pleased to consider elegant diction. In the same way Temple Franklin made alterations in his grandfather’s writings, changing their vigorous Anglo-Saxon into stilted Latin phrases.