Chapter VII RECOMMENCEMENTS I

REACHING Monticello in the middle of March, “having found the roads excessively bad, although I have seen them worse,” Mr. Jefferson immediately wrote a letter to his successor in the White House, giving him news of the great world of reality outside the realm of politics. “The spring is remarkably backward,” is his first observation to the man who was facing the problems of possible war with Old England and possible secession in New England. “No oats sown, not much tobacco-seed, and little done in the gardens. Wheat has suffered considerably. No vegetation visible yet but the red maple, weeping willow and lilac. Flour is said to be at eight dollars in Richmond, and all produce is hurrying down.” War or no war, secession or no secession, men must live, and the only way the means of life can be produced is by “labouring the earth” in vigilant co-operation with the sunshine, the air and the rain.

Mr. Jefferson at once set about picking up the sadly ravelled odds and ends of his farm work, laying out his flower-beds and gardens, and indulging his extravagant passion for architecture, both at Monticello and on his new house at Poplar Forest, in the county of Bedford. Monticello was really never finished; probably it was never meant to be finished, but to be kept as a kind of standing challenge to the ingenuity of its owner. “So I hope it will remain during my life,” he is reported to have told a visitor, “as architecture is my delight, and putting up and pulling down, one of my favourite amusements.” About the first thing he had done to occupy the “rural days in summer” which the sinecure of the Vice-Presidency afforded him, was to tear down the whole top story of Monticello and rebuild it as a votive offering to architectural style. Two weeks after his inauguration into that “honourable and easy office,” he speaks of this discomposing performance with an enthusiasm which those in charge of his housekeeping may not have shared. “I have begun the demolition of my house, and hope to get through its re-edification in the course of the summer.”

His interest in landscape-gardening and architecture began early, and its principle was as practical as that of all his interests, whether in the realm of the flesh or of the spirit. This principle appears in his travel-notes, already quoted, for the European tour of Shippen and Rutledge in 1788. Architecture, he says there, is worth great attention because the doubling of America’s population every twenty years means doubling the number of houses; “and it is desirable to introduce taste into an art which shows so much.” Houses, grounds and towns should be planned with an eye to the effect made upon the human spirit by being continually surrounded by a maximum of beauty. Mean and hideous surroundings, in other words—surroundings that reflect a low, commonplace or eccentric taste—have a debasing and dehumanizing effect upon the spirit. Cultivation of the instinct of beauty, therefore, is a primary practical concern, not only of the moralist but of the statesman; and especially so under a form of government which makes no place for the tutelage of an aristocracy.

Hence Mr. Jefferson seems always to have had a greater æsthetic delight out of the cultivation of art than out of contemplating it. “Here I am,” he playfully wrote the Comtesse de Tesse from Nîmes, in 1787, “gazing whole hours at the Maison Quarrée, like a lover at his mistress. The stocking-weavers and silk-spinners around it consider me a hypochondriac Englishman about to write with a pistol the last chapter of his history.” Yet most of his interest was that of a participant; what he really saw with his mind’s eye was a copy of the building, to be set up in Richmond from his own model, as the new State Capitol. A non-participating interest in art never touched him deeply. He left but a brief record of his admiration for certain pieces of sculpture, and of painting he says almost nothing. As he told Shippen and Rutledge, America could do little with these arts; they were as yet “too expensive for the state of wealth among us. . . . They are worth seeing but not studying.” Yet when he saw them, it was to good purpose. Writing to Macon, in 1816, concerning the costume for a statue of Washington, he recommended the Roman style, remarking with point that “our boots and regimentals have a very puny effect.”

But Americans must have houses; many of them must live in towns; many even of those in towns would have grounds about their houses. Here were practical opportunities for the exercise and cultivation of taste. It was therefore with a different and deeper emotion that he carefully studied the radial plan of cities, the lay-out of notable grounds and gardens, and that “while in Paris I was violently smitten with the Hôtel de Salm, and used to go to the Tuileries almost daily to look at it” and to renew the delightful experience of constructive conjecture concerning the accommodation of this or that architectural quality to the circumstances of the new land. He found, however, that he was in these respects rather out of the current of popular sentiment in America. He was well aware that “the first object of young societies is bread and covering,” and made allowances accordingly; but beyond that lay the great preoccupation with turning the immense resources of the country into money as quickly as possible—and these factors of necessity and greed together put a heavy discount on any devotion to the arts, no matter how practical its purpose. An interest in art marked one as alien, a dawdler and effeminate, and not quite to be trusted in the serious businesses of life. Mr. Jefferson felt the force of this discriminative sentiment, and once at least, attempted to vindicate himself against it in the eyes of an old friend. His enthusiasm for the arts, he wrote Madison in 1785, was one “of which I am not ashamed, as its object is to improve the taste of my countrymen, to increase their reputation, to reconcile to them the respect of the world and procure them its praise.” But his countrymen cared little for having their taste improved. Carpe diem!—the thing was to grow rich as possible as quickly as possible, while yet one might. If ever art were wanted, one could always buy it. Nor were they interested in any enhancement of the world’s respect and praise; whatever of these was not purchasable was negligible.

Hence it came to pass that in 1785 Mr. Jefferson was found pleading his bitter mortification at the news from Virginia that “the first brick of the Capitol would be laid within a few days,” without waiting for the designs which he, in conjunction with the great Clerissault, had taken such devoted pains to work out from the model of the Maison Carrée. What could the Virginians be thinking of? These designs, he wrote distressfully to Dr. Currie, “are not the brat of a whimsical conception never before brought to light, but copied from the most precious, the most perfect model of ancient architecture remaining on earth.” His standard was that of Socrates. An ardent innovator, an indefatigable experimenter and improver, he yet believed that the practical starting-point in art is always with that which represents the longest experience and the greatest collective wisdom—. The Maison Carrée “has obtained the approbation of fifteen or sixteen centuries, and is therefore preferable to any design which might be newly contrived.” Changes and adaptations were always admissible; but their value likewise was not to be appraised contemporaneously, but by the collective experience of posterity.

His plans ought to have at least a fighting chance in competition for the suffrage of the Virginia Legislature. “Pray try if you can effect the stopping of this work,” he wrote Madison. “The loss will be only of the laying the bricks already laid, or a part of them. . . . This loss is not to be weighed against . . . the comfort of laying out the public money in something honourable, the satisfaction of seeing an object and proof of national good taste, and the regret and mortification of erecting a monument of our barbarism.” The Legislature thought he was making a great fuss over a small matter, but, like the unjust judge, finally let him have his way. They had some formal pride in their distinguished fellow-citizen, notwithstanding his residence in Paris had apparently alienated him a little too much towards the exotic fripperies of a light and notoriously immoral people. So at last they carried his plans “into execution, with some variations, not for the better, the most important of which, however, admit of future correction.”

While yet in his twenties, Mr. Jefferson made some rather elaborate notes of his ideas for the planning of a large property. These ideas were never carried out; the record of them is valuable only as marking the initial step in a painstaking development of taste. Perhaps the notes relating to the lay-out of a “burying-place” are as much worth citing as any, and they have a little additional interest because they show some trace of the emotion caused by the death of a young sister, Jane, whom he seems to have loved, in his inward and difficult fashion of loving, all his life. The burying-place should be—

among ancient and venerable oaks; intersperse some gloomy evergreens. The area circular, about sixty feet diameter, encircled with an untrimmed hedge of cedar, or of stone wall with a holly hedge on it. . . . In the centre of it erect a small Gothic temple of antique appearance. Appropriate one-half to the use of my own family, the other of strangers, servants, etc. Erect pedestals with urns, etc., and proper inscriptions. The passages between the walls, four feet wide. On the grave of a favourite and faithful servant might be a pyramid erected of the rough rockstone; the pedestal made plain to receive an inscription. Let the exit of the spiral . . . look on a small and distant part of the Blue Mountains. In the middle of the temple, an altar, the sides of turf, the top a plain stone. Very little light, perhaps none at all, save only the feeble ray of a half-extinguished lamp.

Then follows an epitaph upon his sister, which even the native language of elegiac inscription can not quite liberate from a pinching constraint:

Ah! Joanna, puellarum optima,
Ah! ævi virentis flore prærepta,

Sit tibi terra levis;
Longe, longeque valeto.

But in the America of 1771, if one wished to indulge a cultivated taste in architecture and its allied arts—or indeed, in any art—one pretty well had to work out the practical side of it for oneself. One had to be largely one’s own architect, designer, draughtsman, master-builder and decorator; and the resources available for self-education were extremely scanty. When Mr. Jefferson was a student at William and Mary, he made the most of the few works on architecture to be found in Williamsburg, and later he imported others, more or less taking a shot in the dark at their serviceability. By the time he left for Paris, in 1784, he had in his library about a dozen books on the subject. By favour of instinct, luck, good sense, management, or whatever combination of all these graces, he succeeded in eluding the great peril which besets the Autodidakt to the end of his life, and oftener than nine times out of ten, lays him low, namely: the inability to appraise and grade one’s authorities, the tendency to accept whatever appears on the printed page as authoritative, even though its intrinsic recommendations may be quite specious. Thus Mr. Jefferson managed to keep clear of an undiscriminating Rabbinism on the one hand, and an eccentric neology on the other.

His friends soon discovered his proficiency, and saw to it that he had plenty of practice. He designed houses for the two Madisons and for Monroe, among others, and one for his daughter Martha. He drew plans for several public buildings in Virginia, some of them of a rather special character—a prison, an Episcopalian church at Charlottesville, two county court-houses, and the quadrangle of a university. He sketched two plans for the White House, one of which was submitted anonymously in the competition. Existing remains of his work show that he was competent to do anything that a professional architect can do; he could draught preliminary studies, make working-plans, full-size details and specifications. His farm-book contains a series of minute and interesting observations on materials, most of which still have value.

He originated the rectangular lay-out of city streets with alternate blocks of park-space, recommending this design particularly in the case of the Southern cities which were scourged with yellow fever. “Take, for instance, the checkerboard for a plan,” he wrote Volney. “Let the black squares only be building squares, and the white ones be left open in turf and trees. . . . The atmosphere of such a town would be like that of the country, insusceptible of the miasmata which produce yellow fever.” In this, obviously, he did not reckon with the ineluctable factor of realty values. He was lukewarm about the radial plan on which Washington was laid out, proposing instead that the streets should be “at right angles as in Philadelphia, and that no street should be narrower than one hundred feet, with footways of fifteen feet.” The main trouble with the radial plan was the difficulty of avoiding fantastic and unsightly buildings at the flatiron corners. The French Revolution, however, had bred a great fear of mobs, which gave general favour to the radial plan. The ronds-points or “circles” of Washington are reminiscent of that fear; they were put there in order that soldiers drawn up in them might have full command of the streets in case of any popular uprising. Mobs had been busy in a small way in Philadelphia in the stirring days of the Jacobin clubs and Citizen Genêt; there should be no barricades in Washington.

II

On his last journey from Washington to Monticello, Mr. Jefferson met with a great and irreparable loss. He had sent some of his heavy freight around by water, and by direst misfortune the one trunk containing his Indian vocabularies was broken open and ransacked by thieves. His interest in the Indian tongues began in boyhood. “The Indians were in the habit of coming often and in great numbers to the seat of government [at Williamsburg] where I was very much with them. I knew much the great Ontasseté, the warrior and orator of the Cherokees; he was always the guest of my father, on his journeys to and from Williamsburg. I was in his camp when he made his great farewell oration to his people, the evening before he took his departure for England . . . his sounding voice, distinct articulation, animated action, and the solemn silence of his people at their several fires, filled me with awe and veneration, although I did not understand a word he uttered.” His acquaintance with the Indians having begun in this way, he “acquired impressions of attachment and commiseration for them which have never been obliterated.” He admired their anarchist polity and their highly integrated sense of manners; it was his observation of these that put into his mind the great idea that in so far as mankind needs any kind of government at all, it should be governed by customs rather than by laws. He lamented the effect of the “interested and unprincipled policy of England,” and subsequently even more that of Anglo-American mercantilism, upon these fine developments; foreseeing, as he wrote von Humboldt, that “the confirmed brutalization, if not the extermination of this race in our America is therefore to form an additional chapter in the English history of the same coloured man in Asia, and of the brethren of their own colour in Ireland, and wherever else Anglo-mercantile cupidity can find a twopenny interest in deluging the earth with human blood.” At the time of writing his Notes on Virginia, his speculations had led him to consider a probable kinship of the Indians with the Eastern Asiatics; certain resemblances between them “would induce me to conjecture that the former are the descendants of the latter or the latter of the former, excepting indeed the Esquimaux,” who, he thought, may have come originally from the northern parts of Europe by way of Greenland.

Regarding language as “the best proof of the affinity of nations which can ever be referred to,” he proposed to collect tribal vocabularies, “preserving their appellations of the most common objects in nature, of those which must be present to every nation, barbarous or civilized, with the inflections of their nouns and verbs, their principles of regimen and concord.” But this, again, was one of the things that one must do for oneself if it were to be done. “Very early in life, therefore, I formed a vocabulary of such objects . . . and my course of life having given me opportunities of obtaining vocabularies of many Indian tribes, I have done so on my original plan.” At the time of his retirement in 1809, he had amassed about forty of these; and after they were scattered by the thieves, no more than a few fragments were ever recovered.

In a philological enterprise of this kind, “our reward must be the addition made to the philosophy of language.” As a rule, Mr. Jefferson took a pretty strictly practical view of language, as little more than something whereby one gets oneself understood. “I do not pretend that language is science. It is only an instrument for the attainment of science.” The chief object of learning a language is to get a command of its literature, and the earlier one gets at languages, the better, since getting at them is so largely a matter of memory. “In general, I am of opinion that till the age of about sixteen we are best employed on languages.” Still, the rule was not invariable; he had done most of his own learning of living languages after sixteen. One might do a great deal with languages at any time of life, if one but kept at it. Industriousness, as he remarked to Martha in one of his strange preachments to her while she was at school in Paris, begets a sense of the abundance of time, and thus, more than anything, holds off the approach of age. “No person will have occasion to complain of the want of time who never loses any. It is wonderful how much may be done if we are always doing.” So, when he was past thirty, and the members of the new Continental Congress were looking one another over with curiosity, and gossiping a bit about one another, John Adams wrote that “Duane says that Jefferson is the greatest rubber-off of dust that he has met with; that he has learned French, Italian, Spanish, and wants to learn German.” With German, however, he never got far, perhaps seeing little practical use to be made of it. There are in existence one or two scraps of interlinear translation that he made from the German, not well done or even well copied; not well enough to indicate any great amount of care or interest.

Falle	doch	auf	Doris	augenlieder
Fall	oh	on	Doris’s	eyelids

Holder	schlaf	leicht	wallend	sanft	hernieder
Gentle	sleep	light		soft	down

Hence his great contemporary Goethe, in whose workaday philosophy he might have found so much to his own mind—not the author of Faust or of the Wahlverwandtschaften, certainly, but the real Goethe of the Conversations, the Goethe who said that die Zeit ist unendlich lang —remained unknown to him. What an affinity of spirit, one can not help thinking, would this libertarian practitioner of taste and manners have found with one who formulated the profound truth that Alles was unsern Geist befreit ohne uns die Herrschaft über uns selbst zu geben, ist verderblich! Although Mr. Jefferson never spoke any language but English except on a great pinch, and with no care for anything beyond making himself understood, he seems to have been unable to manage German even to that extent. While travelling in Germany, he made note of having heard that near Duisberg there were “remains of the encampment of Verus, in which he and his legions fell by the arms of Arminius (in the time of Tiberius, I think it was) but there was not a person to be found in Duysberg who could understand either English, French, Italian or Latin. So I could make no inquiry.” Probably he never had the opportunity to pick up the vernacular by the ingenious and time-saving method which he employed to some extent in learning colloquial French, and which he recommended to his son-in-law, advising him to board in a French family where there were children: “You will learn to speak better from women and children in three months than from men in a year.”

He defended the study of Greek and Latin on grounds which have rather a curious turn of practicality; though if any one cared to maintain that these literatures are but an apparatus of intellectual luxury, he raised the pertinent question why luxury in science may not be “at least as justifiable as in architecture, painting, gardening, or the other arts.” He reinforces this large view, however, by observing that “the utilities we derive from the remains of the Greek and Latin languages” are, among others, “first, as models of pure taste in writing”; and he adds with penetration, that “without these models we should probably have continued the inflated style of our northern ancestors, or the hyperbolical and vague one of the East.” To get all this benefit, however, one had to have a certain amount of Grundlichkeit, and a due interest in the structure of language. So, in his latter days, when he had returned to an undistracted occupation with Greek and Latin literature, Mr. Jefferson wrote at great length to Edward Everett, in opposition to the doctrine of Buttman, who “goes with the herd of grammarians in denying an ablative case to the Greek language.” All Buttman’s pretended datives are ablatives, for good and sufficient reasons, carefully set forth and expounded. One may have too much Grundlichkeit—so much that it makes hay of one’s common sense. “By analyzing too minutely, we often reduce our subject to atoms, of which the mind loses its hold.”

In 1813, having resumed correspondence with John Adams, Mr. Jefferson gave him one day a few lines of Theocritus, by way of apposite quotation in a letter. It drew from Adams the whimsical complaint, “Lord! Lord! What can I do with so much Greek? When I was your age, young man, that is, seven or eight years ago, I felt a kind of pang of affection for one of the flames of my youth, and again paid my addresses. . . . It was to little better purpose than writing letters on a pail of water.” This, however, was but a playful pretence, for his range of classical culture and his depth of scholarship were almost equal to Mr. Jefferson’s. Some time later, “to compensate in some measure for this crazy letter,” ¹ John Adams sent Mr. Jefferson an essay on the correct pronunciation of Greek. Mr. Jefferson replied with a letter amounting to a small treatise, summarizing the results of an investigation of the subject which he had made in Paris with the help of some cultivated Greeks whom he stumbled upon and promptly laid under contribution. He shows his reasons for having given up the Italian method of pronouncing Greek in favour of a more modern method, though he accounts with much force and ingenuity for a few exceptions that he insists on in the case of certain diphthongs. Even here his interest has a practical end in view. Acknowledging that “the whole subject is conjectural,” he is nevertheless glad “to see the question stirred” in America. Nothing which starts the human mind going to good purpose is to be disregarded; even this matter, which appears academic, may very well “excite among our young countrymen a spirit of enquiry and criticism, and lead them to more attention to this most beautiful of all languages.”

It is possible that his German went derelict in behalf of Anglo-Saxon, which he took up primarily to qualify himself as a “man of science” in law, in his early days when he pored over the “old dull scoundrel” Coke, under George Wythe. The subject stayed in his mind so well that latterly he wrote a good monograph on it for the benefit of some young men at the University of Virginia who were studying under his guidance. His instruction in Anglo-Saxon seems to have been rather popular, for in speaking of his renewed interest in the subject as “a hobby which too often runs away with me,” he says that “our youth seem disposed to mount it with me, and to begin their course where mine is ending.” He proposed an interesting simplification of Anglo-Saxon, which might lessen “the terrors and difficulties presented by the rude alphabet and unformed orthography,” and make it a regular part of a common English education. Why give Anglo-Saxon so formidably learned a form, mounting it “on all the scaffolding of the Greek and Latin,” and loading it with the impedimenta of imputed paradigms. What were the facts? Simply that our ancestors did so little with either reading or writing that they had no fixed orthography. To represent a given sound, “every one jumbled the letters together according to his unlettered notion of their power, and all jumbled them differently.” The thing to do, therefore, is to drop the superfluous consonants, and give the remaining letters their present English sound; “because, not knowing the true one, the present enunciation is as likely to be right as any other, and indeed more so, and facilitates the acquisition of the language.”

Macpherson’s Ossian came his way when he was about thirty years old, and nearly swept him off his feet. “I am not ashamed to own that I think this rude bard of the North the greatest poet that has ever existed.” Nothing would do but that he must learn Gaelic. It so happened that a relative of the ingenious Macpherson had once been in Virginia, and to him accordingly Mr. Jefferson wrote post-haste a letter full of enthusiasm for the great literary discovery. “Merely for the pleasure of reading his works I am become desirous of learning the language in which he sung, and of possessing the songs in their original form.” Would Mr. Charles Macpherson look into the matter and see what could be done about forwarding a Gaelic grammar and dictionary, and having a manuscript copy made of the Gaelic originals? Money was no object. “The glow of one warm thought,” he says finely, was worth any outlay of money and trouble. One is reminded again of the largeness and lucidity of Goethe, himself a devoted student of natural science, who yet could perceive that “a teacher who can arouse a feeling for one single good action, for one single good poem, accomplishes more than he who fills our memory with rows on rows of natural objects, classified with name and form.” Charles Macpherson replied with an agreeable and somewhat canny letter. There was very little literature that could be sent over: some odds and ends of religious matter, possibly, but no grammar or dictionary. Gaelic was a spoken tongue, its uses passing from mouth to mouth; it would be quite difficult for a foreigner—and so forth. Mr. Jefferson broke off his quest after Gaelic. The Revolution interrupted it in the first instance, and no doubt also his ardour was dampened by the general suspicion that his favourite poems were a literary hoax. Yet his pleasure in Ossian always stood steadfast. “If not ancient,” he wrote stoutly to Lafayette in 1823, “it is equal to the best morsels of antiquity.” The practical function of poetry is, after all, as Hesiod said, to furnish “a release from sorrows and a truce from cares.” If a poem did that, what matter whether it were written by this hand or by that?

In his views of literature generally, Mr. Jefferson’s sense of beauty and his sense of practicality operated in good balance. The exception was in English poetry; there his sense of beauty did not quite hold its ground, and in consequence, his repertoire of favourite English poems is on the whole prosaic and dissatisfying, and the few ventures which he made in original English verse are much more so. He copied lyrics occasionally all his life. In the case of those set to music, his choice was of course largely affected by the setting; but the others reflect no very sound or discriminating poetic taste. Yet in 1813 he wrote John Adams a long criticism on the unpoetic quality of Tate and Brady’s metrical translation of the Psalms. Even the best English version, which he thinks to be that of “the Octagonian dissenters of Liverpool,” is bad, “not a ray of poetical genius having been employed on them.” In themselves, these strictures imply no great amount of discernment—almost any one would make them—but in their context, probably, they have some significance. They are an obiter dictum on some praise which Adams had bestowed on the hymn of Cleanthes to Jupiter. Mr. Jefferson admitted the high poetic quality of this hymn, but thought the Psalmist should have “the palm over all the hymnists of every language and of every time,” and that this superiority was manifest even when apprehended through the medium of a humdrum and jogtrotting translation.

Literary style interested him, but purism did not. “I readily sacrifice the niceties of syntax to euphony and strength,” he told Edward Everett. Thus he was as far from the utilitarian or wheelbarrow theory of written style as he was from purism. He was enough of a musician to know that one should write for the ear as well as for the eye. “Fill up all the ellipses and syllepses of Tacitus, Sallust, Livy, etc., and the elegance and force of their sententious brevity are extinguished.” He had a strong sense of the power of words, and felt that much of this power lay in precision. “I am not scrupulous about words when they are once explained.” Hence he was always “a friend to the encouragement of a judicious neology ; a language can not be too rich.” While new words should be allowed to make their way freely, there should be no interference with one’s reverent regard for the stupendous resources of the English language, and for the immeasurable privilege one has in possessing a native use of them. “It is much to be wished,” he wrote in the last year of his life, “that the publication of the present county dialects of England should go on. It will restore to us our language in all its shades of variation. It will incorporate into the present one all the riches of our ancient dialects; and what a store this will be may be seen by running the eye over the county glossaries, and observing the words we have lost by abandonment and disuse, which in sound and sense are inferior to nothing we have retained.”

He quite early anticipated the growth of an American variant of English, and took issue with the Edinburgh Reviewers on their assumption that such a development would be a culpable adulteration. In his observations on this, he clearly intimates the discrimination to be made between the development and the degeneration of a living language. “Certainly so great growing a population spread over such an extent of country, with such a variety of climates, of productions, of arts, must enlarge their language to make it answer the purpose of expressing all ideas, the new as well as the old. . . . But whether will these adulterate or enrich the English language? . . . Did the Athenians consider the Doric, the Ionian, the olic, and other dialects as disfiguring or as beautifying their language? Did they fastidiously disavow Herodotus, Pindar, Theocritus, Sappho, Alcæus, as Grecian writers? On the contrary, they were sensible that the variety of dialects, still infinitely varied by poetical license, constituted the riches of their language and made the Grecian Homer the first of poets, as he must ever remain until a language equally ductile and copious shall be spoken.”

III

“I think,” wrote Mr. Jefferson to a young relative who was making choice of studies in college, “it is lost time to attend lectures on moral philosophy. He who made us would have been a pitiful bungler if He had made the rules of our moral conduct a matter of science. For one man of science, there are thousands who are not. What would have become of them?” The moral and religious nature of man presents many attractive problems to the metaphysician, but Mr. Jefferson had a pretty clear conviction, in the first place, that these problems are insoluble, and moreover, that their solution, even if one might attain it, would have so little bearing on the practical conduct of life that speculation about them had best be left to those who have nothing better to do. In these matters, it is interesting to see how completely, without being aware of it, he is in the tradition of such English churchmen as Whichcote, Jeremy Taylor and Thomas Wilson. No doubt he was unacquainted with them, as he was unacquainted with Goethe; yet he was an independent and powerful continuator of their thought. The human sense of religion and morals “is submitted indeed in some degree to the guidance of reason; but it is a small stock which is required for this, even a less one than what we call common sense.” First and last, one must be practical; this sense was meant to bear strictly on practice; and, as Bishop Wilson acutely said, while the practical truths of the Gospel are clear, no Christian need complain of a want of light. The worst of speculative system-making was that it tended to interfere with practice; the tenets of these systems were inert. Mr. Jefferson was wholly with Whichcote in perceiving that “too many scholars have lived upon air and empty nothings; falling out about nothings, and being very wise about things that are not and work not.” Furthermore, it was easy to assent to a speculative system, while a practical obedience to one’s native sense of conduct was extremely hard— Pittacus said, —and therefore the tendency was to make the one do duty for the other. Mr. Jefferson had had a bitter experience of this in his collisions with the monstrous systematization of intolerance inculcated upon colonial Virginia by the Church of England. “Why have Christians,” he mused in 1776, “been distinguished above all people who have ever lived, for persecutions? Is it because it is the genius of their religion? No, its genius is the reverse. It is the refusing toleration to those of a different opinion”—toleration, which was of the essence of moral and religious practice. In this there is a distinct echo of Jeremy Taylor’s insistence that “it is keeping the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace, and not identity of opinion, that the Holy Spirit requires of us.”

Mr. Jefferson’s repugnance to metaphysical system-making and its resultant separatism was so strong that he kept fastidiously clear of all contact with the subject. “I not only write nothing on religion,” he said in 1815, “but rarely permit myself to speak of it, and never but in a reasonable society.” His experience of the Dwights, Smiths and Masons of the period had satisfied him concerning the religious character bred by the official organization of Christianity, and therefore he was content to tell Dr. Ezra Stiles in 1819 that he was “of a sect by myself, as far as I know.” Each person’s particular convictions or principles “are a subject of accountability to our God alone”; it was quite enough for others to stay within the line laid down by Jesus, and judge the tree by its fruits. It was a fair inference that if a life “has been honest and dutiful to society, the religion which has regulated it can not be a bad one”; and any attempt at a scrutiny closer than this was inadmissible. The worst thing for religion, indeed, was contention about it; therefore “it is a matter of principle with me to avoid disturbing the tranquillity of others by the expression of any opinion on the innocent questions on which we schismatize.” Once more he is completely in Whichcote’s penetrating view that “nothing is worse done than what is ill done for religion; that must not be done in defence of religion which is contrary to religion.”

In the purview of teleology, especially, Mr. Jefferson was keenly aware of the vanity and viciousness of speculative constructions. He seldom spoke about his beliefs concerning the final destiny of man, and the little that he imparted to his more intimate correspondents is in a vein more nearly akin to the calm and profound thought of Marcus Aurelius than to post-Augustinian Christianity. The word unimpassioned is worth remarking in his suggestion to Mrs. John Adams in 1817, that “perhaps one of the elements of future felicity is to be a constant and unimpassioned view of what is passing here.” A year later, he tells John Adams that presently “we shall only be lookers-on,” and that sub specie æternitatis, “we may be amused with seeing the fallacy of our own guesses, and even the nothingness of those labours which have filled and agitated our own time here.” One might hazard such words to the Adamses, or to Edward Rutledge, or to good old conscientious John Dickinson, who would have liked the half-cooked omelette of demi-semi-independence back in 1776, but who could not bring himself to break any eggs by signing the Declaration. But the Reverend Isaac Story, dallying with a theory of the transmigration of souls, was another matter. “It is not for me to pronounce on the hypothesis you present. . . . When I was young, I was fond of the speculations which seemed to promise some insight into that hidden country, but observing at length that they left me in the same ignorance in which they had found me, I have for very many years ceased to read or think concerning them, and have reposed my head on that pillow of ignorance which a benevolent Creator has made so soft for us, knowing how much we should be forced to use it. I have thought it better, by nourishing the good passions and controlling the bad, to merit an inheritance in a state of being of which I can know so little, and to trust for the future to Him who has been so good in the past.”

Mr. Jefferson surveyed the ancient and modern systems of moral and religious philosophy with an interesting impartiality. He considered the genuine doctrines of Epicurus as “containing everything rational in moral philosophy which Greece and Rome have left us.” He drew up an excellent syllabus of these doctrines for his old diplomatic colleague, William Short, complaining of the sophistication of Epicurus at the hands of disciples and commentators, “in which we lament to see the candid character of Cicero engaging as an accomplice.” Most of all, however, he felt at ease in the Christian system, again energetically discriminating against its sophistication and debasement. “There never was a more pure and sublime system of morality delivered to man than is to be found in the four Evangelists.” His venerable Revolutionary compatriot, Charles Thomson, who was ornamenting a green old age by making a harmony of the Gospels, sent him a copy of his book. It then came out that Mr. Jefferson had to some extent anticipated him by putting together a Verba Christi in the interest of freeing this “pure and sublime system” from even the editorial comment and arrangement of the Evangelists themselves, letting it stand altogether clear of the influence of context. It was during his first term in the Presidency, he wrote Thomson, that he had employed several evenings in making “a wee-little book from the same materials, which I call the Philosophy of Jesus; it is a paradigma of his doctrines, made by cutting the texts out of the book and arranging them on the pages of a blank book in a certain order of time or subject. . . . If I had time, I would add to my little book the Greek, Latin and French texts, in columns side by side.” He found time to do this almost at once, it appears, perhaps stimulated by Thomson’s work; and he put together another book, making the four texts parallel, and styling it the Morals of Jesus.

IV

At the time of the Constitutional Convention, or even before, it was plain that by virtue of their superiority in mobility, in power of organization and in wealth, “the rich and well-born” would easily take command over the institutional voices of the new American society, and cause them to say what they wished said; and that with this would go a rapidly-developing technique of suppression and misrepresentation. It was a matter of great regret to Mr. Jefferson that no history of the Revolution, other than a mere chronology of external facts, could ever be written, “all its councils, designs and discussions having been conducted by Congress with closed doors, and with no members, as far as I know, having even made notes of them.” Such records of post-Revolutionary political history as were made by Harper and Otis, for example, and by John Marshall in his biography of Washington, were only, he thought, about what might be expected; the first two an endeavour to whitewash their party, and the last a “party diatribe,” conceived purely in an electioneering interest. Thus it was, he remarked, that “man is fed with fables through life, leaves it in the belief he knows something of what has been passing, when in truth he knows nothing but what has passed under his own eye.” For what he so well called the “fan-colouring biographers” he had deep disrespect. “You have certainly practiced vigorously the precept of de mortuis nil nisi bonum” he wrote dryly to Patrick Henry’s biographer, William Wirt. “This . . . constitutes perhaps the distinction between panegyric and history.”

Yet he was aware that a long future belonged to such as these. He foresaw a protracted and diligent indoctrination of the public, an unquestioned sway of myth and legend over the popular imagination, in support of the politico-economic system of the United States. “We have been too careless of our future reputations, while our tories will omit nothing to place us in the wrong. Besides the five-volumed libel [Marshall’s Life of Washington] which represents us as struggling for office, . . . the life of Hamilton is in the hands of a man who to the bitterness of the priest adds the rancour of the fiercest Federalism. . . . And doubtless other things are in preparation, unknown to us. On our part, we are depending on truth to make itself known, while history is taking a contrary set which may become too inveterate for correction.” The cohesive power of public plunder, the appeal of America as the “land of opportunity” to get rich by the uncompensated appropriation of the labour-products of others, by methods of speculation, monopoly and forestalling—these would confirm contemporary history in its “contrary set.” More than this, they would give direction to the whole institutional life of the country, to schools and colleges, the pulpit and the forum, to all forms of social organization, and especially to what Mr. Jefferson called the “cannibal newspapers.” True, the years are never unjust, if one but reckon on enough of them—the self-preserving instinct of humanity attends to that—but while waiting for their justice, there is little else that one can do.

V

Yet, little as it might be, that little should be done. It was delightful to go on from day to day in the amiable social life of Monticello, co-operating with the august and unfailing periodicity of nature, keeping Homer and Sophocles, Tacitus and Pindar as one’s intimates, playing at touch-and-go over the whole range of culture in one’s correspondence with John Adams, Humboldt, Ticknor, Wistar, Cooper, Dupont de Nemours. It was well to enjoy the luxury of being a disinterested, irresponsible and occasional observer of public affairs—

turbantibus æquora ventis,
E terra magnum alterius spectare laborem

—watching Madison struggle at the oar, and sometimes giving him a bit of advice from the safe footing of solid ground. These satisfactions were his by right; “having performed my quadragena stipendia, I am entitled to my discharge.” One must be aware also that “nothing is more incumbent on the old than to know when they should get out of the way, and relinquish to younger successors the honours they can no longer earn and the duties they can no longer perform.” When Mr. Jefferson was asked to become a candidate for the Presidency again in 1812, and when in the same year Madison asked him to go back to his old place as Secretary of State, he declined both invitations. “Good wishes,” he wrote Thomas Law, “are all an old man has to offer to his country or friends.” He owed his countrymen nothing, and he asked nothing of them. There is, one may be quite sure, no known instance of any one having prosecuted a career in the service of the United States at so great personal sacrifice. He had the eminent consolation, as he wrote Count Deodati, in 1807, “of having added nothing to my private fortune during my public service, and of retiring with hands as clean as they are empty.”

Yet, although in retirement, busy with the joys of a literary leisure so hardly earned, one might not be quite satisfied without giving one’s waning activity some little turn for the public interest. Good wishes were not quite enough. Even for an old man, even to one’s last hour, “es ist nicht genug zu wissen,” his great German contemporary was insisting, “man muss auch anwenden; es ist nicht genug zu wollen, man muss auch thun.” The wisdom of age, moreover, so improves the management and economy of activity, and so clears and illuminates its direction, that an old man with but little energy and with but little time before him, should accomplish a work of more worth and permanence than could ever be done in youth. “Wenn man alt ist” said Goethe, again, “muss man mehr thun als da man jung war.”

There were two public measures that Mr. Jefferson saw he might still safely and effectively sponsor. One was for resisting centralization and promoting the principle of local self-government, by the division of Virginia’s counties into wards or townships. “These will be pure and elementary republics, the sum of all which, taken together, composes the State, and will make of the whole a true democracy as to the business of the wards, which is that of nearest and daily concern.” If the transactions of the larger political units, which are necessarily carried on in a representative way, become “corrupt and perverted,” the ward-system constitutes the people into a regularly organized power, and furnishes the machinery whereby they may “crush regularly and peaceably the usurpations of their unfaithful agents.” Probably not much could come of this, considering the way the country was going. “I have little hope that the torrent of consolidation can be withstood.” Yet one might always try; it was just possible that in one State at least, the system might be put into effect, and that Virginia might set a good example, most of all to New England, which had the system, but was aborting its best fruit.

The second measure which Mr. Jefferson had at heart was “that of general education, to enable every man to judge for himself what will secure or endanger his freedom.” This was a return to an old love. When he was employed in revising the Virginia Statutes, in 1797, he drew up a remarkable bill for a system of public schools. In the vulgar sense of the term—the sense by which anything merely indiscriminate may be called democratic—it was far from a democratic system. Mr. Jefferson’s notion of the limitation of education at public expense was as explicit as his notion of a limited suffrage, which he set forth at the same time. Like his contemporary, the Iron Duke, he was well aware that it was possible for a man’s education to be too much for his abilities. His bill provided that each ward in the county should have a school, open to all for instruction in reading, writing and common arithmetic. Each year, “the boy of best genius in the school”—the girls, apparently, were out of reckoning —was to be picked out and sent to the grammar school, of which there were to be twenty, conveniently placed in the State. This élite of the primary schools should be continued at the grammar school one or two years and then dismissed, with the exception of “the best genius of the whole,” who should be continued six years. “By this means,” said Mr. Jefferson, “twenty of the best geniuses will be raked from the rubbish annually.” At the end of six years, the best half of the twenty were to be sent to William and Mary, and the rest turned adrift. Children who paid their way might have use of the schools without restriction: this selective system showed only how far Mr. Jefferson thought the State’s responsibility for free popular education should extend, and the directions in which it should be discharged.

Throughout his life, Mr. Jefferson consistently maintained that “the most effectual means of preventing the perversion of power into tyranny are to illuminate as far as possible the minds of the people.” He had no doubt that “if a nation expects to be ignorant and free, . . . it expects what never was and never will be.” He seems never to have suspected, however, the ease with which mere literacy is perverted, and that it is therefore quite possible for a literate people to be much more ignorant than an illiterate people—that a people of well-perverted literacy, indeed, is invincibly unintelligent. His idea of literacy was mechanical, and he insisted on it mechanically; and he is thus, perhaps, as much as any one responsible for the general and calamitous over-confidence in literacy which prevailed in America unquestioned during the century that followed him. The astonishing exaggeration of his own confidence in literacy may be seen in a letter to the Chevalier de Ouis, in 1814, congratulating him upon the provision in the new Constitution of Spain, which disfranchised, after a certain time, all citizens who could not read and write. This, he said, “is the fruitful germ of the improvement of everything good, and the correction of everything imperfect in the present Constitution. This will give you an enlightened people, and an energetic public opinion which will control and enchain the aristocratic spirit of the government!”

VI

In his sixth annual message, Mr. Jefferson proposed the establishment of a national university, to which the élite of the whole land, according to his selective theory of public education, might resort. He suggested, though he did not precisely recommend, that this institution should get its supporting revenue from land-grants, remarking that if Congress thought it should be maintained in this way, “they have it now in their power to endow it with those [lands] which will be among the earliest to produce the necessary income.” He also made the interesting observation that land is the one and only imperishable security, in an economic sense, and that the income from land-values is the only one whose continuity can be relied on in all emergencies. “This foundation would have the advantage of being independent on war, which may suspend other improvements by requiring for its own purposes the resources destined for them.” This project, however, came to nothing. It was by no means popular; “people generally have more feeling for canals and roads than education.” Since the public did not much insist on it, Congress did not move in the matter. The characteristic which John Bright remarked of the British Parliament in particular, is common to legislative bodies in general; they sometimes do a good thing, but never do one merely because it is a good thing. Mr. Jefferson was aware of this. “A forty years experience of popular assemblies has taught me that you must give them time for every step you take.” He therefore neither pressed the matter upon Congress, nor made it an issue of popular agitation. “There is a snail-paced gait for the advance of new ideas on the general mind,” he observed to Joel Barlow, “under which we must acquiesce. . . . If too hard pushed, they balk.”

But one could always “set a good example”—indeed, perhaps, people are more effectively attracted by the force of example into the support of a great reform, than argued, browbeaten or legislated into it. If the nation were not ready to establish a university, Virginia might be; so, on his retirement from the Presidency, Mr. Jefferson took up the project of a State university as “the last object for which I shall obtrude myself on the public observation.” William and Mary would not answer the purpose under any kind of re-organization and renovation. As it stood, it was “just well enough endowed to draw out the miserable existence to which a miserable constitution has doomed it”—that is, its original constitution as a part of the establishment of the Church of England, which made it an object of immitigable jealousy on the part of other sects. It should be left as it was; the extension of the frontier some three hundred miles from tidewater, and the consequent shift of the centre of population, called for a new institution, “not disturbing the old one in its possessions or functions, but leaving them unimpaired for the benefit of those for whom it is convenient.” Again, Mr. Jefferson’s own personal recollections of Devilsburg reminded him that the town was “eccentric in its position, exposed to all bilious diseases, as all the lower country is,” and therefore it was by way of being progressively abandoned by all who could do so, “as that part of the country itself is in a considerable degree by its inhabitants.”

On the whole, the project went better than one could have expected. The Legislature of Virginia contemplated it with circumspection and diffidence, but, stimulated by the force of a considerable private subscription, rather gingerly endorsed it and made an initial appropriation of fifteen thousand dollars a year for its support. Mr. Jefferson made a felicitous choice of terms in describing his own relation to the new institution; he was the “father of the University of Virginia.” He was its architect; he superintended its physical structure; he laid down its lines of organization and educational policy, and directed the assembling of its faculty. These preliminaries occupied six years, and the cost of construction so far exceeded all estimates and expectations as to put Mr. Jefferson in impregnable character as a first-rate architect, and also to arouse an immense amount of dissatisfaction which was promptly turned to account by those to whom, on other grounds, the project was distasteful.

Nearly all the professors were foreigners, the intention being “that its professors shall be of the first order in their respective lines, which can be procured on either side of the Atlantic.” This objective view was held to imply a disparagement of sound Americanism. The University, moreover, had no official connexion with organized Christianity and no chair of divinity, which gave unlimited range for the odium theologicum on the part of what Edmund Burke so well called “the dissidence of Dissent and the protestantism of the Protestant religion.” The red rag thus deliberately unfolded was then as deliberately flourished in the face of sectarian ecclesiasticism by the appointment of Dr. Cooper to a professorship. No one could deny that Dr. Cooper was a man of first-rate ability, reputation and character. But he had been prosecuted under the Sedition Act; his patriotism, good enough for Mr. Jefferson, good enough for James Madison, good enough for the University’s Board of Visitors, had not been good enough to serve, in Dr. Johnson’s phrase, as “the last refuge of a scoundrel.” Besides, he was a friend of the arch-heretic, Dr. Joseph Priestley, and might possibly, even probably, be a Unitarian! This was too much. All the hard, dogged, unintelligent inveteracy of official Protestantism promptly dug up the tomahawk and went on the warpath after Dr. Cooper, nor did it rest from its militant vindication of the true faith until the appointment had been cancelled.

Mr. Jefferson wrote John Cartwright, the stout old British reformer, that there were “some novelties in the University of Virginia. . . . They will be founded in the rights of man.” To the French philosopher, Destutt Tracy, he wrote that “this institution of my native State, the hobby of my old age, will be based on. the illimitable freedom of the human mind to explore and expose every subject susceptible of its contemplation.” In choosing a law-professor, he wrote Madison, “we must be rigorously attentive to his political principles,” in order that the student might assess “the honied Mansfieldism of Black-stone,” under whose influence all the younger lawyers had already begun to “slide into toryism,” not as a matter of logical conviction or intellectual persuasion, but through mere darkenings of counsel, supposing themselves all the time, indeed, “to be whigs, because they no longer know what whiggism or republicanism means!”

One can hardly wonder, therefore, that the University was not a commanding project with the Legislature or the people, and that appropriations sometimes stopped and at all times came hard. One wonders rather that it fared as well as it did, dedicated so explicitly to the satisfaction of non-existent wants and to the promotion of purposes in which no one had any particular interest. Indulgence of this respectable old man and his phrases about the rights of man and freedom of the human mind, his pre-occupation with a sterile nominalism, should be exemplary and to a degree punctilious, but obviously it could not be carried on forever. “The attempt ran foul of so many local interests, of so many personal views and so much ignorance, and I have been considered as so particularly its promoter, that I see evidently a great change of sentiment towards myself.” Well, but if one will dance, one must pay the piper—it is only fair that one should pay. Mr. Jefferson was a distinguished man, an excellent man —a great man, if you like—but the fact remained that he had always been persistently on the side of some wholly impossible loyalty. He had always been against a hierarchy, against primogeniture and entail, against monopoly, against speculation, against every incentive, in short, which keeps alive the spirit of enterprise in the development of a great land of opportunity. Now, in the organization of the University of Virginia, he was proposing in a sense to institutionalize the spirit of his own life and of its heterodox philosophy and undertakings. Really, with the best will in the world and the utmost imaginable tolerance, what was one to do?

Yet the maintenance of the University was never too seriously threatened. “I can not doubt its having dissatisfied with myself a respectable minority, if not a majority, of the House of Delegates”; but even so, the indisposition towards Mr. Jefferson did not obscure the advantage of possessing his tradition. Certain traditions have great power of prepossession, even if they be not followed; indeed, much of the usefulness of a tradition is in the fact that it need only be possessed, not followed. In time the University of Virginia would swing out of the shoals and backwaters of obsolescence, and into the current of a progressive national life. Meanwhile, and even afterwards, the tradition of Mr. Jefferson would have value; even his glossary of words and phrases would have great value. Much could be done with them, even if one were not always precisely clear about their meanings and connotations. “The scope of words is wide,” said Homer; “words may tend this way or that way.”

The first professor of Greek and Latin at the University of Virginia was a very young Englishman by the name of George Long. He served but a short time, and then returned to take a similar post in his own country. There was perhaps some significance, perhaps only coincidence, but at all events a singular and felicitous fitness, in the fact that in his old age Mr. Long made the translation of the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius that is probably definitive. For many years those English readers who knew no Greek and who yet have gained a satisfying view of perhaps the most exquisite figure in human history, have gained it through the work of Mr. Long.

¹ It is impossible to resist quoting the portion of this “crazy letter” which deals with the celebrated Mlle, de l’Espinasse. One hears in it the voice of the best in a culture which sought its end so largely “through a process of moral reasoning,” speaking to the best in a culture which sought the same end through the practice of taste and manners. This may be the place to say also that whoever wishes disinterestedly to know what manner of men John Adams and Mr. Jefferson were, can not do better than begin with their correspondence of 1812-1826. This alone will carry a reader a long way, if he has any literary experience and a fair power of constructive imagination. Unhappily, this correspondence is as yet only to be picked out piecemeal from the standard volumes of “collected works.” The Bobbs-Merrill Company deserves praise for a thin volume of extracts put out lately under the editorship of Mr. Paul Wilstach. As far as it goes, it could probably not be improved, but it goes only far enough to remind a reader of Oliver Twist’s rations in the workhouse and the paternalism of Mr. Bumble. Perhaps the recent increase of interest in the literature of that period will touch the flinty heart of some publisher and induce him to let the world once more see, in accessible and convenient form, the best that the period could do,

February 23, 1819.

“As you were so well acquainted with the philosophers of France, I presume the name and character of Mlle, de l’Espinasse is not unknown to you.

“I have almost put my eyes out by reading two volumes of her letters, which, as they were printed in 1809, I presume you have read long ago. I confess I have never read anything with more ennui, disgust and loathing; the eternal repetition of mon Dieu and mon ami, je vous aime, je vous aime éperdùment, je vous aime à la folie, je suis au désespoir, j’espère la mort, je suis morte, je f rends l’opium, etc., etc.

“She was constantly in love with other women’s husbands, constantly violating her fidelity to her own keepers, constantly tormented with remorse and regrets, constantly wishing for death, and constantly threatening to put herself to death, etc., etc., etc. Yet this great lady was the confidential friend of M. Turgot, the Duke de la Rochefoucauld, the Duchess d’Enville, M. Condorcet, the only lady who was admitted to the dinners which Mme. Geoffrin made for the literati of France and the world, the intimate friend of Mme. Boufflers, the open, acknowledged mistress of the great d’Alembert, and much admired by Marmontel.

“If these letters and the fifteen volumes of de Grimm are to give me an idea of the amelioration of society and government and manners for France, I should think the Age of Reason had produced nothing better than the Mahometans, the Mamelukes or the Hindoos, or the North American Indians have produced in different parts of the world.”