John Quincy Adams | Page 4

the diary proper begins," a very vigorous work in more senses than one. Continued with astonishing persistency and faithfulness until within a few days of the writer's death, the latest entry is of the 4th of January, 1848. Mr. Adams achieved many successes during his life as the result of conscious effort, but (p. 007) the greatest success of all he achieved altogether unconsciously. He left a portrait of himself more full, correct, vivid, and picturesque than has ever been bequeathed to posterity by any other personage of the past ages. Any mistakes which may be made in estimating his mental or moral attributes must be charged to the dulness or prejudice of the judge, who could certainly not ask for better or more abundant evidence. Few of us know our most intimate friends better than any of us may know Mr. Adams, if we will but take the trouble. Even the brief extracts already given from his correspondence show us the boy; it only concerns us to get them into the proper light for seeing them accurately. If a lad of seven, nine, or eleven years of age should write such solemn little effusions amid the surroundings and influences of the present day, he would probably be set down justly enough as either an offensive young prig or a prematurely developed hypocrite. But the precocious Adams had only a little of the prig and nothing of the hypocrite in his nature. Being the outcome of many generations of simple, devout, intelligent Puritan ancestors, living in a community which loved virtue and sought knowledge, all inherited and all present influences combined to make him, as it may be put (p. 008) in a single word, sensible. He had inevitably a mental boyhood and youth, but morally he was never either a child or a lad; all his leading traits of character were as strongly marked when he was seven as when he was seventy, and at an age when most young people simply win love or cause annoyance, he was preferring wisdom to mischief, and actually in his earliest years was attracting a certain respect.
These few but bold and striking touches which paint the boy are changed for an infinitely more elaborate and complex presentation from the time when the Diary begins. Even as abridged in the printing, this immense work ranks among the half-dozen longest diaries to be found in any library, and it is unquestionably by far the most valuable. Henceforth we are to travel along its broad route to the end; we shall see in it both the great and the small among public men halting onward in a way very different from that in which they march along the stately pages of the historian, and we shall find many side-lights, by no means colorless, thrown upon the persons and events of the procession. The persistence, fulness, and faithfulness with which it was kept throughout so busy a life are marvellous, but are also highly characteristic of the most persevering and industrious of men. (p. 009) That it has been preserved is cause not only for thankfulness but for some surprise also. For if its contents had been known, it is certain that all the public men of nearly two generations who figure in it would have combined into one vast and irresistible conspiracy to obtain and destroy it. There was always a superfluity of gall in the diarist's ink. Sooner or later every man of any note in the United States was mentioned in his pages, and there is scarcely one of them, who, if he could have read what was said of him, would not have preferred the ignominy of omission. As one turns the leaves he feels as though he were walking through a graveyard of slaughtered reputations wherein not many headstones show a few words of measured commendation. It is only the greatness and goodness of Mr. Adams himself which relieve the universal atmosphere of sadness far more depressing than the melancholy which pervades the novels of George Eliot. The reader who wishes to retain any comfortable degree of belief in his fellow men will turn to the wall all the portraits in the gallery except only the inimitable one of the writer himself. For it would be altogether too discouraging to think that so wide an experience of men as Mr. Adams enjoyed through his long, varied, and active life must lead to such an unpleasant array of human faces (p. 010) as those which are scattered along these twelve big octavos. Fortunately at present we have to do with only one of these likenesses, and that one we are able to admire while knowing also that it is beyond question accurate. One after another every trait of Mr. Adams comes out;