President Wilsons Addresses | Page 4

have been expected to write as
a Southerner. He has discussed it as an American. His well-known
text-book The State, which has been revised and frequently reprinted,
discusses the chief theories of the origin of government, describes the
administrative systems of Greece and Rome and of the great nations of
medieval and modern Europe and of the United States, and treats in
detail of the functions and objects of government, with special
reference to law and its workings. His History of the American People,
though it contains many passages of insight and has the charm that
comes from intense appreciation of details, is too diffuse and
repetitious. A great history should be a combination of a chronicle and

a treatise; it should be a record of facts and at the same time a
philosophical exposition of an idea. Mr. Wilson's five-volume work is
insufficient as a chronicle and too long for an essay. Yet an essay it
really is. Moreover, unless I myself am blinded by prejudice, it makes
too much of the errors committed by our government in the
reconstruction period after the Civil War. On the whole, with all their
faults, the administrations of Grant and Hayes accomplished a task of
enormous difficulty, with remarkably little impatience and
intemperance. The disadvantage of having been written originally
under pressure in monthly instalments, for a periodical, is clearly
visible in the History. There is a too constant effort to catch the eye
with picturesque description. Nevertheless, in this book, as in the others,
Mr. Wilson evokes in his readers a noble image of that government,
constitutional, traditional, democratic, self-developing, which, from the
days of his youth, aroused in him a poetic enthusiasm.
And now for the way his imagination works and clothes itself in
language. The quality of his mind is poetic, and his style is highly
figurative. There have been very few professors, lecturing on abstruse
subjects, such as economics, jurisprudence, and politics, who have
dared to give so free a rein to an instinct frankly artistic. In the early
days of his career, Mr. Wilson was invited to follow two courses which
were supposed to be inconsistent with each other. The so-called
"scientific" method, much admired at that time even when applied to
subjects in which philosophic insight or a sense for beauty are the
proper guides, was being urged upon the rising generation of scholars.
Perhaps the Johns Hopkins University was the center of this impulse in
America; at least it was thought to be, though the source was almost
wholly German. If he had had to be a dry-as-dust in order to be a writer
on politics and history, Mr. Wilson would have preferred to turn his
attention to biography and literary criticism. But he promptly resolved
to disregard the warnings of pedants and to be a man of letters though a
professor of history and politics. I well remember the irritation,
sometimes amused and sometimes angry, with which he used to speak
of those who were persuaded that scholarship was in some way
contaminated by the touch of imagination or philosophy. He at least
would run the risk. And so he set himself to work cultivating the graces

of style no less assiduously than the exactness of science. There is a
distinct filiation in his diction, by which, from Stevenson to Lamb and
from Lamb to Sir Thomas Browne, one can trace it back to the quaint
old prose writers of the seventeenth century. I remember his calling my
attention, in 1890, or thereabouts, to the delightful stylistic qualities of
those worthies. Many of his colors are from their ink-horns, in which
the pigments were of deep and varied hues. When he is sententious and
didactic he seems to have caught something of Emerson's manner. And
indeed there is in all his writings a flavor of optimism and a slightly
dogmatic, even when thoroughly gentle and persuasive, tone which he
has in common with the New England sage.
But in spite of all these resemblances to older authors, Mr. Wilson
gives proof in his style of a masterful independence. He is constantly
determined to think for himself, to get to the bottom of his subject, and
finally to express the matter in terms of his own personality. Especially
is this evident in his early works, where he struggles manfully to be
himself, even in the choice of words and phrases, weighing and
analyzing the most current idioms and often making in them some
thoughtful alteration the better to express his exact meaning. His
literary training appears to have been almost wholly English. There are
few traces in his writings of any classical reading or of any first-hand
acquaintance with French, German, or Italian authors. And indeed in
the substance of his thought I wonder if he is