A Vivid Portrait of Jefferson

...The United States has long since become a Hamiltonian nation, and would, indeed, have met with disaster had it not abandoned Jefferson's main prescriptions and accepted those of his great rival...

...But he finds highly congenial the London of Wilkes, Johnson and Gibbon, the Scotland of Hume, Adam Smith and Lord Kames...

...It belongs on the shelf with such works as Charnwood's Lincoln and Rosebery's Chatham...

...And he is better when he deals with private than with public transactions...

...Professor of American History, Columbia University This is the best extant popular introduction to the eighteenth-century career of Thomas Jefferson...

...Dos Passos strikes the note of largeness in his first sentence: "It was during the years of Thomas Jefferson's boyhood that the English-speaking people established their preponderance in the world...

...Dos Passos, avoiding or quickly skirting the more difficult questions of Jefferson's great career, does not treat the problem of his strange inadequacy to the problems of our modern world...

...Such a man could not escape the charge of shallowness in learning and looseness in thought...

...For the plain man on the street who knows little of Jefferson, this volume is ideal...

...Does Mr...

...Its principal merits are its skilful portrayal of the social and political background in America and Europe, its entertainingly anecdotal and discursive style, and its firm grasp of Jefferson's distinguished but sometimes eccentric traits of mind...

...Dos Passos, it is enough that this is all entertaining and illuminating...

...It was as a Francophile that he occupied the Secretaryship of State, and as such that he quitted it at the end of 1793 (where the author takes leave of him) to go into opposition to the Washington Administration...

...While the book contains nothing new in facts or ideas, it weaves together the historical and biographical strands, tells the swift story and interprets the man, all with a novelist's dexterity...

...Dos Passos feel a certain regret, as Ben Franklin long did, that Britain and America separated politically...

...What most stands out in these pages is the spaciousness of Jefferson's career...

...But the story of the Virginian's earlier life, impressions and views has never, for the general reader, been so well told as here...

...How many would take so much space to retell the by no means unknown story of John Wilkes's battle with the ministry...

...To be sure, it passes lightly over the more intricate questions of politics, economics and diplomacy...

...Next to Franklin, he was the most versatile of all Americans, and his mental zest and acquisitiveness surpassed even Franklin's...

...In this effort, it is plain that he is in his element...

...But its very unconventionality is beguiling...

...He is not truly proficient in colonial ways and outlooks...

...Scene-painting, narrative and anecdote are the strong elements in Mr...

...Dos Passos has to show what the contemporary society and thought of Virginia, Britain and France were like...

...Some of his most brilliant pages deal with these circles—and with the new, emerging Britain of Boulton and Watt, Erasmus Darwin and Robert Adam...

...It also has a novelist's gifts of style: Such phrases as "the tall rancid stone tenements" (of Edinburgh), the "flutter of little awkward notes of apology" (from Maria Cosway), the "drowsy smile on the lined face" (of the aged Franklin), come from a pen trained to belles lettres, not scholarship...

...Dos Passos's book...

...He brings out instead the amazing mixture of expertness and progressiveness which for the most part stamped Jefferson's voyages into government, architecture, agriculture, paleontology, geography, bibliography and botany...

...Hamiltonian we are and shall remain...

...To Mr...

...analysis he leaves to others...

...In order properly to present Jefferson's mind and ideals, Mr...

...Obviously, he is delighted by the wide range of ideas, the wide sphere of political action, the wide vistas of idealism and reform, which Jefferson possessed or explored...

...The story of the writing of the Declaration has been as well told elsewhere, but who has told with nearly such poignancy the story of Jefferson's devoted vigil at the deathbed of his beloved wife Patty...

...it is never meticulous...

...part of our affection for Jeffersonian ideas is nostalgic and romantic...

...he is not very sympathetic with the French temperament, even in a man like Condorcet...

...How many writers on such a subject would allot two solid pages of quotation to Burnaby's description of Philadelphia...

...But while the British pages have special verve and color, the author does full justice to Jefferson's keen-eyed observations of the French scene and to his interest in the ideas of Gallic scientists and philosophers...

...Dos Passos, while accepting the fact that Jefferson was given to some queer notions, is too well instructed to grant any shallowness or amateurishness...