Portraiture as History
AYRES, C. E.
Portraiture and History The Men Who Made the Nation. Woodrow Wilson. Reviewed by C. E. Ayres By John Dos Passos. By Silas Bent McKinley. Author -Huxiey." professor Doubleday. 469 pp....
...all he lacks is the magic that brings facts to life...
...More to the point, perhaps, we see all these men slaving over trivial tasks, like all the rest of us...
...Excellent biographies have been written of one or another of them...
...But we do have a right to expect the insights of the historian to go beyond the personalities on whom the spotlight of public events may chance to linger...
...The men who made our nation, as we say, were great men, and—well told —their lives make a fascinating story...
...In the course of it, he pulled from his pocket a letter from a friend in Congress in order to show his men that Congress had their interests sincerely at heart...
...they also constitute a continually renewed challenge to the historians...
...5.95...
...We see him crushed by the duelling death of his son, gravitating by manifest destiny into his own fatal duel with Aaron Burr...
...Here we see Alexander Hamilton as a young-man-in-a-hurry, making astute use of George Washington's short temper to extricate himself from a subordinate position as Washington's private secretary...
...But if his attempt to explain the rise and fall of civilizations is a failure, it is a glorious failure, glorious precisely because it goes beyond the puny figures that strut the stage of history to the challenges by which whole peoples are confronted and the responses that show the stuff of which whole societies are made...
...McKinley has the facts...
...These men were the salt of the earth, the salt of our national loaf...
...4.50...
...But there are also larger forces, as Veblen said, moving obscurely in the background...
...of economics, University of Texas One reason that our conception of the past is a continually changing one is the refusal of the present to stay put...
...We see Washington contemplating retirement at the close of his second term and consulting various friends on the text of his farewell address, the importance of which he so clearly sensed...
...This reproach seems to me unfair...
...Theirs, it is often said, is not so much a science as an art...
...I am not an unreserved admirer oi Arnold Toynbee...
...But it isn't the whole story...
...Now, however, they are the artificers of the world's richest and most powerful nation, the designers of the world's most stable and generally successful political and social system...
...But as the world has changed —as the United States has by force of events come to be the "white hope" of the Western world—the role of our forefathers has changed too...
...But here the entire company, an entire generation, walks the boards...
...The picture is a fascinating one...
...We see Hamilton, his place in history assured, nevertheless becoming involved in personal and even financial scandal such that even friends who considered him blameless realized that he was now ineligible for any elective office...
...Here, too, is a faithful study, containing nothing new but presenting an accurate account of the development of a great personality who was fated to stand at the crossroads of history...
...He has made no important historical discoveries...
...and struggling with the wording of documents which in final form have been memorized by successive generations of school children...
...Not only do these circumstances continually renew and heighten our interest in the commanding personalities of our early history...
...In part it is the art of portraiture, of bringing the dim figures of the past to life, so 'that we see them as living men and women, beset as we are by doubts and confusions and cross purposes but somehow rising to the challenge of events and dominating them as only greatness can...
...We see them visiting at each other's homes, meeting their future wives, acquiring the inlaws by whom their future careers will be significantly affected...
...Indeed, to realize how great is the difference between the art of the novelist and the work of even the most conscientious student we need only turn to Silas Bent McKinley's Woodrow Wilson...
...John Dos Passos has been reproached for backsliding...
...Praeger...
...on finding that he couldn't read it without his glasses, he pulled them from his pocket with the remark: "Gentlemen, I have grown gray in your service and now I find myself growing blind...
...As Arnold Toynbee's uncle showed the world, a vast industrial revolution was getting under way at the very time these men were working out their several fates, a process of which they were almost completely unaware...
...John Dos Passos is a case in point...
...they were such men and women as are thrown up on the beach of history by forces that are larger than they, and as such they helped a whole generation to understand something of the forces that are at work in Western civilization...
...But no previous writer has ever brought the men who left these records more vividly to life...
...284 pp...
...It isn't even as much of the story as John Dos Passos was telling when he wrote Three Soldiers, Manhattan Transfer and The Big Money...
...For this task the art of the historian approximates that of the novelist: and it is not surprising, therefore, that novelists have often proved to be extremely good at it...
...Even in the school days of people no older than myself they were the men who (presumably) shaped the destiny of a junior member of the world community...
...The journals, diaries, files of letters, and assorted public documents he has used are those to which all historians have had access lo, these many years...
...Not only were the characters he created vividly living figures...
...But is art all there is to history...
...We see Washington insisting upon facing a mass meeting of disaffected soldiers at Valley Forge and making "the most moving speech of his career...
...But to try to understand the present stature of the United States in terms of personalities alone is like trying to make bread without flour...
...We have no right to expect a man to be a dissenter all his life and in everything he does...
...In one sense the founders and builders of the Republic are the same individuals we have always known...
...It is on this account that I closed The Men Who Made the Nation with a haunting and persistent sense of disappointment...
...and in the days when Dos Passos was an admirer of Veblen, it was with such larger forces that he was most concerned...
...History is made by men...
Vol. 40 • August 1957 • No. 31
