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.
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