THE JEFFERSON-ADAMS LETTERS AS A SHRINE AND A MONUMENT ^[1]
[SPr 117-128]

Our national life might, at least provisorily, be divided into four periods:

1. American civilisation, 1760 to 1830.

2. The period of thinning, of mental impoverishment, scission between life of the mind and life of the nation, say 1830 to 1860.

3. The period of despair, civil war as hiatus, 1870 to 1930. The division between the temper, thickness, richness of the mental life of Henry Adams, and Henry James, and that of say U. S. Grant, McKinley, Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover.

4. The possibilities of revival, starting perhaps with a valorisation of our cultural heritage, not merely as something lost in dim retrospect, a tombstone, tastily carved, whereon to shed dry tears or upon which to lay a few withered violets, in the manner of, let us say, the late Henry (aforementioned) Adams. The query being: should we lose or go on losing our own revolution (of 1776-1830) by whoring after exotics, Muscovite or European?

`As monument' or I should prefer to say as a still workable dynamo , left us from the real period, nothing surpasses the Jefferson correspondence. Or to reduce it to convenient bulk concentrating on the best of it, and its fullest implications, nothing surpasses the evidence that CIVILISATION WAS in America, than the series of letters exchanged between Jefferson and John Adams, during the decade of reconciliation after their disagreements.

It is probable that I could pick one crow a week with the American university system `for the rest of my natural', but two immediate crows are quite obvious, one with the modus of teaching history omitting the most significant documents, and second the mode of teaching literature and/or `American literature', omitting the most significant documents, and assuming that the life of a nation's letters is restricted mostly to second-rate fiction.

From 1760 to 1826 two civilised men lived and to a considerable extent reigned in America. They did not feel themselves isolated phenomena. They were not by any means shrunk into a clique or dependent on mutual admiration, or on clique estimation. They both wrote an excellent prose which has not, so far as I know, been surpassed in our fatherland, though Henry James had a style of his own (narrative) which was fit for a different purpose.

For the purpose and/or duration of this essay I shall define a civilised man as one who can give a serious answer to a serious question and whose circle of mental reference is not limited to mere acquisition of profit. The degree of his civilisation will depend both on the depth of his thought and on the spread of his curiosity. He may have made absolutely no special study of anything outside his profession, but his thoughts on that profession will have been such that his thoughts about anything else will not be completely inane.

In 170 years the United States have at no time contained a more civilised `world' than that comprised by the men to whom Adams and Jefferson wrote and from whom they received private correspondence. A history of American Literature that omits the letters of the founders and memoirs or diaries of J. Q. Adams and Martin Van Buren is merely nonsense. Without competence in matters pertaining to Benjamin Franklin, I should nevertheless hazard the opinion that his public writing will be found slithery and perhaps cheap in comparison. He had not integrity of the word. At least on occasions it deserted him.

From early `bending of the twig' it is impossible for me to think of certain books save as parts of curricula. Certain books should not be in curricula. Other books belong in curricula. The Adams-Jefferson writings ought to be in curricula.

If we are a nation, we must have a national mind. Frobenius escaped both the fiddling term `culture' and rigid `Kultur' by recourse to Greek, he used `Paideuma' with a meaning that is necessary to almost all serious discussion of such subjects as that now under discussion. His `Paideuma' means the mental formation, the inherited habits of thought, the conditionings, aptitudes of a given race or time.

In Italy there is current the adjective `anti-storico' to describe unlikely proposals; ideologies hung in a vacuum or contrary to the natural order of events as conditioned by race, time and geography.

Without Frobenius north of the Alps and the Mediterranean sanity south of them our thoughts would, I heartily believe, lack some of its pleasantest pastures.

As Americans we are neither Teutonic nor in any strict sense Mediterranean, though we should be fools to neglect either element of private nutrition.

As far as I remember U.S. school histories, they start with Columbus and/or in another sense with the Pilgrims. None of them starts with the Encyelopaedists. Is the term heard even by University Undergraduates?

Our national culture can be perhaps better defined from the Jefferson letters than from any other three sources, and mainly to its benefice. I don't think they have been analysed very clearly in themselves and I am not sure that anyone has tried very coherently to relate them to anything else.

No one has thought them perfection. Jefferson has been abused as an incredible optimist. I am not going to concede much to these possible accusations.

Henry Adams with a familial and inherited, but very very discrete chip on his somewhat feminine shoulder lacked, on his own implicit, but never explicit confession, the one quality needful for judging action. Adams never guessed right. Take him in London during his father's embassy. He never foresaw.

It was not for nothing that Quincy Adams took up astrology, not anthropology. The discrete descendant wanted a science, almost a mathematical science of history--overlooking, or does he specifically say he didn't overlook, the impossibility of laboratory methods. Take it that he saw the shallowness of historic aimlessness in his time, his first urge is to rectify it by mathematical measurement. And thereby he loses the chance of examining a great many phenomena which were and still are available for any patient man's contemplation.

I am not leaving my subject. You can not `place' the Jefferson correspondence save by postulating some axes of reference, and by some defined method of mensuration.

Frobenius outrages the English because he agrees with Aquinas that nothing is without efficient cause.

Before trying to establish type-cycles and accelerated rhythms in history it is advisable to gather at least a few data, and if the urge towards rhythmic analysis obsesses one, it might even be possible to study certain recurrences.

Nevertheless, the Flaubertian concept of `l'histoire morale contemporaine' arose not from mathematics but from a perception of paucity. A perception of the paucity registered in historians, the shallowness of their analysis of motivation, their inadequate measurements of causality.

Stendhal, Michelet, Flaubert, the Goncourts differ as individuals, but they were all of them on a trail, they wanted to set down an intelligible record of life in which things happened.

The mere statement that so and so made a war, or so and so reformed or extended an empire is much too much in the vague.

Frobenius taking things back to supposedly `simpler' conditions does try to sort out tendencies and predispositions. He dissociates modes of living. There are twenty volumes waiting translation. The patient reader must allow me to have them there as possible footnote; permitting me for a moment an anthropologist's dissociation of two systems which have functioned in Europe. Without which dissociation one can not `place' the Encyclopaedists or `come to Jefferson', save as isolated phenomenon sprung versatile, voluble, out of chaos. Polumetis, many-minded, distracting, discussable, but minus origins.

A Mediterranean state of mind, state of intelligence, modus of order `arose' out of Sparta perhaps more than from Athens, it developed a system of graduations, an hierarchy of values among which was, perhaps above all other, `order'. As a mental and intellectual filing system it certainly did not fall with Romulus Augustulus in A.D. 476.

In fact the earlier parts of it we know almost as palimpsest. We begin to find it in Constantine, after A.D. 300, and we can carry on via Justinian, after 500, Charlemagne, Gratian, in St. Ambrose, and Duns Scotus. This, you see, is by no means confusing a paideuma or mental growth with an empire, such as Propertius debunked under Augustus slitting out its blah and its rhetoric. Say that this civilisation lasted down to Leo the Tenth. And that its clearest formulation (along my present line of measurement) is Dante's `in una parte piu e meno altrove'.

Which detached phrase I had best translate by explaining that I take it to mean a sense of gradations. Things neither perfect nor utterly wrong, but arranged in a cosmos, an order, stratified, having relations one with another.

This means `the money that built the cathedrals', it means very great care in terminology because the `word' is `holy'.

I will take these last terms out of any possible jargon. Translate it, for present emergency, words, an exact terminology, are an effective means of communication, an efficient modus operandi ONLY if they do retain meanings.

This Mediterranean paideuma fell before, or coincident with, the onslaught of brute disorder of taboo. The grossness of incult thought came into Europe simultaneously with manifestations called `renaissance', `restoration' and muddled in our time with a good deal of newspaper yawp about puritans.

Certain things were `forbidden'. Specifically, on parchment, they were forbidden to Hebrews. The bible emerged and broke the Church Fathers, who had for centuries quoted the bible. All sense of fine assay seemed to decline in Europe.

A whole table of values was lost, but it wasn't just dropped overboard. A confusion which has lasted for several centuries will not be wholly untangled even by this essay. I don't expect to get 500 years onto a shingle.

Lorenzo Vaha extended, in one sense, the propaganda for the RIGHT WORD, but at the same time the cult of terminology lost its grip on general life.

Bayle and Voltaire spent their lives battling against `superstition', and something escaped .them. The process of impoverishment had set in, analagous in long curve, to the short curve I have given for America 1830 to 60. There are no exact historical parallels. I don't wan.t to be held to strict analogy. For the moment all I can do is to dissociate a graduated concept of say good and evil from an incult and gross paideuma. The former created by a series of men following one on another, not neglecting original examination of fact, but not thinking each one in turn that the moon and sea were discovered first by him.

Anybody who has read a labour paper, or reform party propaganda will grasp what I mean by the second crass mode of mentality.

There can be no doubt that the renaissance was born of wide awake curiosity, and that from Italy in the Quattrocento, straight down through Bayle and Voltaire the LIVE men were actuated by a new urge toward veracity.

There can I think, be equally little doubt, that the Church, as bureaucracy and as vested interest was the worst enemy of `faith', of `christianity', of mental order? And yet that doesn't quite cover it either.

Something did not hit plumb on the nail. Without saying that anyone was dead wrong, and without committing me to a statement, can we find some sort of split, some scission or lesion in the mental working of Europe? Didn't the mental integrity of the Encyclopaedists dwindle into bare intellect by dropping that ETHICAL simplicity which makes the canonists, say any canonist so much more `modern', more scientific, than any eighteenth-century `intellectual'?

All I want to do for the moment is to set up two poles of reference. One: a graduated system in which all actions were relative good or evil, according to almost millimetric measurement, but in the absolute. Two, a system in which everything was good or bad without any graduation, but as taboo, though the system itself was continually modified in action by contingencies.

When this second system emerged from low life into high life, when it took over vast stretches of already acquired knowledge, it produced the Encyclopedists. Things were so or not so. You had `Candide', you had writers of maxims, you had `analysis', and you evolved into the Declaration of Les Droits de l'Homme which attained a fineness so near to that of the canonists that no one, so far as I know, has thought much of comparing them.

Out of intellectual revolt. Out of, (perhaps unwittingly) Pico on Human Dignity there proliferated Bobby Burns and to hell with the Duke and the parson...

At which point the elder Adams had the puritanical stubbornness to stand up against popular clamour and to question the omniscience of Mr. Jefferson. It cost him four years in the Executive Mansion. But America was a civilised land in those days. Jefferson could imagine no man leaving it for the pleasures of Europe. He and Adams had been there and met Europeans.

It is only in our time that anyone has, with any shadow of right, questioned the presuppositions on which the U.S. is founded. If we are off that base, why are we off it? Jefferson's America was civilised while because its chief men were social. It is only in our gormy and squalid day that the chief American powers have been, and are, anti-social.

Has any public man in our lifetime dared to say without a sneer or without fear of ridicule that Liberty is the right to do `ce que ne nuit pas aux autres'? That was, past tense, a definition of civic and social concept. Such liberty was, at least by programme guaranteed the American citizen, but no other was offered him.

Jefferson and Adams were responsible. I mean they both were and FELT responsible. Their equals felt with them. The oath of allegiance implies this responsibility but it isn't printed in capitals, it passes in an unheeded phrase.

Two methods of turning in the evidence of the Adams letters are open. I could quote fragments and thereby be inadequate. The letters are printed. Or I could assert the implications, or at least the chief implications. The MAIN implication is that they stand for a life not split into bits.

Neither of these two men would have thought of literature as something having nothing to do with life, the nation, the organisation of government. Of course no first-rate author ever did think of his books in this manner. If he was lyrist, he was crushed under a system; or he was speaking of every man's life in its depth; if he was Trollope or Flaubert he was thinking of history without the defects of generic books by historians which miss the pith and point of the story. The pith and point of Jefferson's story is in a letter to Crawford (1816) ... `and if the national bills issued be bottomed (as is indispensable) on pledges of specific taxes for their redemption within certain and moderate epochs, and be of proper denominations for circulation, no interest on them would be necessary or just, because they would answer to every one of the purposes of the metallic money withdrawn and replaced by them.'

I do not expect one reader in even 600 to believe me when I say these are eight of the most significant lines ever written.

It may take another twenty years' education to give that passage a meaning.^[2] People quite often think me crazy when I make a jump instead of a step, just as if all jumps were unsound and never carried one anywhere.

From that take off I land on the Walter Page correspondence, one hundred or one hundred and one or two years after the Jefferson letter. Page went to Washington and found (verbatim) `men about him (Wilson) nearly all very small fry or worse, narrowest two penny lot I've ever come across... never knew quite such a condition in American Iife.'

The colouring there being that Page has a memorial tablet in Westminster Abbey. He cut no ice in European intellectual life. He earned the gratitude of the British. He and Grey passed through those years of racking anxiety, and Page was refined from a perhaps gawky provincial into a character by that anxiety, WITHOUT either of them ever having any idea of what started the war. Page saw things Wilson didn't. He had detailed news of appalling results; but even Wilson saw things that Page didn't. But Europe went blind into that war because mankind had not digested Jefferson's knowledge. They went into that war because the canon law had been buried, because all general knowledge had been split up into useless or incompetent fragments. Because literature no longer bothered about the language `of law and of the state' because the state and plutocracy cared less than a damn about letters. If I say those eight lines of Jefferson should be cut in brass and nailed to the door of Monticello the reader will think me eccentric. Let it pass as a picturesque fantasy.

And literature in the meanwhile? Goes to p-o-t, pot. Steadily it gets duller and duller, steadily it runs into neologism in contravention to T. J.'s moderate precept of style, namely that any man has the right to a new word when it can make his meaning more clear than an old one. Literature gets duller and duller by limitation of subject. Balzac, Trollope and Henry James extended the subject. EXTENDED the subject, they as Dante before them and as every real writer before them or since, extended the domain of their treatment.

Up till 1820 people read Latin. Your Jefferson-Adams correspondence shows acquaintance with Latin, note the line of impoverishment. The University of today does not communicate to the student the idea of Latin as a window. It instills the idea of `the classics', certain books often of very limited scope, to be read in the acquisition of culture. At some point the whole fact that Berkeley, Hume, whatever serious thought had been printed in English, came in part out of books printed in Latin, has just gone by the board. If anyone had told me or any student of my undergraduate time that I would extend my Greek vocabulary because I have been infuriated to a curiosity as to the nature of money they would have been greeted by (let us hope at least bland) amazement.

There is nothing more firmly rooted in young America's mind than the belief that certain subjects are dull, there is nothing further from the spirit of American University education than the perception that subjects that have interested the best minds for three, five or twenty-five centuries are not perhaps very dull. There must have been something in them to attract recurrent unstill curiosities.

The historic process is continuous. Or `the historic process is probably continuous'. Apparent breaks are probably due to laziness of historians who haven't dug down into causality. When you find two men as different as Marx and M. le Marquis de la Tour du Pin blind in the same spot, there is a chance to use curiosity.

In an age beset with cranks we have I suppose heard of Freud. For every man with an anxiety state due to sex, there are nine and ninety with an anxiety state due to lack of purchasing power, or anticipation of same. It is typical of a bewildered society that it should erect a pathology into a system.

The sanity and civilisation of Adams-Jefferson stems from the Encyclopaedists. You find in their letters a varied culture, and an omniverous (or apparently so) curiosity. And yet the `thinning', the impoverishment of mental life shows in the decades after their death, and not, I think, without cause.

The Aquinian universe, the grades of divine intelligence and/or goodness or goodwill present in graduated degrees throughout this universe gave the thinker, any thinker something to measure by. What was lost or mislaid in the succeeding centuries, or what at least went out of the limelight may have been belief in `God', but it most certainly was the HABIT of thinking of things in general as set in an orderly universe.

The laws of material science presuppose uniformity throughout the cosmos, but they do not offer an hierarchy of anything like the earlier coherence. Call it an hierarchy of evaluation.

The Encyclopaedists have a rich culture. What is the Dictionnaire de Bayle? As an arrangement it treats topics ALPHABETICALLY. Voltaire's Dictionnaire is hardly more than a slight addendum. Bayle has Moreri to make fun of, but they all have an ORDER to criticise. They go over the Accepted Aquinian universe with a set of measuring tools, reductio ad absurdum etc. The multifarious nature of cognisance remains, but they have only the Alphabet for a filing system.

They are brilliant. Bayle is robust with the heritage of Rabelais and Voltaire a bit finer, down almost to silver point. But the habit of gradations of value, and the infinitely more vital of digging down into principles gradually fade out of the The degrees of light and motion, the whole metaphoric richness begins to perish. From a musical concept of man they dwindle to a mathematical concept.

Fontenelle notices it but attributes natural human resistance to abstraction to a hunger for ERROR. I don't think Chesterton ever quite formulated an epigram in reply, but the whole of his life was a protest against this impoverishment.

In fact the whole of Flaubert, the whole of the fight for the novθl as `histoire morale contemporaine' was a fight against maxims, against abstractions, a fight back toward a human and/or total conception.

Flaubert, Trollope, and toward the last Henry James got through to money. Marx and La Tour du Pin, not working on total problem, but on a special problem which one would have thought of necessity would have concentrated their attention on money, merely go blind at the crucial point.

In totalitarian writings before Voltaire one does not find this blind spot. The Church Fathers think down to detail, Duns Scotus has no cloudy obsession onthis point. There is a great deal of Latin on Intrinsic and Extrinsic value of money.

Jefferson is still lucid. Gallatin found banks useful, as T. J. says, because they `gave ubiquity to his money'.

Does the historian stop for such details? I mean the pestilent variety of historian who has filled 97 per cent of the shelves in our libraries (historical alcoves)? Venice took over private banking but it took decades to persuade the normal Venetian to keep books, to get down to the office to see whether his butler did the job for him, let alone having the addition correct.

There is a continuity of historic process. The imaginary speech of Q. Xtius Decimus after the battle of Bogoluz or the steaming open of despatches by Metternich is not the whole of the story.

In American history as professed the monetary factor has been left to the LAST. Van Buren's memoirs stays six decades in manuscript. How you expect to have a nation with no national culture beats me.

`Congress will then be payirig six per cent on twenty millions, and receiving seven per cent on ten millions, being its third of the institution;, so that on the ten millions cash which they receive from the States and individuals, they will, in fact, have to pay but 5 per cent interest. This is the bait.' (Monticello, 6 November 1813.)

The idea, put about I know not why, by I know not whom, that Jefferson was an imprecise rhetorician disappears in a thorough perusal of his letters.

There may be a defect in the `decline and fall' method in writing history. There is certainly a defect in it if the analyst persists in assuming that this or that institution (say the Church) `fell' merely because some other paideuma or activity (organised formally, or sporadic and informal) arises, overcrowds, overshadows it, or merely gets greater publicity.

The Church may not have fallen. The steady building up of social and economic criteria, ever with a tendency to control, via Constantine, justinian, Charlemagne is still there in the records. It is still there as thought and discrimination for anyone who chooses to look at it.

Leibnitz was possibly the last prominent thinker who worried about `reconciliation', about getting all the best European thought `back into' the Church, but one might note that it is not merely theology but philosophy that STOPS with Herr Leibnitz. By that I mean that since his correspondence with Bossuet `philosophy', general ideation, has been merely a squib and trailer, correlated to material particular sciences, from which it has had its starts, shoves, incentives. Often splurging in the vaguest analogies.

I am not offering proof, because full proof will not go onto ten pages. I am offering indications, which the reader can follow for himself, but which will I think lead to perception:

That Adams and Jefferson exist in a full world. They are NOT a province of England. The letters abound in consciousness of Europe, that is of France, Holland, Spain, Russia, Italy. The truly appalling suburbanism that set in after the civil war, partly from our exhaustion, partly frorn the oedematous bulging of the British Empire, our relapse into cerebral tutelage, our suburbanism did not afflict Adams and Jefferson. Not only were they level and (with emphasis) CONTEMPORARY with the best minds of Europe but they entered into the making of that mind. Chateaubriand did not come to Philadelphia to lecture, he came to learn.

I do not believe that either public men or American writers for the past forty years have dared to face the implications of the Adams-Jefferson volumes. Henry James would have, had he been aware of such works existing.

I doubt if they can be adduced to back up any particular theory, one should look at the totality at least at as many as are thrust under your observation more as you can dig out for yourselves.

The first quotation of Jefferson here used, could lead to Gesell. Chemistry and Physics are not mutually contradictory. Faddists and the incult are perpetually trying to refute one set of ideas with other ideas that are sometimes unrelated, sometimes complementary. The just price is a canonist concept. The order of the Roman empire, the possibility of organising such an empire is indissolubly bound up with reduction of usury rates, with disentanglement of the notion of usury from that of marine insurance (hence the scandal of Cato the censor).

An idea or ideal of order developed with the Roman empire, but it was not the empire. It was an ideal of justice that penetrated down, out, through, into marketing. The idea that you can tax idle money dates back through a number of centuries. These questions have intrigued the best human minds, Hume, Berkeley, a whole line of Catholic writers, and a whole congeries of late Latin writers. You can not write or understand any history, and you can not write or understand any serious `history of contemporary customs' in the form of Goncourt and Flaubert novels if you persist in staving off all enquiry into the most vital phenomena, e.g. such as search into the nature and source of the `carrier', of the agent and implement of transference.

A total culture such as that of Adams and Jefferson does not dodge such investigation. A history of literature which refuses to look at such mattess remains merely a shell and a sham.

Adams was anti-clerical (at least I suppose one would call it that), they are both of them heritors of encyclopaedism, but they inherit that forma mentis in an active state where definition of terms and ideas has not been lost. I mean liberty is still the right to do ANYTHING that harms no one else. For seventy years it has been boomed mainly as effrenis in faenerando licentia, alias to hell with the public.

They both had a wide circle of reference, of knowledge, of ideas, with the acid test for hoakum, and no economic inhibitions. The growth of economic inhibition, I mean specifically in the domain of THOUGHT, is a nineteenth-century phenomenon to a degree that I believe inhered in no other century. Edward Grey and Page were sincerely unconscious. They `didn't see things that way'. There was a vast penumbra about their excitement, and penumbra is the mother of bogies.

Jefferson specifically wanted a civilisation in Virginia. Van Buren was at work from very early years. He was servant of the public, and during his public life had, so far as one makes out, time only for good manners. Heaven knows how he spent his time after he was defeated. His memoirs are very well written.

After the death of Van Buren the desire for civilization was limited you might almost say to professional writers, to a very few professional writers and an ineffective minority of the electorate. You have a definite opposition between public life and such men as H. james and H. Adams which you can not ascribe wholly to their individual temperaments.

A totalitarian state uses the best of its human components. Shakespeare and Chaucer did not think of emigrating. Landor, Shelley, Keats, Browning, Beddoes did emigrate, and Bobby Burns thought of it. Something had happened in and to England. An historian, if he were real, would want to pry into it.

And the lesson is, if, heaven help us, I am supposed to be teaching anyone anything in this article--the lesson is against raw ideology, which Napoleon, Adams, Jefferson were all up against, and whereto, as Adams remarked, Napoleon had, in those days, given a name.

The lesson is or might be against peripheric acid as distinct from Confucian building of ideogram and search into motivation, or `principle'.

If you want certain results, you must as scientist examine a great many phenomena. If you won't admit what you are driving at, even to yourself, you remain in penumbra. Adams did not keep himself in penumbra, he believed in a responsible class. He wanted safeguards and precautions and thereby attained unpopularity.

`You and I ought not to die before we have explained ourselves to each other.' (Adams to Jefferson, 15 July 1813.) Did Rousseau or Montaigne ever write anything to equal that sentence, given the context (1760 to 1813)?

[1] North American Review (Winter 1937-1938).
[2] Give 'em another 20 or 40. E.P., 1959.