Arts and Letters

Alfred Thayer Mahan died last year at the age of seventy-four. Deriving in family, training, and confession from the old New York, his ancestry was notable. He was born at West Point, where his father, a learned engineer of high repute, was then professor. His career from his student days at Columbia University and Annapolis onward to his fiftieth year was that of a faithful, painstaking officer and Christian gentleman of the Anglican mold. In 1883 he had published an admirable professional study entitled The Gulf and Inland Waters, and two years later he was made lecturer on naval history and strategy at the Naval War College in Newport. Upon his duties as teacher he entered with the fitness due to university education and professional discipline. Five years later was published The Influence of Sea Power on History. During the twenty-three years following he published no fewer than seventeen pieces of important historical work, short and long, making a total of nineteen titles to his credit.

His biographies of Farragut and Nelson, as well as the finely studied bit of autobiography entitled From Sail to Steam, are all works of the highest importance. They exhibit the mind and style of the author with great clarity, because none of them is abstract, metaphysical, or controversial. Furthermore, they display the man, as his mind worked without artificial stimulus and naturally expressed itself in language. There is the patient, unwearying search for truth, for he had trained himself in archival study and the comparative method in establishing facts; there is his characteristic insight and grasp of meaning, for he was essentially a moralist and interpreter; there is his plain dealing and lucid style. While he was a man of letters, he held his constructive imagination in firm control, a hand-maiden and not a mistress. It was the affair of his readers to supply the element of fancy, if they chose to do so. To the landsman the ocean is a favorite field for the play of that faculty, and readers give it full scope under the stimulus of his suggestions.

It has been the function of certain American historians to exhibit to European peoples the hidden meanings of their past. Among them Admiral Mahan was easily a chief. Were we to reckon the greatness of historical work by its contemporary influence, his would be a reputation to which in the long list of modern historians in all lands none can be exactly paralleled.

Behind the historian was the man, a devout and orthodox Christian, with a strain of mysticism, inquiring into the divine purposes as revealed in the course of human events. Among all forms of this transcendent power in action the sailor-historian magnified that exhibited by national effort on the high seas. His epochal work, for it was nothing less, is contained in his series of six volumes on Sea Power, embracing substantially the historical ages in their entirety. Every people and every age was carefully examined in its relative importance, and naturally the older lands, entering on the portentous struggle to maintain territories and prestige, were more profoundly interested than the newer, his own included.

While therefore it cannot be said that he failed to secure from Americans the due meed of honor, yet it was beyond the seas that he was revered and admired with a passionate intensity never fully apprehended in his own country. When in 1902 he was president of the American Historical Association, the theme of his presidential address was Subordination in Historical Treatment, and his exposition related his own method in emphasizing the central elements of his thought as a historian. So successful was he in his sea-power books that his message was a revelation to Europe generally and to Great Britain particularly. Within a single year both Oxford and Cambridge bestowed upon him their highest honors. The advocates of the Greater England and the Three-Power Standard found in him their prophet and in his studies their justification. As the volumes appeared, they were, in whole or in part, translated into the leading European languages, and carefully edited excerpts were the textbooks for naval expansion. That the ocean, so far from being the barrier it had been considered, was in reality the great highway, the all-uniting menstruum of isolation, burst as a fact upon the consciousness of Europe like a convulsion of nature.

To be sure, the stress of expansion was already powerful in international politics, and the European world was beginning to groan in spirit over problems entailed by material prosperity and the growth of population. The forces of nature were being harnessed for the multiplication indefinitely of human industry and the inflation of wealth. Statesmen were sorely in need of pretexts for armament, and they seized for a corner-stone of their policy upon the fact ruthlessly exposed by the American historian that Nelson, rather than Wellington, had worn away to innocuous and tenuous inefficiency the portentous power of Napoleon. The ears which heard alike in England and Germany were only too receptive, the grasp of national understandings only too swift, and the subsequent activities only too mischievous. But we must not fall into the baneful fallacy of sequence as proving cause and effect. Secular history is not the record of human utopias, and what it reveals is not the dealings of regenerate mankind. Unvarnished truth is the characteristic of Mahan's pages, the truth fairly stated and philosophically considered; for him it was no counsel of perfection; it was an exhibition of how unstable is the equilibrium in the nice balance of political powers. His work, dispassionately considered, has neither charm nor seduction; in a high degree it is a caution against danger, a warning against false interpellations of facts. That self-seekers should abuse it is, alas, the way of the world.

Speaking from frequent contact with Admiral Mahan throughout many years of pleasant acquaintance, the writer must enter a protest against the charge that he was at any time, in conversation or in his writings, an apostle of war. So far from that, he was preëminently an apostle of peace. It is a sacrilege to distort the general tendency of a life-work by false emphasis on particulars. He did not write primarily for others, because, great as he was in other respects, he was greatest as an American, and the lesson he taught was intended for American patriots. He advocated a powerful fleet and battle-ships of great size, but solely for the safety and dignity of the land which was dear to him and to protect against violence a pacific evolution of the civilization he believed to be the highest. Knowing the genius of peoples as few others did, he realized the passions, ambitions, and unprincipled purposes of contemporary nationalities, the shiftiness of policies, the flimsiness of alliances and treaties, the lust for glory, for wealth, and for power. He had marked how the embittered hates of one generation were swiftly transformed into the fawning flatterings of the next, and how readjustment of understandings occurs in the twinkling of an eye when common material advantage imperiously commands it. Fully aware of such appalling truths, and sensitive to his own convictions about sea power, he desired his country to be on its guard against empty protests of affection and shallow pretenses of aloofness.

It was good to know a man of such elevated character, to hear his fascinating talk, to enjoy his courtesy, and to delight the eyes with his fine appearance. Tall, slender, erect, with expressive blue eyes and a clear complexion, he was moderate and modest in his intercourse with men, though fearless and often unsparing in the defense of his principles. He was mindful of his duties great and small, meticulous in his attention to obligations he had accepted, and so in our company a genial, appreciative comrade. He shrank from all notoriety and self-display, and during his years of incumbency in the Institute and Academy there was never a time when he was conspicuous to the degree of his eminence in the great world. As the perspective of time lengthens, our devotion to his memory is likely to increase. The trusted adviser of the Government, he died in Washington with all his armor as a patriot on, with faculties keen and alert. The awful convulsions of the hour had justified his interpretations of sea power, but I have heard that they had likewise filled him with consternation lest as a result, deferred perhaps, yet probable, the political map of America might eventually be as completely remade as that of Europe.