Arts and Letters

Woodrow Wilson was elected a member of the Academy of Arts and Letters in January, 1908. He was then fifty-two, and in the sixth year of his service as President of Princeton University. He had won literary reputation very early. His brilliant treatise on Congressional Government dates from 1885. His books on The State and on Division and Reunion, his various volumes of literary essays appearing during the eighteen-nineties, and his ambitious History of the American People, published in 1902, had brought him deserved praise as a master of English style. He was known to be a gifted teacher, and a speaker, upon academic and literary occasions, of unusual persuasiveness and charm. In any circle of cultivated Americans, at the opening of the twentieth century, the mention of Woodrow Wilson's name excited interest and attention. To the great unliterary and unacademic public he was practically unknown.

But his destiny was to lead him away from the quiet fields of history and literature and political theory into the vexed territory of university administration, and thence into the battlefields of state, national, and international politics. Even at the time of his election to the Academy, it had become impossible to regard Woodrow Wilson as a mere man of letters. He was now an administrator with very definite and radical policies of university reform. They naturally provoked opposition. During his term in the governorship of New Jersey the change of activity from that of the publicist and academic theorist to the practical political leader, became more and more pronounced. Wilson's gay and spirited literary essays of fifteen years earlier, and the historical and political studies of the solitary scholar, were more and more effaced from the public mind. It became the fashion to regard him as a wholly new figure in American political life.

The story of his vogue is highly interesting, and it illustrates certain phases of the national character. Critics and historians of our literature have frequently emphasized the curiously composite structure of American literary reputations. They have rarely been won—as Poe's and Hawthorne's, for instance, were very clearly won—by purely literary achievements. Other considerations such as ethics, politics, public service, personal picturesqueness and fascination have played a great part in establishing the fame not merely of Franklin and Jefferson, Webster and Lincoln, but also of Emerson and Whitman and Mark Twain. Our most characteristic American writing is civic writing, without any stylistic consciousness, and scarcely regarding itself as literature at all. The supreme example of it is the "Gettysburg Address." Neither Lincoln nor Jefferson, neither Roosevelt nor Wilson, after their emergence into public life, can be made the subject of dispassionate scrutiny as mere writers, any more than we can think of Anatole France without remembering the Dreyfus case, or of Burke without remembering his attitude toward the American colonies.

Wilson's fame as a writer has both gained and lost through this complexity of the standards by which he has been judged. His distinction as a man of letters was more clearly acknowledged when he was a college professor than when he had become a college administrator, for the obvious reason that his new and bewildering proposals for university reorganization provoked sharp dissent from his opponents as well as passionate loyalty from his friends. Colleagues who had once debated whether Wilson's essay style was too Stevensonian or whether he quoted Burke and Bagehot too frequently, now quarreled over the "quadrangle" scheme or the location of a graduate school. Trenchant phrases sparkling on the pages of Harper's or the Century had been one thing, but here was the phrase-maker suddenly in power, touching pocket-nerves and vested interests and sanctified traditions. One had to be for him or against him, style or no style.

His campaign for the governorship of New Jersey and his achievements while in office served to widen these divergencies of opinion, even among men who had thought they knew Woodrow Wilson intimately. Was he a dangerous radical, all the more dangerous because of his admitted skill in controversy, or was he the inspired leader of men into the paths of what was then called the New Freedom? He became President of the United States, a masterful ruler of his turbulent party and a spokesman for the nation. Audiences for his eloquent words were amplified. As the underlying issues of the World War became gradually clearer and clearer, it was this once lonely student of Burke and Wordsworth who was called upon to express them and he was listened to by uncounted millions of men all around the world. Neither Jefferson nor Lincoln ever had such an opportunity to impress mankind by the spoken and written word, and surely it may now be said without any imputation of partisanship that Wilson's greatest messages and speeches challenge in range of thought and beauty of expression the noblest utterances in the political history of our race.

That would be glory enough for any man of letters, but I do not think that Woodrow Wilson, in his later years at least, cared nearly as much about literary reputation as he was supposed to care about it. He always knew, of course, that he could write and speak better than most men, but he had, unlike his famous contemporary Theodore Roosevelt, no instinct for publicity, no dramatic or histrionic sense. He was never the "timid," "vacillating" person of the political caricatures. In action he could be recklessly bold, pitilessly obstinate. But in the hidden recesses of his personality he was shy, sensitive, deeply religious, essentially a solitary. Yet like so many solitaries he had seen a vision. It was a vision, as every one now knows, of a new world order, an era of peace and justice for all men, a veritable, visible Kingdom of God on earth. And Wilson's fate was the familiar fate of the visionary. In the emotional exaltation of the closing months of the World War he really believed that a new mode of thinking had taken possession of the forward-looking minds of Europe and America. He was convinced that no one would dare to place the selfish interests of a single nation or group of nations above the interests of humanity as a whole. He was mistaken. The old order had enough strength left to strike him down. The Europe and America of 1919 were not ready for his gospel, and he sleeps now, the crusader's sword by his side, without having seen the "Holy City" of his dream.

I knew the man long and well. He had his faults of temperament and of method. His physical endowments were unequal to the strain of the enormous burdens which he was forced to carry. His body broke but not his will, nor the flawless clearness of his mind. If his career ended with his burial, as in some stormy Elizabethan play, it would be fitting to call Woodrow Wilson's life a tragedy. Take up the body and let "the soldiers' music and the rites of war speak loudly for him." But in the case of the true visionary, those trumpets of the sad fifth act and the fall of the tragic curtain are impertinences. Upon idealists such as he the curtain does not fall: the play evolves into the eternal drama that makes up the life of humanity. The illogical, impertinent bullet that pierced Lincoln's brain has now become a portion of his glory. "I meet him at every turn," said Thoreau of John Brown after he was hanged; "he is more alive than ever he was." Those who hated Wilson in his lifetime and those who loved him can agree at least in this: that his ultimate fame will depend upon the triumph of the political ideals which he clothed with fitting words. We make our guesses even now, but fifty years hence we shall begin to know something of the verdict of mankind.