His friends soon discovered his proficiency, and saw to it that he had plenty of practice. He designed houses for the two Madisons and for Monroe, among others, and one for his daughter Martha. He drew plans for several public buildings in Virginia, some of them of a rather special character—a prison, an Episcopalian church at Charlottesville, two county court-houses, and the quadrangle of a university. He sketched two plans for the White House, one of which was submitted anonymously in the competition. Existing remains of his work show that he was competent to do anything that a professional architect can do; he could draught preliminary studies, make working-plans, full-size details and specifications. His farm-book contains a series of minute and interesting observations on materials, most of which still have value.
He originated the rectangular lay-out of city streets with alternate blocks of park-space, recommending this design particularly in the case of the Southern cities which were scourged with yellow fever. “Take, for instance, the checkerboard for a plan,” he wrote Volney. “Let the black squares only be building squares, and the white ones be left open in turf and trees. . . . The atmosphere of such a town would be like that of the country, insusceptible of the miasmata which produce yellow fever.” In this, obviously, he did not reckon with the ineluctable factor of realty values. He was lukewarm about the radial plan on which Washington was laid out, proposing instead that the streets should be “at right angles as in Philadelphia, and that no street should be narrower than one hundred feet, with footways of fifteen feet.” The main trouble with the radial plan was the difficulty of avoiding fantastic and unsightly buildings at the flatiron corners. The French Revolution, however, had bred a great fear of mobs, which gave general favour to the radial plan. The ronds-points or “circles” of Washington are reminiscent of that fear; they were put there in order that soldiers drawn up in them might have full command of the streets in case of any popular uprising. Mobs had been busy in a small way in Philadelphia in the stirring days of the Jacobin clubs and Citizen Genêt; there should be no barricades in Washington.
II
On his last journey from Washington to Monticello, Mr. Jefferson met with a great and irreparable loss. He had sent some of his heavy freight around by water, and by direst misfortune the one trunk containing his Indian vocabularies was broken open and ransacked by thieves. His interest in the Indian tongues began in boyhood. “The Indians were in the habit of coming often and in great numbers to the seat of government [at Williamsburg] where I was very much with them. I knew much the great Ontasseté, the warrior and orator of the Cherokees; he was always the guest of my father, on his journeys to and from Williamsburg. I was in his camp when he made his great farewell oration to his people, the evening before he took his departure for England . . . his sounding voice, distinct articulation, animated action, and the solemn silence of his people at their several fires, filled me with awe and veneration, although I did not understand a word he uttered.” His acquaintance with the Indians having begun in this way, he “acquired impressions of attachment and commiseration for them which have never been obliterated.” He admired their anarchist polity and their highly integrated sense of manners; it was his observation of these that put into his mind the great idea that in so far as mankind needs any kind of government at all, it should be governed by customs rather than by laws. He lamented the effect of the “interested and unprincipled policy of England,” and subsequently even more that of Anglo-American mercantilism, upon these fine developments; foreseeing, as he wrote von Humboldt, that “the confirmed brutalization, if not the extermination of this race in our America is therefore to form an additional chapter in the English history of the same coloured man in Asia, and of the brethren of their own colour in Ireland, and wherever else Anglo-mercantile cupidity can find a twopenny interest in deluging the earth with human blood.” At the time of writing his Notes on Virginia, his speculations had led him to consider a probable kinship of the Indians with the Eastern Asiatics; certain resemblances between them “would induce me to conjecture that the former are the descendants of the latter or the latter of the former, excepting indeed the Esquimaux,” who, he thought, may have come originally from the northern parts of Europe by way of Greenland.
Regarding language as “the best proof of the affinity of nations which can ever be referred to,” he proposed to collect tribal vocabularies, “preserving their appellations of the most common objects in nature, of those which must be present to every nation, barbarous or civilized, with the inflections of their nouns and verbs, their principles of regimen and concord.” But this, again, was one of the things that one must do for oneself if it were to be done. “Very early in life, therefore, I formed a vocabulary of such objects . . . and my course of life having given me opportunities of obtaining vocabularies of many Indian tribes, I have done so on my original plan.” At the time of his retirement in 1809, he had amassed about forty of these; and after they were scattered by the thieves, no more than a few fragments were ever recovered.
In a philological enterprise of this kind, “our reward must be the addition made to the philosophy of language.” As a rule, Mr. Jefferson took a pretty strictly practical view of language, as little more than something whereby one gets oneself understood. “I do not pretend that language is science. It is only an instrument for the attainment of science.” The chief object of learning a language is to get a command of its literature, and the earlier one gets at languages, the better, since getting at them is so largely a matter of memory. “In general, I am of opinion that till the age of about sixteen we are best employed on languages.” Still, the rule was not invariable; he had done most of his own learning of living languages after sixteen. One might do a great deal with languages at any time of life, if one but kept at it. Industriousness, as he remarked to Martha in one of his strange preachments to her while she was at school in Paris, begets a sense of the abundance of time, and thus, more than anything, holds off the approach of age. “No person will have occasion to complain of the want of time who never loses any. It is wonderful how much may be done if we are always doing.” So, when he was past thirty, and the members of the new Continental Congress were looking one another over with curiosity, and gossiping a bit about one another, John Adams wrote that “Duane says that Jefferson is the greatest rubber-off of dust that he has met with; that he has learned French, Italian, Spanish, and wants to learn German.” With German, however, he never got far, perhaps seeing little practical use to be made of it. There are in existence one or two scraps of interlinear translation that he made from the German, not well done or even well copied; not well enough to indicate any great amount of care or interest.
Falle
doch
auf
Doris
augenlieder
Fall
oh
on
Doris’s
eyelids
Holder
schlaf
leicht
wallend
sanft
hernieder
Gentle
sleep
light
soft
down
Hence his great contemporary Goethe, in whose workaday philosophy he might have found so much to his own mind—not the author of Faust or of the Wahlverwandtschaften, certainly, but the real Goethe of the Conversations, the Goethe who said that die Zeit ist unendlich lang —remained unknown to him. What an affinity of spirit, one can not help thinking, would this libertarian practitioner of taste and manners have found with one who formulated the profound truth that Alles was unsern Geist befreit ohne uns die Herrschaft über uns selbst zu geben, ist verderblich! Although Mr. Jefferson never spoke any language but English except on a great pinch, and with no care for anything beyond making himself understood, he seems to have been unable to manage German even to that extent. While travelling in Germany, he made note of having heard that near Duisberg there were “remains of the encampment of Verus, in which he and
his legions fell by the arms of Arminius (in the time of Tiberius, I think it was) but there was not a person to be found in Duysberg who could understand either English, French, Italian or Latin. So I could make no inquiry.” Probably he never had the opportunity to pick up the vernacular by the ingenious and time-saving method which he employed to some extent in learning colloquial French, and which he recommended to his son-in-law, advising him to board in a French family where there were children: “You will learn to speak better from women and children in three months than from men in a year.”
He defended the study of Greek and Latin on grounds which have rather a curious turn of practicality; though if any one cared to maintain that these literatures are but an apparatus of intellectual luxury, he raised the pertinent question why luxury in science may not be “at least as justifiable as in architecture, painting, gardening, or the other arts.” He reinforces this large view, however, by observing that “the utilities we derive from the remains of the Greek and Latin languages” are, among others, “first, as models of pure taste in writing”; and he adds with penetration, that “without these models we should probably have continued the inflated style of our northern ancestors, or the hyperbolical and vague one of the East.” To get all this benefit, however, one had to have a certain amount of Grundlichkeit, and a due interest in the structure of language. So, in his latter days, when he had returned to an undistracted occupation with Greek and Latin literature, Mr. Jefferson wrote at great length to Edward Everett, in opposition to the doctrine of Buttman, who “goes with the herd of grammarians in denying an ablative case to the Greek language.” All Buttman’s pretended datives are ablatives, for good and sufficient reasons, carefully set forth and expounded. One may have too much Grundlichkeit—so much that it makes hay of one’s common sense. “By analyzing too minutely, we often reduce our subject to atoms, of which the mind loses its hold.”
In 1813, having resumed correspondence with John Adams, Mr. Jefferson gave him one day a few lines of Theocritus, by way of apposite quotation in a letter. It drew from Adams the whimsical complaint, “Lord! Lord! What can I do with so much Greek? When I was your age, young man, that is, seven or eight years ago, I felt a kind of pang of affection for one of the flames of my youth, and again paid my addresses. . . . It was to little better purpose than writing letters on a pail of water.” This, however, was but a playful pretence, for his range of classical culture and his depth of scholarship were almost equal to Mr. Jefferson’s. Some time later, “to compensate in some measure for this crazy letter,” 1 John Adams sent Mr. Jefferson an essay on the correct pronunciation of Greek. Mr. Jefferson replied with a letter amounting to a small treatise, summarizing the results of an investigation of the subject which he had made in Paris with the help of some cultivated Greeks whom he stumbled upon and promptly laid under contribution. He shows his reasons for having given up the Italian method of pronouncing Greek in favour of a more modern method, though he accounts with much force and ingenuity for a few exceptions that he insists on in the case of certain diphthongs. Even here his interest has a practical end in view. Acknowledging that “the whole subject is conjectural,” he is nevertheless glad “to see the question stirred” in America. Nothing which starts the human mind going to good purpose is to be disregarded; even this matter, which appears academic, may very well “excite among our young countrymen a spirit of enquiry and criticism, and lead them to more attention to this most beautiful of all languages.”
It is possible that his German went derelict in behalf of Anglo-Saxon, which he took up primarily to qualify himself as a “man of science” in law, in his early days when he pored over the “old dull scoundrel” Coke, under George Wythe. The subject stayed in his mind so well that latterly he wrote a good monograph on it for the benefit of some young men at the University of Virginia who were studying under his guidance. His instruction in Anglo-Saxon seems to have been rather popular, for in speaking of his renewed interest in the subject as “a hobby which too often runs away with me,” he says that “our youth seem disposed to mount it with me, and to begin their course where mine is ending.” He proposed an interesting simplification of Anglo-Saxon, which might lessen “the terrors and difficulties presented by the rude alphabet and unformed orthography,” and make it a regular part of a common English education. Why give Anglo-Saxon so formidably learned a form, mounting it “on all the scaffolding of the Greek and Latin,” and loading it with the impedimenta of imputed paradigms. What were the facts? Simply that our ancestors did so little with either reading or writing that they had no fixed orthography. To represent a given sound, “every one jumbled the letters together according to his unlettered notion of their power, and all jumbled them differently.” The thing to do, therefore, is to drop the superfluous consonants, and give the remaining letters their present English sound; “because, not knowing the true one, the present enunciation is as likely to be right as any other, and indeed more so, and facilitates the acquisition of the language.”
Macpherson’s Ossian came his way when he was about thirty years old, and nearly swept him off his feet. “I am not ashamed to own that I think this rude bard of the North the greatest poet that has ever existed.” Nothing would do but that he must learn Gaelic. It so happened that a relative of the ingenious Macpherson had once been in Virginia, and to him accordingly Mr. Jefferson wrote post-haste a letter full of enthusiasm for the great literary discovery. “Merely for the pleasure of reading his works I am become desirous of learning the language in which he sung, and of possessing the songs in their original form.” Would Mr. Charles Macpherson look into the matter and see what could be done about forwarding a Gaelic grammar and dictionary, and having a manuscript copy made of the Gaelic originals? Money was no object. “The glow of one warm thought,” he says finely, was worth any outlay of money and trouble. One is reminded again of the largeness and lucidity of Goethe, himself a devoted student of natural science, who yet could perceive that “a teacher who can arouse a feeling for one single good action, for one single good poem, accomplishes more than he who fills our memory with rows on rows of natural objects, classified with name and form.” Charles Macpherson replied with an agreeable and somewhat canny letter. There was very little literature that could be sent over: some odds and ends of religious matter, possibly, but no grammar or dictionary. Gaelic was a spoken tongue, its uses passing from mouth to mouth; it would be quite difficult for a foreigner—and so forth. Mr. Jefferson broke off his quest after Gaelic. The Revolution interrupted it in the first instance, and no doubt also his ardour was dampened by the general suspicion that his favourite poems were a literary hoax. Yet his pleasure in Ossian always stood steadfast. “If not ancient,” he wrote stoutly to Lafayette in 1823, “it is equal to the best morsels of antiquity.” The practical function of poetry is, after all, as Hesiod said, to furnish “a release from sorrows and a truce from cares.” If a poem did that, what matter whether it were written by this hand or by that?
In his views of literature generally, Mr. Jefferson’s sense of beauty and his sense of practicality operated in good balance. The exception was in English poetry; there his sense of beauty did not quite hold its ground, and in consequence, his repertoire of favourite English poems is on the whole prosaic and dissatisfying, and the few ventures which he made in original English verse are much more so. He copied lyrics occasionally all his life. In the case of those set to music, his choice was of course largely affected by the setting; but the others reflect no very sound or discriminating poetic taste. Yet in 1813 he wrote John Adams a long criticism on the unpoetic quality of Tate and Brady’s metrical translation of the Psalms. Even the best English version, which he thinks to be that of “the Octagonian dissenters of Liverpool,” is bad, “not a ray of poetical genius having been employed on them.” In themselves, these strictures imply no great amount of discernment—almost any one would make them—but in their context, probably, they have some significance. They are an obiter dictum on some p
raise which Adams had bestowed on the hymn of Cleanthes to Jupiter. Mr. Jefferson admitted the high poetic quality of this hymn, but thought the Psalmist should have “the palm over all the hymnists of every language and of every time,” and that this superiority was manifest even when apprehended through the medium of a humdrum and jogtrotting translation.
Literary style interested him, but purism did not. “I readily sacrifice the niceties of syntax to euphony and strength,” he told Edward Everett. Thus he was as far from the utilitarian or wheelbarrow theory of written style as he was from purism. He was enough of a musician to know that one should write for the ear as well as for the eye. “Fill up all the ellipses and syllepses of Tacitus, Sallust, Livy, etc., and the elegance and force of their sententious brevity are extinguished.” He had a strong sense of the power of words, and felt that much of this power lay in precision. “I am not scrupulous about words when they are once explained.” Hence he was always “a friend to the encouragement of a judicious neology ; a language can not be too rich.” While new words should be allowed to make their way freely, there should be no interference with one’s reverent regard for the stupendous resources of the English language, and for the immeasurable privilege one has in possessing a native use of them. “It is much to be wished,” he wrote in the last year of his life, “that the publication of the present county dialects of England should go on. It will restore to us our language in all its shades of variation. It will incorporate into the present one all the riches of our ancient dialects; and what a store this will be may be seen by running the eye over the county glossaries, and observing the words we have lost by abandonment and disuse, which in sound and sense are inferior to nothing we have retained.”
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