Custis. And so Parson Weems in the odor of parsonage sanctity excogitated and devised his George Washington, a hero whom he and a piety-loving posterity could understand; Washington, the pure-lipped model of all Sabbath school virtues, the boy who could not tell a lie, the friend of the widow and fatherless (didn't he, for example, marry a widow? with $100,000 to be sure), the affectionate son and brother, the devoted farmer, the mirror of industry and frugality. Weems's Washington was an incredible prig to whom school children for a hundred years have been taught to perform lip-service and genudections.
Since the time, say, of P. L. Ford's "The True George Washington," 1896, there has been accumulating a protest against the heroic demi-god of the classical painters, on the one hand, and the perfect prig of the Weemsian tradition, on the other.
Contemporary biography has learned the A B C's of the art. It is for putting back into the popular conception of the man the "human" traits which the earlier undertakers and sextons of his fame so carefully expunged, including the pockmarks which he got when he accompanied his consumptive brother to the Barbados, where he feasted pretty gaily with the gentlemen of the Beefsteak and Tripe Club and observed that the ladies generally were "very agreeable but by ill custom or . . . affect the Negro style . . . "
Some words are deleted in the diary at that point. Presumably they would have helped the sense and the interest of the passage. But it was a fixed rule with old-school editors to omit everything specially lively. Such a rule obviously bears hard on a diarist like our Father George, who only verged on liveliness half a dozen times in a half century.
