must have been the high spots in Washington's life. How did they seem to him? Well, there is no emphasis or proportioning in the diaries to suggest that Washington himself regarded his soldiership and statesmanship as living and the rest of life as débris and dross. On the contrary, the Revolution and the two Presidential terms dwindle and sink in this long record—sink into troublesome but by no means overwhelming incidents in the half century. So far as the record goes, the planting of a consignment of Chinese flower seeds in his garden made a vastly greater impression upon him than meeting Benjamin Franklin in Philadelphia; and I am certain that he took more pleasure in making inventories of his stock, servants and tools in preparation for the spring planting than he did in making inventories of his regiments in preparation for the spring fighting. It is only when his public life is set in his private that one can see it as he saw it.
All that one knows about Washington gets a new value when one comes at it faithfully in its place amid the long routine of his country life. The first obvious reward of reading straight through the diaries is that one receives an almost oppressive sense of lapsing time, filled with the ordinary "inanities" of existence—so important an element in "artistic illusion." One gets the sense of streaming time not merely or mainly in the crowded years of war and statecraft but most richly and sumptuously in the long, quiet, orderly flow of the years on the Mount Vernon estate in the '60s and the early '70s, when one follows the crops and the weather, the first haul of shad in the river, the breeding stock and the litters of puppies, the blossoms in orchard and garden, the harvesting of hay and
