published. These four fine volumes, therefore, very greatly augment the dimensions of Washington as a diarist. They will greatly augment our consciousness of the real nature of his personality and his career if we have the wit and the imagination and the industry to use them—and only so.
Let us be plain about this. There is a little batch of diaries, perhaps half a dozen, which are of vivid interest throughout—to anybody. But for hundreds of pages an unprepared and incurious reader will regard Washington as the "dumbest" diarist who ever employed the line-a-day method. There is nothing which Greville would have called a "character" in all the four volumes, and upon all the famous men that he met in half a century he utters only with the utmost rarity a two-line judgment. In general, neither births nor deaths nor weddings nor funerals nor good fortune nor calamity nor pestilence nor hurricane betrays him into the recording of the faintest emotion of elation or sorrow or hope or regret. He almost never attempts a picture or reports a conversation. Of himself as a dramatic object of consciousness he seems to have been aware on only two or three occasions in the course of his life. There is virtually no indication that he ever felt the slightest curiosity regarding the "subjective" condition of any other being. He seems to have been absolutely uninitiated into the pleasure of associating ideas. And these characteristics make great tracts of the record—months and years of it—as dry as chopped straw, as dry as Aristotle or Euclid, as dry as the fossil teeth of a dinosaur.
Nevertheless the only way to give this man a chance to reconstitute for us his character and career is to take a clear week and plow straight through the
