The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce (Volume 9); Tangential Views (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: GEORGE THE MADE-OVER r tf HE English have a distinctly higher I and better opinion of Washington fl than is held in this country. Washington, if he could have a choice in the matter, would indubitably prefer his position in the minds of educated Englishmen to the one that he holds in the hearts of his countrymen?not the one that he is said to hold. The superior validity of the English view is due to the better view-point. It is remote, as the American will be when several more generations shall have passed and Americans are devoid (as Englishmen are devoid now) of passions and prejudices engendered in the heat of our Revolution. We should remember that it was not to the English a revolution, but a small and distant squabble, which cut no great figure in the larger affairs in which they were engaged; and the very memory of it was nearly effaced in that of the next generation by the stupendous events of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars. To ears filled with the thunders of Waterloo, the crepitating echoes of the spat at Bunker Hill were inaudible. No benign personage in the calendar of secular saints is really less loved than Washington. The romancing historians and biographers have adorned him with a thousand impossible virtues, naturally, and in so dehumanizing him have set him beyond and above the longest reach of human sympathies. His character, as it pleased them to create it, is like nothing that we know about and care for. He is a monster of goodness and wisdom, with about as much of light and fire as the snow Adam of the small boy playing at creation on the campus of a public school. The Washington-making Frankensteins have done their work so badly that their creature is an insupportable bore, diffusing an infectious dejection. Try to fancy an histor...