CHAPTER XII

ROOSEVELT AND TREVELYAN

No part of Theodore Roosevelt's voluminous correspondence is more interesting than that which he conducted with the literary men and women of his time. In this the catholic intellectual side of the man, his eager and all-embracing joy in the things of the mind, is revealed. An insatiable reader of books, he rejoiced greatly in the society of the writers of them. Whenever a book appeared that pleased him, the author, if within hailing distance, was certain to receive a letter of cordial appreciation and an urgent invitation to the White House or Oyster Bay in order that personal acquaintance might be made. While he was President there was scarcely a writer of even moderate fame with whom he had not established friendly relations. Many a young American author was both enchanted and amazed at discovering the minute knowledge which Roosevelt had of his works, and the genuine personal interest he took in him and in them.

To his intimate friends it seemed, literally, that he read every book that was published the day after it appeared, so rare was it that one could be named to him which he had not read. His usual reply was that he had not only read that particular one but several others on the same subject or by the same author. "Were you ever able to mention a book to the President that he had not read?” asked a lady of her neighbor at a dinner in the White House during the Roosevelt administration. When the reply was in the negative, the lady continued: "I have dined here many times and talked much with him, and I have never discovered a book that was unknown to him. On one occasion I thought I had found one which he surely could not have seen. It

was a rare book by an Icelandic author, and I came here confident that I should at last be able to tell the President something that he did not know. Luckily, I found myself seated next to him at table and when what seemed to be the opportune moment came, I said: 'Mr. President, are you interested in Icelandic literature?' With a bounce in his chair he turned an eager countenance upon me and said: 'Am I not!' and then proceeded to tell me not only all about my one lonely Icelandic book but dozens of others that I had never heard of.'

He did not merely read books-he absorbed them and made their contents a part of his knowledge for all time, ready for instant use at a moment's notice. A book on a particular subject aroused thoughts of his own along the same lines, and when he wrote a letter of praise to the author the chances were that he gave him at the same time ideas and suggestions more or less novel to him, for the wide range of his reading had left few fields of knowledge untouched.

During the years of his presidency and those which followed he was in regular correspondence with the leaders in literary and intellectual life both in this country and in Europe. A bulky volume could be made of his correspondence with English writers alone. Among these the one with whom letters were most frequently exchanged, and during the longest period, was the Right Honorable Sir George Otto Trevelyan, Baronet, O. M., the English statesman and writer of many books, including "The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay,' 'The Early History of Charles James Fox,' and 'The History of the American Revolution.' It was while Trevelyan was engaged in the preparation of the last-named work that the correspondence became intimate.

In this series of letters, covering a period of nearly twenty years, Roosevelt's characteristics as a letter-writer are conspicuously displayed, because in Trevelyan he had a correspondent who was peculiarly responsive to his own intellectual tastes and knowledge. "Thurlow is a fine fel

low," says Doctor Johnson. "He fairly puts his mind to yours." Roosevelt might have said the same of Trevelyan. Each put his mind to the other's, and the result was a correspondence of rare interest and value. Trevelyan himself said of it in a letter to me under date of April 23, 1919, gladly granting me permission to quote from his letters:

"My vocation was only to return the balls struck over the net by the hand of a master! I deliberately think that better letters of that class were never written. Take for instance that one shortly before his Presidential contest, when he says that he would rather be a real President for three years and a half than a figurehead for seven years and a half. What wisdom is in this letter, and what courage! If there is a finer and truer description of a statesman's creed extant in the world, I do not know it."

The passage referred to was in a letter which Roosevelt wrote to Trevelyan on May 28, 1904, from which I shall quote again presently: "I certainly would not be willing to hold the Presidency at the cost of failing to do the things which make the real reason why I care to hold it at all. I had much rather be a real President for three years and a half than a figurehead for seven years and a half. I think I can truthfully say that I now have to my credit a sum of substantial achievement-and the rest must take care of itself.”

The correspondence began while Roosevelt was Governor of New York, and I am much indebted to Sir George for an account of its beginning and the original of the first letter which Roosevelt wrote to him. He had sent to the Governor a copy of the first part of 'The American Revolution,' and on January 16, 1899, Roosevelt wrote:

My dear Sir George:

I have just received a copy of 'The American Revolution,' for which pray accept my sincere thanks. I am rather busy now, but as I have never failed hitherto to read

everything you have written, I doubt if more than a day or two passes before I have gone through your whole book. You are one of the few blessed exceptions to the rule that the readable historian is not truthful. I think that in point of combining literary interest with historic accuracy you must come near satisfying even Mr. Frederick Harrison!

At the bottom of the letter there appears this memorandum:

"This is the hero! I suppose he will some day be President. I sent the book to him as he was so kind to Charles."

Writing to me in explanation of this, on June 6, 1919, Sir George says: "At the foot of the 1899 letter there is a curious contemporary pencil note in my handwriting with a prophecy that came off. By 'the hero' I suppose I referred to his conduct in the Spanish war."

Roosevelt's enjoyment and approval of Trevelyan's 'History of the American Revolution' was warmly expressed in a letter that he wrote to him on December 12, 1903, after he had finished reading the second part. "I feel," he said, “that it is far and away the best account of the Revolution written by any one. For interest, for delightful humor, for absolute fairmindedness, for exactness of narrative, for profound insight (and for the English!)— why, my dear Sir, no other book on the Revolution so much as approaches it. There are two or three points you raise which I should like to discuss with you, but they are not important."

Writing again to Trevelyan, on January 23, 1904, he attributed to Sir George a published article entitled 'Clio' which had been written by his youngest son, George Macaulay Trevelyan, himself an author of distinction. In this letter Roosevelt gave expression with much feeling and spirit to his views on the proper writing of history, with lively comments upon pedantic writers of it:

"In a very small way I have been waging war with their kind (pedants) on this side of the water for a number

of years. We have a preposterous little historical organization which, when I was just out of Harvard and very ignorant, I joined. Fortunately I had enough good sense, or obstinacy, or something, to retain a subconscious belief that inasmuch as books were meant to be read, good books ought to be interesting, and the best books capable in addition of giving one a lift upward in some direction. After a while it dawned on me that all of the conscientious, industrious, painstaking little pedants, who would have been useful people in a rather small way if they had understood their own limitations, had become because of their conceit distinctly noxious. They solemnly believed that if there were only enough of them, and that if they only collected enough facts of all kinds and sorts, there would cease to be any need hereafter for great writers, great thinkers. They looked for instance at a conglomerate narrative history of America-a book which is either literature or science in the sense in which a second-rate cyclopedia is literature and science-as showing an 'advance' upon Francis ParkmanHeaven save the mark! Each of them was a good enough day laborer, trundling his barrowful of bricks and worthy of his hire; so long as they saw themselves as they were they were worthy of all respect; but when they imagined that by their activity they rendered the work of an architect unnecessary, they became both absurd and mischievous.

"Unfortunately with us it is these small men who do most of the historic teaching in the colleges. They have done much real harm in preventing the development of students who might have a large grasp of what history should really be. They represent what is in itself the excellent revolt against superficiality and lack of research, but they have grown into the opposite and equally noxious belief that research is all in all, that accumulation of facts is everything, and that the ideal history of the future will consist not even of the work of one huge pedant but of a multitude of articles by a multitude of small pedants. They are honestly unconscious that all they are doing is to gather