Always his thoughts were turning to the soil.There was poetry in him.It was said of Napoleon that the one approach to poetry in all his writings is the phrase: "The spring is at last appearing and the leaves are beginning to sprout." Washington, on the other hand, brooded over the mysteries of life.He pictured to himself the serenity of a calm old age and always dared to look death squarely in the face.He was sensitive to human passion and he felt the wonder of nature in all her ways, her bounteous response in growth to the skill of man, the delight of improving the earth in contrast with the vain glory gained by ravaging it in war.His most striking characteristics were energy and decision united often with strong likes and dislikes.His clever secretary, Alexander Hamilton, found, as he said, that his chief was not remarkable for good temper and resigned his post because of an impatient rebuke.When a young man serving in the army of Virginia, Washington had many a tussle with the obstinate Scottish Governor, Dinwiddie, who thought his vehemence unmannerly and ungrateful.Gilbert Stuart, who painted several of his portraits, said that his features showed strong passions and that, had he not learned self-restraint, his temper would have been savage.This discipline he acquired.The task was not easy, but in time he was able to say with truth, "I have no resentments," and his self-control became so perfect as to be almost uncanny.
The assumption that Washington fought against an England grown decadent is not justified.To admit this would be to make his task seem lighter than it really was.No doubt many of the rich aristocracy spent idle days of pleasure-seeking with the comfortable conviction that they could discharge their duties to society by merely existing, since their luxury made work and the more they indulged themselves the more happy and profitable employment would their many dependents enjoy.The eighteenth century was, however, a wonderful epoch in England.Agriculture became a new thing under the leadership of great landowners like Lord Townshend and Coke of Norfolk.Already was abroad in society a divine discontent at existing abuses.It brought Warren Hastings to trial on the charge of plundering India.It attacked slavery, the cruelty of the criminal law, which sent children to execution for the theft of a few pennies, the brutality of the prisons, the torpid indifference of the church to the needs of the masses.New inventions were beginning the age of machinery.
The reform of Parliament, votes for the toiling masses, and a thousand other improvements were being urged.It was a vigorous, rich, and arrogant England which Washington confronted.
It is sometimes said of Washington that he was an English country gentleman.A gentleman he was, but with an experience and training quite unlike that of a gentleman in England.The young heir to an English estate might or might not go to a university.
He could, like the young Charles James Fox, become a scholar, but like Fox, who knew some of the virtues and all the supposed gentlemanly vices, he might dissipate his energies in hunting, gambling, and cockfighting.He would almost certainly make the grand tour of Europe, and, if he had little Latin and less Greek, he was pretty certain to have some familiarity with Paris and a smattering of French.The eighteenth century was a period of magnificent living in England.The great landowner, then, as now, the magnate of his neighborhood, was likely to rear, if he did not inherit, one of those vast palaces which are today burdens so costly to the heirs of their builders.At the beginning of the century the nation to honor Marlborough for his victories could think of nothing better than to give him half a million pounds to build a palace.Even with the colossal wealth produced by modern industry we should be staggered at a residence costing millions of dollars.Yet the Duke of Devonshire rivaled at Chatsworth, and Lord Leicester at Holkham, Marlborough's building at Blenheim, and many other costly palaces were erected during the following half century.Their owners sometimes built in order to surpass a neighbor in grandeur, and to this day great estates are encumbered by the debts thus incurred in vain show.The heir to such a property was reared in a pomp and luxury undreamed of by the frugal young planter of Virginia.Of working for a livelihood, in the sense in which Washington knew it, the young Englishman of great estate would never dream.
The Atlantic is a broad sea and even in our own day, when instant messages flash across it and man himself can fly from shore to shore in less than a score of hours, it is not easy for those on one strand to understand the thought of those on the other.Every community evolves its own spirit not easily to be apprehended by the onlooker.The state of society in America was vitally different from that in England.The plain living of Virginia was in sharp contrast with the magnificence and ease of England.It is true that we hear of plate and elaborate furniture, of servants in livery, and much drinking of Port and Madeira, among the Virginians: They had good horses.Driving, as often they did, with six in a carriage, they seemed to keep up regal style.
