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In this brief sketch I have chiefly endeavored to convey
to the reader, not a record of what men did, but a sense of how they thought
and felt about what they did. To give the quality and texture of the state of
mind and feeling of an individual or class, to create for the reader the
illusion (not DELUSION, O able Critic!) of the intellectual atmosphere of past
times, I have as a matter of course introduced many quotations; but I have also
ventured to resort frequently to the literary device (this, I know, gives the
whole thing away) of telling the story by means of a rather free paraphrase of
what some imagined spectator or participant might have thought or said about
the matter in hand. If the critic says that the product of such methods is not
history, I am willing to call it by any name that is better; the point of
greatest relevance being the truth and effectiveness of the illusion aimed
at--the extent to which it reproduces the quality of the thought and feeling of
those days, the extent to which it enables the reader to enter into such states
of mind and feeling. The truth of such history (or whatever the critic wishes
to call it) cannot of course be determined by a mere verification of
references.
To one of my colleagues, who has read the entire
manuscript, I am under obligations for many suggestions and corrections in
matters of detail; and I would gladly mention his name if it could be supposed
that an historian of established reputation would wish to be associated, even
in any slight way, with an enterprise of questionable orthodoxy.
Carl Becker,
Ithaca, New York, January
6, 1918.
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