One of our well-known historical scholars and most learned antiquarians, not long ago, in an essay vindicating the “traditional Washington,” treated with scorn the idea of a “new Washington” being discovered.  In one sense this is quite right, in another totally wrong.  There can be no new Washington discovered, because there never was but one.  But the real man has been so overlaid with myths and traditions, and so distorted by misleading criticisms, that, as has already been suggested, he has been wellnigh lost.  We have the religious or statuesque myth, we have the Weems myth, and the ludicrous myth of the writer of paragraphs.  We have the stately hero of Sparks, and Everett, and Marshall, and Irving, with all his great deeds as general and president duly recorded and set down in polished and eloquent sentences; and we know him to be very great and wise and pure, and, be it said with bated breath, very dry and cold.  We are also familiar with the common-place man who so wonderfully illustrated the power of character as set forth by various persons, either from love of novelty or because the great chief seemed to get in the way of their own heroes.

If this is all, then the career of Washington and his towering fame present a problem of which the world has never seen the like.  But this cannot be all:  there must be more behind.  Every one knows the famous Stuart portrait of Washington.  The last effort of the artist’s cunning is there employed to paint his great subject for posterity.  How serene and beautiful it is!  It is a noble picture for future ages to look upon.  Still it is not all.  There is in the dining-room of Memorial Hall at Cambridge another portrait, painted by Savage.  It is cold and dry, hard enough to serve for the signboard of an inn, and able, one would think, to withstand all weathers.  Yet this picture has something which Stuart left out.  There is a rugged strength in the face which gives us pause, there is a massiveness in the jaw, telling of an iron grip and a relentless will, which has infinite meaning.

  “Here’s John the Smith’s rough-hammered head.  Great eye,
  Gross jaw, and griped lips do what granite can
  To give you the crown-grasper.  What a man!”

In death as in life, there is something about Washington, call it greatness, dignity, majesty, what you will, which seems to hold men aloof and keep them from knowing him.  In truth he was a most difficult man to know.  Carlyle, crying out through hundreds of pages and myriads of words for the “silent man,” passed by with a sneer the most absolutely silent great man that history can show.  Washington’s letters and speeches and messages fill many volumes, but they are all on business.  They are profoundly silent as to the writer himself.  From this Carlyle concluded apparently that there was nothing to tell,—­a very shallow conclusion if it was the one he really reached.  Such an idea was certainly far, very far, from the truth.