The Eve Of The Revolution, A Chronicle Of The Breach With England

by Carl Becker




PREFACE

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.