Ever Optimistic

By Melvin Maddocks

THE SAGE OF MONTICELLO by Dumas Malone Little, Brown; 551 pages; $19.95

Old age is an optimist's severest test of character. Thomas Jefferson, who made the "pursuit of happiness" part of the American way of life, kept the faith until he died, 50 years to the day after the Declaration of Independence.

Jefferson was nearly 66 when he stepped down from the presidency--the point at which Dumas Malone begins this sixth and final volume of his awesomely thorough biography, Jefferson and His Time. But he remained a man of uncommon vigor.

Life at Monticello was a case of hyperactive retirement. Jefferson always argued that no occupation was "so delightful to me as the culture of the earth." Now he had the chance to prove it, every morning after breakfast. Dinner, served at 4, constituted the social hour. The patriot gathered his clan about him: his daughter Martha, who ran the household, plus a varying assortment of twelve grandchildren, as well as random aunts, sons-in-law and omnipresent house guests.

In the evening Jefferson read. "I can not live without books," he confessed. He preferred Greek and Latin classics in the original. He cherished his Homer, his Thucydides, his Tacitus, though he was too much of a pragmatist to abide Plato's "foggy mind."

It was Jefferson's ultimate optimism to believe he could turn the whole world into readers. If human beings were not yet guided by reason, it was because they had not read enough books. So 6,487 volumes from his own library ended up forming the nucleus of the Library of Congress, and he devoted his final energies to founding what would become the University of Virginia.

Jefferson's last years were by no means free from care. Like Job, he suffered from boils. A beloved granddaughter was married to an alcoholic. As friends and relatives died, the old survivor came to feel, he said, like a tree without branches. He was plagued by financial worries. But nothing could cramp his generous heart. When things were at their worst, he was likeliest to buy an elegant $135 watch for one granddaughter, a pianoforte for another.

To the end, he believed that one more bank loan, one more harvest, would turn his affairs around. He was equally optimistic about the rest of the world. Nothing would go far wrong for America if it kept government small and stopped printing so much paper money.

As for Europe, there might be more revolutions, more bloodshed, but most of the Continent, he promised John Adams, would wind up as American-style democracies, upon whose "glorious achieve ments" the two old Presidents would look down from heaven.

"He underestimated the evil in unregenerate man," Malone concludes. But as a remarkably cheerful old man, Malone, himself now 89, cannot condemn Jefferson for so noble, so American a fault. --Melvin Maddocks

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