American Heroes (33 page)

Miller's distinction lay in an extraordinary ability to discover order where others saw chaos, and to express his deepest insights without uttering them, by tracing unsuspected patterns in the raw materials of the past. Only one who has studied the raw materials for himself can fully appreciate the beauty of those patterns in
The New England Mind
or how faithfully they encompass the materials. No one but Miller, in fact, has in our time known so well the materials of New England history during the period that he covered. But a few of us have studied some of them. To do so and then to read or reread Miller is to be stunned not only by his familiarity with the sources but by the way he has put into a paragraph interpretations and observations that one might expect to find as the conclusion of a whole monograph. And good monographs were written, are being written, and doubtless will be written to document in detail what Miller has already said and could himself have documented.

How, then, are we to assess his achievement? It is, of course, true that he has had a powerful influence of the kind that other great historians have had. He has changed in many ways the standard picture of early New England. Because of him we know now that the founders of Massachusetts were non-separating Congregationalists, that the exodus to Connecticut was not the result of a democratic impulse, that the antinomian controversy involved a dispute between John Cotton and other ministers in which Cotton was defeated and obliged to accept the doctrine of preparation, that New England theologians employed the logical system of Peter Ramus, that they made the covenant of grace the central doctrine of their system, and that Jonathan Edwards repudiated that doctrine. These and a great many other such propositions, which have found or will eventually find their way into the standard textbooks, can be counted as a heritage of Miller's work.

But to make such a statement is to reduce the man to the terms by which we measure other historians. One feels a similar incongruity in observing, what is true, that because of him a great many other scholars are now studying Puritanism. Some of these are his students, and it is more than a personal observation that Perry Miller was a great teacher. You could not be in his presence without feeling that he cared about you and your ideas. Indeed, he always saw so much more in your ideas than you had seen yourself that you were compelled to stretch your imagination and to reach beyond yourself. Something of this impetus was communicated by his writings to persons who never saw him. He was a man thinking, and the phenomenon is so rare that it cannot fail to affect everyone who sees it or hears of it. To be sure, it excited envy, mistrust, and dislike as well as imitation. People almost seemed to hope that he was drinking himself to stupefaction, so that his relentless creativity could not continue to chide. And when at last he was gone, one sensed a subdued relief at the funeral service. But there is no escape from his example. Such men do not live without effect.

Yet one remains in the end with the sense that his influence was incommensurate with his genius. Charles Beard and Frederick Jackson Turner, whose intellectual achievements were inferior to Miller's, had at least as great an influence on the study of history as Miller had or is likely to have. He was, in fact, not a leader of thought, because at the level he worked, thought will not bear leading. He raised a standard to which no one could rally. His true achievement lay not in altering the general picture of early New England, or in the encouragement he gave his students, or even in the example he set to men who would think. His achievement was a series of books the like of which had not been seen before, the record of a mind that craved reality and reached for it through history, as others have reached through religion or philosophy. Only when historians become philosophers and philosophers historians will the full significance of his achievement be understood.

—1964