DATE: Sunday, April 27, 1997                TAG: 9704170569

SECTION: COMMENTARY              PAGE: J2   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Book Review

SOURCE: BY JAMES E. PERSON JR. 

                                            LENGTH:   59 lines

MADISON'S ``ADVICE'' GETS RIGHT TO THE POINT

JAMES MADISON'S ``ADVICE TO MY COUNTRY''

EDITED BY DAVID B. MATTERN

University Press of Virginia. 119 pp. $17.95.

Wherever people come together to discuss serious matters, it seems there is always one person of few words and quiet wisdom who can be depended upon to sort through the noise and the side-issues to articulate the nub of each subject. In the formative history of American political thought, James Madison was one such figure.

Madison served on the political stage for some 40 years. Of all his many accomplishments, he is perhaps best known - aside from being the nation's fourth president - for helping to write and secure the ratification of the Constitution. Other than that singular accomplishment, he wrote much, but his words are not extensively known today except by the specialist.

James Madison's ``Advice to My Country,'' selected by David B. Mattern, University of Virginia associate professor and associate editor of Madison's papers, is therefore a most worthwhile volume, bringing the great Virginian's thoughts to light for the modern reader. It is a slim ``commonplace book,'' containing excerpts from the statesman's speeches, letters, essays and autobiography on a wide variety of subjects. Readers will discover here paragraph-length sketches revealing Madison's thoughts on African Americans, the Bill of Rights, death, drugs and alcohol, slavery, religion, women and so on: some 140 topics in all.

There is but one potential drawback to compiling a volume of this sort, and that is that quotations are presented unannotated and out of context, with only brief headings (``Justice,'' ``Freedom of Speech,'' etc.) to guide the reader. Thus there exists the very real opportunity to misunderstand where Madison stood and to co-opt his ideas to fit one's own preconceptions of his intent, whether in regard to his views on women, gun ownership, the relation between church and state, or other issues.

This is especially true because Madison's prose style, unlike that of his friend Thomas Jefferson, could not often be described as pithy. It's not that he is obscure, but rather that he is very exact and very much a man of his era. At times the excerpts in James Madison's ``Advice to My Country'' require slow rereading to understand their meaning.

But at other times, Madison is as clear as crystal. Writing two days after Jefferson's death, he composed a short, eloquent tribute to his old friend, which is a model of clarity and nobility of spirit: ``He lives and will live in the memory and gratitude of the wise and good, as a luminary of science, as a votary of liberty, as a model of patriotism, and as a benefactor of human kind. In these characters, I have known him, and not less in the virtues and charms of social life, for a period of 50 years, during which there was not an interruption of diminuations of mutual confidence and cordial friendship, for a single moment in a single instance. What I feel therefore now, need not, I should say, cannot, be expressed.'' MEMO: James E. Person Jr., a native of Virginia who now lives in

Michigan, is the editor of ``The Unbought Grace of Life: Essays in Honor

of Russell Kirk.''

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