AMERICAN HISTORIANS
As a Harvard undergraduate I roomed for a time in Hollis 8, a room
occupied in turn by William H. Prescott and James Schouler,
and perhaps I may attribute to some contagion caught as a
_transmittendum_ in that apartment, an itch for writing history
which has brought some trouble to me and to the rather limited circle
of readers whom I have reached. I remember debating, as a boy, whether
the more desirable fame fell to the hero in a conflict or to the
scribe who told the story. Whose place would one rather have? That of
Timoleon and Nicias or of Plutarch and Thucydides their celebrants?
But the celebrants, no doubt, seemed to their contemporaries very
insignificant figures compared to the champions whose fame they
perpetuated. The historians of America are a goodly company, scarcely
less worthy than the champions whose deeds they have chronicled. With
most men who, during the last seventy-five years, have written history
in America, I have had contact, sometimes a mere glimpse, sometimes
intimacy. Washington Irving and Prescott I never saw, though as to the
latter I have just been making him responsible to some extent for my
own little proclivity, Parkman, I only saw sitting with his handsome
Grecian face relieved against a dignified background as he sat on the
stage among the Corporation of Harvard University. Motley I have
only seen as he stood with iron-grey curls over a ruddy, strenuous
countenance topping a figure of vigorous symmetry as he spoke with
animation at a scholars' dinner. But George Bancroft, Justin Winsor,
and John Fiske I knew well, the last being in particular one of my
best friends. I could tell stories too, of the living lights, but am
concerned here with the ghosts and not with men still red-blooded.
I first saw George Bancroft when he was Minister at Berlin. He had
read a little book of mine, The Color Guard, my diary as a Corporal of
the Nineteenth Army Corps, scribbled off on my cap-top, my gun-stock,
or indeed my shoe-sole, or whatever desk I could extemporise as we
marched and fought. That book gave me some claim to his notice, but a
better claim was that his wife was Elizabeth Davis, whom more than
a hundred years ago my grandfather of the ancient First Parish in
Plymouth had baptised and who as a girl had been my mother's playmate
in gardens near Plymouth Rock. I did not presume upon such credentials
as these to obtrude myself, and was pleasantly surprised one day by
a note inviting me to the Embassy. It was a retired house near the
Thiergarten. I found Mr. Bancroft embarrassed with duties which in
those days gave trouble. German emigrants returning after prosperous
years to the Fatherland were often pounced upon, the validity of their
American citizenship denied, and taxes and military service demanded.
It was tough work to straighten out such knots and the Minister was
in the midst of such a tangle. But his high, broad forehead smoothed
presently, and his grey eyes grew genial, while the vivacious features
spoke with the very cordial impulse with which he greeted one who
had heard the bullets of the Civil War whistle and was the son of his
wife's old friend. Another tie was that his father, Dr. Aaron Bancroft
of Worcester, and my grandfather, had stood shoulder to shoulder
in the controversy of a century ago which rent apart New England
Congregationalism. Presently we sat down to lunch, a party of three,
for the board was graced by the presence of Mrs. Bancroft, a woman
of fine accomplishments polished through contact with high society in
many lands, and a gifted talker. Many readers have found her published
letters charming. The talk was largely of the Civil War and Bancroft's
words were in the best sense patriotic. During and before that period
his course had been much disapproved. He had been Collector of Boston
under Democratic auspices and had served under Polk as Secretary
of the Navy, where he laid the country lastingly under debt by
establishing the Naval Academy at Annapolis. I do not approve or
condemn, but I felt him wisely and warmly patriotic, deeply concerned
that the outcome of our long national agony should be worthy of the
sacrifice. The breath of a pleasant spring day pervaded the elegant
apartment while the birds sang in the tall trees stretching out
toward the forest of the Thiergarten. I especially associate with the
Bancrofts their beautiful outdoor environment. Another day I drove
with the Minister, our companions in the carriage being the wife and
the daughter of Ernst Curtius, to visit the rose gardens about Berlin.
I have met few men readier or more agreeable in conversation. With a
pleasant smile and intonation he touched gracefully on this and that,
sometimes in reminiscence. I remember in particular a vivid setting
forth of an interview with Goethe which he had enjoyed as a boy fifty
years before. Sometimes his talk was of poetry in general and I was
much struck with his frequent happy application of quotations to the
little events of the drive and phases of feeling that came up as the
day went on. The sun set gloriously, "_So stirbt ein Held_," said
Bancroft, as he burst with feeling into the beautiful lyric of which
these words are a line. The best German poetry seemed to be at his
tongue's end and he recited it with sympathy and accuracy which called
out much admiration from the cultivated German ladies with whom we
were driving. Most interesting of all was Bancroft's evident passion
for roses. The gardeners, as we stopped, were plainly surprised at his
knowledge of their varieties and the best methods of cultivation.
He was so well versed in the lore of the rose and so devoted to its
cultivation one might well have thought it his horse and not his
hobby. He possessed at Newport a rose garden far famed for the number
of its varieties and the perfection of the flowers, and it was an
interesting sight at Washington to see Bancroft, even when nearing
ninety, busy in his garden in H Street, one attendant shielding his
light figure with a sun umbrella, while another held at hand, hoe,
shears, and twine, the implements to train and cull. Is there a subtle
connection between roses and history? Parkman wrote an elaborate book
upon rose culture which I believe is still of authority, and John
Fiske had a conservatory opening out of his library and the rose of
all flowers was the one he prized. Here is a neat turn of McMaster.
At a dinner given in his honour a big bunch of American Beauties was
opposite to him as he sat. It fell to me to make a welcoming speech.
Catching at the occasion, I suggested a connection between roses and
history and referred to McMaster close behind his American Beauties as
an instance in point, at the same time expressing with earnestness my
strong admiration of that good writer's work. McMaster rose, his face
glowing in response to my emphatic compliment. His speech consisted of
only one sentence, "I have one bond with the rose, I blush."
I owe many favours to Bancroft; the greatest perhaps that he allowed
me to consult to my heart's content the papers of Samuel Adams, a
priceless collection which he possessed. For this he gave me _carte
blanche_ to use his library in Washington, though he himself
was absent, a favour which he said he had never accorded to an
investigator before. It was an inspiring place for a student, the
shelves burdened with treasures in manuscript as well as print. The
most interesting portrait of Bancroft presents him as a nonagenarian,
against this impressive background, at work to the last. The critics
of our day minimise Bancroft and his school. History in that time
walked in garments quite too flowing, it is said, and with an
overdisplay of the Horatian purple patch. Our grandsons may feel that
the history of our time walks in garments too sad-coloured and scant.
Research and accuracy are, of course, primary requisites in this
field, but there should be some employment of the picturesque. The
world was beautiful in the old days and human life was vivid. Ought
we to deny to all this a warm and graphic setting forth? If we do we
shall do it to our cost. Is it the proper attitude of the historian
simply to write, without thought of anything so irrelevant as a
reader? Bancroft was a pioneer, breaking the way ponderously perhaps,
but he delved faithfully. If the orotund rolls too sonorously in his
periods it was an excess in which his age upheld him. He was a good
path-breaker and ought not to be lightly esteemed by those who now go
to and fro with ease through the roads he opened.
My first touch with Justin Winsor was in my Freshman year at
Cambridge. We both had rooms under the roof of an uncle of mine. His
room was afterwards occupied, I believe, by Theodore Roosevelt. It had
been rubbed into me by many snubs that a vast gulf interposed between
the Freshman and upper-class man. I used to pass his door with
reverence, for the story went that, even as a boy, he had written a
history of Duxbury, Massachusetts. Once during his temporary absence,
his door standing open, I dared to step into the apartment and
surveyed with awe the well-filled shelves and scribbled papers; but in
later years when I had won some small title to notice I found him most
kind and approachable. The abundance of the Harvard Library and still
better the rich accumulations in the cells of his own memory he held
for general use. He loaned me once for months at St. Louis a rarely
precious seventeenth-century book, which had belonged to Carlyle, and
whose margins were sometimes filled with Carlyle's notes. He imparted
freely from his own vast information and it was pleasant indeed to
hold a chair for an hour or two in his hospitable home. In our last
interview the prose and the solemn romance of life were strangely
blended. We had just heard the burial service in Appleton Chapel read
by Phillips Brooks over the coffin of James Russell Lowell; then we
rode together on the crowded platform of a street-car to the grave at
Mount Auburn; a rough and jostling company on the platform, and in my
mind a throng of deep and melancholy thoughts. I never saw him again.
In his calling he was a master of research extracting with unlimited
toil the last fragment of evidence from the blindest scribblings of
earlier times. These results, painfully accumulated, he set down
with absolute faithfulness; his bibliographies supplementing his own
contributions and also those of the many writers whom he inspired and
guided in like labours are exhaustive. Rarely is there a wisp to be
gleaned where Winsor has garnered. If he was deficient in the power of
vivid and picturesque presentment, it is only that like all men he had
his limitations.
John Fiske I met soon after his graduation at Cambridge. It is odd
to recall him when one thinks of his later physique, as a youth with
fresh ruddy face, tall and not broad, a rather slender pillar of a
man, corniced with an abundant pompadour of brown hair. He was just
then making fame for himself in the domain of philosophy, contributing
to the New York World papers well charged with revolutionary ideas
which were then causing consternation, so lucidly and attractively
formulated that they interested the most cursory reader. Perhaps John
Fiske ought always to have kept to philosophy. Mrs. Mary Hemenway,
that princess among Ladies Bountiful, told me once the story of his
change. He made to her a frank statement of his situation. He was
conscious of power to do service; he was married, had children, and
was embarrassed with care about their bread, butter, and education
after the usual fashion of the scholar. John Fiske said in those days
the difficult problem of his life was to get enough corn-beef for
dinner to have hash for breakfast the next day. Must he descend to
desk and courtroom work to make a way, or could a way be found
by which he might do his proper task and at the same time be a
bread-winner? "Write American history," said Mrs. Hemenway, "and
I will stand behind you." She was inspired with the idea of making
America in the high sense American and saw in the young genius a good
ally. The chance was embraced and John Fiske after that dipped only
fitfully into philosophical themes, writing, however, _The Destiny
of Man, The Idea of God, Cosmic Roots of Loveland Self-sacrifice_,
and _Life Everlasting_. He gave his main strength, to a thing
worth while, the establishment in America of Anglo-Saxon freedom.
Would he have served the world better had he adhered to profound
speculations? As the patriarch in a household into which have been
born a dozen children and grandchildren, I have had good opportunity
for study. What so feeble as the feebleness of the babe! It depends
upon its mother for its sustenance, almost for its breath and its
heart-beats. The sheltering arms and the loving breast must always
be at hand as the very conditions of its existence. I have watched
in wife and daughters, as what grandsire has not, the persistent
sleepless care which alone kept the baby alive, and noted the sweet
effusion of affection which the need and constant care made to flow
abundantly, nor do the care and consequent outflow of love cease
with babyhood. The child must ever be fed, clothed, trained, and
counselled; and the youth, too, of which the baby is father, must
be watchfully guided till the stature is completed. The rod of
Moses smiting the rock evoked the beneficent water, the unremitting
parent-care striking the indifferent heart evokes the beautiful mother
and father love which grows abroad. We cannot love children well
without loving others, their companions, and at last the great worldly
environment in which they and we all are placed. Hence, from the
extension of infancy, through a period of long years, proceeds at last
from the hearts which are subjected to its influence the noble thing
which we call altruism: love for others than ourselves and the other
high spiritual instincts which are the crown of human nature. The
recognition of the extension of infancy as the source from which in
our slow evolution comes the brightest thing in the universe
belongs to our own time. It is perhaps the climax of our philosophic
speculation. What more feeble than the snowflakes! But accumulated and
compressed they become the glacier which may carapace an entire zone
and determine its configuration into mountain and valley. What more
feeble than the feebleness of the babe! And yet that multiplied by the
million through aeons of time and over continents of space fashions
humanity after the sublime pattern shown on the Mount. If to John
Fiske belongs the credit of first recognising in the scheme of
evolution the significance of this mighty factor, the extension
of infancy (he himself so believed and I do not think it can be
questioned that he was the first to recognise it), what philosophic
thinker has to a greater extent laid the world in debt? This I shall
not further discuss. I am touching in these papers only upon light
and exterior things, nor am I competent to deal with philosophical
problems and controversies. John Fiske gave his strength to the
writing of history, where, too, there are controversies into which I
do not propose to enter. I will only say that I resent the account of
him which makes him to have been a mere populariser whose merit lies
solely or for the most part in the fact that, while appropriating
materials accumulated by others, he had only Goldsmith's faculty
of making them graceful and attractive to the mass of readers. His
philosophical instinct, on the other hand, discovered, as few writers
have done, the subtle links through which in history facts are related
to facts and are weighed wisely, in the protagonists, the motives and
qualities which make them foremost figures. He saw unerringly where
emphasis should be put, what should be salient, what subordinate. Too
many writers, German especially, perhaps, have the fault of "writing
a subject to its dregs," giving to the unimportant undue place. In
Fiske's estimation of facts there is no failure of proper proportion,
the great thing is always in the foreground, the trifle in shadow or
quite unnoticed. To do this accurately is a fine power. He delved more
deeply himself perhaps than many of his critics have been willing to
acknowledge, but I incline to say that his main service to history was
in detecting with unusual insight the subtle relations of cause
and effect, links which other and sometimes very able men failed
adequately to recognise. In a high sense he was indeed a populariser.
He wore upon himself like an ample garment a splendid erudition under
which he moved, however, not at all oppressed or trammelled. Much of
the lore of Greece, Rome, the Orient, and also of modern peoples was
as familiar to him as the contents of the morning papers. With acumen
he selected and his memory retained; the cells of his capacious brain
somehow held it ready for instant use. With good discrimination he
could touch lightly or discourse profoundly as occasion required,
his learning and insight always telling effectively, either at the
breakfast-table of the plain citizen, or in the pages of the school
text-book. "John," said such a plain man the other day to a friend who
also had been in touch with Fiske, "the biggest thing that ever came
into your life or mine was when that broad thinker familiarly darkened
our doors." The two men stood reverently under John Fiske's portrait,
the autograph signature underneath seeming in a way to connect the
living with the dead, acknowledging the force of the personality which
had made real to them as nothing else had ever done the deepest and
finest things.
John Fiske was often a guest in my home and I have sat, though less
frequently, with him in his library in Berkeley Street in Cambridge,
the flowers from the conservatory sending their perfumes among the
crowded books and the south wind breathing pleasantly from the garden
which had been Longfellow's, in the rear, to the garden of Howells in
front. His passion for music was scarcely less than his interest in
speculation and history. He knew well the great composers, and had
himself composed. Though the master of no instrument, he could touch
the piano with feeling. He had a pleasant baritone voice, and nothing
gave him more refreshment after a week of study or lecturing than to
pour himself out in song. His accompanist had need not only of great
technical skill but of stout vertebrae, and strong wrists; for
hours at a time the piano stool must be occupied while the difficult
melodies of various lands were unriddled and interpreted. Those were
interesting afternoons when, dropping his pen, he plunged into
music as a strong confident swimmer plunges into the stream which
he especially loves, interpreting with warm feeling Mendelssohn and
Beethoven, wandering unlost in the vocal labyrinths of Dvorak and
Wagner, but never happier than when interpreting the emotions of
simple folk-songs, or some noble Shakespearian lyrics like "Who
is Sylvia, what is she, that all the swains commend her?" Music
stimulated him to vivacity and in the pauses would come outbursts of
abandon. One day the pet dog of a daughter of mine ensconced himself
unawares under the sofa and was disrespectfully napping while
John Fiske sang. In a pause the philosopher broke into an animated
declamation over some matter while standing near the sofa, whereat
the pug thinking himself challenged tore out to the front with sudden
violent barks. The two confronted each other, the pug frantically
vindicating his dignity while the philosopher on his side fixing his
eye upon the interrupter declaimed and gesticulated. As to volubility
and sonorousness they stood about equal. I am bound to say the pug
prevailed. John Fiske retired in discomfiture while the pug was
carried off in triumph in the arms of his little mistress. He had
fairly barked the great man down. I once shared with him the misery
of being a butt. In St. Louis in those days the symposium was held in
honour, and particularly N.O. Nelson, the well-known profit-sharing
captain of industry, was the entertainer of select groups whose
geniality was stimulated by modest potations of Anheuser-Bush, in St.
Louis always the Castor and Pollux in every convivial firmament.
Such a symposium was once held in special honour of Dr. Edward Waldo
Emerson, a transient visitor. "Dr. Emerson," said a guest, "in the
diary of your father just edited by you occurs a passage which needs
illumination. 'Edward and I tried this morning for three quarters of
an hour to get the calf into the barn without success. The Irish girl
stuck her finger into his mouth and got the calf in in two minutes.
I like folks that can do things.' Now," said the guest, "we all know
what became of Emerson, we all know what became of Edward, for you are
here to-night, but what became of the Irish girl and the calf?" Dr.
Emerson laughingly explained the probable fate of the girl and the
calf, and in the hilarity that followed, the question arose as to why
the Irish girl's finger had been so persuasive. I, city-bred and green
as grass as to country lore, rashly attempted to explain; the inserted
finger gave a good purchase on the calf which in its pain became at
once tractable, but the men present who had been farm-boys, with loud
laughter ridiculed the suggestion. Did I not know that nature had
provided a conduit through which the needed sustenance was conveyed
from the maternal udder, and that it was quite possible to delude the
unsuspecting calf into the belief that the slyly inserted finger was
that conduit? The triumph of the Irish girl was explained, and I sank
back, covered with confusion. Fiske, however, blurted out: "Why, I
never should have thought of that in all my life," whereat he too
became the target of ridicule.
I never saw John Fiske happier than once at Concord. Our host had
invited us for a day and had prepared a programme that only Concord
could furnish. The prelude was a performance of the Andante to a
Sonata of Rubinstein, Opus 12, rendered exquisitely by the daughter of
our host. I saw the great frame of my fellow-guest heave with emotion
while his breath came almost in sobs as his spirit responded to
the music. Then came a canoe-trip on the river to which John Fiske
joyfully assented though some of the rest of us were not without
apprehension. Fiske in a canoe was a ticklish proposition, but
there he was at last, comfortably recumbent, his head propped up on
cushions, serenely at ease though a very narrow margin intervened
between water-line and gunwale. The performer of the Sonata, who was
as deft at the paddle as she was at the piano, served as his pilot and
propeller while the rest of us formed an escort which could be turned
into a rescue party if occasion required. A stout, capacious rowboat
followed immediately in the wake of the canoe. We went down the dark,
placid current in the fine summer weather to the Battleground, and
then looked into the solemn forest aisle which arches over the narrow
Assabeth. The day was perfect, the flowers and birds were at their
best, the pleasant nature was all about us. All this John Fiske drank
in to the full but still more was he touched by the great associations
of the environment. From the bank yonder had been "fired the shot
heard round the world." The hill-tops, meadows, the gentle river had
been loved and frequented by Hawthorne, Thoreau, and Emerson; in
these surroundings had bloomed forth the finest flowering of
American literature. No heart could be more sensitive than was his
to influences of this kind. As we moved cautiously about him,
anxious about the equilibrium, though he was calm, he discoursed with
animation. The afternoon waned gloriously into the dusk of the happy
day.
The little hill-town of Petersham in the back of Worcester County was
John Fiske's summer home, a spot he tenderly loved. It is a retired
place made very attractive in later years through the agency of his
brother-in-law, who with wise and kindly art has added to the natural
beauty. I saw John Fiske here in his home of homes to which his heart
clung more and more fondly as his end approached. The weight of
his great body, accumulating morbidly in a way which could not be
counteracted, fairly overwhelmed at last his bright and noble life. As
the doctors put it, a heart made for a frame of one hundred and sixty
pounds could not do the work for three hundred. When, in his weakness,
death was suggested to him as probably near, "Death!" said he simply
and sweetly, "why, that only means going to Petersham to stay!" and
there among the flowers and fields, remote from the world, though his
spirit remains widely and solemnly pervasive, he has gone to stay.