RETURN TO AMERICA.--STUDY OF LAW.--MARRIAGE.--HIS FIRST NOVEL, “MORTON'S
HOPE.”
Of the years passed in the study of law after his return from Germany I
have very little recollection, and nothing of importance to record. He
never became seriously engaged in the practice of the profession he had
chosen. I had known him pleasantly rather than intimately, and our
different callings tended to separate us. I met him, however, not very
rarely, at one house where we were both received with the greatest
cordiality, and where the attractions brought together many both young
and old to enjoy the society of its charming and brilliant inmates. This
was at No. 14 Temple Place, where Mr. Park Benjamin was then living with
his two sisters, both in the bloom of young womanhood. Here Motley found
the wife to whom his life owed so much of its success and its happiness.
Those who remember Mary Benjamin find it hard to speak of her in the
common terms of praise which they award to the good and the lovely. She
was not only handsome and amiable and agreeable, but there was a cordial
frankness, an openhearted sincerity about her which made her seem like a
sister to those who could help becoming her lovers. She stands quite
apart in the memory of the friends who knew her best, even from the
circle of young persons whose recollections they most cherish. Yet hardly
could one of them have foreseen all that she was to be to him whose life
she was to share. They were married on the 2d of March, 1837. His
intimate friend, Mr. Joseph Lewis Stackpole, was married at about the
same time to her sister, thus joining still more closely in friendship
the two young men who were already like brothers in their mutual
affection.
Two years after his marriage, in 1839, appeared his first work, a novel
in two volumes, called “Morton's Hope.” He had little reason to be
gratified with its reception. The general verdict was not favorable to
it, and the leading critical journal of America, not usually harsh or
cynical in its treatment of native authorship, did not even give it a
place among its “Critical Notices,” but dropped a small-print
extinguisher upon it in one of the pages of its “List of New
Publications.” Nothing could be more utterly disheartening than the
unqualified condemnation passed upon the story. At the same time the
critic says that “no one can read 'Morton's Hope' without perceiving it
to have been written by a person of uncommon resources of mind and
scholarship.”
It must be confessed that, as a story, “Morton's Hope” cannot endure a
searching or even a moderately careful criticism. It is wanting in
cohesion, in character, even in a proper regard to circumstances of time
and place; it is a map of dissected incidents which has been flung out of
its box and has arranged itself without the least regard to chronology or
geography. It is not difficult to trace in it many of the influences
which had helped in forming or deforming the mind of the young man of
twenty-five, not yet come into possession of his full inheritance of the
slowly ripening qualities which were yet to assert their robust
independence. How could he help admiring Byron and falling into more or
less unconscious imitation of his moods if not of his special
affectations? Passion showing itself off against a dark foil of cynicism;
sentiment, ashamed of its own self-betrayal, and sneering at itself from
time to time for fear of the laugh of the world at its sincerity,--how
many young men were spoiled and how many more injured by becoming bad
copies of a bad ideal! The blood of Don Juan ran in the veins of Vivian
Grey and of Pelham. But if we read the fantastic dreams of Disraeli, the
intellectual dandyisms of Bulwer, remembering the after careers of which
these were the preludes, we can understand how there might well be
something in those earlier efforts which would betray itself in the way
of thought and in the style of the young men who read them during the
plastic period of their minds and characters. Allow for all these
influences, allow for whatever impressions his German residence and his
familiarity with German literature had produced; accept the fact that the
story is to the last degree disjointed, improbable, impossible; lay it
aside as a complete failure in what it attempted to be, and read it, as
“Vivian Grey” is now read, in the light of the career which it heralded.
“Morton's Hope” is not to be read as a novel: it is to be studied as an
autobiography, a prophecy, a record of aspirations, disguised under a
series of incidents which are flung together with no more regard to the
unities than a pack of shuffled playing-cards. I can do nothing better
than let him picture himself, for it is impossible not to recognize the
portrait. It is of little consequence whether every trait is an exact
copy from his own features, but it is so obvious that many of the lines
are direct transcripts from nature that we may believe the same thing of
many others. Let us compare his fictitious hero's story with what we have
read of his own life.
In early boyhood Morton amused himself and astonished those about him by
enacting plays for a puppet theatre. This was at six years old, and at
twelve we find him acting in a play with other boys, just as Motley's
playmates have already described him. The hero may now speak for himself,
but we shall all perceive that we are listening to the writer's own
story.
“I was always a huge reader; my mind was essentially craving and
insatiable. Its appetite was enormous, and it devoured too greedily
for health. I rejected all guidance in my studies. I already
fancied myself a misanthrope. I had taken a step very common for
boys of my age, and strove with all my might to be a cynic.”
He goes on to describe, under the perfectly transparent mask of his hero,
the course of his studies. “To poetry, like most infants, I devoted most
of my time.” From modern poetry he went back to the earlier sources,
first with the idea of systematic reading and at last through Chaucer and
Gower and early ballads, until he lost himself “in a dismal swamp of
barbarous romances and lying Latin chronicles. I got hold of the
Bibliotheca Monastica, containing a copious account of Anglo-Norman
authors, with notices of their works, and set seriously to reading every
one of them.” One profit of his antiquarianism, however, was, as he says,
his attention to foreign languages,--French, Spanish, German, especially
in their earliest and rudest forms of literature. From these he ascended
to the ancient poets, and from Latin to Greek. He would have taken up the
study of the Oriental languages, but for the advice of a relative, who
begged him seriously to turn his attention to history. The paragraph
which follows must speak for itself as a true record under a feigned
heading.
“The groundwork of my early character was plasticity and fickleness.
I was mortified by this exposure of my ignorance, and disgusted with
my former course of reading. I now set myself violently to the
study of history. With my turn of mind, and with the preposterous
habits which I had been daily acquiring, I could not fail to make as
gross mistakes in the pursuit of this as of other branches of
knowledge. I imagined, on setting out, a system of strict and
impartial investigation of the sources of history. I was inspired
with the absurd ambition, not uncommon to youthful students, of
knowing as much as their masters. I imagined it necessary for me,
stripling as I was, to study the authorities; and, imbued with the
strict necessity of judging for myself, I turned from the limpid
pages of the modern historians to the notes and authorities at the
bottom of the page. These, of course, sent me back to my monastic
acquaintances, and I again found myself in such congenial company to
a youthful and ardent mind as Florence of Worcester and Simeon of
Durham, the Venerable Bede and Matthew Paris; and so on to Gregory
and Fredegarius, down to the more modern and elegant pages of
Froissart, Hollinshed, Hooker, and Stowe. Infant as I was, I
presumed to grapple with masses of learning almost beyond the
strength of the giants of history. A spendthrift of my time and
labor, I went out of my way to collect materials, and to build for
myself, when I should have known that older and abler architects had
already appropriated all that was worth preserving; that the edifice
was built, the quarry exhausted, and that I was, consequently, only
delving amidst rubbish.
“This course of study was not absolutely without its advantages.
The mind gained a certain proportion of vigor even by this exercise
of its faculties, just as my bodily health would have been improved
by transporting the refuse ore of a mine from one pit to another,
instead of coining the ingots which lay heaped before my eyes.
Still, however, my time was squandered. There was a constant want
of fitness and concentration of my energies. My dreams of education
were boundless, brilliant, indefinite; but alas! they were only
dreams. There was nothing accurate and defined in my future course
of life. I was ambitious and conceited, but my aspirations were
vague and shapeless. I had crowded together the most gorgeous and
even some of the most useful and durable materials for my woof, but
I had no pattern, and consequently never began to weave.
“I had not made the discovery that an individual cannot learn, nor
be, everything; that the world is a factory in which each individual
must perform his portion of work:--happy enough if he can choose it
according to his taste and talent, but must renounce the desire of
observing or superintending the whole operation. . . .
“From studying and investigating the sources of history with my own
eyes, I went a step further; I refused the guidance of modern
writers; and proceeding from one point of presumption to another, I
came to the magnanimous conviction that I could not know history as
I ought to know it unless I wrote it for myself. . . .
“It would be tedious and useless to enlarge upon my various attempts
and various failures. I forbear to comment upon mistakes which I
was in time wise enough to retrieve. Pushing out as I did, without
compass and without experience, on the boundless ocean of learning,
what could I expect but an utter and a hopeless shipwreck?
“Thus I went on, becoming more learned, and therefore more ignorant,
more confused in my brain, and more awkward in my habits, from day
to day. I was ever at my studies, and could hardly be prevailed
upon to allot a moment to exercise or recreation. I breakfasted
with a pen behind my ear, and dined in company with a folio bigger
than the table. I became solitary and morose, the necessary
consequence of reckless study; talked impatiently of the value of my
time, and the immensity of my labors; spoke contemptuously of the
learning and acquirements of the whole world, and threw out
mysterious hints of the magnitude and importance of my own project.
“In the midst of all this study and this infant authorship the
perusal of such masses of poetry could not fail to produce their
effect. Of a youth whose mind, like mine at that period, possessed
some general capability, without perhaps a single prominent and
marked talent, a proneness to imitation is sure to be the besetting
sin. I consequently, for a large portion of my earlier life, never
read a work which struck my fancy, without planning a better one
upon its model; for my ambition, like my vanity, knew no bounds.
It was a matter of course that I should be attacked by the poetic
mania. I took the infection at the usual time, went through its
various stages, and recovered as soon as could be expected. I
discovered soon enough that emulation is not capability, and he is
fortunate to whom is soonest revealed the relative extent of his
ambition and his powers.
“My ambition was boundless; my dreams of glory were not confined to
authorship and literature alone; but every sphere in which the
intellect of man exerts itself revolved in a blaze of light before
me. And there I sat in my solitude and dreamed such wondrous
dreams! Events were thickening around me which were soon to change
the world, but they were unmarked by me. The country was changing
to a mighty theatre, on whose stage those who were as great as I
fancied myself to be were to enact a stupendous drama in which I had
no part. I saw it not; I knew it not; and yet how infinitely
beautiful were the imaginations of my solitude! Fancy shook her
kaleidoscope each moment as chance directed, and lo! what new,
fantastic, brilliant, but what unmeaning visions. My ambitious
anticipations were as boundless as they were various and
conflicting. There was not a path which leads to glory in which I
was not destined to gather laurels. As a warrior I would conquer
and overrun the world. As a statesman I would reorganize and govern
it. As a historian I would consign it all to immortality; and in my
leisure moments I would be a great poet and a man of the world.
“In short, I was already enrolled in that large category of what are
called young men of genius,--men who are the pride of their sisters
and the glory of their grandmothers,--men of whom unheard-of things
are expected, till after long preparation comes a portentous
failure, and then they are forgotten; subsiding into indifferent
apprentices and attorneys' clerks.
“Alas for the golden imaginations of our youth! They are bright and
beautiful, but they fade. They glitter brightly enough to deceive
the wisest and most cautious, and we garner them up in the most
secret caskets of our hearts; but are they not like the coins which
the Dervise gave the merchant in the story? When we look for them
the next morning, do we not find them withered leaves?”
The ideal picture just drawn is only a fuller portraiture of the youth
whose outlines have been already sketched by the companions of his
earlier years. If his hero says, “I breakfasted with a pen behind my ear
and dined in company with a folio bigger than the table,” one of his
family says of the boy Motley that “if there were five minutes before
dinner, when he came into the parlor he always took up some book near at
hand and began to read until dinner was announced.” The same unbounded
thirst for knowledge, the same history of various attempts and various
failures, the same ambition, not yet fixed in its aim, but showing itself
in restless effort, belong to the hero of the story and its narrator.
Let no man despise the first efforts of immature genius. Nothing can be
more crude as a novel, nothing more disappointing, than “Morton's Hope.”
But in no other of Motley's writings do we get such an inside view of his
character with its varied impulses, its capricious appetites, its
unregulated forces, its impatient grasp for all kinds of knowledge. With
all his university experiences at home and abroad, it might be said with
a large measure of truth that he was a self-educated man, as he had been
a self-taught boy. His instincts were too powerful to let him work
quietly in the common round of school and college training. Looking at
him as his companions describe him, as he delineates himself 'mutato
nomine,' the chances of success would have seemed to all but truly
prophetic eyes very doubtful, if not decidedly against him. Too many
brilliant young novel-readers and lovers of poetry, excused by their
admirers for their shortcomings on the strength of their supposed
birthright of “genius,” have ended where they began; flattered into the
vain belief that they were men at eighteen or twenty, and finding out at
fifty that they were and always had been nothing more than boys. It was
but a tangled skein of life that Motley's book showed us at twenty-five,
and older men might well have doubted whether it would ever be wound off
in any continuous thread. To repeat his own words, he had crowded
together the materials for his work, but he had no pattern, and
consequently never began to weave.
The more this first work of Motley's is examined, the more are its faults
as a story and its interest as a self-revelation made manifest to the
reader. The future historian, who spared no pains to be accurate, falls
into the most extraordinary anachronisms in almost every chapter. Brutus
in a bob-wig, Othello in a swallow-tail coat, could hardly be more
incongruously equipped than some of his characters in the manner of
thought, the phrases, the way of bearing themselves which belong to them
in the tale, but never could have belonged to characters of our
Revolutionary period. He goes so far in his carelessness as to mix up
dates in such a way as almost to convince us that he never looked over
his own manuscript or proofs. His hero is in Prague in June, 1777,
reading a letter received from America in less than a fortnight from the
date of its being written; in August of the same year he is in the
American camp, where he is found in the company of a certain Colonel
Waldron, an officer of some standing in the Revolutionary Army, with whom
he is said to have been constantly associated for some three months,
having arrived in America, as he says, on the 15th of May, that is to
say, six weeks or more before he sailed, according to his previous
account. Bohemia seems to have bewitched his chronology as it did
Shakespeare's geography. To have made his story a consistent series of
contradictions, Morton should have sailed from that Bohemian seashore
which may be found in “A Winter's Tale,” but not in the map of Europe.
And yet in the midst of all these marks of haste and negligence, here and
there the philosophical student of history betrays himself, the ideal of
noble achievement glows in an eloquent paragraph, or is embodied in a
loving portrait like that of the professor and historian Harlem. The
novel, taken in connection with the subsequent developments of the
writer's mind, is a study of singular interest. It is a chaos before the
creative epoch; the light has not been divided from the darkness; the
firmament has not yet divided the waters from the waters. The forces at
work in a human intelligence to bring harmony out of its discordant
movements are as mysterious, as miraculous, we might truly say, as those
which give shape and order to the confused materials out of which
habitable worlds are evolved. It is too late now to be sensitive over
this unsuccessful attempt as a story and unconscious success as a
self-portraiture. The first sketches of Paul Veronese, the first patterns
of the Gobelin tapestry, are not to be criticised for the sake of
pointing out their inevitable and too manifest imperfections. They are to
be carefully studied as the earliest efforts of the hand which painted
the Marriage at Cana, of the art which taught the rude fabrics made to be
trodden under foot to rival the glowing canvas of the great painters.
None of Motley's subsequent writings give such an insight into his
character and mental history. It took many years to train the as yet
undisciplined powers into orderly obedience, and to bring the unarranged
materials into the organic connection which was needed in the
construction of a work that should endure. There was a long interval
between his early manhood and the middle term of life, during which the
slow process of evolution was going on. There are plants which open their
flowers with the first rays of the sun; there are others that wait until
evening to spread their petals. It was already the high noon of life with
him before his genius had truly shown itself; if he had not lived beyond
this period, he would have left nothing to give him a lasting name.