his abode there, Cortés and his little army of four hundred and fifty
Spaniards, with twice as many native allies, among sixty thousand
cannibals. Boldness marks every step of his course. He seizes the
native ‘king,’ suppresses plots with rigor, and proves his divinity
by tearing down one of the sacrificial pyramids and planting the
cross in its stead. Leaving a lieutenant in command, he hastens back
to the seashore to transact military business there. The lieutenant
precipitates a quarrel and slaughters Indians by the hundred. Cortés
returns and finds his work must be done again. This time it is
thoroughly done. Every step of his progress is marked with blood, and
the story of _la noche triste_ and the siege of Mexico are among the
most romantic passages in the history of the New World.
In estimating men Prescott aimed to employ the standard of their day.
When Cortés lifts up his hands, red with the blood of the miserable
natives, to return thanks to Heaven for victory, the historian does
not permit himself to forget that this savage Spaniard was a typical
soldier of the Cross. ‘Whoever has read the correspondence of Cortés,
or, still more, has attended to the circumstances of his career, will
hardly doubt that he would have been among the first to lay down his
life for the Faith.’ According to Prescott, the charge of cruelty
cannot be brought against Cortés. ‘The path of the conqueror is
necessarily marked with blood. He was not too scrupulous, indeed, in
the execution of his plans. He swept away the obstacles which lay in
his track; and his fame is darkened by the commission of more than one
act which his boldest apologists will find it hard to vindicate. But he
was not wantonly cruel. He allowed no outrage on his unresisting foes.’
The historian likens the Spaniard to Hannibal in his endurance, his
courage, and his unpretentiousness.
Later scholarship has assailed portions of _The Conquest of Mexico_
with needless asperity. Prescott could hardly be expected to avail
himself prophetically of archæological facts not known until thirty
years after his time. Nor was his faith in the early Spanish accounts
of the Conquest quite as childlike and uncritical as it is sometimes
represented. Historians are the most substantial of men of letters; but
they now and then build card houses which topple down under the breath
of a single new fact. And they take a very human delight in blowing
over one another’s structures. For which reason the reading of history
is a fearful joy, like skating on thin ice. The pleasure is intense so
long as nothing gives way. Perhaps the layman is unreasonable in his
demand for knowledge that shall not require too frequent revision. He
can at least read for pleasure, hoping that a part of what he reads is
true, and holding himself prepared to relinquish the parts he likes
best when the time comes.
In the _History of the Conquest of Peru_ the author brings fresh proof
that whatever may be said of his morals, the Spanish soldier cannot
be over-praised for his valor. Pizarro was a marvel of courage and
endurance. Fanaticism, which explains much in his character, does not
explain where such tremendous physical power came from. And he had the
true theatrical bravado of the Sixteenth-century adventurer. Add to
the native histrionic gifts of the Latin race a special training, such
as life in the New World gave, and men like Ojeda, Balboa, Cortés, and
Pizarro come into existence quite naturally. They did wonders in the
coolest possible way, and with a fine sense of the pictorial aspect of
their undertakings. Pizarro, drawing a line from east to west on the
sand with his sword and calling on his comrades to choose each man what
best becomes a brave Castilian (‘For my part I go to the south’), is
a figure for romantic drama. An Englishman equally daring would have
been more or less awkward in a pose of this sort, but the Spaniard was
perfectly at home. Of what clay were these men compounded that they
could imagine such exploits and succeed in them too?
The performance of Pizarro was less splendid than that of Cortés
and the man himself less interesting. The conqueror of Mexico was a
gentleman; not so the hard soldier who subdued the kingdom of the
Incas. His was a violent career, steeped in blood, and ending in
assassination. Not only was Pizarro without fear, but of two courses
he seized upon the more dangerous as the better suited to his genius.
Too ignorant to sign his own name, he could control not alone the
brutal soldier but as well the lawyer and the priest. Aside from his
masterfulness there was little to admire in his character. Brute
force excites wonder, but the exhibition of it becomes wearisome at
last. To Prescott ‘the hazard assumed by Pizarro was far greater
than that of the Conqueror of Mexico.’ Otherwise the man was a mere
bungler upon whom Fortune, with characteristic levity, chanced for a
time to smile. Prescott describes him in a sentence: ‘Pizarro was
eminently perfidious.’ Furthermore, the conqueror of Peru was not
original; he repeated what he had learned from Balboa and Cortés. Had
he chanced upon a country less rich and civilized, it may well be
doubted whether he would have made any considerable figure in history.
The argument from gold was entirely conclusive in those days; just as
at the present time an undertaking is said to ‘succeed’ if it pays
financially. Manners have improved, but ideals of ‘success’ are pretty
much what they were four hundred years ago. When Pizarro extorted from
the wretched Atahualpa a promise to fill a room twenty-two feet by
seventeen to the height of nine feet with gold, his place in history
was assured. The swineherd had become immortal.
Strange is it that the name of Francisco Pizarro should be a household
word while that of his brother Gonzalo is but little known and seldom
repeated. Yet there are few episodes in the history of Spanish
colonization more striking than the story of Gonzalo Pizarro’s march
across the Andes and the discovery of the river Amazon. It is a tale of
horror and suffering to which only the pen of a Defoe could do justice.
Gonzalo not only survived the fearful journey, but had strength enough
left to head a party for revolt against the viceroy, Blasco Nuñez, and
the execution of the Ordinances. Like a true Pizarro, this conqueror
died a violent death. He was beheaded; it seemed the only fitting way
for one of that family to take his departure from life. The Pizarros
used to behead their victims and then show themselves conspicuously at
the funeral. When it came their turn to die, they were treated with
scantier courtesy.
_Philip the Second_ was Prescott’s most ambitious work. Though
but a fragment, the fragment is of noble dimensions, being longer
by many pages than the _Ferdinand and Isabella_. The narrative is
extraordinarily vivid. Few pages can match for interest those in which
are described Philip’s coming to Flanders and his assumption of power
at the hands of his father Charles the Fifth. Here are exhibited at
their best the much-praised qualities of Prescott’s style. His prose
grew better as he grew older.
The characters stand out like the figures of a play: the great princes,
Charles the Fifth, Philip, Mary of England, and Elizabeth; the great
warriors and statesmen, Guise, Montmorency, Alva, Egmont, and William
of Orange; noble ladies like Margaret of Parma and the beautiful
Elizabeth of France. The events were of high and tragic importance,
for during this reign was to be settled the great question of freedom
of thought and the right to worship God as the conscience and the
reason dictated. The very contrasts of costume came to the aid of the
historian in dealing with this romantic age. It would seem as if the
writer must be picturesque in spite of himself.
The modern reader, whatever be his natural bent, finds himself impelled
by the critical spirit of the times into distrusting all history which
is not technical and hard to grasp. Prescott’s books are incorrigibly
‘literary’ and therefore more or less under suspicion. Because they
are attractive, it is taken for granted that they are unsound. Certain
unhappy beings have gone so far as to slander them outright by calling
them romances. But this is mere impatience with the kind of historical
writing which Prescott’s work exemplifies. He was a master of the art
of narrative; and history which stops with narrative is in the minds of
severe students little better than the more vicious forms of literary
idleness, such as poetry and fiction. Prescott gratifies his reader’s
curiosity about the past, but is not over solicitous to ‘modify his
view of the present and his forecast of the future.’ In other words, he
is well content to look at the surface of history, leaving it to others
to look below the surface and philosophize on what they find there.
Nevertheless these brilliant volumes have a value which is something
more than literary even if it be a good deal less than scientific.
It is perhaps not extravagant to pronounce them an indispensable
propædeutic to the study of Spanish-American history. They cannot be
displaced by works which ‘go much deeper into the subject.’ Depth
is not what is at all times most needed. We need stimulus, and
encouragement to face the discipline awaiting us in deep books. He who,
having read Prescott, was content to read no farther would be an odd
sort of student; but not so odd as he who labored under the impression
that Prescott was a historian whom he could afford to do without.
VI
_Ralph Waldo Emerson_
REFERENCES:
=G. W. Cooke=: _Ralph Waldo Emerson, his Life, Writings, and
Philosophy_, fifth edition, 1882.
=O. W. Holmes=: _Ralph Waldo Emerson_, ‘American Men of Letters,’
1885.
=J. E. Cabot=: _A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson_, third edition,
1888.
=Richard Garnett=: _Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson_, ‘Great
Writers,’ 1888.
=E. W. Emerson=: _Emerson in Concord_, 1889.
I
HIS LIFE
The clerical profession was in a manner hereditary in the Emerson race.
With a single exception there was a minister in each of six generations
descending from Thomas Emerson of Ipswich, Massachusetts. For this one
lapse compensation was made; another generation furnished the colony
with three ministers.
For nearly a century and a half the history of the family has centred
in Concord, Massachusetts. The house known as the ‘Old Manse’ was
built in 1765 by William Emerson, the young minister of the First
Church. Gentle in spirit, he was an ardent patriot and in Revolutionary
times won the name of the ‘fighting parson.’ He came honestly by
his militant temper, being a grandson of the famous Father Moody who
distinguished himself at the siege of Louisburg as a preacher, fighter,
and iconoclast.
Besides the gift of eloquence, William Emerson inherited from his
father (the Reverend Joseph Emerson of Maiden) a love of literature.
This he apparently bequeathed to his son, William, who in turn
transmitted it to his son, the author of _Conduct of Life_ and
_Representative Men_.
Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston on May 25, 1803. His father,
minister of the First Church of that city, was a man of vigorous
intellect, fond of society, and, judging from one of his letters,
endowed with a caustic wit. His mother, Ruth (Haskins) Emerson, was
distinguished for her high-bred manners and tender thoughtfulness.
Severity on the part of parents was thought good for boys in that
day. Ralph never forgot how his father ‘twice or thrice put me in
mortal terror by forcing me into the salt water, off some wharf or
bathing-house; and I still recall the fright with which, after some
of these salt experiences, I heard his voice one day (as Adam that of
the Lord God in the garden) summoning me to a new bath, and I vainly
endeavoring to hide myself.’
Left a widow in 1811, with five boys to educate, Mrs. Emerson was
forced to heroic exertions. Her sacrifices made a deep impress on the
mind of the most famous of those boys.
From the Boston Latin School, Emerson went to Harvard College and was
graduated in 1821 ‘with ambitions to be a professor of rhetoric and
elocution.’ After a period of school-teaching, a profession towards
which his attitude was unequivocal (‘Better saw wood, better sow
hemp, better hang with it after it is sown, than sow the seeds of
instruction’), he began his theological studies at Harvard and in due
time was ‘approbated to preach.’ Ill health drove him South for a
winter (1826–27), where he saw novel sights, and made the acquaintance
of Achille Murat, son of the quondam King of Naples. Emerson had Murat
for a fellow traveller from St. Augustine to Charleston: ‘I blessed my
stars for my fine companion, and we talked incessantly.’
On March 11, 1829, Emerson was ordained as colleague of Henry Ware
in the Second Church of Boston and a little later ‘became the sole
incumbent.’ He resigned this advantageous post of labor (September,
1832) because of doubts about the rite of the Lord’s Supper and the
offering of public prayer. To many observers his career seemed wilfully
spoiled by himself.
With impaired health and in despondency and grief (he had but recently
lost his young wife)[19] Emerson tried the effect of a year abroad. He
sailed from Boston and arrived at Malta on February 2, 1833. Thence he
proceeded to Syracuse, Taormina, Messina, Palermo, and Naples. After
visiting the other chief cities of Italy, he journeyed to Paris, which
he admired none the less because he felt out of place there; ‘Pray
what brought you here, grave Sir?’ the moving Boulevard seemed to say.
But he had the opportunity of hearing Jouffroy at the Sorbonne, and
of paying his respects to Lafayette. In London he saw Coleridge. At
Edinburgh he learned Carlyle’s whereabouts, visited him, and found
him, ‘good and wise and pleasant.’ He was unfortunate in his trip to
the Highlands (‘the scenery of a shower-bath must be always much the
same’). He called on Wordsworth at Rydal Mount. In early October he was
back at home.
The future was uncertain. Emerson was reluctant to give up the
ministry, and preached from time to time as the chance presented
itself. For some weeks he supplied Orville Dewey’s church in New
Bedford, but when it was intimated that on Dewey’s resignation he might
be invited to succeed him, Emerson made the impossible conditions that
he should neither administer the Communion, nor offer prayer ‘unless he
felt moved to do so.’ He supplied the pulpit of the Unitarian church in
Concord during three months of the pastor’s illness and for three years
preached to the little congregation in East Lexington.
Having cut himself off from the only ‘regular’ mode of life that
seemed open to him, Emerson took up the irregular vocation of lecturer.
During the winter following his return from Europe, he had lectured
before the Boston Society of Natural History. Beginning in January,
1835, he gave a course on ‘Biography’ consisting of six lectures:
‘Tests of Great Men,’ ‘Michelangelo,’ ‘Luther,’ ‘Milton,’ ‘Fox,’ and
‘Burke.’ During succeeding winters he gave ten lectures on ‘English
Literature’ (1835–36), twelve lectures on ‘The Philosophy of History’
(1836–37), ten lectures on ‘Human Culture’ (1837–38), ten lectures on
‘Human Life’ (1838–39), ten lectures on ‘The Present Age’ (1839–40). He
was now fairly engaged in his new calling.
Meantime he had fixed on Concord for his permanent home, bought a house
there, married Miss Lydia Jackson of Plymouth, and begun that career of
which one of his biographers has humorously complained, ‘a life devoid
of incident, of nearly untroubled happiness, and of absolute conformity
to the moral law.’
In 1836 there was published anonymously a little volume entitled
_Nature_. It was Emerson’s first book. His influence as a man of
letters begins at this point. The succeeding volumes consisted in part
of lectures which, having stood the test of public delivery, were
now recast in essay form. Not every essay, however, had its first
presentation as spoken discourse.
On formal public occasions Emerson was often invited to give the
address. There was authority in his utterances. That he was not
unlikely to say something revolutionary seemed to make it the more
important that he should be heard often. He gave the Historical Address
at Concord at the Second Centennial Anniversary, the Phi Beta Kappa
Oration at Harvard on ‘The American Scholar’ (August, 1837), and the
Address before the Senior Class in Divinity College (July 15, 1838),
which brought down on him the wrath of Andrews Norton and a shower of
remonstrances from Unitarian ministers who, however, loved him too much
to be angry with him.
At the time of the Divinity Hall Address the so-called Transcendental
movement was in full progress. The movement grew in part out of
informal meetings held by a group of liberal thinkers with a view
to protesting against the unsatisfactory state of current opinion
in theology and philosophy, and looking for something broader and
deeper.[20]
Transcendentalism was an intellectual ferment. Having a philosophical
and religious significance, it was also notable for its effect on
social, educational, and literary matters. Emerson defined it as
faith in intuitions. It has been called an ‘outburst of Romanticism
on Puritan ground.’ Certain historians connect it with German
transcendental philosophy. That it was indigenous to New England
appears to be the sounder view. According to a high authority,[21]
‘Emerson’s transcendentalism was native to his mind.... It had been in
the life and thought of his family for generations.’ He was certainly
regarded as the heresiarch.
Like most complex movements Transcendentalism had a grotesque side.
The enthusiasts, in their anxiety to be emancipated from old formulas,
fell victims to ‘the vice of the age,--the propensity to exaggerate
the importance of visible and tangible facts.’ Emerson laughs at them
a little: ‘They promise the establishment of the kingdom of heaven and
end with champing unleavened bread or dedicating themselves to the
nourishment of a beard.’
The movement had an ‘organ,’ a quarterly magazine called ‘The Dial,’
the first number of which appeared in July, 1840. George Ripley was the
business manager, Margaret Fuller the editor. It came under Emerson’s
care two years later, and in 1844 was abandoned. An audience large
enough to support the organ could not be found.
Transcendentalism coincided chronologically with several plans for
bettering the condition of the world. ‘We are a little wild here with
numberless projects of social reform. Not a reading man but has his
draft of a new community in his waistcoat pocket. I am gently mad
myself.’[22]
Emerson was sympathetic with the community experiments at ‘Brook Farm’
and ‘Fruitlands,’ but not to the extent of joining them. He approved
every wild action of the experimenters, nevertheless he had a work of
his own.
The work consisted in bringing his thought to his public by means
of lectures. He was not overfond of the medium of communication.
‘Are not lectures a kind of Peter Parley’s story of Uncle Plato,
and a puppet show of the Eleusinian mysteries?’ he asks. It is not
recorded what he thought of that kind of lecturing which may best be
described in Byron’s phrase--‘to giggle and make giggle.’ He frankly
(but unenviously) admired the speaker who could produce instantaneous
effects, moving the audience to laughter or tears. His own gifts
were of another sort. When ‘the stout Illinoisian’ after a short
trial walked out of the hall Emerson’s sympathies were with him:
‘Shakespeare, or Franklin, or Esop, coming to Illinois, would say, I
must give my wisdom a comic form,...’
Urged thereto by his generous friend Alexander Ireland of the
Manchester ‘Examiner,’ who took on himself all the business
responsibilities, Emerson (in 1847) made a lecturing trip to England.
He spoke in Manchester, Edinburgh, London, and elsewhere. The lectures
were ‘attacked by the clergymen,’ and the attacks met with ‘pale though
brave defences’ by Emerson’s friends. After a few weeks in Paris,
then in the throes of the revolution, the lecturer returned by way of
England to America.
The crisis in the anti-slavery conflict was approaching. Emerson, in
spite of his philosophical attitude towards reformers, became more
and more identified with the Abolitionists. During a political speech
at Cambridge he was repeatedly hissed by students. According to an
eye-witness, he ‘seemed absolutely to enjoy it.’ As late as 1861 he
was received with marked hostility by the audience which gathered at
the annual meeting of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. ‘The Mob
roared whenever I attempted to speak, and after several beginnings
I withdrew.’ The breaking out of the war in a way relieved him. Now
people knew where they stood.
His chief source of income was cut off for a time. The public was
not in the mood for lectures such as his. Later he found it possible
to resume his courses, and he continued to lecture effectively until
within a few years of his death.
Emerson’s principal books are: _Nature_, 1836; _Essays_, 1841;
_Essays_, ‘second series,’ 1844; _Poems_, 1847; _Miscellanies_,
1849 (lectures and addresses, together with a reprint of _Nature_);
_Representative Men_, 1850; _English Traits_, 1856; _Conduct of Life_,
1860; _May-Day and Other Pieces_, 1867; _Society and Solitude_, 1870;
_Letters and Social Aims_, 1876; _Lectures and Biographical Sketches_,
1884; and _Natural History of Intellect_, 1893. He edited a number
of Carlyle’s books, contributed several chapters to the _Memoirs of
Margaret Fuller Ossoli_ and compiled a poetic anthology, _Parnassus_,
1875. _The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson_
(edited by C. E. Norton), 1883, contains two hundred of Emerson’s
letters.
In 1863 Emerson was one of the ‘visitors’ to the Military Academy at
West Point. In 1866 he was Phi Beta Kappa orator at Harvard, and the
following year received from his college the degree of LL. D.
From 1867 to 1879 he was an overseer of Harvard. In 1870, before a
little audience of students from the advanced classes, he gave a course
on the ‘Natural History of Intellect,’ the subject in the handling of
which he had hoped to write his master work. One of the surprises of
his later life was his nomination for the office of Lord Rector of
Glasgow University by the independent party (1874). There were two
other candidates. Emerson polled five hundred votes. Disraeli was
victor with seven hundred votes.
Emerson’s memory failed gradually, but the defect was not much noticed
until after the shock consequent on the burning of his house (1872).
A trip to Egypt did much to restore his health and he never lost the
‘royal trait of cheerfulness.’ He died, after a brief illness, on April
27, 1882.
II
EMERSON’S CHARACTER
The praise which Emerson gives to character at the expense of
luxurious surroundings was sincere. His own tastes were very simple.
‘Can anything be so elegant as to have few wants and to serve them
one’s self, so as to have something left to give, instead of being
always prompt to grab?’ Acknowledging himself enmeshed in the
conventionalities of ‘civilized’ life and no more responsible than his
fellow victims, he nevertheless did what he could to follow out his
theory. He would at least not be one of the infirm people of society,
who, if they miss any one of their comforts, ‘represent themselves as
the most wronged and most wretched persons on earth.’ Emerson did not
live in the woods on twenty-seven cents a week, but he had no objection
to a friend’s living that way if the friend found it profitable. For
himself he would not be ‘absurd and pedantic in reform.’
No characteristic is more marked than his spirit of tolerance. It was
not of a smooth, purring sort, growing out of eagerness to please or
unwillingness to offend, but rather an aggressive tolerance. Emerson
would not merely grant to every man ‘the allowance he takes,’ but would
even force him to take it. He was patient with the most obnoxious of
reformers. And he could be tolerant with those who could tolerate
nothing.
With pronounced and original views he had little solicitude to impose
his views on others. He was without egotism. To state the truth as he
apprehended it and to let the world come to his ideas if the world
could and would, contented him. But he had no quarrel with the order of
things. His good humor and smiling patience are manifest in everything
he has written.