the recipient of academic honors, and was made a member of numerous
historical societies. The mere catalogue of these distinctions fills a
page of printed text. His membership of the Massachusetts Historical
Society and his degree of LL. D. from Harvard College (1889) will
serve as illustrations. Parkman was influential in helping to found
the Archæological Institute of America. He was one of the founders of
the St. Botolph Club in Boston, and its president during the first six
years of its existence.
The history of France and England in North America was completed the
year before he died. Had time and strength been allowed him, he would
have recast the material in the form of a continuous narrative. There
might have been a gain in the new arrangement, as on the other hand
there might have been a loss.
Parkman died at his home at Jamaica Plain, near Boston, on November 8,
1893.
II
PARKMAN’S CHARACTER
Parkman had prodigious will power and unequalled pertinacity. No
barrier to the accomplishment of his object was allowed to stand in
the way. He was beset by the demons of ill health, and their number was
legion. Unable to rout them by impetuous onslaught, he tired them out,
thinning their ranks, one by one. He was infinitely patient, full of
devices for outwitting the enemy. Beaten again and again, he stubbornly
renewed the fight. Threatened with blindness, he set himself to avoid
it, and did. Threatened with insanity, he declined to become insane.
Nothing could be more admirable than the spirit in which he faced daily
torment. He was that extraordinary being, a cheerful stoic. Four times
in his life it was a question whether he would live or die. Parkman
admitted that once, had he been seeking merely his comfort, he would
have elected to die. That must have been the time when, in response to
his physician’s encouraging remark that he had a strong constitution,
Parkman said: ‘I’m afraid I have.’ In ordinary conditions of ill health
he was bright, cheery, philosophical, but when he suffered most he was
silent. At no time was he capable of complaining.
Parkman loved to face the hard facts of life and was apt to admire
others in the degree in which they showed a like spirit. He had a
sovereign contempt for everything not manly and robust. He contradicted
with amusing emphasis the statement in some biographical notice that
he was ‘feeble.’ By his philosophy the militant attitude toward
life was the true one. He believed in war as a moral force; it
made for character both in the man and in the nation. ‘The severest
disappointment of his life was his inability to enter the army during
our civil war.’
He was wholly free from certain narrow traits which are too apt to
be engendered in a life devoted to books and authorship. Manly,
open-hearted, unspoiled, he neither craved honors nor despised them.
It has been remarked that while he was gratified by the recognition
accorded his work in high places, he was equally pleased with a letter
from ‘a live boy’ who wrote to tell him how much he had enjoyed reading
about Pontiac and La Salle. He himself kept to the last a certain
boyish frankness of mind and heart. The year before he died he wrote
to the secretary of the class of ’44: ‘Please give my kind regrets and
remembrances to the fellows.’
There have been not a few attractive personalities in the history of
American letters. Parkman was one of the most attractive among them.
III
THE WRITER
The style is clear and luminous. Short sentences abound, giving the
effect of rapidity. The mind of the reader never halts because of an
obscure term or some intricacy of structure. Neither is the page
spotted with long words ending in _tion_, and which coming in groups,
as they do in Bancroft, are like grit in the teeth. Parkman did not
attain the exquisite grace and composure which characterize Irving’s
prose, but he came nearer to it than did Prescott. The historian of
Ferdinand and Isabella had a self-conscious style. Agreeable as it is,
it reveals a man always on guard as he writes. In his most eloquent
passages Prescott is formal, precise, even stiff.
Parkman’s style is wholly engaging. There is a captivating manner about
it, the result of his immense enthusiasm for his theme. Infinitely
laborious in the preparation, sceptical in use of authorities,
temperate in judgment, when, however, it comes to telling the story,
he allows his genius for narration a free rein, and the style, though
losing none of its dignity, is eager and almost impetuous. The
historian speaks as an eye-witness of all he describes.
This explains Parkman’s popularity in large degree. Fascinating as the
subject is, the manner adds a hundred fold. He who reads Bancroft gets
a deal of information, for which he pays a round price. He who reads
Parkman gets facts, eloquence, philosophy, besides no end of adventure,
and for all this he pays literally nothing.
IV
EARLY WORK
_OREGON TRAIL_, _CONSPIRACY OF PONTIAC_, _VASSALL MORTON_
_The Oregon Trail_ ranks high among books which, though sometimes
written for quite another purpose, are read chiefly for entertainment.
Such was _Two Years before the Mast_, such was _The Bible in Spain_,
that skilful work of a most accomplished poseur.
In addition to its value as literature, _The Oregon Trail_ is a
trustworthy account of a no longer existent state of society. It is
a document. The range of experience was narrow, and the adventures
few, but so far as it goes the record is perfect; and when read in
connection with his historical work, the book becomes a commentary on
Parkman’s method. Here is shown how he got that knowledge of Indian
life and character which distinguishes his work from that of other
historical writers who touch the same field. The knowledge was utilized
at once in his next work.
_The Conspiracy of Pontiac_ is the sort of book people praise by saying
that it is as readable as a novel. The comparison is unfortunate. So
many novels are disciplinary rather than amusing. One wishes it were
possible to say of them that they are as readable as history.
Nevertheless it is quite true that the virtues supposed to inhere
chiefly in a work of fiction are conspicuous in this the first of
Parkman’s historical studies. _The Conspiracy of Pontiac_ is a story,
filled with incident and abounding in illustrations of courage,
craft, endurance, stubbornness, self-sacrifice, despair, triumph. The
plain truth shames invention. Pontiac lives in these pages describing
his towering ambition. So do the other actors,--Rogers, Gladwyn,
Campbell, Catharine the Ojibwa girl. The supernumeraries are strikingly
picturesque,--Canadian settlers, trappers, coureurs des bois, priests,
half-breeds, and Indians, the motley denizens of frontier and
wilderness. A forest drama played by actors like these is bound to be
absorbing were it only as a spectacle.
One fact becomes apparent on taking up this book. History as Parkman
writes it is both dramatic and graphical, filled with action and
movement, filled with color, form, and beauty. With such an eye for
effect it is impossible for him to be dull. Open the volume at random
and the wealth of the author’s observations seems to have been showered
on that page. But the next page is like it, and also the next.
The vivacity of youth explains much in this narrative. Parkman was
but twenty-six when he wrote _The Conspiracy of Pontiac_. Being
young, he was not afraid to be eloquent, to revel in descriptions of
sunrise and sunset, tempests, the coming of spring, the brilliant hues
of autumn foliage, the soft haze of Indian summer. His chapters are
richly enamelled with these glowing pieces of rhetoric. He is no less
brilliant in his martial scenes; the accounts of the Battle of Bloody
Bridge and of Bouquet’s fight in the forest are extraordinarily well
done.
The historian is severe on writers who have idealized the Indian.
Here is one of Parkman’s own characterizations: ‘The stern,
unchanging features of his mind excite our admiration from their very
immutability; and we look with deep interest on the fate of this
irreclaimable son of the wilderness, the child who will not be weaned
from the breast of his rugged mother. And our interest increases when
we discern in the unhappy wanderer, mingled among his vices, the germs
of heroic virtues,--a hand bountiful to bestow, as it is rapacious to
seize, and, even in extremest famine, imparting its last morsel to
a fellow sufferer; a heart which, strong in friendship as in hate,
thinks it not too much to lay down life for its chosen comrade; a soul
true to its own idea of honor, and burning with an unquenchable thirst
for greatness and renown.’ Neither poet nor novelist really needs to
embroider such an account of the Red Man.
This successful historic monograph was followed by an unsuccessful
novel, written, it is thought, for recreation. Without being an
autobiography, _Vassall Morton_ abounds in autobiographical passages.
Its failure was not of the kind that proves inability ever to master
the art of fiction. The loss to American letters however would have
been incalculable had Parkman’s genius for historical narrative been
sacrificed in any degree to novel writing. And this might have happened
had _Vassall Morton_ been a success.
V
_FRANCE AND ENGLAND IN NORTH AMERICA_
The history of France in North America abounds in everything appealing
to the love of the heroic. Parkman writes in a spirit of frank and
contagious admiration. Himself of Puritan blood and appreciative of
the best in Puritan character, he makes the pale narratives of the
contentious little English republics seem colorless indeed when laid
beside his glowing pages. The great warriors, the brave and fanatical
priests, the adventurous rangers, and the iron-hearted explorers of New
France were born to be wondered at and extolled. Without assuming that
these men had a monopoly of virtue, Parkman scatters praise with a free
hand.
The germ of this massive and beautiful work is contained in the
introductory chapters of _Pontiac_. Here is outlined the history of
French exploration, religious propagandism, and military conquest or
defeat up to the fall of Quebec.
The first three narratives (_The Pioneers of France_, _The Jesuits_,
and _La Salle_) cover the period of inception. They abound in
illustrations of heroism, self-sacrifice, and missionary fervor. The
last three volumes (_Count Frontenac_, _A Half-Century of Conflict_,
and _Montcalm and Wolfe_) describe the struggle of rival powers for
supremacy. They are characterized mainly by illustrations of commercial
greed, ecclesiastical jealousy, personal and political ambition. Midway
in the series and related alike to what precedes and what follows is
the fascinating volume, _The Old Régime in Canada_.
The title of the initial volume, _The Pioneers of France in the New
World_, exactly describes it. The ‘Pioneers’ are the Basque, the
Norman, and the Breton sailors who, from an almost unrecorded past,
crossed the sea yearly to fish on the banks of Newfoundland. They are
Jacques Cartier of St. Malo, who first explored the St. Lawrence,
Roberval, La Roche, and De Monts. Men of their time, they were both
devout and unscrupulous. Among them and their followers were grim
humorists. When, after the arrival of De Monts’s company in Acadia, a
priest and a Huguenot minister died at the same time, the crew buried
them in one grave ‘to see if they would lie peaceably together.’
Chief among the great names of this period is that of Samuel Champlain,
the ‘life’ of New France, who united in himself ‘the crusader, the
romance-loving explorer, the curious, knowledge-seeking traveller,
the practical navigator.’ Such a man has a breadth of vision and
strength of purpose in comparison with which the sight of common men is
blindness and their strength infirmity.
The second narrative in the series, _The Jesuits in North America_,
is an amazing record of courage, fanaticism, indomitable will,
perseverance, and martyrdom. The book contains the gist of the famous
_Jesuit Relations_. A man may be forgiven for not wearying himself with
the tediousness of those good fathers who were often as long-winded as
they were brave. But he is inexcusable if he has not learned to admire
them through Parkman’s thrilling account of their physical sufferings
and spiritual triumphs. Those giants of devotion, Brébeuf, Lalemant,
Garnier, and Jogues, seem both human and superhuman as they move across
the stage of history.
In _La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West_ we have a story of
zeal of another sort. La Salle is a pathetic figure. Yet to pity him
were to offer insult. He stood apart from his fellows, misunderstood
and maligned, but self-centred and self-sufficient. His contemporaries
thought him crack-brained; suffering had turned his head. They mocked
his schemes and denied the truth of the discoveries to which he laid
claim. His history is one of pure disaster. But no one of Parkman’s
heroes awakens greater sympathy than this silent man who found in
the pursuit of honor compensation enough for incredible fatigues and
sacrifices.
_The Old Régime in Canada_ treats of the contest between the feudal
chiefs of Acadia, La Tour and D’Aunay, of the mission among the
Iroquois, of the career of that imperious churchman Laval, and then,
in a hundred and fifty brilliant pages, of Canadian civilization in
the Seventeenth Century. This section is a model of instructive and
stimulating writing, grateful alike to the student of manners and to
the amateur of literary delights.
The last volume shows the construction of the ‘political and social
machine.’ The next, _Count Frontenac and New France_, shows the
‘machine in action.’ The period covered is from 1672 to 1698.
Frontenac’s collision with the order which controlled the spiritual
destinies of New France led to his recall in 1682. La Barre, who
succeeded Frontenac, was a failure. Denonville, the next governor,
could live amicably with the Jesuits, but religious fervor proved no
substitute for tact in dealing with the savages. There was need of a
man who could handle both Jesuits and Indians. At seventy years of age
Frontenac returned to prop the tottering fortunes of New France. One
learns to like the irascible old governor who was vastly jealous of his
dignity, but who, when the need was, could take a tomahawk and dance a
war-dance to the great admiration of the Indians and to the political
benefit of New France.
The story of the struggle for supremacy is continued in _A Half-Century
of Conflict_.[56] That phase of the record relating to the border
forays is almost monotonous in its unvarying details of ambuscade,
murder, the torture-stake, and captivity. The French and their Indian
allies descended on the outlying settlements of New England with fire,
sword, and tomahawk. Deerfield was sacked, and the country harried far
and wide.
In the mean time French explorers were advancing west and south. Some,
in their eagerness to anticipate the English, established posts in
Louisiana. Others, with a courage peculiar to the time rather than to
any one race, pushed beyond the Missouri to Colorado and New Mexico, to
Dakota and Montana, led on by mixed motives such as personal ambition,
love of gain, patriotism.
A spectacular event of the period was the siege and capture of
Louisbourg by a force largely composed of New England farmers and
fishermen. The project was conceived in audacity and carried out with
astonishing dash and good humor. That was singular military enterprise
which in the mind of an eye-witness bore some resemblance to a
‘Cambridge Commencement.’ ‘While the cannon bellowed in the front,’
says Parkman, ‘frolic and confusion reigned at the camp, where the men
raced, wrestled, pitched quoits, and ... ran after French cannon balls,
which were carried to the batteries to be returned to those who sent
them.’
The volumes entitled _Montcalm and Wolfe_ crown the work. With stores
of erudition, a finely tempered judgment, a practised pen, and taste
refined by thirty years’ search for the manliest and most becoming
forms of expression, Parkman gave himself to the writing of this his
masterpiece. The work is the longest as well as the best of the seven
parts. Every page, from the account of Céloron de Bienville’s journey
to the Ohio to the story of the fall of Quebec, is crowded with fact,
suggestion, eloquence. The texture of the narrative is close knit. The
early volumes are often disjointed. They resemble groups of essays.
Chapters are so completely a unit that they might be read by themselves
with little regard to what preceded or what was to follow. Not so the
_Montcalm and Wolfe_, which is a perfectly homogeneous piece of work.
This series of narratives has extraordinary merits. Let us note a few
of them.
Among Parkman’s virtues as a historian are clarity of view, a
singularly unbiased attitude, an eye for the picturesque which never
fails to seize on the essentials of form, color, and grouping,
extraordinary power of condensation, a firm grasp of details, together
with the ability to subordinate all details to the main purpose. But
other historians have had these same virtues; we must find something
more distinctive.
History as Parkman conceived it cannot be based on books and documents
alone. The historian must identify himself with the men of the past,
live their life, think their thoughts, place himself so far as possible
at their point of view. Since he cannot talk with them, he must at
least talk with their descendants. But the nature of the ‘habitant’
cannot be studied in the latitude of Boston, it must be studied
on the St. Lawrence. A city covers the site of ancient Hochelaga,
nevertheless the historian must go there, and under the same sky, with
many features of the landscape unchanged, reconstruct Hochelaga as it
was when Jacques Cartier’s eyes rested upon it in 1535. This indicates
Parkman’s method. When he visited a battle-field it was not as one who
aimed at mere mathematical correctness of description, but as an artist
whose imagination took fire at the sight of a historic spot, and who
had there a vision of the past such as would not come to him in his
library.
Would we see Parkman in a characteristic rôle we should not go to
his literary workshop, but for example to the little town of Utica,
Illinois. There one summer night, sitting on the porch of the hotel,
Parkman described to a group of farmers gathered about, the location
of La Salle’s fort and of the great Indian town. The description was
based on what he had learned from books ‘nearly two hundred years old.’
His improvised audience gave hearty assent to its accuracy. Parkman
was there to obtain accuracy of another sort. The next day he visited
all the localities which formed the background of the historic drama
and reconstructed the life of the time. This is but one instance among
hundreds which might be brought forward to show the pains he took.
Herein lay the distinctive feature of his method. He used imagination
not to embroider the facts of history, but to give to dead facts a
new life. A faculty of the mind which is supposed to vitiate history
becomes in Parkman’s hands a means for arriving at truth.
Parkman was a fortunate man. He was happy in his choice of a subject.
The theme was a great one, worthy the pen of so profound a scholar and
so gifted a literary artist. To this theme he gave his life, working
with singleness of purpose and under incredible difficulties. No trace
of this suffering can be detected in the temper of his judgments, or
in the even flow and bright radiance of his narrative. He was not only
happy in his mastery of his subject, he was most happy in his mastery
of himself. Parkman’s life is a reproach to the man who, working amid
normal conditions of health and fortune, permits himself to complain
that there are difficulties in his way.
FOOTNOTES:
[52] _The Oregon Trail_ was first published serially in ‘The
Knickerbocker Magazine.’
[53] Sedgwick’s _Parkman_, p. 217.
[54] His _Book of the Roses_ was published in 1866.
[55] Later renamed _La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West_.
[56] _A Half-Century of Conflict_ was not published until after
the _Montcalm and Wolfe_. The historian became fearful lest
some accident should prevent his completing the part of his
narrative towards which all his study had tended.
XV
_Bayard Taylor_
REFERENCES:
=Marie Hansen-Taylor and H. E. Scudder=: _Life and Letters of
Bayard Taylor_, 1884.
=A. H. Smyth=: _Bayard Taylor_, ‘American Men of Letters’ [1896].
I
HIS LIFE
Bayard Taylor in 1841, when he was sixteen, contributed to the
Philadelphia ‘Saturday Evening Post’ the verses entitled ‘Soliloquy of
a Young Poet.’ In 1878, the year of his death, he was still planning
new literary enterprises, and in so far as declining health permitted,
carrying them out. If unwearied devotion through nearly forty years to
the literary life, great fecundity in production, much taste, no little
scholarship, and unquestioned sincerity in the exercise of his art
entitle one to be called by the honorable name of man of letters, who
is more deserving than the author of _The Masque of the Gods_? To be
sure, only a few of his many books are read. But Taylor is in no worse
case than many men who tower giant-fashion above him. They likewise
have written forty volumes and are known and measured by two or three.
Taylor was partly of German, partly of English Quaker stock, and could
boast an ancestor (Robert Taylor) who had come to America with William
Penn. The fourth of the ten children of Joseph and Rebecca (Way)
Taylor, he was born at Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, on January 11,
1825. His education was got at the neighboring academies of Westchester
and Unionville. He was a rhymester at the age of seven, and had become
an industrious writer by the time he was twelve.
Having no inclination towards school-teaching and still less towards
his father’s vocation, farming, Taylor was apprenticed to a printer.
He was presently seized with a passion for travel, and in 1844, with
one hundred and forty dollars in his pocket, payment in advance for
certain letters he was to write for Philadelphia journals, he set out
on a pedestrian tour of Europe. He had a few remittances from home.
Greeley promised to print some of his letters provided they were ‘not
descriptive’ and that before writing them the young traveller made sure
that he had been in Europe ‘long enough to know something.’ Seventeen
of Taylor’s letters appeared in the ‘Tribune.’
By rigid economy Taylor managed to get on. But one must have youth to
endure the hardships of such a journey. Especially must one have youth
if he proposes, as Taylor did, to walk from Marseilles to Paris in
the cold winter rains. The history of these two years of wandering is
recounted in _Views Afoot, or Europe seen with Knapsack and Staff_
(1846).
Taylor returned to America and took up journalism. Failing in an
attempt to make of the ‘Phœnixville Pioneer’ a paper according to his
ideal, he went to New York (December, 1847). After various experiences
he secured a place on the ‘Tribune,’ was rapidly advanced, and became
in time a stockholder. He was sent to California to report on the gold
discoveries. This journey furnished him with the matter for his second
book of travel, _El Dorado, or Adventures in the Path of Empire_ (1850).
His whole subsequent career is but a variation on the themes of 1846
and 1850. He went everywhere,--to Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Asia Minor
(1851–52); to Spain and India, then on to China, where he joined
Perry’s expedition to Japan (1853). He was in Germany, Norway, and
Lapland in 1856, in Greece in 1857–58, in Russia in 1862–63 (where for
a while he held the post of secretary of legation), in Switzerland, the
Pyrenees, and Corsica in 1868, and in Egypt and Iceland in the same
year (1874).
All his adventures were transmuted into books: _A Journey to Central
Africa_, 1854; _The Lands of the Saracen_, 1854; _A Visit to India,
China, and Japan in the Year 1853_, 1855; _Northern Travel_, 1857;
_Travels in Greece and Russia_, 1859; _At Home and Abroad_, 1859; _At
Home and Abroad_, ‘second series,’ 1862; _Colorado_, 1867; _By-Ways of
Europe_, 1869; _Egypt and Iceland_, 1874.