The average American traveler is better acquainted with foreign lands
than with his own country. Nor is he unique in this regard. I have
known persons who lived a lifetime within a dozen squares of
Westminster Abbey, and were never inside of that historic cathedral, as
I have known persons to live forty years not fifty miles distant from
Niagara, and never to have heard the organ speech of that great
cataract. This is a common flaw in intellect. We tend to
underestimate the near, and exaggerate the remote. Another application
of the same frailty is noticeable in literature. Homegrown literature
is, with not a few, depreciated. According to their logic, good things
can not come out of Nazareth, and imported products are the only viands
worth a Sybarite palate. In mediaeval days the form assumed was
different, while the principle remained the same. Then the question of
value turned upon whether a work was written in the learned language;
namely, in Latin. If written in the vernacular, the work was
immediately set down as vulgar. One of Martin Luther's valuable
services was that, when the reverse was prevalent, he honored the
vernacular of his country, and insisted that it be taught in the
schools, a thing accounted an educational heresy in his time; and in
his translation of the Bible into German, he created German literature.
Americans are a race of readers, and are the Rome to which all
literature turns face and feet. Besides many books not great, all
great books are translated into English. Everybody's book comes to
America. We are a cosmopolitan population in a literary way. If you
were to look at the book-counters of each succeeding month, you would
see how all the writing world has been writing for us. From such
conditions of supply, our taste becomes cultivated. We feel ourselves
connoisseurs. If we give a more ready reading to a foreign than to a
domestic book, the reason is not of necessity that the home book is
deficient in interest or literary finish, but may be attributed simply
to an undesigned and perhaps unperceived predisposition toward the
imported and the remote.
I confess to a love for what is American. I love its Government; its
prevalent and genuine democracy; its chance for the common man and
woman to rise into success and fame and valuable service; its
inheritance, unblemished by primogeniture or entail; its universality
of education to a degree of intelligence; its history and tendency; and
I love its literature, though, as appears to me, our historians have
done the highest grade of work of any of our litterateurs--in saying
which there is no disparagement of other literary workers, but simply a
stated belief in the pre-eminent value of the historian in American
letters. What I mean is this: During the fifty years last passed there
were poets and novelists in England who, with all deference to our own
writers, were equal or superior to the poets and novelists of America.
America had no poets who stood the peer of Browning and Tennyson; and
among novelists, our Hawthorne could not be said to surpass a
Thackeray, Dickens, or Eliot. But say, proudly, beyond the sea were no
historians the masters of Bancroft, Prescott, Motley, and Parkman.
This article wishes to point out the quality and range of American
historians, with an expressed hope of causing research in this ample
and fertile field.
Though first on the soil of the Western Hemisphere, the Spaniard has
made no acknowledged and valuable contribution to American history.
Nor, indeed, has any nation of this hemisphere, save our own. The
French and Spanish Jesuit submitted religious monographs touching the
early days of occupancy of New France and Mexico; but these will
readily be seen to be rather chronicles than histories. And the
historian, native to the United States, is he in whose hands have been
the historical studies of our Western World. La Salle, Hennepin,
Marquette, and Las Casas have written faulty but valuable memoirs; but
they do not reach the dignity and value of histories, being what one
might name crude ore rather than refined gold.
Another thing worthy a glad emphasis is, that America is her own
historian. The New World has begotten the writers of its own story.
How fully this is true will not be appreciated until a detailed and
instantaneous survey is taken. Look down on this plain of history as
one does on Tuscany from an Alp. Thus, and thus only, can we value our
possession. In this estimate, mention is made of the greater
historians, not because others are not worthy of notice, but because
the scope of this essay does not allow, inasmuch as reference is here
had to the specific gravity of the historian and the epoch of our
history he has exploited.
Washington Irving, essayist, biographer, humorist, was, before all, a
historian in temper, and was drawn as by some subtle and unseen
attraction to study that nation to which America owed its discovery.
Irving is an evident American. He loved the land through whose
palisades the stately Hudson flowed. What touched America touched
Irving, and who had loved or helped America had won Irving's heart as a
trophy. And such evident patriotism is commendable in citizen and
writer. We love not Caesar less, but Rome the more, when we believe in
America before all nations of history. I love the patriot above the
cosmopolitan, because in him is an honest look, a homeliness that
touches the heart like the sight of a pasture-field, with its broken
bars, where our childhood ran with happy feet. Carlyle was against
things because they were English; so was Matthew Arnold. These men
were self-expatriated in spirit. I like not the attitude. Give us men
who love native land beyond all other lands, and who, removed
therefrom, turn homesick eyes toward its invisible boundaries. Irving,
admirable in many ways, was in no way more to be admired than in his
predilection for his country as a theme for his historian's muse. To
him pay tribute, because he is historian of the discovery of our brave
Western Hemisphere. Irving has told the story of that great admiral of
the ocean, Christopher Columbus. This memoir may not be exact. Irving
may have idealized this pathfinder of the ocean; though if he has, he
has observed the proprieties, literary and imaginative, as many
successors have not. Some writers are seemingly bent on making every
great soul commonplace, thinking that if they fail to belittle a
distinguished benefactor of the race, if they have not played the
Vandal with a swagger and conceit like Jack Falstaff, they have
ignominiously failed; when the plain truth is, that if they succeeded
in taking the glamour for those heroes of whom they write, they have
hurt mankind so far, and have impoverished imagination and endeavor by
their invidious task. We need not suppose Christopher Columbus and
Washington saints, seeing there is no inclination to canonize them; but
we need not hold their follies up to wake the guffaw of a crowd. Such
laughter is dearly bought. One thing I hold so true no reasoning can
damage it; namely, that a man like Columbus had nobler moods on which
he voyaged as his caravel through the blue seas. Columbus was no
swineherd, but a dreamer, whose dreams enlarged the world by half, and
gave a new civilization room and triumph. He was of his age, and his
morality was not unimpeachable; but in him were still great moralities
and humanities. He had mountain-tops in his spirits, and on these
peaks he stood. What puerile work it is to attempt robbing Columbus of
his discoverer's glory by attempting to show how vikings discovered
this continent! Such historians might fight a less bloody battle still
by showing that the aborigines discovered this continent before the
Norsemen did! What boots such folly? What gold of benefit comes of
such quests? Certain we are that when Columbus set sail for a New
World, no one believed the earth was round as he did, and no one knew
the Norsemen had piloted across seas and found land; and Europe was
ignorant of any shore westward, and Columbus, in his ignorance, risked
all and vanquished all.
"Dragging up drowned honor by the locks,"
as says our Shakespeare. Columbus is America's benefactor. He showed
the Puritans a New World, toward whose shores to sail, and behind whose
harbor-bar to cast anchor. Nothing can invalidate these claims. Honor
him who honors us in giving us a rendezvous for liberty and
civilization. This mood of history Washington Irving caught, and
because he did, I honor him. He was sagacious. He did not traduce a
hero, but enthroned him. In short, Irving behaved toward Christopher
Columbus as a historian and a gentleman, and set Americans a pattern in
history-writing in that they should be the historiographers of their
own world. This Nestor's lessons were heard and heeded. If you care
to read Irving's various historical writings, the logic of these
writings will appear. America was his home and love. He thought to
write the story of how a brave man gave a world this huge room it knew
not of. Loyalty made him historian. His researches gave him
familiarity with Spanish archives. The movement of the era touched
him; for Irving was susceptible to the finer moods of literature, as
any who reads the "Sketch-book" knows; and once having set foot on
Spanish historical _terra firma_, he began a journey as a traveler
might. America led Irving to Columbus, Columbus led him to Spain,
Spain led him to Mohammedism, and Mohammedism led him to Mohammed. How
natural his literary travels! Consider the consecutiveness of his
historical attempts: "Life of Columbus," "Spanish Voyages," "Conquest
of Grenada," "Conquest of Spain," "Moorish Chronicles," and "Life of
Mohammed." The influence of this historical research, too, you shall
find in reading his romances: "Wolfert's Roost," "Legends of the
Conquest of Spain," "Bracebridge Hall," and "Alhambra."
Patriotism taught Irving's Clio to find her voice. Nor must we forget,
in any estimate of Irving's service, his biography of Washington. This
is his tribute to the battle-days of his beloved America.
In strict affinity with Irving in the time of his history is Prescott.
This man is a distinguished historian. To history he devoted his life,
and to such effect that he is to be ranked among the masters of history
among the ages. America attracted him as it had attracted Irving. The
era of the discovery enticed him as the voyage had enticed Columbus.
"Ferdinand and Isabella" are the dominant voices on his stage. Irving
made them subordinate, and made Columbus the chief player, which mode
Prescott reverses. The union of Castile and Aragon, and the subsequent
wars against the Moriscoes, which virtually put the knife in their
heart and concluded that triumph which had been begun by Charles Martel
at Tours, is an attractive portion of history. In Prescott, as in
Motley, is a wealth of research which fairly bewilders. Nothing is
extemporaneous. Archives are ransacked. Moldy correspondence is made
to tell its belated story. Certainly Prescott is abundant in
information. I do not recall, save in Gibbon's, a series of histories
where so much new knowledge is retailed as in Prescott. In seeming
looseness of phrase, I have used the term "new knowledge," but these
words are happily descriptive of "Conquest of Mexico" and "Conquest of
Peru," because the fields were practically untrodden to the ordinary
reader. Everything is new, like a college to the freshman. We see a
New World in more senses than one. The freshness of the facts is
exhilarating. We march with Cortes; we conquer with Pizarro; we
inspect Montezuma's palace; we become interested in the industrial
system of the Incas, a system which should have given Henry George and
Edward Bellamy a delight without alloy; we perceive the incredible
valor and perseverance and endurance of Cortes; we front "new faces,
other minds;" we discover the Amazon through perils and hardships so
multitudinous and so severe as to tempt us to think these narrations a
myth; we see rapacity insatiable as death, a bloody idol-worship
pitiless and terrible; we read Prescott's history with growing avidity
and increasing information; read Prescott, and become wiser concerning
the aborigines of the Americas and the possibilities of human fortitude
and prowess. A study of the Spanish era of discovery and conquest
naturally led to a study of Charles V, grandson of Ferdinand and
Isabella, and Prescott has accordingly brought up to date "Robertson's
Life of Charles V," appending a biography of Charles V subsequent to
his abdication; and as a certificate of indefatigable industry in
historical research is an incomplete but exhaustive memoir, entitled,
"The Life of Philip II." This work is written with such fairness of
spirit and such wealth of information and investigation, such vivid
presentation of a reign which had more of the movement of the universal
dominion than any since the Roman days, and thus written so as to make
us rebellious in spirit in finding the work incomplete. Death came too
soon to give our indefatigable author time to complete his voluminous
history. Read Prescott as a matter of American pride, and because he
has dealt more capably with the era with which he treats than any other
historian.
The United States has supplied her own historians, not needing to go
abroad for either history or historian. George Bancroft, with a
private library larger by almost half than the ten thousand-volume
library Edward Gibbon used in writing "The Decline and Fall of the
Roman empire;" George Bancroft, whose literary life was dedicated to
one task, and that the writing the life of his country prior to the
Constitution; George Bancroft, publicist as well as student of history,
and who in such relation represented his Government with distinction at
the courts of Germany and England,--George Bancroft has written a
history of the United States which will no more become archaic than
Macaulay or Grote. While one may now and then hear from the lips of
the so-called "younger school of American historians" a criticism of
George Bancroft, their carping is ungracious and gratuitous. Theirs
has not been the art to equal him, nor will be. A literary life
devoted to the mastery of one era of a nation's history is a worthy
sight, good for the eyes, and arguing sanity of method and profundity
of investigation. Whoever has read Bancroft can testify to his
readableness, to his comprehensive knowledge, to his philosophical
grasp, to his ability to make dead deeds vividly visible, and to his
gift of interesting the reader in events and their philosophy. He has
written a great history of the United States before the Constitution,
so that no author has felt called on or equipped to reduplicate his
task in the same detail and manner.
Where George Bancroft left off, Schouler has begun. More dramatic than
Bancroft, and in consequence more compelling in interest, the history
marches at a double-quick, like a charging regiment. His pictures of
John Quincy Adams, Calhoun, Clay, Webster, Sumner, Douglas, Lincoln,
and a host beside, vitalize those men. We live with that giant brood.
I have found Schouler invigoratingly helpful. He affords knowledge and
inspiration; a man is behind his pages; we feel him and acknowledge him.
One change has come over the spirit of history to which all must bear
joyful witness, and that is the passing of the king and the advent of
the people. The world has grown more democratic than it knows. The
people engage attention now. We do not know so much of Queen Victoria;
but of the conquering, splendid race whose hereditary sovereign she is,
we know much, very much. The case used to be wholly otherwise, the
sovereign monopolizing attention; but that day is passed. So let it
be. This change is one needed, and waited for long, and longed for
eagerly. John Richard Green saw the demonetization of kings and a
remonetization of the people, and so wrote a revolutionary history,
calling it "A History of the English People," in which he subordinated
the intrigues of courts and the selfish wars of potentates to the quiet
growth of national spirit and the characteristics of domestic life, and
the development and solidification of social instincts into social
customs, and the framing of a literature, the reformation of religion,
and the direction of the thought of the many. These constituted, as he
believed, and as we believe, the genuine biography of a people; and
McMaster has done for the United States what Green has done for
England. His "History of the People of the United States" is so packed
with knowledge; so accurate in laying hold of those things which we did
not know, but wanted to know; so free in giving us the inside life of
our country, as to make us wonder what we did before our historian of
the people came to lend us knowledge. My conviction is, that a careful
reading of McMaster will suffice to cure most of our dyspeptic feelings
about national discontent in our time, and dispel the fabulous notion
of an older time in America, when everybody was happy and everybody was
contented. No such day ever existed. The kingdom of contentment is
within us, like the kingdom of God. McMaster tells us the unvarnished
tale of inflation and political and financial asininity in the former
days, so that when he is done we are less liable to that frailty of the
ignorant soul; namely, the moaning, "The former days were better than
these."
Thus far, those authors have been named who have chronicled the
discovery of America, the conquering of the Southern Hemisphere or the
Eastern territory of that era known as the United States. This was
done to keep a natural movement and logical progress. At this point,
however, must be mentioned those voluminous histories of the States and
Territories of the Pacific Coast, written by H. H. Bancroft. They are
treasure-houses of material for the future historian. Hubert Bancroft
has become the historian of the Spanish dominion in the United States,
and deserves favorable thought for his wealth of research into archives
which might have been lost, or at least less ample with the advance of
time. Topography, geography, archaeology. State papers,--all have
contributed their quota to him, and he has, after the generous manner
of the scholar, contributed to us.
Francis Parkman is a distinguished master in the art of history. His
theme is the "American Indian" and the "French Occupancy of America,"
and he has told a thrilling story. He knows the Indian as no one of
our historians has known him, and has told of his noble traits, and his
ruthless forays, and his sanguine cruelty. His utter lack of thrift;
his feast-and-famine life; his stealth, stolidity, duplicity, and
ferocity,--all are rehearsed. To read his record of the Indian is to
have much of the glamour thrown around him by James Fenimore Cooper
stripped from him incontinently and forever. The Indian was
self-exterminative. He was the assassin of his race, and civilization
was impossible so long as the American Indian was dominant; so that
those who shed tears over the white man's conquest of the Indian may
not well have weighed their cause. The Indian was not the quiet,
inoffensive innocent presented in Cuba at its discovery. There were
Indians and Indians. Some of them were friendly, peaceful, and kindly;
but that this was the character of the American Indian as a whole is
totally incorrect. Parkman shows that the Indian was, throughout North
America, in his native strength furious in his ferocity, relentless as
death, cruel beyond imagination, and occupied a territory he neither
cultivated nor attempted to. The Indians were military vagabonds,
whose continued control had left America an unpeopled wilderness to
this day. Huntsmen and warriors they were; citizens and cultivators
and civilizers they were not, and never would have been. Parkman tells
the truth as history found them, and those truths are well worth our
reading, because in their perusal we pass from sentimentality to
reason, and see how this America of our day, rich, cultivated,
civilized, and possessed of the largest amount of personal liberty ever
vouchsafed to a citizen, is a noble exchange for the thoughtlessness,
improvidence, and barbarity which were original holders of this realm.
Speaking for myself, no author ever helped me to knowledge of the
character of the aborigines of North America as Francis Parkman has
done. I see that wild past, and feel it. And he has written the
thrilling story of the French attempt to build an empire; and the
attempt was courageous to the verge of wonder. There was in the
Frenchman a careless ease and courage and sprightliness of temper,
which lifted him above danger, as a boat is lifted on a billow's
shoulders. Those perils were his drink; with a laugh and a jest he met
his appointment with death as he would have met tryst with a woman. In
"The Romance of American Geography," I have described the genius of the
French voyager, for which I have an unbounded admiration, and in which
I take an intemperate delight. He is the discoverer at his best, but
the colonizer at his worst. The Jesuits had a brave chapter in the
French occupancy. Their labors and sufferings and voyagings, their
fealty to what they thought to be the cause of God, makes us proud of
them, as if they were our own fellow-citizens. The settlement of
Montreal and Quebec and contiguous territory, the religious fervor that
mixed with the military spirit as waters of two streams mingle in a
mountain-meadow,--read Parkman, and discover the dramatic instincts of
these episodes which can be rehearsed no more upon our continent.
Their day is past; but it was a great and stirring day. Gilbert
Parker's "The Seats of the Mighty" is a chapter, torn from Parkman's
"French Regime in Canada." All his facts and the romance are accurate,
and are taken from Parkman's narrative, which misses nothing, but tells
all. Parker's "Pierre and his People," and "An Adventure of the North"
are tales of adventure, dewy with the freshness of a frontier world,
and are in brief a section of the old French voyagers' days. Parkman's
"Wolfe and Montcalm" is a picture, painted in smoke and blood, where
heroism of Englishmen and Frenchmen mix themselves in an inextricable
confusion. Pray you read Parkman, and be transported to a world where
great deeds were done by men whose lives were as contradictory as an
April day; but "their works do follow them" for all that, and do
glorify them. Be glad for Francis Parkman, historian.
Many historians there are. John Fiske has written chapters on the
discovery and colonization days; Rhodes has written on our
Constitutional history; Winsor has written on our antiquities; Baird
has written an exhaustive and competent history of the Huguenots, a
series one will do more than well to read. Many scholars have written
comparatively brief memoirs of the United States. Localities and
States and single villages have had their historians; but the
commanding figures whose faces fill the canvas, so to say,--of them
this appreciation is written, to point youth to an Oregon of delight,
where their leisure may stray with abundant profit and increasing
pleasure, and, as I hope, with growing pride in American literature, so
that they may make mental boast of America's sons, who have been stanch
to enjoy and study the history of their own native land.
My final word is of that brilliant, irascible, and impressible
American, John Lothrop Motley, historian of the Dutch Republic; and
fitting it is that a native of the first great stable Republic was
drawn to study the European Republic which rose at the touch of William
the Silent's genius, and sank back into lethargy of kingship when the
blood of the tragic and heroic inauguration was all spilt. The contact
of the United Netherlands with American history and future is known to
all. From the Netherlands the Puritans set sail to found what proved
to be a colony and Republic. The extent to which the Netherlands
exercised an influence in shaping the future of the American
Commonwealth has not been determined, and can not be, though Douglas
Campbell has maintained that to the Dutch, and not to the English
Puritan, nor yet to the Magna Charta, does the American Republic owe
its chief debt. The theme is productive and stimulative and worthy,
though the facts are indeterminate. America is attached to the Dutch
Republic as a bold attempt whose failure was nobler than many
successes. The Puritan exodus from Holland, when Pastor John Robinson
prayed, preached, and prophesied, is one of the most thrilling events
recorded of the seventeenth century--a century crowded with doings that
thrill the flesh like a bugle-call.
Motley's histories are "The Rise of the Dutch Republic," "The United
Netherlands," and "John of Barneveld," a series which, for brilliancy
of characterization of men and times and events, and interest
stimulated and held, may rank, without hyperbole, with the writings of
Lord Macaulay. Both are always special pleaders, as I am of opinion
history ought probably to be, seeing that it is human nature, and will,
in all but solitary instances, be the case whether or no; both are
fascinating as a romancist; both are colorists, gorgeous as Rembrandt;
both glorify and make you admire and love their heroes, whether you are
so minded or not; both have made the epoch of which they wrote vivid as
the landscape upon which the sunset pours its crimson dyes. Motley's
hero was William the Silent, Prince of Orange; and Macaulay's hero was
William III, King of England, Prince of Orange. Motley will bear being
ranked as a great historian. He hates Philip II, as I suppose good
folks ought who despise egotism, intolerance, vindictiveness, and
horrible cruelty. He lauds William the Silent as soldier and
statesman, Prince Maurice as a soldier, and John of Barneveld as
statesman. Motley marches across old battle-fields like a soldier clad
in steel. He gives portraits of Queen Elizabeth, of Leicester, of
Granvelle, of Prince Maurice, of John of Barneveld, of Henry of
Navarre, of Philip II, of Count Egmont, of Charles V, of Don John of
Austria, of Hugo Grotius, and of William the Silent, which are as noble
as the portraits painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds. I confess myself a
heavy debtor to Motley. He has taught me so much; has familiarized me
with the great world-figure, William the Silent, so that I feel at home
with him and his struggle, and participate with him in them. He has
drawn so clearly the figures of Romanist, Arminian, and Calvinist, as
to make them fairly glow upon his pages. Not as minister to St. James,
under President Grant, was Motley at his best; but rifling the archives
of Holland and Spain with an industry which knew no bounds, and
rehearsing the dry-as-dust discoveries in histories that glow like a
furnace. Here is the field in which he is all but unconquerable. Long
live the American historians!