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_ENGLISH MEN OF LETTERS_
_PRESCOTT_
[Illustration: image of the book's cover]
_ENGLISH MEN OF LETTERS_
WILLIAM HICKLING
PRESCOTT
BY
HARRY THURSTON PECK
New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD.
1905
_All rights reserved_
COPYRIGHT, 1905,
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Set up and electrotyped. Published May, 1905.
Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing & Co.--Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
To
WILLIAM ARCHIBALD DUNNING
_AMICITIAE CAUSA_
PREFATORY NOTE
For the purely biographical portion of this book an especial
acknowledgment of obligation is due to the valuable collection of
Prescott's letters and memoranda made by his friend George Ticknor, and
published in 1864 as part of Ticknor's _Life of W. H. Prescott_. All
other available sources, however, have been explored, and are
specifically mentioned either in the text or in the footnotes.
H. T. P.
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY,
March 1, 1905.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
PAGE
THE NEW ENGLAND HISTORIANS 1
CHAPTER II
EARLY YEARS 13
CHAPTER III
THE CHOICE OF A CAREER 39
CHAPTER IV
SUCCESS 54
CHAPTER V
IN MID CAREER 72
CHAPTER VI
THE LAST TEN YEARS 99
CHAPTER VII
"FERDINAND AND ISABELLA"--PRESCOTT'S STYLE 121
CHAPTER VIII
"THE CONQUEST OF MEXICO" AS LITERATURE AND AS
HISTORY 133
CHAPTER IX
"THE CONQUEST OF PERU"--"PHILIP II." 160
CHAPTER X
PRESCOTT'S RANK AS AN HISTORIAN 173
INDEX 181
_PRESCOTT_
WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT
CHAPTER I
THE NEW ENGLAND HISTORIANS
Throughout the first few decades of the nineteenth century, the United
States, though forming a political entity, were in everything but name
divided into three separate nations, each one of which was quite unlike
the other two. This difference sprang partly from the character of the
population in each, partly from divergent tendencies in American
colonial development, and partly from conditions which were the result
of both these causes. The culture-history, therefore, of each of the
three sections exhibits, naturally enough, a distinct and definite phase
of intellectual activity, which is reflected very clearly in the records
of American literature.
In the Southern States, just as in the Southern colonies out of which
they grew, the population was homogeneous and of English stock. Almost
the sole occupation of the people was agriculture, while the tone of
society was markedly aristocratic, as was to be expected from a
community dominated by great landowners who were also the masters of
many slaves. These landowners, living on their estates rather than in
towns and cities, caring nothing for commerce or for manufactures,
separated from one another by great distances, and cherishing the
intensely conservative traditions of that England which saw the last of
the reigning Stuarts, were inevitably destined to intellectual
stagnation. The management of their plantations, the pleasures of the
chase, and the exercise of a splendid though half-barbaric hospitality,
satisfied the ideals which they had inherited from their Tory ancestors.
Horses and hounds, a full-blooded conviviality, and the exercise of a
semi-feudal power, occupied their minds and sufficiently diverted them.
Such an atmosphere was distinctly unfavourable to the development of a
love of letters and of learning. The Southern gentleman regarded the
general diffusion of education as a menace to his class; while for
himself he thought it more or less unnecessary. He gained a practical
knowledge of affairs by virtue of his position. As for culture, he had
upon the shelves of his library, where also were displayed his weapons
and the trophies of the chase, a few hundred volumes of the standard
essayists, poets, and dramatists of a century before. If he seldom read
them and never added to them, they at least implied a recognition of
polite learning and such a degree of literary taste as befitted a
Virginian or Carolinian gentleman. But, practically, English literature
had for him come to an end with Addison and Steele and Pope and their
contemporaries. The South stood still in the domain of letters and
education. Not that there were lacking men who cherished the ambition to
make for themselves a name in literature. There were many such, among
whom Gayarre, Beverly, and Byrd deserve an honourable remembrance; but
their surroundings were unfavourable, and denied to them that
intelligent appreciation which inspires the man of letters to press on
to fresh achievement. An interesting example is found in the abortive
history of Virginia undertaken by Dr. William Stith, who was President
of William and Mary College, and who possessed not only scholarship but
the gift of literary expression. The work which he began, however, was
left unfinished, because of an utter lack of interest on the part of the
public for whom it had been undertaken. Dr. Stith's own quaint comment
throws a light upon contemporary conditions. He had laboured diligently
in collecting documents which represented original sources of
information; yet, when he came to publish the first and only volume of
his history, he omitted many of them, giving as his reason:--
"I perceive, to my no small Surprise and Mortification, that some
of my Countrymen (and those too, Persons of high Fortune and
Distinction) seemed to be much alarmed, and to grudge, that a
complete History of their own Country would run to more than one
Volume, and cost them above half a Pistole. I was, therefore,
obliged to restrain my Hand, ... for fear of enhancing the Price,
to the immense Charge and irreparable Damage of such generous and
publick-spirited Gentlemen."[1]
The Southern universities were meagrely attended; and though the sons of
wealthy planters might sometimes be sent to Oxford or, more usually, to
Princeton or to Yale, the discipline thus acquired made no general
impression upon the class to which they belonged. In fact, the
intellectual energy of the South found its only continuous and powerful
expression in the field of politics. To government and statesmanship
its leading minds gave much attention, for only thus could they retain
in national affairs the supremacy which they arrogated to themselves and
which was necessary to preserve their peculiar institution. Hence, there
were to be found among the leaders of the Southern people a few
political philosophers like Jefferson, a larger number of political
casuists like Calhoun, and a swarm of political rhetoricians like
Patrick Henry, Hayne, Legare, and Yancey. But beyond the limits of
political life the South was intellectually sterile. So narrowing and so
hostile to liberal culture were its social conditions that even to this
day it has not produced a single man of letters who can be truthfully
described as eminent, unless the name of Edgar Allan Poe be cited as an
exception whose very brilliance serves only to prove and emphasise the
rule.
In the Middle States, on the other hand, a very different condition of
things existed. Here the population was never homogeneous. The English
Royalists and the Dutch in New York, the English Quakers and the Germans
in Pennsylvania and the Swedes in Delaware, made inevitable, from the
very first, a cosmopolitanism that favoured variety of interests, with a
resulting breadth of view and liberality of thought. Manufactures
flourished and foreign commerce was extensively pursued, insuring
diversity of occupation. The two chief cities of the nation were here,
and not far distant from each other. Wealth was not unevenly
distributed, and though the patroon system had created in New York a
landed gentry, this class was small, and its influence was only one of
many. Comfort was general, religious freedom was unchallenged,
education was widely and generally diffused. The large urban population
created an atmosphere of urbanity. Even in colonial times, New York and
Philadelphia were the least provincial of American towns. They attracted
to themselves, not only the most interesting people from the other
sections, but also many a European wanderer, who found there most of the
essential graces of life, with little or none of that combined austerity
and rawness which elsewhere either disgusted or amused him. We need not
wonder, then, if it was in the Middle States that American literature
really found its birth, or if the forms which it there assumed were
those which are touched by wit and grace and imagination. Franklin,
frozen and repelled by what he thought the bigotry of Boston, sought
very early in his life the more congenial atmosphere of Philadelphia,
where he found a public for his copious writings, which, if not
precisely literature, were, at any rate, examples of strong, idiomatic
English, conveying the shrewd philosophy of an original mind. Charles
Brockden Brown first blazed the way in American fiction with six novels,
amid whose turgid sentences and strange imaginings one may here and
there detect a touch of genuine power and a striving after form.
Washington Irving, with his genial humour and well-bred ease, was the
very embodiment of the spirit of New York. Even Professor Barrett
Wendell, whose critical bias is wholly in favour of New England,
declares that Irving was the first of American men of letters, as he was
certainly the first American writer to win a hearing outside of his own
country. And to these we may add still others,--Freneau, from whom both
Scott and Campbell borrowed; Cooper, with his stirring sea-tales and
stories of Indian adventure; and Bryant, whose early verses were thought
to be too good to have been written by an American. And there were also
Drake and Halleck and Woodworth and Paine, some of whose poetry still
continues to be read and quoted. The mention of them serves as a
reminder that American literature in the nineteenth century, like
English literature in the fourteenth, found its origin where wealth,
prosperity, and a degree of social elegance made possible an
appreciation of belles-lettres.
Far different was it in New England. There, as in the South, the
population was homogeneous and English. But it was a Puritan population,
of which the environment and the conditions of its life retarded, and at
the same time deeply influenced, the evolution of its literature. One
perceives a striking parallel between the early history of the people of
New England and that of the people of ancient Rome. Each was forced to
wrest a living from a rugged soil. Each dwelt in constant danger from
formidable enemies. The Roman was ready at every moment to draw his
sword for battle with Faliscans, Samnites, or Etruscans. The New
Englander carried his musket with him even to the house of prayer,
fearing the attack of Pequots or Narragansetts. The exploits of such
half-mythical Roman heroes as Camillus and Cincinnatus find their
analogue in the achievements credited to Miles Standish and the doughty
Captain Church. Early Rome knew little of the older and more polished
civilisation of Greece. New England was separated by vast distances from
the richer life of Europe. In Rome, as in New England, religion was
linked closely with all the forms of government; and it was a religion
which appealed more strongly to men's sense of duty and to their fears,
than to their softer feelings. The Roman gods needed as much
propitiation as did the God of Jonathan Edwards. When a great calamity
befell the Roman people, they saw in it the wrath of their divinities
precisely as the true New Englander was taught to view it as a
"providence." In both commonwealths, education of an elementary sort was
deemed essential; but it was long before it reached the level of
illumination.
Like influences yield like results. The Roman character, as moulded in
the Republic's early years, was one of sternness and efficiency. It
lacked gayety, warmth, and flexibility. And the New England character
resembled it in all of these respects. The historic worthies of Old Rome
would have been very much at ease in early Massachusetts. Cato the
Censor could have hobnobbed with old Josiah Quincy, for they were
temperamentally as like as two peas. It is only the Romans of the Empire
who would have felt out of place in a New England environment. Horace
might conceivably have found a smiling _angulus terrarum_ somewhere on
the lower Hudson, but he would have pined away beside the Nashua; while
to Ovid, Beacon Street would have seemed as ghastly as the frozen slopes
of Tomi. And when we compare the native period of Roman literature with
the early years of New England's literary history, the parallel becomes
more striking still. In New England, as in Rome, beneath all the forms
of a self-governing and republican State, there existed a genuine
aristocracy whose prestige was based on public service of some sort;
and in New England, as in Rome, public service had in it a theocratic
element. In civil life, the most honourable occupation for a free
citizen was to share in this public service. Hence, the disciplines
which had a direct relation to government were the only civic
disciplines to be held in high consideration. Such an attitude
profoundly affected the earliest attempts at literature. The two
literary or semi-literary pursuits which have a close relation to
statesmanship are oratory and history--oratory, which is the statesman's
instrument, and history, which is in part the record of his
achievements. Therefore, at Rome, a line of native orators arose before
a native poet won a hearing, and therefore, too, the annalists and
chroniclers precede the dramatists.
In New England it was much the same. Almost from the founding of the
Massachusetts Bay Colony, there were men among the colonists who wrote
down with diffusive dulness the records of whatever they had seen and
suffered. Governor William Bradford composed a history of New England;
and Thomas Prince, minister of the Old South Church, compiled another
work of like title, described by its author as told "in the Form of
Annals." Hutchinson prepared a history of Massachusetts Bay; and many
others had collected local traditions, which seemed to them of great
moment, and had preserved them in books, or else in manuscripts which
were long afterwards to be published by zealous antiquarians. Cotton
Mather's curious _Magnalia_, printed in 1700, was intended by its author
to be history, though strictly speaking it is theological and is clogged
with inappropriate learning,--Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. The parallel
between early Rome and early Massachusetts breaks down, however, when we
consider the natural temperament of the two peoples as distinct from
that which external circumstances cultivated in them. Underneath the
sternness and severity which were the fruits of Puritanism, there
existed in the New England character a touch of spirituality, of
idealism, and of imagination such as were always foreign to the Romans.
Under the repression of a grim theocracy, New England idealism still
found its necessary outlet in more than one strange form. We can trace
it in the hot religious eloquence of Edwards even better than in the
imitative poetry of Mrs. Bradstreet. It is to be found even in such
strange panics as that which shrieked for the slaying of the Salem
"witches." Time alone was needed to bring tolerance and intellectual
freedom, and with them a freer choice of literary themes and moods. The
New England temper remained, and still remains, a serious one; yet
ultimately it was to find expression in forms no longer harsh and rigid,
but modelled upon the finer lines of truth and beauty.
The development was a gradual one. The New England spirit still exacted
sober subjects of its writers. And so the first evolution of New England
literature took place along the path of historical composition. The
subjects were still local or, at the most, national; but there was a
steady drift away from the annalistic method to one which partook of
conscious art. In the writings of Jared Sparks there is seen imperfectly
the scientific spirit, entirely self-developed and self-trained. His
laborious collections of historical material, and his dry but accurate
biographies, mark a distinct advance beyond his predecessors. Here, at
least, are historical scholarship and, in the main, a conscientious
scrupulosity in documentation. It is true that Sparks was charged, and
not quite unjustly, with garbling some of the material which he
preserved; yet, on the whole, one sees in him the founder of a school of
American historians. What he wrote was history, if it was not
literature. George Bancroft, his contemporary, wrote history, and was
believed for a time to have written it in literary form. To-day his six
huge volumes, which occupied him fifty years in writing, and which bring
the reader only to the inauguration of Washington, make but slight
appeal to a cultivated taste. The work is at once too ponderous and too
rhetorical. Still, in its way, it marks another step.
Up to this time, however, American historians were writing only for a
restricted public. They had not won a hearing beyond the country whose
early history they told. Their themes possessed as yet no interest for
foreign nations, where the feeble American Republic was little known and
little noticed. The republican experiment was still a doubtful one, and
there was nothing in the somewhat paltry incidents of its early years to
rivet the attention of the other hemisphere. "America" was a convenient
term to denote an indefinite expanse of territory somewhere beyond seas.
A London bishop could write to a clergyman in New York and ask him for
details about the work of a missionary in Newfoundland without
suspecting the request to be absurd. The British War Office could
believe the river Bronx a mighty stream, the crossing of which was full
of strategic possibilities. As for the American people, they interested
Europe about as much as did the Boers in the days of the early treks.
Even so acute an observer as Talleyrand, after visiting the United
States, carried away with him only a general impression of rusticity and
bad manners. When Napoleon asked him what he thought of the Americans,
he summed up his opinion with a shrug: _Sire, ce sont des fiers cochons
et des cochons fiers_. Tocqueville alone seems to have viewed the
nascent nation with the eye of prescience. For the rest, petty
skirmishes with Indians, a few farmers defending a rustic bridge, and a
somewhat discordant gathering of planters, country lawyers, and
drab-clad tradesmen held few suggestions of the picturesque and, to most
minds, little that was significant to the student of politics and
institutional history.
There were, however, other themes, American in a larger sense, which
contained within themselves all the elements of the romantic, while they
closely linked the ambitions of old Europe with the fortunes and the
future of the New World. The narration of these might well appeal to
that interest which the more sober annals of England in America wholly
failed to rouse. There was the story of New France, which had for its
background a setting of savage nature, while in the foreground was
fought out the struggle between Englishmen and Frenchmen, at grips in a
feud perpetuated through the centuries. There was the story of Spanish
conquest in the south,--a true romance of chivalry, which had not yet
been told in all its richness of detail. To choose a subject of this
sort, and to develop it in a fitting way, was to write at once for the
Old World and the New. The task demanded scholarship, and presented
formidable difficulties. The chief sources of information were to be
found in foreign lands. To secure them needed wealth. To compare and
analyse and sift them demanded critical judgment of a high order. And
something more was needed,--a capacity for artistic presentation. When
both these gifts were found united in a single mind, historical writing
in New England had passed beyond the confines of its early crudeness and
had reached the stage where it claimed rank as lasting literature.
Rightly viewed, the name of William Hickling Prescott is something more
than a mere landmark in the field of historical composition. It
signalises the beginning of a richer growth in New England letters,--the
coming of a time when the barriers of a Puritan scholasticism were
broken down. Prescott is not merely the continuator of Sparks. He is the
precursor of Hawthorne and Parkman and Lowell. He takes high rank among
American historians; but he is enrolled as well in a still more
illustrious group by virtue of his literary fame.