§ 35. Historical Writing

In the midst of this composition of poetry and novels and philosophy, the early New England tendency toward the historical had by no means disappeared. Here, two opposing influences were at work. On the one hand, the Spanish studies of Irving, the History of Spanish Literature of Ticknor, and the translations of Longfellow, had turned men's minds toward European countries. On the other hand, the War of 1812 and the rapid development of the United States had stimulated patriotism. Moreover, with the passing of the heroes of the Revolution, Americans began to realize that the childhood of the United States had vanished, that the youthful country had already a history to be recorded. The proper method of historical composition was pointed out to his countrymen by Jared Sparks, first a professor and then president of Harvard College.

Before the days of Sparks, few writers had felt the responsibility of historical writing. It was enough if a history was made interesting and romantic; there was little attempt to make it accurate. Even if original sources were at hand and the author took pains to examine them, he paid little attention to any study of causes or results, he made no careful comparison of conflicting accounts. One manuscript was as good as another, and any so-called fact was welcome if it filled a vacant niche in the story. Sparks followed a different method. To gather his information, he consulted not only the records stored in the dignified archives of the great libraries of Europe and America, but also the family papers stuffed away into the corners of ancient garrets. He examined old newspapers and pamphlets and diaries. He traced legends and traditions back to their origins. It was in this way that his Life and Writings of George Washington, his partially completed History of the American Revolution, and his other works were produced. Unfortunately, Sparks lacked the good fairy gift of the power to make his work interesting; that was left for other writers; but in thoroughness in collecting materials he was the pioneer. During this period, there were at least four historians whose fame is far greater than his; but to Sparks they owe the gratitude that is ever due to him who has pointed out the way. These four are Bancroft and Parkman, who wrote on American themes; and Prescott and Motley, who chose for their subjects different phases of European history.

§ 36. George Bancroft, 1800–1891

On a hill in the city of Worcester, Massachusetts, stands a tower of massive stone. It was erected in honor of George Bancroft, who as a boy roamed over the hills and valleys of what is now a part of the city. He graduated at Harvard, and then went to Germany, where he studied with various scholars branches of learning which ranged from French literature to Scriptural interpretation. At twenty he had chosen his lifework,—to become a historian. Fourteen years later the first volume of his History of the United States  came out, a scholarly record of the progress of our country from the discovery of America to the adoption of the Constitution in 1789.

Bancroft's historical work extended over nearly fifty years; but during that time he did much other writing, he was minister to England and to Berlin, and he was Secretary of the Navy. While holding this last office he decided that the United States ought to have a naval school. Congress did not agree, but Mr. Bancroft went quietly to work. He found that he had a right to choose a place where midshipmen should remain while waiting for orders, also that he could direct that the lessons given them at sea should be continued on land. He obtained the use of some military buildings at Annapolis, put the boys into them, and set them to work. Then he said to Congress, "We have a naval school in operation; will you not adopt it?" Congress adopted it, and thus the United States Naval Academy was founded.

§ 37. William Hickling Prescott, 1796–1859

A crust of bread thrown in a students' frolic at Harvard made Prescott nearly blind, and prevented him from becoming a lawyer as he had planned. With what little eyesight remained to him, and with an inexhaustible fund of courage and cheerfulness, he set to work to become a historian. He made a generous preparation. For ten years he read by the eyes of others scores of volumes on ancient and modern literature. He had chosen for the title of his first book The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella. He must learn Spanish, of course; and he describes with a gentle humor the weeks spent under the trees of his country residence, listening to the reading of a man who understood not a word of the language. As the different authorities were read aloud, many of them conflicting, Prescott dictated notes. When he had completed his reading for one chapter, he had these notes read to him. Then he thought over all that he meant to say in the chapter,—thought so exactly, and so many times, that when he took up his noctograph, he could write as rapidly as the contrivance would permit.

It was under such discouragements that Prescott wrote; but he said bravely that these difficulties were no excuse for "not doing well what it was not necessary to do at all." His work needs small excuse. He had chosen the Spanish field; he wrote The Conquest of Mexico, then The Conquest of Peru. Three volumes he completed of The History of the Reign of Philip the Second;  then came death.

Prescott was most painstaking in collecting facts and comparing statements, but the popularity of his books is due in part to their subject and in even greater part to their style. He wrote of the days of romance and wild adventure, it is true; but yet the most thrilling subject will not make a thrilling writer out of a dull one. Prescott has written in a style that is strong, absolutely clear, and often poetic. He describes a battle or a procession or a banquet or even a wedding costume as if he loved to do it. Few writers have combined as successfully as he the accuracy of the historian and the marvellous picturing of the poet and novelist.

§ 38. John Lothrop Motley, 1814–1877

When Bancroft was a young man, he taught for a year at Northampton. One of his pupils was a handsome, bright-eyed boy named Motley. This boy's especial delight was reading poetry and novels, and a few years after he graduated from Harvard he wrote a novel which was fairly good. He wrote another, which was better; but by this time he had become so deeply interested in the Dutch Republic that he determined to write its history. Ten years later he sent a manuscript to the English publisher, Murray. It was promptly declined, and the author published it at his own expense. Then Murray was a sorry man, for The Rise of the Dutch Republic  was a decided success.

The lavish amount of work that had been bestowed upon it ought to have brought success. Motley could not obtain the needed documents in America, therefore he and his family crossed the ocean. When he had exhausted the library in one place, they went to another. He had a hard-working secretary, and in two or three countries he had men engaged to copy rare papers for his use. When his material was well in hand, he had the critical ability to select and arrange his facts, the literary instinct to present them in telling fashion, and the artistic talent to make vivid pictures of famous persons and dramatic scenes.

One of the pleasantest facts about our greater authors is the almost invariable absence of envy among them. This book could hardly fail to trench upon the field of Prescott; yet the blind historian was ready with the warmest commendations, as were Irving and Bancroft. Prescott, indeed, in the first volume of his Philip the Second, published a year earlier, had inserted a cordial note in regard to the forthcoming Dutch Republic.

Motley's next book was The United Netherlands. One more work would have completed the history of the whole struggle of the Dutch for liberty. He postponed preparing this until he should have written The Life and Death of John of Barneveld. Then came the long illness which ended his life, and the story of the epoch was never completed.

§ 39. Francis Parkman, 1823–1893

Some years before Longfellow wrote, "The thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts," Francis Parkman was proving the truth of the line; for he, a young man of eighteen, had already planned his lifework. He would be an historian, and he would write on the subject that appealed to him most strongly,—the contest between France and England for the possession of a continent. The preparation for such a work required more than the reading of papers—though an enormous quantity of these demanded careful attention. The Indians must be known. Their way of living and thinking must be as familiar to the historian as his own. The only way to gain this knowledge was to share their life; and this Parkman did for several months. His health failed, his eyesight was impaired, but he did not give up the work that he had planned. Before beginning it, however, he tried his hand by writing The Oregon Trail, an account of his western journeyings and his life among the red men.

His health was so completely broken down that for some time he could not listen to his secretary's reading for more than half an hour a day; but he had no thought of yielding. He visited the places that he intended to describe; he wrote when he could; when writing was impossible, he cultivated roses and lilies; but whatever he did, and even when he could do nothing, he was always cheerful and courageous.

So it was that Parkman's work was done; but he writes so easily, so gracefully, and with such apparent pleasure that the mere style of his composition would make it of value. He seldom stops to consider motives and determine remote causes, but he gives us a clear narrative, with dramatic and picturesque descriptions of such verisimilitude that we should hardly be surprised to see a foot-note saying, "I was present. F. P." He lived to carry out his plan, comprising twelve volumes which cover the ground from Pioneers of France in the New World  to The Conspiracy of Pontiac. Higginson's summary of the characteristics of the four historians is as follows: "George Bancroft, with a style in that day thought eloquent, but now felt to be overstrained and inflated; William H. Prescott, with attractive but colorless style and rather superficial interpretation. . . . John Lothrop Motley, laborious, but delightful; and Francis Parkman, more original in his work and probably more permanent in his fame than any of these."

§ 40. Minor Authors

These last four chapters have been devoted to the authors of highest rank during the early part of New England's second period of literary leadership; but there are many others whose names it is not easy to omit from even so brief a sketch. In history, there are not only John Gorham Palfrey, whose History of New England, and Jeremy Belknap, whose History of New Hampshire are still standards; but there is Richard Hildreth, whose History of the United States, written from a political point of view opposed to Bancroft's, lacks only an interesting style to win the popularity which its research and scholarship deserve. In criticism, there is Edwin Percy Whipple, who reviewed literary work with sympathetic good sense and expressed his opinions in so vigorous and interesting a style that his own writings became literature. He and Richard Henry Dana ought to have worked hand in hand: Whipple, to criticise completed writings; Dana, to cultivate the public taste to demand the best. Dana wrote poetry also, but it lacked the warmth of feeling that makes a poem live. The Little Beach-Bird  is now his best-known poem. Whipple calls it "delicious, but slightly morbid;" and it certainly has neither the tenderness of Henry Vaughan's The Bird  nor the joyous comradeship of Mrs. Thaxter's The Sandpiper. Among essayists, there are two whose names first became well known during this period, Donald Grant Mitchell and George William Curtis. The story is told of Mitchell that to make sure of a winding, picturesque pathway from the road to his house, he had a heavy load of stone brought to the gate and bade the driver make his way up the hill by the easiest grades. It is "by the easiest grades" that his Dream Life and Reveries of a Bachelor, his earliest books, roam on gently and smoothly. They are full of sentiment; but it is a good, clean sentiment that should be not without honor, even in a book. His latest work, English Lands, Letters, and Kings, has not quite the winsome charm of his earlier writings, but it is vigorous and picturesque. Here is his description of William the Conqueror: "It was as if a new, sharp, eager man of business had on a sudden come to the handling of some old sleepily conducted counting-room: he cuts off the useless heads; he squares the books: he stops waste; pity or tenderness have no hearing in his shop." He says of Elizabeth: "She would have been great if she had been a shoemaker's daughter, . . . she would have bound more shoes, and bound them better, and looked sharper after the affairs of her household than any cobbler's wife of the land."

George William Curtis spent some of his schooldays at Brook Farm among the transcendentalists. Graceful sketches of travel were in vogue, and he wrote Nile Notes of a Howadji; dreamy sentiment was in fashion, and he wrote his ever-charming Prue and I. Then he became an editor, a lecturer, a political speaker. Meanwhile he had entered upon a long and honored career in the Easy Chair  department of Harper's Magazine. For nearly forty years the readers of Harper's  cut open the Easy Chair  pages expectantly, for there they were sure to find some pleasant chat on topics of the day,—on The American Girl, or The Game of Newport, or Honor, or The New England Sabbath, or on some man who was in the public eye. Grave or satirical, they were always marked by a liquid, graceful style, a gentle, kindly humor, and sound thought. Then there were two books, a big one and a little one, written by Noah Webster. They were not literature, and they did not have any special "inspiring influence" toward the making of literature; but they were exceedingly useful tools. The big book was Webster's Dictionary, and the little one was the thin, blue-covered Webster's Spelling-book. Long ago it went far beyond copyrights and publishers' reports; but it is estimated that sufficient copies have been printed to put one into the hand of every child in the nation.

Taking this literature of New England, or almost of Massachusetts, as a whole, we cannot fail to note its atmosphere of conscientious work. It is not enough for the poet that an inspiring thought has flashed into his mind; he feels a responsibility to interpret it to the best of his power. In Longfellow's work, for instance, there is no poem that we would strike out as unworthy of his pen. Hawthorne's slightest sketch is as carefully finished as his Scarlet Letter. Nothing is done heedlessly. The Puritan conscience had been enriched with two centuries of culture; but it was as much of a power in the literature of New England as in the lonely little settlements that clung to her inhospitable coast.