Part 21

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.

A part of the great success of these books was due to causes far from literature. Doubtless, if written to-day, the volumes would be read, but it were idle to suppose that they could have the vogue they enjoyed in the Fifties. The American public of a half-century ago was not nomadic. It had few ways of gratifying its thirst for knowledge of foreign lands. Photographs were so expensive that one seldom ran the risk of being obliged to sit down with a friend ‘just back from Europe’ to admire such novelties as the Leaning Tower and the Bridge of Sighs. The oxyhydrogen stereopticon was imperfect, the panorama clumsy and ill-painted. Therefore the writings of a man who had the knack of telling agreeably what he had seen were most welcome. The home-keeping public enjoyed also hearing the traveller talk. When Taylor lectured (for he became one of the most popular lecturers of the day) they crowded the hall and thought two hours of him not long enough.

Timeliness, however, does not explain all the success of _Views Afoot_ and its companion volumes. Taylor was an excellent writer even when he wrote most hastily. If his word-pictures were often highly colored, they possessed, among other virtues, the great virtue of having been painted on the spot. Through their aid one could really see what Taylor had himself seen.

But Taylor was a poet before he was a traveller. In 1844 he published (under the patronage of R. W. Griswold, his first literary adviser) a little volume entitled _Ximena, or, The Battle of the Sierra Morena, and Other Poems_. It was followed by _Rhymes of Travel_ (1848) and _The American Legend_, the Phi Beta Kappa poem at Harvard (1850). To these must be added _A Book of Romances, Lyrics, and Songs_, 1851; _Poems and Ballads_, 1854; _Poems of the Orient_, 1854; _Poems of Home and Travel_, 1855; _The Poet’s Journal_, 1862; _The Picture of St. John_, 1866; _The Masque of the Gods_, 1872; _Lars_, 1873; _The Prophet_, 1874; _Home Pastorals, Ballads, and Lyrics_, 1875; _The National Ode_ (read by the author at the opening of the ‘Centennial’), 1876; and _Prince Deukalion_, 1878. The great translation of Goethe’s _Faust_, with the commentary, appeared in 1870–71.

Not content with his commercial success as a writer of travels, and his artistic triumphs in poetry, Taylor tried fiction. The first of his four novels, _Hannah Thurston_ (1863), is in part a satire and shows in their most disagreeable light the people who abhor meat and swear by vegetables, the people who profess to hold communication with spirits, the people who think other people ought not to buy and sell human flesh, and so forth.

_John Godfrey’s Fortunes_ (1864) embodies not a few of Taylor’s journalistic experiences in New York. Here are glimpses of literary society such as the soirées at the home of Estelle Ann Lewis, the Mademoiselle de Scudéry of that time and place. _The Story of Kennett_ (1866) is a Pennsylvanian study, a true and lively picture of a phase of civilization which the author perfectly understood. _Joseph and his Friend_ (1870) closed the series of efforts by which Taylor tried to earn money enough to free him from the thraldom of the lecture platform.

His other publications were _Beauty and the Beast, and Tales of Home_ (1872), _The Echo Club_ (1876), the posthumous _Studies in German Literature_ (1879), and _Essays and Studies_ (1880).

Of Taylor’s private life a few important facts remain to be recorded. The pathetic story of Mary Agnew, the beautiful girl whom he had loved since they were school-children together, and whom he married on her death-bed, is a romance which fortunately has been well told by both of Taylor’s biographers. In 1857 (seven years after Mary Agnew’s death) Taylor married Marie Hansen, daughter of Professor Hansen of Gotha, the astronomer. How devoted and helpful she was to him during his arduous life, and how loyal to his memory, are facts too well known to require emphasis.

The home at Kennett known as ‘Cedarcroft’ was built in 1859–60. Taylor lavished on it both money and affection; and while for a few years it gave him a deal of happiness, it proved in the end a burden he could ill afford to carry.

Robust and vigorous though he seemed in middle life, Taylor by unremitting activity had sapped his powers. He gave no evidence of declining literary ambition, but at fifty he was worn out by overwork. A notable recognition of his worth came to him in 1878, when President Hayes appointed him Minister to Germany. He was not to enjoy the honor for long. In May, 1878, he took up the duties of his office, and on the fifteenth of the following December he died while sitting in his armchair in his library.

II

HIS CHARACTER

Ambition was a ruling motive in Taylor’s life. Yet there has seldom been an ambition which, albeit as consuming as fire, was at the same time so free from selfish and ignoble elements.

Taylor aspired to fame through cultivation of the art of poesy. This was the real object of his life. To gain this object he toiled unceasingly and made innumerable sacrifices. Baffled in the attempt to reach his ideal, he was a little comforted when he could persuade himself that he had not fallen completely short of it. And there was exceeding great reward in the knowledge that if wide recognition as a poet was denied him, his friends, Whittier, Longfellow, Stoddard, Boker, and Aldrich, knew for what he was striving and commended him in no uncertain tones.

Whittier described Taylor as one who loved ‘old friends, old ways, and kept his boyhood’s dreams in sight.’ Life was intensely interesting to Taylor. Although the zest of travel disappeared and his large experience of the ways of men had had its customary disillusioning effect, he never really lost his youthful enthusiasm. And it is touching to find in his private correspondence the repeated proofs of how inexhaustible was his fund of hope and of courage, and how quick he was to recover after real or fancied defeat.

Notwithstanding his successes, and he had his share of the good things of life,--contemporary reputation, money of his own earning, and friends,--Bayard Taylor remains, with all his manly qualities, a somewhat pathetic figure in American letters. He led a restless and turbulent mental existence, and died the victim of ambition and overwork.

III

THE ARTIST

Taylor has been pronounced the most skilful of our metrists after Longfellow. One illustration only can be given of his interest in the mechanism of verse, and that is his poetic romance _The Picture of St. John_. The poem was not published until sixteen years after its first conception. Possibly its growth was a little retarded by the structural peculiarities.

The poem contains three hundred and fifty-five eight-line stanzas (iambic pentameter) grouped into four books. The ‘ottava rima’ was chosen as ‘better adapted for the purposes of a romantic epic than either the Spenserian stanza[57] or the heroic couplet.’ But the question with the poet was,--how to avoid the ‘uniform sweetness’ of a regular stanza while obtaining the ‘proper compactness and strength of rhythm’ which (in his belief) only a stanza could give. His device was to allow himself freedom of rhyme within the stanza, and this ‘not to escape the laws which Poetry imposes,’ but rather to impose a different law in the hope that the form would ‘more readily reflect the varying moods.’ When finally the poem was finished Taylor found that the three hundred and fifty-five stanzas contained ‘more than seventy variations in the order of rhyme.’

Only an enthusiast in the study of form would have undertaken the task of reproducing _Faust_ in the original metres. Taylor’s success was so great that his work as a translator has obscured his fame as a poet. Doubtless so nearly perfect a version had been impossible without that wonderful grasp of the spirit of the original. But it must not be forgotten how much it owes to the years of study and practice Taylor gave to the technique of his art.

IV

POETICAL WORK

In 1855 Taylor published a selection from his earlier books of verse under the title _Poems of Home and Travel_. By this volume and its companion, _Poems of the Orient_, he wished, so he said at the time, to be judged. For all his other pieces he desired ‘speedy forgetfulness.’