Part 7

One does well to read Bancroft in the tall, wide-margined, and almost sumptuous volumes of the original editions. The page is open and inviting. Both text and notes have a personal flavor very diverting at times. There is no question as to the usefulness of an attractive page in works of this sort. Political histories should be made easy, not by picture-book methods, but by the legitimate arts of good printing.

The work is generously planned. Twelve octavo volumes are required to bring the narrative down to the ratification of the constitution.[16] Three volumes, comprising nearly fifteen hundred pages, are given to the Colonial period alone.

Bancroft announced his theory of historical writing in the preface of 1834. He was to be controlled always by ‘the principles of historical scepticism,’ and his narrative was to be drawn ‘from writings and sources which were contemporaries of the events that are described.’ Nothing commonly supposed to belong to American history was to be retained merely because it had been unchallenged by former historians.

The treatment, as shown in these volumes on the Colonial period, is in perfect accord with the author’s conception of the dignity of the subject. The matter is as stately as the manner. Bancroft writes history as a lord high chamberlain conducts a court function. He feels that during the ceremony of discovering a world and planting a nation there should be no unseemliness, certainly no laughter or disturbance.

The characters go through their evolutions like well-drilled courtiers. So stately are they as to appear scarce human. Homely and familiar traits are almost completely suppressed. The founders of America, as we see them looming in the pages of Bancroft, are not men but incarnate ideas. They are the embodiment of principles and virtues. Winthrop is enlightened conservatism, Vane is generous impetuosity, Roger Williams is liberty of conscience. Strive how we will to bring these men nearer, to make them tangible, the effort is not wholly successful. These figures of the past, like the characters of a morality-play, persist in remaining personified ideas.

As a reaction against ‘classical’ history comes history of the gossiping school. ‘Thanks to you,’ said Brunetière, welcoming Masson to the French Academy, ‘we now know the exact number of Napoleon’s shirts.’ Bancroft was not interested in the spindles and shoe-buckles of the Puritans. Many people are, but they must find elsewhere the gratification they seek. Whoever wishes at any time absolutely to escape anecdotage, homely detail, and piquant gossip, has it always in his power to do so; he can read Bancroft’s three volumes on the Colonial period and dwell among abstractions.

Even if not at this stage of his career the most human of writers, Bancroft is a comforting historian to return to, after having dwelt for a while with those who instruct us how low and mercenary in motive, how impervious to liberal ideas, were the men who planted English civilization in America. Historical iconoclasts all, they are frightfully convincing. Some of their arguments lose a degree of force as it dawns on the reader that Seventeenth-century men are being judged by Nineteenth-century standards. When Bancroft wrote, the habit of abusing the ancestors had not become deep-seated.

Turning from the Colonial period, the historian takes up the period of the American Revolution. Seven volumes are required for telling the story. The logical arrangement is by ‘epochs.’ They are four in number: ‘Overthrow of the European Colonial system,’ ‘How Great Britain estranged America,’ ‘America declares itself independent,’ ‘The Independence of America is acknowledged.’[17]

General histories must treat of many things, the doings of authorized and representative assemblies and the doings of the mob, skirmishes, battles by land and sea, diplomatic intrigues, party combinations, political and military plots, the characters of the actors in the historic drama, and the setting of the stage on which they played. While doing all parts of his task with workmanlike skill, a historian will be found to excel in this thing or in that. Bancroft’s accounts of military operations are always clear, energetic, and often extremely readable. He could not, like Irving, ‘render you a fearful battle in music,’ but he never made the mistake of supposing that he could. He had not the graphical power of Parkman, but he had enough for his purposes.

His character sketches of the men who figured in the struggles for American independence are among the best parts of his writing. The patriots and their friends in England and on the Continent are too uniformly creatures of light, but their opponents are not represented as necessarily creatures of darkness. If Bancroft could be more than fair to his own side, he was incapable of being wholly unfair to the other. His tendency is to regard human character as all of a piece, fixed rather than fluctuating. Men (politicians included) have been known to grow in virtue as they grow in years. Bancroft was over complacent in his attitude towards frenzied impromptu Revolutionary gatherings whose motives could not always have been so guiltlessly patriotic and disinterested as he represents them.[18] He was but little versed in the psychology of mobs.

Forceful at all points, Bancroft was singularly impressive in dealing with history as it is made in parliaments and conventions, in council chambers, cabinets, and courts of law. He was born to grapple with whole state paper offices. He knew the secret of subordinating a vast amount of detail to his main purpose. An important part of the American Revolution took place in Europe. Bancroft’s capital merit consists in his having brought the event into its largest relations. The story as he told it did not merely concern the uprising of a few petty quarrelsome colonies, it became an important chapter in the history of liberty. Not for an instant did he permit himself to lose sight of that ‘idea of continuity which gives vitality to history.’

It is wonderful how through these seven volumes everything bends to one idea; how it all becomes part of a demonstration, a detail in the history of that spirit which, acting through discontent, led first to local outbreak and resistance, then to concerted action and war, and finally to the birth of a new nation.

The crown of Bancroft’s work is the story of how the states parted with so much of their individuality as stood in the way of union, and then united. Two volumes would seem to afford room for full and leisurely treatment. But in fact the historian only accomplished his task by enormous compression. Often the substance of a speech had to be given in a sentence, and the deliberations of days in a few paragraphs. The marshalling of facts, the grasp of the subject in detail and as a whole, are extraordinary. Bancroft notes what forces led to union and what opposed it. He marks the shifting of public sentiment, the trembling of the balance, but he grants himself few privileges of the sort called literary. Seldom dramatic or picturesque in this portion of his narrative, he is at all times logically exact and magisterial.

* * * * *

There is a peculiar fitness in the word ‘monumental’ applied to Bancroft’s work. It has solidity, strength, durability, a massive and stately grandeur. It is a book which the modern reader finds it easy to neglect; but he puts it in his library and never fails to commend it to his friends, with a hypocritical expression of surprise at their not being better acquainted with it. The truth is, we are spoiled by more attractive historians. Macaulay, Froude, and Parkman have made us indolent, fond of verbal comforts and disinclined to effort. We demand not only to be instructed but to be vastly entertained at the same time. Bancroft certainly instructs; it would be difficult to prove that he also entertains.

His tone of confident eulogy is often condemned. On the whole, this is a merit rather than a fault. Doubtless he admired too uniformly and too much. Many writers have taken pleasure in showing that his admiration was misplaced. And thus a balance is kept. It is a fortunate thing for American literature that Bancroft’s vast work, destined to so wide an influence, and the fruit of such immense labor, should have been conceived and written in a generous and hopeful spirit. The English reviewer who on the appearance of the first volume praised the historian because he was ‘so fearlessly honest and impartial’ might also have praised him because he was so fearlessly optimistic. This too requires courage.

FOOTNOTES:

[11] Bancroft was twice married. His second wife was Mrs. Elisabeth (Davis) Bliss.

[12] For an account of the privileges he enjoyed in making his collections see _Winsor’s Narrative and Critical History of America_, vol. viii, p. 477.

[13] W. M. Sloane.

[14] T. W. Higginson in ‘The Nation,’ January, 1891.

[15] Bancroft’s characteristics as a young man are admirably brought out in the recently printed selection from his letters and journals, edited by M. A. DeWolfe Howe. ‘Scribner’s Magazine,’ September and October, 1905.

[16] Two volumes of the original edition correspond to one volume of the ‘author’s last revision,’ 1883–85.

[17] In the ‘last revision’ Epoch Four is divided into unequal parts and the titles are reworded: Epoch first, ‘Britain overthrows the European colonial system,’ 1748–63; Epoch second, ‘Britain estranges America,’ 1763–74; Epoch third, ‘America takes up arms for self-defence and arrives at independence,’ 1774–76; Epoch fourth, ‘America in alliance with France,’ 1776--80; Epoch fifth, ‘The People of America take their equal station among the powers of the earth,’ 1780 to December, 1782.

[18] J. F. Jameson speaks of Bancroft’s ‘tendency to conventionalize, to compose his American populations of highly virtuous Noah’s-ark men.’ _History of Historical Writing in America_, 1891, p. 108.

V

_William Hickling Prescott_

REFERENCES:

=George Ticknor=: _Life of William Hickling Prescott_, 1864.

=Rollo Ogden=: _William Hickling Prescott_, ‘American Men of Letters,’ 1904.

=H. T. Peck=: _William Hickling Prescott_, ‘English Men of Letters,’ 1905.

I

HIS LIFE

The Prescotts are an ancient family as antiquity is reckoned in the United States. The first Anglo-American of that name, John Prescott, an old Cromwellian soldier, took up residence in this country about 1640, and after living awhile at Watertown, Massachusetts, made a permanent home for himself at Lancaster, then a frontier settlement. When thieving Indians plundered him, it is said that he used to put on helmet, gorget, and cuirass, and start in pursuit. Being a powerful man and stern of countenance, his terrific appearance in his armor had a salutary effect on the red men.

Jonas Prescott, a son of the old warrior, settled at Groton, Massachusetts, and there the family history centres for more than a hundred years. They were a vigorous race, useful and conspicuous in the military and civil affairs of the colony.

William Hickling Prescott, the historian, was born in Salem, Massachusetts, on May 4, 1796. His father, Judge William Prescott, was a man of eminent abilities, esteemed for his great legal acquirements and beloved for his personal worth. His mother, Catharine Hickling, a daughter of Thomas Hickling of Boston, was distinguished for energy and benevolence, as well as for a certain gayety of temperament, a trait which she transmitted to her famous son. The grandfather of the historian was Colonel William Prescott, founder of the town of Pepperell, who, on the night of June 16, 1775, with his force of a thousand men, threw up a redoubt on Bunker (Breed’s) Hill, and on the following day defended it until defence was no longer possible.

Prescott was drilled in the classics by one of old Parr’s pupils, the Reverend Doctor John Gardiner, rector of Trinity Church, Boston. He was an insatiable reader of books; but it were idle to assume that his interest in Spanish history and literature took its first impulse, as has been asserted, from the reading of Southey’s translation of _Amadis of Gaul_.

He entered Harvard College in the Sophomore year and was graduated in 1814. A misfortune befell him early in his course which changed his whole life and made enormous demands on his philosophy and courage. In one of the frolics attending the breaking up of commons, when small missiles were flying about the room, Prescott was struck full in the left eye with a hard crust of bread. The sight was instantly destroyed, and he lived for years in apprehension of what, fortunately, never overtook him, total blindness.

He began the study of law, but illness and consequent weakening of the power of vision put an end to it. In search of health and diversion he went abroad. After spending some months in the Azores, in the family of his maternal grandfather, Thomas Hickling, then United States consul at St. Michael’s, he visited Italy, France, and England. In London he consulted eminent oculists, who were able, however, to give him but little encouragement.

Shortly after his return home he married Miss Susan Amory of Boston, whose maternal grandfather, Captain Linzee, was in command of a British sloop of war at the outbreak of the Revolution, and had cannonaded the redoubt on Bunker Hill. In 1821 Prescott planned a course of literary study. Beginning oddly enough with grammars and rhetorics, he followed this preliminary reading with a wide survey first of English literature, then of French and Italian. German he tried and gave up. With his enfeebled sight he could do but little of the actual reading for himself; the bulk of it had to be done for him.

Prescott’s literary life was peculiar in that he prepared himself to become a man of letters with no definite conception of what he would write about. He was not, like the literary heroes of whom we read, so possessed of his subject from boyhood that all the ancient neighbors distinctly recall early evidences of his predilection. His first impulse towards the studies in which he won renown came from George Ticknor. To help Prescott pass away his time Ticknor read to his friend the lectures he had been giving to advanced classes at Harvard, lectures which formed the basis of his _History of Spanish Literature_. This was in 1824. Prescott became enthusiastic over the study of the Spanish language and history. A year later he was thinking what brilliant passages might be written on the Inquisition, the Conquest of Granada, and the exploits of the Great Captain. After balancing Italian and Spanish subjects against each other, he decided, not without misgivings, on a history of Ferdinand and Isabella, and early in 1826 wrote to Alexander H. Everett, United States minister at Madrid, asking his help in collecting materials.

Three and a half years of study preceded the writing of the first chapter; ten and a half years in all were required to make the book. Its enthusiastic reception from scholars and public alike led Prescott to take up cognate subjects. The list of his writings is brief, but, taking into account the difficulties involved, one may say without exaggeration that Prescott’s historical works represent a labor little short of titanic.

The _History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella the Catholic_ appeared in 1837. It was followed by _The Conquest of Mexico_, 1843; _Critical and Historical Essays_, 1845 (consisting chiefly of papers reprinted from the ‘North American Review’); _The Conquest of Peru_, 1847; _The History of Philip the Second_, 1855 (left unfinished at the author’s death). To this list of important works may be added a brief continuation of Robertson’s _Charles the Fifth_, and a _Memoir of Abbott Lawrence_.

Prescott’s life was without marked external incident. His surroundings were ideal. Having inherited a fortune, he could give himself to toilsome literary undertakings with no care for the financial result. He took satisfaction in the thought of having refuted Johnson’s dictum that no man could write history unless he had good eyes.

Early in 1858 Prescott was stricken with apoplexy, but so far recovered as to be able to resume work on the _History of Philip the Second_. A second attack (January 27, 1859) ended in his death.

II

PRESCOTT’S CHARACTER

To those who knew him in varying degrees of intimacy, whether as friends, neighbors, or chance acquaintance, Prescott seemed the incarnation of urbanity, thoughtfulness, good humor. To us who know him only through the story of his life he seems notable for his heroic qualities.

He had enormous courage and force of will. That other men have performed great tasks under like difficulties cannot lessen the glory of his individual achievement. Handicapped by partial blindness, he wrote history, a type of literature which makes the most exacting demands on the physical powers.

Had Prescott’s genius inclined him towards poetry or fiction, the heroic element in his literary life would have been less noteworthy. In general a novelist is not expected to read; what is chiefly required of him in the way of preparation is, that he shall observe, feel, and occasionally think--but not read; much reading makes a dull story-teller. The novelist gleans material as he walks the street. For his purpose an hour of talk with ‘a set of wretched un-idea’d girls,’ as Doctor Johnson half affectionately, half pettishly, called them, is worth ten hours over a book. History is another matter. The historian must often read a thousand pages in order to write one. And the work of preparation is indescribably exhausting; there is so much detail to set in order, so many documents to be consulted, such a wilderness of notes to be arranged, compared, and fitted into place. The task, difficult under the best conditions, must seem endless to any one with an imperfect sense.

A man with good eye-sight is like a man with the free use of his legs, he goes where he pleases. But a scholar with defective vision is an invalid in a wheeled chair. Prescott, being denied one of the greatest conveniences of study, was forced to try expedients. With most writers pen and ink are an indispensable aid to composition. Prescott used memory instead. Not only was the knowledge accumulated, arranged, and weighed, but it was put into literary form, the paragraphs measured and the sentences polished before the actual writing was begun. Prescott often carried in his head, for days at a time, the equivalent of sixty pages of printed text, and on occasion, seventy-five pages. Only by reflecting on the difficulties met and overcome can the amateur of literature arrive at a conception of Prescott’s indomitable courage.

Add to force and persistency of purpose another notable trait, a passion for nobility of character. Prescott, unwearied in self-examination, studied his own moral nature as he studied the pages of his manuscript, that he might weed out the faults. The methods he employed to this end were often whimsical, and even childlike; but in their touching simplicity lies the best proof of the genuineness of the motive that prompted them.

III

THE WRITER

Prescott gave unusual measure of time and thought to the problem of expression. With a view to grounding himself in the technical part of literature, he invoked the aid of those now forgotten worthies, Lindley Murray and Hugh Blair--how greatly to his advantage would be difficult to say. Books of this sort are so often disfigured by a vicious or, what is worse, a commonplace style that it is a question whether one does not lose by example all that he gains by precept.

Escaping these influences, Prescott took up the chief English authors, beginning with Ascham, Sidney, Bacon, Browne, Raleigh, and Milton. His mind was constantly on the alert to discover by what means these masters produced their effects. His journals show how painstaking he was in these studies, with what intense interest he turned the problem of the art of expression over and over in his mind.

When he came to print, it was observed first of all that he had a ‘style.’ The self-conscious literary workman was plainly visible. Prescott had evidently aimed to produce certain effects through the balance of his periods, the choice of his words, the length and structure of his sentences. Every one said: ‘He is an artist.’ Praise could not have been more aptly bestowed. Among many eminent artists in words Prescott was one of the most conscientious.

But the literary style of the _Ferdinand and Isabella_ had the defect of being too apparent. One often found himself taking note of the manner of expression before he took note of the thought. The panoply of words glittered from afar. It was brilliant but metallic, magnificent but artificial.

The criticism of his first book taught Prescott the futility of worrying about style--after one has worried sufficiently. He was no less anxious to improve; he noted the mannerisms into which he had fallen, resolved to correct them, and that was the conclusion of the whole matter. He stopped dwelling overmuch on the fashion of his writing, and at once gained in ease and naturalness. After ten years of labor he had mastered the materials of his art. His workmanship improved to the last. The volumes of the _History of Philip the Second_ have literary characteristics so gracious as to add sharpness to the regret that this noble work had to be left unfinished.

IV

THE HISTORIES

The _Ferdinand and Isabella_ is not a formidable book for size. A timid reader, shrinking from fifteen hundred pages of any literature but fiction, need not fear mortgaging too much of his time in the perusal. Compared with a reading of Freeman’s _Norman Conquest_ or Carlyle’s _Frederick_, his task is light.

In an introductory section Prescott traces the growth of Castile and Aragon, with their dependencies, up to the time when Ferdinand and Isabella come on the stage of history. Perhaps there is a lack of detail here and there. One would like to know the steps of the process by which the Spaniards regained the territory from which they had been driven by the Saracenic invasion of the Eighth Century. Bitter as were the jealousies and quarrels of the various petty states, they made common cause against the Mohammedans. They hated the hereditary enemy both as infidels and usurpers. Hatred fostered the national spirit.

The history proper is divided into two parts. The first has chiefly to do with the internal policy of Ferdinand and Isabella. It was the period when law displaced anarchy. The law might be severe or even unjust, but it was at all events law. Here is shown how the power of the nobles was curbed, warring factions pacified, banditti of all sorts kept within bounds, and that too whether they lived in castles or lurked in dark corners, heresy suppressed in a truly rigorous fashion, above all the national ideal strengthened. To use a homely figure, Ferdinand and Isabella took up the problem of national housekeeping and handled it as it had never been handled before. A reign of order and economy was inaugurated. Thieving servants were put under restraint or discharged, poachers were apprehended, and the gypsies who had impudently camped on the best part of the estates were driven off. A government which for years had run at loose ends was now under masterful control.

The second part illustrates the foreign policy of the two monarchs. Having made a nation out of an assemblage of turbulent states, Ferdinand and Isabella were enabled to take a conspicuous place among the sovereigns of Europe. By good fortune in war and in discovery, by diplomatic shrewdness and religious zeal, their influence was felt throughout Europe and over the seas. Spain was no longer isolated. Her name carried weight; her will was respected.