Part 8

Much of the narrative proceeds by divisions each of which might have been printed as a monograph. A certain amount of space is given to the Inquisition, so much to the war in Granada, so many chapters to the history of Columbus, so many to the colonial policy, to the Italian wars, to the life of Gonsalvo of Cordova, to the career of Cardinal Ximenes.

While in no sense neglecting the constitutional side of the problems before him, the historian’s bent is to the biographical and pictorial phases of the reign. On these he dwells with satisfaction and often in detail. To him history is a pageant. The rich coloring of the period first attracted Prescott; he can hardly be blamed for painting his canvas in lively hues, for so he conceived the design. Neutral tints and dull tones are wholly wanting. The blackness of certain events only serves to bring out in stronger relief the resplendent brightness of virtuous acts and the goodness of noble characters. Torquemada offsets Isabella; the cruelty of war is forgotten in the splendor of chivalric deeds.

It is not a history of the people of Spain. The people are not forgotten; the struggle of the commons for recognition, for justice, for the right to be themselves and express their individuality--these things are taken into account. But the work belongs rather to that older school of history which concerns itself for the most part with wars and royal progresses, with the intrigues of councillors, the machinations of prelates, the rivalries of great houses and powerful orders.

The _History of the Conquest of Mexico_ is of about the same length as its predecessor. The narrative, simpler in some ways and more vivacious in others, is gorgeously colored throughout. Prescott was disturbed by the picturesqueness of his own treatment. ‘Very like Miss Porter’ and ‘Rather boarding schoolish finery’ were his comments on certain chapters.

The first of the seven ‘books’ into which the work is divided contains an account of Aztec civilization. Sixty years have elapsed since these pages were written, during which time American archæology has made great advances. That the value of Prescott’s introduction is not wholly destroyed is due to the healthy sceptical spirit which controlled his work.

The story has every element of romance. A young Spanish gentleman, handsome, witty, daring, an idler in college and a libertine, joins the army of adventurers in the New World. For ten or fifteen years he leads the life of men of his class. He becomes a planter in Hayti and varies the monotony of watching Indians till the soil by suppressing insurrections of their brother Indians.

He goes to Cuba as secretary to the governor of that island, quarrels with his chief, makes his peace, and quarrels with him again. Thrown repeatedly into prison, he escapes with the ease of a Baron Trenck. Reconciled to the governor, he is appointed to lead an expedition into the newly discovered kingdom of Mexico. On this venture he stakes his every penny. With five hundred soldiers he proposes to subdue the natives; two priests go along to convert the natives as fast as they are subdued. His sailors number one hundred and ten; his pilot had served under Columbus.

Arriving on the coast, he secretly scuttles his ships, all but one, that there may be no retreat, and then begins that wonderful march to the great city of the Aztecs. He fights by craft as well as by physical force. The jealousy of mutually hostile tribes helps to win his battles. Superstition comes to his aid, for the Spaniards are thought to be gods, and the horses they bestride carry terror into the hearts of the natives.

At length he makes his entry into the city of flowers, and takes up his abode there, Cortés and his little army of four hundred and fifty Spaniards, with twice as many native allies, among sixty thousand cannibals. Boldness marks every step of his course. He seizes the native ‘king,’ suppresses plots with rigor, and proves his divinity by tearing down one of the sacrificial pyramids and planting the cross in its stead. Leaving a lieutenant in command, he hastens back to the seashore to transact military business there. The lieutenant precipitates a quarrel and slaughters Indians by the hundred. Cortés returns and finds his work must be done again. This time it is thoroughly done. Every step of his progress is marked with blood, and the story of _la noche triste_ and the siege of Mexico are among the most romantic passages in the history of the New World.

In estimating men Prescott aimed to employ the standard of their day. When Cortés lifts up his hands, red with the blood of the miserable natives, to return thanks to Heaven for victory, the historian does not permit himself to forget that this savage Spaniard was a typical soldier of the Cross. ‘Whoever has read the correspondence of Cortés, or, still more, has attended to the circumstances of his career, will hardly doubt that he would have been among the first to lay down his life for the Faith.’ According to Prescott, the charge of cruelty cannot be brought against Cortés. ‘The path of the conqueror is necessarily marked with blood. He was not too scrupulous, indeed, in the execution of his plans. He swept away the obstacles which lay in his track; and his fame is darkened by the commission of more than one act which his boldest apologists will find it hard to vindicate. But he was not wantonly cruel. He allowed no outrage on his unresisting foes.’ The historian likens the Spaniard to Hannibal in his endurance, his courage, and his unpretentiousness.

Later scholarship has assailed portions of _The Conquest of Mexico_ with needless asperity. Prescott could hardly be expected to avail himself prophetically of archæological facts not known until thirty years after his time. Nor was his faith in the early Spanish accounts of the Conquest quite as childlike and uncritical as it is sometimes represented. Historians are the most substantial of men of letters; but they now and then build card houses which topple down under the breath of a single new fact. And they take a very human delight in blowing over one another’s structures. For which reason the reading of history is a fearful joy, like skating on thin ice. The pleasure is intense so long as nothing gives way. Perhaps the layman is unreasonable in his demand for knowledge that shall not require too frequent revision. He can at least read for pleasure, hoping that a part of what he reads is true, and holding himself prepared to relinquish the parts he likes best when the time comes.

In the _History of the Conquest of Peru_ the author brings fresh proof that whatever may be said of his morals, the Spanish soldier cannot be over-praised for his valor. Pizarro was a marvel of courage and endurance. Fanaticism, which explains much in his character, does not explain where such tremendous physical power came from. And he had the true theatrical bravado of the Sixteenth-century adventurer. Add to the native histrionic gifts of the Latin race a special training, such as life in the New World gave, and men like Ojeda, Balboa, Cortés, and Pizarro come into existence quite naturally. They did wonders in the coolest possible way, and with a fine sense of the pictorial aspect of their undertakings. Pizarro, drawing a line from east to west on the sand with his sword and calling on his comrades to choose each man what best becomes a brave Castilian (‘For my part I go to the south’), is a figure for romantic drama. An Englishman equally daring would have been more or less awkward in a pose of this sort, but the Spaniard was perfectly at home. Of what clay were these men compounded that they could imagine such exploits and succeed in them too?

The performance of Pizarro was less splendid than that of Cortés and the man himself less interesting. The conqueror of Mexico was a gentleman; not so the hard soldier who subdued the kingdom of the Incas. His was a violent career, steeped in blood, and ending in assassination. Not only was Pizarro without fear, but of two courses he seized upon the more dangerous as the better suited to his genius. Too ignorant to sign his own name, he could control not alone the brutal soldier but as well the lawyer and the priest. Aside from his masterfulness there was little to admire in his character. Brute force excites wonder, but the exhibition of it becomes wearisome at last. To Prescott ‘the hazard assumed by Pizarro was far greater than that of the Conqueror of Mexico.’ Otherwise the man was a mere bungler upon whom Fortune, with characteristic levity, chanced for a time to smile. Prescott describes him in a sentence: ‘Pizarro was eminently perfidious.’ Furthermore, the conqueror of Peru was not original; he repeated what he had learned from Balboa and Cortés. Had he chanced upon a country less rich and civilized, it may well be doubted whether he would have made any considerable figure in history. The argument from gold was entirely conclusive in those days; just as at the present time an undertaking is said to ‘succeed’ if it pays financially. Manners have improved, but ideals of ‘success’ are pretty much what they were four hundred years ago. When Pizarro extorted from the wretched Atahualpa a promise to fill a room twenty-two feet by seventeen to the height of nine feet with gold, his place in history was assured. The swineherd had become immortal.

Strange is it that the name of Francisco Pizarro should be a household word while that of his brother Gonzalo is but little known and seldom repeated. Yet there are few episodes in the history of Spanish colonization more striking than the story of Gonzalo Pizarro’s march across the Andes and the discovery of the river Amazon. It is a tale of horror and suffering to which only the pen of a Defoe could do justice. Gonzalo not only survived the fearful journey, but had strength enough left to head a party for revolt against the viceroy, Blasco Nuñez, and the execution of the Ordinances. Like a true Pizarro, this conqueror died a violent death. He was beheaded; it seemed the only fitting way for one of that family to take his departure from life. The Pizarros used to behead their victims and then show themselves conspicuously at the funeral. When it came their turn to die, they were treated with scantier courtesy.

_Philip the Second_ was Prescott’s most ambitious work. Though but a fragment, the fragment is of noble dimensions, being longer by many pages than the _Ferdinand and Isabella_. The narrative is extraordinarily vivid. Few pages can match for interest those in which are described Philip’s coming to Flanders and his assumption of power at the hands of his father Charles the Fifth. Here are exhibited at their best the much-praised qualities of Prescott’s style. His prose grew better as he grew older.

The characters stand out like the figures of a play: the great princes, Charles the Fifth, Philip, Mary of England, and Elizabeth; the great warriors and statesmen, Guise, Montmorency, Alva, Egmont, and William of Orange; noble ladies like Margaret of Parma and the beautiful Elizabeth of France. The events were of high and tragic importance, for during this reign was to be settled the great question of freedom of thought and the right to worship God as the conscience and the reason dictated. The very contrasts of costume came to the aid of the historian in dealing with this romantic age. It would seem as if the writer must be picturesque in spite of himself.

The modern reader, whatever be his natural bent, finds himself impelled by the critical spirit of the times into distrusting all history which is not technical and hard to grasp. Prescott’s books are incorrigibly ‘literary’ and therefore more or less under suspicion. Because they are attractive, it is taken for granted that they are unsound. Certain unhappy beings have gone so far as to slander them outright by calling them romances. But this is mere impatience with the kind of historical writing which Prescott’s work exemplifies. He was a master of the art of narrative; and history which stops with narrative is in the minds of severe students little better than the more vicious forms of literary idleness, such as poetry and fiction. Prescott gratifies his reader’s curiosity about the past, but is not over solicitous to ‘modify his view of the present and his forecast of the future.’ In other words, he is well content to look at the surface of history, leaving it to others to look below the surface and philosophize on what they find there.

Nevertheless these brilliant volumes have a value which is something more than literary even if it be a good deal less than scientific. It is perhaps not extravagant to pronounce them an indispensable propædeutic to the study of Spanish-American history. They cannot be displaced by works which ‘go much deeper into the subject.’ Depth is not what is at all times most needed. We need stimulus, and encouragement to face the discipline awaiting us in deep books. He who, having read Prescott, was content to read no farther would be an odd sort of student; but not so odd as he who labored under the impression that Prescott was a historian whom he could afford to do without.

VI

_Ralph Waldo Emerson_

REFERENCES:

=G. W. Cooke=: _Ralph Waldo Emerson, his Life, Writings, and Philosophy_, fifth edition, 1882.

=O. W. Holmes=: _Ralph Waldo Emerson_, ‘American Men of Letters,’ 1885.

=J. E. Cabot=: _A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson_, third edition, 1888.

=Richard Garnett=: _Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson_, ‘Great Writers,’ 1888.

=E. W. Emerson=: _Emerson in Concord_, 1889.

I

HIS LIFE

The clerical profession was in a manner hereditary in the Emerson race. With a single exception there was a minister in each of six generations descending from Thomas Emerson of Ipswich, Massachusetts. For this one lapse compensation was made; another generation furnished the colony with three ministers.

For nearly a century and a half the history of the family has centred in Concord, Massachusetts. The house known as the ‘Old Manse’ was built in 1765 by William Emerson, the young minister of the First Church. Gentle in spirit, he was an ardent patriot and in Revolutionary times won the name of the ‘fighting parson.’ He came honestly by his militant temper, being a grandson of the famous Father Moody who distinguished himself at the siege of Louisburg as a preacher, fighter, and iconoclast.

Besides the gift of eloquence, William Emerson inherited from his father (the Reverend Joseph Emerson of Maiden) a love of literature. This he apparently bequeathed to his son, William, who in turn transmitted it to his son, the author of _Conduct of Life_ and _Representative Men_.

Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston on May 25, 1803. His father, minister of the First Church of that city, was a man of vigorous intellect, fond of society, and, judging from one of his letters, endowed with a caustic wit. His mother, Ruth (Haskins) Emerson, was distinguished for her high-bred manners and tender thoughtfulness.

Severity on the part of parents was thought good for boys in that day. Ralph never forgot how his father ‘twice or thrice put me in mortal terror by forcing me into the salt water, off some wharf or bathing-house; and I still recall the fright with which, after some of these salt experiences, I heard his voice one day (as Adam that of the Lord God in the garden) summoning me to a new bath, and I vainly endeavoring to hide myself.’

Left a widow in 1811, with five boys to educate, Mrs. Emerson was forced to heroic exertions. Her sacrifices made a deep impress on the mind of the most famous of those boys.

From the Boston Latin School, Emerson went to Harvard College and was graduated in 1821 ‘with ambitions to be a professor of rhetoric and elocution.’ After a period of school-teaching, a profession towards which his attitude was unequivocal (‘Better saw wood, better sow hemp, better hang with it after it is sown, than sow the seeds of instruction’), he began his theological studies at Harvard and in due time was ‘approbated to preach.’ Ill health drove him South for a winter (1826–27), where he saw novel sights, and made the acquaintance of Achille Murat, son of the quondam King of Naples. Emerson had Murat for a fellow traveller from St. Augustine to Charleston: ‘I blessed my stars for my fine companion, and we talked incessantly.’

On March 11, 1829, Emerson was ordained as colleague of Henry Ware in the Second Church of Boston and a little later ‘became the sole incumbent.’ He resigned this advantageous post of labor (September, 1832) because of doubts about the rite of the Lord’s Supper and the offering of public prayer. To many observers his career seemed wilfully spoiled by himself.

With impaired health and in despondency and grief (he had but recently lost his young wife)[19] Emerson tried the effect of a year abroad. He sailed from Boston and arrived at Malta on February 2, 1833. Thence he proceeded to Syracuse, Taormina, Messina, Palermo, and Naples. After visiting the other chief cities of Italy, he journeyed to Paris, which he admired none the less because he felt out of place there; ‘Pray what brought you here, grave Sir?’ the moving Boulevard seemed to say. But he had the opportunity of hearing Jouffroy at the Sorbonne, and of paying his respects to Lafayette. In London he saw Coleridge. At Edinburgh he learned Carlyle’s whereabouts, visited him, and found him, ‘good and wise and pleasant.’ He was unfortunate in his trip to the Highlands (‘the scenery of a shower-bath must be always much the same’). He called on Wordsworth at Rydal Mount. In early October he was back at home.

The future was uncertain. Emerson was reluctant to give up the ministry, and preached from time to time as the chance presented itself. For some weeks he supplied Orville Dewey’s church in New Bedford, but when it was intimated that on Dewey’s resignation he might be invited to succeed him, Emerson made the impossible conditions that he should neither administer the Communion, nor offer prayer ‘unless he felt moved to do so.’ He supplied the pulpit of the Unitarian church in Concord during three months of the pastor’s illness and for three years preached to the little congregation in East Lexington.

Having cut himself off from the only ‘regular’ mode of life that seemed open to him, Emerson took up the irregular vocation of lecturer. During the winter following his return from Europe, he had lectured before the Boston Society of Natural History. Beginning in January, 1835, he gave a course on ‘Biography’ consisting of six lectures: ‘Tests of Great Men,’ ‘Michelangelo,’ ‘Luther,’ ‘Milton,’ ‘Fox,’ and ‘Burke.’ During succeeding winters he gave ten lectures on ‘English Literature’ (1835–36), twelve lectures on ‘The Philosophy of History’ (1836–37), ten lectures on ‘Human Culture’ (1837–38), ten lectures on ‘Human Life’ (1838–39), ten lectures on ‘The Present Age’ (1839–40). He was now fairly engaged in his new calling.

Meantime he had fixed on Concord for his permanent home, bought a house there, married Miss Lydia Jackson of Plymouth, and begun that career of which one of his biographers has humorously complained, ‘a life devoid of incident, of nearly untroubled happiness, and of absolute conformity to the moral law.’

In 1836 there was published anonymously a little volume entitled _Nature_. It was Emerson’s first book. His influence as a man of letters begins at this point. The succeeding volumes consisted in part of lectures which, having stood the test of public delivery, were now recast in essay form. Not every essay, however, had its first presentation as spoken discourse.

On formal public occasions Emerson was often invited to give the address. There was authority in his utterances. That he was not unlikely to say something revolutionary seemed to make it the more important that he should be heard often. He gave the Historical Address at Concord at the Second Centennial Anniversary, the Phi Beta Kappa Oration at Harvard on ‘The American Scholar’ (August, 1837), and the Address before the Senior Class in Divinity College (July 15, 1838), which brought down on him the wrath of Andrews Norton and a shower of remonstrances from Unitarian ministers who, however, loved him too much to be angry with him.

At the time of the Divinity Hall Address the so-called Transcendental movement was in full progress. The movement grew in part out of informal meetings held by a group of liberal thinkers with a view to protesting against the unsatisfactory state of current opinion in theology and philosophy, and looking for something broader and deeper.[20]

Transcendentalism was an intellectual ferment. Having a philosophical and religious significance, it was also notable for its effect on social, educational, and literary matters. Emerson defined it as faith in intuitions. It has been called an ‘outburst of Romanticism on Puritan ground.’ Certain historians connect it with German transcendental philosophy. That it was indigenous to New England appears to be the sounder view. According to a high authority,[21] ‘Emerson’s transcendentalism was native to his mind.... It had been in the life and thought of his family for generations.’ He was certainly regarded as the heresiarch.

Like most complex movements Transcendentalism had a grotesque side. The enthusiasts, in their anxiety to be emancipated from old formulas, fell victims to ‘the vice of the age,--the propensity to exaggerate the importance of visible and tangible facts.’ Emerson laughs at them a little: ‘They promise the establishment of the kingdom of heaven and end with champing unleavened bread or dedicating themselves to the nourishment of a beard.’

The movement had an ‘organ,’ a quarterly magazine called ‘The Dial,’ the first number of which appeared in July, 1840. George Ripley was the business manager, Margaret Fuller the editor. It came under Emerson’s care two years later, and in 1844 was abandoned. An audience large enough to support the organ could not be found.

Transcendentalism coincided chronologically with several plans for bettering the condition of the world. ‘We are a little wild here with numberless projects of social reform. Not a reading man but has his draft of a new community in his waistcoat pocket. I am gently mad myself.’[22]

Emerson was sympathetic with the community experiments at ‘Brook Farm’ and ‘Fruitlands,’ but not to the extent of joining them. He approved every wild action of the experimenters, nevertheless he had a work of his own.

The work consisted in bringing his thought to his public by means of lectures. He was not overfond of the medium of communication. ‘Are not lectures a kind of Peter Parley’s story of Uncle Plato, and a puppet show of the Eleusinian mysteries?’ he asks. It is not recorded what he thought of that kind of lecturing which may best be described in Byron’s phrase--‘to giggle and make giggle.’ He frankly (but unenviously) admired the speaker who could produce instantaneous effects, moving the audience to laughter or tears. His own gifts were of another sort. When ‘the stout Illinoisian’ after a short trial walked out of the hall Emerson’s sympathies were with him: ‘Shakespeare, or Franklin, or Esop, coming to Illinois, would say, I must give my wisdom a comic form,...’