REFERENCES:
O. W. Holmes: John Lothrop Motley, a Memoir, 1879.
G. W. Curtis (edited): The Correspondence of John Lothrop Motley, D. C. L., 1889.
I
HIS LIFE
Motley was born at Dorchester, Massachusetts, on April 15, 1814. His great-grandfather, John Motley, came from Belfast, Ireland, early in the Eighteenth Century, and settled at Falmouth, now Portland, Maine. His father, Thomas Motley, a prosperous merchant of Boston, married Anna Lothrop, daughter of the Reverend John Lothrop. The historian, the second-born of their eight children, was named in honor of his maternal grandfather.
After a course of study under Cogswell and Bancroft at the Round Hill School, Motley entered Harvard College and was graduated in 1831. He was noted both at Northampton and Cambridge for intellectual brilliancy rather than studiousness, for a regal manner which did not tend to make him universally popular, and for rare personal beauty as was becoming in a youth whose parents were reputed in their younger days ‘the handsomest pair the town of Boston could show.’ He was a wit. ‘Give me the luxuries of life and I will dispense with the necessaries,’ is one of his best-known sayings. His passions were literary, he admired Shelley and enjoyed the cleverness of Praed. Although fond of versifying, he seems to have printed little or nothing.
After graduation Motley spent two years (1832–33) at German universities. He went first to Göttingen, where he made the acquaintance of Bismarck. They were fellow-students the next year at Berlin. ‘We lived in closest intimacy, sharing meals and outdoor exercise,’ said Bismarck in a letter to Holmes.
His period of foreign study having come to an end, Motley read law in Boston and was admitted to the bar. In 1837 he married Miss Mary Benjamin, a young woman noted for her beauty, cleverness, and an open-hearted sincerity which ‘made her seem like a sister to those who could help becoming her lovers.’[46] Two years after his marriage Motley made his literary beginning by publishing a novel, Morton’s Hope, or the Memoirs of a Provincial, and in 1849 he published yet another, Merry-Mount, a Romance of the Massachusetts Colony. Neither was successful. Perhaps the second failure was required to emphasize the lesson taught by the first, that the author’s gifts were not for imaginative work.[47] He was more fortunate with a group of three essays printed in the ‘North American Review,’ one on ‘Peter the Great’ (1845), one on ‘Balzac’ (1847), the third on ‘The Polity of the Puritans’ (1849).
The first subject was suggested to Motley during a residence of several months in St. Petersburg as Secretary to the American Legation (1841–42). This taste of diplomatic life seems not to have been wholly relished. Motley’s wife could not accompany him, and homesickness and a Russian winter conspired to drive him back to America. He gained some knowledge of practical politics by serving a term in the Massachusetts legislature (1849). Neither law, nor diplomacy, nor yet politics, seemed at that time to offer a field in which he could work to best advantage. More and more he was tending towards literature. So absorbed had he become in the history of Holland that he felt it ‘necessary to write a book on the subject, even if it were destined to fall dead from the press.’ He had made some progress when he heard of Prescott’s projected history of Philip the Second. Thinking it ‘disloyal’ not to declare his ambition of invading a part of Prescott’s own domain, he went to lay his plan before the elder historian. Prescott immediately offered the use of books from his library and was in all ways cordial and enthusiastic.
It soon became evident that a history of Holland could not be written in America. In 1851 Motley took his family and went abroad, and for the next five years toiled unweariedly among the archives of Dresden, The Hague, Brussels, and Paris. His energy and plodding patience surprised the friends who remembered Motley for a brilliant young man who heretofore had played industriously at work rather than actually worked. ‘He never shrank from any of the drudgery of preparation,’ said his daughter, Lady Harcourt, in after years.
The three volumes of The Rise of the Dutch Republic were at length ready for the press. Motley was forced to publish at his own expense. Notwithstanding hostile criticisms, the success was undeniable. The book was immediately translated into French, German, and Dutch. Of two French versions the one published in Paris was edited, with an introduction, by Guizot.
The historical series as we have it comprises nine volumes. The works appeared in the following order: The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1856; History of the United Netherlands, 1860–68; The Life and Death of John of Barneveld, 1874. Motley’s plan included a history of the Thirty Years’ War. But he was not to be granted length of days sufficient for the writing of this ‘last act of a great drama.’
Among many scholastic honors which in the nature of things fell to Motley’s share may be mentioned the conferring of the degree of D. C. L. by Oxford, and the election to full membership in the Institute of France.
Shortly after the fall of Fort Sumter, Motley published in the London ‘Times’ two letters on the significance and justice of the war. They had a marked effect in England and were reprinted in America. In June, 1861, the Austrian government having refused to accept the minister sent to Vienna, Motley was accredited to the mission. After discharging the duties of his office with marked ability during the four troubled years of Lincoln’s administration, and through two years of Johnson’s, he resigned because of an affront offered him by his own government.[48]
During the political campaign of 1868 Motley gave an address in Music Hall, Boston, on ‘Four Questions for the People at the Presidential Election.’ On December 16, as orator at the sixty-first anniversary of the New York Historical Society, he spoke on ‘Historic Progress and American Democracy.’ In the spring of 1869 President Grant assigned Motley to the English mission, and in July, 1870, recalled him. The reasons given for this summary act have never been satisfactory to Motley’s friends. It is a question for experts. If Motley’s indiscretion (or offence) was great, his punishment was severe, and the manner of it not undeserving of the epithet brutal.[49]
Motley’s health is believed to have been affected by distress of mind over the recall. But the real disaster of his latter years was the loss of his wife. He survived her only two and a half years. His death occurred at Kingston Russell, near Dorchester, England, on May 29, 1877.
Dean Stanley in his tribute to Motley at Westminster Abbey used the striking phrase, ‘an historian at once so ardent and so laborious.’ J. R. Green, who heard the sermon, thought the phrase ‘most happy.’ Said Green: ‘I should have liked Stanley to have pointed out the thing which strikes me most in Motley, that alone of all men past and present he knit together not only America and England, but that Older England which we left on Frisian shores, and which grew into the United Netherlands. A child of America, the historian of Holland, he made England his adopted country, and in England his body lies.’
II
HIS CHARACTER
Motley’s letters afford the best insight into his generous, affectionate, richly endowed, and manly nature. They mirror his complete happiness in the home circle, his chivalrous devotion to the woman of his choice, his loyalty to his friends, and his passionate love of native land. They do not show—nor was it intended by the editor that they should—his fiery impatience, his quick resentment, his sensitive pride, his occasional and pardonable bitterness.
A dominant trait of Motley’s character was intensity of the patriotic sentiment. Much was required of a ‘good American’ who, living in Europe during the Civil War, frequented the circles Motley frequented—much in the way of tact, patience, and, above all, courage and hopefulness. Motley, who was far from being a placid, unreflecting optimist, had need of all his philosophy as he saw everywhere proofs of satisfaction in America’s misfortune. He had not only to meet a frank antagonism which could be understood and dealt with, but a hostility which took the galling form of suave assurances that his country was positively going to the dogs, and on the whole it was a very good thing that it was. If gentlemen did not exactly call on him for the purpose of telling him so, they managed sometimes to leave that impression. Motley’s services to his country in meeting every form of attack, direct or insidious, in the spirit of high confidence, were very great. The extent of his usefulness has not yet been fully measured.
He was free from literary vanity and would have been quite unmoved had his books come short of their actual fortune. His way of accepting the real or the superficial tributes to success shows the man. Honorary degrees, elections to learned societies, drawing-room lionizing, passing compliments, were taken exactly for what they were worth. He was as far removed from the absurdity of being elated by these things as he was from the absurdity of pretending not to care. No one could have been more alive to the significance of a degree from Oxford, yet Motley seems to have got the most of comfort on that occasion from the odd spectacle of the Doctors marching in the rain, and among them old Brougham ‘with his wonderful nose wagging lithely from side to side as he hitched up his red petticoats and stalked through the mud.’
The letters reveal so many pleasant traits as to make it difficult to comprehend the hostility which pursued the writer. Holmes throws a deal of light on that question by a single remark. Motley, he says, ‘did not illustrate the popular type of politician.’ The fact is, he illustrated everything that was opposed to that type. An uncompromising upholder of the democratic theory, a bitter foe of absolutism, a eulogist of the people, Motley was himself an aristocrat to the finger-tips. ‘He had a genuine horror of vulgarity in all its forms,’ said one of his friends, and doubtless he showed it. An ‘instinctive repugnance to bad manners and coarse-grained men’ was a trait ill-suited to popularity. Motley’s high-bred bearing alone constituted an offence. But he was incapable of so much policy as was involved in pretending to a bonhomie that was unnatural to him. He had a pliancy of nature fitted to the complex needs of a very complex social organization, but that was not enough to satisfy all his exacting countrymen. And among them were those who disliked him for being the gentleman he was.
III
THE WRITER
The historian of the Dutch Republic writes as one who thinks nobly, admires with enthusiasm, and hates without pettiness. ‘His thoughts are masculine, full of argumentation,’ and as are his thoughts so is his style. Often the language seems charged with his own energy and chivalric impulsiveness. At such times the style is eager, mettlesome, impetuous, it glows with intensity of feeling.
Motley was not a ‘fine’ writer in the sense of being visibly scrupulous about the choice of words and the balance of sentences. He impresses one as of the opinion that a man can ill afford to give too much time to the problem of expression. But he is far from being indifferent to the reader. He is not merely willing, he prefers to please, provided that in so doing he is not diverted from his main purpose. The prevailing characteristics of his style are a natural dignity and a manly negligence.
He imparts vividness by means of detailed conversations among the actors of the historic drama. These colloquies have at times the air of being inventions of the historian, like the speeches in Xenophon. Conscious that a device intended to give reality might affect the sceptical mind quite otherwise, Motley more than once explained that ‘no historical personage is ever made, in the text, to say or write anything, save what, on ample evidence, he is known to have said or written.’
The reader who turns from Prescott to Motley at once discovers that the younger historian weaves a dense, firm web. Appropriating an admirable figure invented by Henry James and used with respect to Balzac’s style, it may be said that if Motley’s work is not at every point cloth of gold, it has at least a metallic rigidity.
IV
THE HISTORIES
The struggle of the Dutch for religious and political liberty was to have been ‘only an episode’ in Prescott’s Philip the Second. Motley’s broad treatment of the theme requires nine octavo volumes. The Rise of the Dutch Republic (in three volumes) covers the time between the abdication of Charles the Fifth and the murder of William of Orange. The History of the United Netherlands (in four volumes) takes up the narrative at the death of William and carries it on to the end of the Twelve Years’ Truce. John of Barneveld, is ‘the natural sequel’ to the two preceding works, and ‘a necessary introduction’ to the history of the Thirty Years’ War.
These works from first to last are marked by passionate admiration of the spirit which makes for liberty. Admitting the turbulent character of that spirit in the early history of the Netherlands, the historian does not deplore it. Sedition and uproar meant life. ‘Those violent little commonwealths had blood in their veins! They were compact of proud, self-helping muscular vigor.’ And to Motley ‘the most sanguinary tumults which they ever enacted in the face of day were better than the order and silence born of the midnight darkness of despotism.’
The treatment then is strongly partisan. There is a fervor in the account of the deeds and sufferings of those patriots who thought no sacrifice too great if thereby the sum total of human liberty was increased.
Motley does not pretend that the leaders in this struggle were always disinterested. The motives swaying humanity are wondrously complex. But after all deductions are made, it was a struggle of light against darkness, and with such a struggle it was possible to sympathize unqualifiedly. There are cool-blooded critics who view such an attitude with disdain. This, they say, is not the temper in which history should be written. History must be calm, impartial, scientific. Perhaps the reasonable reply is that history must be of many sorts and the product of many types of mind; that one sort never really excludes the other. Also it is well to remember that a great historical master of our time,[50] and one whose creed was by no means narrow, pleaded always for this deep and passionate motive in the work, and laughed at the modern Oxford product which can balance questions but is able to accomplish nothing.
Motley’s historic canvas is crowded with figures. The eye is at first drawn toward the personages, the military, ecclesiastical, and princely chiefs, William of Orange (who is Motley’s hero), Egmont, Alva, and Granvelle; but the eye does not rest on these alone. Surrounding them are the multitudes of aspiring, suffering people becoming more and more a preponderant force in the life of the nation, refusing to be disposed of in the lump, or driven about like a flock of sheep to be sheared or slaughtered at the whim of a monarch.
Here lies Motley’s sympathy. His indignation flames out when misery is brought upon thousands, by the caprice of kings or the selfishness of secular and ecclesiastical politicians. Note his sarcasm on the battle of Saint Quentin, a game in which ‘the players were kings and the people were stakes—not parties.’ Note his fine scorn of that type of government ‘which was administered exclusively for the benefit of the government.’ Note his loathing for that type of vanity which presumes to dictate how a man shall worship God. The temper in which Motley writes is admirably epitomized in the picture of Caraffa, as papal legate, making his entry into Paris, showering blessings upon the people, ‘while the friends who were nearest him were aware that nothing but gibes and sarcasms were falling from his lips.... It would no doubt have increased the hilarity of Caraffa ... could the idea have been suggested to his mind that the sentiments, or the welfare of the people throughout the great states ... could have any possible bearing upon the question of peace or war. The world was governed by other influences. The wiles of a cardinal—the arts of a concubine—the speculations of a soldier of fortune—the ill temper of a monk—the mutual venom of Italian houses—above all, the perpetual rivalry of the two great historical families who owned the greater part of Europe between them as their private property—such were the wheels on which rolled the destiny of Christendom. Compared to these, what were great moral and political ideas, the plans of statesmen, the hopes of nations? Time was to show.... Meanwhile a petty war for petty motives was to precede the great spectacle which was to prove to Europe that principles and peoples still existed, and that a phlegmatic nation of merchants and manufacturers could defy the powers of the universe, and risk all their blood and treasure, generation after generation, in a sacred cause.’[51]
The historian is a hard hitter. The enemies of liberty and their agents are not spared. Philip, Granvelle, Alva, and a score besides are characterized in withering terms. Of Philip, for example, Motley says: ‘It is curious to observe the minute reticulations of tyranny which he had begun already to spin about a whole people, while cold, venomous, and patient he watched his victims from the center of his web.’ The historian is fiery in denouncing the tortuous and Machiavellian politics of the Sixteenth Century. It was an age when honesty, plain speaking, and respect for a promise had nothing to do with the conduct of affairs of state. He who could lie most adroitly was the best man. Granvelle fills his letters with innuendoes against Egmont and Orange, all the while protesting that he would not have a hair of their heads injured. It is he, according to Motley, who puts into Philip’s mind the thoughts he is to think, almost in the words in which he is to utter them. Philip had his own strength, but he was slow to come to a conclusion. Granvelle knew how to clarify that muddy stream of ideas.
The preceding work shows the Dutch states in the beginning and progress of their struggle against the tyranny of Philip; the United Netherlands shows Holland as a rising hope of Protestantism, as a nation to be reckoned with in the diplomacy of Europe.
The Spanish king is still writing letters, still concocting schemes for conquest, still enmeshing friends and enemies alike in a web of falsehood. He is drawn off for the moment from his mission in the Netherlands to extend his conquests elsewhere. These proposed conquests have exactly one object—to enable the spirit of despotism ‘to maintain the old mastery of mankind.’ ‘Countries and nations being regarded as private property to be inherited or bequeathed to a few favored individuals, ... it had now become right and proper for the Spanish monarch to annex Scotland, England, and France to the very considerable possessions which were already his own.’
A picturesque episode of the attempt upon England was the Armada. To this enterprise Motley gives one of his best and most thrilling chapters. Equally fascinating is the account of the attempt upon France, the battle of Ivry (when the white plume of Henry of Navarre carried the hopes of all liberal-minded men), and the terrible siege of Paris which almost immediately followed. ‘Rarely have men at any epoch defended their fatherland against foreign oppression with more heroism than that which was manifested by the Parisians of 1590 in resisting religious toleration, and in obeying a foreign and priestly despotism.’
Perhaps there are not to be found in the historian’s works more striking passages than those in which are described the last days of Philip the Second. To Philip’s fortitude, in agony as poignant as any he had visited upon his miserable victims, the historian gives unstinted praise. The account, which rests upon documentary basis, presents an accumulation of horrors from which a Zola or a Flaubert might have learned a lesson. The king died with a clear conscience, having upon his soul the blood of uncounted numbers of human beings, and providing in his will that ‘thirty thousand masses should be said for his soul.’
‘It seems like mere railing to specify his crimes,’ says Motley. ‘The horrible monotony of his career stupefies the mind until it is ready to accept the principle of evil as the fundamental law of the land.’ Motley’s conclusion is that Philip the Second of Spain was Machiavelli’s greatest pupil.
What remains of the book after Philip’s death lacks neither literary interest nor historic value. But we have something akin to the feeling which comes over us when the chief character in a play dies before the last act; we question for a moment whether the interest will hold. That dominant and sinister personality leaves a void which the exploits of Prince Maurice hardly serve to fill. With these exploits, however, and a discussion of the causes leading to the Twelve Years’ Truce, Motley concluded the History of the United Netherlands.
In the last of his three great works, John of Barneveld, Motley gave full expression to his generous partisanship of all that seemed to him to stand for the spirit of liberty. With a contempt for the subtleties of theological speculation, the historian was by instinct ‘Remonstrant,’ that is, anti-Calvinistic, and found in Barneveld one of his heroes. He has painted a wonderful picture of the old advocate’s trial and death. Hounded daily by twenty-four judges, many of them his personal enemies, compelled to rely on his powerful memory in reviewing the events and explaining the acts of his forty-three years of public service, denied books, denied counsel, denied a knowledge in advance of the charges made against him, denied access to the notes of his examination as it proceeded, denied everything suggested by the words ‘law’ and ‘justice,’ Barneveld came out of the ordeal so triumphantly that the announcement of his sentence might well have moved him to say: ‘I am ready enough to die, but I cannot comprehend why I am to die.’
In characterization of men, in searching analysis of causes and motives, in brilliant description, and in manly eloquence, Motley’s John of Barneveld equals its predecessors, while the note of passion is if anything intensified by the bitter experiences through which the historian had so recently passed.
* * * * *
A fitting postlude to Motley’s work as a whole may be found in the last sentence of the United Netherlands. It makes clear the motives other than scholarly and creative which led to the writing of these splendid narratives. Says the historian: ‘If by his labors a generous love has been fostered for that blessing, without which everything that this earth can afford is worthless,—freedom of thought, of speech, and of life,—his highest wish has been fulfilled.’