REFERENCES:
Edward Wheelwright: ‘Memoir of Francis Parkman, LL.D.,’ Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, vol. i, 1895.
C. H. Farnham: A Life of Francis Parkman, 1901.
H. D. Sedgwick: Francis Parkman, ‘American Men of Letters,’ 1904.
I
HIS LIFE
The Parkmans are descendants of Thomas Parkman of Sidmouth, Devon, whose son Elias settled in Dorchester, Massachusetts, in 1633. Francis Parkman was a son of the Reverend Francis Parkman, pastor for thirty-six years of the New North Church in Boston. Through his mother, Caroline (Hall) Parkman, he was related to the famous colonial minister, John Cotton. Two of his maternal ancestors used to preach to the Indians in their own tongue. Parkman’s deep interest in the ‘aborigines’ may have been ‘partly inherited from these Puritan ancestors.’ ‘It does not appear, however, that he ever learned their language, and it may be regarded as certain that he never preached to them.’
Born in Boston on September 16, 1823, Parkman prepared for college at Chauncy Hall School and was graduated at Harvard in 1844. During his college course he ‘showed symptoms of Injuns on the brain,’ as a classmate phrased it. In 1841 he began those vacation wanderings which gave him such an intimate acquaintance with the American wilderness. Before taking his degree he had planned a book on the conspiracy of Pontiac. The year after graduation he visited Detroit and other scenes of the historic drama, collected papers, and, wherever it was possible, ‘interviewed descendants of the actors.’
At his father’s instance Parkman then entered the Dane Law School at Cambridge and obtained his degree (1846), but took no steps to be admitted to the bar. He studied by himself history, Indian ethnology, and ‘models of English style.’ The passage in Vassall Morton describing the influence of Thierry’s Norman Conquest in directing the hero of the novel towards ethnological study, is thought to be autobiographical.
Having weakened his sight by immoderate reading, Parkman (in 1846) made a journey to the Northwest, ‘partly to cure his eyes and partly to study Indian life.’ He was accompanied by his friend Quincy Adams Shaw. For some weeks he lived in a village of Ogillallah Indians, sharing the tent of a chief and following the wanderings of the tribe in their search for enemies and buffalo. The hardships of the life ruined his health. His sight was made worse rather than better, and his first book, The Oregon Trail (1849), describing these western experiences, had to be written from dictation.[52] It was followed by The Conspiracy of Pontiac (1851), and that by Vassall Morton (1856), an attempt at fiction. This ends the initial period of Parkman’s literary life.
In 1850 Parkman married Catharine, a daughter of Doctor Jacob Bigelow of Boston. She is said to have been a woman of a sweet and joyful disposition, having a keen sense of humor, and, above all, endowed with ‘the high courage requisite to tend unfalteringly the pain and suffering of the man she loved.’[53] It was a perfect union, but unhappily it was not to last long. Mrs. Parkman died in 1858.
The historian’s health steadily declined. For years together his chief study was to keep himself alive. As a part of this study he took up floriculture, and soon found himself absorbed in it for its own sake. He became famous for his roses and lilies, and was the recipient of prizes innumerable from horticultural societies.[54] Yet at no time did he lose sight of his main object, the history of France in North America. Little by little his store of materials accumulated. Even when he was at his worst physically, some progress was made. It might be only a step, but the step had not to be retraced.
As his strength returned he began to travel. To renew his acquaintance with the Indians he went to Fort Snelling in 1867. He was repeatedly in Paris consulting archives and doctors. He visited Canada in 1873 and explored over and over again the region between Quebec and Lake George.
The great historical series to which its author gave the title of France and England in North America began to appear just at the close of the Civil War. The volumes in the order of their publication are: The Pioneers of France in the New World, 1865; The Jesuits in North America, 1867; The Discovery of the Great West, 1869;[55] The Old Régime, 1874; Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV, 1877; Montcalm and Wolfe, 1884; A Half-Century of Conflict, 1892.
The merits of this extraordinary series were recognized at once as many and varied. It is a question to which of three types of reader the books most appealed,—the scholar, who is bound to read critically whether he will or no, the utilitarian in search of facts chiefly, or the mere lover of literature. Each found what he was seeking in these narratives, and each paid homage to the author in his own way.
As is often true of historians far less notable than he, Parkman was the recipient of academic honors, and was made a member of numerous historical societies. The mere catalogue of these distinctions fills a page of printed text. His membership of the Massachusetts Historical Society and his degree of LL. D. from Harvard College (1889) will serve as illustrations. Parkman was influential in helping to found the Archæological Institute of America. He was one of the founders of the St. Botolph Club in Boston, and its president during the first six years of its existence.
The history of France and England in North America was completed the year before he died. Had time and strength been allowed him, he would have recast the material in the form of a continuous narrative. There might have been a gain in the new arrangement, as on the other hand there might have been a loss.
Parkman died at his home at Jamaica Plain, near Boston, on November 8, 1893.
II
PARKMAN’S CHARACTER
Parkman had prodigious will power and unequalled pertinacity. No barrier to the accomplishment of his object was allowed to stand in the way. He was beset by the demons of ill health, and their number was legion. Unable to rout them by impetuous onslaught, he tired them out, thinning their ranks, one by one. He was infinitely patient, full of devices for outwitting the enemy. Beaten again and again, he stubbornly renewed the fight. Threatened with blindness, he set himself to avoid it, and did. Threatened with insanity, he declined to become insane.
Nothing could be more admirable than the spirit in which he faced daily torment. He was that extraordinary being, a cheerful stoic. Four times in his life it was a question whether he would live or die. Parkman admitted that once, had he been seeking merely his comfort, he would have elected to die. That must have been the time when, in response to his physician’s encouraging remark that he had a strong constitution, Parkman said: ‘I’m afraid I have.’ In ordinary conditions of ill health he was bright, cheery, philosophical, but when he suffered most he was silent. At no time was he capable of complaining.
Parkman loved to face the hard facts of life and was apt to admire others in the degree in which they showed a like spirit. He had a sovereign contempt for everything not manly and robust. He contradicted with amusing emphasis the statement in some biographical notice that he was ‘feeble.’ By his philosophy the militant attitude toward life was the true one. He believed in war as a moral force; it made for character both in the man and in the nation. ‘The severest disappointment of his life was his inability to enter the army during our civil war.’
He was wholly free from certain narrow traits which are too apt to be engendered in a life devoted to books and authorship. Manly, open-hearted, unspoiled, he neither craved honors nor despised them. It has been remarked that while he was gratified by the recognition accorded his work in high places, he was equally pleased with a letter from ‘a live boy’ who wrote to tell him how much he had enjoyed reading about Pontiac and La Salle. He himself kept to the last a certain boyish frankness of mind and heart. The year before he died he wrote to the secretary of the class of ’44: ‘Please give my kind regrets and remembrances to the fellows.’
There have been not a few attractive personalities in the history of American letters. Parkman was one of the most attractive among them.
III
THE WRITER
The style is clear and luminous. Short sentences abound, giving the effect of rapidity. The mind of the reader never halts because of an obscure term or some intricacy of structure. Neither is the page spotted with long words ending in tion, and which coming in groups, as they do in Bancroft, are like grit in the teeth. Parkman did not attain the exquisite grace and composure which characterize Irving’s prose, but he came nearer to it than did Prescott. The historian of Ferdinand and Isabella had a self-conscious style. Agreeable as it is, it reveals a man always on guard as he writes. In his most eloquent passages Prescott is formal, precise, even stiff.
Parkman’s style is wholly engaging. There is a captivating manner about it, the result of his immense enthusiasm for his theme. Infinitely laborious in the preparation, sceptical in use of authorities, temperate in judgment, when, however, it comes to telling the story, he allows his genius for narration a free rein, and the style, though losing none of its dignity, is eager and almost impetuous. The historian speaks as an eye-witness of all he describes.
This explains Parkman’s popularity in large degree. Fascinating as the subject is, the manner adds a hundred fold. He who reads Bancroft gets a deal of information, for which he pays a round price. He who reads Parkman gets facts, eloquence, philosophy, besides no end of adventure, and for all this he pays literally nothing.
IV
EARLY WORK OREGON TRAIL, CONSPIRACY OF PONTIAC, VASSALL MORTON
The Oregon Trail ranks high among books which, though sometimes written for quite another purpose, are read chiefly for entertainment. Such was Two Years before the Mast, such was The Bible in Spain, that skilful work of a most accomplished poseur.
In addition to its value as literature, The Oregon Trail is a trustworthy account of a no longer existent state of society. It is a document. The range of experience was narrow, and the adventures few, but so far as it goes the record is perfect; and when read in connection with his historical work, the book becomes a commentary on Parkman’s method. Here is shown how he got that knowledge of Indian life and character which distinguishes his work from that of other historical writers who touch the same field. The knowledge was utilized at once in his next work.
The Conspiracy of Pontiac is the sort of book people praise by saying that it is as readable as a novel. The comparison is unfortunate. So many novels are disciplinary rather than amusing. One wishes it were possible to say of them that they are as readable as history.
Nevertheless it is quite true that the virtues supposed to inhere chiefly in a work of fiction are conspicuous in this the first of Parkman’s historical studies. The Conspiracy of Pontiac is a story, filled with incident and abounding in illustrations of courage, craft, endurance, stubbornness, self-sacrifice, despair, triumph. The plain truth shames invention. Pontiac lives in these pages describing his towering ambition. So do the other actors,—Rogers, Gladwyn, Campbell, Catharine the Ojibwa girl. The supernumeraries are strikingly picturesque,—Canadian settlers, trappers, coureurs des bois, priests, half-breeds, and Indians, the motley denizens of frontier and wilderness. A forest drama played by actors like these is bound to be absorbing were it only as a spectacle.
One fact becomes apparent on taking up this book. History as Parkman writes it is both dramatic and graphical, filled with action and movement, filled with color, form, and beauty. With such an eye for effect it is impossible for him to be dull. Open the volume at random and the wealth of the author’s observations seems to have been showered on that page. But the next page is like it, and also the next.
The vivacity of youth explains much in this narrative. Parkman was but twenty-six when he wrote The Conspiracy of Pontiac. Being young, he was not afraid to be eloquent, to revel in descriptions of sunrise and sunset, tempests, the coming of spring, the brilliant hues of autumn foliage, the soft haze of Indian summer. His chapters are richly enamelled with these glowing pieces of rhetoric. He is no less brilliant in his martial scenes; the accounts of the Battle of Bloody Bridge and of Bouquet’s fight in the forest are extraordinarily well done.
The historian is severe on writers who have idealized the Indian. Here is one of Parkman’s own characterizations: ‘The stern, unchanging features of his mind excite our admiration from their very immutability; and we look with deep interest on the fate of this irreclaimable son of the wilderness, the child who will not be weaned from the breast of his rugged mother. And our interest increases when we discern in the unhappy wanderer, mingled among his vices, the germs of heroic virtues,—a hand bountiful to bestow, as it is rapacious to seize, and, even in extremest famine, imparting its last morsel to a fellow sufferer; a heart which, strong in friendship as in hate, thinks it not too much to lay down life for its chosen comrade; a soul true to its own idea of honor, and burning with an unquenchable thirst for greatness and renown.’ Neither poet nor novelist really needs to embroider such an account of the Red Man.
This successful historic monograph was followed by an unsuccessful novel, written, it is thought, for recreation. Without being an autobiography, Vassall Morton abounds in autobiographical passages. Its failure was not of the kind that proves inability ever to master the art of fiction. The loss to American letters however would have been incalculable had Parkman’s genius for historical narrative been sacrificed in any degree to novel writing. And this might have happened had Vassall Morton been a success.
V
FRANCE AND ENGLAND IN NORTH AMERICA
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.