John Lothrop Motley.
Grand with all that the young earth had of vigorous and queenly to adorn her, rich with the spoils of victories not all bought with battle-axe and sword, stately with a pride that had won its just and inalienable majesty from elastic centuries of progress and culture, History, the muse to whom fewest songs were sung, yet whose march was music's sublimest voice, trembled upon the brink of the Dark Ages, and leaped, in her armor, into the abyss of ignorance before her. A poetry the purest, an art the noblest, a religion deeply symbolical, a freedom bold and magnificent, had given to the world-histories of those early days a melody varied and faultless, a form flowing yet well-defined, an earnestness that was sacred, a truth that was divine. A philosophy rich and largely suggestive had made the great men of Greece and Rome alert, vigilant, penetrating, before luxury and oppression had dragged them down to ruin and ignorance; and at last Ambition, splendid but destructive, becoming the world's artist, blended the midnight tints of decline and suffering with the carnation of triumph and liberty, and cast over the pictures of History the Rembrandt-like shadows, heavy and wavering, that add a fearful intensity to their charms.
To these eras, once splendid and promising, succeeded a night, long, hopeless, disastrous. Its hours were counted by contentions, its darkness was deepened by crime. The sun had set upon a mighty empire, regnant upon her seven hills, glorious with conquest, drunken with power: when the day dawned upon the thousandth year of the Christian era, its crumbled arches and moss-grown walls alone testified to the truth of History that had survived the universal destruction.
And now came the age of knight and paladin, of crusades and talismans. The rough, vigorous life that had been developing at the North, exuberant with a strength not yet so mature that it could be employed in the wise and practical pursuits of civilized life, burst forth into an enthusiasm half military, half religious, that pervaded all ranks, but was 'mightiest in the mighty.' The Saxons, fair-haired, with wild blue eyes, whence looked an inflexible perseverance, the dark-browed Normans, and the men of fair Bretagne, swooped down falcon-like from their nests among the rocks and by the seas of Northern Europe upon the impetuous Saracens, and fought brave poems that were written on sacred soil with their blood. From the strife of years the heroes returned, their flowing locks whitened by years and suffering, the fair Saxon faces browned by the fervent suns of the distant East. From hardship and imprisonment they marched with gay songs amid acclamations and welcome to their homes upon the Northern shores. Their once shining armor was dimmed and rusted with their own blood; but they bore upon their 'spears the light' of a culture more refined, a knowledge more subtle, than those high latitudes had ever before known.
From this marriage of the barbaric vigor of the North with the delicate and infinitely pliable sensuousness of the South, the classic union of Strength and Desire, Chivalry was born. Leaping forth to light and power, a majestic creation, glittering in the knightly panoply, noble by its knightly vows, it stood resplendent against the dark background of the past ages, the inevitable and legitimate offspring of the times and circumstances that gave it birth. The courtly baptism was eagerly sought, its requirements rigidly obeyed. The lands bristled with the lances of their valiant sons, and Quixotic expeditions were the order of the age. But not alone with sword and spear were gallant contests decided; the gauntlet thrown at the feet of a proud foe was not always of iron. El gai saber, the gaye science, held its august courts, where princesses entered the lists and vanquished gallant troubadours with the concord of their sweet measures. Slowly, yet with resistless strength, a new social world was rising upon the splendid ruins of the old. Its principles were just, if their garb was fantastical. It began with that almost superstitious reverence for woman, which had borrowed its religion from the Teuton, its romance from the Minnesinger and the Trouveur: it will end in the honesty and freedom of a world mature for its enjoyment.
Thus, while the kingdoms of Europe were rising to a height where to oppress, to torture, to fight, were to seem their sole aim and purpose, in a hitherto obscure corner of the great theatre of modern life an unknown element was developing itself, which was in time to shake the greatest nations with its power, to inflame all Europe with jealousy and cupidity, and to dictate to empires the very terms of their existence. And this element was LABOR. The rich lowlands of the 'double-armed' Rhine teemed with a busy life, that, king-like, demanded a tribute of the sea, and wrenched from the greedy waves a treasure that its industry made priceless. Each man became a prince in his own divine right, and every occupation had its lords and its lore, its 'mysteries,' and its social rights. The seamen, merchants, and artisans of the Netherlands had made their country the richest in Europe. They ranged the seas and learned the value of the land; and while they fed the great despot of the Middle Ages, the light of intelligence, born of energy and nurtured by activity, cast its benignant gleams from the central island of the Rhine, and drove from their mountain nooks the owls and bats of tyranny and superstition. They fought first, these lords of the soil, among themselves, for local privileges, advancing in their continuous struggles upon the very threshold of the church. By strong alliances they kept at bay their feudal lords, and fettered the ecclesiastical power with the yoke of a justice, meagre, indeed, and sadly unfruitful, but still ominous of a better day. Within the alabaster vase of despotism, frail, yet old as ambition, the lamp of freedom had long burned dimly: now its flames were licking, with serpent-like tongues, the enclosure so long deemed sacred, and threatened, as they dyed the air with their amber flood of light, to shiver their temple to fragments. The theory of the divine right of kings was but another 'Luck of Edenhall.' Its slender stem trembled now within the rough grasp of the sacrilegious and burly Netherlanders, who hesitated not long ere they dashed it with the old superstition to the ground, shaking the civilized world to its centre by the shock. But out of the ruins a statelier edifice was to rise, whose windows, like those of the old legend, were stained by the lifeblood of its architect.
The historian who would worthily depict such an age, such a people, such principles, must be an artist, but one in whom the creative faculty does not blind the moral obligations. He must bring to the work a republican sympathy, must be governed by a republican justice, and wear a character as noble as the struggle that he paints. And such an artist, such a historian, such a man, we have in JOHN LOTHROP MOTLEY.
The honors of Harvard, early and nobly earned, had given to the boy at seventeen the privileges and dignity of manhood. He was destined to become a scholar, eminent, even among the rarely and richly cultured minds of his own New England, for his universal knowledge, clearness of intellect, prompt energy, and indomitable perseverance. Inspired by these gifts and attainments, it was only natural, almost inevitable, that his first appearance upon the literary stage should have been in the rôle of a novelist. The active young intellect was pliant and strong, but had not yet learned its power. Before him lay the broad fields of romance, fascinating with their royal fleurs de lis, rich with the contributions of every age, some quaint and laughter-moving, some pompous and exaggerated, some soul-stirring and grand. Impelled, perhaps, less by a thirst for fame than a desire to satisfy the resistless impulses of an energetic nature, and lay those fair ghosts of enterprises dimly recognized that beckoned him onward, he followed the first path that lay before him, and became a romance writer. His first work, Morton's Hope, or the Memoirs of a Provincial, was published in 1839, and subsequently appeared Merry Mount, a Romance of Massachusetts. It is curious to trace in these first flights of a genius that has since learned its legitimate field, a tendency to the breadth of Motley's later efforts, an instinctive and evidently unconscious passion for the descriptive, an admirably curbed yet still powerful impatience of the light fetters, the toy regulations of the realm of Fiction, and an earnestness that has since bloomed in the world of Fact and History. The very imperfections of the novelist have become the charms of the historian. His student-life in Germany, his after-plot in the stirring Revolutionary times, strongly as they are drawn, animated as they are with dashes of that vivid power that stamps every page of the histories of their author, yet lack the proof of that unquestioned yet unobtrusive consciousness of genius that harden the telling sentences of the Rise of the Dutch Republic and the United Netherlands into blocks of adamant, polished by friction with each other to a diamond brightness, and reflecting only the noblest sentiments, the most profound principles. The dice had been thrown a second time, and Motley had not won a victory. The applause of the press was insufficient to the man, who felt that he had not yet struck the key-note of his destiny. To be counted the follower of Cooper was not the meet guerdon of an intellect to which the shapely monuments of ancient literature yielded the clue to their hieroglyphic labyrinths of knowledge, and that pierced with lightning swiftness the shell of events, and possessed the latent principles of life in their warm hearts. He returned, therefore, to Europe, leaving behind him a reputation which at no distant day was destined to spring from a new and more noble foundation into a lasting and more stately pile.
To a mind like Motley's, the department of history presented the most attractive features. There could honestly be no dabbling with the specious and seductive alchemy of Fiction. Truth had molded every period of the world's life. Truth defied had tripped up nations in their headlong race after dominion and unrighteous power. Truth victorious had smiled upon their steady growth to greatness and honor. To write history was to write poetry, art, philosophy, religion, life. The pen that sketched the rise, the progress, and the fate of nations, was in fact the chisel of a sculptor, whose theme was humanity.
And what work so fitting for the American author as the record of a nation struggling away from the oppression of feudal institutions, which stifled all growth either towards knowledge or civil greatness, throwing off the trammels of religious intolerance, defying the most powerful nation of Christendom, which had breathed an air of bigotry in its long contest with the Moors, and waging an exhaustive war of nearly a century's duration against fearful odds, only to win an independent existence? We had treasured as rare heirlooms the Mechlin laces of our grandmothers, had our favorite sets of Tournay porcelain, awaited with curious and enthusiastic patience our shares in the floral exportations of Harlem, trodden daily the carpetings of Brussels, and esteemed ourselves rich with a fragment of its tapestry, or a rifle of Namur; we had honored the vast manufacturing interest of the Netherlands, their commercial prosperity and noble enterprise; but here all thought of them had ended. Schiller had not taught us that the ancestors of the miners of Mons, the artisans of Brussels, the seamen of Antwerp, the professors of Leyden, were heroes, worthy to stand beside Leonidas and Bozzaris; Strâda had failed to rouse us to enthusiasm at the thought of their long, noble battle for life. Grotius had indeed painted for us with a very Flemish nicety of detail their manners and customs, but had forgotten to round his skeleton of a nation with the passions that animated every stage of its development. It remained for Motley, with all the quick sympathies of an American heart, to rouse our affections and to command our reverence for a people so unfortunate and so brave. It was reserved for him to teach us that William of Orange was not less a martyr to the truth than Huss or Latimer.
It was no common scholar who so worthily finished this task. It was not enough that the intellectual integrity of oar historian was unquestioned, his judgment mature, his knowledge vast and comprehensive. During the years of preparation he had become thoroughly cosmopolite; all the petty prejudices of country and blood had been swept away before the advancing dignity of a reason that became daily more truly and completely the master of itself. All the thousand minute refinements of an extensive and intimate association with the commanding and courtly minds of the age fitted him to cope more successfully with the spirit of subtle intrigue, the fox-like sagacity, the wolfish rapacity, the cruel lack of diplomatic honor, and the illimitable and terrible intolerance that distinguished in so wonderful a degree the historical era of Motley's choice. He came with all the zeal of a true lover of liberty, himself republican, as earth's most cultured sons have been in every age, in thought, habit, and sentiment, to trace for the future and for us the records of a people who were willing to suffer a master, but who revolted from a tyrant; who, with a rare but unappreciated and too nice honor, strove to keep to the yoke that their forefathers had worn, only asking from their ruler the respect and consideration due the faithful servants of his crown, who were no longer the abject slaves of a monarchy, and yet, through an inveterate habit of servitude, were scarcely prepared for the independence of a republic. How nobly he has fulfilled his mission, the hearty applause of two nations sufficiently testifies.
To the wide, comprehensive vision of Motley, history appears in its true light as a science, demanding the assistance of other sciences to the due and harmonious development of all its parts. It relies not more upon the correctness of the recorder's authorities and the profoundness of his researches in the mere region of the events and mutual relation of nations, than upon his universal acquaintance with general literature and the sister arts of politics and philosophy. It was for the treacherous and elegant Bolingbroke to reduce the noble art of Thucydides from the height of sublimity and grandeur to the parlor level of the conversations of the Hotel de Rambouillet, to introduce into the most serious political disquisitions, concerning perhaps the welfare of society, an imperceptible yet carefully elaborated and most effective tone of levity that speedily proved disastrous to their object. It was be who forced the vapid but imposing ceremonial of the bon ton into the records of church and state; who clothed his empty but pompous periods with the ermine of royalty, to ensure them the reverence of a deluded multitude; who stripped Virtue of her ancient prerogatives, and fed her with the crumbs from his table. His polished diction, undeniable talent and fine acquisitions served most unhappily to disguise his real poverty of sentiment, and for a time, at least, diverted the current of popular feeling from the true, beautiful, and reliable in early literature and art, no less than in history. With what success his faulty and imperfect theories were engrafted upon the literature of his nation, the learned and sagacious Schlosser conclusively proves in his History of the Eighteenth Century. Says this ripe scholar and deep thinker, 'All that Bolingbroke ridicules as tedious and without talent, all that he laughs at as useless and without taste, all that which, urged by his labors and those of his like-minded associates, had for eighty years disappeared from ancient history, is again brought back in our day. So short is the triumph of falsehood.' Well may we pervert the verses of Horace,—
'Nullæ placere diu, nec vivere historiæ possunt
Quæ scribuntur aquæ potoribus.'
That was an ungenerous fountain whence Bolingbroke drank even his chilling draughts of inspiration. Splendid, in sooth, as the great Brunnen of the luckless Abderites of Wieland, with its sea-god of marble surrounded by a stately train of nymphs, tritons, and dolphins, from whose jets the water only dripped like tears, because, says the writer, with grave naïveté, 'there was scarcely enough to moisten the lips of a single nymph.' Truly the purple wine of inspiration is as necessary to the historian as to the poet; and if the laughing Bacchus that holds the beaker to the student's eager lips be not clothed in the classic robes of the senate-chamber or the flowing garments of the professor, he wears at least the fawn's dappled hide, and in his hand
'His thyrsus holds—an ivy-crowned spear.'
Does not the gentle Euripides show us the god, 'his horned head with dragon wreath entwined?' And those two sacred horns point back to the dread mysteries of the Ogdoad sublime,
'The great Cabiri of earth's dawning prime.'
They trace with lines that never swerve from truth the history of the primeval world, the early days of Noah and his ark. They recall to us the old story of life and suffering, of deluge and salvation; on their crescent points hangs the eternal principle of the efficacy of sacrifice. They float with the moon-ark of Astarté Mylitta on hyacinthine seas of night-clouds, and their high import, dimmed and lost in the great stream of Time, rises again in the ages, uncrowned with the early luxuriance of symbol and mystery. The mystic horns appear over the brow of the queenly Sappho of Grillparzer, upon whose hair
'Rested the diadem, like the pale moon
Upon the brow of night, a silver crest;'
and the white-robed Madonna, with child-like face upraised, and deep, tender eyes uplifted, yet rests her slender, sandaled foot upon the horned moon, floating below her in misty clouds.
A hiatus for which we crave indulgence; a dream, and yet not all a dream, for each of these old types encloses a living truth, and unfolds into a history, tangled, perhaps, and imperfect, but suggestive and reliable, of races and religions that had else passed away into oblivion. And the earnest student of the present, or the historian of the past, can never disregard these dim old treasures, but must draw from them a fresher faith in his own humanity and in the eternal laws of God, that are unchangeable as he is immortal.
The art of history advances with the art of poetry; both, and indeed all literature, correspond aesthetically with the manners, customs, theology, and politics of the nation of their birth. The severe grandeur of Thucydides, the invariable sweetness of Xenophon, and the cheerful elegance of Herodotus, recall, with their just conceptions of harmony, their noble and sustained flow of thought, and their freedom from the adventitious ornaments of an exaggerated rhetoric or a sentimental morality, the golden age of Greece. We seem to stand within the Parthenon, to gaze upon the Venus of Cnidus, to be jostled by the gay crowd at the Olympic games. It was indeed a golden age, when all that was beautiful in nature was reverently and assiduously nurtured, and all that was noble and natural in art was magnificently encouraged; an age in which refinement and nobility were not accidents, but necessities; when politics had reached the high grade of an art, and oratory attained a beauty and power beyond which no Pitt, Canning, or Brougham has ever yet aspired; an age when the gifted Aspasia held her splendid court, and Alcibiades and Socrates were proud to sit at the Milesian's feet; when Pericles, who 'well deserved the lofty title of Olympian,' lived and ruled: the golden age when Socrates thought and taught, bearing in its bosom the guilty day when Socrates died.
Not less faithful portraitures of the influences that formed them are the histories of Livy, of Sallust, and of Tacitus. They wrote in a language that had been sublimated into electric clouds by the warm and splendid diffuseness of Cicero, and reduced to a granite-like strength by the cold and exquisite simplicity of Terence. The amiable fustian, the Falstaffian bombast of Lucan and Ovid's brilliant imagination, all stamp their indelible seal upon the vivid coloring of Livy, the somewhat affected severity of Sallust, and the elegant morality of Tacitus. The banner of the monarchy flaunts across every page of these writers. They even bear the impress of an architecture whose splendor and strength did not atone for its disregard of the old Hellenic lines and rules. They bear the same relation to Thucydides and Herodotus that a pillar of the Roman Ionic order, with its angularly turned volutes and arbitrary perpendicularity of outline, does to its graceful Greek mother, with her primitive and expressive scrolls, and the slightly convex profile of her shaft. In more modern times, a black-letter, quaint sentence of Froissart or Monstrelet is like a knight in full armor, bristling with quaint, beautiful devices, golden dragons inlaid on Milan cuirasses, golden vines on broad Venetian blades, apes on the hilts of grooved-bladed, firm stilettoes, or the illuminated margins of old metrical romances. The pages of Strada are darkened by the stormy passions of a battling age, crossed with the lurid light of Moorish tragedies; an ay de mi Alhama moans under his pride and bigotry. Torquemadas grind each sentence into dullness and inquisitorial harmlessness, yet now and then sweeps by a trace of Lope de Vega, a word that reminds us of Calderon, while still oftener the euphuism of Gongora pervades the writer's mind and flows in platitudes from his guarded pen.
As we near our own day, history is invested with new dignities; its arms float, sea-weed like, on the raging waves of political life, as if to grasp from some fragment of shipwrecked treaties or some passing argosy of government a precious jewel to light its deep researches. It takes in with nervous grasp the tendencies of literature; its keen gaze drinks in the features of popular belief and searches out the fountains of popular error. Fully equal to the requirements of the exacting age, Motley has produced a work whose lightest merit is its equal conformity to the new rules of his art. He possesses in an eminent degree the first qualification which the old Abbé de Mably, in his Manière d'ecrire l'histoire, insists upon for the historian. He recognizes the natural rights of man, those rights which are the same in every age, and as powerful in their demands in the sixteenth century as in the nineteenth. His well-balanced mind acknowledges and respects the duties of man as citizen and magistrate, and the mutual rights of nations. No splendor, no power, no prejudice, has been able to seduce him from his high principles, neither does a warm and manifest sympathy with his subject delude him even into the passing extravagance of an undue praise. If he comprehends the greatness of the national character he almost flings upon the canvas before us, he appreciates as profoundly its weaknesses too. Strada's history is a poison, which strikes at the very roots of society, and would wither all the fresh young leaves of its vigorous spring. Motley's is its powerful antidote, which restores the juices of life to the brittle fibres, smooths out the shriveled leaves, and clothes them again with the fresh green of hope and promise. Strada is the slave of the victor; Motley is the champion of the vanquished. Strada bends the dignity of Justice before the painted sceptre of Despotism; Motley exalts the honest title of the man above the will of the perjured monarch. Strada gilds with the false gold of sophistry the very chains that gall his soul; Motley sharpens on the clear crystal of his unobtrusive logic, the two-handed sword of power, and cuts his way through an army of protocols and pacts to the fortress of Liberty.
It is, we believe, an exploded theory that the characters of modern times are inferior to those of antiquity. 'Under the toga as under the modern dress,' says Guizot, 'in the senate as in our councils, men were what they still are;' and the old Jesuit takes a narrow view of the progress of mankind, who asserts that the masculine and vigorous treatment that was necessary to Thucydides and Livy is not required by the historians of our puny and degenerate day. Even the Count Gobineau, who so ably and, to his followers, conclusively proves the fallacy of the dearest hope of every learned philanthropist and patriot, does not, in his most earnest antagonism to the doctrine of human progress, insinuate the existence of a principle urging the systematic and inevitable decline of individual power from age to age. So far from exacting less of the historian, the present age demands even a firmer handling. Our era has its Alexanders and Cæsars; its Hannibals and Hectors; and if these men of antiquity rise before us with an unapproachable air of grandeur, it is because the light shining from our distant stand-point surrounds them with deeper shadows, and throws them in bolder relief against the background of their vanished ages. It is a simple triumph of chiaro-scuro, and by no means the proof of the truth of an absurd theory.
It is mournful enough to see the dead nations that were once young and glorious pacing onward through an inferno like so many headless Bertrand de Borns, bearing by the hair
'The severed member, lantern-wise
Pendent in hand.'
For ourselves, we have no fear of lighting our own spirit thus through any Malabolge of purification. And this bold faith animates Motley; it invigorates all his work with a firmness that inspires full confidence in his readers. Free as he is from every puerile superstition, his mastery of his subject is complete. He exercises over it a sort of magistracy which extends even to his own flashing impulses. Never pausing to display his moral learning, he avoids the tedious diffuseness of Rollin; steering adroitly around the quicksands of political dissertation, he escapes the pragmatical essayism of Guiccardini. Not easily fascinated by the trifles that swim like vapid foam upon the tide of history,—petty domestic details, the Königsmark intrigues of royalty, the wines and flowers of the banquet table, the laces and jewels of the court,—he leaves far in the distance the entertaining Davila, who, says the sarcastic Schlosser, 'wrote memoirs after the French fashion for good society,' yet whom the arbitrary and adventurous Bolingbroke does not scruple to declare 'in many respects the equal of Livy!' And yet no single stroke is omitted which is needed to preserve the unity of the work. Tacitus himself did not embellish with more commanding morality his histories. The jots and tittles of the Groot Privilegie, the terms of the famous 'Pacification of Ghent,' the solemn import of the Act of Adjuration, and the political ambition of the church, are as faithfully drawn as the Siege of Leyden, or the 'Spanish Fury' of Antwerp.
Hume, in the narrowness of a so-called philosophical indifference to the appeals of domestic life and the details of national theology and art, gives us only a running commentary upon mere chronological events, galvanized by the touch of his keen intellect and fine rhetoric into a deceitful vigor, and ornamented with the poisonous night-shade blossoms of a spurious philosophy. We may more justly seek some analogy between Gibbon and Motley, even if the search but discover points of difference so radical that a comparison is impossible. The solemn, measured, and splendid rhetoric of Gibbon is met by the animated, impetuous, and brilliant flow of Motley's thought. Neither leans to the ideal; with both the actual prevails. The policy of a government is summoned by neither before the partial tribunal of a sentiment, or the intricate scheme of some Machiavelli subjected to the imperfect analysis of a headstrong imagination. But Gibbon, though he writes in the vernacular, has lost all the honest nationality that should give an air of sincerity to his work; his brilliant antithesis belongs to the ornate school of the French literature of the day; and, fascinating as is the pomp and commanding march of his sentences, we are rather dazzled by his eloquence than convinced by his argument. He is picturesque, rich; but it is the picturesqueness and richness of the truly bewildering Roman architecture of the Renaissance—half Byzantine, three-eighths Gothic, and the remainder Greek. But Motley, with all his varied learning and association, is still perfectly and nobly Anglo-Saxon. His short, epigrammatic sentences ring like the click of musketry before the charge, and swell into length and grandeur with the progress of his theme. The simplicity, not of ignorance but of genius, characterizes him. He does not cater to our hungry fancy, he appeals grandly to our noblest impulses. In Motley a spirit of the most refined humanity is everywhere visible; he is guilty of no Voltairean satiric stabs at purity, no petulant Voltairean flings at the faith he does not share. All is manly, terse, frank, undisguised. Honorable himself, he does not, like Gibbon, distrust all mankind, and question with a sarcasm the very sincerity of a martyr at the stake.
Among Americans, Motley is what Botta is to the historians of Southern Europe. The same grand principles actuate both writers; the same tendency to philosophical generalization is evident in the structure of their works, the same inflexible pursuit of a fixed and visible aim, the same enthusiastic love for freedom. But with Botta the poetical element, which is only secondary with Motley, predominates. He holds the nervous pen of a true Italian—more than that, of a true Italian patriot. All the hitherto suppressed fire of his nation flames out on his pages in an indignation as natural as it is superb. His lines vibrate with passion, his words are tremulous with a noble pain. His very pathos is impatient, stern, and proud; it cleaves our hearts like a battle-axe, rather than meets them as with summer showers. His sarcasm is as keen and effective, but far more startling; it hisses its way from some iron-cold comment, and stabs the monarch whom it crowns. His fertility of imagination is not weakened by contact with the details of government. The same pen that draws in such inimitably graceful lines the sugar-plums of starving Genoa, lingering about flower-wreathed baskets of bonbons sold in the public squares to famishing men and women, sketches in a style as nervous and appropriate the complex detail of governmental policy. He unfolds his subject with the skill of an epic poet; its general effect is sublime, and its petty details arranged with a rarely careless skill. If he is sometimes diverted by a burst of enthusiasm, of indignation, or of horror, into an inequality, the rough island thrown up in the sea of his fancy is speedily verdured over with the wonderful luxuriance of his genius. If he bends sometimes to amuse, to revel among his sonorous Italian adjectives in the description of a coronation at Milan, or an opera of Valetta, it is part of his purpose, giving to his picture the rich and glowing tints that bring out, by violence of contrast, the more elaborate tinting in of dark upon dark behind them.
Something of this we recognize in Motley; but none of Botta's tendency to proverbial sayings, bitter with a sarcasm that wounds most deeply its creator; as, 'To believe that abstract principle will prevail over full purses is the folly of a madman.' Neither do we find in Motley the occasional terse conciseness of Botta,—little epics enclosed in a short sentence. 'Napoleon had redeemed France; but he had created Italy.' But the Italian can not be impartial. Just he is, but it is the accident of his political position, not the deference paid by the historian to his art. He writes of an age from whose injustice he has suffered, of a country whose miseries he has shared, of a people whose brother he is. And here Motley stands second only to Thucydides among historians. In the Greek, impartiality was almost divine, for he wrote in the very smoke of the conflict, wrote as if with his dripping lance upon rocks dyed with the blood of his countrymen. With Motley impartiality is the product of a nature strictly noble, that aims through its art not only to delight the present, but to instruct the future, and which bases its doctrines of right and wrong upon the principles that govern universal nature. The temper of Thucydides is lofty and even; though never genial, he is always calm and accessible; though often sublime, he is never pathetic; too grand to be sarcastic, he is also too proud to be selfish.
Motley, if lacking the great and admirable element of sublimity, which Longinus extols, compensates for it by the animation and variety of his style, which changes, as does his mood, with his subject. He enters with all the vigor of his manhood into the spirit of the scenes which he sketches. He describes a character, and his strokes are bold, quick, decided; he follows the intricacies of political intrigue, and his movement is slow, continuous, wary, while it still remains firm, confident, and successful. He can administer the finances with Escovedo, while his wide, keen intelligence, undismayed, masters at a glance the wily policy of Alexander of the 'fel Gesicht.' No modern historian has given more comprehensive sketches of character. No quality escapes his vigilance; he yields every faculty the consideration which is its due. The portraits of Alva, of Navarre, of Farnese, of Orange, of Don John of Austria, are so many colossal statues, that seem to unite in themselves all the possible features and characteristics of humanity. He is indeed rather a sculptor than a painter. His figures are round, perfect, throbbing with life, and their hard and striking outlines, springing sharply from the background of despotism and persecution, are more imposing than any Rubens-like vividness of coloring which could warm them. He treats of diplomacy as a diplomat, unwinds the reel of protocol and treaty, and binds up with the inflexible cord the rich sheaves of his deep researches. His reflections are suggestive but short, and his details never weary.
He loves, too, to mark the sympathies of nature with event—the rain falling upon the black-hung scaffold, or the laughter of gay sunshine mingling with the shouts of a great victory. And here he differs, as indeed he does in almost every other respect, with Macaulay. The Englishman thinks little of nature; as he himself says of Dante, 'He leaves to others the earth, the ocean, and the sky; his business is with man.' Indeed, the absence of a true and universal sympathy is the one vast defect of Macaulay. No position is so high that it may not be overshadowed by the giant form of his violent partisanship, no character so small that it may not be raised to the semblance of greatness by the mere force of his political preferences. His scholarship was splendid, his genius commanding, the beauty of his style unsurpassed; but he perverted his knowledge to subserve certain public ends, and wielded his magnificent powers too often in the defence of an undeserving cause. Fascinated by his dazzling rhetoric, borne along by its rapid and tumultuous current to the most brilliant conclusions, we forget the narrowness of the stream. His scope of vision was indeed great, but it had its limits, and these were not imposed by time or necessity, but by the unyielding will of his own prejudices. As his virtues were massive, so were his errors grievous. He ventured to grasp the great speculative themes of existence with a mind that was neither profound nor suggestive. He swam with all the wondrous ease of an athlete through the billows and across the currents and counter-currents of elegant literature, of politics, of theology, yet possessed not the diver's power to win their sunken but priceless jewels. Rich he was with the accumulated intellectual spoil of centuries, but the power of exhaustive generalization was denied him. His perceptions were vigorous and acute, and none knew more perfectly to exhaust a subject, if its requirements were of the actual and tangible rather than of the ideal and spiritual order. He was a thorough logician, but a superficial philosopher; a master of style, but oblivious of those great religious truths of which the events of his great history were but the natural outgrowth and product. But nothing can exceed the power of his rhetoric, that is uncontrolled by any laws, yet offends none, unless it be the arbitrariness of his dogmatism, that concedes no favors and asks no gifts.
Less vehement, less ornate, possibly less learned than Macaulay, with frequent though trifling inequalities of style, Motley goes far beyond him in real practical insight into the heart of affairs. There is a unity in all visible life, whether of nation, of individual, of church, or of inarticulate nature, that escaped Macaulay and impresses Motley. The one would govern the universe with the arbitrary rules of a political clique; the other applies to all the infallible test of a universal philosophy. Both writers are thoroughly incorporated with their subject; but where Macaulay was the captive of a mighty and often just prejudice, Motley is the exponent of a living principle. Everywhere Macaulay was a Whig and an Englishman; everywhere Motley is a Republican and a cosmopolite.
Motley is indeed inferior to his English contemporary in many striking points whose value every reader will determine for himself; but his occasional and rare inaccuracies of expression and inelegances of language are on the surface, and may be removed by the stroke of a pen without marring the general effect of his work. He possesses, among many charms, an unfailing geniality, which, united with his fine dramatic powers, fascinates us completely. He abounds also in fine poetical touches, that give us glimpses of a mind cultured to the last degree of literary refinement. His 'rows of whispering limes and poplars' are like arabesques of gold straying over the margins of some old romanceros. His descriptions glow with the fresh and ever-varying delight of the observant traveler, who seems to see before him for the first time the cities which, with a few vigorous and simple strokes, he transfers to big pages. His pictures have the charm of naturalness and a simplicity that is more effective than the most ornate diffuseness. Thus he says of the picturesque little city of Namur: 'Seated at the confluence of the Sambre with the Meuse, and throwing over each river a bridge of solid but graceful structure, it lay in the lap of a most fruitful valley. A broad, crescent-shaped plain, fringed by the rapid Meuse, and enclosed by gently-rolling hills, cultivated to their crests, or by abrupt precipices of limestone crowned with verdure, was divided by numerous hedgerows, and dotted all over with corn-fields, vine-yards, and flower-gardens. Many eyes have gazed with delight upon that well-known and most lovely valley, and many torrents of blood have mingled with those glancing waters since that long-buried and most sanguinary age which forms our theme; and still, placid as ever is the valley, brightly as ever flows the stream. Even now, as in that banished but never-forgotten time, nestles the little city in the angle of the two rivers; still directly over its head seems to hang in mid-air the massive and frowning fortress, like the gigantic helmet in the fiction, as if ready to crush the pigmy town below.' How like the Ueberfahrt of Uhland:—
'Ueber diesen Strohm, vor Jahren,
Bin ich einmal schon gefahren,
Hier die Burg, im Abendschimmer,
Drüben rauscht das Wehr, wie immer.'
We may quote his description of the great square of Brussels, the scene of the double execution of Montmorency, of Horn, and the gallant and unfortunate 'Count d'Egmont,' not only as an example of his dignified and sustained style, but also as an evidence of his sensitiveness to those minor refinements of association and place that bespeaks the talented artist. 'The great square of Brussels had always a striking and theatrical aspect. Its architectural effects, suggesting in some degree the meretricious union between Oriental and a corrupt Grecian art, accomplished in the mediaeval midnight, have amazed the eyes of many generations. The splendid Hotel de Ville, with its daring spire and elaborate front, ornamented one side of the place; directly opposite was the graceful but incoherent façade of the Brood-huis, now the last earthly resting place of the two distinguished victims; while grouped around these principal buildings rose the fantastic palaces of the Archers, Mariners, and other guilds, with their festooned walls and toppling gables bedizened profusely with emblems, statues, and quaint decorations. The place had been alike the scene of many a brilliant tournament and of many a bloody execution. Gallant knights had contended within its precincts, while bright eyes rained influences from all those picturesque balconies and decorated windows. Martyrs to religious and to political liberty had upon the same spot endured agonies which might have roused every stone of its pavement to mutiny or softened them to pity. Here Egmont himself, in happier days, had often borne away the prize of skill or of valor, the cynosure of every eye; and hence, almost in the noon of a life illustrated by many brilliant actions, he was to be sent, by the hand of tyranny, to his great account.'
There are, too, dashes of a healthy sarcasm among these records, not, however, of such frequent occurrence as to darken the flow of the narrative, but sufficiently indicative of the strength and energy of the writer. Never attacking the honest faith of any man, his satires are levelled at hypocrisy, never error, as when he says of the venerable tyrant, the master of the Invincible Armada, when he had received from the trembling secretary the assurance of the failure of the hope of Spain: 'So the king, as fortune flew away from him, wrapped himself in his virtue, and his counsellors, imitating their sovereign, arrayed themselves in the same garment;' a scanty mantle, in truth, but, no doubt, amply sufficient for the denizens of that torrid atmosphere of bigotry in which Spain has lived for centuries.
Of what earnest stuff Motley's dreams of religious freedom are made, we read in his terse comments upon the declaration of the principles of liberty of conscience by the States General. 'Such words shine through the prevailing darkness of the religious atmosphere at that epoch like characters of light. They are beacons in the upward path of mankind. Never before had so bold and wise a tribute to the genius of the Reformation been paid by an organized community. Individuals walking in advance of their age had enunciated such truths, and their voices had seemed to die away, but at last, a little, struggling, half-developed commonwealth had proclaimed the rights of conscience for all mankind.'
Thus we have no longer a wearisome compilation of events strung upon the thread of chronology, but a practical history of the most momentous epoch of modern times. No hand has before pointed out so faithfully its great motive power or adjusted so nicely its apparent contradictions. The structure is grand; it is the expression of a glorious faith. In the accomplishment of so vast a design, Motley has won our warmest gratitude, while he has awakened our deepest sympathies. Not alone to the learned, the scholarly, and the elegant, are these volumes addressed; their high-toned thought has met response in the people's heart, and children bend with flushed faces over the high romance of the struggle that cost the lives of thousands, and recognize, perhaps dimly, the import of that great advance from the darkness of intolerance to the light of freedom, that was so well worth the treasure of blood with which it was bought.
And here we part with Motley the historian, only to clasp hands with Motley the patriot. In the present tremendous struggle of people against progress, this fierce contest between labor and the lords, these last convulsions of the expiring giant of feudal aristocracy, whose monstrous conception dates far back among the Middle Ages, Motley has shown himself the true champion of the doctrines advocated in his histories. His platform is still the same, but how changed the theatre of his action! His letter to the London Times on the 'Causes of the American Civil War' is a masterly exposition of facts, whose naked power is obscured by no useless displays of rhetoric. Its tone is calm, dignified, confident; its statements are strongly maintained, its logic convincing. All honor to the man who from his quiet researches in royal archives and busy deciphering of dusty MSS. turned to his country in her hour of need, and defended her where defence should have been superfluous, but was, unhappily, of small avail. And still he works nobly for the dear old flag, and, intimately lié as he is with the first literati and politicians of Europe, it is not easy to measure his influence. His purely literary habits forbid all suspicion of his disinterestedness, and will go far to commend him to the sympathies of the commanding intellects of the age. Let us hope for the time when, with renewed faith in his mighty theories and still renewing love for his motherland, he shall return to the retirement which has already produced such noble fruits, and add works as worthy to our American classics. Meanwhile, vive qui vince!