William Hickling Prescott

by Harry Thurston Peck

No wonder then that his friends were legion, comprising men and women of the most different types. Dry and formal scholars such as Jared Sparks; men of the world like Lord Carlisle; nice old ladies like Maria Edgeworth and the octogenarian Miss Berry, Walpole's friend; women of fashion like Lady Lyell, Lady Mary Labouchère, and the Duchess of Sutherland; Spanish hidalgos like Calderon de la Barca; smooth politicians like Caleb Cushing; and intense partisans like Charles Sumner,—all agreed in their affectionate admiration for Prescott. His friendship with Sumner was indeed quite notable, since no men could have been more utterly unlike. Sumner was devoid of the slightest gleam of humour, and his self-consciousness was extreme; yet Prescott sometimes poked fun at him with impunity. Thus, writing to Sumner about his Phi Beta Kappa oration (delivered in 1846), he said:—

"Last year you condemned wars in toto, making no exception even for the wars of freedom. This year you condemn the representation of war, whether by the pencil or the pen. Marathon, Salamis, Bunker Hill, the retreat from Moscow, Waterloo, great and small, are all to be blotted from memory equally with my own wild skirmishes of barbarians and banditti. Lord deliver us! Where will you bring up? If the stories are not to be painted or written, such records of them as have been heedlessly made should by the same rule be destroyed. I laugh; but I fear you will make the judicious grieve. But fare thee well, dear Sumner. Whether thou deportest thyself sana mente or mente insana, believe me always truly yours."

But Sumner's arrogance and egoism were always in abeyance where Prescott was concerned, and even their lack of political sympathy never marred the warmth of their intercourse. Prescott, in fact, cared very little about contemporary politics. He had inherited from his fighting ancestors a sturdy patriotism, but his loyalty was given to the whole country and not to any faction or party. His cast of mind was essentially conservative, and down to 1856 he would no doubt have called himself an old-line Whig. He was always, however, averse to political discussion which, indeed, led easily to personalities that were offensive not only to Prescott's taste but to his amiable disposition. His friend Parsons said of him: "He never sought or originated political conversation, but he would not decline contributing his share to it; and the contribution he made was always of good sense, of moderation, and of forbearance."

Prescott's detachment with regard to politics was partly due, no doubt, to the nature of the life he led, which kept him isolated from the bustle of the world about him; yet it was probably due still more to a lack of combativeness in his nature. Motley once said of him that he lacked the capacity for sæva indignatio. This remark was called forth by Prescott's tolerant view of Philip II. of Spain, who was in Motley's eyes little better than a monster. One might fairly, however, give it a wider application, and we must regard it as an undeniable defect in Prescott that nothing external could strike fire from him. Thus, when his intimate friend Sumner had been brutally assaulted in the Senate chamber by the Southern bully, Brooks, Prescott wrote to him: "You have escaped the crown of martyrdom by a narrow chance, and have got all the honours, which are almost as dangerous to one's head as a gutta-percha cane." There is a tameness about this sentence which one would scarcely notice had Sumner merely received a black eye, but which offends one's sense of fitness when we recall that Sumner had been beaten into insensibility, and that he never fully recovered from the attack. Again, when, in 1854, Boston was all ablaze over the capture of a fugitive slave, when the city was filled with troops and muskets were levelled at the populace, Prescott merely remarked to an English correspondent: "It is a disagreeable business." To be sure, he also said, "It made my blood boil," but the general tone of the letter shows that his blood must have boiled at a very low temperature. Nevertheless, he seems to have been somewhat stirred by the exciting struggle which took place over Kansas between the Free-Soil forces and the partisans of slavery. Hence, in 1856, he cast his vote for Frémont, the first Republican candidate for the Presidency. But, as a rule, the politics of the sixteenth century were his most serious concern, and in the very year in which he voted for Frémont, he wrote: "I belong to the sixteenth century and am quite out of place when I sleep elsewhere." It was this feeling which led him to decline a tempting invitation to write a history of the modern conquest of Mexico by the American army under General Scott. The offer came to him in 1847; and both the theme itself and the terms in which the offer was made might well have attracted one whose face was set less resolutely toward the historic past. His comment was characteristic. "I had rather not meddle with heroes who have not been under ground two centuries at least." It is interesting to note that the subject which Prescott then rejected has never been adequately treated; and that the brilliant exploits of Scott in Mexico still await a worthy chronicler.

It was natural that a writer so popular as Prescott should, in spite of his methodical life, find his time encroached upon by those who wished to meet him. He had an instinct for hospitality; and this made it the more difficult for him to maintain that scholarly seclusion which had been easy to him in the days of his comparative obscurity. His personal friends were numerous, and there were many others who sought him out because of his distinction. Many foreign visitors were entertained by him, and these he received with genuine pleasure. Their number increased as the years went by so that once in a single week he entertained, at Pepperell, Señor Calderon, Stephens the Central American traveller, and the British General Harlan from Afghanistan. Sir Charles Lyell, Lady Lyell, Lord Carlisle, and Dickens were also visitors of his. It was as the guest of Prescott that Thackeray ate his first dinner in America.[14] Visitors of this sort, of course, he was very glad to see. Not so much could be said of the strangers who forced themselves upon him at Nahant, where swarms of summer idlers filled the hotels and cottages, and with well-meaning but thoughtless interest sought out the historian in the darkened parlour of his house. "I have lost a clear month here by company," he wrote in 1840, "company which brings the worst of all satieties; for the satiety from study brings the consciousness of improvement. But this dissipation impairs health, spirit, scholarship. Yet how can I escape it, tied like a bear to a stake here?"

Prescott's favourite form of social intercourse was found in little dinners shared with a few chosen friends. These affairs he called "cronyings," and in them he took much delight, even though they often tempted him to an over-indulgence in tobacco and sometimes in wine.[15] One rule, however, he seldom broke, and that was his resolve never to linger after ten o'clock at any function, however pleasant. An old friend of his has left an account of one especially convivial occasion to which Prescott had invited a number of his friends. The dinner was given at a restaurant, and the guests were mostly young men and fond of good living. The affair went off so well that, as the hour of ten approached, no one thought of leaving. Prescott began to fidget in his chair and even to drop a hint or two, which passed unnoticed, for the reason that Prescott's ten o'clock rule was quite unknown to his jovial guests. At last, to the surprise of every one, he rose and made a little speech to the company, in which he said that he was sorry to leave them, but that he must return home.

"But," he added, "I am sure you will be very soon in no condition to miss me,—especially as I leave behind that excellent representative"—pointing to a basket of uncorked bottles which stood in a corner. "Then you know you are just as much at home in this house as I am. You can call for what you like. Don't be alarmed—I mean on my account. I abandon to you, without reserve, all my best wines, my credit with the house, and my reputation to boot. Make free with them all, I beg of you—and if you don't go home till morning, I wish you a merry night of it."

It is to be hoped that Prescott was not quite accurately reported, and that he did not speak that little sentence, "Don't be alarmed," which may have been characteristic of a New Englander, but which certainly would have induced a different sort of guests to leave the place at once. If he did say it, however, it was somewhat in keeping with the tactlessness which he occasionally showed. The habit of frank speech, which had made him a nuisance as a boy, never quite left him, and he frequently blurted out things which were of the sort that one would rather leave unsaid. His wife would often nod and frown at him on these occasions, and then he would always make the matter worse by asking her, with the greatest innocence, what the matter was. Mr. Ogden records an amusing instance of Prescott's naïveté during his last visit to England. Conversing about Americanisms with an English lady of rank, she criticised the American use of the word "snarl" in the sense of disorder. "Why, surely," cried Prescott, "you would say that your ladyship's hair is in a snarl!" Which, unfortunately, it was—a fact that by no means soothed the lady's temper at being told so. There was a certain boyishness about Prescott, however, which usually enabled him to carry these things off without offence, because they were obviously so natural and so unpremeditated. His boyishness took other forms which were more generally pleasing. One evidence of it was his fondness for such games as blindman's buff and puss-in-the-corner, in which he used to engage with all the zest of a child, even after he had passed his fiftieth year, and in which the whole household took part, together with any distinguished foreigners who might be present. Another youthful trait was his readiness to burst into song on all occasions, even in the midst of his work. In fact, just before beginning any animated bit of descriptive writing he would rouse himself up by shouting out some ballad that had caught his fancy; so that strangers visiting his house would often be amused when, from the grave historian's study, there came forth the sonorous musical appeal, "O give me but my Arab steed!" Boyish, too, was his racy talk, full of colloquialisms and bits of Yankee dialect, with which also his personal correspondence was peppered. Even though his rather prim biographer, Ticknor, has gone over Prescott's letters with a fine-tooth comb, there still remain enough of these Doric gems to make us wish that all of them had been retained. It is interesting to find the author of so many volumes of stately and ornate narration letting himself go in private life, and dropping into such easy phrases as "whopper-jawed," "cotton to," "quiddle," "book up," "crack up," "podder" (a favourite word of his), and "slosh." He retained all of a young man's delight in his own convivial feats, and we find him in one of his letters, after describing a rather prolonged and complicated entertainment, asking gleefully, "Am I not a fast boy?"

His Yankee phrases were the hall-mark of his Yankee nature. Old England, with all its beauty of landscape and its exquisite finish, never drove New England from his head or heart. Thus, on his third visit to England, he wrote to his wife: "I came through the English garden,—lawns of emerald green, winding streams, light arched bridges, long lines stretching between hedges of hawthorn all flowering; rustic cottages, lordly mansions, and sweeping woods—the whole landscape a miracle of beauty." And then he adds: "I would have given something to see a ragged fence, or an old stump, or a bit of rock, or even a stone as big as one's fist, to show that man's hand had not been combing Nature's head so vigorously. I felt I was not in my own dear, wild America." Prescott was a true Yankee also in the carefulness of his attention to matters of business. He did not value money for its own sake. His father had left him a handsome competence. He spent freely both for himself and for his friends; but none the less, he made the most minute notes of all his publishing ventures and analysed the publishers' returns as carefully as though he were a professional accountant. This was due in part, no doubt, to a natural desire to measure the popularity of his books by the standard of financial success. He certainly had no reason to be dissatisfied. Up to the time of his death, of the Ferdinand and Isabella there had been sold in the United States and England nearly eighteen thousand copies; of the Conquest of Mexico, twenty-four thousand copies; and of the Conquest of Peru, seventeen thousand copies—a total, for the three works, of nearly sixty thousand copies. When we remember that each of these histories was in several volumes and was expensively printed and bound, and that the reading public was much smaller in those days than now, this is a very remarkable showing for three serious historical works. Since his death, the sales have grown greater with the increase of general readers and the lapse of the American copyright Prescott made excellent terms with his publishers, as has already been recorded, and if a decision of the House of Lords had been favourable to his copyright in England, his literary gains in that country would have been still larger.[16]