The French in the Heart of America

by John H. Finley

An English essayist [Footnote: G. K. Chesterton, "The Fallacy of the Young Nation," in his "Heretics," pp. 247-266.] has estimated that we of the United States are no longer young and finds in the fact that we have produced great artists the intimations of age. The art of Whistler and the letters of Henry James are to him the "sweet and startling" but "unmistakable cry of a dying man." But this essayist could not have known the men of the valley which is the heart of the nation as it is the heart of the country, the place of its dominant spirits. That valley, so rapidly exploited of its resources that it has grown ages poorer, is yet virile, youthful in its faults and its achievements. It has no "fine futility" as yet, and the cry is not "sweet" though it may be "startling." It is the shout of a young god, of a Jason driving the bulls in the fields of Colchis. The attenuations of distance may easily deceive one's ears who listens from across the ocean and the mountains.

I think it was this same essayist who said that to understand a people one must study them with the "loyalty of a child" and the patience not of a scientist but of a poet. I thank him for that, while I excuse his confounding of sounds that he hears in England from America, and agree that what we need in that valley to tell its story, to interpret it, is not a specialist in statistics nor an annalist, not a critic who looks at the smoke of the chimneys and visits the slaughter-houses only, but a poet who will have the patience to consult both the statistician and the annalist, a patient poet with the "loyalty of a child" toward his theme.

EPILOGUE

FRANCIS PARKMAN THE HISTORIAN OF FRANCE IN THE NEW WORLD

I make the epilogue of this story my tribute to Francis Parkman, who has in a sense made this all possible for me: first, by reason of the love he gave me long ago for his New France with its primeval forests, its virgin prairies, its glistening rivers, its untamed Indians, its explorers, its gray and black cowls, its coureurs de bois, its stars whose light had never before looked on a white face; and second, by reason of the mass of incident and color which he has supplied for the background of the life I have known in that valley.

On entering a college out in the midst of that region—the middle of the Mississippi Valley—nearly thirty years ago I was assigned, as my first important task in English, the reading and criticism of one of Parkman's books. I think that "The Oregon Trail" was suggested. I read several volumes, however, but found my interest greatest in "The Pioneers of France in the New World" and "The Jesuits in North America." What I wrote I do not now remember (nor do I wish to refresh my memory), but so persistent was the grip of those graphic relations upon my imagination that years later, when leaving the presidency of that same college, I asked to be permitted to take from the library three books (replacing them with fresher copies): the chapel Bible—from which I had been read to by my president and professors and from which I in turn had read to succeeding students—a copy of Spenser's "Faerie Queene"—which my college's only poet, Eugene Field, had read through—and a volume of Parkman's on the pioneers of France.

So I take the opportunity to pay my tribute to him who long ago put these figures on the frontier of my imagination, and who has prevented my ever speaking in dispassion or without favorable prejudice of them.

When Parkman was leaving America for Paris in 1868, "for medical advice and research," uncertain as to whether he would ever return to take up his unfinished story of the American forest, he left in the hands of a friend a parcel, "not to be opened during his life." It is that parcel, not opened until twenty-five years later—for Parkman lived to return to America and to return again to Paris more than once, and then to go back and finish, after a full half-century of struggle with physical maladies and infirmities, the last book of the plan virtually sketched fifty years before, and with a singular felicity of coincidence named "The Half- Century of Conflict"—it is that parcel which has kept for later generations his remarkable autobiography.

While on his visits in Paris he was known in a wide circle. As he himself said in writing to his sisters, "if able to accept invitations," he "would have had the run of Faubourg St. Germain." I doubt, however, if his personality is remembered by many, much less that strangely tortured life which probably gave little mark of its suffering even to those who knew him best in France.

I therefore recall some of the detail of the years preceding those days when he appeared in the streets of Paris seeking health, but seeing often Margry, the "intractable yet kindly keeper" of an important department of French archives, who had in his secretive keeping documents most precious to the uses of Parkman.