Aaron Goodrich.
"Vagaries like these," he adds, "which came occasionally like clouds over his soul to shut out the light of reason, cannot fail to fill the mind of the reader, as they doubtless did those of the sovereigns, with mingled sentiments of wonder and compassion." An unstinted denunciatory purpose, much weakened by an inconsiderate rush of disdain, characterizes an American writer, Aaron Goodrich, in his Life of the so-called Christopher Columbus (New York, 1875); but the critic's temper is too peevish and his opinions are too unreservedly biased to make his results of any value.
Humboldt.
The mental hallucinations of Columbus, so patent in his last years, were not beyond recognition at a much earlier age, and those who would get the true import of his character must trace these sorrowful manifestations to their beginnings, and distinguish accurately between Columbus when his purpose was lofty and unselfish and himself again when he became mercenary and erratic. So much does the verdict of history lodge occasionally more in the narrator of events than in the character of them that, in Humboldt's balancing of the baser with the nobler symptoms of Columbus's nature, he does not find even the most degraded of his actions other than powerful in will, and sometimes, at least, clear in intelligence. There were certainly curiously transparent, but transient gleams of wisdom to the last. Humboldt further says that the faith of Columbus soothed his dreary and weary adversities by the charm of ascetic reveries. So a handsome euphuism tries to save his fame from harsher epithets.
It was a faith, says the same delineator, which justified at need, under the pretext of a religious object, the employment of deceit and the excess of a despotic power; a tenderer form, doubtless, of the vulgar expression that the end sanctifies the means. It is not, however, within the practice of the better historical criticism of our day to let such elegant wariness beguile the reader's mind. If the different, not to say more advanced, condition of the critical mind is to be of avail to a new age through the advantage gained from all the ages, it is in precisely this emancipation from the trammels of traditionary bondage that the historian asserts his own, and dispels the glamour of a conventionalized hero-worship.
Dr. J. G. Shea.
Dr. Shea, our most distinguished Catholic scholar, who has dealt with the character of Columbus, says: "He accomplished less than some adventurers with poor equipped vessels. He seems to have succeeded in attaching but few men to him who adhered loyally to his cause. Those under him were constantly rebellious and mutinous; those over him found him impracticable. To array all these as enemies, inspired by a satanic hostility to a great servant of God, is to ask too much for our belief;" and yet this is precisely what Irving by constant modifications, and De Lorgues in a monstrous degree, feel themselves justified in doing.
The French canonizers.
There is nothing in Columbus's career that these French canonizers do not find convertible to their purpose, whether it be his wild vow to raise 4,000 horse and 50,000 foot in seven years, wherewith to snatch the Holy Sepulchre from the infidel, or the most commonplace of his canting ejaculations. That Columbus was a devout Catholic, according to the Catholicism of his epoch, does not admit of question, but when tried by any test that finds the perennial in holy acts, Columbus fails to bear the examination. He had nothing of the generous and noble spirit of a conjoint lover of man and of God, as the higher spirits of all times have developed it. There was no all-loving Deity in his conception. His Lord was one in whose name it was convenient to practice enormities. He shared this subterfuge with Isabella and the rest. We need to think on what Las Casas could be among his contemporaries, if we hesitate to apply the conceptions of an everlasting humanity.
Converts and slaves.