Strange is it that the name of Francisco Pizarro should be a household word while that of his brother Gonzalo is but little known and seldom repeated. Yet there are few episodes in the history of Spanish colonization more striking than the story of Gonzalo Pizarro’s march across the Andes and the discovery of the river Amazon. It is a tale of horror and suffering to which only the pen of a Defoe could do justice. Gonzalo not only survived the fearful journey, but had strength enough left to head a party for revolt against the viceroy, Blasco Nuñez, and the execution of the Ordinances. Like a true Pizarro, this conqueror died a violent death. He was beheaded; it seemed the only fitting way for one of that family to take his departure from life. The Pizarros used to behead their victims and then show themselves conspicuously at the funeral. When it came their turn to die, they were treated with scantier courtesy.
Philip the Second was Prescott’s most ambitious work. Though but a fragment, the fragment is of noble dimensions, being longer by many pages than the Ferdinand and Isabella. The narrative is extraordinarily vivid. Few pages can match for interest those in which are described Philip’s coming to Flanders and his assumption of power at the hands of his father Charles the Fifth. Here are exhibited at their best the much-praised qualities of Prescott’s style. His prose grew better as he grew older.
The characters stand out like the figures of a play: the great princes, Charles the Fifth, Philip, Mary of England, and Elizabeth; the great warriors and statesmen, Guise, Montmorency, Alva, Egmont, and William of Orange; noble ladies like Margaret of Parma and the beautiful Elizabeth of France. The events were of high and tragic importance, for during this reign was to be settled the great question of freedom of thought and the right to worship God as the conscience and the reason dictated. The very contrasts of costume came to the aid of the historian in dealing with this romantic age. It would seem as if the writer must be picturesque in spite of himself.
The modern reader, whatever be his natural bent, finds himself impelled by the critical spirit of the times into distrusting all history which is not technical and hard to grasp. Prescott’s books are incorrigibly ‘literary’ and therefore more or less under suspicion. Because they are attractive, it is taken for granted that they are unsound. Certain unhappy beings have gone so far as to slander them outright by calling them romances. But this is mere impatience with the kind of historical writing which Prescott’s work exemplifies. He was a master of the art of narrative; and history which stops with narrative is in the minds of severe students little better than the more vicious forms of literary idleness, such as poetry and fiction. Prescott gratifies his reader’s curiosity about the past, but is not over solicitous to ‘modify his view of the present and his forecast of the future.’ In other words, he is well content to look at the surface of history, leaving it to others to look below the surface and philosophize on what they find there.
Nevertheless these brilliant volumes have a value which is something more than literary even if it be a good deal less than scientific. It is perhaps not extravagant to pronounce them an indispensable propædeutic to the study of Spanish-American history. They cannot be displaced by works which ‘go much deeper into the subject.’ Depth is not what is at all times most needed. We need stimulus, and encouragement to face the discipline awaiting us in deep books. He who, having read Prescott, was content to read no farther would be an odd sort of student; but not so odd as he who labored under the impression that Prescott was a historian whom he could afford to do without.
VI
Ralph Waldo Emerson
REFERENCES:
G. W. Cooke: Ralph Waldo Emerson, his Life, Writings, and Philosophy, fifth edition, 1882.
O. W. Holmes: Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘American Men of Letters,’ 1885.
J. E. Cabot: A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson, third edition, 1888.