In early boyhood Morton amused himself and astonished those about him by enacting plays for a puppet theatre. This was at six years old, and at twelve we find him acting in a play with other boys, just as Motley's playmates have already described him. The hero may now speak for himself, but we shall all perceive that we are listening to the writer's own story.
“I was always a huge reader; my mind was essentially craving and
insatiable. Its appetite was enormous, and it devoured too greedily
for health. I rejected all guidance in my studies. I already
fancied myself a misanthrope. I had taken a step very common for
boys of my age, and strove with all my might to be a cynic.”
He goes on to describe, under the perfectly transparent mask of his hero, the course of his studies. “To poetry, like most infants, I devoted most of my time.” From modern poetry he went back to the earlier sources, first with the idea of systematic reading and at last through Chaucer and Gower and early ballads, until he lost himself “in a dismal swamp of barbarous romances and lying Latin chronicles. I got hold of the Bibliotheca Monastica, containing a copious account of Anglo-Norman authors, with notices of their works, and set seriously to reading every one of them.” One profit of his antiquarianism, however, was, as he says, his attention to foreign languages,—French, Spanish, German, especially in their earliest and rudest forms of literature. From these he ascended to the ancient poets, and from Latin to Greek. He would have taken up the study of the Oriental languages, but for the advice of a relative, who begged him seriously to turn his attention to history. The paragraph which follows must speak for itself as a true record under a feigned heading.
“The groundwork of my early character was plasticity and fickleness.
I was mortified by this exposure of my ignorance, and disgusted with
my former course of reading. I now set myself violently to the
study of history. With my turn of mind, and with the preposterous
habits which I had been daily acquiring, I could not fail to make as
gross mistakes in the pursuit of this as of other branches of
knowledge. I imagined, on setting out, a system of strict and
impartial investigation of the sources of history. I was inspired
with the absurd ambition, not uncommon to youthful students, of
knowing as much as their masters. I imagined it necessary for me,
stripling as I was, to study the authorities; and, imbued with the
strict necessity of judging for myself, I turned from the limpid
pages of the modern historians to the notes and authorities at the
bottom of the page. These, of course, sent me back to my monastic
acquaintances, and I again found myself in such congenial company to
a youthful and ardent mind as Florence of Worcester and Simeon of
Durham, the Venerable Bede and Matthew Paris; and so on to Gregory
and Fredegarius, down to the more modern and elegant pages of
Froissart, Hollinshed, Hooker, and Stowe. Infant as I was, I
presumed to grapple with masses of learning almost beyond the
strength of the giants of history. A spendthrift of my time and
labor, I went out of my way to collect materials, and to build for
myself, when I should have known that older and abler architects had
already appropriated all that was worth preserving; that the edifice
was built, the quarry exhausted, and that I was, consequently, only
delving amidst rubbish.
“This course of study was not absolutely without its advantages.
The mind gained a certain proportion of vigor even by this exercise
of its faculties, just as my bodily health would have been improved
by transporting the refuse ore of a mine from one pit to another,
instead of coining the ingots which lay heaped before my eyes.
Still, however, my time was squandered. There was a constant want
of fitness and concentration of my energies. My dreams of education
were boundless, brilliant, indefinite; but alas! they were only
dreams. There was nothing accurate and defined in my future course
of life. I was ambitious and conceited, but my aspirations were
vague and shapeless. I had crowded together the most gorgeous and
even some of the most useful and durable materials for my woof, but
I had no pattern, and consequently never began to weave.
“I had not made the discovery that an individual cannot learn, nor
be, everything; that the world is a factory in which each individual
must perform his portion of work:—happy enough if he can choose it
according to his taste and talent, but must renounce the desire of
observing or superintending the whole operation. . . .
“From studying and investigating the sources of history with my own
eyes, I went a step further; I refused the guidance of modern
writers; and proceeding from one point of presumption to another, I
came to the magnanimous conviction that I could not know history as
I ought to know it unless I wrote it for myself. . . .
“It would be tedious and useless to enlarge upon my various attempts
and various failures. I forbear to comment upon mistakes which I
was in time wise enough to retrieve. Pushing out as I did, without
compass and without experience, on the boundless ocean of learning,
what could I expect but an utter and a hopeless shipwreck?
“Thus I went on, becoming more learned, and therefore more ignorant,
more confused in my brain, and more awkward in my habits, from day
to day. I was ever at my studies, and could hardly be prevailed
upon to allot a moment to exercise or recreation. I breakfasted
with a pen behind my ear, and dined in company with a folio bigger
than the table. I became solitary and morose, the necessary
consequence of reckless study; talked impatiently of the value of my
time, and the immensity of my labors; spoke contemptuously of the
learning and acquirements of the whole world, and threw out
mysterious hints of the magnitude and importance of my own project.
“In the midst of all this study and this infant authorship the
perusal of such masses of poetry could not fail to produce their
effect. Of a youth whose mind, like mine at that period, possessed
some general capability, without perhaps a single prominent and
marked talent, a proneness to imitation is sure to be the besetting
sin. I consequently, for a large portion of my earlier life, never
read a work which struck my fancy, without planning a better one
upon its model; for my ambition, like my vanity, knew no bounds.
It was a matter of course that I should be attacked by the poetic
mania. I took the infection at the usual time, went through its
various stages, and recovered as soon as could be expected. I
discovered soon enough that emulation is not capability, and he is
fortunate to whom is soonest revealed the relative extent of his
ambition and his powers.
“My ambition was boundless; my dreams of glory were not confined to
authorship and literature alone; but every sphere in which the
intellect of man exerts itself revolved in a blaze of light before
me. And there I sat in my solitude and dreamed such wondrous
dreams! Events were thickening around me which were soon to change
the world, but they were unmarked by me. The country was changing
to a mighty theatre, on whose stage those who were as great as I
fancied myself to be were to enact a stupendous drama in which I had
no part. I saw it not; I knew it not; and yet how infinitely
beautiful were the imaginations of my solitude! Fancy shook her
kaleidoscope each moment as chance directed, and lo! what new,
fantastic, brilliant, but what unmeaning visions. My ambitious
anticipations were as boundless as they were various and
conflicting. There was not a path which leads to glory in which I
was not destined to gather laurels. As a warrior I would conquer
and overrun the world. As a statesman I would reorganize and govern
it. As a historian I would consign it all to immortality; and in my
leisure moments I would be a great poet and a man of the world.
“In short, I was already enrolled in that large category of what are
called young men of genius,—men who are the pride of their sisters
and the glory of their grandmothers,—men of whom unheard-of things
are expected, till after long preparation comes a portentous
failure, and then they are forgotten; subsiding into indifferent
apprentices and attorneys' clerks.
“Alas for the golden imaginations of our youth! They are bright and
beautiful, but they fade. They glitter brightly enough to deceive
the wisest and most cautious, and we garner them up in the most
secret caskets of our hearts; but are they not like the coins which
the Dervise gave the merchant in the story? When we look for them
the next morning, do we not find them withered leaves?”
The ideal picture just drawn is only a fuller portraiture of the youth whose outlines have been already sketched by the companions of his earlier years. If his hero says, “I breakfasted with a pen behind my ear and dined in company with a folio bigger than the table,” one of his family says of the boy Motley that “if there were five minutes before dinner, when he came into the parlor he always took up some book near at hand and began to read until dinner was announced.” The same unbounded thirst for knowledge, the same history of various attempts and various failures, the same ambition, not yet fixed in its aim, but showing itself in restless effort, belong to the hero of the story and its narrator.
Let no man despise the first efforts of immature genius. Nothing can be more crude as a novel, nothing more disappointing, than “Morton's Hope.” But in no other of Motley's writings do we get such an inside view of his character with its varied impulses, its capricious appetites, its unregulated forces, its impatient grasp for all kinds of knowledge. With all his university experiences at home and abroad, it might be said with a large measure of truth that he was a self-educated man, as he had been a self-taught boy. His instincts were too powerful to let him work quietly in the common round of school and college training. Looking at him as his companions describe him, as he delineates himself 'mutato nomine,' the chances of success would have seemed to all but truly prophetic eyes very doubtful, if not decidedly against him. Too many brilliant young novel-readers and lovers of poetry, excused by their admirers for their shortcomings on the strength of their supposed birthright of “genius,” have ended where they began; flattered into the vain belief that they were men at eighteen or twenty, and finding out at fifty that they were and always had been nothing more than boys. It was but a tangled skein of life that Motley's book showed us at twenty-five, and older men might well have doubted whether it would ever be wound off in any continuous thread. To repeat his own words, he had crowded together the materials for his work, but he had no pattern, and consequently never began to weave.
The more this first work of Motley's is examined, the more are its faults as a story and its interest as a self-revelation made manifest to the reader. The future historian, who spared no pains to be accurate, falls into the most extraordinary anachronisms in almost every chapter. Brutus in a bob-wig, Othello in a swallow-tail coat, could hardly be more incongruously equipped than some of his characters in the manner of thought, the phrases, the way of bearing themselves which belong to them in the tale, but never could have belonged to characters of our Revolutionary period. He goes so far in his carelessness as to mix up dates in such a way as almost to convince us that he never looked over his own manuscript or proofs. His hero is in Prague in June, 1777, reading a letter received from America in less than a fortnight from the date of its being written; in August of the same year he is in the American camp, where he is found in the company of a certain Colonel Waldron, an officer of some standing in the Revolutionary Army, with whom he is said to have been constantly associated for some three months, having arrived in America, as he says, on the 15th of May, that is to say, six weeks or more before he sailed, according to his previous account. Bohemia seems to have bewitched his chronology as it did Shakespeare's geography. To have made his story a consistent series of contradictions, Morton should have sailed from that Bohemian seashore which may be found in “A Winter's Tale,” but not in the map of Europe.
And yet in the midst of all these marks of haste and negligence, here and there the philosophical student of history betrays himself, the ideal of noble achievement glows in an eloquent paragraph, or is embodied in a loving portrait like that of the professor and historian Harlem. The novel, taken in connection with the subsequent developments of the writer's mind, is a study of singular interest. It is a chaos before the creative epoch; the light has not been divided from the darkness; the firmament has not yet divided the waters from the waters. The forces at work in a human intelligence to bring harmony out of its discordant movements are as mysterious, as miraculous, we might truly say, as those which give shape and order to the confused materials out of which habitable worlds are evolved. It is too late now to be sensitive over this unsuccessful attempt as a story and unconscious success as a self-portraiture. The first sketches of Paul Veronese, the first patterns of the Gobelin tapestry, are not to be criticised for the sake of pointing out their inevitable and too manifest imperfections. They are to be carefully studied as the earliest efforts of the hand which painted the Marriage at Cana, of the art which taught the rude fabrics made to be trodden under foot to rival the glowing canvas of the great painters. None of Motley's subsequent writings give such an insight into his character and mental history. It took many years to train the as yet undisciplined powers into orderly obedience, and to bring the unarranged materials into the organic connection which was needed in the construction of a work that should endure. There was a long interval between his early manhood and the middle term of life, during which the slow process of evolution was going on. There are plants which open their flowers with the first rays of the sun; there are others that wait until evening to spread their petals. It was already the high noon of life with him before his genius had truly shown itself; if he had not lived beyond this period, he would have left nothing to give him a lasting name.