PALFREY'S AND ARNOLD'S HISTORIES.[A]
[Footnote A: History of New England during the Stuart Dynasty. By John
Gorham Palfrey. Vol. I. Boston: Little, Brown, & Co. 1858. 8vo. pp. 638.
History of the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations. By Samuel Greene Arnold & Co. 1859. 8vo. pp. 574.]
The London "Times," in its comments upon a recent desponding utterance of foreboding for our republic, by President Buchanan, in his Fort Duquesne Letter, affirms that the horizon of England is clearing while our own is darkening. Mr. Bright, true to the omen of his name, thinks better of our country. He seizes upon all fit occasions, as in his late speech at Manchester, to hold up to his countrymen the opposite view, so far at least as concerns our republic. He loves to recommend to his constituents American notions and institutions. Perhaps it may be allowed,—though this is hardly to be affirmed, if any decisive argument depends upon it,—that the peculiar institutions, political and social, of the two nations, have been on trial long enough, side by side, through the same race of men and in the pursuit of the same interests, to enable a wise discerner to strike the balance between them, in respect to their efficiency and their security as intrusted with the welfare and destiny of millions. If we can learn to look at the large experiment in that light, all that helps to put the real issue intelligently before us will be of equal interest to us, from whichever side of the water it may present itself. For ourselves, we believe that the best security against despair for our country is a knowledge of its history. If the study of our annals does not train up patriots among us, we must consent to lose our heritage. We are glad to be assured that our historians do not intend to allow the republic to decay before they have written out in full the tale of its life. Their records, well digested, may prove to be the pledges of its vigor and permanence.
There are those in the land, who, for reasons suggested by President Buchanan, and for others, of darker omen, to which he makes no reference, do despair, or greatly fear. What with an honest hate of some public iniquities among us,—the tolerance and strengthening of which many of our politicians regard as the vital conditions of our national existence,—and a dread of the excesses incident to our large liberty, it is not strange that some of our own citizens should accord in sentiment with the London "Times." Probably the same proportion of persons may be now living among the native population of our national soil, appeared at the era of the Revolution, preferring English institutions to our own, and predicting that her government will outlast our own. Discussions raised upon the present aspect of affairs in either country will not settle the issue thus opened. A real knowledge of our own institutions and a reasonable confidence in their permanence are to be found only in an intelligent and very intimate acquaintance with their growth and development. In our histories are to be found the materials of our prophecies.
We welcome, therefore, with infinite satisfaction, the two admirable volumes whose titles we have set down. For reasons which will appear before we conclude our remarks upon them, we find it convenient to unite their titles and to write about them together; but for distinctness of subject and marked individuality in the mode of treatment, no two books can stand more widely apart. Abilities and culture and aptitudes of the very highest order have been brought to the composition of each of them. An exhaustive use of abundant materials, and a most conscientious fidelity in digesting them into high-toned philosophical narrations, are marked features of both the volumes, and we will not venture upon the ungracious office of instituting comparisons, in these respects, between their authors. We must make a slight report of the story of each of them, and of the method and spirit in which it is told, and then confront them for mutual cross-examination.
Our historians have learned to write their books with full as much reference to their being read abroad as at home. The problem with which they first have to deal, therefore, is, how to make the men and the incidents and the cardinal points of our annals look as large to foreigners as they do to us. Many of our town-histories are written in the tone and style of Mr. Poole's "Little Pedlington,"—the epithet Little being suppressed in the title, but obtruded on every page. The intensity and emphasis of our historic strain appear to foreigners to be disproportionate to the subject-matter of the story. Mr. Punch always represents a Yankee as larger than his garments. His trousers never cover his ankles; his cuffs stop far short of his wrists; his long neck extends beyond the reach of even his capacious collar; and the bone in him lacks amplitude of muscle. But Mr. Punch, with all his wisdom, does not fully understand the composition of a Yankee, as the greatest common multiple of a Teuton, Dane, Norman, Frank, Kelt, and Englishman. Dr. Palfrey's volume will largely conciliate our cousins beyond the water to our own conceit of our annals, because, more distinctly and cogently than any previous record in pamphlet or folio, it identifies the springs and purposes of our heroic age with an era and a type of men which English historians now exalt on their own noblest pages.
Dr. Palfrey has had precisely that natural endowment, training, experience, mental discipline, and intercourse with the world in public and private relations, to furnish him with the best qualifications for the work to which he has devoted the autumn of an eminently useful and honored life. The sinewy fibre of his theme is religion. And he is a religious man of the highest pattern, deeply skilled in its scholarly lore, erudite in its Scriptural and controversial elements, and practised in the sagacity which it imparts for understanding and interpreting human nature. Religion enters into the subject-matter of his narrative, not so much in its philosophical bearings as in its civico-ecclesiastical and institutional relations; where it becomes the spine of the social fabric, traversed and perforated with the nervous life-chords for all the members of the organism. His education has been that of the highest ideal of New England,—through books and men, through professional duties and public services, bringing him into relations with youth, with men and women, and with the forms and the routine work of civil and political administrations. He has at his command the language of devotion, the rhetoric and logic of philosophy, and the technicalities of jurisprudence. To his personal friends, and they are very many in every walk of life, it is a matter of grateful recognition that he escaped from a political arena whose conflicts were not congenial with his delicacy of taste or of conscience, in season to give the vigor of his best years to the composition of a work which will spread his fame to other lands and identify it forever with what is of most reverent and honored remembrance on his native soil.
The historian's work, when done after the best pattern, involves a duty to his readers and a privilege for himself. To them he is bound to present all the essential facts, authenticated, illustrated, and carefully disposed in their natural relations. For himself, having done this, he is at liberty to construct his own theory, to follow his own philosophy, and to pronounce judicial decisions. The highest exaction to be made of an historian, and the loftiest function which he could claim to exercise, are expressed in these two conditions. The noble privilege and opportunity secured in the latter condition are the only adequate reward for the drudgery of the labor required in the former. It would be foolish to raise a question whether it be more essential for an historian to be faithful in his narration or to be wise in his comments. Only the statement we have made will serve to remind us how essential the philosophy of human nature is to throw life into a record of old annals.
The two books in our hands, where their specific themes are identical, substantially accord in their relation of facts,—allowing for a few exceptional cases,—but they differ widely in their philosophy. Very much of the fresh interest which both of them will create in their respective subjects will be found in the collisions of their philosophy.