In an Essay, introductory to his present volume, he embodies the results of many years of study, research, and personal observation concerning our Northern aborigines,—their tribal, treaty, and confederate relations, their distribution and numbers, their government, their family life, their customs, modes of subsistence, and warfare, their character and traits, their intellectual stage, their superstitions, their religious notions and observances. It is evident that his task, to this extent, was made an exacting one, not only by its inherent difficulties and complications, but by the misleading and guess-work representations of other writers who have been accepted as authorities. He makes stupendous reductions from the romance which has invested Indian character and life. "The noble savage," the ideal of so much fanciful and morbid sentimentality, becomes in his pages the representative of quite other qualities than those ascribed to him. In all that constitutes and ennobles manhood, and in all the conditions which should elevate the human above the brute creature, the savage and his lot are wanting.
Mr. Parkman says of the Huron-Iroquois family, that, from average capacity, superior cranium, and such advancement as is indicated by what we must call their mode of government, we might look to them, if to any of the aborigines, for examples of the higher traits popularly ascribed to Indians. But if we so look, we look in vain. Rather do we find in them the more repulsive and hideous qualities of the fiercest and the foulest brutes and reptiles,—a relentless and untamable ferocity and a homicidal frenzy. From the calm and exhaustive analysis of the philosophy of his theme, as well as from the tragic story which fills his thrilling pages, it is evident that Mr. Parkman traces to the nature and circumstances of the savage himself the prime causes of his extermination. Independently of the white man's agency,—saving only the sale of guns by the Dutch traders at Albany to the Iroquois,—the decay of the Indian tribes is to be ascribed to their own incapacity for civilization, and to their own homicidal passion. One might as well expect to neutralize the game flavor in the deer or the sea-fowl, as to bring an Indian tribe under the conditions of what we call culture and civilization. Mr. Everett, in his address in commemoration of the massacre at Bloody Brook, near Deerfield, Massachusetts, vindicated the general course of the white men towards the aborigines of these regions, by claiming for it an accordance with the manifest will of Providence from an economical point of view. The Indian was a wasteful, wretched, improvident consumer and spoiler of the means of subsistence and enjoyment for communities of civilized men. So reckless and ruthless was he, so idle and thriftless, that he required for his precarious and beastly subsistence a domain which would furnish cities with all their comforts and luxuries. A thousand white men might subsist in comfort through the whole year where five Indians could find but enough with which to gorge themselves for a small part of the year, while for the rest of it they suffered for lack of food, fire, and shelter.
Undeniable, also, is the fact that, according to the measure of what represented Christianity to themselves, and the form and degree of benefit which they personally by experience derived from it, the earliest European comers labored sincerely, and at cost, to impart the blessing to the Indians. They made this attempt with equal fidelity under the inspiration and guidance respectively of the two very different forms in which Christianity, as a religion, was accepted by themselves, and divided the range of Christendom. Eliot and the Mayhews stand, and will ever stand, as exponents of the purest, most patient and persistent zeal of Protestantism, matched only, but not surpassed, by the chivalrous devotion, constancy, and martyr-heroism of the subjects of Mr. Parkman's volume, in all the aims and toils of their impracticable work. The Protestant offered the Gospel to the Indians through intellectual teachings; the Romanist tried the experiment through a symbolism which one might, at first thought, regard as admirably adapted to the nature and circumstances of the savage. Success of a certain sort seemed to have secured, in both experiments, the promise of an ultimate reward for labor.
Happily, too, the Jesuit and the Protestant might alike find comfort in referring the disastrous overthrow of their hopes, not to the failure of their work, nor even to the inconstancy of their respective converts, but to the fortunes of the ferocious warfare by which the native tribes exterminated each other. Mr. Parkman first, or most lucidly and emphatically among our historians, and without a particle of special pleading, but simply by the fidelity of his narrative, makes it appear that the common impression as to the prime or fatal agency of the white man in visiting so ruthless a destiny on the Indians is exaggerated, if not substantially false. The tragic element in his pages, deep and plaintive as it is, comes in to show how Christian zeal and humane effort were thwarted by animosities and passions working among the Indian tribes before the continent was occupied by Europeans.
One of the most suggestive exercises to which the perusal of Mr. Parkman's book will quicken the minds of many of his readers, and for the more intelligent pursuit of which his pages will be found to afford the most helpful material, will be a comparison or contrast, not only of the genius of the Catholic and the Protestant religions in the work of missions among barbarians, but of the less spiritual and more homely qualities of the French and English proclivities, as exhibited in their respective relations with the savages. The French came more closely and familiarly into sympathy and intercourse with them. The English never could fraternize with them. If an Englishman of the lowest grade took a squaw for his partner, he sank to the level of barbarism himself. It was quite otherwise with the Frenchman. After the permanent occupation of Canada was secured, a race of half-breeds constituted, so to speak, a very respectable, as well as the most efficient, element in its population. It was enough if the squaw of the Frenchman had been the subject of Christian baptism. But that ordinance, however effective for the life to come, did not qualify a native woman for English wedlock. Sir William Johnson, indeed, made no disguise of his manner of life, which the complexion of the daughters who sat at his table with his most honored guests would have rendered rather difficult; but their mother—or mothers—were not presentable.
A very engaging episode in Mr. Parkman's narrative—we propose it to our artists as a subject of rare and novel interest, and rich in capacity—presents us two noble specimens of Christian zeal, in the persons of a Jesuit and a Protestant missionary in amicable intercourse with each other. Would that we had a more detailed account of the interview, and of the conversation which must have given it the highest charm of courteous sympathy, though with reserve, between two men who represented the sharpest antagonisms of creed, while a common faith may have proved an inner attraction for their hearts. The Colony of Massachusetts had applied to the French at Quebec, in negotiations looking toward a reciprocity of trade. The Jesuit missionary Druilletes was sent in that behalf to Boston. His diplomatic character saved him from the penalty of the halter, which Puritan law had pronounced upon any one of his profession who should be caught in this jurisdiction. He arrived in the autumn of 1650, and had a most hospitable and kindly reception, though he failed in his object. The scene we have proposed to a painter is that which finds Druilletes a welcome and honored guest in the humble dwelling of the apostle Eliot, at Roxbury, who invited the Jesuit to remain through the winter. We are sure they met and communed as friends,—high-souled, respecting each other, recognizing in each other aims and purposes, and the experience, alike in success and failure, of the arduous nature of a work which brought into a true communion of piety the spirits consecrated by it.
Not quite a score of years—from 1634 to 1650—suffice for the dates of the chief events in the profoundly interesting and saddening story of effort and failure which Mr. Parkman rehearses with such masterly ability. Starting with the renewed occupancy of Quebec in 1634, and the accession of the Jesuits to the abortive enterprise of the Recollet Fathers, he traces out for us the history of the Mission to the Hurons, giving us the characters of all its agents, an account of the settlements established, and the methods pursued till the work was frustrated.
It is but a sad and painful story—in some of its incidents harrowing and revolting—which Mr. Parkman has to tell us. So far as strict fidelity to his subject would admit, he has had regard to the sensibilities of his readers, and where he could neither hide nor soften, he has contented himself with intimating and suggesting what it would have been simply shocking for him to follow into further details.
With an acute skill in the reading of human nature, and a cosmopolitan spirit of his own which identifies religious toleration and charity with common sense, Mr. Parkman, in a few paragraphs crowded with facts and philosophy, takes us into the inner organization of Jesuitism, indicates the spring and aliment of its vitality, and explains to us how it reconciles the abnegation of the will with the concentration of resolve in obedience. Starting from Quebec as a centre of operation, and the place where French supplies and Indian traders were brought into contact in the spring of each year, the Fathers, following the direction of their Provincial at home, through their Superior resident, Le Jeune, radiated towards the dismal localities where each looked to live and die, as the majority of them did. We ought to have their names before us. The first six of them at Quebec were Le Jeune, Brébeuf, Masse, Daniel, Davost, and De Nouë. To these were added Buteux, Bressani, Ragueneau, Chabanel, Garreau, Garnier, Lalemant, Jogues, Chaumonot, and Vimont. Most of them were very young men, of noble lineage, and with the finest prospects of worldly success had they sought the prizes of courts and of civilized life. With few exceptions, they were not robust, but delicate. Eight of them died under Indian torture. Not one of them failed in purpose or in courage.
It is not possible for the pen of either Romanist or Protestant to make a Jesuit a lovely or attractive object to a Protestant. The flaw, if not the falsehood, in their claim to the loftiest homage, vitiates the appeal of the disciples of Loyola to the profoundest regard of the human heart, independently of the antipathies of creed. It is enough to know that their fellow-Romanists of other orders share to the full the sentiment of distrust towards them which no pleading in their defence has weakened in the common Protestant mind. Their devotion, their heroism, their stern constancy to the recognized principles of their severe discipline, does not neutralize, even if it qualifies, the persuasion, which has not lacked evidence to support it, that, in the service of God, they have been willing to learn art and subtlety from the Devil. True, we are told that a generous candor will always enable and dispose us to honor and reverence self-sacrifice with a sincere purpose, even when folly, instead of necessity, crowns it with martyrdom. The plausibility of this plea lies in a vague use of the word sincere. The honors of martyrdom are yielded by a fine discrimination, as graduated by a scale recognizing a varying proportion of truth and value in the purpose for which the self-sacrifice is made. Every grain of superstition, duplicity, or recklessness reduces—every element of loftiness, high-thinking, and wise-purposing exalts—the honors rendered to a sufferer and a victim. We think that Mr. Parkman has held a fair balance in those almost alternate sentences in which, with a terse and comprehensive way of communicating his judgment, he recognizes the personal devotion, and compassionates the puerility and aimless toil, of the Jesuit missionaries. They might be pardoned for believing that the direction which the soul of a dying Indian child would take, either for heaven or for hell, was decided by their being able to cross a moistened finger upon its face. But to turn that saving charm into an act of jugglery, deceiving or falsifying to the parents, was an act which reduced the performer of it, either in intelligence or honesty, below the level of the sorcerer.