A Hero and Some Other Folks

by William A. Quayle

The average American traveler is better acquainted with foreign lands than with his own country. Nor is he unique in this regard. I have known persons who lived a lifetime within a dozen squares of Westminster Abbey, and were never inside of that historic cathedral, as I have known persons to live forty years not fifty miles distant from Niagara, and never to have heard the organ speech of that great cataract. This is a common flaw in intellect. We tend to underestimate the near, and exaggerate the remote. Another application of the same frailty is noticeable in literature. Homegrown literature is, with not a few, depreciated. According to their logic, good things can not come out of Nazareth, and imported products are the only viands worth a Sybarite palate. In mediaeval days the form assumed was different, while the principle remained the same. Then the question of value turned upon whether a work was written in the learned language; namely, in Latin. If written in the vernacular, the work was immediately set down as vulgar. One of Martin Luther's valuable services was that, when the reverse was prevalent, he honored the vernacular of his country, and insisted that it be taught in the schools, a thing accounted an educational heresy in his time; and in his translation of the Bible into German, he created German literature.

Americans are a race of readers, and are the Rome to which all literature turns face and feet. Besides many books not great, all great books are translated into English. Everybody's book comes to America. We are a cosmopolitan population in a literary way. If you were to look at the book-counters of each succeeding month, you would see how all the writing world has been writing for us. From such conditions of supply, our taste becomes cultivated. We feel ourselves connoisseurs. If we give a more ready reading to a foreign than to a domestic book, the reason is not of necessity that the home book is deficient in interest or literary finish, but may be attributed simply to an undesigned and perhaps unperceived predisposition toward the imported and the remote.

I confess to a love for what is American. I love its Government; its prevalent and genuine democracy; its chance for the common man and woman to rise into success and fame and valuable service; its inheritance, unblemished by primogeniture or entail; its universality of education to a degree of intelligence; its history and tendency; and I love its literature, though, as appears to me, our historians have done the highest grade of work of any of our litterateurs—in saying which there is no disparagement of other literary workers, but simply a stated belief in the pre-eminent value of the historian in American letters. What I mean is this: During the fifty years last passed there were poets and novelists in England who, with all deference to our own writers, were equal or superior to the poets and novelists of America. America had no poets who stood the peer of Browning and Tennyson; and among novelists, our Hawthorne could not be said to surpass a Thackeray, Dickens, or Eliot. But say, proudly, beyond the sea were no historians the masters of Bancroft, Prescott, Motley, and Parkman. This article wishes to point out the quality and range of American historians, with an expressed hope of causing research in this ample and fertile field.

Though first on the soil of the Western Hemisphere, the Spaniard has made no acknowledged and valuable contribution to American history. Nor, indeed, has any nation of this hemisphere, save our own. The French and Spanish Jesuit submitted religious monographs touching the early days of occupancy of New France and Mexico; but these will readily be seen to be rather chronicles than histories. And the historian, native to the United States, is he in whose hands have been the historical studies of our Western World. La Salle, Hennepin, Marquette, and Las Casas have written faulty but valuable memoirs; but they do not reach the dignity and value of histories, being what one might name crude ore rather than refined gold.

Another thing worthy a glad emphasis is, that America is her own historian. The New World has begotten the writers of its own story. How fully this is true will not be appreciated until a detailed and instantaneous survey is taken. Look down on this plain of history as one does on Tuscany from an Alp. Thus, and thus only, can we value our possession. In this estimate, mention is made of the greater historians, not because others are not worthy of notice, but because the scope of this essay does not allow, inasmuch as reference is here had to the specific gravity of the historian and the epoch of our history he has exploited.

Washington Irving, essayist, biographer, humorist, was, before all, a historian in temper, and was drawn as by some subtle and unseen attraction to study that nation to which America owed its discovery. Irving is an evident American. He loved the land through whose palisades the stately Hudson flowed. What touched America touched Irving, and who had loved or helped America had won Irving's heart as a trophy. And such evident patriotism is commendable in citizen and writer. We love not Caesar less, but Rome the more, when we believe in America before all nations of history. I love the patriot above the cosmopolitan, because in him is an honest look, a homeliness that touches the heart like the sight of a pasture-field, with its broken bars, where our childhood ran with happy feet. Carlyle was against things because they were English; so was Matthew Arnold. These men were self-expatriated in spirit. I like not the attitude. Give us men who love native land beyond all other lands, and who, removed therefrom, turn homesick eyes toward its invisible boundaries. Irving, admirable in many ways, was in no way more to be admired than in his predilection for his country as a theme for his historian's muse. To him pay tribute, because he is historian of the discovery of our brave Western Hemisphere. Irving has told the story of that great admiral of the ocean, Christopher Columbus. This memoir may not be exact. Irving may have idealized this pathfinder of the ocean; though if he has, he has observed the proprieties, literary and imaginative, as many successors have not. Some writers are seemingly bent on making every great soul commonplace, thinking that if they fail to belittle a distinguished benefactor of the race, if they have not played the Vandal with a swagger and conceit like Jack Falstaff, they have ignominiously failed; when the plain truth is, that if they succeeded in taking the glamour for those heroes of whom they write, they have hurt mankind so far, and have impoverished imagination and endeavor by their invidious task. We need not suppose Christopher Columbus and Washington saints, seeing there is no inclination to canonize them; but we need not hold their follies up to wake the guffaw of a crowd. Such laughter is dearly bought. One thing I hold so true no reasoning can damage it; namely, that a man like Columbus had nobler moods on which he voyaged as his caravel through the blue seas. Columbus was no swineherd, but a dreamer, whose dreams enlarged the world by half, and gave a new civilization room and triumph. He was of his age, and his morality was not unimpeachable; but in him were still great moralities and humanities. He had mountain-tops in his spirits, and on these peaks he stood. What puerile work it is to attempt robbing Columbus of his discoverer's glory by attempting to show how vikings discovered this continent! Such historians might fight a less bloody battle still by showing that the aborigines discovered this continent before the Norsemen did! What boots such folly? What gold of benefit comes of such quests? Certain we are that when Columbus set sail for a New World, no one believed the earth was round as he did, and no one knew the Norsemen had piloted across seas and found land; and Europe was ignorant of any shore westward, and Columbus, in his ignorance, risked all and vanquished all.

"Dragging up drowned honor by the locks,"

as says our Shakespeare. Columbus is America's benefactor. He showed the Puritans a New World, toward whose shores to sail, and behind whose harbor-bar to cast anchor. Nothing can invalidate these claims. Honor him who honors us in giving us a rendezvous for liberty and civilization. This mood of history Washington Irving caught, and because he did, I honor him. He was sagacious. He did not traduce a hero, but enthroned him. In short, Irving behaved toward Christopher Columbus as a historian and a gentleman, and set Americans a pattern in history-writing in that they should be the historiographers of their own world. This Nestor's lessons were heard and heeded. If you care to read Irving's various historical writings, the logic of these writings will appear. America was his home and love. He thought to write the story of how a brave man gave a world this huge room it knew not of. Loyalty made him historian. His researches gave him familiarity with Spanish archives. The movement of the era touched him; for Irving was susceptible to the finer moods of literature, as any who reads the "Sketch-book" knows; and once having set foot on Spanish historical terra firma, he began a journey as a traveler might. America led Irving to Columbus, Columbus led him to Spain, Spain led him to Mohammedism, and Mohammedism led him to Mohammed. How natural his literary travels! Consider the consecutiveness of his historical attempts: "Life of Columbus," "Spanish Voyages," "Conquest of Grenada," "Conquest of Spain," "Moorish Chronicles," and "Life of Mohammed." The influence of this historical research, too, you shall find in reading his romances: "Wolfert's Roost," "Legends of the Conquest of Spain," "Bracebridge Hall," and "Alhambra."

Patriotism taught Irving's Clio to find her voice. Nor must we forget, in any estimate of Irving's service, his biography of Washington. This is his tribute to the battle-days of his beloved America.

In strict affinity with Irving in the time of his history is Prescott. This man is a distinguished historian. To history he devoted his life, and to such effect that he is to be ranked among the masters of history among the ages. America attracted him as it had attracted Irving. The era of the discovery enticed him as the voyage had enticed Columbus. "Ferdinand and Isabella" are the dominant voices on his stage. Irving made them subordinate, and made Columbus the chief player, which mode Prescott reverses. The union of Castile and Aragon, and the subsequent wars against the Moriscoes, which virtually put the knife in their heart and concluded that triumph which had been begun by Charles Martel at Tours, is an attractive portion of history. In Prescott, as in Motley, is a wealth of research which fairly bewilders. Nothing is extemporaneous. Archives are ransacked. Moldy correspondence is made to tell its belated story. Certainly Prescott is abundant in information. I do not recall, save in Gibbon's, a series of histories where so much new knowledge is retailed as in Prescott. In seeming looseness of phrase, I have used the term "new knowledge," but these words are happily descriptive of "Conquest of Mexico" and "Conquest of Peru," because the fields were practically untrodden to the ordinary reader. Everything is new, like a college to the freshman. We see a New World in more senses than one. The freshness of the facts is exhilarating. We march with Cortes; we conquer with Pizarro; we inspect Montezuma's palace; we become interested in the industrial system of the Incas, a system which should have given Henry George and Edward Bellamy a delight without alloy; we perceive the incredible valor and perseverance and endurance of Cortes; we front "new faces, other minds;" we discover the Amazon through perils and hardships so multitudinous and so severe as to tempt us to think these narrations a myth; we see rapacity insatiable as death, a bloody idol-worship pitiless and terrible; we read Prescott's history with growing avidity and increasing information; read Prescott, and become wiser concerning the aborigines of the Americas and the possibilities of human fortitude and prowess. A study of the Spanish era of discovery and conquest naturally led to a study of Charles V, grandson of Ferdinand and Isabella, and Prescott has accordingly brought up to date "Robertson's Life of Charles V," appending a biography of Charles V subsequent to his abdication; and as a certificate of indefatigable industry in historical research is an incomplete but exhaustive memoir, entitled, "The Life of Philip II." This work is written with such fairness of spirit and such wealth of information and investigation, such vivid presentation of a reign which had more of the movement of the universal dominion than any since the Roman days, and thus written so as to make us rebellious in spirit in finding the work incomplete. Death came too soon to give our indefatigable author time to complete his voluminous history. Read Prescott as a matter of American pride, and because he has dealt more capably with the era with which he treats than any other historian.