A Hero and Some Other Folks

by William A. Quayle

The United States has supplied her own historians, not needing to go abroad for either history or historian. George Bancroft, with a private library larger by almost half than the ten thousand-volume library Edward Gibbon used in writing "The Decline and Fall of the Roman empire;" George Bancroft, whose literary life was dedicated to one task, and that the writing the life of his country prior to the Constitution; George Bancroft, publicist as well as student of history, and who in such relation represented his Government with distinction at the courts of Germany and England,—George Bancroft has written a history of the United States which will no more become archaic than Macaulay or Grote. While one may now and then hear from the lips of the so-called "younger school of American historians" a criticism of George Bancroft, their carping is ungracious and gratuitous. Theirs has not been the art to equal him, nor will be. A literary life devoted to the mastery of one era of a nation's history is a worthy sight, good for the eyes, and arguing sanity of method and profundity of investigation. Whoever has read Bancroft can testify to his readableness, to his comprehensive knowledge, to his philosophical grasp, to his ability to make dead deeds vividly visible, and to his gift of interesting the reader in events and their philosophy. He has written a great history of the United States before the Constitution, so that no author has felt called on or equipped to reduplicate his task in the same detail and manner.

Where George Bancroft left off, Schouler has begun. More dramatic than Bancroft, and in consequence more compelling in interest, the history marches at a double-quick, like a charging regiment. His pictures of John Quincy Adams, Calhoun, Clay, Webster, Sumner, Douglas, Lincoln, and a host beside, vitalize those men. We live with that giant brood. I have found Schouler invigoratingly helpful. He affords knowledge and inspiration; a man is behind his pages; we feel him and acknowledge him.

One change has come over the spirit of history to which all must bear joyful witness, and that is the passing of the king and the advent of the people. The world has grown more democratic than it knows. The people engage attention now. We do not know so much of Queen Victoria; but of the conquering, splendid race whose hereditary sovereign she is, we know much, very much. The case used to be wholly otherwise, the sovereign monopolizing attention; but that day is passed. So let it be. This change is one needed, and waited for long, and longed for eagerly. John Richard Green saw the demonetization of kings and a remonetization of the people, and so wrote a revolutionary history, calling it "A History of the English People," in which he subordinated the intrigues of courts and the selfish wars of potentates to the quiet growth of national spirit and the characteristics of domestic life, and the development and solidification of social instincts into social customs, and the framing of a literature, the reformation of religion, and the direction of the thought of the many. These constituted, as he believed, and as we believe, the genuine biography of a people; and McMaster has done for the United States what Green has done for England. His "History of the People of the United States" is so packed with knowledge; so accurate in laying hold of those things which we did not know, but wanted to know; so free in giving us the inside life of our country, as to make us wonder what we did before our historian of the people came to lend us knowledge. My conviction is, that a careful reading of McMaster will suffice to cure most of our dyspeptic feelings about national discontent in our time, and dispel the fabulous notion of an older time in America, when everybody was happy and everybody was contented. No such day ever existed. The kingdom of contentment is within us, like the kingdom of God. McMaster tells us the unvarnished tale of inflation and political and financial asininity in the former days, so that when he is done we are less liable to that frailty of the ignorant soul; namely, the moaning, "The former days were better than these."

Thus far, those authors have been named who have chronicled the discovery of America, the conquering of the Southern Hemisphere or the Eastern territory of that era known as the United States. This was done to keep a natural movement and logical progress. At this point, however, must be mentioned those voluminous histories of the States and Territories of the Pacific Coast, written by H. H. Bancroft. They are treasure-houses of material for the future historian. Hubert Bancroft has become the historian of the Spanish dominion in the United States, and deserves favorable thought for his wealth of research into archives which might have been lost, or at least less ample with the advance of time. Topography, geography, archaeology. State papers,—all have contributed their quota to him, and he has, after the generous manner of the scholar, contributed to us.

Francis Parkman is a distinguished master in the art of history. His theme is the "American Indian" and the "French Occupancy of America," and he has told a thrilling story. He knows the Indian as no one of our historians has known him, and has told of his noble traits, and his ruthless forays, and his sanguine cruelty. His utter lack of thrift; his feast-and-famine life; his stealth, stolidity, duplicity, and ferocity,—all are rehearsed. To read his record of the Indian is to have much of the glamour thrown around him by James Fenimore Cooper stripped from him incontinently and forever. The Indian was self-exterminative. He was the assassin of his race, and civilization was impossible so long as the American Indian was dominant; so that those who shed tears over the white man's conquest of the Indian may not well have weighed their cause. The Indian was not the quiet, inoffensive innocent presented in Cuba at its discovery. There were Indians and Indians. Some of them were friendly, peaceful, and kindly; but that this was the character of the American Indian as a whole is totally incorrect. Parkman shows that the Indian was, throughout North America, in his native strength furious in his ferocity, relentless as death, cruel beyond imagination, and occupied a territory he neither cultivated nor attempted to. The Indians were military vagabonds, whose continued control had left America an unpeopled wilderness to this day. Huntsmen and warriors they were; citizens and cultivators and civilizers they were not, and never would have been. Parkman tells the truth as history found them, and those truths are well worth our reading, because in their perusal we pass from sentimentality to reason, and see how this America of our day, rich, cultivated, civilized, and possessed of the largest amount of personal liberty ever vouchsafed to a citizen, is a noble exchange for the thoughtlessness, improvidence, and barbarity which were original holders of this realm. Speaking for myself, no author ever helped me to knowledge of the character of the aborigines of North America as Francis Parkman has done. I see that wild past, and feel it. And he has written the thrilling story of the French attempt to build an empire; and the attempt was courageous to the verge of wonder. There was in the Frenchman a careless ease and courage and sprightliness of temper, which lifted him above danger, as a boat is lifted on a billow's shoulders. Those perils were his drink; with a laugh and a jest he met his appointment with death as he would have met tryst with a woman. In "The Romance of American Geography," I have described the genius of the French voyager, for which I have an unbounded admiration, and in which I take an intemperate delight. He is the discoverer at his best, but the colonizer at his worst. The Jesuits had a brave chapter in the French occupancy. Their labors and sufferings and voyagings, their fealty to what they thought to be the cause of God, makes us proud of them, as if they were our own fellow-citizens. The settlement of Montreal and Quebec and contiguous territory, the religious fervor that mixed with the military spirit as waters of two streams mingle in a mountain-meadow,—read Parkman, and discover the dramatic instincts of these episodes which can be rehearsed no more upon our continent. Their day is past; but it was a great and stirring day. Gilbert Parker's "The Seats of the Mighty" is a chapter, torn from Parkman's "French Regime in Canada." All his facts and the romance are accurate, and are taken from Parkman's narrative, which misses nothing, but tells all. Parker's "Pierre and his People," and "An Adventure of the North" are tales of adventure, dewy with the freshness of a frontier world, and are in brief a section of the old French voyagers' days. Parkman's "Wolfe and Montcalm" is a picture, painted in smoke and blood, where heroism of Englishmen and Frenchmen mix themselves in an inextricable confusion. Pray you read Parkman, and be transported to a world where great deeds were done by men whose lives were as contradictory as an April day; but "their works do follow them" for all that, and do glorify them. Be glad for Francis Parkman, historian.

Many historians there are. John Fiske has written chapters on the discovery and colonization days; Rhodes has written on our Constitutional history; Winsor has written on our antiquities; Baird has written an exhaustive and competent history of the Huguenots, a series one will do more than well to read. Many scholars have written comparatively brief memoirs of the United States. Localities and States and single villages have had their historians; but the commanding figures whose faces fill the canvas, so to say,—of them this appreciation is written, to point youth to an Oregon of delight, where their leisure may stray with abundant profit and increasing pleasure, and, as I hope, with growing pride in American literature, so that they may make mental boast of America's sons, who have been stanch to enjoy and study the history of their own native land.

My final word is of that brilliant, irascible, and impressible American, John Lothrop Motley, historian of the Dutch Republic; and fitting it is that a native of the first great stable Republic was drawn to study the European Republic which rose at the touch of William the Silent's genius, and sank back into lethargy of kingship when the blood of the tragic and heroic inauguration was all spilt. The contact of the United Netherlands with American history and future is known to all. From the Netherlands the Puritans set sail to found what proved to be a colony and Republic. The extent to which the Netherlands exercised an influence in shaping the future of the American Commonwealth has not been determined, and can not be, though Douglas Campbell has maintained that to the Dutch, and not to the English Puritan, nor yet to the Magna Charta, does the American Republic owe its chief debt. The theme is productive and stimulative and worthy, though the facts are indeterminate. America is attached to the Dutch Republic as a bold attempt whose failure was nobler than many successes. The Puritan exodus from Holland, when Pastor John Robinson prayed, preached, and prophesied, is one of the most thrilling events recorded of the seventeenth century—a century crowded with doings that thrill the flesh like a bugle-call.

Motley's histories are "The Rise of the Dutch Republic," "The United Netherlands," and "John of Barneveld," a series which, for brilliancy of characterization of men and times and events, and interest stimulated and held, may rank, without hyperbole, with the writings of Lord Macaulay. Both are always special pleaders, as I am of opinion history ought probably to be, seeing that it is human nature, and will, in all but solitary instances, be the case whether or no; both are fascinating as a romancist; both are colorists, gorgeous as Rembrandt; both glorify and make you admire and love their heroes, whether you are so minded or not; both have made the epoch of which they wrote vivid as the landscape upon which the sunset pours its crimson dyes. Motley's hero was William the Silent, Prince of Orange; and Macaulay's hero was William III, King of England, Prince of Orange. Motley will bear being ranked as a great historian. He hates Philip II, as I suppose good folks ought who despise egotism, intolerance, vindictiveness, and horrible cruelty. He lauds William the Silent as soldier and statesman, Prince Maurice as a soldier, and John of Barneveld as statesman. Motley marches across old battle-fields like a soldier clad in steel. He gives portraits of Queen Elizabeth, of Leicester, of Granvelle, of Prince Maurice, of John of Barneveld, of Henry of Navarre, of Philip II, of Count Egmont, of Charles V, of Don John of Austria, of Hugo Grotius, and of William the Silent, which are as noble as the portraits painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds. I confess myself a heavy debtor to Motley. He has taught me so much; has familiarized me with the great world-figure, William the Silent, so that I feel at home with him and his struggle, and participate with him in them. He has drawn so clearly the figures of Romanist, Arminian, and Calvinist, as to make them fairly glow upon his pages. Not as minister to St. James, under President Grant, was Motley at his best; but rifling the archives of Holland and Spain with an industry which knew no bounds, and rehearsing the dry-as-dust discoveries in histories that glow like a furnace. Here is the field in which he is all but unconquerable. Long live the American historians!

IX

King Arthur