Mr. Parkman's Montcalm and Wolfe

THERE is a pleasure in taking up one of Mr. Parkman’s histories, for the reader knows that he will be invited to a share in the results of the historian’s patient labor without being made a partner in the labor itself. There are some historical writers who drag one along with them, and one has to work hard to make the book one’s own ; but Mr. Parkman’s dealings with the reader are of another sort. He assimilates his material so thoroughly that his narrative reads like the tale of a man who saw all, and if he was not a part of the action was all the better a narrator for being a bystander. The reader listens, and places implicit confidence in the narrator, not merely because the array of public and private authorities shows that Mr. Parkman has had access to material known in its mass to no other student, but because the firm tone of the historian carries conviction of his entire familiarity with his subject.

Mr. Parkman occupies a somewhat peculiar position as an historical writer. He belongs, one would say, by culture and by choice to the older school of narrative historians, but he brings to his task a scholarship which identifies him with the newer school of critical historians. He has the virtues of both schools, the defects of neither. He avoids, on the one hand, the tendency to rhetoric and smoothness which makes one distrust some very agreeable and even fascinating writers, men who are praised for making history as interesting as a novel; and he has none of that contempt for human interest which leads the scientific historian to treat all historical questions as merely unsolved problems. His positive merit lies in the thoroughly scientific method of his knowledge and the fine artistic power of his expression; while he never writes as a partisan, his work is warm with a genuine human sympathy.

His latest book¹ affords a better opportunity than any of the previous volumes in the series for a judgment on Mr. Parkman’s special gifts as a historical writer. The whole subject of France and England in North America, when treated in detail, is so dissipated, and owes its interest so much to detached incidents and half-isolated persons, that one is more impressed by Mr. Parkman’s mastery of the separate passages and by his clear portraiture than by his dramatic power. The story of the downfall of France, however, as contained in the volumes before us, moves so swiftly to its conclusion, and involves such vast interests, that it might easily tempt one into a theatrical display. It is to the credit of Mr. Parkman’s literary judgment that he has not yielded to any such temptation, but has so marshaled his facts as to make the historical development depend for its impressiveness upon the luminous qualities of the narrative. The drama involved in the sequence of events receives no adventitious aid from any manipulation of detail.

Indeed, any mere scenic dramatic effect is forbidden, except in the culminating encounter between Montcalm and Wolfe on the Heights of Abraham. The disputed points in the Seven Years’ War, so far as America was concerned, were not many, — Fort Du Quesne, Louisbourg, Ticonderoga, and Crown Point, the western forts, Montreal and Quebec ; but the campaigns were so independent, for the most part, so little under the control of one master mind, that the impression created on the reader is of a great deal of straggling warfare, — an impression heightened by the remembrance of natural conditions, the dense forests, the trackless ways, the wilderness penetrated only by small parties, and by the frequent glimpses of Indians and bush-rangers, whose mode of warfare emphasizes the unscientific character of the entire struggle.

The real drama lies deeper than this superficial picture, and it is this essential dramatic property which is never lost sight of by Mr. Parkman. Faithful as he is to the delineation of details in this dispersed conflict, he knows that a bystander could not measure the significance of the contest. There is needed that larger historical knowledge, of which prescience can only be dim, and in the light of that knowledge he is able to interpret the isolated fights, to sketch the successive scenes upon the large background of that ethnic struggle for possession of the continent which now stands revealed to the human mind. The brief introduction with which the first volume opens is a vigorous outline of the thought underlying the struggle, and in the first chapter the author has given a rapid, trenchant sketch of the physical, political, and social conditions under which the movements were to be made.

It may be said, without extravagance, that Mr. Parkman’s previous volumes in the series have been in the nature of introduction to this ; for he appears from the beginning to have kept in mind the real character of the forces to be pitted against each other, and to have given hints occasionally to the reader of what was finally to be expected. All this will undoubtedly appear more clearly when the only missing link has been supplied, and the reader is able to follow the entire series from Pioneers of France in the New World down to this work. We cannot forbear now calling attention to a singularly perspicacious passage in his volume Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV., because it contains in a nutshell the difference of the two national elements at war with each other. It occurs in the eighteenth chapter, where the capture of Fort Nelson by Iberville leads Mr. Parkman into a sudden consideration of the rival colonies, English and French. “ These northern conflicts,” he says, " were but episodes. In Hudson Bay, Newfoundland, and Acadia, the issues of the war were unimportant, compared with the momentous question whether France or England should be mistress of the West; that is to say, of the whole interior of the continent. There was a strange contrast in the attitude of the rival colonies toward this supreme prize: the one was inert, and seemingly indifferent ; the other, intensely active.” He then proceeds to analyze the character of the two colonies and their aim, in two or three pages, which are masterly in their clear, profound disclosure of the inherent differences between the French and the English.

It was in 1697 that Iberville took Fort Nelson. The attitude of the two nations was not essentially different in 1759, except that even under the narrow policy of France Canadian self-consciousness had grown more firm, and the community occupying the basin of the St. Lawrence could no longer be described as a mere French camp. Mr. Parkman occasionally hints at, but nowhere that we remember calls special attention to, the fact that in the final struggle Canada counted upon the side of France with something of the force that New England counted on the side of England. With something of the force, we say, for relatively New England was far more an integer in the struggle, and the evolution of the two peoples in America proceeded with greater rapidity in the case of the English settlers, since they were helped, not only as were the others, by physical conditions, but also by the accumulating influence of political and intellectual principles which made for freedom.

Mr. Parkman says in his introduction that “ it was the fatuity of Louis XV. and his Pompadour that made the conquest of Canada possible,” an epigram like Emerson’s “ In the year 1775 we had many enemies and many friends in England, but our one benefactor was King George the Third.” If one concentrates one’s attention, it is not difficult to sum the matter into such phrases, and Mr. Parkman gives abundant proof of the weakness of Canada through the fatuity of the French court, but his two volumes diminish the force of his epigram. He might with equal truth have said that it was the reinforcement of England by Pitt that made the conquest of Canada possible ; and indeed one of the most brilliant passages in the work is to be found in the contrast drawn in the two pictures of Pitt and Pompadour: —

“ The Great Commoner was not a man of the people, in the popular sense of that hackneyed phrase. Though himself poor, being a younger son, he came of a rich and influential family; he was patrician at heart; both his faults and his virtues, his proud incorruptibility and passionate, domineering patriotism, bore the patrician stamp. Yet he loved liberty and he loved the people, because they were the English people. The effusive humanitarianism of to-day had no part in him, and the democracy of to-day would detest him. Yet to the middle-class England of his own time, that unenfranchised England which had little representation in Parliament, he was a voice, an inspiration, and a tower of strength. He would not flatter the people; but, turning with contempt from the tricks and devices of official politics, he threw himself with a confidence that never wavered on their patriotism and public spirit. They answered him with a boundless trust, asked but to follow his lead, gave him without stint their money and their blood, loved him for his domestic virtues and his disinterestedness, believed him even in his self-contradiction, and idolized him even in his bursts of arrogant passion. It was he who waked England from her lethargy, shook off the spell that Newcastle and his fellowenchanters had cast over her, and taught her to know herself again. A heart that beat in unison with all that was British found responsive throbs in every corner of the vast empire that through him was to become more vast. With the instinct of his fervid patriotism he would join all its far-extended members into one, not by vain assertions of parliamentary supremacy, but by bonds of sympathy and ties of a common freedom and a common cause. The passion for power and glory subdued in him all the sordid parts of humanity, and he made the power and glory of England one with his own. He could change front through resentment or through policy, but in whatever path he moved his objects were the same: not to curb the power of France in America, but to annihilate it, — crush her navy, cripple her foreign trade, ruin her in India, in Africa, and wherever else, east or west, she had found foothold; gain for England the mastery of the seas, open to her the great highways of the globe, make her supreme in commerce and colonization, and while limiting the activities of her rival to the European continent give to her the whole world for a sphere.

“ To this British Roman was opposed the pampered Sardanapalus of Versailles, with the silken favorite who by calculated adultery had bought the power to ruin France. The Marquise de Pompadour, who began life as Jeanne Poisson, — Jane Fish, — daughter of the head clerk of a banking-house, who then became wife of a rich financier, and then, as mistress of the king, rose to a pinnacle of gilded ignominy, chose this time to turn out of office the two ministers who had shown most ability and force, — Argenson, head of the department of war, and Machault, head of the marine and colonies: the one because he was not subservient to her will, and the other because he had unwittingly touched the self-love of her royal paramour. She aspired to a share in the conduct of the war, and not only made and unmade ministers and generals, but discussed campaigns: and battles with them, while they listened to her prating with a show of obsequious respect, since to lose her favor was to risk losing all. A few months later, when blows fell heavy and fast, she turned a deaf ear to representations of financial straits and military disasters, played the heroine, affected a greatness of soul superior to misfortune, and in her perfumed boudoir varied her fulsome graces by posing as a Roman matron. In fact, she never wavered in her spite against Frederic, and her fortitude was perfect in bearing the suffering of others and defying dangers that could not touch her.”

In these personal sketches Mr. Parkman is at his best. He loves men. He has drawn Montcalm and Wolfe with equal care and affection, and his sense of honor inspires him to give Vaudreuil his due, when that offensive governor turns his best side to the light. The persons who make history are dearer to him than the forces which the philosopher discovers at work; but this is only another way of saying that Mr. Parkman is an artist in his history, and that is what we wish to say most emphatically, for it is the charm of these volumes that the reader sees the action, while he is never deluded into supposing that he is merely watching a game of skill.

The story gains perceptibly from the familiarity which the writer shows with the actual ground of the several scenes. That Mr. Parkman should have taken pains to visit the localities mentioned in his history was to be expected ; it was a part of his patient preparation for a faithful report. He has used his local knowledge, however, for other purposes than to identify movements or to fix the position of forces, for he has transferred the scene more than once to his pages with the effect of giving color and richness. Such a picture as he draws of Louisbourg at the beginning of chapter xix. is more than a pleasant way of introducing the reader to the scenes which are to follow. It is a background upon which one may see the moving figures in the siege; for it is clear that the historian himself was informed in his imagination by the aspect of the place.

We have preferred to direct attention to the artistic side of this admirable work. The material in which Mr. Parkman has dealt is very largely of his own gathering; the results which he reaches commend themselves to the reader’s judgment by the clear, impartial tone which pervades the book ; one feels that the years which have been given to the entire series have mellowed and ripened the author’s power, and that if the subject had been one which the world chose to consider a great subject the historian would by this time be ranked with the great historians. But is not the subject great? It is only when one considers it as the affair of Canada that one relegates it to a subordinate place. No juster or more generous conclusion could be drawn than Mr. Parkman presents when he sums up the case as it relates to Canada: —

“ With the peace of Paris ended the checkered story of New France, a story which could have been a history if faults of constitution and the bigotry and folly of rulers had not dwarfed it to an episode. Yet it is a noteworthy one in both its lights and shadows ; in the disinterested zeal of the founder of Quebec, the self-devotion of the early missionary martyrs, and the daring enterprise of explorers ; in the spiritual and temporal vassalage from which the only escape was to the savagery of the wilderness ; and in the swarming corruptions which were the natural result of an attempt to rule, by the absolute hand of a master beyond the Atlantic, a people bereft of every vestige of civil liberty. Civil liberty was given them by the British sword ; but the conqueror left their religious system untouched, and through it they have imposed upon themselves a weight of ecclesiastical tutelage that finds few equals in the most Catholic countries of Europe. Such guardianship is not without certain advantages. When faithfully exercised it aids to uphold some of the tamer virtues, if that can be called a virtue which needs the constant presence of a sentinel to keep it from escaping: but it is fatal to mental robustness and moral courage, and if French Canada would fulfill its aspirations it must cease to be one of the most priest-ridden communities of the modern world.”

It is when the history which Mr. Parkman records is taken as a constituent part of the history of great movements in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and especially when it is considered with reference to the genesis of the United States, that it becomes one of dignity and consequence. To miss a knowledge of it is to miss a clear conception of the history of our own country; and as, generation by generation, this history becomes of greater moment to American readers, and all else is read for the light it throws upon it, the series of which Montcalm and Wolfe is the closing number will come to have an importance much greater than the early books of Livy could have had to Romans.