Comment on Recent Books in American History
To those who are disposed to regret the barrenness of current American literature in certain directions, particularly in the field of poetic and imaginative production, we commend for consideration the activity shown in historical study and in economics. Not that one kind of literature can be taken as a substitute for another, or that research necessarily means a resultant literary creation, but that it is a more healthful occupation to look for positive signs of intellectual force in national life than to inquire too curiously into apparent atrophy. We may confidently assert that a very large body of young students is at present engaged enthusiastically in the study of history, especially American history; and if this energy is intelligently directed, we have a right to look for results not only in a clearer perception of the facts and logic of history, but in a better proportioned narrative, and it may be in some genuine work of historic art. Our universities, colleges, and even academies and schools are at any rate educating readers, and out of the number of these readers are issuing those who have received the impetus for research and have an ambition to push forward the line of exploration and settlement.
The publication of the results of research is naturally, in the first instance, through the proceedings of historical societies, and the special monographs or historical series issued by colleges and universities. Indeed, the publishing function of the university is coming to be no mean consideration, and is to be looked upon with interest, since it serves to emphasize the importance of the university as a scientific station. It is fair to expect, also, that the publication in this way of historical monographs will carry special authority, since the reader has a right to reckon on the historical department as indorsing the value of the work. Here, for example, is the initial volume of Harvard Historical Studies (Longmans), published under the direction of the Department of History and Government ; and as there is a fund, the income from which is applied to the publication, the enterprise is happily independent of trade considerations. The Department need not take popularity into account, as a publisher must when appealing to the public for support, but only intrinsic value.
This initial volume is entitled The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America, 16381870, by W. E. Burghardt Du Bois, who is a professor in Wilberforce University, an institution devoted to the higher education of the colored race. Dr. Du Bois has shown good judgment in the choice of his subject, and has been most industrious in gathering and arranging his material; for though the substance of his monograph may be reached more succinctly in Lalor’s Encyclopædia of Political Science, he has given a very full array of authorities for all his facts, and has furnished a workmanlike chronological conspectus of colonial, state, national, and international legislation, and a good bibliography. All this apparatus looks well, and Dr. Du Bois has laid students under obligation to him, but his own reasoning and what we may call his hortatory application seem to disclose a lack of appreciation of the subject in its historical proportions.
In the first four chapters Dr. Du Bois describes the origin of the slave-trade, and the efforts of the planting, the farning, and the trading colonies to suppress it, regarding which he says : “In spite of many attempts to stop further pursuit of the slave-trade, we notice back of nearly all such attempts a sort of moral apathy, an indisposition to attack the evil with the sharp weapons its nature demanded.” But he forgets that the colonies were not yet united, and had no machinery for concerted action, even had their interests not been so distinct and different as he admits them to have been. To change the condition of half a million of “ savages,” as he calls them, with the whole power of the European nations working to keep up the trade, was no slight task for thirteen poor little colonies. The measures of the “ Association ” of 1774, which, ostensibly aiming at non-intercourse with England, incidentally included the importation of slaves, were certainly a praiseworthy effort in the right direction, and the framing in 1787 of Sec. 9 of Art. I. of the Constitution, forbidding prohibition of the slave-trade prior to 1808, was a temporary truce in attacking that evil. We could do little without the aid of foreign nations, and they had made no great progress toward the abolition of the trade. Denmark, which headed the list, in 1792 by royal order prohibited the slave-trade after 1802. France did not finally abolish it till 1815, and then only by a stroke of the Napoleonic pen during the “ hundred days.” England was hard at work from May, 1788, to March 25, 1807, before she abolished the trade, twentythree days after our own act of March 2 had passed. The Netherlands, which had perhaps the largest colonial trade, abolished it in 1814. Portugal in 1815 agreed to abolish it north of the equator only, Spain following her example in 1817.
The attempts of England, at the Conference of 1818, to secure a general agreement of the powers to a qualified international right of search failed. As late as 1824 only Sweden had agreed to the right of search. In 1826 Brazil agreed to abolish the slave-trade in three years. Between 1831 and 1839, France, Denmark, Sardinia, the Hanse towns, and Naples had joined the other powers. France made the slave-trade piracy in 1836, but our government had already made it piracy by the acts of May 15, 1820, and January 30, 1823. So that we were well abreast of other nations in legislation, although undoubtedly great laxity existed in carrying out our laws. Dr. Du Bois severely criticises our government for refusing to join in the quintuple treaty of 1841, of England, France, Russia, Prussia, and Austria, which Belgium signed subsequently, giving the right of search. But it was simply impossible at that time to carry such a measure through Congress with its strong pro-slavery element, and the Treaty of Washington of 1842, which established joint cruising by English and American squadrons, was the best that could be made at that time. There were two sides to the question of permitting the right of search, which Dr. Du Bois says involved itself in metaphysical subtleties at Mr. Webster’s hands. It would have amounted to throwing the whole police duty into the hands of England, as the other European powers did little or nothing, and it was contrary to American tradition and feeling to make entangling alliances. Dr. Du Bois admits that “ without doubt the contention of the United States as to England’s pretensions to a right of search was technically correct.” France changed her right of search stipulation to one of joint cruising. Texas and Portugal agreed to it. Several unpleasant cases of the confiscation of cargoes of slaves by England without compensation, notably that of the Creole, had caused an imbittered correspondence, and recriminations were exchanged as to the execution of the joint cruising treaty of 1842. The Buchanan administration would not act. The yacht Wanderer from New York landed a cargo of 420 slaves in Georgia in 1859. It devolved on the Lincoln administration to sign the treaty of June 7, 1862, granting a mutual limited right of search, and establishing mixed courts for the trial of offenders at the Cape of Good Hope, Sierra Leone, and New York. The charge of carrying out the slavetrade laws was given to the Secretary of the Interior, who acted energetically. The slaver Erie was condemned in 1862 as a pirate and her captain was hanged, four other slavers soon suffering the same fate.
This gave the death-blow to the slavetrade, and the coastwise trade was prohibited in 1864. A squadron of ten ships with 113 guns patrolled the slave coast in 1866. The slaveholding States of West Virginia, Missouri, and Maryland voted for gradual emancipation in the years between 1862 and 1865, and after January, 1865, slavery had a legal existence only in Kentucky and Delaware, the two States which rejected the Thirteenth Amendment of December 18, 1865, the ratification of which closed the slavery question. The fact, however, that this amendment was not unanimous, being ratified by only thirty-one out of thirty-six States, and that the Fifteenth Amendment, which was the corollary of it, was ratified by only thirty out of thirty-seven States, shows that the opposition complained of by Dr. Du Bois in the thirteen original States still existed, and that the suppression of slavery and the slave-trade was not such a simple matter as he considers it. Perhaps that is what he means in his closing enigmatical remark : “ The riddle of the Sphinx may be postponed, it may be evasively answered ; some time it must be fully answered.” We suspect he has failed in a satisfactory answer to the historical problem involved in his thesis by trying to isolate it too completely, not only from the institution of slavery and the interstate slave-trade, but from those considerations of the development of ethics which lie at the basis of all final political action. It is not difficult to establish, for example, a chain of witnesses against African slavery, from Las Casas to Garrison, but it is quite another thing to demonstrate a common consciousness of the evil during the same period.
It is perhaps even a better testimony to the spread of historical studies than that offered by academic publication that so serious an enterprise as the issue of the special mémoires pour servir contained in the Jesuit Relations should be undertaken by Messrs. Burrows Brothers, of Cleveland, under the competent editorship of Mr. Reuben G. Thwaites. Confined to definite but by no means narrow limits, the projected and already begun publication, in sixty volumes, promises to stand high in intrinsic worth and performance among our collections of archives. It is felicitous that publishers and editor hail from the very centre of the vast sweep covered by the missions of the Jesuits, from Labrador to Louisiana. The middle West is surely a coign of vantage for a critical yet enthusiastic survey of whatever relates to French America.
We have received, as part of our national culture, definite memories of these devoted missionaries, celebrating the Mass in the deepest forests, jeopardizing their lives in frail canoes or on the breaking ice of Canadian rivers, ministering to the sick and dying, though often worn with disease, and always ready, even glad, to die. We know, too, that they were in the habit of sending back to their superiors and others annual accounts of their doings, which served as official reports of the mission. These reports, printed at the Cramoisy Press, from Le Jeune’s Relation in 1632 to Dablon’s in 1672, comprise the Jesuit Relations, and are of incalculable value to collectors of choice books. Up to the present there is but one perfect set, and that is in the Lenox Library in the city of New York. The brave stories of Catholic zeal found a prompt welcome at home, even in the brilliant French court of the seventeenth century, and among those sentimental admirers of heroism who, like ourselves, it may be, were ready to weep with sympathy at some unusual tale of suffering, while comforting their own sleek persons over good fare and fuel, under a sound roof. Most of these frail pamphlets, largely read at the time, perished in the using, as, for the most part, have the innumerable issues of our own New England Primer; for religious tracts, if read at all, are read to annihilation.
As now planned, this series includes not only all of these Relations, but also many other papers, among them unedited manuscripts and rare letters from archives of the Society of Jesus, extending from the various reports of Biard, the pioneer of the order, to an account, in 1791, of the death of Father Well, the " last Jesuit of Montreal.” The stretch of time is long, the documents are numerous. The missions to the Abenakis, Montagnais, Iroquois, Hurons, and Ottawas, as well as those at Quebec, Montreal, and Louisiana, are to be included. The scope and plan of the work are admirable. Maps, portraits, facsimiles, bibliographies, biographies of the fathers, translations of all the French texts, and explanatory notes,— this inclusive programme, carried out in volumes tasteful in color, size, binding, type, and paper, is sure to win approval and even gratitude.
There is satisfaction in knowing that one more of the many fields of investigation has been measured off, well cleared and staked, and made ready for the cultivators who, by their genius and insight, shall draw nutriment from soil thus rendered fertile. These Relations can never become, in the usual sense, popular. They will probably share the doom, in that particular, of most sources of knowledge. At the same time, it is not altogether easy to point out their value. In all that has been written about them one fails to find any distinct recognition of the part that they may fairly be expected to play in our future history or literature. Each critic repeats, to a greater or less degree, the words and sentiments of earlier critics, and thus conveys an impression that there is, after all, lack of variety or of color disclosed by a closer familiarity with the Jesuit Relations. There may be a feeling also that historians, and especially Parkman, have pressed the pulp pretty thoroughly. Parkman has, indeed, extracted much of the essential virtue for his narrative histories ; but O’Callaghan and Shea, although they have done their work faithfully, have appealed mainly to bibliographical interests and to special investigators of the establishment and progress of the Catholic faith in the New World. Mr. Thwaites is working in advance of future historians on lines which point to large methods and sure results, and he is known to be competent to his task.
Some of the difficulties in the way of one who seeks to form a fair opinion of the status of these documents should in fairness be recognized. Although the Jesuits were certainly not of untrained minds nor unused to literary expression, in many eases they exhibit a rustiness of style and a provoking irregularity of spelling and punctuation which render an intelligent translation more than usually desirable. There are valid reasons for their occasional crudities and uncouthness, for they had put aside the neat habits of clerics for the rough life of frontiersmen, and must often have penned their reports with fingers cramped by meanest drudgery. Events of small import assumed large proportions to men removed from the complicated life of civilization, and thus it happens that endless repetitions naturally occur; the same story is rehearsed to various correspondents with an almost thematic treatment. The conversion of the great sagamore, old chief Membertou, and the embarkation of Biard and Ennemond Massé at Dieppe after the buying off, by the queen and certain court ladies, of the Huguenot merchants who would have stayed the sailing of these fathers, — these and other oft-told tales consume many pages and some of our patience. There is, however, sufficient diversity, in the midst of a curious homogeneity of thought and expression, to warrant the printing of each document.
Accepting Mr. Thwaites’s own estimate of the historical importance of these archives, one may naturally turn a little afield and look for other treasures in this mass of material. The first object of interest is, as a matter of course, the American Indian. Here is an abundant supply of sociological data, of isolated observations, but no correlation, no organization of method. Nor is this strange. The mission fathers did not come hither to collect sociological data, or to elevate the standard of living, or to make this earth more habitable for savages. Their one purpose was to prepare souls for another life by baptism and by the ministration of the sacraments of Holy Church. They were also instrumental in exalting the glory and renown of France ; but if they were conscious of this, they gave no sign. From the first they were scrupulous in regard to the baptism of adults, though freely administering it to infants. Even Shea admits that the Jesuits were discredited by their rivals, but it would be hard to prove that they were not ingenuous in this matter of genuine conversion, though the temptation to exaggerate their successes must have been great.
It is difficult to conceive the vastness of the territory which their missions covered; still more difficult to understand the sparseness of the native population. A celebrated evangelist or mission father to-day can reach more souls in a month than these fathers could have affected by hearsay in years, although the field was all their own for the harvesting. The Indians appear always to have insisted on their own superiority to white men, even claiming exemption from disease on this ground. Their arrogance may easily have been heightened by the constant humility of the Jesuits, who seem never to have allowed themselves expressions of harshness or contempt. Biard distinctly calls the Indians “ good,” but adds that they “ are purely and absolutely wretched.” The same father cites a case of conscious humor, a rare trait in Indians. When, in teaching Membertou the Pater Noster, he came to " Give us this day our daily bread,”the old chief said, “If I did not ask him for anything but bread, I would be without moose meat or fish ! ” This is an illustration of one important observation by Biard that an Indian’s “ conceptions are limited to sensible and material things; there is nothing abstract, internal, spiritual, or distinct.”
The results of assiduous labors which covered the better part of two centuries cannot be measured by the practical standards of a workaday world. It is true that for the most part the Indians, when labored with, have been “Christianized,” but the mass of aboriginal life has not been lifted. To this day, the retention of the French Canadians, one of the least of racial forces on this continent, within the fold of faith would appear to be the main accomplishment of the strenuous religious zeal of New France. The melancholy decadence of the apostolic labors of Eliot in New England, ending practically with the experience with the Praying Indians after King Philip’s war, suggests a parallel to the fate of Jesuit influence in the North and Northwest. Such failures certainly need not bury with them the lessons of adhesion to lofty ideals. Tenderness may properly be cherished for martyrdom in the Canadian forests, and for the spiritual zeal which shines in the unintelligible jargon of Up-biblum God, perhaps the most closely sealed book which now exists.
There should be some material brought to light, through the medium of these documents, on the attitude of the Jesuits towards the abominable practice of supplying a weaker race with strong drink, ever their subtlest enemy. Without a full understanding of their efforts to suppress this traffic, the important history of the “ temperance question ” in America cannot be adequately treated. The Jesuits have been charged with an unfair treatment of La Salle, mention of whom they sedulously avoid in their reports. In so far as it is true that this explorer was antagonistic to their policy of keeping Indians and liquor safely divorced, they were clearly within their rights, according to civilized codes, in remaining silent in regard to a declared enemy of their principles.
In these eighteen thousand pages there should also be some substantial encouragement for the cause of American literature. Dullness of expression, tiresome repetition, there is sure to be, but there will also be many a vivid passage. In some of the narratives already printed is the sweet savor of a wild, unrestrained life among simplest conditions and scenes made memorable by heroism and self-sacrifice. At times one seems to be reading, not official reports for the edification of the pious across the sea, but works of the imagination pictured by literary artfulness, which ever seeks to be artlessness. For him who re-creates the past through the delicate medium of romance, here are fresh possibilities. May the store remain hidden from those who have neither grace nor genius to use it skillfully!
This intimation of material for the historical novel is powerfully suggested not only by several of the Relations, but also by the recently issued Journal of Captain William Pote (Dodd, Mead & Co.), the manuscript of which, according to its editor, Bishop Hurst, was found in Geneva several years ago. The captain, a sturdy Yankee from Maine, was captured in 1745 on his vessel, then anchored in Annapolis Basin, by a party of French and Indians. With an Indian as his master, Pote was taken a hard journey to Quebec, and there imprisoned until 1747. He narrates matters of interest concerning the capture of Louisburg, that overwhelming piece of strategy and good luck for New Englanders. With no little sense of humor and a grim determination, the captain, who was fascinatingly illiterate, but not ignorant, wrote a journal which was no fuller of aridities than such performances usually are. His account of the treatment of the prisoners on the march at the hands of Indian women is good testimony that ferocity is not a matter of sex. His arrival in Quebec, after a close pursuit across the river and up to the very town by hostile river Indians, who would wrest him from his captors to submit him to slow torture, is told in a breathless paragraph, hardly excelled in the least possible of romances. Pote is treasure-trove for local historians and genealogists. The book, which is handsomely contrived, is, in fact, edited with this in view.
Mr. Edward L. Pierce, in a searching paper on Recollections as a Source of History, has properly made a distinction between those set down immediately after the event and those recalled after a lapse of ten, fifteen, or more years. The paper is printed in a collection of the author’s Addresses and Papers, to which he gives the comprehensive title Enfranchisement and Citizenship (Roberts), and in this volume he has preserved some of his own recollections which form really interesting and valuable memorabilia for the student of recent history. Mr. Pierce was a young lawyer at the breaking out of the war for the Union, and an ardent anti-slavery man. He enlisted as a private, served for three months at Fortress Monroe, and afterward was employed by the government as an agent at the Sea Islands. The narrative of his experience as a soldier is of trifling value, except for its incidental illustration of the temper in which a peaceful young lawyer took up military service; but his account of the freedmen in the early days of the war is and must remain a real contribution to history, both of the quality of the emancipated negro as judged by a keen and friendly critic, and of the spirit which stirred the antislavery people of the North to use the earliest possible opportunity to demonstrate a practical concern in the race for whose emancipation they had so long been agitating. The political side of enfranchisement has been fairly well set forth in our histories, but as historians inquire more closely into the social and industrial forces at work in any period, larger space will be given to the earnest and sometimes misguided labors of the Northern men and women who threw themselves into the task of educating the blacks upon the lines familiar to themselves. Mr. Pierce has collected in the volume a number of addresses and papers which illustrate the activity of a semipublic life, and offer an interesting view of a historical student who has been concerned more with the manipulation of material still plastic than with that which lies beyond his own memory ; and one cannot overlook the valuable component in such a nature of hero-worship and profound interest in persons.
A somewhat younger scholar has also collected his miscellaneous papers, but the book is rather an accompaniment to a more epic work than the scattered evidences of a life busy with history in the making. Mr. James Schouler is known to the public by his five-volume History of the United States under the Constitution, and his new book, Historical Briefs (Dodd, Mead & Co.), contains the chips from his workshop, as well as a curious Biography written by some unknown third person, but rendered authoritative by a large admixture of contributions in the first person. The several papers on President Polk (reprinted from this magazine), Lafayette’s Tour in 1824, and Monroe and the Rhea Letter are minor studies in American history, but the volume has its chief interest and value through the paper on Francis Parkman, and the group dealing with subjects bearing directly upon the historian and his task. This group and the Biography, which occupies nearly half the work, form the real excuse for the publication, and they have the curious value which attaches to an author’s reflection on his own career, his methods of work, his aims and his ideals. Those who have found Mr. Schouler’s History rather hard reading, in spite of a certain freshness of attack which it makes, will turn with interest to what the author has to say on Historical Style. He opens this paper with a frank statement that various critics have berated him for bad taste in his historical expression, but offsets the force of this criticism by bringing into court the testimony of others that his composition is " warm, vivid in its coloring, lucid, epigrammatic, and intensely interesting.” His conclusion is that " men of good critical acquirements differ among themselves in their estimates of what should constitute a meritorious style.” It was hardly necessary to balance the judgments pronounced on him to reach this conclusion. It is more to the point to know what Mr. Schouler regards as the notes of a good historical style. He names these in their order, as, first, genuineness, so that an author’s style shall be the image of himself ; next, self-forgetfulness, so that one is engrossed with the thought, and not with the fashion of expressing it. And in order to compass the utmost perfection, an author should train himself by much exercise and the study of great composers ; he should, moreover, make much use of the concrete, and Mr. Schouler draws from his own experience a comparison between writing law-books and writing history. In the former case, he says, where clearness in the development of principles is of the chief consequence, “ I have, with rare exceptions in certain paragraphs, sent regularly my first and only draft to the printer as written out with the running pen, keeping the general plan and proportion of each volume well in view, and feeling my own way from one legal doctrine to another, so as to impart knowledge by induction as my own mind comprehended it. . . . The professional mind, intent upon illustrating and tracing out rules and their subtle limitations, as applied by our courts, compares and comments upon the mass of cases, and may leave warmth of coloring to take care of itself, so long as he applies a logical analysis and sound sense and is himself interested. In historical composition, on the other hand, one feels the greater sublimity and scope of the task, in a literary aspect, and having rules less ready at hand to rest upon and the ipse dixit of others, trusts less to his first simple expression. Political maxims, metaphors, images, comparisons, troop forth from the mind into the pen, and obstruct the limpid course of his narrative.”
In this somewhat naïve confession we suspect we have a clue to what perplexes the reader of Mr. Schouler’s History. He appears to have retained the habit acquired in writing law-books, “ feeling his way from one legal doctrine to another,” and to have superimposed a sort of confused literary sense that history must be written in a picturesque manner. So long as history is taken up as a succession of topics, it will be liable, in the hands of a somewhat tropical person, to be exaggerated in color, and to lack that great logic which results from a full grasp of the whole in its continuity; and we suspect further that Mr. Schouler has been a little too much affected by his canon that an author’s style should be an image of himself, and too little governed by the excellent rule he lays down in the words of Prescott, that one should be “ engrossed with the thought, and not with the fashion of expressing it.”
Another historian, whose work has lain in the same period as that of Mr. Schouler, has also put forth a collection of his studies, but they are wholly objective. Mr. McMaster’s With the Fathers (Appleton) contains thirteen papers, which may be taken largely as glosses upon his still unfinished History of the People of the United States. The Monroe Doctrine, The Third Term Tradition, The Political Depravity of the Fathers, The Riotous Career of the Know Nothings, Franklin in France, Washington’s Inauguration, Four Centuries of Progress, — these are a few of the titles that indicate the range of the volume. The papers are for the most part too brief to answer as thorough expositions, although the first named is admirable as a rapid and perfectly intelligible citation of the historical incidents which attended the formulation of the Monroe Doctrine, and serve as footnotes to it up to the date of President Cleveland’s famous message. But fragmentary and almost offhand as the papers are, they illustrate anew the extraordinarily familiar acquaintance which Mr. McMaster possesses with the facts of United States history. No other American historian has shown so emphatically what may be called the journalistic instinct for news. Nothing comes amiss to him, and he has not only the journalist’s habit of gathering news, but the deft, swift faculty of arranging his news to the best advantage, so that the most hurried reader can see at a glance what is significant. These papers, moreover, bring into stronger evidence than his history Mr. McMaster’s power of seeing wholes. He is not an idealist, and it is not the imaginative function which he employs so much as what might be called the correlating and the ingenious. He makes things fit, and there is a finality about his results which is sometimes rather exasperatingly positive; as when, for example, after discussing the third term tradition, he concludes: “ Under our system of government, we do not want, we do not need, a President of extraordinary ability. The average man is good enough, and for him two terms is ample.” The reader can hardly resist the conviction, after going through this book, that Mr. McMaster has such a conception of the multifarious activity of the United States as gives him a solid confidence in the inviolability of its mechanism. It would be going too far to say that he takes a materialistic view of government and civilization, yet it can scarcely be denied that the great mass of facts which he handles, and from which he draws his inferences, are best stated in very material terms.
It is a long stride from a thing to a man, and as the real history of the United States is epitomized in the careers and characters of a few men, though illustrated by multitudes, the prowess of a historian may be pretty fairly measured by his capacity to deal with these men. Indeed, in the case of Washington it may almost be said that the only possible treatment is that which takes him as a symbol rather than as a man, and Mr. Woodrow Wilson in his George Washington (Harpers) gives a fresh argument in support of those who persistently maintain that the first citizen of the American people was a statue, and not a man. In vain, they say, do you tell us stories of his profanity and collect the instances of his laughter ; you cannot make us really believe he was alive. He was a great figure, we grant, but the evidences of his humanity are feeble. Mr. Wilson reinforces this position by a new method. He gives over the attempt at vivifying Washington ; he scarcely attempts even a lifelike portrait-statue, but expends his energy upon what may be termed the bas-relief treatment of a great man. He does not avail himself of some of the minor facts hoarded for the proper building-up of a human character, nor does he give a very close or detailed itinerary of Washington’s course as that great figure moves through history. Rather, he takes his subject in the large way as a person moulded by nature out of great historic material, and shows him chiefly in his relation to the place from which he sprang, the time in which he lived, and the men amongst whom he moved.
Mr. Wilson’s studies in government and history have given him an admirable equipment for this task. They have accustomed him to seeing life in its broad masses and movements, so that when he comes to particular narrative he gives the person the benefit of the class. Nothing could be better than his characterization of the Virginian life out of which Washington came. Without confusing the reader with too many details, he sets forth the old contrast between New England and Virginia in a luminous fashion, and enables readers of history to perceive clearly the sources of power which made Virginia the mother of Presidents. Facts with regard to Washington may be had with little difficulty from various biographies, but we know of no other writer who has come so near to accounting for him as it is reasonable to expect; and if, in addition, he could have sent this creation along its way with the vigor of a dramatic narrator, he would unquestionably have achieved a great work of biographic art. As it is, he has given an agreeable and illuminating philosophy of Washington which ought to be of great service to some writer who is a story-teller as well.
It would be an interesting speculation to consider how far historical study might tend to train a novelist, how far working in fiction might give vitality to the historian’s labor. Motley began with fiction, and parts of his work show plainly that he might have proved an admirable novelist, but his head was more or less filled with historic action when he began his attempts at novel-writing. It is more difficult to trace with any precision the influence of Dr. Eggleston the storyteller upon Dr. Eggleston the historian. It might even be argued that in his The Beginners of a Nation (Appleton) he has thrown away such advantages as he had acquired in the character-drawing of fiction, since he pays comparatively little attention to individual delineation, and certainly takes small pains to construct out of the material easily furnished vivid personalities of such notable figures as Bradford and Winthrop and Penn and Roger Williams. Yet the attentive reader will be disposed to credit Dr. Eggleston with a distinct literary art in his book, however small or large a part his experience in novel - writing may have played in the training for it. It is well known that while still a storyteller he was busying himself with details of manners and customs in our early life, and his school histories bear witness to a survey of the entire field of American history ; but this volume, announced as the first of a series, proceeds upon a plan which has its own character and appeals to a special class of readers. It is in fact, though not in name, an historical essay, based upon a careful reading of history, and fortified in a somewhat singular way by specific references to the less accessible authorities.
The statement of the contents will make this a little clearer. The first book is entitled Rise of the First English Colony ; the second, The Puritan Migration ; the third, Centrifugal Forces in Colony Planting. In brief, Dr. Eggleston has taken his history topically, and has essayed to set forth the underlying principles discoverable in the apparently fortuitous movement of historic atoms. In doing this, he has used a selection of facts in order to relieve the subject of confusing details. He is an interpreter of history, only he formulates his interpretation in concrete examples as far as possible. The art consists in so presenting a series of incidents that they shall bring the same inference to the mind of a reader that they do to the writer : and here, we may say, the training he has had as a novelist stands him in good stead, for it enables him to introduce a subject almost casually by some apparently incidental aspect, and then to lead the reader on to the larger concern, leaving him to feel the keen pleasure of the connection between the minor and the major circumstance. For example, he begins his chapter on the Rise and Development of Puritanism with an account of the love of display in Elizabeth’s time, and the reader is conducted from rich clothes to the drama, to the observance of ceremonies, and so to the protest against pomp and ceremonialism in religious worship, to the rise of the Quaker and the Puritan, to the Continental exiles, and to the great division in religion and politics. The reserve with which one is treated to the storehouse of facts from which the author is drawing gives him a feeling of confidence that the historian knows his ground and will not weary him with overmuch detail ; and Dr. Eggleston has certainly shown himself a literary artist in the mode which he adopts for disclosing his apprehension of the development of historic movement. But after all, the book, as we have intimated, is for a class. It is for those who have read history before, and are tolerably familiar with the times and the men of whom Dr. Eggleston is writing. It is not for inexperienced readers. Once this is granted, one may take solid satisfaction in what is really a spacious historical sketch. It suggests almost a new variation of historical writing.
What a wide arc is subtended by this row of books we have been commenting on ! What a variety of intellectual operations from the collector of facts to the artist in world movements !