Two Historians

THE new biographies of Prescott and Parkman, recently added to the American Men of Letters Series, bring fresh opportunities of comparison and contrast between these two historians.¹ In outward circumstances they had much in common. Below the surface the divergences were wide. Their personal backgrounds and educative influences had the similarities which Boston in the first half and in the second half of the nineteenth century, broadly speaking, could so well provide. The differences between them were temperamental, and radical. Each had the fortune to be free from the necessity of remunerative labor. Each, therefore, deserves the credit for having done so much of it. Prescott, besides enjoying the greater financial freedom, — “his purse did not lay an embargo on his scholar’s instinct,” says Mr. Ogden,— had for his chief physical handicap the disability of eyesight which resulted from a mere accident, a wanton-seeming caprice of fate. The disabling of Parkman’s vision was but one of many handicaps, the outgrowth of a general condition, intensified by his too vigorous dealings with life. “His body,” says Mr. Sedgwick, “was but a ragged fort in which the spirit was incessantly beleaguered;” and again, in reference to his purgatory of inaction during the civil war, “there is not a chapter in his books which does not show that the bent of his spirit was to fight by day in the forest, and bivouac by night under the stars; and yet while a million men were under arms he was not able to take any part, even the very least.” Where Parkman was restive and headlong, Prescott showed the acceptance and patience of a nature with less need of the curb. It was characteristic of Prescott that many of his earlier years were spent in deliberating upon the theme to which he should devote himself. From boyhood Parkman could not help knowing what he wished and meant to do, or doing it with a zeal which bent every energy and thought to the prosecution of a single purpose. Prescott, the “ well-bred gentleman of letters,” was conspicuously an historian of the old school, writing of what was virtually as remote from him as Greece or Rome. He was under no enforcement to visit the scenes with which he must deal, and make his studies at first hand. It was enough to collect the records as a scholar, and, as an accomplished writer, to give them forth in a form to delight the reader. Parkman stood among the pioneers of the new school. He shirked none of the obligations of old-fashioned scholarship, or of the more modern method requiring some personal contact with his themes. “A cartload of practical experience” was what he himself said he brought back from the Oregon Trail. This, too, was what he sought in all his travels, into the woods, amongst Indians, little changed since the time of Pontiac, and at the headquarters of the religion which the French brought with them to the New World. With such differences of method, as of temperament, it is inevitable that Parkman’s work, like the story of his life, makes the more vivid appeal to the generation of which his spirit is more characteristic than the spirit of Prescott.

From the very material with which Mr. Ogden had to deal — stimulating as it is — his opportunity to tell the absorbing story of a life was a little more restricted than Mr. Sedgwick’s. It is obvious that each of the two biographers has been somewhat hampered by the previous existence of a satisfactory treatment of his subject. Ticknor’s Life of Prescott and Mr. Farnham’s Parkman are reasonably familiar to readers of American biography. But would not the writer of one of these shorter Lives do better to assume that every reader will take up the book innocent of all knowledge of its substance ? Mr. Ogden seems, indeed, to have felt at times that his readers must be almost as familiar with Ticknor’s volume as he himself has had to become.

Yet he throws an interesting light on Ticknor’s point of view when he says that “to bring out vividly the playful and engagingly human aspects of Prescott’s character would doubtless have seemed to him like taking liberties with the Muse of History.” It is significant also to learn that Ticknor took liberties with the text of some of Prescott’s letters. “His severe pen struck out passages wherein the Yankee levity of his compatriot seemed too daring—especially when in the presence of royal personages.” It is the distinction of Mr. Ogden’s biography, therefore, that, where it is not a mere summary it is rather a supplement to Ticknor’s book than a substitute for it. The supplementary knowledge it conveys has happily to do with the “playful and engagingly human aspects of Prescott’s character,” — the aspects which made George Hillard tell him directly:“ those who have the privilege of being your friends entirely forget that you are a great historian, and only think of you as a person to be loved.” The justice of Mr. Ogden’s apprehension of Prescott’s endowments is only confirmed by the admirable passage comparing the historian’s critical ability, to Prescott’s disadvantage, with that of Carlyle and of Lowell. By reason of this clearness of vision, one is the more ready to accept the writer’s liberal appreciation of Prescott’s power and achievement. In a word, Mr. Ogden has accomplished with a high measure of success the task rendered anything but easy by some of the very conditions which seem at a first glance to remove its difficulties.

Because Mr. Farnham’s Life of Parkman took so unconventional a form, letting chronological sequence give way to what was in effect a series of essays on separate phases of the subject, Mr. Sedgwick had and seized an opportunity to make an individual book. The new material brought forward is not plentiful or important; but the arrangement of the old and new is orderly and effective. The years of preparation receive the greater emphasis which is their due. It is well that there is no hesitation in printing again such extracts from Parkman’s diaries as those which describe the delightful Sicilian guide Luigi. It may fairly be asked why the attention of the reader is not definitely drawn to the episode of Parkman’s residence in a Roman monastery during Holy Week as a portion of his deliberate training for a fair-minded treatment of the Catholic spirit. It may also be questioned whether Mr. Sedgwick does not at times go somewhat needlessly out of his way in the search for individual expression. The substance of what he has to say is here generally quite important enough to render this effort superfluous. But it is only occasional. The biography as a whole achieves its purpose in realizing Parkman’s heroic personality, and placing a just estimate upon his enriching contributions to history and literature, to history which is literature.

To the American historians of the nineteenth century the literature of the country owes many of its brightest and most characteristic pages. The value and importance of the work these historians have done are best understood when the manner of their doing it and the personal qualities which informed their labors are adequately appreciated. The peculiar service of books like these two new Lives is to place within the reach of all a comprehension of the terms on which heroic struggles were fought to a successful issue. In the annals of any country or any literature there are few lives in which this species of warfare is more memorably illustrated than in the lives of Prescott and Parkman.

M. A. DeW. H.