I. D. EXPOSITORY BIOGRAPHY

FRANCIS PARKMAN 1

HENRY CABOT LODGE

I DESIRE to give, if possible, the impression, for it can be no more than an impression, of a life which in its conflicts and victories manifested throughout heroic qualities. Such qualities can be shown in many ways, and the field of battle is only one of the fields of human endeavor where heroism can be displayed.

Francis Parkman was born in Boston on September 16, 1822. He came of a well-known family, and was of good Puritan stock. He was rather a delicate boy, with an extremely active mind and of a highly sensitive, nervous organization. Into everything that attracted him he threw himself with feverish energy. His first passion, when he was only about twelve years old, was for chemistry, and his eager boyish experiments in this direction were undoubtedly injurious to his health. The interest in chemistry was succeeded by a passion for the woods and the wilderness, and out of this came the longing to write the history of the men of the wilderness, and of the great struggle between France and England for the control of the North American continent. All through his college career this desire was with him, and while in secret he was reading widely to prepare himself for his task, he also spent a great deal of time in the forests and on the mountains. To quote his own words, he was "fond of hardships, and he was vain of enduring them, cherishing a sovereign scorn for every physical weakness or defect; but deceived, moreover,

From Hero Tales of American History. The Century Company, 1895. Reprinted by permission.

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by the rapid development of frame and sinew, which flattered him into the belief that discipline sufficiently unsparing would harden him into an athlete, he slighted the precautions of a more reasonable woodcraft, tired old foresters with long marches, stopped neither for heat nor for rain, and slept on the earth without blankets." The result was that his intense energy carried him beyond his strength, and while his muscles strengthened and hardened, his sensitive nervous organization began to give way. It was not merely because he led an active outdoor life. He himself protests against any such conclusion, and says that "if any pale student glued to his desk here seek an apology for a way of life whose natural fruit is that pallid and emasculate scholarship, of which New England has had too many examples, it will be far better that this sketch had not been written. For the student there is, in its season, no better place than the saddle, and no better companion than the rifle or the oar."

The evil that was done was due to Parkman's highly irritable organism, which spurred him to excess in everything he undertook. The first special sign of the mischief he was doing to himself and his health appeared in a weakness of sight. It was essential to his plan of historical work to study not only books and records but Indian life from the inside. Therefore, having graduated from college and the law-school, he felt that the time had come for this investigation, which would enable him to gather material for his history and at the same time to rest his eyes. He went to the Rocky Mountains, and after great hardships, living in the saddle, as he said, with weakness and pain, he joined a band of Ogallalla Indians. With them he remained despite his physical suffering, and from them he learned, as he could not have learned in any other way, what Indian life really was.

The immediate result of the journey was his first book, instinct with the freshness and wildness of the mountains and the prairies, and called by him The Oregon Trail. Unfortunately, the book was not the only outcome. The illness incurred during his journey from fatigue and exposure was followed by other

disorders. The light of the sun became unsupportable, and his nervous system was entirely deranged. His sight was now so impaired that he was almost blind, and could neither read nor write. It was a terrible prospect for a brilliant and ambitious man, but Parkman faced it unflinchingly. He devised a frame by which he could write with closed eyes, and books and manuscripts were read to him. In this way he began the history of The Conspiracy of Pontiac, and for the first half-year the rate of composition covered about six lines a day. His courage was rewarded by an improvement in his health, and a little more quiet in nerves and brain. In two and a half years he managed to complete the book.

He then entered upon his great subject of "France in the New World." The material was mostly in manuscript, and had to be examined, gathered, and selected in Europe and in Canada. He could not read, he could write only a very little and that with difficulty, and yet he pressed on. He slowly collected his material and digested and arranged it, using the eyes of others to do that which he could not do himself, and always on the verge of a complete breakdown of mind and body. In 1851 he had an effusion of water on the left knee, which stopped his outdoor exercise, on which he had always largely depended. All the irritability of the system then centred in the head, resulting in intense pain and in a restless and devouring activity of thought. He himself says: "The whirl, the confusion, and strange undefined tortures attending this condition are only to be conceived by one who has felt them." The resources of surgery and medicine were exhausted in vain. The trouble in the head and eyes constantly recurred. In 1858 there came a period when for four years he was incapable of the slightest mental application, and the attacks varied in duration from four hours to as many months. When the pressure was lightened a little, he went back to his work. When work was impossible, he turned to horticulture, grew roses, and wrote a book about the cultivation of those flowers which is a standard authority.

As he grew older the attacks moderated, although they never

departed. Sleeplessness pursued him always, the slightest excitement would deprive him of the power of exertion, his sight was always sensitive, and at times he was bordering on blindness. In this hard-pressed way he fought the battle of life. He says himself that his books took four times as long to prepare and write as if he had been strong and able to use his faculties. That this should have been the case is little wonder, for those books came into being with failing sight and shattered nerves, with sleeplessness and pain, and the menace of insanity ever hanging over the brave man who, nevertheless, carried them through to an end.

Yet the result of those fifty years, even in amount, is a noble one, and would have been a great achievement for a man who had never known a sick day. In quality, and subject, and method of narration, they leave little to be desired. There, in Parkman's volumes, is told vividly, strongly, and truthfully, the history of the great struggle between France and England for the mastery of the North American continent, one of the most important events of modern times. This is not the place to give any critical estimate of Mr. Parkman's work. It is enough to say that it stands in the front rank. It is a great contribution to history, and a still greater gift to the literature of this country. All Americans certainly should read the volumes in which Parkman has told that wonderful story of hardship and adventure, of fighting and of statesmanship, which gave this great continent to the English race and the English speech. But better than the literature or the history is the heroic spirit of the man, which triumphed over pain and all other physical obstacles, and brought a work of such value to his country and his time into existence. There is a great lesson as well as a lofty example in such a career, and in the service which such a man rendered by his life and work to literature and to his country. On the tomb of the conqueror of Quebec it is written: "Here lies Wolfe victorious." The same epitaph might with entire justice be carved above the grave of Wolfe's historian.

GOLDWIN SMITH 1

JAMES BRYCE

THE earliest picture in literature of a man of wide knowledge and wise thought who has with unquenched powers lived down into a generation not his own is that of Nestor as he is presented to us in the Homeric poems. Nestor had known the grandfathers and fathers of the chieftains of his later years, so all his juniors honored him, and listened respectfully to his long discourses. But when in the vast and constantly changing society of these modern days of ours a sage or a prophet outlives all his contemporaries, there is a certain risk that he may be misunderstood and possibly even disparaged by the generation which did not know him till his prime had passed, and which has forgotten the men and the conditions that formed his character and doctrines. It seems therefore almost a duty laid upon those who, though much his juniors, remember Goldwin Smith in his earlier days, when he was a power in the political and literary world of England, to put on paper their impressions of him as he was then, and try to present a view of him which may prevent misconceptions either of his personal quality or of the ideas which he held with unwavering conviction and strove during more than half a century to propagate. He left a short Autobiography; and parts of his correspondence have been published, but it sometimes happens that neither the letters which a man writes nor what he tells of himself conveys an adequate picture of him as he was in his best years. A brilliant talker, moreover, with a vein of sarcastic humor, says many things which he does not mean to be taken literally, and which, when read in cold print, may easily be misunderstood. So it may be worth while to give some personal impressions formed in a friendship which extended over more than forty-five years.

A distinguished man once described him as the last of the

1 From the North American Review, 1914. Copyright, 1914, by the North American Review Publishing Company. Reprinted by permission.