The French in the Heart of America Part 24

When Parkman was leaving America for Paris in 1868, "for medical advice and research," uncertain as to whether he would ever return to take up his unfinished story of the American forest, he left in the hands of a friend a parcel, "not to be opened during his life." It is that parcel, not opened until twenty-five years later--for Parkman lived to return to America and to return again to Paris more than once, and then to go back and finish, after a full half-century of struggle with physical maladies and infirmities, the last book of the plan virtually sketched fifty years before, and with a singular felicity of coincidence named "The Half- Century of Conflict"--it is that parcel which has kept for later generations his remarkable autobiography.

While on his visits in Paris he was known in a wide circle. As he himself said in writing to his sisters, "if able to accept invitations," he "would have had the run of Faubourg St. Germain." I doubt, however, if his personality is remembered by many, much less that strangely tortured life which probably gave little mark of its suffering even to those who knew him best in France.

I therefore recall some of the detail of the years preceding those days when he appeared in the streets of Paris seeking health, but seeing often Margry, the "intractable yet kindly keeper" of an important department of French archives, who had in his secretive keeping doc.u.ments most precious to the uses of Parkman.

It is not altogether an agreeable chronicle, this autobiography.

[Footnote: Printed in "Proceedings Ma.s.sachusetts Historical Society, 1892- 4," series 2, 8:349-360.] It is rather like a "pathological record," and as totally unlike the pages of his books as can be well imagined. But it is an essential doc.u.ment.

The first pages of this biography were withheld by him and so removed from the parcel; the record begins with a general characterization of his childhood. There is no detail. But there are to be found elsewhere the memories of others which tell of his boyish enjoyment of the little wilderness of joyous colors near the school to which he was sent-microcosm of the greater wilderness in which his body and then his imagination were to wander through all his mature days till his death. His own chronicle has forgotten or ignored those elysian days and has not in all its length a joyful note or a bright color.

This is the summary: His childhood was neither healthful nor buoyant....

Chemical experiment was his favorite hobby, involving a lonely, confined, unwholesome sort of life, baneful to body and mind.... The age of fifteen or sixteen produced a revolution; retorts and crucibles were forever discarded.... He became enamoured of the woods, a fancy which soon gained full control over the course of his literary pursuits.... He resolved to confine his homage to the muse of history.... At the age of eighteen (born in 1823) the plan (to whose execution he gave his long life) was, in its most essential features, formed. His idea was clear before him, yet attended with unpleasant doubts as to his ability to realize it to his own satisfaction.... The task, as he then reckoned it, would require about twenty years. The time allowed was ample; but here he fell into a fatal error, entering upon this long pilgrimage with all the vehemence of one starting on a mile heat. His reliance, however, was less on books than on such personal experience as should intimately identify him with his theme.

Let me here say that I have found traces of his steps at nearly every site that I have visited. He had been at Fort St. Louis, at the most important portages, and at the places where the French forts once stood. His natural inclinations urged him in the same direction, his thoughts were constantly in the forest, whose features, not unmixed with softer images, possessed his waking and sleeping dreams; he was as fond of hardships as he was vain of enduring them, cherishing a sovereign scorn for every physical weakness or defect. Moreover, deceived by a rapid development of frame and sinews which flattered him with the belief that discipline sufficiently unsparing would harden him into an athlete, he slighted precautions of a more reasonable woodcraft, tired old foresters with long marches, stopped neither for heat nor rain, and slept on the earth without a blanket.... He spent his summer vacations in the woods or in Canada, at the same time reading such books as he thought suited to help him toward his object....

While in the law school he entered in earnest on two other courses, one of general history, the other of Indian history and ethnology, studying diligently at the same time the models of English style.... There developed in him a state of mental tension, habitual for several years, and abundantly mischievous in its effects. With a mind overstrained and a body overtaxed, he was burning his candle at both ends.... A highly irritable organism spurred the writer to excess.... Labor became a pa.s.sion, and rest intolerable yet with a keen appet.i.te for social enjoyments.... His condition became that of a rider whose horse runs headlong with the bit between his teeth, or of a locomotive, built of indifferent material, under a head of steam too great for its strength, hissing at a score of crevices, yet rushing on with accelerating speed to the inevitable smash.... Soon appeared, as a sign of mischief, weakness of sight. Accordingly he went to the Rocky Mountains to rest his failing vision and to get an inside view of Indian life.... Reeling in the saddle, he set forth, attended by a Canadian hunter.... Joining the Ogallala Indians, he followed their wanderings for several weeks. To have worn the air of an invalid would have been an indiscretion, as he says, since "a horse, a rifle, a pair of pistols, and a red shirt might have offered temptations too strong for aboriginal virtue." So he hunted when he could scarcely sit upright.... To the maladies of the prairies other disorders succeeded on his return.... Flat stagnation followed, reaching its depth in eighteen months.... The desire to return to the prairie was intense, but exposure to the sunlight would have destroyed his sight.... When his condition was at its worst, he resolved to attempt the composition of the "History of the Conspiracy of Pontiac," for which he had been collecting material since his days in college. Suffering from extreme weakness of sight, a condition of the brain prohibiting fixed attention, and a nervous derangement, he yet set out upon this labor, using a wooden frame strung with parallel wires to guide his crayon. Books and doc.u.ments were read to him, but never, without injury, for more than a half-hour at a time, and frequently not at all for days. For the first half-year he averaged six lines of composition a day. And he wrote, I suppose, at least ten hundred thousand lines. His health improving, he dictated, pacing a dark garret.

He then entered upon "France in the New World." The difficulties were incalculable.... Wholly unable to use his eyes, he had before him the task of tracing out, collecting, indexing, arranging, and digesting a great ma.s.s of incongruous material, scattered on both sides of the Atlantic. He was unable to employ trained a.s.sistants and had to rely mainly on his own research, though, in some cases, receiving valuable aid of scholars and others. He used to employ as reader of French a public-school girl wholly ignorant of French (who, I suppose, gave English p.r.o.nunciation to all the words), but with such help and that of members of his own family the work went on. Then came another disaster--an effusion of water on the knee which involved a close confinement for two years; and this in turn resulted in serious nervous disturbance centring in the head. These extreme conditions of disorder continued for many years.... His work was wholly interrupted for one year, four years, and numerous short intervals.... Later the condition of sight so far improved as to permit reading, not exceeding, on an average, five minutes at one time. By judicious use this modic.u.m of power was extended. By reading for one minute and then resting for an equal time the alternate process could be continued for about half an hour, then, after a sufficient interval, repeated three or four times a day. Working under such conditions he makes this report, 1868, of progress: "Most of the material is collected or within reach; another volume, on the Jesuits of North America, is one- third written; another, on the French explorers of the Great West, is half written; while a third, devoted to the checkered career of Comte de Frontenac, is partially arranged for composition." During this period he had made many journeys in the United States and Canada for material, and had been four times in Europe.... He wonders as to the advantage of this tortoise pace, but says in conclusion that, "irksome as may be the requirements of conditions so anomalous, they are far less oppressive than the necessity they involve of being busied with the Past when the Present has claims so urgent, and of holding the pen with the hand that should have grasped the sword" (for he was greatly disappointed that he could not enter the army at the time of the Civil War).

I have made this rather extensive summary of the singular autobiography-- and largely in the author's own words--not to prepare your minds for lenient judgments of his work, but to inform them of the tenacious purpose of the man whose infirmities of the knees kept him most of his life from the wild forest trails and streams and compelled him to a wheel-chair in gardens of tame roses; whose weakness of the eyes allowed him but inadequate vision of the splendor of the woods and even robbed him of the intimacy of books; whose malady of mind kept him ever in terror of devils more fierce than the inhuman tortures of Jogues and Brebeuf--a tenacious purpose that wrought its youth-selected, self-appointed work, and so well, so splendidly, so thoroughly that it needs never to be done again.

One of his friends, in a memoir of Parkman, recalls an observation of Sainte-Beuve, in his paper on Taine's "English Literature," that has found its best ill.u.s.tration in what Parkman accomplished in spite of lameness, blindness, and mental distress: "All things considered, every allowance being made for general or particular elements and for circ.u.mstances, there still remain place and s.p.a.ce enough around men of talent, wherein they can move and turn themselves with entire freedom. And, moreover, were the circle drawn round each a very contracted one, every man of talent, every genius, in so far as he is in some degree a magician and an enchanter, possesses a secret entirely his own, whereby to perform prodigies within this circle and work wonders there." [Footnote: "Nouveaux Lundis," vol.

VIII, English translation in "English Portraits," p. 243.]

This autobiography has shown how short was the radius of the circle. The twelve volumes of his work attest, under Sainte-Beuve's definition, the degree of his powers of magic and enchantment. Men of strong knees, of good eyes, and of brains that do not keep them from sleep by night or from work by day, have travelled over this same field, but of most that they gathered it may be said: "To no such aureate earth 'tis turned as, buried once, men want dug up again."

I have sat for days in the Harvard University Library among the books bequeathed to it by Parkman (being the greater part of the library which surrounded him in his work--books of history, of travel, and of biography; books about Indians, flints, and folk-lore; maps and guides-among them several guides to Paris--only twenty-five hundred volumes in all); but they are not the material of his magic. His work was not legerdemain, skilful manipulation, but recreation, and he found the aureate earth in the forests, on the prairies, and in doc.u.ments contemporary to his theme.

In a cabinet (bearing in its carving suggestions of the fleur-de-lis) in the rooms of the Ma.s.sachusetts Historical Society, I found some of this precious material, also bequeathed by the historian. Its nature is suggested in the preface to his "Montcalm and Wolfe." "A very large amount," he says, "of unpublished material has been used in its preparation, consisting for the most part of doc.u.ments copied from the archives and libraries of France and England. The papers copied for the present work ["Montcalm and Wolfe"] in France alone, exceed six thousand folio pages of ma.n.u.script, additional and supplementary to the 'Paris Doc.u.ments' procured for the State of New York.... The copies made in England form ten volumes, besides many English doc.u.ments consulted in the original ma.n.u.script. Great numbers of autograph letters, diaries, and other writings of persons engaged in the war have also been examined on this [_i.e._, American] side of the Atlantic."

But even these were as the dry bones in the valley which Ezekiel saw, till he touched these scattered fragments with his genius.

The process employed by the blind workman is described by Frothingham, one of his friends: "The ma.n.u.scripts were read over to him, slowly, one by one. First the chief points were considered, then the details of the story were gone over carefully and minutely. As the reading went on, he made notes, first of essential and then of non-essential. After this he welded everything together, made the narrative completely his own, infused into it his own fire, quickened it by his own imagination, and made it as it were a living experience, so that his books read like personal reminiscences." [Footnote: "Memoirs of Francis Parkman," in "Proceedings Ma.s.sachusetts Historical Society, 1892-4," series 2, 8:555.]

In a book of Parkman memorabilia of various kinds which I found in the Harvard Library, I happened one day upon a few sc.r.a.ps of paper which furnish ill.u.s.tration of the first steps of the process--paper on which were notes made in Parkman's own hand:

"Deserts covered with bones of buffalo and elk"; "No sign of man from Fort Union to Fort Mackenzie"; "White clay, cactus dried up, gra.s.shoppers"; "Poplars,--wild roses,--gooseberries"; "prairie dogs,--heat,--aridity"; "extraordinary castellated mountains, stone walls,--etc. above Fort Union"; "in 1832 Blackfeet are said to have killed 58 whites, three years before, 80"; "Blackfeet do not eat dogs--Blackfeet Societies--beaver traps lent to Blackfeet"; "wood near Fort Clark chiefly poplar"; "fossils-- terres mauvaises"; "maize cultivated by Mandans"; "catching the war eagle"; "Mandans etc. agricultural tribes"; "wolf-pits described"; "Exceptional cold Ft. Clark"; "Wolf attacked three women;--wooden carts no iron"; "Barren Mts. little dells with water,--gooseberries, strawberries, currants, very few trees, mad river."

But these and many other notes on sc.r.a.ps of blue paper in his hand have significance only in their translation, transfusion into the color or detail of some of his wonderful pictures. Somewhere in his books I felt certain, when reading these notes, I should find those poplars growing on the plains with wild roses and gooseberry bushes not far away; some day I should come to the barren mountains and the dells with water, or should hear the roaring of the mad river and witness the catching of the war- eagle. Indeed, some of these very notes had entered, as I found, into the description of that lonely journey of the brothers Verendrye as they pa.s.sed through the bad lands (terres mauvaises of the notes), where the clay is sometimes white as chalk and the barren, castellated bluffs, "carved into fantastic shapes by the storms," stand about.

"For twenty days the travellers saw no human being [see note above], so scanty was the population of these plains. Game, however, was abundant.

Deer sprang from the tall reed gra.s.s of the river bottoms; buffalo tramped by in ponderous columns, or dotted the swells of the distant prairie with their grazing thousands; antelope approached, with the curiosity of their species, to gaze at the pa.s.sing hors.e.m.e.n, then fled like the wind; and as they neared the broken uplands towards the Yellowstone, they saw troops of elk (later their bones) and flocks of mountain-sheep. Sometimes, for miles together, the dry plain was studded thick with the earthen mounds that marked the burrows of the curious marmots, called prairie dogs from their squeaking bark. Wolves, white and gray, howled about the camp at night, and their cousin, the coyote, seated in the dusk of evening upright on the gra.s.s, with nose turned to the sky, saluted them with a complication of yelpings, as if a score of petulant voices were pouring together from the throat of one small beast." [Footnote: Parkman, "Half-Century of Conflict," 2 23, 24.]

It is impossible to know how much of this came from his own actual seeing (for in his journey over the Oregon trail he had pa.s.sed near the trail of the Verendrye brothers) and how much came from those sc.r.a.ps of color and incident picked up in his blindness from varied sources; nor is it of consequence, except as it connotes something of the quality and character of his genius, for it is all accurate and the brave brothers Verendrye move as living men across it. He was able to revivify a dusty doc.u.ment as well as a personal experience. "To him," as Mr. Barrett Wendell said out of an intimate acquaintance with him and his work, "a doc.u.ment of whatever kind,--a state paper, a Jesuit 'relation,' the diary of a provincial soldier, the record of a Yankee church,--was merely the symbol of a fact which had once been as real as his own hardships among the western Indians, or as the lifetime of physical suffering, which never bent his will." [Footnote: "Proceedings American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1893-4," 29:439.] I have never read "The Oregon Trail" with the same keen enthusiasm as his other books, largely, I think, because it is a mere report of personal adventure and not a composition fused of his imagination. It is an excellent photograph by the side of a master's painting.

But all this accuracy of detail, this revivifying of dead Indians, knights, voyageurs and soldiers, this painting of prairie, forest, and mountain, was not in itself to put him among the world's great historians.

And, indeed, there are those who, appreciating the artist's skill, have expressed regret that he gave this skill to no great theme. It is as if he were (they would doubtless say) writing of the labors of sacrificing missionaries in Africa, or of colonial administration in Indo-China, or of forest adventure along the Amazon. In the Boston Public Library I found that every work of his had duplicate copies in the boys' department. (And how great the reading is to this day is intimated by my inability one evening to get a copy of "Pontiac's War," though there were several copies in the possession of the library. A reserve had finally to be called in.) But I should say that this double cla.s.sification intimated rather the genuine human interest of his story, appealing alike to men and to boys (as the greatest of human writings do)--a work "for all mankind and for all time."

But I should go beyond this. His books are not merely of elemental entertainment. He has seized the most fundamental, far-reaching, and consequential of themes. He found going on in his forest, of which he set out to write, not merely flame-lighted scalpings and official rapacities and picturesque maraudings and quixotic pageants and the like. His theme was even greater than the mere gathering of all these raids and rapacities and maraudings and pageants into an informed racial, national struggle for the possession of a continent. It was nothing less than the grappling, out on the frontier of the world, between two principles of organized human life. The forests are so demanding, the incidents so stirring in themselves, that many have doubtless missed the high theme that expressed itself there. But that theme possessed its author, and it possesses every sensitive reader as some fateful, recurring, tragic melody in an opera full of diverting incident and picturesque figures.

Parkman is more likely to keep his generalizations within the overture, but frequently one gives summary to an act or scene, so that even he who comes for entertainment can hardly miss the significance of it all; though, as Mr. Wendell has said, to borrow again from his, the best, brief tribute: "Parkman was very sparing of generalization, of philosophic comment," whether from overconsciousness or from the intrusion of his malady which forbade long-continued thought. He made the course of events carry its own philosophy.

Several n.o.ble and notable generalizations have, however, already thrust themselves into these chapters to ill.u.s.trate his appreciation of the loftiness of his theme, his candor, and his genuine sympathy with those to whose ill-fated heroism he gave such "precious testimony."

One has only to a.s.sociate with the persistent, clearly outlined purpose of a half-century a realization of the completeness of its achievement to be stirred, as by the victory not of a fortuitously reckless a.s.sault but of a long, carefully planned campaign.

Among his papers (in the fleur-de-lis cabinet of which I have spoken) there are the first prophecies: two maps of the Lake George (Champlain) region drawn by him on the inside of a red portfolio cover, marked 1842, when he was nineteen years old; and next an odd-covered blank book in which he began his note-making on the "Old French War," with such notes as these: "Rights of the two nations"; "When did Marquette make his discoveries?" "When did La Salle settle?" "Had not the French a right both of prior discovery and prior settlement?" "The English never settled"; "The letters patent to Louisiana are preposterous, perhaps, but not more so than the English claim from coasts back of the Mississippi"; "The first blood was spilt by Washington. Jumonville would seem to have been sent with peaceful intentions. His orders charged him to attack the French."

The t.i.tle is written in a strong hand, but before he has half filled the little book he makes entry that the "French War" is laid aside, for the time, for the history of "Pontiac's War," and thus the latter part of this thin note-book grew into "The Conspiracy of Pontiac," and that in turn became sequel to the whole series of which it also was the promise, a series of books so closely related that John Fiske speaks of them as "one book."

The scope, to be sure, is a restricted one. He has two great wildernesses to cover, but it is a century and a half after the epic narrative begins before enough people enter to prevent one from keeping track of all of them. It is as if he were writing the history of man, from the last day of creation forward, starting with a few transmigrant souls still under the control of their oversea existence. He begins at the beginning, with not even a twilight zone of tradition and with a stage "far more primitive than that which is depicted in the Odyssey or even Genesis." Cartier's route is as well known as that of the steamship that sailed yesterday through the "Square Gulf," if the ice permitted, and the incidents of his first days beyond the gates of the first wilderness have been as accurately recorded, to say the least, as are yesterday's events yonder in the morning's papers here. And when his story ends, there are not as many people in the two great valleys along the St. Lawrence and the Mississippi as in a good-sized city to-day. But none the less, as I have said, are the forces (fighting in and through these few representatives of civilization) age-old and world-important. Never has historian had such fascinating theme--such "epic theme," says Fiske--"save when Herodotus told the story of Greece and Persia, or when Gibbon's pages resounded with the marshalled hosts through a thousand years of change." And Parkman met one of what Lowell calls "the convincing tests of genius" in the choice of this subject.

When John Fiske said at the Harvard exercises in memory of Parkman that he was one of the world's greatest historians, I subtracted something because of the occasion and the nearness of view. But a year later he is saying of Parkman's work, in a critical review: "Strong in its individuality and like to nothing besides, it clearly belongs, I think, among the world's few masterpieces of the highest rank, along with the works of Herodotus, Thucydides, and Gibbon." [Footnote: _Atlantic Monthly_, 73:674; "A Century of Science and Other Essays," p. 264.]

There will never be such a story to write again, for the frontier of forest and prairie has disappeared. It is now in the midst of cities where civilizations grapple in their smoke and turmoil. So shall we hold even more precious his gift and thank Heaven for "sending us such a scholar, such an artist, such a genius before it was too late to catch the fleeting light and fix it upon immortal canvas."

Among the writings of Francis Parkman there are a few pages--known not even to a score of his readers, I suppose--which might very well be printed in summary of his great work--though they find no place in any volume--for the symbol they carry of his achievement. These few pages make a leaflet--a reprint of a paper contributed to the _Botanical Bulletin_ in 1878 by "Francis Parkman, late Professor of Horticulture at the Bussey Inst.i.tution," and ent.i.tled "The Hybridization of Lilies." In this brief paper is related the story of Parkman's own attempts, extending through seven years, to combine certain well-established varieties of lilies, and especially two superb lilies--the "Speciosum" (_Lancifolium_) and the "Auratum,"--the pollen of the latter being carried to the deanthered flowers of the former. The patient, anxious, exquisite care with which he carried on these experiments suggests the infinite pains with which he gathered and cla.s.sified and sifted and weighed his historical material (his material of "France Speciosum" and of "France Auratum"). The result of his floral experiment, the wonderfully beautiful flower which he produced, described in a London horticultural magazine as the "grandest flowering plant yet introduced into our gardens," and known as the "Lilium Parkmanni," is suggestive of his achievement in so depicting and defining that civilization which is symbolized by the lily, the fleur-de-lis, in its strange, wild, highly colored flowering on the prairies and by the rivers of Nouvelle France, as to make it for all time identified with his memory and name. He lived among roses of his own growing, through his later invalid years, in the outskirts of Boston. He even wrote a book about roses. But his peculiar triumph (the one flower that lingers in gardens carrying a memory of him) is a "magnificent" lily. And though he lived amid the heritages of the English, in the new continent, with fair mind and most acute and industrious, he has preserved the hybrid heritages of the French spirit in the American regions--heritages that, save for his research lighted by imagination, might never have blossomed in the pages of history.