img A Hero and Some Other Folks  /  Chapter 8 No.8 | 66.67%
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Chapter 8 No.8

Word Count: 4554    |    Released on: 30/11/2017

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. We tend to underestimate the near, and exaggerate the remote. Another application of the same frailty is noticeable in literature. Homegrown literature is, with not a few, depreciated. According to their logic, good things can not come out of Nazareth, and imported products are the only viands worth a Sybarite palate. In mediaeval days the form assumed was different, while the principle remained the same. Then the question of value turned upo

If you were to look at the book-counters of each succeeding month, you would see how all the writing world has been writing for us. From such conditions of supply, our taste becomes cultivated. We feel ourselves connoisseurs. If we give a more ready readi

highest grade of work of any of our litterateurs-in saying which there is no disparagement of other literary workers, but simply a stated belief in the pre-eminent value of the historian in American letters. What I mean is this: During the fifty years last passed there were poets and novelists in England who, with all deference to our own writers, were equal or superior to the poets and novelists of America. Americ

ligious monographs touching the early days of occupancy of New France and Mexico; but these will readily be seen to be rather chronicles than histories. And the historian, native to the United States, is he in whose hands have been the histo

eous survey is taken. Look down on this plain of history as one does on Tuscany from an Alp. Thus, and thus only, can we value our possession. In this estimate, mention is made of the greater historians, not be

to be admired than in his predilection for his country as a theme for his historian's muse. To him pay tribute, because he is historian of the discovery of our brave Western Hemisphere. Irving has told the story of that great admiral of the ocean, Christopher Columbus. This memoir may not be exact. Irving may have idealized this pathfinder of the ocean; though if he has, he has observed the proprieties, literary and imaginative, as many successors have not. Some writers are seemingly bent on making every great soul commonplace, thinking that if they fail to belittle a distinguished benefactor of the race, if they have not played the Vandal with a swagger and conceit like Jack Falstaff, they have ignominiously failed; when the plain truth is, that if they succeeded in taking the glamour for those heroes of whom they write, they have hurt mankind so far, and have impoverished imagination and endeavor by their invidious task. We need not suppose Christopher Columbus and Washington saints, seeing there is no inclination to canonize them; but we need not hold their follies up to wake the guffaw of a crowd. Such

drowned honor

be the historiographers of their own world. This Nestor's lessons were heard and heeded. If you care to read Irving's various historical writings, the logic of these writings will appear. America was his home and love. He thought to write the story of how a brave man gave a world this huge room it knew not of. Loyalty made him historian. His researches gave him familiarity with Spanish archives. The movement of the era touched him; for Irving was susceptible to the finer moods of literature, as any who reads the "Sketch-book" knows; and once having set foot on Spanish histor

get, in any estimate of Irving's service, his biography of Washing

dge is retailed as in Prescott. In seeming looseness of phrase, I have used the term "new knowledge," but these words are happily descriptive of "Conquest of Mexico" and "Conquest of Peru," because the fields were practically untrodden to the ordinary reader. Everything is new, like a college to the freshman. We see a New World in more senses than one. The freshness of the facts is exhilarating. We march with Cortes; we conquer with Pizarro; we inspect Montezuma's palace; we become interested in the industrial system of the Incas, a system which should have given Henry George and Edward Bellamy a delight without alloy; we perceive the incredible valor and perseverance and endurance of Cortes; we front "new faces, other minds;" we discover the Amazon through perils and hardships so multitudinous and so severe as to tempt us to think these narrations a myth; we see rapacity insatiable as death, a bloody idol-worship pitiless and terrible; we read Prescott's history with growing avidity and increasing information; read Prescott, and become wiser c

ed his Government with distinction at the courts of Germany and England,-George Bancroft has written a history of the United States which will no more become archaic than Macaulay or Grote. While one may now and then hear from the lips of the so-called "younger school of American historians" a criticism of George Bancroft, their carping is ungracious and gratuitous. Theirs has not been the art to equal him, nor will be. A literary life devoted to the mastery of one era of a nation's history is a worthy si

ck, like a charging regiment. His pictures of John Quincy Adams, Calhoun, Clay, Webster, Sumner, Douglas, Lincoln, and a host beside, vitalize those men. We live wi

People," in which he subordinated the intrigues of courts and the selfish wars of potentates to the quiet growth of national spirit and the characteristics of domestic life, and the development and solidification of social instincts into social customs, and the framing of a literature, the reformation of religion, and the direction of the thought of the many. These constituted, as he believed, and as we believe, the genuine biography of a people; and McMaster has done for the United States what Green has done for England. His "History of the People of the United States" is so packed with knowledge; so accurate in laying hold of those things which we did not know, but wanted to know; so free in giving us the insi

mentioned those voluminous histories of the States and Territories of the Pacific Coast, written by H. H. Bancroft. They are treasure-houses of material for the future historian. Hubert Bancroft has become the historian of the Spanish dominion in the United States, and deserves favorable

an unpeopled wilderness to this day. Huntsmen and warriors they were; citizens and cultivators and civilizers they were not, and never would have been. Parkman tells the truth as history found them, and those truths are well worth our reading, because in their perusal we pass from sentimentality to reason, and see how this America of our day, rich, cultivated, civilized, and possessed of the largest amount of personal liberty ever vouchsafed to a citizen, is a noble exchange for the thoughtlessness, improvidence, and barbarity which were original holders of this realm. Speaking for myself, no author ever helped me to knowledge of the character of the aborigines of North America as Francis Parkman has done. I see that wild past, and feel it. And he has written the thrilling story of the French attempt to build an empire; and the attempt was courageous to the verge of wonder. There was in the Frenchman a careless ease and courage and sprightliness of temper, which lifted him above danger, as a boat is lifted on a billow's shoulders. Those perils were his drink; with a laugh and a jest he met his appointment with death as he would have met tryst with a woman. In "The Romance of American Geography," I have described the genius of the French voyager, for which I have an unbounded admiration, and in which I take an intemperate delight. He is the discoverer at his best, but the colonizer at h

han well to read. Many scholars have written comparatively brief memoirs of the United States. Localities and States and single villages have had their historians; but the commanding figures whose faces fill the canvas, so to say,-of them this appreciation is written, to point youth to

American history and future is known to all. From the Netherlands the Puritans set sail to found what proved to be a colony and Republic. The extent to which the Netherlands exercised an influence in shaping the future of the American Commonwealth has not been determined, and can not be, though Douglas Campbell has maintained that to the Dutch, and not to the English Puritan, nor yet to the Magna Charta, does the American Republic owe its

mson dyes. Motley's hero was William the Silent, Prince of Orange; and Macaulay's hero was William III, King of England, Prince of Orange. Motley will bear being ranked as a great historian. He hates Philip II, as I suppose good folks ought who despise egotism, intolerance, vindictiveness, and horrible cruelty. He lauds William the Silent as soldier and statesman, Prince Maurice as a soldier, and John of Barneveld as statesman. Motley marches across old battle-fields like a soldier clad in steel. He gives portraits of Queen Elizabeth, of Leicester, of Granvelle, of Prince Maurice, of John of Barneveld, of Henry of Navarre, of Philip II, of Count Egmont, of Charles V, of Don John of Austria, of Hugo Grotius, and of William the Silent,

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