While human nature for Gibbon is anything but unintelligible, it tempts him precisely because it is only partly explicable. His explanations of rise and fall, of prosperity and decline, are lists and alternatives. What he recounts is “the triumph of barbarism and religion.” His balanced style was well designed for ambiguity and equivocation. An appealing example is his description of the younger Emperor Gordian (192–238):
His manners were less pure, but his character was equally amiable with that of his father. Twenty-two acknowledged concubines, and a library of sixty-two thousand volumes, attested the variety of his inclinations; and from the productions which he left behind him, it appears that both the one and the other were designed for use rather than for ostentation.
His footnote adds, “By each of his concubines the younger Gordian left three or four children. His literary productions, though less numerous, were by no means contemptible.” The quirks and quibbles of theologians, the rivalries, crimes, and monstrosities of Eastern monarchs, their wives and mistresses and sons and daughters, are both “amusing and instructive.” Can anything be trivia that can illuminate this, “the greatest, perhaps, and the most awful scene in the history of mankind”?
The landscape becomes the setting for parables of human nature. When earthquakes shook the eastern Mediterranean on July 21, 365, “their affrighted imagination enlarged the real extent of a momentary evil … and their fearful vanity was disposed to confront the symptoms of a declining empire and a sinking world.” Which they explained as the retribution of a just Deity. “Without presuming to discuss the truth or propriety of these lofty speculations, the historian may content himself with the observation, which seems to be justified by experience, that man has much more to fear from the passions of his fellow-creatures than from the convulsions of the elements.”
Human habits, utterances, exclamations, and emotions are not mere raw materials for distilling “forces” and “movements” but the very essence of history. The more vividly we see, the better we know our subject. Inevitably, then, we must doubt our capacity to grasp the whole story. Advancing into his final three volumes, Gibbon ceases to speak only for himself, and enlists us as “we.” Classic sagas had been grand and impersonal, but Gibbon makes his intimate, precisely because he does not speak the obsolescing parables of science or social science. Nor is he confined by the etiquette of chronology. Although his story extends from the Age of the Antonines (A.D. c.98) to the fall of Constantinople in 1453, he gives more space to the first few centuries than to the whole last millennium. “My Roman decay,” he calls it. Somehow he is entranced by the melodramatic and melancholy scenes of decay. These had first inspired his work, attracted him to the decline and fall of the Western Roman Empire and to its equal, the declining Empire of the East. It is not surprising that he is not attracted by the thriving Western civilization that would rise out of the ruins of Rome. His pleasures of melancholy are the very sentiments that produced Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” and that nourished the Romantic movement. These still make his history of a great empire intimate, as we join him in sighing for the departed grandeur. Just as Piranesi (1720–1778) was transforming the classic into the romantic by what he made of the Roman ruins, so Gibbon was working a comparable magic with his saga of a disintegrated empire.
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New-World Epics
GIBBON created his sagas of ancient empire from familiar material. He had the writings of the Antonines themselves, of Procopius, Tacitus, and the Church Fathers. But Prescott and Parkman, historians of empires falling and rising in the New World, were traveling there in unfamiliar territory. They had to create their dramas from the rawest of raw material. They had to discover the landscape, conceive new heroes, and mark their own paths through time. The story of how they made their histories was itself a kind of epic.
The easy life of Edward Gibbon, troubled only by obedience to his father and the eclipse of Lord North, was not the lot of these historians of rising empires in America. William Hickling Prescott (1796–1859) and Francis Parkman (1823–1893) each showed a single-minded courage with few precedents in the annals of literature. While it was the familiar spectacle of decay and decline that inspired Gibbon’s view of Empire, Parkman and Prescott were captured by the unchronicled drama of a New World.
William Hickling Prescott was the son of a wealthy Boston judge from a historic New England family. On the walls of his library at 55 Beacon Street he displayed the crossed swords of his grandfather William Prescott, who was in command at Bunker Hill, and his wife’s grandfather, who captained the British sloop that cannonaded Boston during the battle. He was sent of course to Harvard, where he had an undistinguished record. One day in his junior year when students in the Commons were bombarding one another with scraps of food, he turned as his name was called out and a crust of bread hit him in his open left eye. He never saw with the eye again, and within two years an inflammation impaired the vision of his right eye. For long periods he could not read at all, at other times he could read for only a few minutes, and never more than an hour or two a day.
Prescott was intended to take up his “natural inheritance” and follow the law. But five months as a law clerk in his father’s office squinting his one good eye at antique reports and documents in Gothic type were enough to convince him that he must find some other vocation. Meanwhile the strain of these months and his recurrent attacks of rheumatism persuaded his family to send him to recuperate in his grandfather’s house in the Azores. From there he traveled around Europe, not for historical inspiration but to find a cure for his several ailments. Returning to Boston, he was persuaded that he would have to live with his infirmities and find a career to go with them. Friends believed that his affable outgoing personality would qualify him for business, in which his family had been successful. Or he could have afforded to remain a gentleman of leisure, but somehow he was determined, whatever the difficulties, to pursue a career in letters.
He had already begun finding ways to deal with his impaired vision. His family income helped him do his reading, as he “resolved to make the ear, if possible, do the work of the eye.” At first his wife, whom he married in 1820, read to him. Then Prescott relied on a hired secretary, whose crude pronunciation of Spanish, French, or Italian he still managed to understand. “As the reader proceeded,” he explained, “I dictated copious notes; and when these had swelled to a considerable amount they were read to me repeatedly, till I had mastered their contents sufficiently for the purpose of composition. The same notes furnished an easy means of reference to sustain the text.” He liked to have at least a glimpse of the books himself. The difficulties of reading Gothic type may have led him away from a German subject.
Finding the labor of writing a severe trial to his eye, in London he had bought his first noctograph. This device for the blind was a framework of parallel wires that folded down on a sheet of carbon paper. Using the wires to guide his fingers, he wrote with an ivory stylus, which left an impression below. So he did not need to know when the ink in his pen was exhausted, and he avoided running the lines into one another. “The characters thus formed made a near approach to hieroglyphics; but my secretary became expert in the art of deciphering, and a fair copy—with a liberal allowance for unavoidable blunders—was transcribed for the use of the printer.” Still, he warned his readers not to give him “undeserved credit” for having surmounted the incalculable obstacles that lie in the path of the blind man.
His friend George Ticknor (1791–1871) had also abandoned the practice of law for a career in letters. At twenty-six, the brilliant Ticknor, as professor of French, Spanish, and belles lettres, was trying to broaden the antique Harvard curriculum, and was writing his landmark History of Spanish Literature. American interest in Spain had been awakened by the works of Washington Irving, who had been a diplomatic attaché in Madrid, and whose romanticized Christopher Columbus (1828) was vastly popular. The Peninsular War (1808–14) and the exploits of Bolivar in the Latin Ameri
can wars for independence had kept Spain in the news. Spanish scholars had been editing their archives, but no epic history had been written from them.
Prescott’s fellow Bostonians, to whom he was only a half-blind gentleman of leisure, were astonished in 1837 at the publication of his three-volume History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella the Catholic. Though he had spent ten years at work in his darkened study, he had to be persuaded to send his manuscript to the publisher. His father insisted that “the man who writes a book which he is afraid to publish is a coward.” The first printing sold out in five weeks, and the work was acclaimed on both sides of the Atlantic. Prescott then decided to turn to the American scene for his saga of the Spanish conquest. When he heard that Irving was already at work on the conquest of Mexico, Prescott offered to abandon the subject. But Irving generously deferred to the newcomer.
For his writing on the Spanish conquest Prescott had all the help that his patrician position and his wealth could provide. To supplement his personal library of five thousand volumes he enlisted a Harvard classmate, then minister to Spain, to secure copies of manuscripts and to find learned assistants in the archives. The copied manuscripts arrived in Boston by the thousands. To fix them in his mind Prescott had some read to him a dozen times. For a friend of his youth, Fanny Erskine, who had married the Spanish minister to Mexico, Prescott bought a daguerreotype camera. And from Mexico she sent pictures and descriptions of the historic scenes.
Three years of labor produced the three volumes of his Conquest of Mexico in 1843. Without stopping to take breath, he turned to the companion History of the Conquest of Peru, which appeared in three volumes in 1847.
Prescott’s polished histories were a product of his miraculous memory. During his morning horseback rides to Jamaica Plain he would compose in his mind whole chapters at a time. “My way has been lately to go over a large mass in my mind—over and over—till ready to throw it on paper—then an effort rather of memory than of creation.”
Despite his prodigious industry Prescott considered himself indolent. To keep his writing on schedule he made playful bets with himself or his secretary. On one occasion he promised his favorite reader-secretary, James English, the sum of one thousand dollars if he did not finish his next stint of pages on time. “39 pages in 15 days,” he boasted in Boston as he was writing about Cortése advance in Mexico, “not bad for the giddy town where I have been spinning about in dances and dinners, plus quam suf.”
Though Prescott has been called the nation’s first “scientific historian” for his use of manuscript sources, he would live on as a creator of literature. “The Conquest of Mexico” Prescott called “the greatest miracle in an age of miracles.… It is, without doubt, the most poetic subject ever offered to the pen of the historian.”
The natural development of the story … is precisely what would be prescribed by the severest rules of art. The conquest of the country is the great end always in view of the reader. From the first landing of the Spaniards on the soil, their subsequent adventures, their battles and negotiations, their ruinous retreat, their rally and final siege, all tend to this grand result till the long series of events is closed by the downfall of the capital.… It is a magnificent epic, in which the unity of interest is complete.
And one of his greatest feats as a “scientific” historian, was to depict the scenes of his drama so vividly without ever having been there—for he never visited Spain, Mexico, or Peru.
The enduring interest in Prescott’s Conquest of Mexico comes less from his engaging survey of Aztec civilization than from his genius for the epic. Hernando Cortés, “his enlightened spirit and his comprehensive and versatile genius,” dominates the book in a bitter-end contest with his noble antagonist the “barbarian” emperor Montezuma. The better we know the wealth and weaknesses of the Aztec emperor the more poignant is his downfall. The grandeur and elegance of the Aztec monuments offer ironic contrast to the horrors of cannibal savagery. Prescott awes us by this unlikely combination of “refinement” with “the extreme of barbarism.” The saga of the “knight-errant” Cortés follows his triumphal march to Mexico City, his residence there, receiving the allegiance and treasure of Montezuma, his expulsion by the fury of the Mexicans, his retreat, his triumphal return and siege, overcoming famine and conspiracy in his own camp, and achieving the final surrender of Mexico. Cortés’s heroic career is rounded out by his defeat of enemies’ intrigues in Spain, and his royal confirmation as supreme commander.
Prescott captures the suspense of the living experience, and never better than in his classic account of the Noche Triste. On that “melancholy night” of July 1, 1520, Cortés’s forces retreating from Mexico City were slaughtered by a surprise attack.
The night was cloudy and a drizzling rain, which fell without intermission, added to the obscurity. The great square before the palace was deserted, as, indeed, it had been since the fall of Montezuma. Steadily, and as noiselessly as possible, the Spaniards held their way along the great street of Tlocopan, which so lately had resounded to the tumult of battle. All was now hushed in silence; and they were only reminded of the past by the occasional presence of some solitary corpse, or a dark heap of the slain, which too plainly told where the strife had been hottest.… they easily fancied that they discerned the shadowy forms of their foe lurking in ambush, and ready to spring on them. But it was only fancy; and the city slept undisturbed even by the prolonged echoes of the tramp of the horses, and the hoarse rumbling of the artillery and baggage trains.… They might well have congratulated themselves on having thus escaped the dangers of an assault in the city itself, and that a brief time would place them in comparative safety on the opposite shore. —But the Mexicans were not asleep.
He concludes his history with a ruthless but charitable portrait of his hero. “Cortés was not a vulgar conqueror. He did not conquer from the mere ambition of conquest. If he destroyed the ancient capital of the Aztecs, it was to build up a more magnificent capital on its ruins. If he desolated the land, and broke up its existing institutions, he employed the short period of his administration in digesting schemes for introducing there a more improved culture and a higher civilization.” And Cortés was not cruel, “at least, not cruel as compared with most of those who followed his iron trade.… He allowed no outrage on his unresisting foes. This may seem small praise, but it is an exception to the usual conduct of his countrymen in their conquests, and it is something to be in advance of one’s time.”
Finally, Prescott notes and explains Cortés’s “bigotry, the failing of the age, for, surely it should be termed only a failing. When we see the hand, red with the blood of the wretched native, raised to invoke the blessing of Heaven on the cause which it maintains, we experience something like a sensation of disgust at the act, and a doubt of its sincerity. But this is unjust. We should throw ourselves back (it cannot be too often repeated) into the age; the age of the Crusades. For every Spanish cavalier, however sordid and selfish might be his private motives, felt himself to be the soldier of the Cross.… Whoever has read the correspondence of Cortes, or, still more has attended to the circumstances of his career will hardly doubt that he would have been among the first to lay down his life for the Faith.” And Prescott ends by humanizing Cortes, with the aid of his companion-in-arms, Bernal Díaz, who recounts how “when very angry, the veins in his throat and forehead would swell, but he uttered no reproaches against either officer or soldier,” how he loved cards and dice, would take a nap after his meals under a tree, even in stormy weather. Cortés never became rich from his conquests. “It was perhaps intended that he should receive his recompense in a better world.”
There is a strange symmetry in the lives and works of the two pioneers of a literature of American history, William Hickling Prescott and his successor Francis Parkman. It is almost as if a dissatisfied editor had chosen to revise the life of Prescott for another emphasis in the next generation. Both labored under disabilities that made their works deeds
of heroism. But while Prescott had his blindness thrust on him by a crust of bread in his eye, Parkman at eighteen was energetically creating his own disabilities. And he was bolder than Prescott in his choice of subject. Spain, Prescott’s point of departure, was an eminently respectable area for historical literature, proven by Washington Irving’s popular Columbus (1828), his Conquest of Granada (1829), and his Alhambra (1832). Europe seemed the proper base for serious American historians. Even George Bancroft’s immensely popular three-volume History of the Colonization of the United States had followed that convention. And Prescott, too, followed the fortunes of Spain in the New World.
Parkman made a bold and risky thrust. As an eighteen-year-old sophomore, also at Harvard College, his literary ambitions “crystallized into a plan of writing the story of what was then known as the ‘Old French War,’ that is, the war that ended in the conquest of Canada.… My theme fascinated me, and I was haunted with wilderness images day and night.” Soon he “enlarged the plan to include the whole course of the American conflict between France and England, or, in other words, the history of the American forest.” Boston friends who heard his plan were dismayed that a man of Parkman’s talents and resources should choose a subject so peripheral to the mainstream of European history, a tale whose actors were red savages and crude colonists.
The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination Page 48