wand has touched, from the cliffs of the
Saguenay to the Texas coast, and from
Acadia to the western slopes of the Rocky
Mountains.

tive, the taint is quickly tasted, and its flavor spoils the whole.

We are then brought, I say, to the secret of Parkman's power. His Indians 5 are true to life. In his pages Pontiac is a man of warm flesh and blood, as much so as Montcalm or Israel Putnam. This solid reality in the Indians makes the whole work real and convincing. Here is the great contrast between Parkman's work and that of Prescott, in so far as the latter dealt with American themes. In reading Prescott's account of the conquest of Mexico, one feels one's self in the world of the Arabian Nights; indeed, the author himself, in occasional comments, lets us see that he is unable to get rid of just such a feeling.

His story moves on in a region that is unreal to him, and therefore tantalizing to the reader; his Montezuma is a personality like none that ever existed beneath the moon. This is because Prescott simply followed his Spanish authorities not only in their statements of physical fact but in their inevitable misconceptions of the strange Aztec society which they encountered; the Aztecs in his story are unreal, and this false note vitiates it all. In his Peruvian story Prescott followed safer leaders in Garcilasso de la Vega and Cieza de Leon, and made a much truer picture; but he lacked the ethnological knowledge needful for coming into touch with that ancient society, and one often feels this as the weak spot in a narrative of marvelous power and beauty.

I do not forget that earlier writers than Parkman had felt something of the pic turesqueness and the elements of dramatic force in the history of the conquest of our continent. In particular, the characteristics of the red men and the incidents of 10 forest life had long ago been made the theme of novels and poems, such as they were; I wonder how many people of today remember even the names of such books as Yonnondio or Kabaosa? All 15 such work was thrown into the shade by that of Fenimore Cooper, whose genius, though limited, was undeniable. But when we mention Cooper we are brought at once by contrast to the secret of Park- 20 man's power. It has long been recognized that Cooper's Indians are more or less unreal; just such creatures never existed anywhere. When Corneille and Racine put ancient Greeks or Romans on the stage 25 they dressed them in velvet and gold lace, flowing wigs and high buckled shoes, and made them talk like Louis XIV's courtiers; in seventeenth-century dramatists the historical sense was lacking. In the 30 next age it was not much better. When Rousseau had occasion to philosophize about men in a state of nature he invented the Noble Savage, an insufferable creature whom any real savage would justly 35 loathe and despise. The noble savage has figured extensively in modern literature, and has left his mark upon Cooper's pleasant pages as well as upon many a chapter of serious history. But you can- 40 not introduce unreal Indians as factors in the development of a narrative without throwing a shimmer of unreality about the whole story. It is like bringing in ghosts or goblins among live men and 45 women; it instantly converts sober narrative into fairy tale; the two worlds will no more mix than oil and water. The ancient and medieval minds did not find it so, as the numberless histories encum- 50 cotencat or the Mexico of Montezuma! bered with the supernatural testify; but the modern mind does find it so. The modern mind has taken a little draught, the prelude to deeper draughts, at the healing and purifying well of science; 55 and it has begun to be dissatisfied with anything short of exact truth. When any unsound element enters into a narra

Now it was Parkman's good fortune at an early age to realize that in order to do his work it was first of all necessary to know the Indian by personal fellowship and contact. It was also his good fortune that the right sort of Indians were still accessible. What would not Pres cott have given, what would not any student of human evolution give, for a chance to pass a week or even a day in such a community as the Tlascala of Xi

That phase of social development has long since disappeared. But fifty years ago, on our great western plains and among the Rocky Mountains, there still prevailed a state of society essentially similar to that which greeted the eyes of Champlain upon the St. Lawrence and of John Smith upon the Chickahominy.

In

those days the Oregon Trail had changed but little since the memorable journey of Lewis and Clark in the beginning of the present century. In 1846, two years after taking his bachelor degree at Harvard, young Parkman had a taste of the excitements of savage life in that primeval wilderness.

aloud to him. The heroism shown year after year in contending with physical ailments was the index of a character fit to be mated, for its pertinacious courage, 5 with the heroes that live in those shining pages.

He was accompanied by his kinsman, Mr. Quincy Shaw. They joined a roving tribe of Sioux Indians, at a time 10 when to do such a thing was to take their lives in their hands, and they spent a wild summer among the Black Hills of Dakota and the vast moorland sclitudes through which the Platte River winds its 15 interminable length. In the chase and in the wigwam, in watching the sorcery of which their religion chiefly consisted, or in listening to primitive folk tales by the evening camp fire, Parkman learned to 20 understand the red man, to interpret his motives and his moods. With his naturalist's keen and accurate eye and his quick poetic apprehension, that youthful experience formed a safe foundation for 25 all his future work. From that time forth he was fitted to absorb the records and memorials of the early explorers, and to make their strange experiences his

own.

The progress in working up materials was slow and sure. The Conspiracy of Pontiac, which forms the sequel and conclusion of Parkman's work, was first published in 1851, only five years after the summer spent with the Indians; fourteen years then elapsed before the Pioneers made their appearance in Little, Brown & Co.'s window; and then there were yet seven-and-twenty years more before the final volumes came out in 1892. Altogether, about half a century was required for the building of this grand literary monument. Nowhere can we find a better illustration of the French critic's definition of a great life,- a thought conceived in youth, and realized in later years.

This elaborateness of preparation had its share in producing the intense vividness of Parkman's descriptions. Profusion of detail makes them seem like the accounts of an eye-witness. The realism is so strong that the author seems to have 30 come in person fresh from the scenes he describes, with the smoke of the battle hovering about him and its fierce light glowing in his eyes. Such realism is usually the prerogative of the novelist rather than of the historian, and in one of his prefaces Parkman recognizes that the reader may feel this and suspect him. 'If at times,' he says, it may seem that range has been allowed to fancy, it is so in appearance only, since the minutest details of narrative or description rest on authentic documents or on personal observation.'

The next step was to gather these early records from government archives, and from libraries public and private, on both sides of the Atlantic.- a task, as Parkman himself calls it, abundantly irksome 35 and laborious. It extended over many years and involved several visits to Europe. It was performed with a thoroughness approaching finality. Already in the preface to the Pioneers the author was 4° able to say that he had gained access to all the published materials in existence. Of his research among manuscript sources a notable monument exists in a cabinet now standing in the library of the Massa- 45 chusetts Historical Society, containing nearly two hundred folio volumes of documents copied from the originals by expert copyists. Ability to incur heavy expense is, of course, a prerequisite for all under- 50 takings of this sort, and herein our historian was favored by fortune. Against this chiefest among advantages were to be offset the hardships entailed by delicate health and inability to use the eyes for 55 reading and writing. Parkman always dictated instead of holding the pen, and his huge mass of documents had to be read

This kind of personal observation Parkman carried so far as to visit all the important localities, indeed well-nigh all the localities, that form the scenery of his story, and study them with the patience of a surveyor and the discerning eye of a landscape painter. His strong love of Nature added keen zest to this sort of work. From boyhood he was a trapper and hunter; in later years he became eminent as a horticulturist, originating new varieties of flowers. To sleep under the open sky was his delight. His books fairly reek with the fragrance of pine woods. I open one of them at random, and my eye falls upon such a sentence as this:

5

something more. Into the making of a historian there should enter something of the philosopher, something of the naturalist, something of the poet. In Parkman this rare union of qualities was realized in a greater degree than in any other American historian. Indeed, I doubt if the nineteenth century can show in any part of the world another historian quite his equal in respect of such a union.

'There is softness in the mellow air, the warm sunshine, and the budding leaves of spring; and in the forest flower, which, more delicate than the pampered offspring of gardens, lifts its tender head through the refuse and decay of the wilderness.' Looking at the context, I find that this sentence comes in a remarkable passage suggested by Colonel Henry Bouquet's western expedition of 1764, when he com- 10 pelled the Indians to set free so many French and English prisoners. Some of these captives were unwilling to leave the society of the red men; some positively refused to accept the boon of what was called freedom. In this strange conduct, exclaims Parkman, there was no unaccountable perversity; and he breaks out with two pages of noble dithyrambics in praise of savage life. To him who has 20 once tasted the reckless independence, the haughty self-reliance, the sense of irresponsible freedom, which the forest life. engenders, civilization thenceforth seems flat and stale. . . . The entrapped wan- 25 derer grows fierce and restless, and pants for breathing room. His path, it is true, was choked with difficulties, but his body and soul were hardened to meet them; it was beset with dangers, but these were the very spice of his life, gladdening his heart with exulting self-confidence, and sending the blood through his veins with a livelier current. The wilderness, rough, harsh, and inexorable, has charms more potent in 35 it is not true that they are dying out phystheir seductive influence than all the lures of luxury and sloth. And often he on whom it has cast its magic finds no heart to dissolve the spell, and remains a wanderer and an Ishmaelite to the hour of his death.'

30

No one can doubt that the man who could write like this had the kind of temperament that could look into the Indian's mind and portray him correctly. But for 45 this inborn temperament all his microscopic industry would have availed him but little. To use his own words: Faith

fulness to the truth of history involves far more than a research, however pa- 50 tient and scrupulous, into special facts. Such facts may be detailed with the most minute exactness, and yet the narrative, taken as a whole, may be unmeaning or untrue.' These are golden words for the 55 student of the historical art to ponder. To make a faithful record of a vanished age patient scholarship is needed, and

There is one thing that lends to Parkman's work a peculiar interest, and will be sure to make it grow in fame with the ages. Not only has he left the truthful record of a vanished age so complete and final that the work will never need to be done again, but if any one should in future attempt to do it again he cannot approach the task with quite such equipment as Parkman. In an important sense, the age of Pontiac is far more remote from us than the age of Clovis or the age of Agamemnon. When barbaric society is overwhelmed by advancing waves of civilization, its vanishing is final: the thread of tradition is cut off forever with the shears of Fate. Where are Montezuma's Aztecs? Their physical offspring still dwell on the table-land of Mexico, and their ancient speech is still heard in the streets. but that old society is as extinct as the trilobites, and has to be painfully studied in fossil fragments of custom and tradi tion. So with the red men of the North:

ically, as many people suppose, but their stage of society is fast disappearing, and soon it will have vanished forever. Soon their race will be swallowed up and forgotten, just as we overlook and ignore to-day the existence of five thousand Iroquois farmers in the state of New York.

Now the study of comparative ethnology has begun to teach us that the red Indian is one of the most interesting of men He represents a stage of evolution through which civilized men have once passed,a stage far more ancient and primitive than that which is depicted in the Odyssey or in the Book of Genesis. When Champlain and Frontenac met the feathered chieftains of the St. Lawrence, they talked with men of the Stone Age face to face. Phases of life that had vanished from Europe long before Rome was built survived in America long enough to be seen and studied by modern men. Behind Mr. Parkman's picturesqueness, therefore,

HENRY JAMES, JR. (1843-1916)

The inheritance and the early, as well as the later, training of Henry James and of his brother William James, the psychologist, were refining and cultural in the most exclusive sense. The father, Henry James, Senior, was a scholar, a mystic, a theorist of the Bronson Alcott type, who could live without a profession and write books for the few on such subjects as Swedenborg and The Nature of Evil. The younger Henry James was born in Albany and reared until early boyhood in New York City, a sequestered childhood with little contact with other children, with education from carefully chosen tutors, and with books as the central interest. At twelve he was sent abroad for education with the privilege of pursuing only such studies as pleased him. He learned French and French literature, estheticism, art. Returning to America, he attended a few lectures at the Harvard law school, but with no serious intention of learning a profession, and then settled down like his father to a life of intellectual and esthetic leisure. In France he had been impressed with the new brilliant school of novelists and short story writers, and, with abundance of leisure, he tried his own hand at fiction. His first story appeared in The Atlantic in 1865, and from time to time he contributed others, all of them finished and careful bits of work, with traces of the French influence. Four years later, in 1869, he removed again to Europe, and in Europe - chiefly in England - he spent the rest of his life. He was never married, he followed no profession, he held no office, civil or political: he gave himself wholly to literary art which he studied in all its details of technique. He wrote short stories at first, varied by critical studies of literary artists, especially French litterateurs, and later he made longer ventures in fiction international novels' since they dealt with characters and scenes on both sides of the ocean, and minute studies of character and manners. From the great number of his books one may choose for mention Roderick Hudson, 1875, The American, 1877, Daisy Miller, 1878, The Portrait of a Lady, 1881, and What Maisie Knew, 1897.

James approached fiction from the standpoint of the scientist. His realism was founded on the taking of many notes, on close observation of actual characters in their social relations. on skilful ability to note little peculiarities and tell-tale trifles. He evolves his plot slowly. so slowly indeed that the reader sometimes is in doubt if there be a plot at all. Character is analyzed with scientific thoroughness. Actions and reactions are explained, and motives are dissected with minute care. The characters reveal themselves in endless conversations. In his later novels he grew more and more individual in his style and treatment until many who had enjoyed his early work ceased to read him. A lifetime of analysis, of introspection, of self-conscious concentration, of eternal contemplation of manners, led to over refinement, to mannerism, to eccentricities. One may safely say that the later James is delightful only to the few.

ALPHONSE DAUDET1

I

branch of literature mentioned by M. Taine has no longer, in the soil of our English-speaking genius, so strong a vitality. The French may bear the palm 5 to-day in the representation of manners by the aid of fiction. Formerly, it was possible to oppose Balzac and Madame Sand to Dickens and Thackeray; but at present we have no one, either in England

'The novel of manners grows thick in England, and there are many reasons for it. In the first place it was born there, and a plant always flourishes in its own country.' So wrote M. Taine, the French critic, many years ago. But those were the years of Dickens and Thackeray (as 10 or in America, to oppose to Alphonse

a prelude to the study of the latter of whom the remark was made); and the

1 Reprinted from Partial Portraits by arrangement with the Macmillan Company, holders of the copyright.

Daudet. The appearance of a new novel by this admirable genius is to my mind the most delightful literary event that can occur just now; in other words Alphonse 15 Daudet is at the head of his profession.