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A STUDY IN AMERICAN LETTERS

THE CORRESPONDENCE OF WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT: 1833-1847. Edited by Roger Wolcott. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.

One hundred years ago on January 19, 1826, to be preciseWilliam Prescott, then at the age of twenty-nine, entered in his diary his decision to write a history of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella. Misfortune had retarded his career. Blinded in his left eye by an accident during a Sophomore scrimmage at Harvard, he had since passed through periodical ordeals of cruel suffering and the tragic threat of blindness. This threat was to shadow his path throughout his life. Yet he had laid out for himself a vast course of study in many hundred books, though the Atlantic lay between him and most of his materials. Further, the blessings of Prescott's destiny as well as its mischances were to act as deterrents of his large purposes. His family's ample means enhanced a tendency of his to utter indolence; and he had an uncommon power of enjoying life apart from the art and science of history. Everybody delighted in his company and loved to serve him. This had its advantages. In his months in a darkened room his sister used to lie on the floor with a book placed to catch the streak of light entering at the sill of the closed door, and read aloud to him for hours. But in general Prescott's pleasure in companionship was a distraction from history.

He was a tall, dark-haired youth, long-limbed and free-moving, with a vivid color and an inexhaustible fund of high spirits and good humor. The injury of his sight was not disfiguring. Many persons considered him the finest-looking creature they had ever seen. Testimonies to his social talent are as abundant as those accorded to Burns:

I have never known any other man whose company was so universally attractive equally to men and to women, to young and to old, and to all classes that he mingled with.

It was only by a powerful effort of will that Prescott tore himself away from all this pleasurable intercourse with his classmates, friends, family and wife-for with all the rest of his ties with his kind, he was happily married at twenty-four-and devoted himself by a rigid programme to his great plan. A secretary read aloud to him for many hours daily, while he took notes with a device used for writing by the blind. From the first months of his seclusion he had cultivated a phenomenal faculty of composing mentally without the outer aid of pen or dictation. His power of memory was so great that he could hold and repeat accurately sixty pages of narrative, either of his own creation, or from the records read aloud to him.

Such in brief is the impression of the historian's remarkable "works and days" which one receives from the sympathetic and quick-moving preface of this volume, supplemented by its reference to Ticknor's biography. Prescott has been working on The Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella for seven years at the period when this collection of letters begins. His research for his first book is mainly finished; and before its publication and through its resounding success and acclaim he has begun to gather data for The Conquest of Mexico. The greater part of the correspondence is concerned with his accumulation of historical material from friends or literary agents abroad; and undoubtedly the book's leading interest lies in its record of his methods of documentation. Probably the greater number of Prescott's readers are in somewhat the position of his lifelong friends. They have always known and delighted in his books. But as one grows older and reads some of the Spanish chroniclers of his reference, one is puzzled by his arbitrary choice of authorities. His relation to Las Casas, whom John Fiske has justly called "the corner-stone of American history", is especially bewildering. Prescott gives high praise to Las Casas. He quotes him extensively in footnotes. But he follows Oviedo, whose disinterestedness is doubtful, or Herrera, who is notoriously an apologist for the Conquistadores, and not a contemporary witness.

Las Casas possessed a wider and more intimate knowledge of the Indians of the western continent than any other man of his age. In his inter-racial sympathy, his anti-imperialism, his

hatred of cruelty, he was centuries ahead of his time. This correspondence shows that circumstance obscured his mighty chronicle from Prescott, who tries to obtain a full copy and fails. The historian is competently directed later to a complete manuscript in America. But a letter to Stephens in this collection and the footnotes of The Conquest of Peru indicate clearly that he did not consult it.

Throughout the letters we notice an inclination on his part to edge away from Las Casas's testimony against the Conquistadores. The intent of Prescott's composition requires the softening or elimination of all those lines and colors of Las Casas's great history which convince the reader of the poverty, ignorance and defencelessness of the Indian populations of the New World, Aztec and Inca alike; and outline the continental conquest in the terrible and piteous terms of an empire strangely like that of the Emperor Jones.

You ask me about the Conquest of Mexico and Peru - Prescott writes. . . . I have materials such as never writer, Spanish or foreign, had before, and as the narrative is a perfect epic and as full of incident as any tale of Chivalry, it will be my fault if I do not make a pleasant story of it.

He did make a pleasant story of it. Too pleasant for Las Casas in the sixteenth century. Too pleasant for Morgan and Bandelier in the nineteenth. (Fifty years ago, in 1876, Morgan published in THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW his vivid criticism, "Montezuma's Dinner.") A little because of the state of research in Prescott's time, but more because of his own temperament he chose to record a conquest over foes at once more powerful and more advanced in the arts of civilization than the Indians of Las Casas's picture, or of Morgan's.

Prescott's researches take us through the magnificent European and English libraries and literary collections of the early nineteenth century, in the company of his correspondents, the chief of these being Gayangos, a Spanish gentleman and generous scholar allied to the glorious line of the Great Captain. The conquests of Gayangos form a peculiar romance of their own, delightful perhaps only to those who like to wander in the realms of gold, in the vast, literary land of early Spanish-American chronicle.

For such readers this volume is invaluable. For others it must, one imagines, seem lacking in "the personal touch"; and must appear to offer a somewhat monotonous record of historical material. The book will however be most rewarding to all those who are especially interested in the nature of Prescott's contribution to the truth of history.

We have here a record of the honor and praise which the world justly heaped upon him for his many services to that truth. Perhaps the most precious of these services for us is this: he understood the great qualities of great men and women. He could reveal with reality the force in Philip that built the Escorial, the magnanimity of Isabella, the resourcefulness of the Great Captain. He knew the ways of courage, devotion, generosity, humor, and freedom and endurance and richness of heart. His letters to his family, his friends and the finest scholars of his time show us that he was a profound observer of all these human powers. Where Prescott's truth is romantically arbitrary it is on the side of idealization. This is the defect of his signal value, his true interpretation of the greatnesses of the great. We have seen lately a strong tendency towards a species of history and biography not precisely romantic, and yet more arbitrary, more nonrealistic than Prescott's. Where this later non-realistic history and biography is arbitrary it is all on the side of disparagement. It has had an admirable success in describing the smallnesses of the great. But perhaps because amusement at the expense of other people is easier than understanding them, it has largely edged away from their greatnesses.

The truth presented by every historian and biographer is severely limited by his knowledge of humankind. Undoubtedly Prescott's predeterminations have given us a more realistic portrait of Queen Isabella, a picture closer to truth than we could possibly have received from the predeterminations of, let us say, August Strindberg. This is not only because of the data the historian collected in Spain, but because of the data he collected throughout his life-because, for instance, he had a sister who was glad to lie on the floor and read to him for hours: and he knew how to appreciate her.

EDITH FRANKLIN WYATT.

ABOUT FOREIGN LANDS AND PEOPLES

HISTORY OF RUSSIA. By S. F. Platonov. Translated by E. Aronsberg. New York: The Macmillan Company.

AN ECONOMIC HISTORY OF RUSSIA. By James Mavor. Revised Edition. New York: E. P. Dutton and Company.

RUSSIA. By Nicholas Makeev and Valentine O'Hara. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.

FRANCE AND THE FRENCH. By Sisley Huddleston. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.

POST-WAR BRITAIN. By André Siegfried. Translated by H. H. Hemming. New York: E. P. Dutton and Company.

Whether one's interest in foreign peoples have its root in naïve curiosity, in a craving to appreciate and in some degree to appropriate what is best in foreign culture, or simply in a desire to gain an unbiased understanding of the course of events, one is likely to find that satisfactory conclusions can best be arrived at through the study of economic causes. That these are the only true causes, or that their operation can be clearly traced in every sphere of life, it would be rash to maintain; yet the fact remains that we cannot understand the spirit of a people without knowing something of its economic conditions, past and present. By beginning with what can be in some sort weighed and measured we may reach a clearer conception of the "imponderables". Through common sense we may attain to "spiritual" values.

If this be true, then, in a deeper sense than is usually implied, economics rightfully holds its place at the head of the newer "humanities"; and it is from this point of view that I am inclined to evaluate and rank the several important works that are now before me for consideration.

Professor Platonov's history may be not unfairly described as a sort of bourgeois history of Russia. The Professor, a man of humble origin, who worked his way to high academic position, was at one time tutor to Grand Duke Michael and Grand Duchess Olga, brother and sister of Nicholas II. If Russia had been such a country as England (or the United States) Platonov might have written such a patriotic and humanly interesting work as Green's Shorter History of the English People, and that work, like Green's

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