THE EPIC OF FRENCH CANADA.*
PAnxmArr does not rank with the greatest historians of the nineteenth century ; he has not Macaulay's bold sweep, Froude's colour, the encyclopaedic knowledge of Ranke, nor Maitland's penetrating subtlety. But he stands high in the second class, he had a narrative to tell full of adventure and heroism, and he described in full-dress style the rise and fall of the French dominion in North America. The debates of savages in council he treated quite properly with gravity ; the Iroquois never counted more than 4,000 warriors, but they held in terrorized subjection a radius of over 800 miles from the centre of their confederacy, and on their decisions of war and peace hung, for a time, the future of the St. Lawrence basin. Even though Parkman did not often say the last word, he paved the road for others to follow, and it is a pleasure to read a pioneer work, dignified, stately and much more inter- esting than the composite productions common to-day. The
• The Weeks of Frantis Parkman. Centenary Edition. Boston : Little, Brown and Company. 12 Vols., and Life of Parkman, 1 Vol. [10s. net per vol.)
best centenary celebration of an author is' a. new edition, and this, a reprint of one a score of years old, is undeniably welcome.
As interesting- as Parkman's work is his life, briefly and._ somewhat guardedly told by Mr. Farnham in 1900 and here reprinted. Parkman was born on September 16th one hundred years ago, and died in 1893 ; besides his eleven volumes of history and The Oregon Trail he wrote. numerous articles, a novel that failed, and a guide to rose-growing. It would., have been a creditable production for any man ; for Parkman it was almost miraculous. He had chosen his subject before he was eighteen ; he brought to it unconquerable resolve, a knowledge of Indian life and a passion for the woods where were set his best scenes. But almost from the beginning ill-health interfered. He had acute inflammation of the eyes, and for twenty years could neither read nor write for over five minutes at a time ; rheumatic gout and arthritis often made all walking impossible ; insomnia, indigestion and constant nervous disorder plagued him, and the spectre of insanity haunted him more than once. Apparently there was something wrong with the blood-vessels of his brain, and early journeys in the woods and over the prairies had under- mined his general health. Fortunately he had private means —had he been forced to earn a living all literary work would have become impossible—and by training his memory he was able to use the eyes of others. He dictated, wrote in the dark on paper divided into squares by a wire frame, used orange paper to ease his eyes, and spent his means freely in getting copies of documents from France and England. When things were at their darkest, his wife and only son dead, himself forbidden by doctors to read or write, he. took up gardening, and though nearly colour-blind and with little sense of smell, invented a new lily and became for a year a professor of horticulture in the Bussey Institute. But even when so engaged he stuck to history, and every decade from 1860 till his death saw him produce two or more volumes.
To do this, to do it without complaint, was a great achieve- ment. The books so produced speak for themselves. They are vivid, accurate, and generally impartial. They show some of Parkman's own reserve about his private affairs, for they are concerned chiefly with external things. Parkman had no deep knowledge of European history ; considering the age he lived in he was singularly uninterested. in consti- tutional matters ; he did not see subtle changes of. opinion or understand difficult problems of administration. What he looked for in history was the heroic and the generous, and he sought these on frontiers and battlefields, not in European Cabinets or provincial capitals. • Probably few people read his eleven historical volumes in chronological sequence ;. those who do notice that he is happier in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when. ersonality counted for much, than in the eighteenth, when the battle between French and English was too wide for a single Homeric hero to alter the result. Like most New Englanders an individualist, Parkman was at his best when his story was a saga. Dominiques de Gourgues' brilliant revenge on Spanish murderers, the martyrdoms of Brebeuf and Jogues, La Salle's iron resolution—these are his best field ; here he is happier than in the complicated strategy of the Seven Years' War. The struggle grew beyond its saga days and came to turn on decisions of. Whitehall and Versailles. In the strategy of Pitt's war as a whole Parkman was unversed ; for instance,. he did not know that Montcalm's ability, to hold Quebec through the tortured summer of 1759 was due to Durell's failure to obey orders and close the St. Lawrence in May. To Parkman the struggle remained what. it had been, one of individual protagonists, and he calls the volumes Montcalrn and Wolfe, whereas the. main struggle was between the French system and a man of genius made dictator by the British Parliament. Parkman seems to forget that when there was war on Lake Champlain political and military decisions were being made in Europe ; he cannot see the whole war for the trees of his beloved forest.
He has been accused of unfairness to the Roman Catholic Church. He hated clericalism in all forms, and his subject brought him face to face with French rather than with New England clericalism, so some unfairness was natural. Jesuit heroism in missionary work he could not help admiring, but its purpose seemed to him futile. Barring the religious question, Parkman's natural sympathies, though not his intellect, were with the French rather than with the English.
The French were the better woodsmen, they produced more heroic individuals—martyrs, explorers, fighters—than all the English colonies combined. The French in North America built a colony whose rise and fall was a true epic, and it was this epic Parkman told. But New England was too strong for him ; the French colony stood for all things against which New England had striven—a centralized hierarchical church, an administrative system without a shadow of local self-government. If the French were right Massachusetts was wrong, and Parkman's heredity would not let him hold this possible. So he finishes one of his volumes with the cocksure and very questionable remark, " a happier calamity never befell a people than the conquest of Canada
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