Part 5 (1/2)

During the year which followed, Prescott's health began steadily to fail. He suffered from violent pains in the head; so severe as to rob him of sleep and to make work of any kind impossible. He still, however, enjoyed intervals when he could laugh and jest in his old careless way, and even at times indulge in the pleasant little dinners which he loved to share with his most intimate friends. On February 4th, however, while walking in the street, he was stricken down by an apoplectic seizure, which solved the mystery of his severe headaches. When he recovered consciousness his first words were, ”My poor wife! I am so sorry for you that this has come upon you so soon.” The attack was a warning rather than an instant summons. After a few days he was once more himself, except that his enunciation never again became absolutely clear. Serious work, of course, was out of the question. He listened to a good deal of reading, chiefly fiction. He was put upon a very careful regimen in the matter of diet, and wrote, with a touch of rueful amus.e.m.e.nt, of the vegetarian meals to which he was restricted: ”I have been obliged to exchange my carnivorous propensities for those of a more innocent and primitive nature, picking up my fare as our good parents did before the Fall.” Improving somewhat, he completed the third volume of _Philip II._; not so fully as he had intended, but mainly putting together so much of it as had already been prepared. The book was printed in April, 1858, and the supervision of the proof-sheets afforded him some occupation, as did also the making of a few additional notes for a new edition of the _Conquest of Mexico_. The summer of 1858 he spent in Pepperell, returning to Boston in October, in the hope of once more taking up his studies. He did, in fact, linger wistfully over his books and ma.n.u.scripts, but accomplished very little; for, soon after the New Year, there came the end of all his labours. On January 27th, his health was apparently in a satisfactory condition. He listened to his secretary, Mr. Kirk, read from one of Sala's books of travel, and, in order to settle a question which arose in the course of the reading, he left the library to speak to his wife and sister. Leaving them a moment later with a laugh, he went into an adjoining room, where presently he was heard to groan. His secretary hurried to his side, and found him quite unconscious. In the early afternoon he died, without knowing that the end had come.

Prescott had always dreaded the thought of being buried alive. His vivid imagination had shown him the appalling horror of a living burial. Again and again he had demanded of those nearest him that he should be s.h.i.+elded from the possibility of such a fate. Therefore, when the physicians had satisfied themselves that life had really left him, a large vein was severed, to make a.s.surance doubly sure.

On the last day of January he was buried in the family tomb, in the crypt of St. Paul's. Men and women of every rank and station were present at the simple ceremony. The Legislature of the State had adjourned so that its members might pay their tribute of respect to so distinguished a citizen. The Historical Society was represented among the mourners. His personal friends and those of humble station, whom he had so often befriended, filled the body of the church. Before his burial, his remains, in accordance with a wish of his that was well known, had been carried to the room in which were his beloved books and where so many imperishable pages had been written. There, as it were, he lay in state. It is thus that one may best, in thought, take leave of him, amid the memorials and records of a past which he had made to live again.

CHAPTER VII

”FERDINAND AND ISABELLA”--PRESCOTT'S STYLE

The _History of Ferdinand and Isabella_ is best regarded as Prescott's initiation into the writing of historical literature. It was a _prolusio_, a preliminary trial of his powers, in some respects an apprentices.h.i.+p to the profession which he had decided to adopt. When he began its composition he had published nothing but a few casual reviews.

He had neither acquired a style nor gained that self-confidence which does so much to command success. No such work as this had as yet been undertaken by an American. How far he could himself overcome the peculiar difficulties which confronted him was quite uncertain. Whether he had it in him to be at once a serious investigator and a maker of literature, he did not know. Therefore, the _Ferdinand and Isabella_ shows here and there an uncertainty of touch and a lack of a.s.sured method such as were quite natural in one who had undertaken so ambitious a task with so little technical experience.

In the matter of style, Prescott had not yet emanc.i.p.ated himself from that formalism which had been inherited from the eighteenth-century writers, and which Americans, with the wonted conservatism of provincials, retained long after Englishmen had begun to write with naturalness and simplicity. Even in fiction this circ.u.mstance is noticeable. At a time when Scott was thrilling the whole world of English readers with his vivid romances, written hastily and often carelessly, in a style which reflected his own individual nature, Cooper was producing stories equally exciting, but told in phraseology almost as stilted as that which we find in _Ra.s.selas_. This was no less true in poetry. The great romantic movement which in England found expression in Byron and Sh.e.l.ley and the exquisitely irregular metres of Coleridge had as yet awakened no true responsive echo on this side of the Atlantic.

Among the essay-writers and historians of America none had summoned up the courage to shake off the Addisonian and Johnsonian fetters and to move with free, unstudied ease. Irving was but a later Goldsmith, and Bancroft a Yankee Gibbon. The papers which then appeared in the _North American Review_, to whose pages Prescott himself was a regular contributor, give ample evidence that the literary models of the time were those of an earlier age,--an age in which dignity was supposed to lie in ponderosity and to be incompatible with grace.

Prescott's nature was not one that had the slightest sympathy with pedantry. No more spontaneous spirit than his can be imagined. His joyousness and gayety sometimes even tended toward the frivolous. Yet in this first serious piece of historical writing, he imposed upon himself the shackles of an earlier convention. Just because his mood prompted him to write in an unstudied style, all the more did he feel it necessary to repress his natural inclination. Therefore, in the text of his history, we find continual evidence of the eighteenth century literary manner,--the balanced sentence, the inevitable adjective, the studied ant.i.thesis, and the elaborate parallel. Women are invariably ”females”; a gift is a ”donative”; a marriage does not take place, but ”nuptials are solemnized”; a name is usually an ”appellation”; a crown ”devolves” upon a successor; a poet ”delivers his sentiments”; a king ”avails himself of indeterminateness”; and so on. A c.u.mbrous sentence like the following smacks of the sort of English that was soon to pa.s.s away:--

”Fanaticism is so far subversive of the most established principles of morality that under the dangerous maxim 'For the advancement of the faith all means are lawful,' which Ta.s.so has rightly, though perhaps undesignedly, derived from the spirits of h.e.l.l, it not only excuses but enjoins the commission of the most revolting crime as a sacred duty.”[24]

And the following:--

”Casiri's multifarious catalogue bears ample testimony to the emulation with which not only men but even females of the highest rank devoted themselves to letters; the latter contending publicly for the prizes, not merely in eloquence and poetry, but in those recondite studies which have usually been reserved for the other s.e.x.”[25]

The style of these sentences is essentially the style of the old _North American Review_ and of eighteenth-century England. The particular chapter from which the last quotation has been taken was, in fact, originally prepared by Prescott for the _North American_, as already mentioned,[26] and was only on second thought reserved for a chapter of the history.

The pa.s.sion for parallel, which had existed among historical writers ever since the time of Plutarch, was responsible for the elaborate comparison which Prescott makes between Isabella and Elizabeth of England.[27] It is worked out relentlessly--Isabella and Elizabeth in their private lives, Isabella and Elizabeth in their characters, Isabella and Elizabeth in the selection of their ministers of State, Isabella and Elizabeth in their intellectual power, Isabella and Elizabeth in their respective deaths. Prescott drags it all in; and it affords evidence of the literary standards of his countrymen at the time, that this laboured parallel was thought to be the very finest thing in the whole book.

If, however, Prescott maintained in the body of his text the rigid lapidary dignity which he thought to be appropriate, his natural liveliness found occasional expression in the numerous foot-notes, which at times he wrote somewhat in the vein of his private letters from Pepperell and Nahant. The contrast, therefore, between text and notes was often thoroughly incongruous because so violent. This led his English reviewer, Mr. Richard Ford,[28] to write some rather acrid sentences that in their manner suggest the tone which, in our days, the _Sat.u.r.day Review_ has always taken with new authors, especially when they happen to be American. Wrote Mr. Ford of Prescott:--

”His style is too often sesquipedalian and ornate; the stilty, wordy, false taste of Dr. Channing without his depth of thought; the sugar and sack of Was.h.i.+ngton Irving without the half-pennyworth of bread--without his grace and polish of pure, grammatical, careful Anglicism. We have many suspicions, indeed, from his ordinary quotations, from what he calls in others 'the cheap display of school-boy erudition,' and from sundry lurking sneers, that he has not drunk deeply at the Pierian fountains, which taste the purer the higher we track them to their source. These, the only sure foundations of a pure and correct style, are absolutely necessary to our Transatlantic brethren, who are unfortunately deprived of the high standing example of an order of n.o.bility, and of a metropolis where local peculiarities evaporate. The elevated tone of the cla.s.sics is the only corrective for their unhappy democracy. Moral feeling must of necessity be degraded wherever the mult.i.tude are the sole dispensers of power and honour. All candidates for the foul-breathed universal suffrage must lower their appeal to base understandings and base motives. The authors of the United States, independently of the deteriorating influence of their inst.i.tutions, can of all people the least afford to be negligent. Far severed from the original spring of English undefiled, they always run the risk of sinking into provincialisms, into Patavinity,--both positive, in the use of obsolete words, and the adoption of conventional village significations, which differ from those retained by us,--as well as negative, in the omission of those happy expressions which bear the fire-new stamp of the only authorised mint. Instances occur constantly in these volumes where the word is English, but English returned after many years'

transportation. We do not wish to be hypercritical, nor to strain at gnats. If, however, the authors of the United States aspire to be admitted _ad eundem_, they must write the English of the 'old country,' which they will find it is much easier to forget and corrupt than to improve. We cannot, however, afford s.p.a.ce here for a _florilegium Yankyense_. A professor from New York, newly imported into England and introduced into real _good_ society, of which previously he can only have formed an abstract idea, is no bad ill.u.s.tration of Mr. Prescott's _over-done_ text. Like the stranger in question, he is always on his best behaviour, prim, prudish, and stiff-necky, afraid of self-committal, ceremonious, remarkably dignified, supporting the honour of the United States, and monstrously afraid of being laughed at. Some of these travellers at last discover that bows and starch are not even the husk of a gentleman; and so, on re-crossing the Atlantic, their manner becomes like Mr. Prescott's _notes_; levity is mistaken for ease, an un-'pertinent' familiarity for intimacy, second-rate low-toned 'jocularities' (which make no one laugh but the retailer) for the light, hair-trigger repartee, the brilliancy of high-bred pleasantry. Mr. Prescott emulates Dr. Channing in his text, Dr.

Dunham and Mr. Joseph Miller in his notes. Judging from the facetiae which, by his commending them as 'good,' have furnished a gauge to measure his capacity for relis.h.i.+ng humour, we are convinced that his non-perception of wit is so genuine as to be organic. It is perfectly allowable to rise occasionally from the ludicrous into the serious, but to descend from history to the bathos of balderdash is too bad--_risu inepto nihil ineptius_.”

This pa.s.sage, which is an amusing example of an overflow of High Tory bile, does not by any means fairly represent the general tone of Ford's review. Prescott had here and there indulged himself in some of the commonplaces of republicanism such as were usual in American writings of that time; and these harmlessly trite political pedantries had rasped the nerves of his British reviewer. To speak of ”the empty decorations, the stars and garters of an order of n.o.bility,” to mention ”royal perfidy,” ”royal dissimulation,” ”royal recompense of ingrat.i.tude,” and generally to intimate that ”the people” were superior to royalty and n.o.bility, roused a spirit of antagonism in the mind of Mr. Ford. Several of Prescott's semi-facetious notes dealt with rank and aristocracy in something of the same hold-cheap tone, so that Ford was irritated into a very personal retort. He wrote:--

”These pleasantries come with a bad grace from the son, as we learn from a full-length dedication, of 'the _Honourable_ William Prescott, _LL.D._' We really are ignorant of the exact value of this t.i.tular potpourri in a _soi-disant_ land of equality, of these n.o.ble and academic plumes, borrowed from the wing of a professedly despised monarchy.”

Although Ford's characterisation of Prescott's style had some basis of truth, it was, of course, grossly exaggerated. Throughout the whole of the _Ferdinand and Isabella_, one is conscious of a strong tendency toward simplicity of expression. Many pa.s.sages are as easy and unaffected as any that we find in an historical writer of to-day.

Reading the pages over now, one can see the true Prescott under all the starch and stiffness which at the time he mistakenly regarded as essential to the dignity of historical writing. In fact, as the work progressed, the author gained something of that ease which comes from practice, and wrote more and more simply and more after his own natural manner. What is really lacking is sharpness of outline. The narrative is somewhat too flowing. One misses, now and then, crispness of phrase and force of characterisation. Prescott never wrote a sentence that can be remembered. His strength lies in his _ensemble_, in the general effect, and in the agreeable manner in which he carries us along with him from the beginning to the end. This first book of his, from the point of view of style, is ”pleasant reading.” Its movement is that of an ambling palfrey, well broken to a lady's use. Nowhere have we the sensation of the rush and thunder of a war-horse.

Ford's strictures made Prescott wince, or, as Mr. Ticknor gently puts it, ”disturbed his equanimity.” They caused him to consider the question of his own style in the light of Ford's very slas.h.i.+ng strictures. In making this self-examination Prescott was perfectly candid with himself, and he noted down the conclusions which he ultimately reached.

”It seems to me the first and sometimes the second volume afford examples of the use of words not so simple as might be; not objectionable in themselves, but unless something is gained in the way of strength or of colouring it is best to use the most simple, _unnoticeable_ words to express ordinary things; _e.g._ 'to send'

is better than 'to transmit'; 'crown descended' better than 'devolved'; 'guns fired' than 'guns discharged'; 'to name,' or 'call,' than 'to nominate'; 'to read' than 'peruse'; 'the term,' or 'name,' than 'appellation,' and so forth. It is better also not to enc.u.mber the sentence with long, lumbering nouns; as,'the relinquishment of,' instead of 'relinquis.h.i.+ng'; 'the embellishment and fortification of,' instead of 'embellis.h.i.+ng and fortifying'; and so forth. I can discern no other warrant for Master Ford's criticism than the occasional use of these and similar words on such commonplace matters as would make the simpler forms of expression preferable. In my third volume, I do not find the language open to much censure.”

He also came to the following sensible decision which very materially improved his subsequent writing:--