Part 57 (1/2)
[Sidenote: Prescott.]
[Sidenote: Irving.]
The character of Columbus has been variously drawn, almost always with a violent projection of the limner's own personality. We find Prescott contending that ”whatever the defects of Columbus's mental const.i.tution, the finger of the historian will find it difficult to point to a single blemish in his moral character.” It is certainly difficult to point to a more flagrant disregard of truth than when we find Prescott further saying, ”Whether we contemplate his character in its public or private relations, in all its features it wears the same n.o.ble aspects. It was in perfect harmony with the grandeur of his plans, and with results more stupendous than those which Heaven has permitted any other mortal to achieve.” It is very striking to find Prescott, after thus speaking of his private as well as public character, and forgetting the remorse of Columbus for the social wrongs he had committed, append in a footnote to this very pa.s.sage a reference to his ”illegitimate” son. It seems to mark an obdurate purpose to disguise the truth. This is also nowhere more patent than in the palliating hero-wors.h.i.+p of Irving, with his constant effort to save a world's exemplar for the world's admiration, and more for the world's sake than for Columbus's.
Irving at one time berates the biographer who lets ”pernicious erudition” destroy a world's exemplar; and at another time he does not know that he is criticising himself when he says that ”he who paints a great man merely in great and heroic traits, though he may produce a fine picture, will never present a faithful portrait.” The commendation which he bestows upon Herrera is for precisely what militates against the highest aims of history, since he praises that Spanish historian's disregard of judicial fairness.
In the being which Irving makes stand for the historic Columbus, his skill in softened expression induced Humboldt to suppose that Irving's avoidance of exaggeration gave a force to his eulogy, but there was little need to exaggerate merits, if defects were blurred.
[Sidenote: Humboldt.]
The learned German adds, in the opening of the third volume of his _Examen Critique_, his own sense of the impressiveness of Columbus. That impressiveness stands confessed; but it is like a gyrating storm that knows no law but the vagrancy of destruction.
One need not look long to discover the secret of Humboldt's estimate of Columbus. Without having that grasp of the picturesque which appeals so effectively to the popular mind in the letters of Vespucius, the Admiral was certainly not dest.i.tute of keen observation of nature, but unfortunately this quality was not infrequently prost.i.tuted to ign.o.ble purposes. To a student of Humboldt's proclivities, these traits of observation touched closely his sympathy. He speaks in his _Cosmos_ of the development of this exact scrutiny in manifold directions, notwithstanding Columbus's previous ignorance of natural history, and tells us that this capacity for noting natural phenomena arose from his contact with such. It would have been better for the fame of Columbus if he had kept this scientific survey in its purity. It was simply, for instance, a vitiated desire to astound that made him mingle theological and physical theories about the land of Paradise. Such jugglery was promptly weighed in Spain and Italy by Peter Martyr and others as the wild, disjointed effusions of an overwrought mind, and ”the reflex of a false erudition,” as Humboldt expresses it. It was palpably by another effort, of a like kind, that he seized upon the views of the fathers of the Church that the earthly Paradise lay in the extreme Orient, and he was quite as audacious when he exacted the oath on the Cuban coast, to make it appear by it that he had really reached the outermost parts of Asia.
[Sidenote: Observations of nature.]
Humboldt seeks to explain this errant habit by calling it ”the sudden movement of his ardent and pa.s.sionate soul; the disarrangement of ideas which were the effect of an incoherent method and of the extreme rapidity of his reading; while all was increased by his misfortunes and religious mysticism.” Such an explanation hardly relieves the subject of it from blunter imputations. This urgency for some responsive wonderment at every experience appears constantly in the journal of Columbus's first voyage, as, for instance, when he makes every harbor exceed in beauty the last he had seen. This was the commonplace exaggeration which in our day is confined to the calls of speculating land companies.
The fact was that Humboldt transferred to his hero something of the superlative love of nature that he himself had experienced in the same regions; but there was all the difference between him and Columbus that there is between a genuine love of nature and a commercial use of it.
Whenever Columbus could divert his mind from a purpose to make the Indies a paying investment, we find some signs of an insight that shows either observation of his own or the garnering of it from others, as, for example, when he remarks on the decrease of rain in the Canaries and the Azores which followed upon the felling of trees, and when he conjectures that the elongated shape of the islands of the Antilles on the lines of the parallels was due to the strength of the equatorial current.
[Sidenote: Roselly de Lorgues and his school.]
[Sidenote: Harrisse.]
Since Irving, Prescott, and Humboldt did their work, there has sprung up the unreasoning and ecstatic French school under the lead of Roselly de Lorgues, who seek to ascribe to Columbus all the virtues of a saint.
”Columbus had no defect of character and no worldly quality,” they say.
The antiquarian and searching spirit of Harrisse, and of those writers who have mainly been led into the closest study of the events of the life of Columbus, has not done so much to mould opinion as regards the estimate in which the Admiral should be held as to eliminate confusing statements and put in order corroborating facts. The reaction from the laudation of the canonizers has not produced any writer of consideration to array such derogatory estimates as effectually as a plain recital of established facts would do it. Hubert Bancroft, in the incidental mention which he makes of Columbus, has touched his character not inaptly, and with a consistent recognition of its infirmities. Even Prescott, who verges constantly on the ecstatic elements of the adulatory biographer, is forced to entertain at times ”a suspicion of a temporary alienation of mind,” and in regard to the letter which Columbus wrote from Jamaica to the sovereigns, is obliged to recognize ”sober narrative and sound reasoning strangely blended with crazy dreams and doleful lamentations.”
[Sidenote: Aaron Goodrich.]
”Vagaries like these,” he adds, ”which came occasionally like clouds over his soul to shut out the light of reason, cannot fail to fill the mind of the reader, as they doubtless did those of the sovereigns, with mingled sentiments of wonder and compa.s.sion.” An unstinted denunciatory purpose, much weakened by an inconsiderate rush of disdain, characterizes an American writer, Aaron Goodrich, in his _Life of the so-called Christopher Columbus_ (New York, 1875); but the critic's temper is too peevish and his opinions are too unreservedly biased to make his results of any value.
[Sidenote: Humboldt.]
The mental hallucinations of Columbus, so patent in his last years, were not beyond recognition at a much earlier age, and those who would get the true import of his character must trace these sorrowful manifestations to their beginnings, and distinguish accurately between Columbus when his purpose was lofty and unselfish and himself again when he became mercenary and erratic. So much does the verdict of history lodge occasionally more in the narrator of events than in the character of them that, in Humboldt's balancing of the baser with the n.o.bler symptoms of Columbus's nature, he does not find even the most degraded of his actions other than powerful in will, and sometimes, at least, clear in intelligence. There were certainly curiously transparent, but transient gleams of wisdom to the last. Humboldt further says that the faith of Columbus soothed his dreary and weary adversities by the charm of ascetic reveries. So a handsome euphuism tries to save his fame from harsher epithets.
It was a faith, says the same delineator, which justified at need, under the pretext of a religious object, the employment of deceit and the excess of a despotic power; a tenderer form, doubtless, of the vulgar expression that the end sanctifies the means. It is not, however, within the practice of the better historical criticism of our day to let such elegant wariness beguile the reader's mind. If the different, not to say more advanced, condition of the critical mind is to be of avail to a new age through the advantage gained from all the ages, it is in precisely this emanc.i.p.ation from the trammels of traditionary bondage that the historian a.s.serts his own, and dispels the glamour of a conventionalized hero-wors.h.i.+p.
[Sidenote: Dr. J. G. Shea.]
Dr. Shea, our most distinguished Catholic scholar, who has dealt with the character of Columbus, says: ”He accomplished less than some adventurers with poor equipped vessels. He seems to have succeeded in attaching but few men to him who adhered loyally to his cause. Those under him were constantly rebellious and mutinous; those over him found him impracticable. To array all these as enemies, inspired by a satanic hostility to a great servant of G.o.d, is to ask too much for our belief;”
and yet this is precisely what Irving by constant modifications, and De Lorgues in a monstrous degree, feel themselves justified in doing.
[Sidenote: The French canonizers.]
There is nothing in Columbus's career that these French canonizers do not find convertible to their purpose, whether it be his wild vow to raise 4,000 horse and 50,000 foot in seven years, wherewith to s.n.a.t.c.h the Holy Sepulchre from the infidel, or the most commonplace of his canting e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.ns. That Columbus was a devout Catholic, according to the Catholicism of his epoch, does not admit of question, but when tried by any test that finds the perennial in holy acts, Columbus fails to bear the examination. He had nothing of the generous and n.o.ble spirit of a conjoint lover of man and of G.o.d, as the higher spirits of all times have developed it. There was no all-loving Deity in his conception. His Lord was one in whose name it was convenient to practice enormities. He shared this subterfuge with Isabella and the rest. We need to think on what Las Casas could be among his contemporaries, if we hesitate to apply the conceptions of an everlasting humanity.