V. 1841-1842. AEt. 27-28.
FIRST DIPLOMATIC APPOINTMENT, SECRETARY OF LEGATION TO THE RUSSIAN MISSION.—BRIEF RESIDENCE AT ST. PETERSBURG.—LETTER TO HIS MOTHER. —RETURN.
In the autumn of 1841, Mr. Motley received the appointment of Secretary of Legation to the Russian Mission, Mr. Todd being then the Minister. Arriving at St. Petersburg just at the beginning of winter, he found the climate acting very unfavorably upon his spirits if not upon his health, and was unwilling that his wife and his two young children should be exposed to its rigors. The expense of living, also, was out of proportion to his income, and his letters show that he had hardly established himself in St. Petersburg before he had made up his mind to leave a place where he found he had nothing to do and little to enjoy. He was homesick, too, as a young husband and father with an affectionate nature like his ought to have been under these circumstances. He did not regret having made the experiment, for he knew that he should not have been satisfied with himself if he had not made it. It was his first trial of a career in which he contemplated embarking, and in which afterwards he had an eventful experience. In his private letters to his family, many of which I have had the privilege of looking over, he mentions in detail all the reasons which influenced him in forming his own opinion about the expediency of a continued residence at St. Petersburg, and leaves the decision to her in whose judgment he always had the greatest confidence. No unpleasant circumstance attended his resignation of his secretaryship, and though it must have been a disappointment to find that the place did not suit him, as he and his family were then situated, it was only at the worst an experiment fairly tried and not proving satisfactory. He left St. Petersburg after a few months' residence, and returned to America. On reaching New York he was met by the sad tidings of the death of his first-born child, a boy of great promise, who had called out all the affections of his ardent nature. It was long before he recovered from the shock of this great affliction. The boy had shown a very quick and bright intelligence, and his father often betrayed a pride in his gifts and graces which he never for a moment made apparent in regard to his own.
Among the letters which he wrote from St. Petersburg are two miniature ones directed to this little boy. His affectionate disposition shows itself very sweetly in these touching mementos of a love of which his first great sorrow was so soon to be born. Not less charming are his letters to his mother, showing the tenderness with which he always regarded her, and full of all the details which he thought would entertain one to whom all that related to her children was always interesting. Of the letters to his wife it is needless to say more than that they always show the depth of the love he bore her and the absolute trust he placed in her, consulting her at all times as his nearest and wisest friend and adviser,—one in all respects fitted “To warn, to comfort, and command.”
I extract a passage from one of his letters to his mother, as much for the sake of lending a character of reality to his brief residence at St. Petersburg as for that of the pleasant picture it gives us of an interior in that Northern capital.
treble doors, padded with leather to exclude the cold and guarded by
two 'proud young porters' in severe cocked hats and formidable
batons, into a broad hall,—threw off our furred boots and cloaks,
ascended a carpeted marble staircase, in every angle of which stood
a statuesque footman in gaudy coat and unblemished unmentionables,
and reached a broad landing upon the top thronged as usual with
servants. Thence we passed through an antechamber into a long,
high, brilliantly lighted, saffron-papered room, in which a dozen
card-tables were arranged, and thence into the receiving room. This
was a large room, with a splendidly inlaid and polished floor, the
walls covered with crimson satin, the cornices heavily incrusted
with gold, and the ceiling beautifully painted in arabesque. The
massive fauteuils and sofas, as also the drapery, were of crimson
satin with a profusion of gilding. The ubiquitous portrait of the
Emperor was the only picture, and was the same you see everywhere.
This crimson room had two doors upon the side facing the three
windows: The innermost opened into a large supper-room, in which a
table was spread covered with the usual refreshments of European
parties,—tea, ices, lemonade, and et ceteras,—and the other opened
into a ball-room which is a sort of miniature of the 'salle blanche'
of the Winter Palace, being white and gold, and very brilliantly
lighted with 'ormolu' chandeliers filled with myriads of candles.
This room (at least forty feet long by perhaps twenty-five) opened
into a carpeted conservatory of about the same size, filled with
orange-trees and japonica plants covered with fruit and flowers,
arranged very gracefully into arbors, with luxurious seats under the
pendent boughs, and with here and there a pretty marble statue
gleaming through the green and glossy leaves. One might almost have
imagined one's self in the 'land of the cypress and myrtle' instead
of our actual whereabout upon the polar banks of the Neva.
Wandering through these mimic groves, or reposing from the fatigues
of the dance, was many a fair and graceful form, while the
brilliantly lighted ballroom, filled with hundreds of exquisitely
dressed women (for the Russian ladies, if not very pretty, are
graceful, and make admirable toilettes), formed a dazzling contrast
with the tempered light of the 'Winter Garden.' The conservatory
opened into a library, and from the library you reach the
antechamber, thus completing the 'giro' of one of the prettiest
houses in St. Petersburg. I waltzed one waltz and quadrilled one
quadrille, but it was hard work; and as the sole occupation of these
parties is dancing and card-playing—conversation apparently not
being customary—they are to me not very attractive.”
He could not be happy alone, and there were good reasons against his being joined by his wife and children.
longer to become intimate here than to thaw the Baltic. I have only
to 'knock that it shall be opened to me,' but that is just what I
hate to do. . . . 'Man delights not me, no, nor woman neither.'”
Disappointed in his expectations, but happy in the thought of meeting his wife and children, he came back to his household to find it clad in mourning for the loss of its first-born.
VI. 1844. AEt. 30.
LETTER TO PARK BENJAMIN.—POLITICAL VIEWS AND FEELINGS.
A letter to Mr. Park Benjamin, dated December 17, 1844, which has been kindly lent me by Mrs. Mary Lanman Douw of Poughkeepsie, gives a very complete and spirited account of himself at this period. He begins with a quiet, but tender reference to the death of his younger brother, Preble, one of the most beautiful youths seen or remembered among us, “a great favorite,” as he says, “in the family and in deed with every one who knew him.” He mentions the fact that his friends and near connections, the Stackpoles, are in Washington, which place he considers as exceptionally odious at the time when he is writing. The election of Mr. Polk as the opponent of Henry Clay gives him a discouraged feeling about our institutions. The question, he thinks, is now settled that a statesman can never again be called to administer the government of the country. He is almost if not quite in despair “because it is now proved that a man, take him for all in all, better qualified by intellectual power, energy and purity of character, knowledge of men, a great combination of personal qualities, a frank, high-spirited, manly bearing, keen sense of honor, the power of attracting and winning men, united with a vast experience in affairs, such as no man (but John Quincy Adams) now living has had and no man in this country can ever have again,—I say it is proved that a man better qualified by an extraordinary combination of advantages to administer the government than any man now living, or any man we can ever produce again, can be beaten by anybody. . . . . It has taken forty years of public life to prepare such a man for the Presidency, and the result is that he can be beaten by anybody,—Mr. Polk is anybody,—he is Mr. Quelconque.”
I do not venture to quote the most burning sentences of this impassioned letter. It shows that Motley had not only become interested most profoundly in the general movements of parties, but that he had followed the course of political events which resulted in the election of Mr. Polk with careful study, and that he was already looking forward to the revolt of the slave States which occurred sixteen years later. The letter is full of fiery eloquence, now and then extravagant and even violent in expression, but throbbing with a generous heat which shows the excitable spirit of a man who wishes to be proud of his country and does not wish to keep his temper when its acts make him ashamed of it. He is disgusted and indignant to the last degree at seeing “Mr. Quelconque” chosen over the illustrious statesman who was his favorite candidate. But all his indignation cannot repress a sense of humor which was one of his marked characteristics. After fatiguing his vocabulary with hard usage, after his unsparing denunciation of “the very dirty politics” which he finds mixed up with our popular institutions, he says,—it must be remembered that this was an offhand letter to one nearly connected with him,—
the Balm of Columbia advertisement, 'bring every generous thinking
youth to that heavy sinking gloom which not even the loss of
property can produce, but only the loss of hair, which brings on
premature decay, causing many to shrink from being uncovered, and
even to shun society, to avoid the jests and sneers of their
acquaintances. The remainder of their lives is consequently spent
in retirement.'”
He continues:—
motives, I will add that I am not at all anxious about the
legislation of the new government. I desired the election of Clay
as a moral triumph, and because the administration of the country,
at this moment of ten thousand times more importance than its
legislation, would have been placed in pure, strong, and determined
hands.”
Then comes a dash of that satirical and somewhat cynical way of feeling which he had not as yet outgrown. He had been speaking about the general want of attachment to the Union and the absence of the sentiment of loyalty as bearing on the probable dissolution of the Union.
got any. It seems to me that the best way is to look at the
hodge-podge, be good-natured if possible, and laugh,
'As from the height of contemplation
We view the feeble joints men totter on.'
“I began a tremendous political career during the election, having
made two stump speeches of an hour and a half each,—after you went
away,—one in Dedham town-hall and one in Jamaica Plain, with such
eminent success that many invitations came to me from the
surrounding villages, and if I had continued in active political
life I might have risen to be vote-distributor, or fence-viewer, or
selectman, or hog-reeve, or something of the kind.”
The letter from which the above passages are quoted gives the same portrait of the writer, only seen in profile, as it were, which we have already seen drawn in full face in the story of “Morton's Hope.” It is charged with that 'saeva indignatio' which at times verges on misanthropic contempt for its objects, not unnatural to a high-spirited young man who sees his lofty ideals confronted with the ignoble facts which strew the highways of political life. But we can recognize real conviction and the deepest feeling beneath his scornful rhetoric and his bitter laugh. He was no more a mere dilettante than Swift himself, but now and then in the midst of his most serious thought some absurd or grotesque image will obtrude itself, and one is reminded of the lines on the monument of Gay rather than of the fierce epitaph of the Dean of Saint Patrick's.
VII. 1845-1847. AEt. 31-33.
FIRST HISTORICAL AND CRITICAL ESSAYS.—PETER THE GREAT.—NOVELS OF BALZAC.—POLITY OF THE PURITANS.
Mr. Motley's first serious effort in historical composition was an article of fifty pages in “The North American Review” for October, 1845. This was nominally a notice of two works, one on Russia, the other “A Memoir of the Life of Peter the Great.” It is, however, a narrative rather than a criticism, a rapid, continuous, brilliant, almost dramatic narrative. If there had been any question as to whether the young novelist who had missed his first mark had in him the elements which might give him success as an author, this essay would have settled the question. It shows throughout that the writer has made a thorough study of his subject, but it is written with an easy and abundant, yet scholarly freedom, not as if he were surrounded by his authorities and picking out his material piece by piece, but rather as if it were the overflow of long-pursued and well-remembered studies recalled without effort and poured forth almost as a recreation.
As he betrayed or revealed his personality in his first novel, so in this first effort in another department of literature he showed in epitome his qualities as a historian and a biographer. The hero of his narrative makes his entrance at once in his character as the shipwright of Saardam, on the occasion of a visit of the great Duke of Marlborough. The portrait instantly arrests attention. His ideal personages had been drawn in such a sketchy way, they presented so many imperfectly harmonized features, that they never became real, with the exception, of course, of the story-teller himself. But the vigor with which the presentment of the imperial ship-carpenter, the sturdy, savage, eager, fiery Peter, was given in the few opening sentences, showed the movement of the hand, the glow of the color, that were in due time to display on a broader canvas the full-length portraits of William the Silent and of John of Barneveld. The style of the whole article is rich, fluent, picturesque, with light touches of humor here and there, and perhaps a trace or two of youthful jauntiness, not quite as yet outgrown. His illustrative poetical quotations are mostly from Shakespeare,—from Milton and Byron also in a passage or two,—and now and then one is reminded that he is not unfamiliar with Carlyle's “Sartor Resartus” and the “French Revolution” of the same unmistakable writer, more perhaps by the way in which phrases borrowed from other authorities are set in the text than by any more important evidence of unconscious imitation.
The readers who had shaken their heads over the unsuccessful story of “Morton's Hope” were startled by the appearance of this manly and scholarly essay. This young man, it seemed, had been studying,—studying with careful accuracy, with broad purpose. He could paint a character with the ruddy life-blood coloring it as warmly as it glows in the cheeks of one of Van der Helst's burgomasters. He could sweep the horizon in a wide general outlook, and manage his perspective and his lights and shadows so as to place and accent his special subject with its due relief and just relations. It was a sketch, or rather a study for a larger picture, but it betrayed the hand of a master. The feeling of many was that expressed in the words of Mr. Longfellow in his review of the “Twice-Told Tales” of the unknown young writer, Nathaniel Hawthorne: “When a new star rises in the heavens, people gaze after it for a season with the naked eye, and with such telescopes as they may find. . . . This star is but newly risen; and erelong the observation of numerous star-gazers, perched up on arm-chairs and editor's tables, will inform the world of its magnitude and its place in the heaven of”—not poetry in this instance, but that serene and unclouded region of the firmament where shine unchanging the names of Herodotus and Thucydides. Those who had always believed in their brilliant schoolmate and friend at last felt themselves justified in their faith. The artist that sent this unframed picture to be hung in a corner of the literary gallery was equal to larger tasks. There was but one voice in the circle that surrounded the young essayist. He must redeem his pledge, he can and will redeem it, if he will only follow the bent of his genius and grapple with the heroic labor of writing a great history.
And this was the achievement he was already meditating.
In the mean time he was studying history for its facts and principles, and fiction for its scenery and portraits. In “The North American Review” for July, 1847, is a long and characteristic article on Balzac, of whom he was an admirer, but with no blind worship. The readers of this great story-teller, who was so long in obtaining recognition, who “made twenty assaults upon fame and had forty books killed under him” before he achieved success, will find his genius fully appreciated and fairly weighed in this discriminating essay. A few brief extracts will show its quality.
unimpassioned, remorseless diagnosis of morbid phenomena, in his
cool method of treating the morbid anatomy of the heart, in his
curiously accurate dissection of the passions, in the patient and
painful attention with which, stethoscope in hand, finger on pulse,
eye everywhere, you see him watching every symptom, alive to every
sound and every breath, and in the scientific accuracy with which he
portrays the phenomena which have been the subject of his
investigation,—in all this calm and conscientious study of nature
he often reminds us of Goethe. Balzac, however, is only an artist
. . . He is neither moral nor immoral, but a calm and profound
observer of human society and human passions, and a minute, patient,
and powerful delineator of scenes and characters in the world before
his eyes. His readers must moralize for themselves. . . . It
is, perhaps, his defective style more than anything else which will
prevent his becoming a classic, for style above all other qualities
seems to embalm for posterity. As for his philosophy, his
principles, moral, political, or social, we repeat that he seems to
have none whatever. He looks for the picturesque and the striking.
He studies sentiments and sensations from an artistic point of view.
He is a physiognomist, a physiologist, a bit of an anatomist, a bit
of a mesmerist, a bit of a geologist, a Flemish painter, an
upholsterer, a micrological, misanthropical, sceptical philosopher;
but he is no moralist, and certainly no reformer.”
Another article contributed by Mr. Motley to “The North American Review” is to be found in the number for October, 1849. It is nominally a review of Talvi's (Mrs. Robinson's) “Geschichte der Colonisation von New England,” but in reality an essay on the Polity of the Puritans,—an historical disquisition on the principles of self-government evolved in New England, broad in its views, eloquent in its language. Its spirit is thoroughly American, and its estimate of the Puritan character is not narrowed by the nearsighted liberalism which sees the past in the pitiless light of the present,—which looks around at high noon and finds fault with early dawn for its long and dark shadows. Here is a sentence or two from the article:—
practical system. With all their foibles, with all their teasing,
tyrannical, and arbitrary notions, the Pilgrims were lovers of
liberty as well as sticklers for authority. . . . Nowhere can a
better description of liberty be found than that given by Winthrop,
in his defence of himself before the General Court on a charge of
arbitrary conduct. 'Nor would I have you mistake your own liberty,'
he says. 'There is a freedom of doing what we list, without regard
to law or justice; this liberty is indeed inconsistent with
authority; but civil, moral, and federal liberty consists in every
man's enjoying his property and having the benefit of the laws of
his country; which is very consistent with a due subjection to the
civil magistrate.' . . .
“We enjoy an inestimable advantage in America. One can be a
republican, a democrat, without being a radical. A radical, one who
would uproot, is a man whose trade is dangerous to society. Here is
but little to uproot. The trade cannot flourish. All classes are
conservative by necessity, for none can wish to change the structure
of our polity. . .
“The country without a past cannot be intoxicated by visions of the
past of other lands. Upon this absence of the past it seems to us
that much of the security of our institutions depends. Nothing
interferes with the development of what is now felt to be the true
principle of government, the will of the people legitimately
expressed. To establish that great truth, nothing was to be torn
down, nothing to be uprooted. It grew up in New England out of the
seed unconsciously planted by the first Pilgrims, was not crushed
out by the weight of a thousand years of error spread over the whole
continent, and the Revolution was proclaimed and recognized.”
VIII. 1847-1849. AEt. 33-35.
JOSEPH LEWIS STACKPOLE, THE FRIEND OF MOTLEY. HIS SUDDEN DEATH.—MOTLEY IN THE MASSACHUSETTS HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES.—SECOND NOVEL, “MERRY-MOUNT, A ROMANCE OF THE MASSACHUSETTS COLONY.”
The intimate friendships of early manhood are not very often kept up among our people. The eager pursuit of fortune, position, office, separates young friends, and the indoor home life imprisons them in the domestic circle so generally that it is quite exceptional to find two grown men who are like brothers,—or rather unlike most brothers, in being constantly found together. An exceptional instance of such a more than fraternal relation was seen in the friendship of Mr. Motley and Mr. Joseph Lewis Stackpole. Mr. William Amory, who knew them both well, has kindly furnished me with some recollections, which I cannot improve by changing his own language.
in 1835. In 1837 they married sisters, and this cemented their
intimacy, which continued to Stackpole's death in 1847. The
contrast in the temperament of the two friends—the one sensitive
and irritable, and the other always cool and good-natured—only
increased their mutual attachment to each other, and Motley's
dependence upon Stackpole. Never were two friends more constantly
together or more affectionately fond of each other. As Stackpole
was about eight years older than Motley, and much less impulsive and
more discreet, his death was to his friend irreparable, and at the
time an overwhelming blow.”
Mr. Stackpole was a man of great intelligence, of remarkable personal attractions, and amiable character. His death was a loss to Motley even greater than he knew, for he needed just such a friend, older, calmer, more experienced in the ways of the world, and above all capable of thoroughly understanding him and exercising a wholesome influence over his excitable nature without the seeming of a Mentor preaching to a Telemachus. Mr. Stackpole was killed by a railroad accident on the 20th of July, 1847.
In the same letter Mr. Amory refers to a very different experience in Mr. Motley's life,—his one year of service as a member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, 1849.
Massachusetts House of Representatives, I can recall only one thing,
to which he often and laughingly alluded. Motley, as the Chairman
of the Committee on Education, made, as he thought, a most masterly
report. It was very elaborate, and, as he supposed, unanswerable;
but Boutwell, then a young man from some country town [Groton,
Mass.], rose, and as Motley always said, demolished the report, so
that he was unable to defend it against the attack. You can imagine
his disgust, after the pains he had taken to render it unassailable,
to find himself, as he expressed it, 'on his own dunghill,'
ignominiously beaten. While the result exalted his opinion of the
speech-making faculty of a Representative of a common school
education, it at the same time cured him of any ambition for
political promotion in Massachusetts.”
To my letter of inquiry about this matter, Hon. George S. Boutwell courteously returned the following answer:—
MY DEAR SIR,—As my memory serves me, Mr. Motley was a member of the
Massachusetts House of Representatives in the year 1847 1849. It
may be well to consult the manual for that year. I recollect the
controversy over the report from the Committee on Education.
His failure was not due to his want of faculty or to the vigor of
his opponents.
In truth he espoused the weak side of the question and the unpopular
one also. His proposition was to endow the colleges at the expense
of the fund for the support of the common schools. Failure was
inevitable. Neither Webster nor Choate could have carried the bill.
Very truly,
GEO. S. BOUTWELL.
No one could be more ready and willing to recognize his own failures than Motley. He was as honest and manly, perhaps I may say as sympathetic with the feeling of those about him, on this occasion, as was Charles Lamb, who, sitting with his sister in the front of the pit, on the night when his farce was damned at its first representation, gave way to the common feeling, and hissed and hooted lustily with the others around him. It was what might be expected from his honest and truthful nature, sometimes too severe in judging itself.
The commendation bestowed upon Motley's historical essays in “The North American Review” must have gone far towards compensating him for the ill success of his earlier venture. It pointed clearly towards the field in which he was to gather his laurels. And it was in the year following the publication of the first essay, or about that time (1846), that he began collecting materials for a history of Holland. Whether to tell the story of men that have lived and of events that have happened, or to create the characters and invent the incidents of an imaginary tale be the higher task, we need not stop to discuss. But the young author was just now like the great actor in Sir Joshua's picture, between the allurements of Thalia and Melpomene, still doubtful whether he was to be a romancer or a historian.
The tale of which the title is given at the beginning of this section had been written several years before the date of its publication. It is a great advance in certain respects over the first novel, but wants the peculiar interest which belonged to that as a partially autobiographical memoir. The story is no longer disjointed and impossible. It is carefully studied in regard to its main facts. It has less to remind us of “Vivian Grey” and “Pelham,” and more that recalls “Woodstock” and “Kenilworth.” The personages were many of them historical, though idealized; the occurrences were many of them such as the record authenticated; the localities were drawn largely from nature. The story betrays marks of haste or carelessness in some portions, though others are elaborately studied. His preface shows that the reception of his first book had made him timid and sensitive about the fate of the second, and explains and excuses what might be found fault with, to disarm the criticism he had some reason to fear.
That old watch-dog of our American literature, “The North American Review,” always ready with lambent phrases in stately “Articles” for native talent of a certain pretension, and wagging its appendix of “Critical Notices” kindly at the advent of humbler merit, treated “Merry-Mount” with the distinction implied in a review of nearly twenty pages. This was a great contrast to the brief and slighting notice of “Morton's Hope.” The reviewer thinks the author's descriptive power wholly exceeds his conception of character and invention of circumstances.
landscape as it was before the stillness of the forest had been
broken by the axe of the settler; but the picture is so finely
drawn, with so much beauty of language and purity of sentiment, that
we cannot blame him for lingering upon the scene. . . . The
story is not managed with much skill, but it has variety enough of
incident and character, and is told with so much liveliness that few
will be inclined to lay it down before reaching the conclusion. .
. . The writer certainly needs practice in elaborating the details
of a consistent and interesting novel; but in many respects he is
well qualified for the task, and we shall be glad to meet him again
on the half-historical ground he has chosen. His present work,
certainly, is not a fair specimen of what he is able to accomplish,
and its failure, or partial success, ought only to inspirit him for
further effort.”
The “half-historical ground” he had chosen had already led him to the entrance into the broader domain of history. The “further effort” for which he was to be inspirited had already begun. He had been for some time, as was before mentioned, collecting materials for the work which was to cast all his former attempts into the kindly shadow of oblivion, save when from time to time the light of his brilliant after success is thrown upon them to illustrate the path by which it was at length attained.
IX. 1850. AEt. 36.
PLAN OF A HISTORY.—LETTERS.
The reputation of Mr. Prescott was now coextensive with the realm of scholarship. The histories of the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella and of the conquest of Mexico had met with a reception which might well tempt the ambition of a young writer to emulate it, but which was not likely to be awarded to any second candidate who should enter the field in rivalry with the great and universally popular historian. But this was the field on which Mr. Motley was to venture.
After he had chosen the subject of the history he contemplated, he found that Mr. Prescott was occupied with a kindred one, so that there might be too near a coincidence between them. I must borrow from Mr. Ticknor's beautiful life of Prescott the words which introduce a letter of Motley's to Mr. William Amory, who has kindly allowed me also to make use of it.
condition of things, and the consequent possibility that there might
be an untoward interference in their plans, he took the same frank
and honorable course with Mr. Prescott that Mr. Prescott had taken
in relation to Mr. Irving, when he found that they had both been
contemplating a 'History of the Conquest of Mexico.' The result was
the same. Mr. Prescott, instead of treating the matter as an
interference, earnestly encouraged Mr. Motley to go on, and placed
at his disposition such of the books in his library as could be most
useful to him. How amply and promptly he did it, Mr. Motley's own
account will best show. It is in a letter dated at Rome, 26th
February, 1859, the day he heard of Mr. Prescott's death, and was
addressed to his intimate friend, Mr. William Amory, of Boston, Mr.
Prescott's much-loved brother-in-law.”
“It seems to me but as yesterday,” Mr. Motley writes, “though it
must be now twelve years ago, that I was talking with our
ever-lamented friend Stackpole about my intention of writing a history
upon a subject to which I have since that time been devoting myself.
I had then made already some general studies in reference to it,
without being in the least aware that Prescott had the intention of
writing the 'History of Philip the Second.' Stackpole had heard the
fact, and that large preparations had already been made for the
work, although 'Peru' had not yet been published. I felt naturally
much disappointed. I was conscious of the immense disadvantage to
myself of making my appearance, probably at the same time, before
the public, with a work not at all similar in plan to 'Philip the
Second,' but which must of necessity traverse a portion of the same
ground.
“My first thought was inevitably, as it were, only of myself.
It seemed to me that I had nothing to do but to abandon at once a
cherished dream, and probably to renounce authorship. For I had not
first made up my mind to write a history, and then cast about to
take up a subject. My subject had taken me up, drawn me on, and
absorbed me into itself. It was necessary for me, it seemed, to
write the book I had been thinking much of, even if it were destined
to fall dead from the press, and I had no inclination or interest to
write any other. When I had made up my mind accordingly, it then
occurred to me that Prescott might not be pleased that I should come
forward upon his ground. It is true that no announcement of his
intentions had been made, and that he had not, I believe, even
commenced his preliminary studies for Philip. At the same time I
thought it would be disloyal on my part not to go to him at once,
confer with him on the subject, and if I should find a shadow of
dissatisfaction on his mind at my proposition, to abandon my plan
altogether.
“I had only the slightest acquaintance with him at that time. I was
comparatively a young man, and certainly not entitled on any ground
to more than the common courtesy which Prescott never could refuse
to any one. But he received me with such a frank and ready and
liberal sympathy, and such an open-hearted, guileless expansiveness,
that I felt a personal affection for him from that hour. I remember
the interview as if it had taken place yesterday. It was in his
father's house, in his own library, looking on the garden-house and
garden,—honored father and illustrious son,—alas! all numbered
with the things that were! He assured me that he had not the
slightest objection whatever to my plan, that he wished me every
success, and that, if there were any books in his library bearing on
my subject that I liked to use, they were entirely at my service.
After I had expressed my gratitude for his kindness and cordiality,
by which I had been in a very few moments set completely at ease,
—so far as my fears of his disapprobation went,—I also very
naturally stated my opinion that the danger was entirely mine, and
that it was rather wilful of me thus to risk such a collision at my
first venture, the probable consequence of which was utter
shipwreck. I recollect how kindly and warmly he combated this
opinion, assuring me that no two books, as he said, ever injured
each other, and encouraging me in the warmest and most earnest
manner to proceed on the course I had marked out for myself.
“Had the result of that interview been different,—had he distinctly
stated, or even vaguely hinted, that it would be as well if I should
select some other topic, or had he only sprinkled me with the cold
water of conventional and commonplace encouragement,—I should have
gone from him with a chill upon my mind, and, no doubt, have laid
down the pen at once; for, as I have already said, it was not that I
cared about writing a history, but that I felt an inevitable impulse
to write one particular history.
“You know how kindly he always spoke of and to me; and the generous
manner in which, without the slightest hint from me, and entirely
unexpected by me, he attracted the eyes of his hosts of readers to
my forthcoming work, by so handsomely alluding to it in the Preface
to his own, must be almost as fresh in your memory as it is in mine.
“And although it seems easy enough for a man of world-wide
reputation thus to extend the right hand of fellowship to an unknown
and struggling aspirant, yet I fear that the history of literature
will show that such instances of disinterested kindness are as rare
as they are noble.”
It was not from any feeling that Mr. Motley was a young writer from whose rivalry he had nothing to apprehend. Mr. Amory says that Prescott expressed himself very decidedly to the effect that an author who had written such descriptive passages as were to be found in Mr. Motley's published writings was not to be undervalued as a competitor by any one. The reader who will turn to the description of Charles River in the eighth chapter of the second volume of “Merry-Mount,” or of the autumnal woods in the sixteenth chapter of the same volume, will see good reason for Mr. Prescott's appreciation of the force of the rival whose advent he so heartily and generously welcomed.
X. 1851-1856. AEt. 37-42.
HISTORICAL STUDIES IN EUROPE.—LETTER FROM BRUSSELS.
After working for several years on his projected “History of the Dutch Republic,” he found that, in order to do justice to his subject, he must have recourse to the authorities to be found only in the libraries and state archives of Europe. In the year 1851 he left America with his family, to begin his task over again, throwing aside all that he had already done, and following up his new course of investigations at Berlin, Dresden, the Hague, and Brussels during several succeeding years. I do not know that I can give a better idea of his mode of life during this busy period, his occupations, his state of mind, his objects of interest outside of his special work, than by making the following extracts from a long letter to myself, dated Brussels, 20th November, 1853.
After some personal matters he continued:—
aught I know, may be very gay. I don't know a living soul in it.
We have not a single acquaintance in the place, and we glory in the
fact. There is something rather sublime in thus floating on a
single spar in the wide sea of a populous, busy, fuming, fussy world
like this. At any rate it is consonant to both our tastes. You may
suppose, however, that I find it rather difficult to amuse my
friends out of the incidents of so isolated an existence. Our daily
career is very regular and monotonous. Our life is as stagnant as a
Dutch canal. Not that I complain of it,—on the contrary, the canal
may be richly freighted with merchandise and be a short cut to the
ocean of abundant and perpetual knowledge; but, at the same time,
few points rise above the level of so regular a life, to be worthy
of your notice. You must, therefore, allow me to meander along the
meadows of commonplace. Don't expect anything of the impetuous and
boiling style. We go it weak here. I don't know whether you were
ever in Brussels. It is a striking, picturesque town, built up a
steep promontory, the old part at the bottom, very dingy and mouldy,
the new part at the top, very showy and elegant. Nothing can be
more exquisite in its way than the grande place in the very heart of
the city, surrounded with those toppling, zigzag, ten-storied
buildings bedizened all over with ornaments and emblems so peculiar
to the Netherlands, with the brocaded Hotel de Ville on one side,
with its impossible spire rising some three hundred and seventy feet
into the air and embroidered to the top with the delicacy of needle-
work, sugarwork, spider-work, or what you will. I haunt this place
because it is my scene, my theatre. Here were enacted so many deep
tragedies, so many stately dramas, and even so many farces, which
have been familiar to me so long that I have got to imagine myself
invested with a kind of property in the place, and look at it as if
it were merely the theatre with the coulisses, machinery, drapery,
etc., for representing scenes which have long since vanished, and
which no more enter the minds of the men and women who are actually
moving across its pavements than if they had occurred in the moon.
When I say that I knew no soul in Brussels I am perhaps wrong. With
the present generation I am not familiar. 'En revanche,' the dead
men of the place are my intimate friends. I am at home in any
cemetery. With the fellows of the sixteenth century I am on the
most familiar terms. Any ghost that ever flits by night across the
moonlight square is at once hailed by me as a man and a brother. I
call him by his Christian name at once. When you come out of this
place, however, which, as I said, is in the heart of the town,—the
antique gem in the modern setting,—you may go either up or down.
If you go down, you will find yourself in the very nastiest
complications of lanes and culs-de-sac possible, a dark entanglement
of gin-shops, beer-houses, and hovels, through which charming valley
dribbles the Senne (whence, I suppose, is derived Senna), the most
nauseous little river in the world, which receives all the
outpourings of all the drains and houses, and is then converted into
beer for the inhabitants, all the many breweries being directly upon
its edge. If you go up the hill instead of down, you come to an
arrangement of squares, palaces, and gardens as trim and fashionable
as you will find in Europe. Thus you see that our Cybele sits with
her head crowned with very stately towers and her feet in a tub of
very dirty water.
“My habits here for the present year are very regular. I came here,
having, as I thought, finished my work, or rather the first Part
(something like three or four volumes, 8vo), but I find so much
original matter here, and so many emendations to make, that I am
ready to despair. However, there is nothing for it but to
penelopize, pull to pieces, and stitch away again. Whatever may be
the result of my labor, nobody can say that I have not worked like
a brute beast,—but I don't care for the result. The labor is in
itself its own reward and all I want. I go day after day to the
archives here (as I went all summer at the Hague), studying the old
letters and documents of the fifteenth century. Here I remain among
my fellow-worms, feeding on these musty mulberry-leaves, out of
which we are afterwards to spin our silk. How can you expect
anything interesting from such a human cocoon? It is, however, not
without its amusement in a mouldy sort of way, this reading of dead
letters. It is something to read the real, bona fide signs-manual
of such fellows as William of Orange, Count Egmont, Alexander
Farnese, Philip II., Cardinal Granvelle, and the rest of them. It
gives a 'realizing sense,' as the Americans have it. . . . There
are not many public resources of amusement in this place,—if we
wanted them,—which we don't. I miss the Dresden Gallery very much,
and it makes me sad to think that I shall never look at the face of
the Sistine Madonna again,—that picture beyond all pictures in the
world, in which the artist certainly did get to heaven and painted a
face which was never seen on earth—so pathetic, so gentle, so
passionless, so prophetic. . . . There are a few good Rubenses
here,—but the great wealth of that master is in Antwerp. The great
picture of the Descent from the Cross is free again, after having
been ten years in the repairing room. It has come out in very good
condition. What a picture? It seems to me as if I had really stood
at the cross and seen Mary weeping on John's shoulder, and Magdalen
receiving the dead body of the Saviour in her arms. Never was the
grand tragedy represented in so profound and dramatic a manner. For
it is not only in his color in which this man so easily surpasses
all the world, but in his life-like, flesh-and-blood action,—the
tragic power of his composition. And is it not appalling to think
of the 'large constitution of this man,' when you reflect on the
acres of canvas which he has covered? How inspiriting to see with
what muscular, masculine vigor this splendid Fleming rushed in and
plucked up drowning Art by the locks when it was sinking in the
trashy sea of such creatures as the Luca Giordanos and Pietro
Cortonas and the like. Well might Guido exclaim, 'The fellow mixes
blood with his colors! . . . How providentially did the man come
in and invoke living, breathing, moving men and women out of his
canvas! Sometimes he is ranting and exaggerated, as are all men of
great genius who wrestle with Nature so boldly. No doubt his
heroines are more expansively endowed than would be thought genteel
in our country, where cryptogams are so much in fashion,
nevertheless there is always something very tremendous about him,
and very often much that is sublime, pathetic, and moving. I defy
any one of the average amount of imagination and sentiment to stand
long before the Descent from the Cross without being moved more
nearly to tears than he would care to acknowledge. As for color,
his effects are as sure as those of the sun rising in a tropical
landscape. There is something quite genial in the cheerful sense of
his own omnipotence which always inspired him. There are a few fine
pictures of his here, and I go in sometimes of a raw, foggy morning
merely to warm myself in the blaze of their beauty.”
I have been more willing to give room to this description of Rubens's pictures and the effect they produced upon Motley, because there is a certain affinity between those sumptuous and glowing works of art and the prose pictures of the historian who so admired them. He was himself a colorist in language, and called up the image of a great personage or a splendid pageant of the past with the same affluence, the same rich vitality, that floods and warms the vast areas of canvas over which the full-fed genius of Rubens disported itself in the luxury of imaginative creation.