The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination

by DANIEL J. BOORSTIN

  Parkman had been attracted by his love of the forest, an unconventional enthusiasm for a New England Brahmin. His grandfather was one of the richest Boston merchants, his father the minister of the New North Church. And his mother was descended from the Reverend John Cotton, the Patriarch of New England, who had defended the magistrates against troublemakers like Roger Williams. The sickly but hyperactive Frank was sent at the age of eight to live with his maternal grandfather, Nathaniel Hall, in neighboring Medford on the ancestral estate that bordered six thousand acres of wild woodland. “I walked twice a day to a school of high but undeserved reputation, in the town of Medford. Here I learned very little, and spent the intervals of schooling more profitably in collecting eggs, insects, and reptiles, trapping squirrels and woodchucks, and making persistent though rarely fortunate attempts to kill birds with arrows.” This first taste of the domesticated wilderness stirred his interest in the wilder wilderness, its inhabitants and their ways. After four years his father brought him back to Boston to the Chauncy Hall School to prepare for the Harvard entrance examinations.

  He inevitably entered Harvard, “the center of the intellectual aristocracy of our country,” in the class of 1844. There he studied Latin, Greek, mathematics, natural and ancient history, and a modern language. Longfellow was lecturing on French and Spanish literature. The pioneer professor of history, Jared Sparks, was teaching a new university subject, the American Revolution. Parkman received highest honors in History.

  Since college “athletics” did not exist—Harvard had not yet put its first boat on the Charles, baseball and football were still decades in the future, and there was no proper gymnasium—students had to find their exercise off campus. By the time his successor historian of the West, Theodore Roosevelt, came to Harvard, athletics would be well established. The undergraduate Parkman eagerly returned to the wilderness paths that he had come to love as a boy. At Harvard he would study early by candlelight so he could be outdoors when the sun was up. In the summer of his sophomore year, he took off from Albany with a friend, visited the battlefields of the French and Indian Wars around Lake George and Lake Champlain, crossed Vermont and New Hampshire into Canada, and then returned to Cambridge via Mount Katahdin in Maine. At eighteen he was already keeping a journal of his adventures, of sleeping outdoors and living off the country. He later attributed his painful harvest of physical ailments, disabling headaches, insomnia, and blindness, to one strenuous undergraduate excursion when he spent three days and nights in the woods in the rain without shelter after his spruce-bark canoe had fallen apart.

  The avalanche of his ills, as his biographers explain, seems to have come from his relentless determination to make his easy Boston life into a struggle. Wealth and social position had smoothed his path to a literary career. But he seems to have enjoyed making his simplest literary task a battle against obstacles. Even in Harvard’s primitive gymnasium, which offered nothing but gymnastics, he overstrained himself. He idealized struggle, the heroic, the dangerous, and the masculine, which helps explain his passionate opposition to woman suffrage. If a struggle did not offer itself, he somehow managed to create one. His tendency toward depression, headaches, and weak eyesight appears to have run in his family. But he built up his ills to dramatize his life. His letters expand on his heart trouble, depression, headaches, semiblindness, insomnia, water on the knee, rheumatism, and arthritis. He had “so thoroughly studied his own case” that the famous Dr. S. Weir Mitchell had no help to offer. Somehow the one ailment Parkman never imagined for himself was hypochondria. The shadow of Prescott was always with him. Both had impaired eyesight. But Parkman thought his own worsening disability outdid Prescott’s. “Prescott could see a little—confound him and he could even look over his proofs, but I am no better off than an owl in the sunlight.”

  By his senior year at Harvard, Parkman’s family, alarmed at his ailments, hoped to cure him by sending him on a European grand tour. At Rome he saw the pope, and managed to spend a brief tour in a monastery of the Passionist monks, “the strictest of the orders of monks—wear haircloth next the skin—lash their backs with ‘disciplines’ made of little iron chains, and mortify the flesh in various other similar ways.” The medal they had given him, to bring on a vision of the Virgin, had not worked in their kind efforts to convert him. Later when he came to know the Sioux he said he preferred them to the monks. Still, the Rome experience, and visits to the church of the Benedictines in Messina, gave this son of a Congregational minister “new ideas of the Catholic Church. Not exactly, for I reverenced it before as the religion of brave and great men—but now I honor it for itself. They are mistaken who sneer at its ceremonies as a mere mechanical farce; they have a powerful and salutary effect on the mind.”

  Returning home, after Harvard College he went on to the Law School. After receiving his law degree in 1846, he was invited by his cousin Quincy A. Shaw on a strenuous hunting expedition to the Far West. Despite his ailments, Parkman eagerly accepted. This would be the crucial experience of his life, his baptism into the culture of the American Indian and his first encounter with frontiersmen, soldiers, and emigrants. All these would figure in his Oregon Trail, the first classic of the American West, of American frontiersmen on their way. The Shaw party went by steamboat and horseback from St. Louis to Fort Laramie, Wyoming, where they found an encampment of Sioux. There Parkman and his guide left the party and joined the Sioux, sharing their food, their life, and their buffalo hunts for some weeks. So he learned the Indian ways of a tribe similar to the Iroquois, about whom he would be writing, and that was still in the “unspoiled” condition in which Champlain and La Salle would have met the Iroquois.

  Parkman returned in even worse health than when he had left. His eyesight had suffered from the glaring sun of the high plains and he was so weakened by dysentery contracted from the Sioux diet that he had barely been able to keep his seat in the saddle on the rocky buffalo hunts. In Boston, like Prescott, he dictated The Oregon Trail as his sisters or Quincy Shaw read him his notes. After serial publication in 1847, it appeared as a book in 1849, and has never ceased to appeal. During the next two years he tried to recover his health, but then relentlessly returned to the projected twenty-year plan for his history of France and England in North America. In 1850 he married Catherine Bigelow of an old New England family. Both she and their son died in 1858, plunging him into a deep depression. Four years would pass before he could return to his writing.

  Meanwhile, in 1851 he had published The Conspiracy of Pontiac, the first volume of his large plan. He described his problems in writing. “The difficulties were threefold: an extreme weakness of sight, disabling him even from writing his name except with eyes closed; a condition of the brain prohibiting fixed attention except at occasional and brief intervals; and an exhaustion and total derangement of the nervous system producing of necessity a mood of mind most unfavorable to effort.” For writing he relied on a noctograph similar to Prescott’s except that instead of carbonated paper he used “a blacklead crayon” with which he could write “not unlegibly with closed eyes.” To avoid strain on him his readers dared not read to him much more than a half hour at a time, and days passed when he could not listen at all. For the first six months his composition averaged about six lines a day. Then his health improved and he could compose “while pacing in the twilight of a large garret, the only exercise which the sensitive condition of his sight permitted him on an unclouded day while the sun was above the horizon.” In two and a half years, the book was completed.

  He had chosen to write the Pontiac first though it was the last in chronological order of his series. Perhaps he feared he might not live to produce the earlier volumes. Pontiac’s conspiracy, the final great explosion of Indian power in the conflict between British and French for North America, provided a climactic conclusion “affording better opportunities than any other portion of American history for portraying forest life and the Indian Character, and I have never seen reason to change th
is opinion.” His mentor, Professor Jared Sparks, congratulated him on “a striking picture of the influence of war, and religious bigotry, upon savage and semi-barbarous minds,” but missed “a word or two of indignation now and then.” Parkman had paid for having the book set in type, and it was published but sold only slowly.

  When Parkman returned to writing in 1862, he picked up his large plan and doggedly turned out the seven volumes of his historic drama beginning with Pioneers of France in the New World (1865) and concluding with Montcalm and Wolfe (1884) and A Half Century of Conflict (1892). As his readers increased, so did his fame. His production, prodigious under any circumstances, was miraculous with his handicaps. Ailments multiplied with age. When arthritis and water on the knee made it hard for him to walk, he pursued horticulture from a wheelchair in his three-acre garden at Jamaica Pond. He developed his own varieties of lilies, rhododendrons, and apples. After writing his Book of Roses (1866) and numerous articles, he was appointed professor of horticulture at Harvard.

  In the tradition of Gibbon and Prescott, Parkman’s achievement was seeing the human and the personal in the great movements of history. The rise of a profession of American history brought criticism for his not being interested enough in the Westward Movement, which became a professional icon, an original species of historical thinking. But Parkman would not let his story become the victim of demography, sociology, or professional jargon. He too was an atomic historian, focusing on the ultimate human unit. With few exceptions, the titles of his works featured the heroic figures—the Pioneers of France, the Jesuits, La Salle, Count Frontenac, Montcalm, and Wolfe. Never professionally “trained” as a historian, he never lost the enthusiasm of the amateur. And he wrote before the rise of academic history would make readability suspect. Just as Gibbon had been engaged by the spectacle of Roman grandeur in decline, and Prescott by a new Spanish empire in creation, Parkman was entranced by the wilderness struggles of France and England in North America in the making of a new freer world. If Parkman did not show enough indignation to satisfy Jared Sparks, or enough “philosophy” to satisfy the Congregational apostle Theodore Parker, he dramatized a grand conflict between the ideals of Absolutism, Rome and France on one side and those of Liberty, Protestantism, and England on the other—acted out on the novel scene of the American wilderness. And he showed charity, sympathy, and tolerance for all those in the battle.

  His masterpiece, Montcalm and Wolfe (two volumes, 1884), described the decisive battle in the struggle for Canada. “In making Canada a citadel of a state religion … the clerical monitors of the Crown robbed their country of a trans-Atlantic empire. New France could not grow with a priest on guard at the gate to let in none but such as pleased him.… France built its best colony on a principle of exclusion and failed; England reversed the system and succeeded.” Henry Adams said this book put Parkman “in the front rank of living English historians” in an age when history flourished. Parkman explained that he had studied the subject “as much from life and in the open air as the library table.” On his continentwide wilderness battleground, Parkman luxuriated in accounts of his heroes sacrificing their lives. So he depicted the martyrdom of Father Jogues and the death of La Salle “in the vigor of his manhood at the age of forty-three.”

  The Battle for Quebec on the Plains of Abraham in 1759 gave Parkman the opportunity to depict the death in battle of two heroes. In his last hours the English commander Wolfe, after being felled by three shots, mustered strength to cut off the enemies’ retreat. “ ‘Now God be praised, I will die in peace!’ And in a few moments his gallant soul had fled.” On the other side, “In the night of humiliation,” when the French forces had abandoned Quebec,

  Montcalm was breathing his last within its walls. When he was brought wounded from the field, he was placed in the house of the Surgeon Arnoux … whose younger brother, also a surgeon, examined the wound and pronounced it mortal. “I am glad of it,” Montcalm said quietly; and then asked how long he had to live. “Twelve hours, more or less,” was the reply. “So much the better,” he returned. “I am happy that I shall not live to see the surrender of Quebec.” He is reported to have said that since he had lost the battle it consoled him to have been defeated by so brave an enemy.…

  A restless admirer of the heroic, Parkman had celebrated it in his own career.

  Supported most of his life by his family inheritance, he lived simply. But he welcomed his two-thousand-dollar-a-year salary as Harvard’s new professor of horticulture. He never taught history or lectured for money. The royalties from his books never helped much, since he spent the profits from one volume to copy documents for the next.

  But he basked in the admiration of connoisseurs. Henry James, “fascinated from the first page to the last” by Montcalm and Wolfe, found it “a truly noble book.” Theodore Roosevelt dedicated his Winning of the West to Parkman, who had provided “models for all historical treatment of the founding of new communities and the growth of the frontier here in the wilderness,” and compared him with Gibbon. It was lucky that the talents of an American Gibbon were engaged in chronicling the rise of Jefferson’s Empire for Liberty while the drama was still visible. As John Fiske prophesied, “The book which depicts at once the social life of the Stone Age and the victory of the English political ideal over the ideal which France inherited from imperial Rome, is a book for all mankind and for all time.”

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  A Mosaic of Novels

  As historians added their visions of the past to the human comedy, novelists created wide-angle mirrors for their readers and their times. The rapid improvement in the technology of printing in the nineteenth century made the book a popular vehicle for a new reading public, as hungry for an imaginary drama as for piquant rumors and the latest news. Now authors, with the aid of publishers and sales figures, received speedy feedback. They could know quickly what their readers liked, and were increasingly tempted to give them whatever they wanted. The author-creator himself became the audience of his audience.

  Unlike great literary creations of earlier centuries—of Dante, Rabelais, Cervantes, and Milton—the novelists’ new versions of the human comedy would not be monolithic. The emphatically secular world of the vernacular, of everybody’s here-and-now, had to be created and re-created piecemeal. And the reading public’s human comedy would always be unfinished. “Nothing in the world exists in a single block,” wrote Balzac. “Everything is a mosaic. The history of the past may be told in chronological sequence, but you cannot apply the same method to the moving present.”

  The idea of a comprehensive human comedy came to Honoré de Balzac almost as an afterthought. Some might even call it a marketing notion. In 1841, when the great bulk of his novels had already been written, he signed a contract with a group of French publishers to publish all his works under the title La Comédie humaine. Before then he had grouped together novels and stories under inclusive titles, such as “Scenes of Private Life,” “Scenes of Paris Life,” “Scenes of Provincial Life.” His first notion was to call his complete works “Études sociales.” But a recollection of Dante, whose Comedy later generations called Divine, suggested to Balzac around 1839 that he distinguish his kind of Comedy by calling it Human. He succeeded in borrowing a Dantesque dignity for his earthly world.

  Balzac’s title proved appropriate for his many-sided saga of the people of his time. As a frustrated playwright who saw his work in “scenes,” he also may have intended the theatrical analogy. But while Shakespeare’s plays could be parsed into Histories, Comedies, and Tragedies, Balzac’s novels did not fit the familiar dramatic categories. Calling himself the Secretary of Society, he thought all his works were a kind of history. While his broad sense of the ridiculous provided what for ancient Greece was the raw material of comedy, his overarching sense of fate and dominant circumstance made all his novels a form of tragedy. Now that literature had become popular, the scholars’ neat categories would no longer do. The novel revealed the confusions of daily
experience.

  Balzac himself was a prodigy. In his short fifty-one years (1799–1850) he wrote ninety-two novels, scores of short stories, and a half-dozen plays. Believing that “all excesses are brothers,” he showed that Paris “has only two rhythms: self-interest or vanity.” Balzac’s own life was dominated by contradictory passions, for love and for fame, for mystic unity and for the chaos of everyday facts. No one more effectively depicted the destructive power of “money, the only god we now believe in,” yet no one was more hungry for money than Balzac. A willing victim of the mystic Mesmer and other cloudy dogmas, he was still an enthusiastic student of things. “I have learned more from Balzac,” wrote Friedrich Engels, “than from all the professional historians, economists, and statisticians put together.” But for Henry James he was the gold-plated “towering idol” from whom he had “learned more of the lessons of the engaging mystery of fiction than from anyone else.” In tune with his declaration that “in every life there is only one true love,” Balzac repeatedly professed eternal love to the woman he was addressing at the moment. But he kept in reserve his bedroom or banknote passion for secret favorites. Next to love, what he professed to love most was fame through the generations. Yet he schemed for the baubles of celebrity and social precedence. His life was a perfect Balzac novel.

  He had a talent for making every experience a point of departure for another novel, and few people he knew escaped becoming figures in his novels. “I have undertaken the history of a whole society. I have often described my plan in this one sentence: ‘A generation is a drama with four or five thousand outstanding characters.’ That drama is my book.” He did not quite come up to that number, but there are about two thousand characters in the novels and stories that make up his human comedy.