Collected Essays (34 page)

5 July 1872. (Stanley by this time had come and gone.) ‘Weary! Weary!’ – but there were still ten months to go.

All the last months of the seven years’ trek were spent in a flat prairie waste of water; the earth, what there was of it was like adhesive plaster. In one night six inches of rain fell. Canoes sank and stuck; tents became rotten, clothes were never dry. There are moments when the reader feels as though Livingstone had forgotten his true purpose, which was not to explore the limit of human endurance but to reach the Lualaba river and sail down it in the hope that it might lead him to the Nile and its sources (even that was only a means to the great white trade routes, the blessings as he believed of commerce, the end of slavery). He was in Childe Roland’s territory now – ‘a lion wandered into this world of water and anthills and roared night and morning’. What a long way he had come from the gracefully curved fronds, the magnificent streams, the lofty palmyra towers. Like Stevenson struggling with
Weir
he had reached rock at the moment of death.

The comparison between these two Scotsmen is oddly close. Under the literary polish of the Vailima Prayers was a simplicity of faith very similar to Livingstone’s. Does it come from a Scottish upbringing – this ability to feel regret without remorse, to pardon oneself and accept one’s weakness, the ability to leave oneself to God? ‘For our sins forgiven or prevented, for our shame unpublished, we bless and thank Thee, O God.’ Thus Stevenson, and thus Livingstone:

We now end 1866. It has not been so fruitful or useful as I intended. Will try to do better in 1867, and be better – more gentle and loving. And may the Almighty, to whom I commit my way, bring my desires to pass, and prosper me. Let all the sins of ’66 be blotted out for Jesus’ sake.

At the end they shared the same sense of failure. Who suffered more? Stevenson two months before his death writing, ‘I am a fictitious article and have long known it. I am read by journalists, by my fellow novelists, and by boys’, or Livingstone finding himself embroiled in the slave trade he hated: ‘I am heart sore and sick of human blood. . . . I doubt whether the divine favour and will is on my side.’

For the end their wish was the same. It is impossible not to recall the grave on Mount Vaea and the over-familiar verses. ‘Here he lies where he longed to be’, when we read in Livingstone’s journal on 25 June 1868:

We came to a grave in the forest. It was a little rounded mound, as if the occupant sat in it. It was strewn over with flour, and a number of large beads had been put on it. A little path showed that it had visitors. That is the sort of grave I should prefer. To lie in the still, still forest, with no hand ever to disturb my bones. Graves at home seem to me miserable and without elbow room, especially those in cold, damp clay.

Stevenson’s wishes were the more respected, for Livingstone’s embalmed body was brought home to the damp clay and the lack of elbow room in the nave of Westminster Abbey.

Less than a hundred years have gone by since Livingstone’s death and we can see the measure of his failure in East Africa today. The trade routes have been opened up, the slave trade abolished, but the true lesson of Livingstone’s life was completely forgotten. ‘In attempting their moral elevation’, Livingstone wrote of the Africans, ‘it is always more conductive to the end desired that the teacher should come unaccompanied by any power to cause either jealousy or fear.’ In the same book he wrote, ‘Good manners are as necessary among barbarians as among the civilized’, but during those weeks in Stanley’s company he had failed to influence his companion except superficially. It was to Stanley and his Maxim guns and rawhide whips that the future in East Africa belonged, and it was Stanley’s methods that left a legacy of hatred and distrust throughout Africa.

1954

FRANCIS PARKMAN

‘M
Y
23rd Birthday. Nooned at a mud puddle.’ So Parkman noted in his journal
*3
in 1846, and we shall look far for any comparable passage in the diaries of a creative artist. Certainly the wind has never played quite so freely at a historian’s birth. The smell of documents, the hard feel of the desk-chair, are singularly absent. Parkman had already ridden for three weeks on the arduous and dangerous Oregon trail, and in an earlier passage, a week or two back, he had let his imagination dwell on the vast range of experience already crossed between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two.

Shaw and Henry went off for buffaloes. H. Killed two bulls. The Capt. very nervous and old-womanish at nooning – he did not like the look of the hills, which were at least half a mile off – there might be Inds. there, ready to pounce on the horses. In the afternoon, rode among the hills – plenty of antelope – lay on the barren ridge of one of them, and contrasted my present situation with my situation in the convent at Rome.

Surely no other historian has planned his life work so young nor learned to write so hard a way. At the age of eighteen the whole scheme of his great work
France and England in North America
had captured his consciousness; there remained only to gather his material and to begin. One remembers the immense importance that Gibbon’s biographers have attributed to his gentlemanly service in the Hampshire Militia, but what are we to think of a young historian who, before starting to write his first volume.
The Conspiracy of Pontiac
, finds it necessary to make the long journey to Europe and Rome, there to stay in a Passionist monastery so that he may attain some imaginative sympathy with the Catholic missionaries who are the heroes of his second volume (published twenty-four years later) and after that to undertake his journey along the Oregon trail in quest of Indian lore, thus ruining his health for a lifetime in the mere gathering of background material?

Parkman was an uncertain stylist (as the admirable editor of these journals writes: ‘There seems to have been a natural instinct for the phrase that is just a shade too high, just as his ear was naturally faulty’), but his errors of taste are carried away by the great drive of his narrative, much as they are in the case of Motley and in our own day Mr Churchill. He had ridden off through the dangerous wilderness with a single companion, like one of the heroes of his epic or a character in Fenimore Cooper, who had woken his genius, he had eaten dog with the Indians and stayed in their moving villages, he had watched the tribes gather for war and heard the news of traders’ deaths brought in. He had listened to Big Crow’s own account of his savagery – ‘he has killed 14 men; and dwells with great satisfaction on the capture of a Utah, whom he took personally; and, with the other Sioux, scalped alive, cut the tendons of his wrist, and flung, still alive, into a great fire.’ Since the seventeenth century no historian had so lived and suffered for his art. Like Prescott he all but lost his sight, so that he was forced to use a wire grid to guide his pencil, he suffered from misanthropy and a melancholia that snaps out like a dog even from his early journals (‘the little contemptible faces – the thin, weak tottering figures – that one meets here on Broadway, are disgusting. One feels savage with human nature’). The work planned at eighteen, begun at twenty-eight, was only finished at fifty-nine, in the year before his death, by working against time and his own health. This was a poet’s vocation, followed with a desperate intensity careless of consequences, and the journals are as important in tracing the course of the creative impulse as the journals of Henry James. And how closely we are reminded of the James family and their strange melancholia when we read in one of Parkman’s letters:

Between 1852 and 1860 this cerebral rebellion passed through great and seemingly capricious fluctuation. It had its ebbs and floods Slight and sometimes imperceptible causes would produce an access which sometimes lasted with little respite for months. When it was in its milder moods, I used the opportunity to collect material and prepare ground for the future work, should work ever become practicable. When it was at its worst, the condition was not enviable. I could neither listen to reading nor engage in conversation even of the lightest. Sleep was difficult, and was often banished entirely for one or two nights during which the brain was apt to be in a state of abnormal activity which had to be repressed at any cost, since thought produced the intensest torture. The effort required to keep the irritated organ quiet was so fatiguing that I occasionally rose and spent hours in the open air, where I found distraction and relief watching the policemen and the tramps on the Malls of Boston Common, at the risk of passing for a tramp myself. Towards the end of the night this cerebral excitation would seem to tire itself out, and give place to a condition of weight and oppression much easier to bear.

Mr Mason Wade is an impeccable editor, sensitive to the qualities of Parkman’s style, its merits as well as its demerits, learned in his subject, passionately industrious in tracing the most transient character. His notes are often as fascinating as the text – on ‘Old Dick’ for example, an odd job man on Lake George, who collected rattlesnakes and exhibited them in a box inscribed: ‘In this box a Rattel Snaick Hoo was Kecht on Black mountaing. He is seven years old last July. Admittance sixpence site. Children half price, or notten,’ or on that strange character, Joseph Brant, alias Thayendanegea, Mohawk chief and freemason, who on one occasion saved from the stake a fellow mason who gave him the right sign. Brant was entertained by Boswell and painted by Romney. What a long way such a character seems from the murderers of the Jesuit Brébeuf (they baptized him with boiling water, cut strips of flesh from his living body and ate them, and opened his breast and drank his blood before he died).

Mr Wade himself discovered these journals, with the romantic and paradoxical simplicity of a Chesterton detective story, in Parkman’s old Boston home on Chestnut Street.

Parkman’s Indian trophies still hung on the walls; the bookcases still held the well-worn editions of Byron, Cooper, and Scott which were his life-long favourites; and in the centre of the room, covered with a dust sheet, stood the desk on which the great histories had been written. This desk was two-sided; the drawers on one side had obviously been inspected and emptied of most of their contents . . . the drawers on the other side had been overlooked; they contained the missing journals and a great mass of correspondence, including some of the most important letters Parkman wrote and received.

For the general reader the most interesting of Mr Wade’s discoveries is Parkman’s journal of the Oregon Trail which Mr Wade rightly prefers to the work based on it – Parkman’s first and most popular book, popular because of the way in which it was adulterated to suit the fashion of the time by his friend Charles Eliot Norton, ‘carefully bowdlerized of much anthropological data and many insights into Western life which seemed too crude to his delicate taste’. Mr Wade quotes several examples of these changes from the vivid fluid journal to the stilted literary tones – the false Cooperisms – of the book. These Cooperisms, still evident in
The Conspiracy of Pontiac
, Parkman gradually shed. Life and literature at the beginning lay uneasily with a sword between them, so that nothing in the early books has the same sense of individual speech and character that we find in the journals. Here from the journals is a certain Mr Smith of Palermo:

‘Don’t tell me about your Tarpeian rock. I’ve seen it, and what’s more, the feller wanted I should give him half a dollar for taking me there. “Now look here!” says I, “do you s’pose I’m going to pay you for showing me this old pile of stones? I can see better rocks than this any day, for nothing; so clear out!” I’ll tell you the way I do,’ continued Mr Smith, ‘I don’t go and
look
and
stare
as some people do when I get inside of a church, but I pace off the length and breadth, and then set it down on paper. Then, you see, I’ve got something that will keep.’

And here is an old soldier near the Canadian Border:

On entering the bar-room, an old man with a sunburnt wrinkled face and no teeth, a little straw hat set on one side of his grey head – and who was sitting on a chair leaning his elbows on his knees and straddling his legs apart – thus addressed me: ‘Hullo! hullo! What’s again’ on, now? Ye ain’t off to the wars already, be ye? Ther’ ain’t no war now as I knows on, though there’s agoin’ to be one afore long, as damned bloody as ever was fit this side o’ hell!’ . . . He then began to speak of some of his neighbours, one of whom he mentioned as ‘that G—d damnedest, sneakingest, nastiest puppy that ever went this side of hell!’ Another he likened to a ‘sheep’s cod dried’; another was ‘not fit to carry guts to a bear’.

Only with his third book –
The Jesuits in North America
– did the marriage satisfactorily take place. In the deeply moving
Relations
of the Jesuits that form the greater part of his material he found again the power of characteristic speech: like that of the tortured priest Bressani who wrote with bitter humour to his Superior. ‘I could not have believed that a man was so hard to kill’, and in another letter of ironic apology to the Jesuit General in safe Rome: ‘I don’t know if your Paternity will recognize the handwriting of one whom you once knew very well. The letter is soiled and ill-written; because the writer had only one finger of his right hand left entire, and cannot prevent the blood from his wounds, which are still open, from staining the paper. His ink is gunpowder mixed with water and his table is the earth.’

By this time, too, Parkman had learned the value of bald narrative:

Noel Chabanel came later to the mission: for he did not reach the Huron country until 1643. He detested the Indian life – the smoke, the vermin, the filthy food, the impossibility of privacy. He could not study by the smoky lodge-fire, among the noisy crowd of men and squaws, with their dogs, and their restless, screeching children. He had a natural inaptitude to learning the language, and laboured at it for five years with scarcely a sign of progress. The Devil whispered a suggestion into his ear: Let him procure his release from these barren and revolting toils, and return to France, where congenial and useful employments awaited him. Chabanel refused to listen; and when the temptation still beset him he bound himself by a solemn vow to remain in Canada to the day of his death.