IN

FRANCIS PARKMAN

1823-1893

N the 'Life of Francis Parkman,' by Charles Haight Farnham, it is related of him that 'he had an especial fondness for the Saturday Club, where he met a few intimate friends in the freest and most informal intercourse.' Mr. Farnham's excellent biography touches with more detail upon Parkman's social instincts and qualities. 'He lacked the overflowing geniality and magnetism needed to set the social currents flowing in a large company or club, as well as the special talents required in a successful dinerout.' Yet 'people regarded him as a "good fellow" - which nobody would think of denying in the light of the following words from Mr. Farnham's book: 'He used to tell of a visit he made to a court-room, where one of his friends sat on the bench, arrayed in his robes and stiffened with official grandeur. Parkman winked at him on entering, and enjoyed immensely the pompous immobility of his old friend in failing to respond. He knew and remembered everything which affected those with whom he was intimate; knew their children and grandchildren by name and character, and never forgot to inquire after them.'

The ready accessibility of the biography of Parkman renders a detailed memoir of him in this place superfluous. In its stead it is the good fortune of the following pages to present for the first time within the covers of a book the text of an address written by Professor Bliss Perry for the Parkman Centenary Celebration of 1923 in Montreal, printed in the Yale Review of April, 1924, and reprinted here by special permission of that quarterly.

SOME PERSONAL QUALITIES OF FRANCIS PARKMAN

It is thirty years since Francis Parkman died. A few elderly Bostonians recall that gallant crippled figure, with the keen gray eyes and the chin thrust forward, as he marched rapidly with his two canes along Chestnut or Charles Street, stopping every few rods

to rest against a fence. It was agony for him to walk, it was a worse agony to sit still. Yet his proud face gave no sign. He had a smile for an old friend and for every child, and if there were roses in any window, his eye quickened, but he hobbled on, through those streets already submerged by the tide of alien immigrants, a patrician, a Puritan of the Puritans, remote, inscrutable, indomitable. Thanks to the autobiographical fragments which Parkman left to the keeping of the Massachusetts Historical Society, thanks to that Society's remarkable collection of his note-books and manuscript sources, and to Farnham's painstaking biography, we may know this reserved and secretive man better than did his contemporaries. We know now the history of that athletic but wrongly disciplined body, that passionate but hard mind, that unbroken will which made him choose his life-work at eighteen and follow it until he pencilled on a few slips of orange-colored paper, in his seventieth year, his last notes for a revised edition. It is impossible here to tell the detailed story of his life or to weigh carefully his merits as a historian. Nevertheless, one may venture to point out a few personal qualities which entered into the very texture of his books.

Enough has been made of Parkman's boyish passion for the woods as related to his later development, but not enough has been made of his early reading in its relation to his task as a historian. The young Parkman was a Romantic. He tells us in an autobiographical sketch that his first ambition was to be a poet, then a novelist, and that he turned to history as a third choice. He read Byron, Scott, Chateaubriand, Cooper. I find the trace of Byron everywhere in his earliest books, such as 'The Oregon Trail' and 'Vassall Morton.' When Quincy Shaw offered him three books to read at Fort Laramie in 1846 — the Bible, Shakespeare, and Byron Parkman chose, he says, 'the worst of the three,' and 'Childe Harold' happened to be the last book he read before his death. In 'The Oregon Trail' and 'Vassall Morton' you will find the very image of the Byronic wanderer and outlaw, the Byronic clash of the Primitive against the Civilized. Doubtless the middle-aged Parkman felt that there was too much Byronic rebellion and self-revelation in 'Vassall Morton,' and was glad to