The Boston merchant's son was a
high-hearted gentleman, and his cosmopolitan experiences used to
make his stay-at-home friend, Oliver Wendell Holmes, feel rather
dull and provincial in comparison. Both were Sons of Liberty, but
Motley had had the luck to find in "brave little Holland" a
subject which captivated the interest of Europe and gave the
historian international fame. He had more eloquence than the
Doctor, and a far more varied range of prose, but there may be
here and there a Yankee guesser about the taste of future
generations who will bet on "The Autocrat," after all.
The character and career of Francis Parkman afford curious
material to the student of New England's golden age. In the
seventy years of his heroic life, from 1823 to 1893, all the
characteristic forces of the age reached their culmination and
decline, and his own personality indicates some of the violent
reactions produced by the over-strain of Transcendentalism. For
here was a descendant of John Cotton, and a clergyman's son, who
detested Puritanism and the clergy; who, coming to manhood in the
eighteen-forties, hated the very words Transcendentalism,
Philosophy, Religion, Reform; an inheritor of property, trained
at Harvard, and an Overseer and Fellow of his University, who
disliked the ideals of culture and refinement; a member of the
Saturday Club who was bored with literary talk and literary
people; a staunch American who despised democracy as thoroughly
as Alexander Hamilton, and thought suffrage a failure; a
nineteenth century historian who cared nothing for philosophy,
science, or the larger lessons of history itself; a fascinating
realistic writer who admired Scott, Byron, and Cooper for their
tales of action, and despised Wordsworth and Thoreau as
effeminate sentimentalists who were preoccupied with themselves.
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