Parkman's Tenacity

The Contributors’ Club.

THE appearance of Mr. Farnham’s clear and well-ordered life of Parkman¹ recalls a spare and martial figure once familiar on certain quiet streets of Boston, and a life of entire yet inconspicuous heroism.

The memories and recollections which the publication of this book has awakened are singularly harmonious, and unite to reproduce for us a man of austere simplicity and Roman fortitude. Mr. Godkin’s reminiscences, that he tucked a few weeks ago modestly into a corner of The Nation, were fittingly summed up in Constantia, which he counted Parkman’s peculiar trait. It is perhaps as good a word as any for that enduring, steadfast quality by which he withstood disease and despair, and was able, when well on in years, to say, “ I have not yet abandoned any plan which I ever formed.”

The Atlantic editorial memory contains an instance of Parkman’s tenacity, the preëminence of which has thus far not been endangered by any rival feats. When Lowell was editor, in the first year of the magazine, he invited Parkman to prepare an article on the conquest of Canada. Thirty years later, when Lowell’s fourth successor had come to what the first editor used playfully to call “ the seat of the scorner,” Parkman finished and sent the paper. Only Holmes, in that light-footed leap over a decade and a half with which he begins the Autocrat, “As I was saying when I was interrupted,” comes into any comparison with this splendid disregard of time. And with Holmes it was merely a flash of fancy.

Parkman’s unconquerable patience, glacier-like as it may seem from one point of view, was by no means an index of a phlegmatic nature. Rather, his nature was of steel, durable, but highly tempered. “ A life of action and death in battle ” was, he says, his earliest wish. All his young ambition seems to have run to martial deeds. His heroes were La Salle, Montcalm, Wolfe, and Champlain, soldiers and explorers ; and as long as he lived he kept within view a picture of the Colleoni statue at Venice, the most spirited equestrian statue in the world. The weight of the long campaign against illness which meant torturing pain, and the dread of mental breakdown, checked somewhat the eagerness of his spirit, but left his fortitude undimmed. As he grew older, he wore more and more the look of a veteran. A kind of heroic severity settled upon his figure, and to strangers his bearing became increasingly impressive. It is told of a clever authoress who went to be presented to Parkman, that she found him standing to greet her resting upon his crutches, like an old soldier, and wearing a look of so much dignity and distinction that she could not so much as say a word, but retired in admiring confusion.

We have reason to be grateful for Mr. Farnham’s gracious service in recalling for us this notable figure, and portraying a character which is among the most memorable and heroic in our literary history.