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John Lothrop Motley, A Memoir — Complete

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Title: John Lothrop Motley, A Memoir — Complete

Author: Oliver Wendell Holmes


        
Release date: September 29, 2004 [eBook #4728]
                Most recently updated: December 28, 2020

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK JOHN LOTHROP MOTLEY, A MEMOIR — COMPLETE ***




Produced by David Widger





JOHN LOTHROP MOTLEY.

A MEMOIR, Complete

By Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.



Volume I.


NOTE.

The Memoir here given to the public is based on a biographical sketch
prepared by the writer at the request of the Massachusetts Historical
Society for its Proceedings. The questions involving controversies into
which the Society could not feel called to enter are treated at
considerable length in the following pages. Many details are also given
which would have carried the paper written for the Society beyond the
customary limits of such tributes to the memory of its deceased members.
It is still but an outline which may serve a present need and perhaps be
of some assistance to a future biographer.




I.

1814-1827. To AEt. 13.
BIRTH AND EARLY YEARS.

John Motley, the great-grandfather of the subject of this Memoir, came in
the earlier part of the last century from Belfast in Ireland to Falmouth,
now Portland, in the District, now the State of Maine. He was twice
married, and had ten children, four of the first marriage and six of the
last. Thomas, the youngest son by his first wife, married Emma, a
daughter of John Wait, the first Sheriff of Cumberland County under the
government of the United States. Two of their seven sons, Thomas and
Edward, removed from Portland to Boston in 1802 and established
themselves as partners in commercial business, continuing united and
prosperous for nearly half a century before the firm was dissolved.

The earlier records of New England have preserved the memory of an
incident which deserves mention as showing how the historian's life was
saved by a quickwitted handmaid, more than a hundred years before he was
born. On the 29th of August, 1708, the French and Indians from Canada
made an attack upon the town of Haverhill, in Massachusetts. Thirty or
forty persons were slaughtered, and many others were carried captive into
Canada.

The minister of the town, Rev. Benjamin Rolfe, was killed by a bullet
through the door of his house. Two of his daughters, Mary, aged thirteen,
and Elizabeth, aged nine, were sleeping in a room with the maid-servant,
Hagar. When Hagar heard the whoop of the savages she seized the children,
ran with them into the cellar, and, after concealing them under two large
washtubs, hid herself. The Indians ransacked the cellar, but missed the
prey. Elizabeth, the younger of the two girls, grew up and married the
Rev. Samuel Checkley, first minister of the “New South” Church, Boston.
Her son, Rev. Samuel Checkley, Junior, was minister of the Second Church,
and his successor, Rev. John Lothrop, or Lathrop, as it was more commonly
spelled, married his daughter. Dr. Lothrop was great-grandson of Rev.
John Lothrop, of Scituate, who had been imprisoned in England for
nonconformity. The Checkleys were from Preston Capes, in
Northamptonshire. The name is probably identical with that of the
Chicheles or Chichleys, a well-known Northamptonshire family.

Thomas Motley married Anna, daughter of the Rev. John Lothrop,
granddaughter of the Rev. Samuel Checkley, Junior, the two ministers
mentioned above, both honored in their day and generation. Eight children
were born of this marriage, of whom four are still living.

JOHN LOTHROP MOTLEY, the second of these children, was born in
Dorchester, now a part of Boston, Massachusetts, on the 15th of April,
1814. A member of his family gives a most pleasing and interesting
picture, from his own recollections and from what his mother told him, of
the childhood which was to develop into such rich maturity. The boy was
rather delicate in organization, and not much given to outdoor
amusements, except skating and swimming, of which last exercise he was
very fond in his young days, and in which he excelled. He was a great
reader, never idle, but always had a book in his hand,--a volume of
poetry or one of the novels of Scott or Cooper. His fondness for plays
and declamation is illustrated by the story told by a younger brother,
who remembers being wrapped up in a shawl and kept quiet by sweetmeats,
while he figured as the dead Caesar, and his brother, the future
historian, delivered the speech of Antony over his prostrate body. He was
of a most sensitive nature, easily excited, but not tenacious of any
irritated feelings, with a quick sense of honor, and the most entirely
truthful child, his mother used to say, that she had ever seen. Such are
some of the recollections of those who knew him in his earliest years and
in the most intimate relations.

His father's family was at this time living in the house No. 7 Walnut
Street, looking down Chestnut Street over the water to the western hills.
Near by, at the corner of Beacon Street, was the residence of the family
of the first mayor of Boston, and at a little distance from the opposite
corner was the house of one of the fathers of New England manufacturing
enterprise, a man of superior intellect, who built up a great name and
fortune in our city. The children from these three homes naturally became
playmates. Mr. Motley's house was a very hospitable one, and Lothrop and
two of his young companions were allowed to carry out their schemes of
amusement in the garden and the garret. If one with a prescient glance
could have looked into that garret on some Saturday afternoon while our
century was not far advanced in its second score of years, he might have
found three boys in cloaks and doublets and plumed hats, heroes and
bandits, enacting more or less impromptu melodramas. In one of the boys
he would have seen the embryo dramatist of a nation's life history, John
Lothrop Motley; in the second, a famous talker and wit who has spilled
more good things on the wasteful air in conversation than would carry a
“diner-out” through half a dozen London seasons, and waked up somewhat
after the usual flowering-time of authorship to find himself a very
agreeable and cordially welcomed writer,--Thomas Gold Appleton. In the
third he would have recognized a champion of liberty known wherever that
word is spoken, an orator whom to hear is to revive all the traditions of
the grace, the address, the commanding sway of the silver-tongued
eloquence of the most renowned speakers,--Wendell Phillips.

Both of young Motley's playmates have furnished me with recollections of
him and of those around him at this period of his life, and I cannot do
better than borrow freely from their communications. His father was a man
of decided character, social, vivacious, witty, a lover of books, and
himself not unknown as a writer, being the author of one or more of the
well remembered “Jack Downing” letters. He was fond of having the boys
read to him from such authors as Channing and Irving, and criticised
their way of reading with discriminating judgment and taste. Mrs. Motley
was a woman who could not be looked upon without admiration. I remember
well the sweet dignity of her aspect, her “regal beauty,” as Mr. Phillips
truly styles it, and the charm of her serene and noble presence, which
made her the type of a perfect motherhood. Her character corresponded to
the promise of her gracious aspect. She was one of the fondest of
mothers, but not thoughtlessly indulgent to the boy from whom she hoped
and expected more than she thought it wise to let him know. The story
used to be current that in their younger days this father and mother were
the handsomest pair the town of Boston could show. This son of theirs was
“rather tall,” says Mr. Phillips, “lithe, very graceful in movement and
gesture, and there was something marked and admirable in the set of his
head on his shoulders,”--a peculiar elegance which was most noticeable in
those later days when I knew him. Lady Byron long afterwards spoke of him
as more like her husband in appearance than any other person she had met;
but Mr. Phillips, who remembers the first bloom of his boyhood and youth,
thinks he was handsomer than any portrait of Byron represents the poet.
“He could not have been eleven years old,” says the same correspondent,
“when he began writing a novel. It opened, I remember, not with one
solitary horseman, but with two, riding up to an inn in the valley of the
Housatonic. Neither of us had ever seen the Housatonic, but it sounded
grand and romantic. Two chapters were finished.”

There is not much remembered of the single summer he passed at Mr.
Green's school at Jamaica Plain. From that school he went to Round Hill,
Northampton, then under the care of Mr. Cogswell and Mr. Bancroft. The
historian of the United States could hardly have dreamed that the
handsome boy of ten years was to take his place at the side of his
teacher in the first rank of writers in his own department. Motley came
to Round Hill, as one of his schoolmates tells me, with a great
reputation, especially as a declaimer. He had a remarkable facility for
acquiring languages, excelled as a reader and as a writer, and was the
object of general admiration for his many gifts. There is some reason to
think that the flattery he received was for a time a hindrance to his
progress and the development of his character. He obtained praise too
easily, and learned to trust too much to his genius. He had everything to
spoil him,--beauty, precocious intelligence, and a personal charm which
might have made him a universal favorite. Yet he does not seem to have
been generally popular at this period of his life. He was wilful,
impetuous, sometimes supercilious, always fastidious. He would study as
he liked, and not by rule. His school and college mates believed in his
great possibilities through all his forming period, but it may be doubted
if those who counted most confidently on his future could have supposed
that he would develop the heroic power of concentration, the
long-breathed tenacity of purpose, which in after years gave effect to
his brilliant mental endowments. “I did wonder,” says Mr. Wendell
Phillips, “at the diligence and painstaking, the drudgery shown in his
historical works. In early life he had no industry, not needing it. All
he cared for in a book he caught quickly,--the spirit of it, and all his
mind needed or would use. This quickness of apprehension was marvellous.”
 I do not find from the recollections of his schoolmates at Northampton
that he was reproached for any grave offences, though he may have
wandered beyond the prescribed boundaries now and then, and studied
according to his inclinations rather than by rule. While at that school
he made one acquisition much less common then than now,--a knowledge of
the German language and some degree of acquaintance with its literature,
under the guidance of one of the few thorough German scholars this
country then possessed, Mr. George Bancroft.




II.

1827-1831. AEt. 13-17.
COLLEGE LIFE.

Such then was the boy who at the immature, we might almost say the
tender, age of thirteen entered Harvard College. Though two years after
me in college standing, I remember the boyish reputation which he brought
with him, especially that of a wonderful linguist, and the impression
which his striking personal beauty produced upon us as he took his seat
in the college chapel. But it was not until long after this period that I
became intimately acquainted with him, and I must again have recourse to
the classmates and friends who have favored me with their reminiscences
of this period of his life. Mr. Phillips says:

   “During our first year in college, though the youngest in the class,
   he stood third, I think, or second in college rank, and ours was an
   especially able class. Yet to maintain this rank he neither cared
   nor needed to make any effort. Too young to feel any
   responsibilities, and not yet awake to any ambition, he became so
   negligent that he was 'rusticated' [that is, sent away from college
   for a time]. He came back sobered, and worked rather more, but with
   no effort for college rank thenceforward.”

I must finish the portrait of the collegian with all its lights and
shadows by the help of the same friends from whom I have borrowed the
preceding outlines.

He did not care to make acquaintances, was haughty in manner and cynical
in mood, at least as he appeared to those in whom he felt no special
interest. It is no wonder, therefore, that he was not a popular favorite,
although recognized as having very brilliant qualities. During all this
period his mind was doubtless fermenting with projects which kept him in
a fevered and irritable condition. “He had a small writing-table,” Mr.
Phillips says, “with a shallow drawer; I have often seen it half full of
sketches, unfinished poems, soliloquies, a scene or two of a play, prose
portraits of some pet character, etc. These he would read to me, though
he never volunteered to do so, and every now and then he burnt the whole
and began to fill the drawer again.”

My friend, Mr. John Osborne Sargent, who was a year before him in
college, says, in a very interesting letter with which he has favored me:

   “My first acquaintance with him [Motley] was at Cambridge, when he
   came from Mr. Cogswell's school at Round Hill. He then had a good
   deal of the shyness that was just pronounced enough to make him
   interesting, and which did not entirely wear off till he left
   college. . . I soon became acquainted with him, and we used to take
   long walks together, sometimes taxing each other's memory for poems
   or passages from poems that had struck our fancy. Shelley was then
   a great favorite of his, and I remember that Praed's verses then
   appearing in the 'New Monthly' he thought very clever and brilliant,
   and was fond of repeating them. You have forgotten, or perhaps
   never knew, that Motley's first appearance in print was in the
   'Collegian.' He brought me one day, in a very modest mood, a
   translation from Goethe, which I was most happy to oblige him by
   inserting. It was very prettily done, and will now be a curiosity.
   . . . How it happened that Motley wrote only one piece I do not
   remember. I had the pleasure about that time of initiating him as a
   member of the Knights of the Square Table,--always my favorite
   college club, for the reason, perhaps, that I was a sometime Grand
   Master. He was always a genial and jovial companion at our supper-
   parties at Fresh Pond and Gallagher's.”

We who live in the days of photographs know how many faces belong to
every individual. We know too under what different aspects the same
character appears to those who study it from different points of view and
with different prepossessions. I do not hesitate, therefore, to place
side by side the impressions of two of his classmates as to one of his
personal traits as they observed him at this period of his youth.

   “He was a manly boy, with no love for or leaning to girls' company;
   no care for dress; not a trace of personal vanity. . . . He was,
   or at least seemed, wholly unconscious of his rare beauty and of the
   fascination of his manner; not a trace of pretence, the simplest and
   most natural creature in the world.”

Look on that picture and on this:--

   “He seemed to have a passion for dress. But as in everything else,
   so in this, his fancy was a fitful one. At one time he would excite
   our admiration by the splendor of his outfit, and perhaps the next
   week he would seem to take equal pleasure in his slovenly or
   careless appearance.”

It is not very difficult to reconcile these two portraitures. I recollect
it was said by a witty lady of a handsome clergyman well remembered among
us, that he had dressy eyes. Motley so well became everything he wore,
that if he had sprung from his bed and slipped his clothes on at an alarm
of fire, his costume would have looked like a prince's undress. His
natural presentment, like that of Count D'Orsay, was of the kind which
suggests the intentional effects of an elaborate toilet, no matter how
little thought or care may have been given to make it effective. I think
the “passion for dress” was really only a seeming, and that he often
excited admiration when he had not taken half the pains to adorn himself
that many a youth less favored by nature has wasted upon his unblest
exterior only to be laughed at.

I gather some other interesting facts from a letter which I have received
from his early playmate and school and college classmate, Mr. T. G.
Appleton.

   “In his Sophomore year he kept abreast of the prescribed studies,
   but his heart was out of bounds, as it often had been at Round Hill
   when chasing squirrels or rabbits through forbidden forests.
   Already his historical interest was shaping his life. A tutor
   coming-by chance, let us hope--to his room remonstrated with him
   upon the heaps of novels upon his table.

“'Yes,' said Motley, 'I am reading historically, and have come to the
novels of the nineteenth century. Taken in the lump, they are very hard
reading.'”

All Old Cambridge people know the Brattle House, with its gambrel roof,
its tall trees, its perennial spring, its legendary fame of good fare and
hospitable board in the days of the kindly old bon vivant, Major Brattle.
In this house the two young students, Appleton and Motley, lived during a
part of their college course.

   “Motley's room was on the ground floor, the room to the left of the
   entrance. He led a very pleasant life there, tempering his college
   duties with the literature he loved, and receiving his friends
   amidst elegant surroundings, which added to the charm of his
   society. Occasionally we amused ourselves by writing for the
   magazines and papers of the day. Mr. Willis had just started a slim
   monthly, written chiefly by himself, but with the true magazine
   flavor. We wrote for that, and sometimes verses in the corner of a
   paper called 'The Anti-Masonic Mirror,' and in which corner was a
   woodcut of Apollo, and inviting to destruction ambitious youths by
   the legend underneath,--

          'Much yet remains unsung.'

   “These pieces were usually dictated to each other, the poet recumbent
   upon the bed and a classmate ready to carry off the manuscript for
   the paper of the following day. 'Blackwood's' was then in its
   glory, its pages redolent of 'mountain dew' in every sense; the
   humor of the Shepherd, the elegantly brutal onslaughts upon Whigs
   and Cockney poets by Christopher North, intoxicated us youths.

   “It was young writing, and made for the young. The opinions were
   charmingly wrong, and its enthusiasm was half Glenlivet. But this
   delighted the boys. There were no reprints then, and to pass the
   paper-cutter up the fresh inviting pages was like swinging over the
   heather arm in arm with Christopher himself. It is a little
   singular that though we had a college magazine of our own, Motley
   rarely if ever wrote for it. I remember a translation from Goethe,
   'The Ghost-Seer,' which he may have written for it, and a poem upon
   the White Mountains. Motley spoke at one of the college exhibitions
   an essay on Goethe so excellent that Mr. Joseph Cogswell sent it to
   Madam Goethe, who, after reading it, said, 'I wish to see the first
   book that young man will write.'”

Although Motley did not aim at or attain a high college rank, the rules
of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, which confine the number of members to the
first sixteen of each class, were stretched so as to include him,--a
tribute to his recognized ability, and an evidence that a distinguished
future was anticipated for him.




III.

1832-1833. AEt. 18-19.
STUDY AND TRAVEL IN EUROPE.

Of the two years divided between the Universities of Berlin and Gottingen
I have little to record. That he studied hard I cannot doubt; that he
found himself in pleasant social relations with some of his
fellow-students seems probable from the portraits he has drawn in his
first story, “Morton's Hope,” and is rendered certain so far as one of
his companions is concerned. Among the records of the past to which he
referred during his last visit to this country was a letter which he took
from a collection of papers and handed me to read one day when I was
visiting him. The letter was written in a very lively and exceedingly
familiar vein. It implied such intimacy, and called up in such a lively
way the gay times Motley and himself had had together in their youthful
days, that I was puzzled to guess who could have addressed him from
Germany in that easy and off-hand fashion. I knew most of his old friends
who would be likely to call him by his baptismal name in its most
colloquial form, and exhausted my stock of guesses unsuccessfully before
looking at the signature. I confess that I was surprised, after laughing
at the hearty and almost boyish tone of the letter, to read at the bottom
of the page the signature of Bismarck. I will not say that I suspect
Motley of having drawn the portrait of his friend in one of the
characters of “Morton's Hope,” but it is not hard to point out traits in
one of them which we can believe may have belonged to the great
Chancellor at an earlier period of life than that at which the world
contemplates his overshadowing proportions.

Hoping to learn something of Motley during the two years while we had
lost sight of him, I addressed a letter to His Highness Prince Bismarck,
to which I received the following reply:--

               FOREIGN OFFICE, BERLIN, March 11, 1878.

   SIR,--I am directed by Prince Bismarck to acknowledge the receipt of
   your letter of the 1st of January, relating to the biography of the
   late Mr. Motley. His Highness deeply regrets that the state of his
   health and pressure of business do not allow him to contribute
   personally, and as largely as he would be delighted to do, to your
   depicting of a friend whose memory will be ever dear to him. Since
   I had the pleasure of making the acquaintance of Mr. Motley at
   Varzin, I have been intrusted with communicating to you a few
   details I have gathered from the mouth of the Prince. I enclose
   them as they are jotted down, without any attempt of digestion.

          I have the honor to be
                  Your obedient servant,
                         LOTHAIR BUCHER.

   “Prince Bismarck said:--

   “'I met Motley at Gottingen in 1832, I am not sure if at the
   beginning of Easter Term or Michaelmas Term. He kept company with
   German students, though more addicted to study than we members of
   the fighting clubs (corps). Although not having mastered yet the
   German language, he exercised a marked attraction by a conversation
   sparkling with wit, humor, and originality. In autumn of 1833,
   having both of us migrated from Gottingen to Berlin for the
   prosecution of our studies, we became fellow-lodgers in the house
   No. 161 Friedrich Strasse. There we lived in the closest intimacy,
   sharing meals and outdoor exercise. Motley by that time had arrived
   at talking German fluently; he occupied himself not only in
   translating Goethe's poem “Faust,” but tried his hand even in
   composing German verses. Enthusiastic admirer of Shakespeare,
   Byron, Goethe, he used to spice his conversation abundantly with
   quotations from these his favorite authors. A pertinacious arguer,
   so much so that sometimes he watched my awakening in order to
   continue a discussion on some topic of science, poetry, or practical
   life, cut short by the chime of the small hours, he never lost his
   mild and amiable temper. Our faithful companion was Count Alexander
   Keyserling, a native of Courland, who has since achieved distinction
   as a botanist.

   “'Motley having entered the diplomatic service of his country, we
   had frequently the opportunity of renewing our friendly intercourse;
   at Frankfort he used to stay with me, the welcome guest of my wife;
   we also met at Vienna, and, later, here. The last time I saw him
   was in 1872 at Varzin, at the celebration of my “silver wedding,”
    namely, the twenty-fifth anniversary.

   “'The most striking feature of his handsome and delicate appearance
   was uncommonly large and beautiful eyes. He never entered a
   drawing-room without exciting the curiosity and sympathy of the
   ladies.'”

It is but a glimpse of their young life which the great statesman gives
us, but a bright and pleasing one. Here were three students, one of whom
was to range in the flowery fields of the loveliest of the sciences,
another to make the dead past live over again in his burning pages, and a
third to extend an empire as the botanist spread out a plant and the
historian laid open a manuscript.




IV.

1834-1839. 2ET. 20-25.

RETURN TO AMERICA.--STUDY OF LAW.--MARRIAGE.--HIS FIRST NOVEL, “MORTON'S
HOPE.”

Of the years passed in the study of law after his return from Germany I
have very little recollection, and nothing of importance to record. He
never became seriously engaged in the practice of the profession he had
chosen. I had known him pleasantly rather than intimately, and our
different callings tended to separate us. I met him, however, not very
rarely, at one house where we were both received with the greatest
cordiality, and where the attractions brought together many both young
and old to enjoy the society of its charming and brilliant inmates. This
was at No. 14 Temple Place, where Mr. Park Benjamin was then living with
his two sisters, both in the bloom of young womanhood. Here Motley found
the wife to whom his life owed so much of its success and its happiness.
Those who remember Mary Benjamin find it hard to speak of her in the
common terms of praise which they award to the good and the lovely. She
was not only handsome and amiable and agreeable, but there was a cordial
frankness, an openhearted sincerity about her which made her seem like a
sister to those who could help becoming her lovers. She stands quite
apart in the memory of the friends who knew her best, even from the
circle of young persons whose recollections they most cherish. Yet hardly
could one of them have foreseen all that she was to be to him whose life
she was to share. They were married on the 2d of March, 1837. His
intimate friend, Mr. Joseph Lewis Stackpole, was married at about the
same time to her sister, thus joining still more closely in friendship
the two young men who were already like brothers in their mutual
affection.

Two years after his marriage, in 1839, appeared his first work, a novel
in two volumes, called “Morton's Hope.” He had little reason to be
gratified with its reception. The general verdict was not favorable to
it, and the leading critical journal of America, not usually harsh or
cynical in its treatment of native authorship, did not even give it a
place among its “Critical Notices,” but dropped a small-print
extinguisher upon it in one of the pages of its “List of New
Publications.” Nothing could be more utterly disheartening than the
unqualified condemnation passed upon the story. At the same time the
critic says that “no one can read 'Morton's Hope' without perceiving it
to have been written by a person of uncommon resources of mind and
scholarship.”

It must be confessed that, as a story, “Morton's Hope” cannot endure a
searching or even a moderately careful criticism. It is wanting in
cohesion, in character, even in a proper regard to circumstances of time
and place; it is a map of dissected incidents which has been flung out of
its box and has arranged itself without the least regard to chronology or
geography. It is not difficult to trace in it many of the influences
which had helped in forming or deforming the mind of the young man of
twenty-five, not yet come into possession of his full inheritance of the
slowly ripening qualities which were yet to assert their robust
independence. How could he help admiring Byron and falling into more or
less unconscious imitation of his moods if not of his special
affectations? Passion showing itself off against a dark foil of cynicism;
sentiment, ashamed of its own self-betrayal, and sneering at itself from
time to time for fear of the laugh of the world at its sincerity,--how
many young men were spoiled and how many more injured by becoming bad
copies of a bad ideal! The blood of Don Juan ran in the veins of Vivian
Grey and of Pelham. But if we read the fantastic dreams of Disraeli, the
intellectual dandyisms of Bulwer, remembering the after careers of which
these were the preludes, we can understand how there might well be
something in those earlier efforts which would betray itself in the way
of thought and in the style of the young men who read them during the
plastic period of their minds and characters. Allow for all these
influences, allow for whatever impressions his German residence and his
familiarity with German literature had produced; accept the fact that the
story is to the last degree disjointed, improbable, impossible; lay it
aside as a complete failure in what it attempted to be, and read it, as
“Vivian Grey” is now read, in the light of the career which it heralded.

“Morton's Hope” is not to be read as a novel: it is to be studied as an
autobiography, a prophecy, a record of aspirations, disguised under a
series of incidents which are flung together with no more regard to the
unities than a pack of shuffled playing-cards. I can do nothing better
than let him picture himself, for it is impossible not to recognize the
portrait. It is of little consequence whether every trait is an exact
copy from his own features, but it is so obvious that many of the lines
are direct transcripts from nature that we may believe the same thing of
many others. Let us compare his fictitious hero's story with what we have
read of his own life.

In early boyhood Morton amused himself and astonished those about him by
enacting plays for a puppet theatre. This was at six years old, and at
twelve we find him acting in a play with other boys, just as Motley's
playmates have already described him. The hero may now speak for himself,
but we shall all perceive that we are listening to the writer's own
story.

   “I was always a huge reader; my mind was essentially craving and
   insatiable. Its appetite was enormous, and it devoured too greedily
   for health. I rejected all guidance in my studies. I already
   fancied myself a misanthrope. I had taken a step very common for
   boys of my age, and strove with all my might to be a cynic.”

He goes on to describe, under the perfectly transparent mask of his hero,
the course of his studies. “To poetry, like most infants, I devoted most
of my time.” From modern poetry he went back to the earlier sources,
first with the idea of systematic reading and at last through Chaucer and
Gower and early ballads, until he lost himself “in a dismal swamp of
barbarous romances and lying Latin chronicles. I got hold of the
Bibliotheca Monastica, containing a copious account of Anglo-Norman
authors, with notices of their works, and set seriously to reading every
one of them.” One profit of his antiquarianism, however, was, as he says,
his attention to foreign languages,--French, Spanish, German, especially
in their earliest and rudest forms of literature. From these he ascended
to the ancient poets, and from Latin to Greek. He would have taken up the
study of the Oriental languages, but for the advice of a relative, who
begged him seriously to turn his attention to history. The paragraph
which follows must speak for itself as a true record under a feigned
heading.

   “The groundwork of my early character was plasticity and fickleness.
   I was mortified by this exposure of my ignorance, and disgusted with
   my former course of reading. I now set myself violently to the
   study of history. With my turn of mind, and with the preposterous
   habits which I had been daily acquiring, I could not fail to make as
   gross mistakes in the pursuit of this as of other branches of
   knowledge. I imagined, on setting out, a system of strict and
   impartial investigation of the sources of history. I was inspired
   with the absurd ambition, not uncommon to youthful students, of
   knowing as much as their masters. I imagined it necessary for me,
   stripling as I was, to study the authorities; and, imbued with the
   strict necessity of judging for myself, I turned from the limpid
   pages of the modern historians to the notes and authorities at the
   bottom of the page. These, of course, sent me back to my monastic
   acquaintances, and I again found myself in such congenial company to
   a youthful and ardent mind as Florence of Worcester and Simeon of
   Durham, the Venerable Bede and Matthew Paris; and so on to Gregory
   and Fredegarius, down to the more modern and elegant pages of
   Froissart, Hollinshed, Hooker, and Stowe. Infant as I was, I
   presumed to grapple with masses of learning almost beyond the
   strength of the giants of history. A spendthrift of my time and
   labor, I went out of my way to collect materials, and to build for
   myself, when I should have known that older and abler architects had
   already appropriated all that was worth preserving; that the edifice
   was built, the quarry exhausted, and that I was, consequently, only
   delving amidst rubbish.

   “This course of study was not absolutely without its advantages.
   The mind gained a certain proportion of vigor even by this exercise
   of its faculties, just as my bodily health would have been improved
   by transporting the refuse ore of a mine from one pit to another,
   instead of coining the ingots which lay heaped before my eyes.
   Still, however, my time was squandered. There was a constant want
   of fitness and concentration of my energies. My dreams of education
   were boundless, brilliant, indefinite; but alas! they were only
   dreams. There was nothing accurate and defined in my future course
   of life. I was ambitious and conceited, but my aspirations were
   vague and shapeless. I had crowded together the most gorgeous and
   even some of the most useful and durable materials for my woof, but
   I had no pattern, and consequently never began to weave.

   “I had not made the discovery that an individual cannot learn, nor
   be, everything; that the world is a factory in which each individual
   must perform his portion of work:--happy enough if he can choose it
   according to his taste and talent, but must renounce the desire of
   observing or superintending the whole operation. . . .

   “From studying and investigating the sources of history with my own
   eyes, I went a step further; I refused the guidance of modern
   writers; and proceeding from one point of presumption to another, I
   came to the magnanimous conviction that I could not know history as
   I ought to know it unless I wrote it for myself. . . .

   “It would be tedious and useless to enlarge upon my various attempts
   and various failures. I forbear to comment upon mistakes which I
   was in time wise enough to retrieve. Pushing out as I did, without
   compass and without experience, on the boundless ocean of learning,
   what could I expect but an utter and a hopeless shipwreck?

   “Thus I went on, becoming more learned, and therefore more ignorant,
   more confused in my brain, and more awkward in my habits, from day
   to day. I was ever at my studies, and could hardly be prevailed
   upon to allot a moment to exercise or recreation. I breakfasted
   with a pen behind my ear, and dined in company with a folio bigger
   than the table. I became solitary and morose, the necessary
   consequence of reckless study; talked impatiently of the value of my
   time, and the immensity of my labors; spoke contemptuously of the
   learning and acquirements of the whole world, and threw out
   mysterious hints of the magnitude and importance of my own project.

   “In the midst of all this study and this infant authorship the
   perusal of such masses of poetry could not fail to produce their
   effect. Of a youth whose mind, like mine at that period, possessed
   some general capability, without perhaps a single prominent and
   marked talent, a proneness to imitation is sure to be the besetting
   sin. I consequently, for a large portion of my earlier life, never
   read a work which struck my fancy, without planning a better one
   upon its model; for my ambition, like my vanity, knew no bounds.
   It was a matter of course that I should be attacked by the poetic
   mania. I took the infection at the usual time, went through its
   various stages, and recovered as soon as could be expected. I
   discovered soon enough that emulation is not capability, and he is
   fortunate to whom is soonest revealed the relative extent of his
   ambition and his powers.

   “My ambition was boundless; my dreams of glory were not confined to
   authorship and literature alone; but every sphere in which the
   intellect of man exerts itself revolved in a blaze of light before
   me. And there I sat in my solitude and dreamed such wondrous
   dreams! Events were thickening around me which were soon to change
   the world, but they were unmarked by me. The country was changing
   to a mighty theatre, on whose stage those who were as great as I
   fancied myself to be were to enact a stupendous drama in which I had
   no part. I saw it not; I knew it not; and yet how infinitely
   beautiful were the imaginations of my solitude! Fancy shook her
   kaleidoscope each moment as chance directed, and lo! what new,
   fantastic, brilliant, but what unmeaning visions. My ambitious
   anticipations were as boundless as they were various and
   conflicting. There was not a path which leads to glory in which I
   was not destined to gather laurels. As a warrior I would conquer
   and overrun the world. As a statesman I would reorganize and govern
   it. As a historian I would consign it all to immortality; and in my
   leisure moments I would be a great poet and a man of the world.

   “In short, I was already enrolled in that large category of what are
   called young men of genius,--men who are the pride of their sisters
   and the glory of their grandmothers,--men of whom unheard-of things
   are expected, till after long preparation comes a portentous
   failure, and then they are forgotten; subsiding into indifferent
   apprentices and attorneys' clerks.

   “Alas for the golden imaginations of our youth! They are bright and
   beautiful, but they fade. They glitter brightly enough to deceive
   the wisest and most cautious, and we garner them up in the most
   secret caskets of our hearts; but are they not like the coins which
   the Dervise gave the merchant in the story? When we look for them
   the next morning, do we not find them withered leaves?”

The ideal picture just drawn is only a fuller portraiture of the youth
whose outlines have been already sketched by the companions of his
earlier years. If his hero says, “I breakfasted with a pen behind my ear
and dined in company with a folio bigger than the table,” one of his
family says of the boy Motley that “if there were five minutes before
dinner, when he came into the parlor he always took up some book near at
hand and began to read until dinner was announced.” The same unbounded
thirst for knowledge, the same history of various attempts and various
failures, the same ambition, not yet fixed in its aim, but showing itself
in restless effort, belong to the hero of the story and its narrator.

Let no man despise the first efforts of immature genius. Nothing can be
more crude as a novel, nothing more disappointing, than “Morton's Hope.”
 But in no other of Motley's writings do we get such an inside view of his
character with its varied impulses, its capricious appetites, its
unregulated forces, its impatient grasp for all kinds of knowledge. With
all his university experiences at home and abroad, it might be said with
a large measure of truth that he was a self-educated man, as he had been
a self-taught boy. His instincts were too powerful to let him work
quietly in the common round of school and college training. Looking at
him as his companions describe him, as he delineates himself 'mutato
nomine,' the chances of success would have seemed to all but truly
prophetic eyes very doubtful, if not decidedly against him. Too many
brilliant young novel-readers and lovers of poetry, excused by their
admirers for their shortcomings on the strength of their supposed
birthright of “genius,” have ended where they began; flattered into the
vain belief that they were men at eighteen or twenty, and finding out at
fifty that they were and always had been nothing more than boys. It was
but a tangled skein of life that Motley's book showed us at twenty-five,
and older men might well have doubted whether it would ever be wound off
in any continuous thread. To repeat his own words, he had crowded
together the materials for his work, but he had no pattern, and
consequently never began to weave.

The more this first work of Motley's is examined, the more are its faults
as a story and its interest as a self-revelation made manifest to the
reader. The future historian, who spared no pains to be accurate, falls
into the most extraordinary anachronisms in almost every chapter. Brutus
in a bob-wig, Othello in a swallow-tail coat, could hardly be more
incongruously equipped than some of his characters in the manner of
thought, the phrases, the way of bearing themselves which belong to them
in the tale, but never could have belonged to characters of our
Revolutionary period. He goes so far in his carelessness as to mix up
dates in such a way as almost to convince us that he never looked over
his own manuscript or proofs. His hero is in Prague in June, 1777,
reading a letter received from America in less than a fortnight from the
date of its being written; in August of the same year he is in the
American camp, where he is found in the company of a certain Colonel
Waldron, an officer of some standing in the Revolutionary Army, with whom
he is said to have been constantly associated for some three months,
having arrived in America, as he says, on the 15th of May, that is to
say, six weeks or more before he sailed, according to his previous
account. Bohemia seems to have bewitched his chronology as it did
Shakespeare's geography. To have made his story a consistent series of
contradictions, Morton should have sailed from that Bohemian seashore
which may be found in “A Winter's Tale,” but not in the map of Europe.

And yet in the midst of all these marks of haste and negligence, here and
there the philosophical student of history betrays himself, the ideal of
noble achievement glows in an eloquent paragraph, or is embodied in a
loving portrait like that of the professor and historian Harlem. The
novel, taken in connection with the subsequent developments of the
writer's mind, is a study of singular interest. It is a chaos before the
creative epoch; the light has not been divided from the darkness; the
firmament has not yet divided the waters from the waters. The forces at
work in a human intelligence to bring harmony out of its discordant
movements are as mysterious, as miraculous, we might truly say, as those
which give shape and order to the confused materials out of which
habitable worlds are evolved. It is too late now to be sensitive over
this unsuccessful attempt as a story and unconscious success as a
self-portraiture. The first sketches of Paul Veronese, the first patterns
of the Gobelin tapestry, are not to be criticised for the sake of
pointing out their inevitable and too manifest imperfections. They are to
be carefully studied as the earliest efforts of the hand which painted
the Marriage at Cana, of the art which taught the rude fabrics made to be
trodden under foot to rival the glowing canvas of the great painters.
None of Motley's subsequent writings give such an insight into his
character and mental history. It took many years to train the as yet
undisciplined powers into orderly obedience, and to bring the unarranged
materials into the organic connection which was needed in the
construction of a work that should endure. There was a long interval
between his early manhood and the middle term of life, during which the
slow process of evolution was going on. There are plants which open their
flowers with the first rays of the sun; there are others that wait until
evening to spread their petals. It was already the high noon of life with
him before his genius had truly shown itself; if he had not lived beyond
this period, he would have left nothing to give him a lasting name.




V.

1841-1842. AEt. 27-28.

FIRST DIPLOMATIC APPOINTMENT, SECRETARY OF LEGATION TO THE RUSSIAN
MISSION.--BRIEF RESIDENCE AT ST. PETERSBURG.--LETTER TO HIS MOTHER.
--RETURN.

In the autumn of 1841, Mr. Motley received the appointment of Secretary
of Legation to the Russian Mission, Mr. Todd being then the Minister.
Arriving at St. Petersburg just at the beginning of winter, he found the
climate acting very unfavorably upon his spirits if not upon his health,
and was unwilling that his wife and his two young children should be
exposed to its rigors. The expense of living, also, was out of proportion
to his income, and his letters show that he had hardly established
himself in St. Petersburg before he had made up his mind to leave a place
where he found he had nothing to do and little to enjoy. He was homesick,
too, as a young husband and father with an affectionate nature like his
ought to have been under these circumstances. He did not regret having
made the experiment, for he knew that he should not have been satisfied
with himself if he had not made it. It was his first trial of a career in
which he contemplated embarking, and in which afterwards he had an
eventful experience. In his private letters to his family, many of which
I have had the privilege of looking over, he mentions in detail all the
reasons which influenced him in forming his own opinion about the
expediency of a continued residence at St. Petersburg, and leaves the
decision to her in whose judgment he always had the greatest confidence.
No unpleasant circumstance attended his resignation of his secretaryship,
and though it must have been a disappointment to find that the place did
not suit him, as he and his family were then situated, it was only at the
worst an experiment fairly tried and not proving satisfactory. He left
St. Petersburg after a few months' residence, and returned to America. On
reaching New York he was met by the sad tidings of the death of his
first-born child, a boy of great promise, who had called out all the
affections of his ardent nature. It was long before he recovered from the
shock of this great affliction. The boy had shown a very quick and bright
intelligence, and his father often betrayed a pride in his gifts and
graces which he never for a moment made apparent in regard to his own.

Among the letters which he wrote from St. Petersburg are two miniature
ones directed to this little boy. His affectionate disposition shows
itself very sweetly in these touching mementos of a love of which his
first great sorrow was so soon to be born. Not less charming are his
letters to his mother, showing the tenderness with which he always
regarded her, and full of all the details which he thought would
entertain one to whom all that related to her children was always
interesting. Of the letters to his wife it is needless to say more than
that they always show the depth of the love he bore her and the absolute
trust he placed in her, consulting her at all times as his nearest and
wisest friend and adviser,--one in all respects fitted “To warn, to
comfort, and command.”

I extract a passage from one of his letters to his mother, as much for
the sake of lending a character of reality to his brief residence at St.
Petersburg as for that of the pleasant picture it gives us of an interior
in that Northern capital.

   “We entered through a small vestibule, with the usual arrangement of
   treble doors, padded with leather to exclude the cold and guarded by
   two 'proud young porters' in severe cocked hats and formidable
   batons, into a broad hall,--threw off our furred boots and cloaks,
   ascended a carpeted marble staircase, in every angle of which stood
   a statuesque footman in gaudy coat and unblemished unmentionables,
   and reached a broad landing upon the top thronged as usual with
   servants. Thence we passed through an antechamber into a long,
   high, brilliantly lighted, saffron-papered room, in which a dozen
   card-tables were arranged, and thence into the receiving room. This
   was a large room, with a splendidly inlaid and polished floor, the
   walls covered with crimson satin, the cornices heavily incrusted
   with gold, and the ceiling beautifully painted in arabesque. The
   massive fauteuils and sofas, as also the drapery, were of crimson
   satin with a profusion of gilding. The ubiquitous portrait of the
   Emperor was the only picture, and was the same you see everywhere.
   This crimson room had two doors upon the side facing the three
   windows: The innermost opened into a large supper-room, in which a
   table was spread covered with the usual refreshments of European
   parties,--tea, ices, lemonade, and et ceteras,--and the other opened
   into a ball-room which is a sort of miniature of the 'salle blanche'
   of the Winter Palace, being white and gold, and very brilliantly
   lighted with 'ormolu' chandeliers filled with myriads of candles.
   This room (at least forty feet long by perhaps twenty-five) opened
   into a carpeted conservatory of about the same size, filled with
   orange-trees and japonica plants covered with fruit and flowers,
   arranged very gracefully into arbors, with luxurious seats under the
   pendent boughs, and with here and there a pretty marble statue
   gleaming through the green and glossy leaves. One might almost have
   imagined one's self in the 'land of the cypress and myrtle' instead
   of our actual whereabout upon the polar banks of the Neva.
   Wandering through these mimic groves, or reposing from the fatigues
   of the dance, was many a fair and graceful form, while the
   brilliantly lighted ballroom, filled with hundreds of exquisitely
   dressed women (for the Russian ladies, if not very pretty, are
   graceful, and make admirable toilettes), formed a dazzling contrast
   with the tempered light of the 'Winter Garden.' The conservatory
   opened into a library, and from the library you reach the
   antechamber, thus completing the 'giro' of one of the prettiest
   houses in St. Petersburg. I waltzed one waltz and quadrilled one
   quadrille, but it was hard work; and as the sole occupation of these
   parties is dancing and card-playing--conversation apparently not
   being customary--they are to me not very attractive.”

He could not be happy alone, and there were good reasons against his
being joined by his wife and children.

   “With my reserved habits,” he says, “it would take a great deal
   longer to become intimate here than to thaw the Baltic. I have only
   to 'knock that it shall be opened to me,' but that is just what I
   hate to do. . . . 'Man delights not me, no, nor woman neither.'”

Disappointed in his expectations, but happy in the thought of meeting his
wife and children, he came back to his household to find it clad in
mourning for the loss of its first-born.




VI.

1844. AEt. 30.
LETTER TO PARK BENJAMIN.--POLITICAL VIEWS AND FEELINGS.

A letter to Mr. Park Benjamin, dated December 17, 1844, which has been
kindly lent me by Mrs. Mary Lanman Douw of Poughkeepsie, gives a very
complete and spirited account of himself at this period. He begins with a
quiet, but tender reference to the death of his younger brother, Preble,
one of the most beautiful youths seen or remembered among us, “a great
favorite,” as he says, “in the family and in deed with every one who knew
him.” He mentions the fact that his friends and near connections, the
Stackpoles, are in Washington, which place he considers as exceptionally
odious at the time when he is writing. The election of Mr. Polk as the
opponent of Henry Clay gives him a discouraged feeling about our
institutions. The question, he thinks, is now settled that a statesman
can never again be called to administer the government of the country. He
is almost if not quite in despair “because it is now proved that a man,
take him for all in all, better qualified by intellectual power, energy
and purity of character, knowledge of men, a great combination of
personal qualities, a frank, high-spirited, manly bearing, keen sense of
honor, the power of attracting and winning men, united with a vast
experience in affairs, such as no man (but John Quincy Adams) now living
has had and no man in this country can ever have again,--I say it is
proved that a man better qualified by an extraordinary combination of
advantages to administer the government than any man now living, or any
man we can ever produce again, can be beaten by anybody. . . . . It has
taken forty years of public life to prepare such a man for the
Presidency, and the result is that he can be beaten by anybody,--Mr. Polk
is anybody,--he is Mr. Quelconque.”

I do not venture to quote the most burning sentences of this impassioned
letter. It shows that Motley had not only become interested most
profoundly in the general movements of parties, but that he had followed
the course of political events which resulted in the election of Mr. Polk
with careful study, and that he was already looking forward to the revolt
of the slave States which occurred sixteen years later. The letter is
full of fiery eloquence, now and then extravagant and even violent in
expression, but throbbing with a generous heat which shows the excitable
spirit of a man who wishes to be proud of his country and does not wish
to keep his temper when its acts make him ashamed of it. He is disgusted
and indignant to the last degree at seeing “Mr. Quelconque” chosen over
the illustrious statesman who was his favorite candidate. But all his
indignation cannot repress a sense of humor which was one of his marked
characteristics. After fatiguing his vocabulary with hard usage, after
his unsparing denunciation of “the very dirty politics” which he finds
mixed up with our popular institutions, he says,--it must be remembered
that this was an offhand letter to one nearly connected with him,--

   “All these things must in short, to use the energetic language of
   the Balm of Columbia advertisement, 'bring every generous thinking
   youth to that heavy sinking gloom which not even the loss of
   property can produce, but only the loss of hair, which brings on
   premature decay, causing many to shrink from being uncovered, and
   even to shun society, to avoid the jests and sneers of their
   acquaintances. The remainder of their lives is consequently spent
   in retirement.'”

He continues:--

   “Before dropping the subject, and to show the perfect purity of my
   motives, I will add that I am not at all anxious about the
   legislation of the new government. I desired the election of Clay
   as a moral triumph, and because the administration of the country,
   at this moment of ten thousand times more importance than its
   legislation, would have been placed in pure, strong, and determined
   hands.”

Then comes a dash of that satirical and somewhat cynical way of feeling
which he had not as yet outgrown. He had been speaking about the general
want of attachment to the Union and the absence of the sentiment of
loyalty as bearing on the probable dissolution of the Union.

   “I don't mean to express any opinions on these matters,--I haven't
   got any. It seems to me that the best way is to look at the
   hodge-podge, be good-natured if possible, and laugh,

          'As from the height of contemplation
          We view the feeble joints men totter on.'

   “I began a tremendous political career during the election, having
   made two stump speeches of an hour and a half each,--after you went
   away,--one in Dedham town-hall and one in Jamaica Plain, with such
   eminent success that many invitations came to me from the
   surrounding villages, and if I had continued in active political
   life I might have risen to be vote-distributor, or fence-viewer, or
   selectman, or hog-reeve, or something of the kind.”

The letter from which the above passages are quoted gives the same
portrait of the writer, only seen in profile, as it were, which we have
already seen drawn in full face in the story of “Morton's Hope.” It is
charged with that 'saeva indignatio' which at times verges on
misanthropic contempt for its objects, not unnatural to a high-spirited
young man who sees his lofty ideals confronted with the ignoble facts
which strew the highways of political life. But we can recognize real
conviction and the deepest feeling beneath his scornful rhetoric and his
bitter laugh. He was no more a mere dilettante than Swift himself, but
now and then in the midst of his most serious thought some absurd or
grotesque image will obtrude itself, and one is reminded of the lines on
the monument of Gay rather than of the fierce epitaph of the Dean of
Saint Patrick's.




VII.

1845-1847. AEt. 31-33.

FIRST HISTORICAL AND CRITICAL ESSAYS.--PETER THE GREAT.--NOVELS OF
BALZAC.--POLITY OF THE PURITANS.

Mr. Motley's first serious effort in historical composition was an
article of fifty pages in “The North American Review” for October, 1845.
This was nominally a notice of two works, one on Russia, the other “A
Memoir of the Life of Peter the Great.” It is, however, a narrative
rather than a criticism, a rapid, continuous, brilliant, almost dramatic
narrative. If there had been any question as to whether the young
novelist who had missed his first mark had in him the elements which
might give him success as an author, this essay would have settled the
question. It shows throughout that the writer has made a thorough study
of his subject, but it is written with an easy and abundant, yet
scholarly freedom, not as if he were surrounded by his authorities and
picking out his material piece by piece, but rather as if it were the
overflow of long-pursued and well-remembered studies recalled without
effort and poured forth almost as a recreation.

As he betrayed or revealed his personality in his first novel, so in this
first effort in another department of literature he showed in epitome his
qualities as a historian and a biographer. The hero of his narrative
makes his entrance at once in his character as the shipwright of Saardam,
on the occasion of a visit of the great Duke of Marlborough. The portrait
instantly arrests attention. His ideal personages had been drawn in such
a sketchy way, they presented so many imperfectly harmonized features,
that they never became real, with the exception, of course, of the
story-teller himself. But the vigor with which the presentment of the
imperial ship-carpenter, the sturdy, savage, eager, fiery Peter, was
given in the few opening sentences, showed the movement of the hand, the
glow of the color, that were in due time to display on a broader canvas
the full-length portraits of William the Silent and of John of Barneveld.
The style of the whole article is rich, fluent, picturesque, with light
touches of humor here and there, and perhaps a trace or two of youthful
jauntiness, not quite as yet outgrown. His illustrative poetical
quotations are mostly from Shakespeare,--from Milton and Byron also in a
passage or two,--and now and then one is reminded that he is not
unfamiliar with Carlyle's “Sartor Resartus” and the “French Revolution”
 of the same unmistakable writer, more perhaps by the way in which phrases
borrowed from other authorities are set in the text than by any more
important evidence of unconscious imitation.

The readers who had shaken their heads over the unsuccessful story of
“Morton's Hope” were startled by the appearance of this manly and
scholarly essay. This young man, it seemed, had been studying,--studying
with careful accuracy, with broad purpose. He could paint a character
with the ruddy life-blood coloring it as warmly as it glows in the cheeks
of one of Van der Helst's burgomasters. He could sweep the horizon in a
wide general outlook, and manage his perspective and his lights and
shadows so as to place and accent his special subject with its due relief
and just relations. It was a sketch, or rather a study for a larger
picture, but it betrayed the hand of a master. The feeling of many was
that expressed in the words of Mr. Longfellow in his review of the
“Twice-Told Tales” of the unknown young writer, Nathaniel Hawthorne:
“When a new star rises in the heavens, people gaze after it for a season
with the naked eye, and with such telescopes as they may find. . . . This
star is but newly risen; and erelong the observation of numerous
star-gazers, perched up on arm-chairs and editor's tables, will inform
the world of its magnitude and its place in the heaven of”--not poetry in
this instance, but that serene and unclouded region of the firmament
where shine unchanging the names of Herodotus and Thucydides. Those who
had always believed in their brilliant schoolmate and friend at last felt
themselves justified in their faith. The artist that sent this unframed
picture to be hung in a corner of the literary gallery was equal to
larger tasks. There was but one voice in the circle that surrounded the
young essayist. He must redeem his pledge, he can and will redeem it, if
he will only follow the bent of his genius and grapple with the heroic
labor of writing a great history.

And this was the achievement he was already meditating.

In the mean time he was studying history for its facts and principles,
and fiction for its scenery and portraits. In “The North American Review”
 for July, 1847, is a long and characteristic article on Balzac, of whom
he was an admirer, but with no blind worship. The readers of this great
story-teller, who was so long in obtaining recognition, who “made twenty
assaults upon fame and had forty books killed under him” before he
achieved success, will find his genius fully appreciated and fairly
weighed in this discriminating essay. A few brief extracts will show its
quality.

   “Balzac is an artist, and only an artist. In his tranquil,
   unimpassioned, remorseless diagnosis of morbid phenomena, in his
   cool method of treating the morbid anatomy of the heart, in his
   curiously accurate dissection of the passions, in the patient and
   painful attention with which, stethoscope in hand, finger on pulse,
   eye everywhere, you see him watching every symptom, alive to every
   sound and every breath, and in the scientific accuracy with which he
   portrays the phenomena which have been the subject of his
   investigation,--in all this calm and conscientious study of nature
   he often reminds us of Goethe. Balzac, however, is only an artist
   . . . He is neither moral nor immoral, but a calm and profound
   observer of human society and human passions, and a minute, patient,
   and powerful delineator of scenes and characters in the world before
   his eyes. His readers must moralize for themselves. . . . It
   is, perhaps, his defective style more than anything else which will
   prevent his becoming a classic, for style above all other qualities
   seems to embalm for posterity. As for his philosophy, his
   principles, moral, political, or social, we repeat that he seems to
   have none whatever. He looks for the picturesque and the striking.
   He studies sentiments and sensations from an artistic point of view.
   He is a physiognomist, a physiologist, a bit of an anatomist, a bit
   of a mesmerist, a bit of a geologist, a Flemish painter, an
   upholsterer, a micrological, misanthropical, sceptical philosopher;
   but he is no moralist, and certainly no reformer.”

Another article contributed by Mr. Motley to “The North American Review”
 is to be found in the number for October, 1849. It is nominally a review
of Talvi's (Mrs. Robinson's) “Geschichte der Colonisation von New
England,” but in reality an essay on the Polity of the Puritans,--an
historical disquisition on the principles of self-government evolved in
New England, broad in its views, eloquent in its language. Its spirit is
thoroughly American, and its estimate of the Puritan character is not
narrowed by the nearsighted liberalism which sees the past in the
pitiless light of the present,--which looks around at high noon and finds
fault with early dawn for its long and dark shadows. Here is a sentence
or two from the article:--

   “With all the faults of the system devised by the Puritans, it was a
   practical system. With all their foibles, with all their teasing,
   tyrannical, and arbitrary notions, the Pilgrims were lovers of
   liberty as well as sticklers for authority. . . . Nowhere can a
   better description of liberty be found than that given by Winthrop,
   in his defence of himself before the General Court on a charge of
   arbitrary conduct. 'Nor would I have you mistake your own liberty,'
   he says. 'There is a freedom of doing what we list, without regard
   to law or justice; this liberty is indeed inconsistent with
   authority; but civil, moral, and federal liberty consists in every
   man's enjoying his property and having the benefit of the laws of
   his country; which is very consistent with a due subjection to the
   civil magistrate.' . . .

   “We enjoy an inestimable advantage in America. One can be a
   republican, a democrat, without being a radical. A radical, one who
   would uproot, is a man whose trade is dangerous to society. Here is
   but little to uproot. The trade cannot flourish. All classes are
   conservative by necessity, for none can wish to change the structure
   of our polity. . .

   “The country without a past cannot be intoxicated by visions of the
   past of other lands. Upon this absence of the past it seems to us
   that much of the security of our institutions depends. Nothing
   interferes with the development of what is now felt to be the true
   principle of government, the will of the people legitimately
   expressed. To establish that great truth, nothing was to be torn
   down, nothing to be uprooted. It grew up in New England out of the
   seed unconsciously planted by the first Pilgrims, was not crushed
   out by the weight of a thousand years of error spread over the whole
   continent, and the Revolution was proclaimed and recognized.”




VIII.

1847-1849. AEt. 33-35.

JOSEPH LEWIS STACKPOLE, THE FRIEND OF MOTLEY. HIS SUDDEN DEATH.--MOTLEY
IN THE MASSACHUSETTS HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES.--SECOND NOVEL,
“MERRY-MOUNT, A ROMANCE OF THE MASSACHUSETTS COLONY.”

The intimate friendships of early manhood are not very often kept up
among our people. The eager pursuit of fortune, position, office,
separates young friends, and the indoor home life imprisons them in the
domestic circle so generally that it is quite exceptional to find two
grown men who are like brothers,--or rather unlike most brothers, in
being constantly found together. An exceptional instance of such a more
than fraternal relation was seen in the friendship of Mr. Motley and Mr.
Joseph Lewis Stackpole. Mr. William Amory, who knew them both well, has
kindly furnished me with some recollections, which I cannot improve by
changing his own language.

   “Their intimacy began in Europe, and they returned to this country
   in 1835. In 1837 they married sisters, and this cemented their
   intimacy, which continued to Stackpole's death in 1847. The
   contrast in the temperament of the two friends--the one sensitive
   and irritable, and the other always cool and good-natured--only
   increased their mutual attachment to each other, and Motley's
   dependence upon Stackpole. Never were two friends more constantly
   together or more affectionately fond of each other. As Stackpole
   was about eight years older than Motley, and much less impulsive and
   more discreet, his death was to his friend irreparable, and at the
   time an overwhelming blow.”

Mr. Stackpole was a man of great intelligence, of remarkable personal
attractions, and amiable character. His death was a loss to Motley even
greater than he knew, for he needed just such a friend, older, calmer,
more experienced in the ways of the world, and above all capable of
thoroughly understanding him and exercising a wholesome influence over
his excitable nature without the seeming of a Mentor preaching to a
Telemachus. Mr. Stackpole was killed by a railroad accident on the 20th
of July, 1847.

In the same letter Mr. Amory refers to a very different experience in Mr.
Motley's life,--his one year of service as a member of the Massachusetts
House of Representatives, 1849.

   “In respect to the one term during which he was a member of the
   Massachusetts House of Representatives, I can recall only one thing,
   to which he often and laughingly alluded. Motley, as the Chairman
   of the Committee on Education, made, as he thought, a most masterly
   report. It was very elaborate, and, as he supposed, unanswerable;
   but Boutwell, then a young man from some country town [Groton,
   Mass.], rose, and as Motley always said, demolished the report, so
   that he was unable to defend it against the attack. You can imagine
   his disgust, after the pains he had taken to render it unassailable,
   to find himself, as he expressed it, 'on his own dunghill,'
   ignominiously beaten. While the result exalted his opinion of the
   speech-making faculty of a Representative of a common school
   education, it at the same time cured him of any ambition for
   political promotion in Massachusetts.”

To my letter of inquiry about this matter, Hon. George S. Boutwell
courteously returned the following answer:--

                  BOSTON, October 14, 1878.

   MY DEAR SIR,--As my memory serves me, Mr. Motley was a member of the
   Massachusetts House of Representatives in the year 1847 1849. It
   may be well to consult the manual for that year. I recollect the
   controversy over the report from the Committee on Education.

   His failure was not due to his want of faculty or to the vigor of
   his opponents.

   In truth he espoused the weak side of the question and the unpopular
   one also. His proposition was to endow the colleges at the expense
   of the fund for the support of the common schools. Failure was
   inevitable. Neither Webster nor Choate could have carried the bill.

                  Very truly,
                       GEO. S. BOUTWELL.

No one could be more ready and willing to recognize his own failures than
Motley. He was as honest and manly, perhaps I may say as sympathetic with
the feeling of those about him, on this occasion, as was Charles Lamb,
who, sitting with his sister in the front of the pit, on the night when
his farce was damned at its first representation, gave way to the common
feeling, and hissed and hooted lustily with the others around him. It was
what might be expected from his honest and truthful nature, sometimes too
severe in judging itself.

The commendation bestowed upon Motley's historical essays in “The North
American Review” must have gone far towards compensating him for the ill
success of his earlier venture. It pointed clearly towards the field in
which he was to gather his laurels. And it was in the year following the
publication of the first essay, or about that time (1846), that he began
collecting materials for a history of Holland. Whether to tell the story
of men that have lived and of events that have happened, or to create the
characters and invent the incidents of an imaginary tale be the higher
task, we need not stop to discuss. But the young author was just now like
the great actor in Sir Joshua's picture, between the allurements of
Thalia and Melpomene, still doubtful whether he was to be a romancer or a
historian.

The tale of which the title is given at the beginning of this section had
been written several years before the date of its publication. It is a
great advance in certain respects over the first novel, but wants the
peculiar interest which belonged to that as a partially autobiographical
memoir. The story is no longer disjointed and impossible. It is carefully
studied in regard to its main facts. It has less to remind us of “Vivian
Grey” and “Pelham,” and more that recalls “Woodstock” and “Kenilworth.”
 The personages were many of them historical, though idealized; the
occurrences were many of them such as the record authenticated; the
localities were drawn largely from nature. The story betrays marks of
haste or carelessness in some portions, though others are elaborately
studied. His preface shows that the reception of his first book had made
him timid and sensitive about the fate of the second, and explains and
excuses what might be found fault with, to disarm the criticism he had
some reason to fear.

That old watch-dog of our American literature, “The North American
Review,” always ready with lambent phrases in stately “Articles” for
native talent of a certain pretension, and wagging its appendix of
“Critical Notices” kindly at the advent of humbler merit, treated
“Merry-Mount” with the distinction implied in a review of nearly twenty
pages. This was a great contrast to the brief and slighting notice of
“Morton's Hope.” The reviewer thinks the author's descriptive power
wholly exceeds his conception of character and invention of
circumstances.

   “He dwells, perhaps, too long and fondly upon his imagination of the
   landscape as it was before the stillness of the forest had been
   broken by the axe of the settler; but the picture is so finely
   drawn, with so much beauty of language and purity of sentiment, that
   we cannot blame him for lingering upon the scene. . . . The
   story is not managed with much skill, but it has variety enough of
   incident and character, and is told with so much liveliness that few
   will be inclined to lay it down before reaching the conclusion. .
   . . The writer certainly needs practice in elaborating the details
   of a consistent and interesting novel; but in many respects he is
   well qualified for the task, and we shall be glad to meet him again
   on the half-historical ground he has chosen. His present work,
   certainly, is not a fair specimen of what he is able to accomplish,
   and its failure, or partial success, ought only to inspirit him for
   further effort.”

The “half-historical ground” he had chosen had already led him to the
entrance into the broader domain of history. The “further effort” for
which he was to be inspirited had already begun. He had been for some
time, as was before mentioned, collecting materials for the work which
was to cast all his former attempts into the kindly shadow of oblivion,
save when from time to time the light of his brilliant after success is
thrown upon them to illustrate the path by which it was at length
attained.




IX.

1850. AEt. 36.
PLAN OF A HISTORY.--LETTERS.

The reputation of Mr. Prescott was now coextensive with the realm of
scholarship. The histories of the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella and of
the conquest of Mexico had met with a reception which might well tempt
the ambition of a young writer to emulate it, but which was not likely to
be awarded to any second candidate who should enter the field in rivalry
with the great and universally popular historian. But this was the field
on which Mr. Motley was to venture.

After he had chosen the subject of the history he contemplated, he found
that Mr. Prescott was occupied with a kindred one, so that there might be
too near a coincidence between them. I must borrow from Mr. Ticknor's
beautiful life of Prescott the words which introduce a letter of Motley's
to Mr. William Amory, who has kindly allowed me also to make use of it.

   “The moment, therefore, that he [Mr. Motley] was aware of this
   condition of things, and the consequent possibility that there might
   be an untoward interference in their plans, he took the same frank
   and honorable course with Mr. Prescott that Mr. Prescott had taken
   in relation to Mr. Irving, when he found that they had both been
   contemplating a 'History of the Conquest of Mexico.' The result was
   the same. Mr. Prescott, instead of treating the matter as an
   interference, earnestly encouraged Mr. Motley to go on, and placed
   at his disposition such of the books in his library as could be most
   useful to him. How amply and promptly he did it, Mr. Motley's own
   account will best show. It is in a letter dated at Rome, 26th
   February, 1859, the day he heard of Mr. Prescott's death, and was
   addressed to his intimate friend, Mr. William Amory, of Boston, Mr.
   Prescott's much-loved brother-in-law.”

   “It seems to me but as yesterday,” Mr. Motley writes, “though it
   must be now twelve years ago, that I was talking with our
   ever-lamented friend Stackpole about my intention of writing a history
   upon a subject to which I have since that time been devoting myself.
   I had then made already some general studies in reference to it,
   without being in the least aware that Prescott had the intention of
   writing the 'History of Philip the Second.' Stackpole had heard the
   fact, and that large preparations had already been made for the
   work, although 'Peru' had not yet been published. I felt naturally
   much disappointed. I was conscious of the immense disadvantage to
   myself of making my appearance, probably at the same time, before
   the public, with a work not at all similar in plan to 'Philip the
   Second,' but which must of necessity traverse a portion of the same
   ground.

   “My first thought was inevitably, as it were, only of myself.
   It seemed to me that I had nothing to do but to abandon at once a
   cherished dream, and probably to renounce authorship. For I had not
   first made up my mind to write a history, and then cast about to
   take up a subject. My subject had taken me up, drawn me on, and
   absorbed me into itself. It was necessary for me, it seemed, to
   write the book I had been thinking much of, even if it were destined
   to fall dead from the press, and I had no inclination or interest to
   write any other. When I had made up my mind accordingly, it then
   occurred to me that Prescott might not be pleased that I should come
   forward upon his ground. It is true that no announcement of his
   intentions had been made, and that he had not, I believe, even
   commenced his preliminary studies for Philip. At the same time I
   thought it would be disloyal on my part not to go to him at once,
   confer with him on the subject, and if I should find a shadow of
   dissatisfaction on his mind at my proposition, to abandon my plan
   altogether.

   “I had only the slightest acquaintance with him at that time. I was
   comparatively a young man, and certainly not entitled on any ground
   to more than the common courtesy which Prescott never could refuse
   to any one. But he received me with such a frank and ready and
   liberal sympathy, and such an open-hearted, guileless expansiveness,
   that I felt a personal affection for him from that hour. I remember
   the interview as if it had taken place yesterday. It was in his
   father's house, in his own library, looking on the garden-house and
   garden,--honored father and illustrious son,--alas! all numbered
   with the things that were! He assured me that he had not the
   slightest objection whatever to my plan, that he wished me every
   success, and that, if there were any books in his library bearing on
   my subject that I liked to use, they were entirely at my service.
   After I had expressed my gratitude for his kindness and cordiality,
   by which I had been in a very few moments set completely at ease,
   --so far as my fears of his disapprobation went,--I also very
   naturally stated my opinion that the danger was entirely mine, and
   that it was rather wilful of me thus to risk such a collision at my
   first venture, the probable consequence of which was utter
   shipwreck. I recollect how kindly and warmly he combated this
   opinion, assuring me that no two books, as he said, ever injured
   each other, and encouraging me in the warmest and most earnest
   manner to proceed on the course I had marked out for myself.

   “Had the result of that interview been different,--had he distinctly
   stated, or even vaguely hinted, that it would be as well if I should
   select some other topic, or had he only sprinkled me with the cold
   water of conventional and commonplace encouragement,--I should have
   gone from him with a chill upon my mind, and, no doubt, have laid
   down the pen at once; for, as I have already said, it was not that I
   cared about writing a history, but that I felt an inevitable impulse
   to write one particular history.

   “You know how kindly he always spoke of and to me; and the generous
   manner in which, without the slightest hint from me, and entirely
   unexpected by me, he attracted the eyes of his hosts of readers to
   my forthcoming work, by so handsomely alluding to it in the Preface
   to his own, must be almost as fresh in your memory as it is in mine.

   “And although it seems easy enough for a man of world-wide
   reputation thus to extend the right hand of fellowship to an unknown
   and struggling aspirant, yet I fear that the history of literature
   will show that such instances of disinterested kindness are as rare
   as they are noble.”

It was not from any feeling that Mr. Motley was a young writer from whose
rivalry he had nothing to apprehend. Mr. Amory says that Prescott
expressed himself very decidedly to the effect that an author who had
written such descriptive passages as were to be found in Mr. Motley's
published writings was not to be undervalued as a competitor by any one.
The reader who will turn to the description of Charles River in the
eighth chapter of the second volume of “Merry-Mount,” or of the autumnal
woods in the sixteenth chapter of the same volume, will see good reason
for Mr. Prescott's appreciation of the force of the rival whose advent he
so heartily and generously welcomed.




X.

1851-1856. AEt. 37-42.
HISTORICAL STUDIES IN EUROPE.-LETTER FROM BRUSSELS.

After working for several years on his projected “History of the Dutch
Republic,” he found that, in order to do justice to his subject, he must
have recourse to the authorities to be found only in the libraries and
state archives of Europe. In the year 1851 he left America with his
family, to begin his task over again, throwing aside all that he had
already done, and following up his new course of investigations at
Berlin, Dresden, the Hague, and Brussels during several succeeding years.
I do not know that I can give a better idea of his mode of life during
this busy period, his occupations, his state of mind, his objects of
interest outside of his special work, than by making the following
extracts from a long letter to myself, dated Brussels, 20th November,
1853.

After some personal matters he continued:--

   “I don't really know what to say to you. I am in a town which, for
   aught I know, may be very gay. I don't know a living soul in it.
   We have not a single acquaintance in the place, and we glory in the
   fact. There is something rather sublime in thus floating on a
   single spar in the wide sea of a populous, busy, fuming, fussy world
   like this. At any rate it is consonant to both our tastes. You may
   suppose, however, that I find it rather difficult to amuse my
   friends out of the incidents of so isolated an existence. Our daily
   career is very regular and monotonous. Our life is as stagnant as a
   Dutch canal. Not that I complain of it,--on the contrary, the canal
   may be richly freighted with merchandise and be a short cut to the
   ocean of abundant and perpetual knowledge; but, at the same time,
   few points rise above the level of so regular a life, to be worthy
   of your notice. You must, therefore, allow me to meander along the
   meadows of commonplace. Don't expect anything of the impetuous and
   boiling style. We go it weak here. I don't know whether you were
   ever in Brussels. It is a striking, picturesque town, built up a
   steep promontory, the old part at the bottom, very dingy and mouldy,
   the new part at the top, very showy and elegant. Nothing can be
   more exquisite in its way than the grande place in the very heart of
   the city, surrounded with those toppling, zigzag, ten-storied
   buildings bedizened all over with ornaments and emblems so peculiar
   to the Netherlands, with the brocaded Hotel de Ville on one side,
   with its impossible spire rising some three hundred and seventy feet
   into the air and embroidered to the top with the delicacy of needle-
   work, sugarwork, spider-work, or what you will. I haunt this place
   because it is my scene, my theatre. Here were enacted so many deep
   tragedies, so many stately dramas, and even so many farces, which
   have been familiar to me so long that I have got to imagine myself
   invested with a kind of property in the place, and look at it as if
   it were merely the theatre with the coulisses, machinery, drapery,
   etc., for representing scenes which have long since vanished, and
   which no more enter the minds of the men and women who are actually
   moving across its pavements than if they had occurred in the moon.
   When I say that I knew no soul in Brussels I am perhaps wrong. With
   the present generation I am not familiar. 'En revanche,' the dead
   men of the place are my intimate friends. I am at home in any
   cemetery. With the fellows of the sixteenth century I am on the
   most familiar terms. Any ghost that ever flits by night across the
   moonlight square is at once hailed by me as a man and a brother. I
   call him by his Christian name at once. When you come out of this
   place, however, which, as I said, is in the heart of the town,--the
   antique gem in the modern setting,--you may go either up or down.
   If you go down, you will find yourself in the very nastiest
   complications of lanes and culs-de-sac possible, a dark entanglement
   of gin-shops, beer-houses, and hovels, through which charming valley
   dribbles the Senne (whence, I suppose, is derived Senna), the most
   nauseous little river in the world, which receives all the
   outpourings of all the drains and houses, and is then converted into
   beer for the inhabitants, all the many breweries being directly upon
   its edge. If you go up the hill instead of down, you come to an
   arrangement of squares, palaces, and gardens as trim and fashionable
   as you will find in Europe. Thus you see that our Cybele sits with
   her head crowned with very stately towers and her feet in a tub of
   very dirty water.

   “My habits here for the present year are very regular. I came here,
   having, as I thought, finished my work, or rather the first Part
   (something like three or four volumes, 8vo), but I find so much
   original matter here, and so many emendations to make, that I am
   ready to despair. However, there is nothing for it but to
   penelopize, pull to pieces, and stitch away again. Whatever may be
   the result of my labor, nobody can say that I have not worked like
   a brute beast,--but I don't care for the result. The labor is in
   itself its own reward and all I want. I go day after day to the
   archives here (as I went all summer at the Hague), studying the old
   letters and documents of the fifteenth century. Here I remain among
   my fellow-worms, feeding on these musty mulberry-leaves, out of
   which we are afterwards to spin our silk. How can you expect
   anything interesting from such a human cocoon? It is, however, not
   without its amusement in a mouldy sort of way, this reading of dead
   letters. It is something to read the real, bona fide signs-manual
   of such fellows as William of Orange, Count Egmont, Alexander
   Farnese, Philip II., Cardinal Granvelle, and the rest of them. It
   gives a 'realizing sense,' as the Americans have it. . . . There
   are not many public resources of amusement in this place,--if we
   wanted them,--which we don't. I miss the Dresden Gallery very much,
   and it makes me sad to think that I shall never look at the face of
   the Sistine Madonna again,--that picture beyond all pictures in the
   world, in which the artist certainly did get to heaven and painted a
   face which was never seen on earth--so pathetic, so gentle, so
   passionless, so prophetic. . . . There are a few good Rubenses
   here,--but the great wealth of that master is in Antwerp. The great
   picture of the Descent from the Cross is free again, after having
   been ten years in the repairing room. It has come out in very good
   condition. What a picture? It seems to me as if I had really stood
   at the cross and seen Mary weeping on John's shoulder, and Magdalen
   receiving the dead body of the Saviour in her arms. Never was the
   grand tragedy represented in so profound and dramatic a manner. For
   it is not only in his color in which this man so easily surpasses
   all the world, but in his life-like, flesh-and-blood action,--the
   tragic power of his composition. And is it not appalling to think
   of the 'large constitution of this man,' when you reflect on the
   acres of canvas which he has covered? How inspiriting to see with
   what muscular, masculine vigor this splendid Fleming rushed in and
   plucked up drowning Art by the locks when it was sinking in the
   trashy sea of such creatures as the Luca Giordanos and Pietro
   Cortonas and the like. Well might Guido exclaim, 'The fellow mixes
   blood with his colors! . . . How providentially did the man come
   in and invoke living, breathing, moving men and women out of his
   canvas! Sometimes he is ranting and exaggerated, as are all men of
   great genius who wrestle with Nature so boldly. No doubt his
   heroines are more expansively endowed than would be thought genteel
   in our country, where cryptogams are so much in fashion,
   nevertheless there is always something very tremendous about him,
   and very often much that is sublime, pathetic, and moving. I defy
   any one of the average amount of imagination and sentiment to stand
   long before the Descent from the Cross without being moved more
   nearly to tears than he would care to acknowledge. As for color,
   his effects are as sure as those of the sun rising in a tropical
   landscape. There is something quite genial in the cheerful sense of
   his own omnipotence which always inspired him. There are a few fine
   pictures of his here, and I go in sometimes of a raw, foggy morning
   merely to warm myself in the blaze of their beauty.”

I have been more willing to give room to this description of Rubens's
pictures and the effect they produced upon Motley, because there is a
certain affinity between those sumptuous and glowing works of art and the
prose pictures of the historian who so admired them. He was himself a
colorist in language, and called up the image of a great personage or a
splendid pageant of the past with the same affluence, the same rich
vitality, that floods and warms the vast areas of canvas over which the
full-fed genius of Rubens disported itself in the luxury of imaginative
creation.




XI.

1856-1857. AEt. 42-43.

PUBLICATION OF HIS FIRST HISTORICAL WORK, “RISE OF THE DUTCH REPUBLIC.”
 --ITS RECEPTION.--CRITICAL NOTICES.

The labor of ten years was at last finished. Carrying his formidable
manuscript with him,--and how formidable the manuscript which melts down
into three solid octavo volumes is, only writers and publishers know,--he
knocked at the gate of that terrible fortress from which Lintot and Curll
and Tonson looked down on the authors of an older generation. So large a
work as the “History of the Rise of the Dutch Republic,” offered for the
press by an author as yet unknown to the British public, could hardly
expect a warm welcome from the great dealers in literature as
merchandise. Mr. Murray civilly declined the manuscript which was offered
to him, and it was published at its author's expense by Mr. John Chapman.
The time came when the positions of the first-named celebrated publisher
and the unknown writer were reversed. Mr. Murray wrote to Mr. Motley
asking to be allowed to publish his second great work, the “History of
the United Netherlands,” expressing at the same time his regret at what
he candidly called his mistake in the first instance, and thus they were
at length brought into business connection as well as the most agreeable
and friendly relations. An American edition was published by the Harpers
at the same time as the London one.

If the new work of the unknown author found it difficult to obtain a
publisher, it was no sooner given to the public than it found an
approving, an admiring, an enthusiastic world of readers, and a noble
welcome at the colder hands of the critics.

“The Westminster Review” for April, 1856, had for its leading article a
paper by Mr. Froude, in which the critic awarded the highest praise to
the work of the new historian. As one of the earliest as well as one of
the most important recognitions of the work, I quote some of its
judgments.

   “A history as complete as industry and genius can make it now lies
   before us of the first twenty years of the Revolt of the United
   Provinces; of the period in which those provinces finally conquered
   their independence and established the Republic of Holland. It has
   been the result of many years of silent, thoughtful, unobtrusive
   labor, and unless we are strangely mistaken, unless we are ourselves
   altogether unfit for this office of criticising which we have here
   undertaken, the book is one which will take its place among the
   finest histories in this or in any language. . . . All the
   essentials of a great writer Mr. Motley eminently possesses. His
   mind is broad, his industry unwearied. In power of dramatic
   description no modern historian, except perhaps Mr. Carlyle,
   surpasses him, and in analysis of character he is elaborate and
   distinct. His principles are those of honest love for all which is
   good and admirable in human character wherever he finds it, while he
   unaffectedly hates oppression, and despises selfishness with all his
   heart.”

After giving a slight analytical sketch of the series of events related
in the history, Mr. Froude objects to only one of the historian's
estimates, that, namely, of the course of Queen Elizabeth.

   “It is ungracious, however,” he says, “even to find so slight a
   fault with these admirable volumes. Mr. Motley has written without
   haste, with the leisurely composure of a master. . . . We now
   take our leave of Mr. Motley, desiring him only to accept our hearty
   thanks for these volumes, which we trust will soon take their place
   in every English library. Our quotations will have sufficed to show
   the ability of the writer. Of the scope and general character of
   his work we have given but a languid conception. The true merit of
   a great book must be learned from the book itself. Our part has
   been rather to select varied specimens of style and power. Of Mr.
   Motley's antecedents we know nothing. If he has previously appeared
   before the public, his reputation has not crossed the Atlantic. It
   will not be so now. We believe that we may promise him as warm a
   welcome among ourselves as he will receive even in America; that his
   place will be at once conceded to him among the first historians in
   our common language.”

The faithful and unwearied Mr. Allibone has swept the whole field of
contemporary criticism, and shown how wide and universal was the welcome
accorded to the hitherto unknown author. An article headed “Prescott and
Motley,” attributed to M. Guizot, which must have been translated, I
suppose, from his own language, judging by its freedom from French
idioms, is to be found in “The Edinburgh Review” for January, 1857. The
praise, not unmingled with criticisms, which that great historian
bestowed upon Motley is less significant than the fact that he
superintended a translation of the “Rise of the Dutch Republic,” and
himself wrote the Introduction to it.

A general chorus of approbation followed or accompanied these leading
voices. The reception of the work in Great Britain was a triumph. On the
Continent, in addition to the tribute paid to it by M. Guizot, it was
translated into Dutch, into German, and into Russian. At home his
reception was not less hearty. “The North American Review,” which had set
its foot on the semi-autobiographical medley which he called “Morton's
Hope,” which had granted a decent space and a tepid recognition to his
“semi-historical” romance, in which he had already given the reading
public a taste of his quality as a narrator of real events and a
delineator of real personages,--this old and awe-inspiring New England
and more than New England representative of the Fates, found room for a
long and most laudatory article, in which the son of one of our most
distinguished historians did the honors of the venerable literary
periodical to the new-comer, for whom the folding-doors of all the
critical headquarters were flying open as if of themselves. Mr. Allibone
has recorded the opinions of some of our best scholars as expressed to
him.

Dr. Lieber wrote a letter to Mr. Allibone in the strongest terms of
praise. I quote one passage which in the light of after events borrows a
cruel significance:--

   “Congress and Parliament decree thanks for military exploits,
   --rarely for diplomatic achievements. If they ever voted their thanks
   for books,--and what deeds have influenced the course of human
   events more than some books?--Motley ought to have the thanks of our
   Congress; but I doubt not that he has already the thanks of every
   American who has read the work. It will leave its distinct mark
   upon the American mind.”

Mr. Everett writes:--

   “Mr. Motley's 'History of the Dutch Republic' is in my judgment a
   work of the highest merit. Unwearying research for years in the
   libraries of Europe, patience and judgment in arranging and
   digesting his materials, a fine historical tact, much skill in
   characterization, the perspective of narration, as it may be called,
   and a vigorous style unite to make it a very capital work, and place
   the name of Motley by the side of those of our great historical
   trio,--Bancroft, Irving, and Prescott.”

Mr. Irving, Mr. Bancroft, Mr. Sumner, Mr. Hillard, united their voices in
the same strain of commendation. Mr. Prescott, whose estimate of the new
history is of peculiar value for obvious reasons, writes to Mr. Allibone
thus:--

   “The opinion of any individual seems superfluous in respect to a
   work on the merits of which the public both at home and abroad have
   pronounced so unanimous a verdict. As Motley's path crosses my own
   historic field, I may be thought to possess some advantage over most
   critics in my familiarity with the ground.

   “However this may be, I can honestly bear my testimony to the extent
   of his researches and to the accuracy with which he has given the
   results of them to the public. Far from making his book a mere
   register of events, he has penetrated deep below the surface and
   explored the cause of these events. He has carefully studied the
   physiognomy of the times and given finished portraits of the great
   men who conducted the march of the revolution. Every page is
   instinct with the love of freedom and with that personal knowledge
   of the working of free institutions which could alone enable him to
   do justice to his subject. We may congratulate ourselves that it
   was reserved for one of our countrymen to tell the story-better than
   it had yet been told--of this memorable revolution, which in so many
   of its features bears a striking resemblance to our own.”

The public welcomed the work as cordially as the critics. Fifteen
thousand copies had already been sold in London in 1857. In America it
was equally popular. Its author saw his name enrolled by common consent
among those of the great writers of his time. Europe accepted him, his
country was proud to claim him, scholarship set its jealously guarded
seal upon the result of his labors, the reading world, which had not
cared greatly for his stories, hung in delight over a narrative more
exciting than romances; and the lonely student, who had almost forgotten
the look of living men in the solitude of archives haunted by dead
memories, found himself suddenly in the full blaze of a great reputation.




XII.

1856-1857. AEt. 42-43.
VISIT TO AMERICA.--RESIDENCE IN BOYLSTON PLACE.

He visited this country in 1856, and spent the winter of 1856-57 in
Boston, living with his family in a house in Boylston Place. At this time
I had the pleasure of meeting him often, and of seeing the changes which
maturity, success, the opening of a great literary and social career, had
wrought in his character and bearing. He was in every way greatly
improved; the interesting, impulsive youth had ripened into a noble
manhood. Dealing with great themes, his own mind had gained their
dignity. Accustomed to the company of dead statesmen and heroes, his own
ideas had risen to a higher standard. The flattery of society had added a
new grace to his natural modesty. He was now a citizen of the world by
his reputation; the past was his province, in which he was recognized as
a master; the idol's pedestal was ready for him, but he betrayed no
desire to show himself upon it.




XIII.

1858-1860. AEt. 44-46.
RETURN TO ENGLAND.--SOCIAL RELATIONS.--LADY HARCOURT'S LETTER.

During the years spent in Europe in writing his first history, from 1851
to 1856, Mr. Motley had lived a life of great retirement and simplicity,
devoting himself to his work and to the education of his children, to
which last object he was always ready to give the most careful
supervision. He was as yet unknown beyond the circle of his friends, and
he did not seek society. In this quiet way he had passed the two years of
residence in Dresden, the year divided between Brussels and the Hague,
and a very tranquil year spent at Vevay on the Lake of Geneva. His health
at this time was tolerably good, except for nervous headaches, which
frequently recurred and were of great severity. His visit to England with
his manuscript in search of a publisher has already been mentioned.

In 1858 he revisited England. His fame as a successful author was there
before him, and he naturally became the object of many attentions. He now
made many acquaintances who afterwards became his kind and valued
friends. Among those mentioned by his daughter, Lady Harcourt, are Lord
Lyndhurst, Lord Carlisle, Lady William Russell, Lord and Lady Palmerston,
Dean Milman, with many others. The following winter was passed in Rome,
among many English and American friends.

   “In the course of the next summer,” his daughter writes to me, “we
   all went to England, and for the next two years, marked chiefly by
   the success of the 'United Netherlands,' our social life was most
   agreeable and most interesting. He was in the fulness of his health
   and powers; his works had made him known in intellectual society,
   and I think his presence, on the other hand, increased their
   effects. As no one knows better than you do, his belief in his own
   country and in its institutions at their best was so passionate and
   intense that it was a part of his nature, yet his refined and
   fastidious tastes were deeply gratified by the influences of his
   life in England, and the spontaneous kindness which he received
   added much to his happiness. At that time Lord Palmerston was Prime
   Minister; the weekly receptions at Cambridge House were the centre
   of all that was brilliant in the political and social world, while
   Lansdowne House, Holland House, and others were open to the
   'sommites' in all branches of literature, science, rank, and
   politics. . . . It was the last year of Lord Macaulay's life,
   and as a few out of many names which I recall come Dean Milman, Mr.
   Froude (whose review of the 'Dutch Republic' in the 'Westminster'
   was one of the first warm recognitions it ever received), the Duke
   and Duchess of Argyll, Sir William Stirling Maxwell, then Mr.
   Stirling of Keir, the Sheridan family in its different brilliant
   members, Lord Wensleydale, and many more.”

There was no society to which Motley would not have added grace and
attraction by his presence, and to say that he was a welcome guest in the
best houses of England is only saying that these houses are always open
to those whose abilities, characters, achievements, are commended to the
circles that have the best choice by the personal gifts which are
nature's passport everywhere.




XIV.

1859. AEt. 45.

LETTER TO MR. FRANCIS H. UNDERWOOD.--PLAN OF MR. MOTLEY'S HISTORICAL
WORKS.--SECOND GREAT WORK, “HISTORY OF THE UNITED NETHERLANDS.”

I am enabled by the kindness of Mr. Francis H. Underwood to avail myself
of a letter addressed to him by Mr. Motley in the year before the
publication of this second work, which gives us an insight into his mode
of working and the plan he proposed to follow. It begins with an allusion
which recalls a literary event interesting to many of his American
friends.

                    ROME, March 4, 1859.

   F. H. UNDERWOOD, ESQ.

   My dear Sir,--. . . I am delighted to hear of the great success
   of “The Atlantic Monthly.” In this remote region I have not the
   chance of reading it as often as I should like, but from the
   specimens which I have seen I am quite sure it deserves its wide
   circulation. A serial publication, the contents of which are purely
   original and of such remarkable merit, is a novelty in our country,
   and I am delighted to find that it has already taken so prominent a
   position before the reading world. . .

   The whole work [his history], of which the three volumes already
   published form a part, will be called “The Eighty Years' War for
   Liberty.”

   Epoch I. is the Rise of the Dutch Republic.

   Epoch II. Independence Achieved. From the Death of William the
   Silent till the Twelve Years' Truce. 1584-1609.

   Epoch III. Independence Recognized. From the Twelve Years' Truce
   to the Peace of Westphalia. 1609-1648.

   My subject is a very vast one, for the struggle of the United
   Provinces with Spain was one in which all the leading states of
   Europe were more or less involved. After the death of William the
   Silent, the history assumes world-wide proportions. Thus the volume
   which I am just about terminating . . . is almost as much English
   history as Dutch. The Earl of Leicester, very soon after the death
   of Orange, was appointed governor of the provinces, and the alliance
   between the two countries almost amounted to a political union. I
   shall try to get the whole of the Leicester administration,
   terminating with the grand drama of the Invincible Armada, into one
   volume; but I doubt, my materials are so enormous. I have been
   personally very hard at work, nearly two years, ransacking the
   British State Paper Office, the British Museum, and the Holland
   archives, and I have had two copyists constantly engaged in London,
   and two others at the Hague. Besides this, I passed the whole of
   last winter at Brussels, where, by special favor of the Belgian
   Government, I was allowed to read what no one else has ever been
   permitted to see,--the great mass of copies taken by that government
   from the Simancas archives, a translated epitome of which has been
   published by Gachard. This correspondence reaches to the death of
   Philip II., and is of immense extent and importance. Had I not
   obtained leave to read the invaluable and, for my purpose,
   indispensable documents at Brussels, I should have gone to Spain,
   for they will not be published these twenty years, and then only in
   a translated and excessively abbreviated and unsatisfactory form.
   I have read the whole of this correspondence, and made very copious
   notes of it. In truth, I devoted three months of last winter to
   that purpose alone.

   The materials I have collected from the English archives are also
   extremely important and curious. I have hundreds of interesting
   letters never published or to be published, by Queen Elizabeth,
   Burghley, Walsingham, Sidney, Drake, Willoughby, Leicester, and
   others. For the whole of that portion of my subject in which
   Holland and England were combined into one whole, to resist Spain in
   its attempt to obtain the universal empire, I have very abundant
   collections. For the history of the United Provinces is not at all
   a provincial history. It is the history of European liberty.
   Without the struggle of Holland and England against Spain, all
   Europe might have been Catholic and Spanish. It was Holland that
   saved England in the sixteenth century, and, by so doing, secured
   the triumph of the Reformation, and placed the independence of the
   various states of Europe upon a sure foundation. Of course, the
   materials collected by me at the Hague are of great importance. As
   a single specimen, I will state that I found in the archives there
   an immense and confused mass of papers, which turned out to be the
   autograph letters of Olden Barneveld during the last few years of
   his life; during, in short, the whole of that most important period
   which preceded his execution. These letters are in such an
   intolerable handwriting that no one has ever attempted to read them.
   I could read them only imperfectly myself, and it would have taken
   me a very long time to have acquired the power to do so; but my
   copyist and reader there is the most patient and indefatigable
   person alive, and he has quite mastered the handwriting, and he
   writes me that they are a mine of historical wealth for me. I shall
   have complete copies before I get to that period, one of signal
   interest, and which has never been described. I mention these
   matters that you may see that my work, whatever its other value may
   be, is built upon the only foundation fit for history,--original
   contemporary documents. These are all unpublished. Of course, I
   use the contemporary historians and pamphleteers,--Dutch, Spanish,
   French, Italian, German, and English,--but the most valuable of my
   sources are manuscript ones. I have said the little which I have
   said in order to vindicate the largeness of the subject. The
   kingdom of Holland is a small power now, but the Eighty Years' War,
   which secured the civil and religious independence of the Dutch
   Commonwealth and of Europe, was the great event of that whole age.

   The whole work will therefore cover a most remarkable epoch in human
   history, from the abdication of Charles Fifth to the Peace of
   Westphalia, at which last point the political and geographical
   arrangements of Europe were established on a permanent basis,--in
   the main undisturbed until the French Revolution. . . .

   I will mention that I received yesterday a letter from the
   distinguished M. Guizot, informing me that the first volume of the
   French translation, edited by him, with an introduction, has just
   been published. The publication was hastened in consequence of the
   appearance of a rival translation at Brussels. The German
   translation is very elegantly and expensively printed in handsome
   octavos; and the Dutch translation, under the editorship of the
   archivist general of Holland, Bakhuyzen v. d. Brink, is enriched
   with copious notes and comments by that distinguished scholar.

   There are also three different piratical reprints of the original
   work at Amsterdam, Leipzig, and London. I must add that I had
   nothing to do with the translation in any case. In fact, with the
   exception of M. Guizot, no one ever obtained permission of me to
   publish translations, and I never knew of the existence of them
   until I read of it in the journals. . . . I forgot to say that
   among the collections already thoroughly examined by me is that
   portion of the Simancas archives still retained in the Imperial
   archives of France. I spent a considerable time in Paris for the
   purpose of reading these documents. There are many letters of
   Philip II. there, with apostilles by his own hand. . . . I
   would add that I am going to pass this summer at Venice for the
   purpose of reading and procuring copies from the very rich archives
   of that Republic, of the correspondence of their envoys in Madrid,
   London, and Brussels during the epoch of which I am treating.

   I am also not without hope of gaining access to the archives of the
   Vatican here, although there are some difficulties in the way.

             With kind regards . . .
                  I remain very truly yours,
                         J. L. MOTLEY.




XV.

1860. AT. 46.

PUBLICATION OF THE FIRST TWO VOLUMES OF THE “HISTORY OF THE UNITED
NETHERLANDS.”--THEIR RECEPTION.

We know something of the manner in which Mr. Motley collected his
materials. We know the labors, the difficulties, the cost of his toils
among the dusty records of the past. What he gained by the years he spent
in his researches is so well stated by himself that I shall borrow his
own words:--

   “Thanks to the liberality of many modern governments of Europe, the
   archives where the state secrets of the buried centuries have so
   long mouldered are now open to the student of history. To him who
   has patience and industry, many mysteries are thus revealed which no
   political sagacity or critical acumen could have divined. He leans
   over the shoulder of Philip the Second at his writing-table, as the
   King spells patiently out, with cipher-key in hand, the most
   concealed hieroglyphics of Parma, or Guise, or Mendoza. He reads
   the secret thoughts of 'Fabius' [Philip II.] as that cunctative
   Roman scrawls his marginal apostilles on each dispatch; he pries
   into all the stratagems of Camillus, Hortensius, Mucius, Julius,
   Tullius, and the rest of those ancient heroes who lent their names
   to the diplomatic masqueraders of the sixteenth century; he enters
   the cabinet of the deeply pondering Burghley, and takes from the
   most private drawer the memoranda which record that minister's
   unutterable doubtings; he pulls from the dressing-gown folds of the
   stealthy, soft-gliding Walsingham the last secret which he has
   picked from the Emperor's pigeon-holes or the Pope's pocket, and
   which not Hatton, nor Buckhurst, nor Leicester, nor the Lord
   Treasurer is to see,--nobody but Elizabeth herself; he sits
   invisible at the most secret councils of the Nassaus and Barneveld
   and Buys, or pores with Farnese over coming victories and vast
   schemes of universal conquest; he reads the latest bit of scandal,
   the minutest characteristic of king or minister, chronicled by the
   gossiping Venetians for the edification of the Forty; and after all
   this prying and eavesdropping, having seen the cross-purposes, the
   bribings, the windings in the dark, he is not surprised if those who
   were systematically deceived did not always arrive at correct
   conclusions.”

The fascination of such a quest is readily conceivable. A drama with real
characters, and the spectator at liberty to go behind the scenes and look
upon and talk with the kings and queens between the acts; to examine the
scenery, to handle the properties, to study the “make up” of the imposing
personages of full-dress histories; to deal with them all as Thackeray
has done with the Grand Monarque in one of his caustic sketches,--this
would be as exciting, one might suppose, as to sit through a play one
knows by heart at Drury Lane or the Theatre Francais, and might furnish
occupation enough to the curious idler who was only in search of
entertainment. The mechanical obstacles of half-illegible manuscript, of
antiquated forms of speech, to say nothing of the intentional obscurities
of diplomatic correspondence, stand, however, in the way of all but the
resolute and unwearied scholar. These difficulties, in all their complex
obstinacy, had been met and overcome by the heroic efforts, the
concentrated devotion, of the new laborer in the unbroken fields of
secret history.

Without stopping to take breath, as it were,--for his was a task 'de
longue haleine,'--he proceeded to his second great undertaking.

The first portion--consisting of two volumes--of the “History of the
United Netherlands” was published in the year 1860. It maintained and
increased the reputation he had already gained by his first history.

“The London Quarterly Review” devoted a long article to it, beginning
with this handsome tribute to his earlier and later volumes:--

   “Mr. Motley's 'History of the Rise of the Dutch Republic' is already
   known and valued for the grasp of mind which it displays, for the
   earnest and manly spirit in which he has communicated the results of
   deep research and careful reflection. Again he appears before us,
   rich with the spoils of time, to tell the story of the United
   Netherlands from the time of William the Silent to the end of the
   eventful year of the Spanish Armada, and we still find him in every
   way worthy of this 'great argument.' Indeed, it seems to us that he
   proceeds with an increased facility of style, and with a more
   complete and easy command over his materials. These materials are
   indeed splendid, and of them most excellent use has been made. The
   English State Paper Office, the Spanish archives from Simancas, and
   the Dutch and Belgian repositories, have all yielded up their
   secrets; and Mr. Motley has enjoyed the advantage of dealing with a
   vast mass of unpublished documents, of which he has not failed to
   avail himself to an extent which places his work in the foremost
   rank as an authority for the period to which it relates. By means
   of his labor and his art we can sit at the council board of Philip
   and Elizabeth, we can read their most private dispatches. Guided by
   his demonstration, we are enabled to dissect out to their ultimate
   issues the minutest ramifications of intrigue. We join in the
   amusement of the popular lampoon; we visit the prison-house; we
   stand by the scaffold; we are present at the battle and the siege.
   We can scan the inmost characters of men and can view them in their
   habits as they lived.”

After a few criticisms upon lesser points of form and style, the writer
says:--

   “But the work itself must be read to appreciate the vast and
   conscientious industry bestowed upon it. His delineations are true
   and life-like, because they are not mere compositions written to
   please the ear, but are really taken from the facts and traits
   preserved in those authentic records to which he has devoted the
   labor of many years. Diligent and painstaking as the humblest
   chronicler, he has availed himself of many sources of information
   which have not been made use of by any previous historical writer.
   At the same time he is not oppressed by his materials, but has
   sagacity to estimate their real value, and he has combined with
   scholarly power the facts which they contain. He has rescued the
   story of the Netherlands from the domain of vague and general
   narrative, and has labored, with much judgment and ability, to
   unfold the 'Belli causas, et vitia, et modos,' and to assign to
   every man and every event their own share in the contest, and their
   own influence upon its fortunes. We do not wonder that his earlier
   publication has been received as a valuable addition, not only to
   English, but to European literature.”

One or two other contemporary criticisms may help us with their side
lights. A critic in “The Edinburgh Review” for January, 1861, thinks that
“Mr. Motley has not always been successful in keeping the graphic variety
of his details subordinate to the main theme of his work.” Still, he
excuses the fault, as he accounts it, in consideration of the new light
thrown on various obscure points of history, and--

   “it is atoned for by striking merits, by many narratives of great
   events faithfully, powerfully, and vividly executed, by the clearest
   and most life-like conceptions of character, and by a style which,
   if it sacrifices the severer principles of composition to a desire
   to be striking and picturesque, is always vigorous, full of
   animation, and glowing with the genuine enthusiasm of the writer.
   Mr. Motley combines as an historian two qualifications seldom found
   united,--to great capacity for historical research he adds much
   power of pictorial representation. In his pages we find characters
   and scenes minutely set forth in elaborate and characteristic
   detail, which is relieved and heightened in effect by the artistic
   breadth of light and shade thrown across the broader prospects of
   history. In an American author, too, we must commend the hearty
   English spirit in which the book is written; and fertile as the
   present age has been in historical works of the highest merit, none
   of them can be ranked above these volumes in the grand qualities of
   interest, accuracy, and truth.”

A writer in “Blackwood” (May, 1861) contrasts Motley with Froude somewhat
in the way in which another critic had contrasted him with Prescott.
Froude, he says, remembers that there are some golden threads in the
black robe of the Dominican. Motley “finds it black and thrusts it
farther into the darkness.”

Every writer carries more or less of his own character into his book, of
course. A great professor has told me that there is a personal flavor in
the mathematical work of a man of genius like Poisson. Those who have
known Motley and Prescott would feel sure beforehand that the impulsive
nature of the one and the judicial serenity of the other would as surely
betray themselves in their writings as in their conversation and in their
every movement. Another point which the critic of “Blackwood's Magazine”
 has noticed has not been so generally observed: it is what he calls “a
dashing, offhand, rattling style,”--“fast” writing. It cannot be denied
that here and there may be detected slight vestiges of the way of writing
of an earlier period of Motley's literary life, with which I have no
reason to think the writer just mentioned was acquainted. Now and then I
can trace in the turn of a phrase, in the twinkle of an epithet, a faint
reminiscence of a certain satirical levity, airiness, jauntiness, if I
may hint such a word, which is just enough to remind me of those perilous
shallows of his early time through which his richly freighted argosy had
passed with such wonderful escape from their dangers and such very slight
marks of injury. That which is pleasant gayety in conversation may be
quite out of place in formal composition, and Motley's wit must have had
a hard time of it struggling to show its spangles in the processions
while his gorgeous tragedies went sweeping by.






JOHN LOTHROP MOTLEY.

A MEMOIR

By Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

Volume II.



XVI.

1860-1866. AEt. 46-52.

RESIDENCE IN ENGLAND.--OUTBREAK OF THE CIVIL WAR.--LETTERS TO THE LONDON
“TIMES.”--VISIT TO AMERICA.--APPOINTED MINISTER TO AUSTRIA.--LADY
HARCOURT'S LETTER.--MISS MOTLEY'S MEMORANDUM.

The winter of 1859-60 was passed chiefly at Oatlands Hotel,
Walton-on-Thames. In 1860 Mr. Motley hired the house No. 31 Hertford
Street, May Fair, London. He had just published the first two volumes of
his “History of the Netherlands,” and was ready for the further labors of
its continuation, when the threats, followed by the outbreak, of the
great civil contention in his native land brought him back from the
struggles of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to the conflict of
the nineteenth.

His love of country, which had grown upon him so remarkably of late
years, would not suffer him to be silent at such a moment. All around him
he found ignorance and prejudice. The quarrel was like to be prejudged in
default of a champion of the cause which to him was that of Liberty and
Justice. He wrote two long letters to the London “Times,” in which he
attempted to make clear to Englishmen and to Europe the nature and
conditions of our complex system of government, the real cause of the
strife, and the mighty issues at stake. Nothing could have been more
timely, nothing more needed. Mr. William Everett, who was then in
England, bears strong testimony to the effect these letters produced. Had
Mr. Motley done no other service to his country, this alone would entitle
him to honorable remembrance as among the first defenders of the flag,
which at that moment had more to fear from what was going on in the
cabinet councils of Europe than from all the armed hosts that were
gathering against it.

He returned to America in 1861, and soon afterwards was appointed by Mr.
Lincoln Minister to Austria. Mr. Burlingame had been previously appointed
to the office, but having been objected to by the Austrian Government for
political reasons, the place unexpectedly left vacant was conferred upon
Motley, who had no expectation of any diplomatic appointment when he left
Europe. For some interesting particulars relating to his residence in
Vienna I must refer to the communications addressed to me by his
daughter, Lady Harcourt, and her youngest sister, and the letters I
received from him while at the Austrian capital. Lady Harcourt writes:--

   “He held the post for six years, seeing the civil war fought out and
   brought to a triumphant conclusion, and enjoying, as I have every
   reason to believe, the full confidence and esteem of Mr. Lincoln to
   the last hour of the President's life. In the first dark years the
   painful interest of the great national drama was so all-absorbing
   that literary work was entirely put aside, and with his countrymen
   at home he lived only in the varying fortunes of the day, his
   profound faith and enthusiasm sustaining him and lifting him above
   the natural influence of a by no means sanguine temperament. Later,
   when the tide was turning and success was nearing, he was more able
   to work. His social relations during the whole period of his
   mission were of the most agreeable character. The society of Vienna
   was at that time, and I believe is still, the absolute reverse of
   that of England, where all claims to distinction are recognized and
   welcomed. There the old feudal traditions were still in full force,
   and diplomatic representatives admitted to the court society by
   right of official position found it to consist exclusively of an
   aristocracy of birth, sixteen quarterings of nobility being
   necessary to a right of presentation to the Emperor and Empress.
   The society thus constituted was distinguished by great charm and
   grace of manner, the exclusion of all outer elements not only
   limiting the numbers, but giving the ease of a family party within
   the charmed circle. On the other hand, larger interests suffered
   under the rigid exclusion of all occupations except the army,
   diplomacy, and court place. The intimacy among the different
   members of the society was so close that, beyond a courtesy of
   manner that never failed, the tendency was to resist the approach of
   any stranger as a 'gene'. A single new face was instantly remarked
   and commented on in a Vienna saloon to an extent unknown in any
   other large capital. This peculiarity, however, worked in favor of
   the old resident. Kindliness of feeling increased with familiarity
   and grew into something better than acquaintance, and the parting
   with most sincere and affectionately disposed friends in the end was
   deeply felt on both sides. Those years were passed in a pleasant
   house in the Weiden Faubourg, with a large garden at the back, and I
   do not think that during this time there was one disagreeable
   incident in his relations to his colleagues, while in several cases
   the relations, agreeable with all, became those of close friendship.
   We lived constantly, of course, in diplomatic and Austrian society,
   and during the latter part of the time particularly his house was as
   much frequented and the centre of as many dancing and other
   receptions as any in the place. His official relations with the
   Foreign Office were courteous and agreeable, the successive Foreign
   Ministers during his stay being Count Richberg, Count Mensdorff, and
   Baron Beust. Austria was so far removed from any real contact with
   our own country that, though the interest in our war may have been
   languid, they did not pretend to a knowledge which might have
   inclined them to controversy, while an instinct that we were acting
   as a constituted government against rebellion rather inclined them
   to sympathy. I think I may say that as he became known among them
   his keen patriotism and high sense of honor and truth were fully
   understood and appreciated, and that what he said always commanded a
   sympathetic hearing among men with totally different political
   ideas, but with chivalrous and loyal instincts to comprehend his
   own. I shall never forget his account of the terrible day when the
   news of Mr. Lincoln's death came. By some accident a rumor of it
   reached him first through a colleague. He went straight to the
   Foreign Office for news, hoping against hope, was received by Count
   Mensdorff, who merely came forward and laid his arm about his
   shoulder with an intense sympathy beyond words.”

Miss Motley, the historian's youngest daughter, has added a note to her
sister's communication:--

   “During his residence in Vienna the most important negotiations
   which he had to carry on with the Austrian Government were those
   connected with the Mexican affair. Maximilian at one time applied
   to his brother the Emperor for assistance, and he promised to accede
   to his demand. Accordingly a large number of volunteers were
   equipped and had actually embarked at Trieste, when a dispatch from
   Seward arrived, instructing the American Minister to give notice to
   the Austrian Government that if the troops sailed for Mexico he was
   to leave Vienna at once. My father had to go at once to Count
   Mensdorff with these instructions, and in spite of the Foreign
   Minister being annoyed that the United States Government had not
   sooner intimated that this extreme course would be taken, the
   interview was quite amicable and the troops were not allowed to
   sail. We were in Vienna during the war in which Denmark fought
   alone against Austria and Prussia, and when it was over Bismarck
   came to Vienna to settle the terms of peace with the Emperor. He
   dined with us twice during his short stay, and was most delightful
   and agreeable. When he and my father were together they seemed to
   live over the youthful days they had spent together as students,
   and many were the anecdotes of their boyish frolics which Bismarck
   related.”




XVII.

1861-1863. AEt. 47-49.
LETTERS FROM VIENNA.

Soon after Mr. Motley's arrival in Vienna I received a long letter from
him, most of which relates to personal matters, but which contains a few
sentences of interest to the general reader as showing his zealous
labors, wherever he found himself, in behalf of the great cause then in
bloody debate in his own country:

                    November 14, 1861.

   . . . What can I say to you of cis-Atlantic things? I am almost
   ashamed to be away from home. You know that I had decided to
   remain, and had sent for my family to come to America, when my
   present appointment altered my plans. I do what good I can. I
   think I made some impression on Lord John Russell, with whom I spent
   two days soon after my arrival in England, and I talked very frankly
   and as strongly as I could to Palmerston, and I have had long
   conversations and correspondences with other leading men in England.
   I have also had an hour's [conversation] with Thouvenel in Paris. I
   hammered the Northern view into him as soundly as I could. For this
   year there will be no foreign interference with us. I don't
   anticipate it at any time, unless we bring it on ourselves by bad
   management, which I don't expect. Our fate is in our own hands, and
   Europe is looking on to see which side is strongest,--when it has
   made the discovery it will back it as also the best and the most
   moral. Yesterday I had my audience with the Emperor. He received
   me with much cordiality, and seemed interested in a long account
   which I gave him of our affairs. You may suppose I inculcated the
   Northern views. We spoke in his vernacular, and he asked me
   afterwards if I was a German. I mention this not from vanity, but
   because he asked it with earnestness, and as if it had a political
   significance. Of course I undeceived him. His appearance
   interested me, and his manner is very pleasing.

I continued to receive long and interesting letters from him at intervals
during his residence as Minister at Vienna. Relating as they often did to
public matters, about which he had private sources of information, his
anxiety that they should not get into print was perfectly natural. As,
however, I was at liberty to read his letters to others at my discretion,
and as many parts of these letters have an interest as showing how
American affairs looked to one who was behind the scenes in Europe, I may
venture to give some extracts without fear of violating the spirit of his
injunctions, or of giving offence to individuals. The time may come when
his extended correspondence can be printed in full with propriety, but it
must be in a future year and after it has passed into the hands of a
younger generation. Meanwhile these few glimpses at his life and records
of his feelings and opinions will help to make the portrait of the man we
are studying present itself somewhat more clearly.

          LEGATION of THE U. S. A., VIENNA, January 14, 1862.

   MY DEAR HOLMES,--I have two letters of yours, November 29 and
   December 17, to express my thanks for. It is quite true that it is
   difficult for me to write with the same feeling that inspires you,
   --that everything around the inkstand within a radius of a thousand
   miles is full of deepest interest to writer and reader. I don't
   even intend to try to amuse you with Vienna matters. What is it to
   you that we had a very pleasant dinner-party last week at Prince
   Esterhazy's, and another this week at Prince Liechtenstein's, and
   that to-morrow I am to put on my cocked hat and laced coat to make a
   visit to her Imperial Majesty, the Empress Mother, and that to-night
   there is to be the first of the assembly balls, the Vienna Almack's,
   at which--I shall be allowed to absent myself altogether?

   It strikes me that there is likely to be left a fair field for us a
   few months longer, say till midsummer. The Trent affair I shall not
   say much about, except to state that I have always been for giving
   up the prisoners. I was awfully afraid, knowing that the demand had
   gone forth,--

        “Send us your prisoners or you'll hear of it,”

   that the answer would have come back in the Hotspur vein--

       'And if the Devil come and roar for them,
        We will not send them.”

   The result would have been most disastrous, for in order to secure a
   most trifling advantage,--that of keeping Mason and Slidell at Fort
   Warren a little longer,--we should have turned our backs on all the
   principles maintained by us when neutral, and should have been
   obliged to accept a war at an enormous disadvantage. . . .

   But I hardly dared to hope that we should have obtained such a
   victory as we have done. To have disavowed the illegal transaction
   at once,--before any demand came from England,--to have placed that
   disavowal on the broad ground of principle which we have always
   cherished, and thus with a clear conscience, and to our entire
   honor, to have kept ourselves clear from a war which must have given
   the Confederacy the invincible alliance of England,--was exactly
   what our enemies in Europe did not suppose us capable of doing. But
   we have done it in the handsomest manner, and there is not one
   liberal heart in this hemisphere that is not rejoiced, nor one hater
   of us and of our institutions that is not gnashing his teeth with
   rage.

The letter of ten close pages from which I have quoted these passages is
full of confidential information, and contains extracts from letters of
leading statesmen. If its date had been 1762, I might feel authorized in
disobeying its injunctions of privacy. I must quote one other sentence,
as it shows his animus at that time towards a distinguished statesman of
whom he was afterwards accused of speaking in very hard terms by an
obscure writer whose intent was to harm him. In speaking of the Trent
affair, Mr. Motley says: “The English premier has been foiled by our much
maligned Secretary of State, of whom, on this occasion at least, one has
the right to say, with Sir Henry Wotton,--

       'His armor was his honest thought,
        And simple truth his utmost skill.'”

“He says at the close of this long letter:

   'I wish I could bore you about something else but American politics.
   But there is nothing else worth thinking of in the world. All else
   is leather and prunella. We are living over again the days of the
   Dutchmen or the seventeenth-century Englishmen.'”

My next letter, of fourteen closely written pages, was of similar
character to the last. Motley could think of nothing but the great
conflict. He was alive to every report from America, listening too with
passionate fears or hopes, as the case might be, to the whispers not yet
audible to the world which passed from lip to lip of the statesmen who
were watching the course of events from the other side of the Atlantic
with the sweet complacency of the looker-on of Lucretius; too often
rejoicing in the storm that threatened wreck to institutions and an
organization which they felt to be a standing menace to the established
order of things in their older communities.

A few extracts from this very long letter will be found to have a special
interest from the time at which they were written.

             LEGATION OF U. S. A., VIENNA, February 26, 1862.

   MY DEAR HOLMES,--. . . I take great pleasure in reading your
   prophecies, and intend to be just as free in hazarding my own, for,
   as you say, our mortal life is but a string of guesses at the
   future, and no one but an idiot would be discouraged at finding
   himself sometimes far out in his calculations. If I find you
   signally right in any of your predictions, be sure that I will
   congratulate and applaud. If you make mistakes, you shall never
   hear of them again, and I promise to forget them. Let me ask the
   same indulgence from you in return. This is what makes letter-
   writing a comfort and journalizing dangerous. . . The ides of March
   will be upon us before this letter reaches you. We have got to
   squash the rebellion soon, or be squashed forever as a nation. I
   don't pretend to judge military plans or the capacities of generals.
   But, as you suggest, perhaps I can take a more just view of the
   whole picture of the eventful struggle at this great distance than
   do those absolutely acting and suffering on the scene. Nor can I
   resist the desire to prophesy any more than you can do, knowing that
   I may prove utterly mistaken. I say, then, that one great danger
   comes from the chance of foreign interference. What will prevent
   that?

   Our utterly defeating the Confederates in some great and conclusive
   battle; or,

   Our possession of the cotton ports and opening them to European
   trade; or,

   A most unequivocal policy of slave emancipation.

   Any one of these three conditions would stave off recognition by
   foreign powers, until we had ourselves abandoned the attempt to
   reduce the South to obedience.

   The last measure is to my mind the most important. The South has,
   by going to war with the United States government, thrust into our
   hands against our will the invincible weapon which constitutional
   reasons had hitherto forbidden us to employ. At the same time it
   has given us the power to remedy a great wrong to four millions of
   the human race, in which we had hitherto been obliged to acquiesce.
   We are threatened with national annihilation, and defied to use the
   only means of national preservation. The question is distinctly
   proposed to us, Shall Slavery die, or the great Republic? It is
   most astounding to me that there can be two opinions in the free
   States as to the answer.

   If we do fall, we deserve our fate. At the beginning of the
   contest, constitutional scruples might be respectable. But now we
   are fighting to subjugate the South; that is, Slavery. We are
   fighting for nothing else that I know of. We are fighting for the
   Union. Who wishes to destroy the Union? The slaveholder, nobody
   else. Are we to spend twelve hundred millions, and raise six
   hundred thousand soldiers, in order to protect slavery? It really
   does seem to me too simple for argument. I am anxiously waiting for
   the coming Columbus who will set this egg of ours on end by smashing
   in the slavery end. We shall be rolling about in every direction
   until that is done. I don't know that it is to be done by
   proclamation. Rather perhaps by facts. . . . Well, I console
   myself with thinking that the people--the American people, at least
   --is about as wise collectively as less numerous collections of
   individuals, and that the people has really declared emancipation,
   and is only puzzling how to carry it into effect. After all, it
   seems to be a law of Providence, that progress should be by a spiral
   movement; so that when it seems most tortuous, we may perhaps be
   going ahead. I am firm in the faith that slavery is now wriggling
   itself to death. With slavery in its pristine vigor, I should think
   the restored Union neither possible nor desirable. Don't understand
   me as not taking into account all the strategical considerations
   against premature governmental utterances on this great subject.
   But are there any trustworthy friends to the Union among the
   slaveholders? Should we lose many Kentuckians and Virginians who
   are now with us, if we boldly confiscated the slaves of all rebels?
   --and a confiscation of property which has legs and so confiscates
   itself, at command, is not only a legal, but would prove a very
   practical measure in time of war. In brief, the time is fast
   approaching, I think, when 'Thorough' should be written on all our
   banners. Slavery will never accept a subordinate position. The
   great Republic and Slavery cannot both survive. We have been defied
   to mortal combat, and yet we hesitate to strike. These are my poor
   thoughts on this great subject. Perhaps you will think them crude.
   I was much struck with what you quote from Mr. Conway, that if
   emancipation was proclaimed on the Upper Mississippi it would be
   known to the negroes of Louisiana in advance of the telegraph. And
   if once the blacks had leave to run, how many whites would have to
   stay at home to guard their dissolving property?

   You have had enough of my maunderings. But before I conclude them,
   may I ask you to give all our kindest regards to Lowell, and to
   express our admiration for the Yankee Idyl. I am afraid of using
   too extravagant language if I say all I think about it. Was there
   ever anything more stinging, more concentrated, more vigorous, more
   just? He has condensed into those few pages the essence of a
   hundred diplomatic papers and historical disquisitions and Fourth of
   July orations. I was dining a day or two since with his friend
   Lytton (Bulwer's son, attache here) and Julian Fane (secretary of
   the embassy), both great admirers of him,--and especially of the
   “Biglow Papers;” they begged me to send them the Mason and Slidell
   Idyl, but I wouldn't,--I don't think it is in English nature
   (although theirs is very cosmopolitan and liberal) to take such
   punishment and come up smiling. I would rather they got it in some
   other way, and then told me what they thought voluntarily.

   I have very pleasant relations with all the J. B.'s here. They are
   all friendly and well disposed to the North,--I speak of the
   embassy, which, with the ambassador and---dress, numbers eight or
   ten souls, some of them very intellectual ones. There are no other
   J. B.'s here. I have no fear at present of foreign interference.
   We have got three or four months to do our work in,--a fair field
   and no favor. There is no question whatever that the Southern
   commissioners have been thoroughly snubbed in London and Paris.
   There is to be a blockade debate in Parliament next week, but no bad
   consequences are to be apprehended. The Duke de Gramont (French
   ambassador, and an intimate friend of the Emperor) told my wife last
   night that it was entirely false that the Emperor had ever urged the
   English government to break the blockade. “Don't believe it,--don't
   believe a word of it,” he said. He has always held that language to
   me. He added that Prince Napoleon had just come out with a strong
   speech about us,--you will see it, doubtless, before you get this
   letter,--but it has not yet reached us.

   Shall I say anything of Austria,--what can I say that would interest
   you? That's the reason why I hate to write. All my thoughts are in
   America. Do you care to know about the Archduke Ferdinand
   Maximilian, that shall be King hereafter of Mexico (if L. N. has his
   way)? He is next brother to the Emperor, but although I have had
   the honor of private audiences of many archdukes here, this one is a
   resident of Trieste.

   He is about thirty,--has an adventurous disposition,--some
   imagination,--a turn for poetry,--has voyaged a good deal about the
   world in the Austrian ship-of-war,--for in one respect he much
   resembles that unfortunate but anonymous ancestor of his, the King
   of Bohemia with the seven castles, who, according to Corporal Trim,
   had such a passion for navigation and sea-affairs, “with never a
   seaport in all his dominions.” But now the present King of Bohemia
   has got the sway of Trieste, and is Lord High Admiral and Chief of
   the Marine Department. He has been much in Spain, also in South
   America; I have read some travels, “Reise Skizzen,” of his--printed,
   not published. They are not without talent, and he ever and anon
   relieves his prose jog-trot by breaking into a canter of poetry. He
   adores bull-fights, and rather regrets the Inquisition, and
   considers the Duke of Alva everything noble and chivalrous, and the
   most abused of men. It would do your heart good to hear his
   invocations to that deeply injured shade, and his denunciations of
   the ignorant and vulgar protestants who have defamed him. (N.B.
   Let me observe that the R. of the D. R. was not published until long
   after the “Reise Skizzen” were written.) 'Du armer Alva! weil du
   dem Willen deines Herrn unerschiitterlich treu vast, weil die
   festbestimmten grundsatze der Regierung,' etc., etc., etc. You
   can imagine the rest. Dear me! I wish I could get back to the
   sixteenth and seventeenth century. . . . But alas! the events
   of the nineteenth are too engrossing.

   If Lowell cares to read this letter, will you allow me to “make it
   over to him jointly,” as Captain Cuttle says. I wished to write to
   him, but I am afraid only you would tolerate my writing so much when
   I have nothing to say. If he would ever send me a line I should be
   infinitely obliged, and would quickly respond. We read the “Washers
   of the Shroud” with fervid admiration.

   Always remember me most sincerely to the Club, one and all. It
   touches me nearly when you assure me that I am not forgotten by
   them. To-morrow is Saturday and the last of the month.--[See
   Appendix A.]--We are going to dine with our Spanish colleague. But
   the first bumper of the Don's champagne I shall drain to the health
   of my Parker House friends.

From another long letter dated August 31, 1862, I extract the following
passages:--

   “I quite agree in all that you said in your last letter. 'The imp
   of secession can't reenter its mother's womb.' It is merely
   childish to talk of the Union 'as it was.' You might as well bring
   back the Saxon Heptarchy. But the great Republic is destined to
   live and flourish, I can't doubt. . . . Do you remember that
   wonderful scene in Faust in which Mephistopheles draws wine for the
   rabble with a gimlet out of the wooden table; and how it changes to
   fire as they drink it, and how they all go mad, draw their knives,
   grasp each other by the nose, and think they are cutting off bunches
   of grapes at every blow, and how foolish they all look when they
   awake from the spell and see how the Devil has been mocking them?
   It always seems to me a parable of the great Secession.

   “I repeat, I can't doubt as to the ultimate result. But I dare say
   we have all been much mistaken in our calculations as to time.
   Days, months, years, are nothing in history. Men die, man is
   immortal, practically, even on this earth. We are so impatient,
   --and we are always watching for the last scene of the tragedy. Now I
   humbly opine that the drop is only about falling on the first act,
   or perhaps only the prologue. This act or prologue will be called,
   in after days, War for the status quo. Such enthusiasm, heroism,
   and manslaughter as status quo could inspire, has, I trust, been not
   entirely in vain, but it has been proved insufficient.

   “I firmly believe that when the slaveholders declared war on the
   United States government they began a series of events that, in the
   logical chain of history, cannot come to a conclusion until the last
   vestige of slavery is gone. Looking at the whole field for a moment
   dispassionately, objectively, as the dear Teutonic philosophers say,
   and merely as an exhibition of phenomena, I cannot imagine any other
   issue. Everything else may happen. This alone must happen.

   “But after all this isn't a war. It is a revolution. It is n't
   strategists that are wanted so much as believers. In revolutions
   the men who win are those who are in earnest. Jeff and Stonewall
   and the other Devil-worshippers are in earnest, but it was not
   written in the book of fate that the slaveholders' rebellion should
   be vanquished by a pro-slavery general. History is never so
   illogical. No, the coming 'man on horseback' on our side must be a
   great strategist, with the soul of that insane lion, mad old John
   Brown, in his belly. That is your only Promethean recipe:--

             'et insani leonis
        Vim stomacho apposuisse nostro.'

   “I don't know why Horace runs so in my head this morning. . . .

   “There will be work enough for all; but I feel awfully fidgety just
   now about Port Royal and Hilton Head, and about affairs generally
   for the next three months. After that iron-clads and the new levies
   must make us invincible.”

In another letter, dated November 2, 1862, he expresses himself very
warmly about his disappointment in the attitude of many of his old
English friends with reference to our civil conflict. He had recently
heard the details of the death of “the noble Wilder Dwight.”

   “It is unnecessary,” he says, “to say how deeply we were moved. I
   had the pleasure of knowing him well, and I always appreciated his
   energy, his manliness, and his intelligent cheerful heroism. I look
   back upon him now as a kind of heroic type of what a young New
   Englander ought to be and was. I tell you that one of these days
   --after a generation of mankind has passed away--these youths will
   take their places in our history, and be regarded by the young men
   and women now unborn with the admiration which the Philip Sidneys
   and the Max Piccolominis now inspire. After all, what was your
   Chevy Chace to stir blood with like a trumpet? What noble
   principle, what deathless interest, was there at stake? Nothing but
   a bloody fight between a lot of noble gamekeepers on one side and of
   noble poachers on the other. And because they fought well and
   hacked each other to pieces like devils, they have been heroes for
   centuries.”

The letter was written in a very excited state of feeling, and runs over
with passionate love of country and indignation at the want of sympathy
with the cause of freedom which he had found in quarters where he had not
expected such coldness or hostile tendencies.

From a letter dated Vienna, September 22, 1863.

   . . . “When you wrote me last you said on general matters this:
   'In a few days we shall get the news of the success or failure of
   the attacks on Port Hudson and Vicksburg. If both are successful,
   many will say that the whole matter is about settled.' You may
   suppose that when I got the great news I shook hands warmly with you
   in the spirit across the Atlantic. Day by day for so long we had
   been hoping to hear the fall of Vicksburg. At last when that little
   concentrated telegram came, announcing Vicksburg and Gettysburg on
   the same day and in two lines, I found myself almost alone. . . .
   There was nobody in the house to join in my huzzahs but my youngest
   infant. And my conduct very much resembled that of the excellent
   Philip II. when he heard the fall of Antwerp,--for I went to her
   door, screeching through the key-hole 'Vicksburg is ours!' just as
   that other 'pere de famille,' more potent, but I trust not more
   respectable than I, conveyed the news to his Infanta. (Fide, for
   the incident, an American work on the Netherlands, i. p. 263, and
   the authorities there cited.) It is contemptible on my part to
   speak thus frivolously of events which will stand out in such golden
   letters so long as America has a history, but I wanted to illustrate
   the yearning for sympathy which I felt. You who were among people
   grim and self-contained usually, who, I trust, were falling on each
   other's necks in the public streets, shouting, with tears in their
   eyes and triumph in their hearts, can picture my isolation.

   “I have never faltered in my faith, and in the darkest hours, when
   misfortunes seemed thronging most thickly upon us, I have never felt
   the want of anything to lean against; but I own I did feel like
   shaking hands with a few hundred people when I heard of our Fourth
   of July, 1863, work, and should like to have heard and joined in an
   American cheer or two.

   “I have not much to say of matters here to interest you. We have
   had an intensely hot, historically hot, and very long and very dry
   summer. I never knew before what a drought meant. In Hungary the
   suffering is great, and the people are killing the sheep to feed the
   pigs with the mutton. Here about Vienna the trees have been almost
   stripped of foliage ever since the end of August. There is no glory
   in the grass nor verdure in anything.

   “In fact, we have nothing green here but the Archduke Max, who
   firmly believes that he is going forth to Mexico to establish an
   American empire, and that it is his divine mission to destroy the
   dragon of democracy and reestablish the true Church, the Right
   Divine, and all sorts of games. Poor young man! . . .

   “Our information from home is to the 12th. Charleston seems to be
   in 'articulo mortis,' but how forts nowadays seem to fly in the face
   of Scripture. Those founded on a rock, and built of it, fall easily
   enough under the rain of Parrotts and Dahlgrens, while the house
   built of sand seems to bid defiance to the storm.”

In quoting from these confidential letters I have been restrained from
doing full justice to their writer by the fact that he spoke with such
entire freedom of persons as well as events. But if they could be read
from beginning to end, no one could help feeling that his love for his
own country, and passionate absorption of every thought in the strife
upon which its existence as a nation depended, were his very life during
all this agonizing period. He can think and talk of nothing else, or, if
he turns for a moment to other subjects, he reverts to the one great
central interest of “American politics,” of which he says in one of the
letters from which I have quoted, “There is nothing else worth thinking
of in the world.”

But in spite of his public record as the historian of the struggle for
liberty and the champion of its defenders, and while every letter he
wrote betrayed in every word the intensity of his patriotic feeling, he
was not safe against the attacks of malevolence. A train laid by unseen
hands was waiting for the spark to kindle it, and this came at last in
the shape of a letter from an unknown individual,--a letter the existence
of which ought never to have been a matter of official recognition.




XVIII.

1866-1867. AEt. 52-43.
RESIGNATION OF HIS OFFICE.--CAUSES OF HIS RESIGNATION.

It is a relief to me that just here, where I come to the first of two
painful episodes in this brilliant and fortunate career, I can preface my
statement with the generous words of one who speaks with authority of his
predecessor in office.

The Hon. John Jay, Ex-Minister to Austria, in the tribute to the memory
of Motley read at a meeting of the New York Historical Society, wrote as
follows:--

   “In singular contrast to Mr. Motley's brilliant career as an
   historian stands the fact recorded in our diplomatic annals that he
   was twice forced from the service as one who had forfeited the
   confidence of the American government. This society, while he was
   living, recognized his fame as a statesman, diplomatist, and
   patriot, as belonging to America, and now that death has closed the
   career of Seward, Sumner, and Motley, it will be remembered that the
   great historian, twice humiliated, by orders from Washington, before
   the diplomacy and culture of Europe, appealed from the passions of
   the hour to the verdict of history.

   “Having succeeded Mr. Motley at Vienna some two years after his
   departure, I had occasion to read most of his dispatches, which
   exhibited a mastery of the subjects of which they treated, with much
   of the clear perception, the scholarly and philosophic tone and
   decided judgment, which, supplemented by his picturesque
   description, full of life and color, have given character to his
   histories. They are features which might well have served to extend
   the remark of Madame de Stael that a great historian is almost a
   statesman. I can speak also from my own observation of the
   reputation which Motley left in the Austrian capital.
   Notwithstanding the decision with which, under the direction of Mr.
   Seward, he had addressed the minister of foreign affairs, Count
   Mensdorff, afterwards the Prince Diedrickstein, protesting against
   the departure of an Austrian force of one thousand volunteers, who
   were about to embark for Mexico in aid of the ill-fated Maximilian,
   --a protest which at the last moment arrested the project,--Mr.
   Motley and his amiable family were always spoken of in terms of
   cordial regard and respect by members of the imperial family and
   those eminent statesmen, Count de Beust and Count Andrassy. His
   death, I am sure, is mourned to-day by the representatives of the
   historic names of Austria and Hungary, and by the surviving
   diplomats then residing near the Court of Vienna, wherever they may
   still be found, headed by their venerable Doyen, the Baron de
   Heckeren.”

The story of Mr. Motley's resignation of his office and its acceptance by
the government is this.

The President of the United States, Andrew Johnson, received a letter
professing to be written from the Hotel Meurice, Paris, dated October 23,
1866, and signed “George W. M'Crackin, of New York.” This letter was
filled with accusations directed against various public agents,
ministers, and consuls, representing the United States in different
countries. Its language was coarse, its assertions were improbable, its
spirit that of the lowest of party scribblers. It was bitter against New
England, especially so against Massachusetts, and it singled out Motley
for the most particular abuse. I think it is still questioned whether
there was any such person as the one named,--at any rate, it bore the
characteristic marks of those vulgar anonymous communications which
rarely receive any attention unless they are important enough to have the
police set on the track of the writer to find his rathole, if possible. A
paragraph in the “Daily Advertiser” of June 7, 1869, quotes from a
Western paper a story to the effect that one William R. M'Crackin, who
had recently died at ---- confessed to having written the M' Crackin
letter. Motley, he said, had snubbed him and refused to lend him money.
“He appears to have been a Bohemian of the lowest order.” Between such
authorship and the anonymous there does not seem to be much to choose.
But the dying confession sounds in my ears as decidedly apocryphal. As
for the letter, I had rather characterize it than reproduce it. It is an
offence to decency and a disgrace to the national record on which it is
found. This letter of “George W. M'Crackin” passed into the hands of Mr.
Seward, the Secretary of State. Most gentlemen, I think, would have
destroyed it on the spot, as it was not fit for the waste-basket. Some,
more cautious, might have smothered it among the piles of their private
communications. If any notice was taken of it, one would say that a
private note to each of the gentlemen attacked might have warned him that
there were malicious eavesdroppers about, ready to catch up any careless
expression he might let fall and make a scandalous report of it to his
detriment.

The secretary, acquiescing without resistance in a suggestion of the
President, saw fit to address a formal note to several of the gentlemen
mentioned in the M'Crackin letter, repeating some of its offensive
expressions, and requesting those officials to deny or confirm the report
that they had uttered them.

A gentleman who is asked whether he has spoken in a “malignant” or
“offensive” manner, whether he has “railed violently and shamefully”
 against the President of the United States, or against anybody else,
might well wonder who would address such a question to the humblest
citizen not supposed to be wanting in a common measure of self-respect. A
gentleman holding an important official station in a foreign country,
receiving a letter containing such questions, signed by the prime
minister of his government, if he did not think himself imposed upon by a
forgery, might well consider himself outraged. It was a letter of this
kind which was sent by the Secretary of State to the Minister
Plenipotentiary to the Empire of Austria. Not quite all the vulgar
insolence of the M'Crackin letter was repeated. Mr. Seward did not ask
Mr. Motley to deny or confirm the assertion of the letter that he was a
“thorough flunky” and “un-American functionary.” But he did insult him
with various questions suggested by the anonymous letter,--questions that
must have been felt as an indignity by the most thick-skinned of battered
politicians.

Mr. Motley was very sensitive, very high-spirited, very impulsive, very
patriotic, and singularly truthful. The letter of Mr. Seward to such a
man was like a buffet on the cheek of an unarmed officer. It stung like
the thrust of a stiletto. It roused a resentment that could not find any
words to give it expression. He could not wait to turn the insult over in
his mind, to weigh the exact amount of affront in each question, to take
counsel, to sleep over it, and reply to it with diplomatic measure and
suavity. One hour had scarcely elapsed before his answer was written. As
to his feelings as an American, he appeals to his record. This might have
shown that if he erred it was on the side of enthusiasm and extravagant
expressions of reverence for the American people during the heroic years
just passed. He denounces the accusations as pitiful fabrications and
vile calumny. He blushes that such charges could have been uttered; he is
deeply wounded that Mr. Seward could have listened to such falsehood. He
does not hesitate to say what his opinions are with reference to home
questions, and especially to that of reconstruction.

   “These opinions,” he says, “in the privacy of my own household, and
   to occasional American visitors, I have not concealed. The great
   question now presenting itself for solution demands the
   conscientious scrutiny of every American who loves his country and
   believes in the human progress of which that country is one of the
   foremost representatives. I have never thought, during my residence
   at Vienna, that because I have the honor of being a public servant
   of the American people I am deprived of the right of discussing
   within my own walls the gravest subjects that can interest freemen.
   A minister of the United States does not cease to be a citizen of
   the United States, as deeply interested as others in all that
   relates to the welfare of his country.”

Among the “occasional American visitors” spoken of above must have been
some of those self-appointed or hired agents called “interviewers,” who
do for the American public what the Venetian spies did for the Council of
Ten, what the familiars of the Inquisition did for the priesthood, who
invade every public man's privacy, who listen at every key-hole, who
tamper with every guardian of secrets; purveyors to the insatiable
appetite of a public which must have a slain reputation to devour with
its breakfast, as the monster of antiquity called regularly for his
tribute of a spotless virgin.

The “interviewer” has his use, undoubtedly, and often instructs and
amuses his public with gossip they could not otherwise listen to. He
serves the politician by repeating the artless and unstudied remarks
which fall from his lips in a conversation which the reporter has been
invited to take notes of. He tickles the author's vanity by showing him
off as he sits in his library unconsciously uttering the engaging items
of self-portraiture which, as he well knows, are to be given to the
public in next week's illustrated paper. The feathered end of his shaft
titillates harmlessly enough, but too often the arrowhead is crusted with
a poison worse than the Indian gets by mingling the wolf's gall with the
rattlesnake's venom. No man is safe whose unguarded threshold the
mischief-making questioner has crossed. The more unsuspecting, the more
frank, the more courageous, the more social is the subject of his
vivisection, the more easily does he get at his vital secrets, if he has
any to be extracted. No man is safe if the hearsay reports of his
conversation are to be given to the public without his own careful
revision. When we remember that a proof-text bearing on the mighty
question of the future life, words of supreme significance, uttered as
they were in the last hour, and by the lips to which we listen as to none
other,--that this text depends for its interpretation on the position of
a single comma, we can readily see what wrong may be done by the
unintentional blunder of the most conscientious reporter. But too
frequently it happens that the careless talk of an honest and high-minded
man only reaches the public after filtering through the drain of some
reckless hireling's memory,--one who has played so long with other men's
characters and good name that he forgets they have any value except to
fill out his morning paragraphs.

Whether the author of the scandalous letter which it was disgraceful to
the government to recognize was a professional interviewer or only a
malicious amateur, or whether he was a paid “spotter,” sent by some
jealous official to report on the foreign ministers as is sometimes done
in the case of conductors of city horsecars, or whether the dying
miscreant before mentioned told the truth, cannot be certainly known. But
those who remember Mr. Hawthorne's account of his consular experiences at
Liverpool are fully aware to what intrusions and impertinences and
impositions our national representatives in other countries are
subjected. Those fellow-citizens who “often came to the consulate in
parties of half a dozen or more, on no business whatever, but merely to
subject their public servant to a rigid examination, and see how he was
getting on with his duties,” may very possibly have included among them
some such mischief-maker as the author of the odious letter which
received official recognition. Mr. Motley had spoken in one of his
histories of “a set of venomous familiars who glided through every
chamber and coiled themselves at every fireside.” He little thought that
under his own roof he himself was to be the victim of an equally base
espionage.

It was an insult on the part of the government to have sent Mr. Motley
such a letter with such questions as were annexed to it. No very exact
rule can be laid down as to the manner in which an insult shall be dealt
with. Something depends on temperament, and his was of the warmer
complexion. His first impulse, he says, was to content himself with a
flat denial of the truth of the accusations. But his scrupulous honesty
compelled him to make a plain statement of his opinions, and to avow the
fact that he had made no secret of them in conversation under conditions
where he had a right to speak freely of matters quite apart from his
official duties. His answer to the accusation was denial of its charges;
his reply to the insult was his resignation.

It may be questioned whether this was the wisest course, but wisdom is
often disconcerted by an indignity, and even a meek Christian may forget
to turn the other cheek after receiving the first blow until the natural
man has asserted himself by a retort in kind. But the wrong was
committed; his resignation was accepted; the vulgar letter, not fit to be
spread out on these pages, is enrolled in the records of the nation, and
the first deep wound was inflicted on the proud spirit of one whose
renown had shed lustre on the whole country.

That the burden of this wrong may rest where it belongs, I quote the
following statement from Mr. Jay's paper, already referred to.

   “It is due to the memory of Mr. Seward to say, and there would seem
   now no further motive for concealing the truth, that I was told in
   Europe, on what I regarded as reliable authority, that there was
   reason to believe that on the receipt of Mr. Motley's resignation
   Mr. Seward had written to him declining to accept it, and that this
   letter, by a telegraphic order of President Johnson, had been
   arrested in the hands of a dispatch agent before its delivery to Mr.
   Motley, and that the curt letter of the 18th of April had been
   substituted in its stead.”

The Hon. John Bigelow, late Minister to France, has published an article
in “The International Review” for July-August, 1878, in which he defends
his late friend Mr. Seward's action in this matter at the expense of the
President, Mr. Andrew Johnson, and not without inferences unfavorable to
the discretion of Mr. Motley. Many readers will think that the simple
record of Mr. Seward's unresisting acquiescence in the action of the
President is far from being to his advantage. I quote from his own
conversation as carefully reported by his friend Mr. Bigelow. “Mr.
Johnson was in a state of intense irritation, and more or less suspicious
of everybody about him.”--“Instead of throwing the letter into the fire,”
 the President handed it to him, the secretary, and suggested answering
it, and without a word, so far as appears, he simply answered,
“Certainly, sir.” Again, the secretary having already written to Mr.
Motley that “his answer was satisfactory,” the President, on reaching the
last paragraph of Mr. Motley's letter, in which he begged respectfully to
resign his post, “without waiting to learn what Mr. Seward had done or
proposed to do, exclaimed, with a not unnatural asperity, 'Well, let him
go,' and 'on hearing this,' said Mr. Seward, laughing, 'I did not read my
dispatch.'” Many persons will think that the counsel for the defence has
stated the plaintiff's case so strongly that there is nothing left for
him but to show his ingenuity and his friendship for the late secretary
in a hopeless argument. At any rate, Mr. Seward appears not to have made
the slightest effort to protect Mr. Motley against his coarse and jealous
chief at two critical moments, and though his own continuance in office
may have been more important to the State than that of the Vicar of Bray
was to the Church, he ought to have risked something, as it seems to me,
to shield such a patriot, such a gentleman, such a scholar, from ignoble
treatment; he ought to have been as ready to guard Mr. Motley from wrong
as Mr. Bigelow has shown himself to shield Mr. Seward from reproach, and
his task, if more delicate, was not more difficult. I am willing to
accept Mr. Bigelow's loyal and honorable defence of his friend's memory
as the best that could be said for Mr. Seward, but the best defence in
this case is little better than an impeachment. As for Mr. Johnson, he
had held the weapon of the most relentless of the 'Parcae' so long that
his suddenly clipping the thread of a foreign minister's tenure of office
in a fit of jealous anger is not at all surprising.

Thus finished Mr. Motley's long and successful diplomatic service at the
Court of Austria. He may have been judged hasty in resigning his place;
he may have committed himself in expressing his opinions too strongly
before strangers, whose true character as spies and eavesdroppers he was
too high-minded to suspect. But no caution could have protected him
against a slanderer who hated the place he came from, the company he
kept, the name he had made famous, to whom his very look and bearing
--such as belong to a gentleman of natural refinement and good breeding
--must have been a personal grievance and an unpardonable offence.

I will add, in illustration of what has been said, and as showing his
feeling with reference to the matter, an extract from a letter to me from
Vienna, dated the 12th of March, 1867.

   . . . “As so many friends and so many strangers have said so much
   that is gratifying to me in public and private on this very painful
   subject, it would be like affectation, in writing to so old a friend
   as you, not to touch upon it. I shall confine myself, however, to
   one fact, which, so far as I know, may be new to you.

   “Geo. W. M'Cracken is a man and a name utterly unknown to me.

   “With the necessary qualification which every man who values truth
   must make when asserting such a negation,--viz., to the very best of
   my memory and belief,--I never set eyes on him nor heard of him
   until now, in the whole course of my life. Not a member of my
   family or of the legation has the faintest recollection of any such
   person. I am quite convinced that he never saw me nor heard the
   sound of my voice. That his letter was a tissue of vile calumnies,
   shameless fabrications, and unblushing and contemptible falsehoods,
   --by whomsoever uttered,--I have stated in a reply to what ought
   never to have been an official letter. No man can regret more than
   I do that such a correspondence is enrolled in the capital among
   American state papers. I shall not trust myself to speak of the
   matter. It has been a sufficiently public scandal.”




XIX.

1867-1868. AEt. 53-54.

LAST TWO VOLUMES OF THE “HISTORY OF THE UNITED NETHERLANDS.”--GENERAL
CRITICISMS OF DUTCH SCHOLARS ON MOTLEY'S HISTORICAL WORKS.

In his letter to me of March 12, 1867, just cited, Mr. Motley writes:--

   “My two concluding volumes of the United Netherlands are passing
   rapidly through the press. Indeed, Volume III. is entirely printed
   and a third of Volume IV.

   “If I live ten years longer I shall have probably written the
   natural sequel to the first two works,--viz., the Thirty Years' War.
   After that I shall cease to scourge the public.

   “I don't know whether my last two volumes are good or bad; I only
   know that they are true--but that need n't make them amusing.

   “Alas! one never knows when one becomes a bore.”

In 1868 the two concluding volumes of the “History of the Netherlands”
 were published at the same time in London and in New York. The events
described and the characters delineated in these two volumes had,
perhaps, less peculiar interest for English and American readers than
some of those which had lent attraction to the preceding ones. There was
no scene like the siege of Antwerp, no story like that of the Spanish
Armada. There were no names that sounded to our ears like those of Sir
Philip Sidney and Leicester and Amy Robsart. But the main course of his
narrative flowed on with the same breadth and depth of learning and the
same brilliancy of expression. The monumental work continued as nobly as
it had begun. The facts had been slowly, quietly gathered, one by one,
like pebbles from the empty channel of a brook. The style was fluent,
impetuous, abundant, impatient, as it were, at times, and leaping the
sober boundaries prescribed to it, like the torrent which rushes through
the same channel when the rains have filled it. Thus there was matter for
criticism in his use of language. He was not always careful in the
construction of his sentences. He introduced expressions now and then
into his vocabulary which reminded one of his earlier literary efforts.
He used stronger language at times than was necessary, coloring too
highly, shading too deeply in his pictorial delineations. To come to the
matter of his narrative, it must be granted that not every reader will
care to follow him through all the details of diplomatic intrigues which
he has with such industry and sagacity extricated from the old
manuscripts in which they had long lain hidden. But we turn a few pages
and we come to one of those descriptions which arrest us at once and show
him in his power and brilliancy as a literary artist. His characters move
before us with the features of life; we can see Elizabeth, or Philip, or
Maurice, not as a name connected with events, but as a breathing and
acting human being, to be loved or hated, admired or despised, as if he
or she were our contemporary. That all his judgments would not be
accepted as final we might easily anticipate; he could not help writing
more or less as a partisan, but he was a partisan on the side of freedom
in politics and religion, of human nature as against every form of
tyranny, secular or priestly, of noble manhood wherever he saw it as
against meanness and violence and imposture, whether clad in the
soldier's mail or the emperor's purple. His sternest critics, and even
these admiring ones, were yet to be found among those who with
fundamental beliefs at variance with his own followed him in his long
researches among the dusty annals of the past.

The work of the learned M. Groen van Prinsterer,--[Maurice et Barnevelt,
Etude Historique. Utrecht, 1875.]--devoted expressly to the revision and
correction of what the author considers the erroneous views of Mr. Motley
on certain important points, bears, notwithstanding, such sincere and
hearty tribute to his industry, his acquisitions, his brilliant qualities
as a historian, that some extracts from it will be read, I think, with
interest.

   “My first interview, more than twenty years ago, with Mr. Lothrop
   Motley, has left an indelible impression on my memory.

   “It was the 8th of August, 1853. A note is handed me from our
   eminent archivist Bakhuyzen van den Brink. It informs me that I am
   to receive a visit from an American, who, having been struck by the
   analogies between the United Provinces and the United States,
   between Washington and the founder of our independence, has
   interrupted his diplomatic career to write the life of William the
   First; that he has already given proof of ardor and perseverance,
   having worked in libraries and among collections of manuscripts,
   and that he is coming to pursue his studies at the Hague.

   “While I am surprised and delighted with this intelligence, I am
   informed that Mr. Motley himself is waiting for my answer. My
   eagerness to make the acquaintance of such an associate in my
   sympathies and my labors may be well imagined. But how shall I
   picture my surprise, in presently discovering that this unknown and
   indefatigable fellow-worker has really read, I say read and reread,
   our Quartos, our Folios, the enormous volumes of Bor, of van
   Meteren, besides a multitude of books, of pamphlets, and even of
   unedited documents. Already he is familiar with the events, the
   changes of condition, the characteristic details of the life of his
   and my hero. Not only is he acquainted with my Archives, but it
   seems as if there was nothing in this voluminous collection of which
   he was ignorant. . . .

   “In sending me the last volume of his 'History of the Foundation of
   the Republic of the Netherlands,' Mr. Motley wrote to me: 'Without
   the help of the Archives I could never have undertaken the difficult
   task I had set myself, and you will have seen at least from my
   numerous citations that I have made a sincere and conscientious
   study of them.' Certainly in reading such a testimonial I
   congratulated myself on the excellent fruit of my labors, but the
   gratitude expressed to me by Mr. Motley was sincerely reciprocated.
   The Archives are a scientific collection, and my 'Manual of National
   History,' written in Dutch, hardly gets beyond the limits of my own
   country. And here is a stranger, become our compatriot in virtue of
   the warmth of his sympathies, who has accomplished what was not in
   my power. By the detail and the charm of his narrative, by the
   matter and form of a work which the universality of the English
   language and numerous translations were to render cosmopolitan, Mr.
   Motley, like that other illustrious historian, Prescott, lost to
   science by too early death, has popularized in both hemispheres the
   sublime devotion of the Prince of Orange, the exceptional and
   providential destinies of my country, and the benedictions of the
   Eternal for all those who trust in Him and tremble only at his
   Word.”

The old Dutch scholar differs in many important points from Mr. Motley,
as might be expected from his creed and his life-long pursuits. This I
shall refer to in connection with Motley's last work, “John of
Barneveld.” An historian among archivists and annalists reminds one of
Sir John Lubbock in the midst of his ant-hills. Undoubtedly he disturbs
the ants in their praiseworthy industry, much as his attentions may
flatter them. Unquestionably the ants (if their means of expressing
themselves were equal to their apparent intellectual ability) could teach
him many things that he has overlooked and correct him in many mistakes.
But the ants will labor ingloriously without an observer to chronicle
their doings, and the archivists and annalists will pile up facts forever
like so many articulates or mollusks or radiates, until the vertebrate
historian comes with his generalizing ideas, his beliefs, his prejudices,
his idiosyncrasies of all kinds, and brings the facts into a more or less
imperfect, but still organic series of relations. The history which is
not open to adverse criticism is worth little, except as material, for it
is written without taking cognizance of those higher facts about which
men must differ; of which Guizot writes as follows, as quoted in the work
of M. Groen van Prinsterer himself.

   “It is with facts that our minds are exercised, it has nothing but
   facts as its materials, and when it discovers general laws these
   laws are themselves facts which it determines. . . . In the
   study of facts the intelligence may allow itself to be crushed; it
   may lower, narrow, materialize itself; it may come to believe that
   there are no facts except those which strike us at the first glance,
   which come close to us, which fall, as we say, under our senses; a
   great and gross error; there are remote facts, immense, obscure,
   sublime, very difficult to reach, to observe, to describe, and which
   are not any less facts for these reasons, and which man is not less
   obliged to study and to know; and if he fails to recognize them or
   forgets them, his thought will be prodigiously abashed, and all his
   ideas carry the stamp of this deterioration.”

In that higher region of facts which belongs to the historian, whose task
it is to interpret as well as to transcribe, Mr. Motley showed, of
course, the political and religious school in which he had been brought
up. Every man has a right to his “personal equation” of prejudice, and
Mr. Motley, whose ardent temperament gave life to his writings, betrayed
his sympathies in the disputes of which he told the story, in a way to
insure sharp criticism from those of a different way of thinking. Thus it
is that in the work of M. Groen van Prinsterer, from which I have quoted,
he is considered as having been betrayed into error, while his critic
recognizes “his manifest desire to be scrupulously impartial and
truth-telling.” And M. Fruin, another of his Dutch critics, says, “His
sincerity, his perspicacity, the accuracy of his laborious researches,
are incontestable.”

Some of the criticisms of Dutch scholars will be considered in the pages
which deal with his last work, “The Life of John of Barneveld.”




XX.

1868-1869. AEt. 54-55.

VISIT TO AMERICA.--RESIDENCE AT NO. 2 PARK STREET, BOSTON.--ADDRESS ON
THE COMING PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION.--ADDRESS ON HISTORIC PROGRESS AND
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY.--APPOINTED MINISTER TO ENGLAND.

In June, 1868, Mr. Motley returned with his family to Boston, and
established himself in the house No. 2 Park Street. During his residence
here he entered a good deal into society, and entertained many visitors
in a most hospitable and agreeable way.

On the 20th of October, 1868, he delivered an address before the Parker
Fraternity, in the Music Hall, by special invitation. Its title was “Four
Questions for the People, at the Presidential Election.” This was of
course what is commonly called an electioneering speech, but a speech
full of noble sentiments and eloquent expression. Here are two of its
paragraphs:--

   “Certainly there have been bitterly contested elections in this
   country before. Party spirit is always rife, and in such vivid,
   excitable, disputatious communities as ours are, and I trust always
   will be, it is the very soul of freedom. To those who reflect upon
   the means and end of popular government, nothing seems more stupid
   than in grand generalities to deprecate party spirit. Why,
   government by parties and through party machinery is the only
   possible method by which a free government can accomplish the
   purpose of its existence. The old republics of the past may be said
   to have fallen, not because of party spirit, but because there was
   no adequate machinery by which party spirit could develop itself
   with facility and regularity.

   “And if our Republic be true to herself, the future of the human
   race is assured by our example. No sweep of overwhelming armies, no
   ponderous treatises on the rights of man, no hymns to liberty,
   though set to martial music and resounding with the full diapason of
   a million human throats, can exert so persuasive an influence as
   does the spectacle of a great republic, occupying a quarter of the
   civilized globe, and governed quietly and sagely by the people
   itself.”

A large portion of this address is devoted to the proposition that it is
just and reasonable to pay our debts rather than to repudiate them, and
that the nation is as much bound to be honest as is the individual. “It
is an awful thing,” he says, “that this should be a question at all,” but
it was one of the points on which the election turned, for all that.

In his advocacy of the candidate with whom, and the government of which
he became the head, his relations became afterwards so full of personal
antagonism, he spoke as a man of his ardent nature might be expected to
speak on such an occasion. No one doubts that his admiration of General
Grant's career was perfectly sincere, and no one at the present day can
deny that the great captain stood before the historian with such a record
as one familiar with the deeds of heroes and patriots might well consider
as entitling him to the honors too often grudged to the living to be
wasted on the dead. The speaker only gave voice to the widely prevailing
feelings which had led to his receiving the invitation to speak. The time
was one which called for outspoken utterance, and there was not a
listener whose heart did not warm as he heard the glowing words in which
the speaker recorded the noble achievements of the soldier who must in so
many ways have reminded him of his favorite character, William the
Silent.

On the 16th of December of this same year, 1868, Mr. Motley delivered an
address before the New York Historical Society, on the occasion of the
sixty-fourth anniversary of its foundation. The president of the society,
Mr. Hamilton Fish, introduced the speaker as one “whose name belongs to
no single country, and to no single age. As a statesman and diplomatist
and patriot, he belongs to America; as a scholar, to the world of
letters; as a historian, all ages will claim him in the future.”

His subject was “Historic Progress and American Democracy.” The discourse
is, to use his own words, “a rapid sweep through the eons and the
centuries,” illustrating the great truth of the development of the race
from its origin to the time in which we are living. It is a long distance
from the planetary fact of the obliquity of the equator, which gave the
earth its alternation of seasons, and rendered the history, if not the
existence of man and of civilization a possibility, to the surrender of
General Lee under the apple-tree at Appomattox Court-House. No one but a
scholar familiar with the course of history could have marshalled such a
procession of events into a connected and intelligible sequence. It is
indeed a flight rather than a march; the reader is borne along as on the
wings of a soaring poem, and sees the rising and decaying empires of
history beneath him as a bird of passage marks the succession of cities
and wilds and deserts as he keeps pace with the sun in his journey.

Its eloquence, its patriotism, its crowded illustrations, drawn from vast
resources of knowledge, its epigrammatic axioms, its occasional
pleasantries, are all characteristic of the writer.

Mr. Gulian C. Verplanck, the venerable senior member of the society,
proposed the vote of thanks to Mr. Motley with words of warm
commendation.

Mr. William Cullen Bryant rose and said:--

   “I take great pleasure in seconding the resolution which has just
   been read. The eminent historian of the Dutch Republic, who has
   made the story of its earlier days as interesting as that of Athens
   and Sparta, and who has infused into the narrative the generous glow
   of his own genius, has the highest of titles to be heard with
   respectful attention by the citizens of a community which, in its
   origin, was an offshoot of that renowned republic. And cheerfully
   has that title been recognized, as the vast audience assembled here
   to-night, in spite of the storm, fully testifies; and well has our
   illustrious friend spoken of the growth of civilization and of the
   improvement in the condition of mankind, both in the Old World--the
   institutions of which he has so lately observed--and in the country
   which is proud to claim him as one of her children.”

Soon after the election of General Grant, Mr. Motley received the
appointment of Minister to England. That the position was one which was
in many respects most agreeable to him cannot be doubted. Yet it was not
with unmingled feelings of satisfaction, not without misgivings which
warned him but too truly of the dangers about to encompass him, that he
accepted the place. He writes to me on April 16, 1869:--

   “I feel anything but exultation at present,--rather the opposite
   sensation. I feel that I am placed higher than I deserve, and at
   the same time that I am taking greater responsibilities than ever
   were assumed by me before. You will be indulgent to my mistakes and
   shortcomings,--and who can expect to avoid them? But the world will
   be cruel, and the times are threatening. I shall do my best,--but
   the best may be poor enough,--and keep 'a heart for any fate.'”




XXI.

1869-1870. AEt. 55-56.
RECALL FROM THE ENGLISH MISSION.--ITS ALLEGED AND ITS PROBABLE REASONS.

The misgivings thus expressed to me in confidence, natural enough in one
who had already known what it is to fall on evil days and evil tongues,
were but too well justified by after events. I could have wished to leave
untold the story of the English mission, an episode in Motley's life full
of heart-burnings, and long to be regretted as a passage of American
history. But his living appeal to my indulgence comes to me from his
grave as a call for his defence, however little needed, at least as a
part of my tribute to his memory. It is little needed, because the case
is clear enough to all intelligent readers of our diplomatic history, and
because his cause has been amply sustained by others in many ways better
qualified than myself to do it justice. The task is painful, for if a
wrong was done him it must be laid at the doors of those whom the nation
has delighted to honor, and whose services no error of judgment or
feeling or conduct can ever induce us to forget. If he confessed him,
self-liable, like the rest of us, to mistakes and shortcomings, we must
remember that the great officers of the government who decreed his
downfall were not less the subjects of human infirmity.

The outline to be filled up is this: A new administration had just been
elected. The “Alabama Treaty,” negotiated by Motley's predecessor, Mr.
Reverdy Johnson, had been rejected by the Senate. The minister was
recalled, and Motley, nominated without opposition and unanimously
confirmed by the Senate, was sent to England in his place. He was
welcomed most cordially on his arrival at Liverpool, and replied in a
similar strain of good feeling, expressing the same kindly sentiments
which may be found in his instructions. Soon after arriving in London he
had a conversation with Lord Clarendon, the British Foreign Secretary, of
which he sent a full report to his own government. While the reported
conversation was generally approved of in the government's dispatch
acknowledging it, it was hinted that some of its expressions were
stronger than were required by the instructions, and that one of its
points was not conveyed in precise conformity with the President's view.
The criticism was very gently worded, and the dispatch closed with a
somewhat guarded paragraph repeating the government's approbation.

This was the first offence alleged against Mr. Motley. The second ground
of complaint was that he had shown written minutes of this conversation
to Lord Clarendon to obtain his confirmation of its exactness, and that
he had--as he said, inadvertently,--omitted to make mention to the
government of this circumstance until some weeks after the time of the
interview.

He was requested to explain to Lord Clarendon that a portion of his
presentation and treatment of the subject discussed at the interview
immediately after his arrival was disapproved by the Secretary of State,
and he did so in a written communication, in which he used the very words
employed by Mr. Fish in his criticism of the conversation with Lord
Clarendon. An alleged mistake; a temperate criticism, coupled with a
general approval; a rectification of the mistake criticised. All this
within the first two months of Mr. Motley's official residence in London.

No further fault was found with him, so far as appears, in the discharge
of his duties, to which he must have devoted himself faithfully, for he
writes to me, under the date of December 27, 1870: “I have worked harder
in the discharge of this mission than I ever did in my life.” This from a
man whose working powers astonished the old Dutch archivist, Groen van
Prinsterer, means a good deal.

More than a year had elapsed since the interview with Lord Clarendon,
which had been the subject of criticism. In the mean time a paper of
instructions was sent to Motley, dated September 25, 1869, in which the
points in the report of his interview which had been found fault with are
so nearly covered by similar expressions, that there seemed no real
ground left for difference between the government and the minister.
Whatever over-statement there had been, these new instructions would
imply that the government was now ready to go quite as far as the
minister had gone, and in some points to put the case still more
strongly. Everything was going on quietly. Important business had been
transacted, with no sign of distrust or discontent on the part of the
government as regarded Motley. Whatever mistake he was thought to have
committed was condoned by amicable treatment, neutralized by the virtual
indorsement of the government in the instructions of the 25th of
September, and obsolete as a ground of quarrel by lapse of time. The
question about which the misunderstanding, if such it deserves to be
called, had taken 

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