440 FRANCIS PARKMAN. 



this is often reason enough for grown people to think it a bit the less 

 worth their attention. 



In this criticism there is some apparent truth. Undoubtedly Mr. 

 Parkman's first youthful purpose was, in his own words, to write 

 " the history of the American forest," which incidentally should 

 include the long struggle between France and England. Undoubtedly 

 his love for the woods pervaded his fancy to the last. Undoubtedly, 

 in comparison with much that has happened on earth, these matters 

 seem at first glance rather picturesque than notable, of romantic interest 

 rather than of historic. To assert that they are really so, however, is 

 not to understand them. A little consideration reveals them in a dif- 

 ferent light. Historical phenomena of any kind must be the result 

 of historical forces ; and though here the historical phenomena may 

 sometimes seem trivial, the historical forces that underlie ihem prove 

 before long to be of prime importance. In the first place, we have 

 European civilization inevitably, unwittingly overpowering the bar- 

 barism of savage America. In the second place, far nearer to ourselves, 

 we have the absolutism of the old French monarchy struggling to the 

 death for the dominion of a conquered continent with that firmest 

 known system of human rights, — the common law of England. All 

 this, too, we have implied in Mr. Parkman's own pages ; to feel it so 

 that we may philosophize about it to our hearts' content, we need only 

 turn to him. The matters he deals with, then, are really matters 

 grave enough for anybody. 



The fact that the seriousness of his work is not to all readers 

 instantly apparent, however, is in itself significant. Here, and only 

 here, I think, is revealed the superficiality of that commonplace criti- 

 cism which declares that his illness in no way affected his achieve- 

 ment. Whoever knew him, at least in his later years, must have felt 

 that the man himself was as far removed as possible from that delight- 

 ful but unimportant personage, the mere teller of stories. You 

 could not talk with him for five minutes without feeling that he not 

 only knew things, but thought about them too ; that, to a rare degree, 

 he was a critic of life. In his historical work, however, this trait, 

 though by no means absent if one will but search for it, is not quite 

 obvious. In his later books, to be sure, it is more apparent than in 

 his earlier ; implicitly, after a while, one finds it everywhere ; but to 

 find it one must sometimes search. To a superficial reader, in fact, 

 the luxuriant profusion of his detail — a trait which would naturally 

 result from the circumstances under which bis illness compelled 

 him to work — must sometimes obscure the principles which any 



