FRANCIS PARKMAN. 439 



Besides this, his unswerving tenacity of purpose makes his work sin- 

 gularly complete. In the first six chapters of " The Conspiracy of 

 Pontine/' as I have said, he sketched what may broadly be called the 

 whole scheme of his historical writing. For forty years of enthusi- 

 astic study, in the course of which he sought out every available 

 authority, he busied himself in finishing, on the grand scale, the pic- 

 ture thus sketched. In its own way, then, his work probably stands 

 among the most permanent that has been done by American hands. 



Perhaps its most salient trait is its unbroken vitality. His imagina- 

 tion was very vivid. To him men were always alive, — thinking, feel- 

 ino-. acting, stirriiisr, in the midst of a living Nature. To him a docu- 

 mentof whatever kind — a state paper, a Jesuit " Relation," the diary 

 of a Provincial soldier, the record of a Yankee church — was merely 

 the symbol of a fact which had once been as real as his own hardships 

 among the Western Indians, or as the lifetime of physical suffering 

 which never bent his will. In turning from "The Oregon Trail" — 

 the single volume which records experience of his own — to the series 

 of volumes which record the experience of men who have been dead 

 for generations, one feels strangely little difference. Both alike are 

 records of actual human existence. 



This constant vitality is generally recognized. By those who know 

 his work well, indeed, it is by and by assumed, in a mood akin to that 

 in which the great generalizations of human wisdom are accepted 

 by posterity as commonplace. If much remarked, it is spoken of as 

 notable in view of the maladies which kept him so long a cripple or 

 an invalid. These, it is said, in no way impaired his scholarly and 

 artistic vigor. To a great extent, the remark is true. More vivid 

 writing than his is hard to find ; nothing could be further from what he 

 called " the pallid and emasculate scholarship of which New England 

 has already had too much." 



For all this vitality, there is an aspect of his work which thorough 

 criticism cannot neglect. Here and there one sometimes hears from 

 people who cordially admire his writings an occasional expression of 

 regret that he did not devote his exceptional powers to the execution 

 of a task in itself more important. After all, these critics say, he 

 has only told us — incomparably, to be sure — how European mis- 

 sionaries and pioneers penetrated and tamed the American wilderness, 

 and how in the end the provinces that used to be French became sub- 

 ject to the Crown of England. Full of vigorous interest as all this 

 is, it sometimes seems — in this age of grave constitutional and philo- 

 sophic study — just a shade puerile. Boys like to read it. Nowadays 



