第13章

His experience in laying the groundwork for his history,and his researches in making it thorough,were such as to have liberated him to the knowledge of other manners and ideals,but he remained strictly a Bostonian,and as immutably of the Boston social and literary faith as any I knew in that capital of accomplished facts.He had lived like an Indian among the wild Western tribes;he consorted with the Canadian archaeologists in their mousings among the colonial archives of their fallen state;every year he went to Quebec or Paris to study the history of New France in the original documents;European society was open to him everywhere;but he had those limitations which I nearly always found in the Boston men,I remember his talking to me of 'The Rise of Silas Lapham',in a somewhat troubled and uncertain strain,and interpreting his rise as the achievement of social recognition,without much or at all liking it or me for it.I did not think it my part to point out that Ihad supposed the rise to be a moral one;and later I fell under his condemnation for certain high crimes and misdemeanors I had been guilty of against a well-known ideal in fiction.These in fact constituted lese-majesty of romanticism,which seemed to be disproportionately dear to a man who was in his own way trying to tell the truth of human nature as I was in mine.His displeasures passed,however,and my last meeting with our greatest historian,as I think him,was of unalloyed friendliness.He came to me during my final year in Boston for nothing apparently but to tell me of his liking for a book of mine describing boy-life in Southern Ohio a half-century ago.He wished to talk about many points of this,which he found the same as his own boylife in the neighborhood of Boston;and we could agree that the life of the Anglo-Saxon boy was pretty much the same everywhere.He had helped himself into my apartment with a crutch,but I do not remember how he had fallen lame.It was the end of his long walks,I believe,and not long afterwards I had the grief to read of his death.I noticed that perhaps through his enforced quiet,he had put on weight;his fine face was full;whereas when I first knew him he was almost delicately thin of figure and feature.He was always of a distinguished presence,and his face had a great distinction.

It had not the appealing charm I found in the face of James Parton,another historian I knew earlier in my Boston days.I cannot say how much his books,once so worthily popular,are now known but I have an abiding sense of their excellence.I have not read the 'Life of Voltaire',which was the last,but all the rest,from the first,I have read,and if there are better American biographies than those of Franklin or of Jefferson,I could not say where to find them.The Greeley and the Burr were younger books,and so was the Jackson,and they were not nearly so good;but to all the author had imparted the valuable humanity in which he abounded.He was never of the fine world of literature,the world that sniffs and sneers,and abashes the simpler-hearted reader.