HISTORICAL INDUSTRIES. By JAMES SCHOULER. Historians are sometimes said to be a long-lived race. To historical students, at all events, this is a comfortable theory. Recent examples of a productive old age, such as Ranke so long supplied, and our own illustrious George Bancroft, may have lent strong force to the supposition. History herself, no doubt, is a long-winded muse, and demands of each votary the power of continuance. But I doubt whether statistics would bear out strongly this theory of a long-lived race. Among modern historians, well known, who have died a natural death, neither Niebuhr, Gibbon, Macaulay, nor Hildreth reached his sixtieth year; both Prescott and Motley died at about 63.* On the other hand, to take poets alone whom many of us may have seen in the flesh, both Longfellow and Lowell passed well preserved the bounds of three-score years and ten; while Bryant, Whittier, and Holmes, the last of whom still vigorously survives, enjoyed life much beyond fourscore; and of English composers the most famous, both Tennyson and Browning mellowed long before they dropped. Undoubtedly, however, steady and systematic brain-work without brain worry conduces to health and long life, whatever be the special occupation; and who may better claim that precious condition of mind than the average historian? For of all literary pursuits none on the whole appears so naturally allied to competent means and good family. Public office and influence, the making of history, have belonged in most epochs before our own to the aristocracy-superior station being usually linked in the world's experiences to wealth; and it is the scions and kindred of those who have been actors and associates in events, if not the actors and associates themselves, whose pens *Francis Parkman has recently died at the age of 70, longer spared for his work than any of those above mentioned. describe past exploits most readily. These have gained the readiest access for their studies to the public archives-ransacking, moreover, that private correspondence of illustrious leaders defunct, which family pride guards so jealously; and with mingled urbanity and scholarship they maintain the polish of easy intercourse in the courtly circles of their own times. One ought to be a man of letters and liberal training for such a life; a close student, and yet, in some sense, a person of affairs. It costs long leisure, and money too, to collect materials properly, while the actual composition proceeds in comparison but slowly. Nor are the royalties from historical writings, however successful and popular, likely to remunerate one greatly, considering his aggregate outlay; but rather than in any enhanced pecuniary ease, his reward must be looked for in the distinguished comradeship of the dead and of the living-in the satisfaction that he has performed exalted labors faithfully for the good of his fellowmen, and found them in his own day fairly appreciated. Happy the historian, withal, whom fame or early promise has helped into some collateral or congenial employment of indirect advantage to his task. Calmness and constancy of purpose carry us on steadily in work of this character, with powers of mind that strengthen by habitual exercise. It is not brilliancy of assault; it is not the pompous announcement of a narrative purpose, that determines the historian, but rather silent concentration and perseverance. The story one begins will never be thoroughly finished while the world stands; and on the one hand is the temptation of preparing with too much elaboration or fastidiousness to narrate rapidly enough, and on the other of trying to tell more than the circumscribed limits of preparation and of personal capacity will permit. Men who are free from financial anxieties will be tempted aside from the incessant laborious work by the seductions of pleasure. Thus Prescott, the blind historian, with excuses much stronger than Milton ever had for social ease and inaction, found himself compelled to overcome his temptations to sloth by placing himself habitually under penal bonds to his secretary to prepare so many pages by a given time. More, however, than the gift of time and income the world will scarcely look for in a literary man. It is the publisher, rather, who projects encyclopedias and huge reservoirs of useful information and who embarks large money capital in the enterprise. A few celebrated authors, to be sure, have figured, some in a dormant sense, as publishers of their own works, like Richardson, the English novelist, for instance, the Chambers brothers, and most disastrously for himself, Sir Walter Scott. Many literary men of means own their plates, while putting firms forward to print and publish for them notwithstanding. But it is reserved, I believe, to America and to the present age to furnish to the world the first unique example of bookseller, book collector, historian, and publisher, all combined in one, whose fortune is devoted to the fulfillment of a colossal pioneer research. We must count, I apprehend, the living historian of "the Pacific States" among the wealthy benefactors of our higher learning, for that prolific brood of brown volumes such as no other historian from Herodotus down ever fathered for his own can hardly have repaid their immense cost and labor of preparation, even with the ultimate sale added of the famous library whose precious contents gave them substance. Mr. Bancroft's "Literary Industries," a stimulating and well-written book, recounts fully the methods he employed, with a corps of literary writers under his personal direction, in ransacking the contents of that huge library which he afterward sold, to furnish forth his own compendious treatises upon the archæology, history, and ethnology of our Pacific coast, hitherto but little illustrated by its latest race of conquerors. And he felicitates himself that an enterprise otherwise beyond any one man's power of execution was brought by his own organized efforts within the compass of some thirty years. I will not undertake any direct criticism of such comprehensive methods as his, nor seek to disparage labors so generously and so successfully rounded out to a close. But this present age runs very strongly, as it seems to me, and perhaps too strongly, to vast executive projects in every department of human activity. We are apt in consequence to sacrifice high individual thought and mental creativeness to feats of technique and organized mastery; while our trusts, our syndicates, and combiners of capital seek so constantly to monopolize profits both moral and material for themselves, by welding and concentrating the lesser resources of individuals, that single endeavor faints in the unequal rivalry. Such a development artfully conducts the human race back, sooner or later, to a species of slavery; it hands over the many to the patronage |