3 October: Boreham on George Bancroft

History in Colour
When he first arrived in London, George Bancroft, whose birthday this is, was a tall, good-looking, well-knit man of forty-six. He had come to represent the United States at the Court of Queen Victoria. America is a law unto itself in such matters. It has been said that England rewards her brilliant young writers by starving them; America kills hers by kindness. As soon as a man makes some mark in the literary world, instead of encouraging him to focus all his attention upon the work that is peculiarly his own, she sets herself to lure him from it by the offer of an embassy or a consulship. A man who has written a good book should surely be incited to write a still better one. America, on the contrary, makes him an ambassador and sends him overseas. The work of Lowell, Bret Harte, Bancroft, and others was sadly hampered by this doubtful policy.

As scarcely more than a boy, Bancroft aspired to be the chronicler of his country's glory. He was in the early thirties when the first volumes of his "History of the United States" were given to the world. From the time of Herodotus, no writer of a nation's story has ever made his pages so varied, so colourful, so exciting, as has Bancroft. "Here," exclaimed Carlyle, in complimenting him on the quality of his opening volumes, "here I find, set visibly before me, the old primeval forest in its hot dark strength and tangled savagery and putrescence; rough Virginian planters with their tobacco pouches, galloping in buckskin among the cattle in the glades of the wildwood; sturdy Puritans, stern of visage but sound of heart; all this and much more, is ocularly here." Suffusing the rich fruits of painstaking research with the genius of an active imagination, his main appeal is to the eye. With evident pride he leads out his imposing and variegated procession. As a painter of stirring and captivating pictures he has never been surpassed.

The Fountainhead Of Western Adventure
The grandfathers of today have not forgotten—will, indeed, never forget—the delicious thrills which they enjoyed as children in devouring the American Indian stories of R. M. Ballantyne, Fenimore Cooper, and Mayne Reid. In those days every schoolboy was familiar with the wigwams and the moccasins, the frayed leggings and the feathered headgear, the tomahawk and the scalping knife, the canoe and the peace-pipe, and all the other distinctive and picturesque features of Indian life among the woods, the rapids and the rolling prairies of the West. But, in following breathlessly the hair-raising exploits of these fierce and cunning braves, the boys of yesterday seldom suspected that the neglected but glowing pages of Bancroft contained in their original and authentic forms most of these animated narratives.

The chapters in which the historian deals with the struggles of the early pioneers—struggles with the densely-wooded virgin soil; struggles with a stern and inhospitable climate; struggles with astute and well-mounted Indians—are as absorbing as anything in the pages of the novelists who have stolen his thunder for their melodramatic effects. Bancroft possessed a tremendous appreciation of the heroic, whether among the lawless adventurers who swarmed across the Atlantic in quest of wealth, or among the pious pilgrims of New England, or among the Quakers of Pennsylvania, or among the Catholics of Maryland, or among the negroes of the southern States, or among the Indians on the warpath. And, gathering it all up with eager and admiring hand, he wove it into an epic that has stirred the blood of every reader.

Dedication Of a Long Life To a Noble Purpose
Like a cinematographic film of gripping intensity and enchanting beauty, Bancroft flings across his spacious screen the moving drama of America's most critical and eventful years. His story is splashed by all the elements of grandeur, pathos, loveliness, and horror. It is one of the wonders of the world that, within the compass of a century or two, a primeval forest peopled only by the Mohawks and the Delawares, the Hurons and the Iroquois, should have given place to cities of towering architecture with populations greater than the entire population of Australia. In microscopic detail, Bancroft traces that amazing process of evolution, weaving it into a story that can never be read without admiration and emotion.

Beginning early, he lived to be a very old man, and was thus able to complete a work so monumental and so majestic that John Bright called it the most readable, the most graphic, and most instructive history ever written. Sir George Otto Trevelyan, himself an historian of the very first rank, regarded Bancroft's achievement as a model for the chroniclers of all future ages. No man, in any century, ever laid the foundations of their country's historical literature more broadly, more accurately, or more magnificently than did Bancroft. Although he lived to see the children come of age who were born when he attained his three score years and ten, he exhibited, in his closing years, no symptoms of feebleness or decrepitude. His mind was alert; his soul was aflame with curiosity concerning every detail of which he had to write. He loved to magnify his office. "The work of the historian," he wrote, "is incomparably noble." He beheld with wondering eyes the pageant of the ages; but he recognised that the procession is marshalled, and, with reverent eyes, he discerned its august Commandant. The writer of history, he declared, is the biographer of deity. Bancroft thridded the maze of the centuries, not only seeing the puppets moving, but seeing also the Hand that so cunningly fashioned those puppets and so cleverly pulled the strings. On his 87th birthday, Browning cabled him a touching little poem of congratulation, and others, no less eminent, marvelled at the vigour and fruitfulness of his mind in extreme old age. For 60 years his history occupied all his thought, and, as long as our literature endures, it will stand as his most eloquent memorial.

F W Boreham

Image: George Bancroft