Chapter II: Parkman’s Character

Parkman had prodigious will power and unequalled pertinacity. No barrier to the accomplishment of his object was allowed to stand in the way. He was beset by the demons of ill health, and their number was legion. Unable to rout them by impetuous onslaught, he tired them out, thinning their ranks, one by one. He was infinitely patient, full of devices for outwitting the enemy. Beaten again and again, he stubbornly renewed the fight. Threatened with blindness, he set himself to avoid it, and did. Threatened with insanity, he declined to become insane.

Nothing could be more admirable than the spirit in which he faced daily torment. He was that extraordinary being, a cheerful stoic. Four times in his life it was a question whether he would live or die. Parkman admitted that once, had he been seeking merely his comfort, he would have elected to die. That must have been the time when, in response to his physician’s encouraging remark that he had a strong constitution, Parkman said: ‘I’m afraid I have.’ In ordinary conditions of ill health he was bright, cheery, philosophical, but when he suffered most he was silent. At no time was he capable of complaining.

Parkman loved to face the hard facts of life and was apt to admire others in the degree in which they showed a like spirit. He had a sovereign contempt for everything not manly and robust. He contradicted with amusing emphasis the statement in some biographical notice that he was ‘feeble.’ By his philosophy the militant attitude toward life was the true one. He believed in war as a moral force; it made for character both in the man and in the nation. ‘The severest disappointment of his life was his inability to enter the army during our civil war.’

He was wholly free from certain narrow traits which are too apt to be engendered in a life devoted to books and authorship. Manly, open-hearted, unspoiled, he neither craved honors nor despised them. It has been remarked that while he was gratified by the recognition accorded his work in high places, he was equally pleased with a letter from ‘a live boy’ who wrote to tell him how much he had enjoyed reading about Pontiac and La Salle. He himself kept to the last a certain boyish frankness of mind and heart. The year before he died he wrote to the secretary of the class of ’44: ‘Please give my kind regrets and remembrances to the fellows.’

There have been not a few attractive personalities in the history of American letters. Parkman was one of the most attractive among them.