The Historian as Novelist

PRESCOTT'S HISTORIES edited by Irwin R. Blacker. 568 pages. Viking. $7.50.

William Hickling Prescott never visited Spain. Friends tried to lure him there during his many tours of Europe, and so did the Spanish government. But Prescott had a Spain in his mind, and he wanted nothing to mar that image. Prescott's Spain was a darkly dramatic land, and he populated it with villains of incredible baseness and heroes of astounding virtue. In so doing he became one of the most famous American historians of the 19th century.

Prescott is often quoted today, but seldom, if ever, read. To put him back into circulation, Historian Irwin Blacker has soldered together generous excerpts from Prescott's four books--Ferdinand and Isabella, The Conquest of Mexico, The Conquest of Peru and Philip II. Prescott may have had no first-hand experience of Spain, but he had what was perhaps better--good friends in the U.S. diplomatic service. He used them to get access to documents in Madrid that no historian had seen before. The scaffolding of fact upon which Prescott constructed his books was so solid that more than a century after their publication, his histories remain basic sources of information on the Spanish empire.

Sometime Novelist. As popular reading they are something else again. The style and the viewpoint that made Prescott so popular in his own time now seem quaint and dated. A modern reader, reading him for the first time, might conclude that he was perhaps as great a novelist as that other sometime historian, Sir Walter Scott.

Prescott did not plan on a career as a historian. Born into a wealthy Boston family, he wrote one volume of indifferent poetry, dabbled in literary criticism, traveled about Europe, and at 30 decided that he should write a significant book. The role of literary-man-turned-historian appealed to him; he had always admired Gibbon and Voltaire. But their weakness, he noted, was that their "writings are nowhere warmed with generous moral sentiment." Looking for a country on which to lavish moral sentiment, Prescott discovered Spain.

Ferdinand and Isabella took him ten years, and purely in terms of the physical effort involved, it is a wonder that he ever finished it, or any of his other books. Prescott had been all but blinded in one eye in an accident at school, and by his mid-30s the sight in his other eye had begun to fail. He devised a method of writing on a board lined with wires to guide his hand. But most of the research materials that went into his books had to be read to him by a secretary, and when his sight failed completely, he took to dictating.

Play with Figures. Seeing history as a kind of gigantic morality play, Prescott decorated it with figures that are plainly preposterous. His Queen Isabella, for instance, is straight out of the 19th century romantic novel--blue-eyed, fair-haired, and possessed of a piety that "shone forth from the very depths of her soul with a heavenly radiance which illuminated her whole character." It was her remarkable innocence, says Prescott, and her implicit trust in her "ghostly advisers" that caused her to fall under the influence of the villainous Torquemada, who established the Spanish Inquisition.

Prescott heroes--Philip II, Cortes of The Conquest of Mexico--are generous, manly and brave. They are at their best when things are worst: "Even Cortes, as he contrasted the tremendous array before him with his own diminished squadrons, could not escape the conviction that his last hour had arrived. But his was not the heart to despond . . ." Destiny, in Prescott's universe, was white and strenuously Christian.

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