FRANCIS PARKMAN 283
an ample canvas for vivid description stamped with the fresh impressions of his western travels and recent sojourn among the Sioux. In the earlier chapters, as an introduction to his subject, he takes a broad survey of the whole history of New France, sketching in outline what was to be his life work.
In the thirteen years that follow he labored on under the same cruel shackles, varying severer studies by gardening and by writing his only novel. Vassal Morton (1856). Of Vassal Morton it is sufficient to say that its chief importance to-day lies in its reflection of Parkman's character. In parts it is a thinly disguised self-portrait. Parkman mentions in several of his prefaces his disabilities in a purely objective way, just as he recorded the other conditions of his work. In the narratives there is, however, no odor of the sick-room, no feebleness; the artist's all-embracing memory and con- structive imagination transport him to the woods, and the strain of the effort is betrayed only by a certain tenseness of style. But in Vassal Morton he let himself out, and under the mask of Morton's agony in his dungeon, his own sufferings are revealed.
The novel is full of sharply drawn portraits, vivid descrip- tion of nature and lifelike pictures of manners. It is a little melodramatic in plot, rather too brilliant in conversation, and unreal at critical junctures, but it is interesting, and hardly deserved oblivion. Parkman did not include it in his works, and is said not to have liked to hear it mentioned. One can- not help feeling that as he attained distinction he felt a certain shame at having betrayed his feelings even in that indirect fashion and recovered his consistency of stoicism by ignoring this single lapse.
In the introduction to The Pioneers of France in the Neiv World (1865) Parkman announces his plan of a series to be devoted to " the attempt of Feudalism, Monarchy, and Rome, to master a continent, where at this hour, half a million bay- onets are vindicating the ascendancy of a regulated free- dom." After contrasting in a few paragraphs of compressed but richly colored description the contending civilizations, he
