Arts and Letters

For the whole earth is the sepulchre of famous men; and their story is not graven on stone alone, over their native earth, but lives on, woven into the stuff of other men's lives.

Thucydides, Funeral Oration of Pericles.

The death of Samuel Eliot Morison on 15 May of this year marks the end of the heroic era in American historical writing. Henry Adams' great history of the Jefferson and Madison administration appeared the year after Samuel Eliot Morison's birth, and two years later came the Half Century of Conflict with which Francis Parkman—almost a neighbor—brought to a climax his own great enterprise and his own life-long conflict. Morison, in a sense, inherited their mantle. He carried on the Adams tradition of scholarship which was at once a family and a national affair: as Adams had addressed himself to New England federalism and to the record of his own family in American politics, so Morison inaugurated his own historical career with a two-volume biography of his great-great grandfather, Harrison Gray Otis, and devoted himself in his history of Harvard University to celebrating the achievements of his great uncle, President Eliot, and other ancestors.

Better than any other historian of his age—we can scarcely say his generation, for his professional life spanned more than two generations—he combined vast erudition, impeccable scholarship, narrative vigor, philosophical insight, and literary grace, and he addressed his talents—we are tempted to say his genius—to great and affluent subjects. In all this he was closer, perhaps, to his two English contemporaries George Macaulay Trevelyan and Winston Churchill than to his American. For all three displayed in their histories the same talent for great subjects and great eloquence.

Samuel Eliot Morison was a child of Puritanism; formed by that moral discipline, by Boston, by Harvard, and, perhaps above all else, by the sea. Puritanism was in his blood. It gave us his Builders of the Bay Colony, his masterly edition of Bradford, his beautiful Puritan Pronaos. It accounted, no doubt, for that relentless devotion to the most rigorous standards of scholarship, and that unflagging industry, which enabled him to write two score books, participate actively in professional life, serve his country in two wars and in many public responsibilities, and somehow never wholly forego the pleasures of social life on two continents.

Boston was in his blood. He lived all his life in that forbidding house on Brimmer which his grandfather Samuel Eliot (did his two-volume history of liberty in the ancient world inspire something of Samuel Eliot Morison's dedication to liberty?) had built; ancestral portraits hanging on the walls, furniture—all of it, he said—inherited, and the bookshelves of his study lined with Greek and Latin and French as well as English and American classics which had come down to him from generations of scholars. No wonder he was conceded the title of first citizen of Boston.

Harvard was in his blood and in his family: the responsibility for launching the history of that great university went to him almost by default, and his three volumes on the founding of Harvard College and Harvard College in the seventeenth century set standards as yet unsurpassed in the otherwise disorderly field of Academic History.

But the sea was his first love, and his abiding love. As a boy he had sailed the waters of Boston and Salem harbours, and he came to know every inlet and every cove and every island from Cape Cod to Penobscot Bay and Machias Bay, and eventually to know the great oceans which he traversed with Columbus and with Magellan, and with the proud warships of the United States Navy. Indeed, in the words of his life-long friend, Archibald MacLeish, he was "our Yankee Admiral of the Ocean Sea." One of his earliest books and one of his best was that Maritime History of Massachusetts whose every page is a paean of praise both to Massachusetts and to the sea, to the intrepid captains who ploughed a path to the Pepper Islands and the China Seas, to the whalers and to the clipper ships. When he wrote of these poetry graced his pages:

Never in these United States has the brain of man conceived or the hand of man fashioned so perfect a thing as the clipper ship. In her the long suppressed artistic impulse of a practical hardworking race burst into flower. The Flying Cloud was our Rheims, the Sovereign of the Seas our Parthenon, the Lightning our Amiens: But they were monuments carved in snow. For a brief moment of time they flashed their splendour around the world, then disappeared with the sudden completeness of the wild pigeon. One by one they sailed out of Boston Harbour to return no more.

(Maritime History of Massachusetts, p. 370)

He wrote the definitive biography of Christopher Columbus, following the Santa Maria from Palos to San Salvador, so he could know the wind and the currents as Columbus himself had known them. He sailed with Verrazzano and with Magellan on even more daring voyages, and gave us the first adequate accounts of their great explorations. And finally, with a breadth, daring, and expertise no other historian has commanded he gave us that History of United States Naval Operations in World War II—fourteen volumes built not only on a scrupulous study of the documents, but on personal observation of the landings in North Africa, at Salerno, the invasion of Norway, the battle for the Solomons, and the Gilberts, and for Okinawa. It is one of the most remarkable historical works in literature, not only for its comprehensiveness, its judiciousness, its mastery of grand strategy and of tactics, and for the dignity and vigor of its style; but because its every page was illuminated by personal experience. In his determination to live what he was to write, and to write what he had lived, Admiral Morison reminds us of that Thucydides whom he regarded as a master, and that Winston Churchill who was his peer. But he put it modestly enough: "I have always attempted to live and feel the history I write."

Professor Morison did not subscribe to any formal "Philosophy" of History; indeed, he distrusted all such, as he distrusted the ostentatious concern for "methodology" or historical criticism, and observed, with characteristic acidity, that those who taught the methodology of history rarely practiced it. Yet he had, of course, as all historians have, a philosophical view of history. History should recreate the past, history should be narrative as well as analytical and critical, history was—in the great tradition from Thucydides to Gibbon and—may we say Morison—philosophy teaching by examples.

It is appropriate to recall here at this Academy of which he was a member, and which conferred upon him its Gold Medal for History, that Samuel Eliot Morison played a long and distinguished role in the Republic of Letters. He was our first Harmsworth Professor of American History at Oxford University, teaching there for three years and setting a standard which subsequent incumbents must try to meet. He was a member of learned academies in many parts of the globe, and President of our oldest and most distinguished historical society—the Massachusetts—and of the American Antiquarian Society of Worcester, and he was loaded (although never loaded down) with honors and decorations of governments, not the least the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Samuel Eliot Morison was austere, dignified, even formidable: he was, too, genial, hospitable, and generous, and to the young he was kind and helpful. He did not suffer fools gladly and was visibly impatient with pedantry or pretentiousness. He had high standards for others, and higher for himself. He was a good companion and a fascinating one; he could be magisterial without being authoritative. In his attachment to Boston, and to New England, he was stubbornly provincial, but he was, quite literally, a man of the world. And he moved with assurance in every society. To intellectual integrity he added courage—courage to battle—even to place his life in peril for what he believed right. For he knew, literally and figuratively, "the crush of arctic ice." May we not say of him what Oliver Wendell Holmes, whom in so many ways he resembled, said of himself: "his heart was touched with fire," and he had "seen with his own eyes, beyond and above the gold fields, the snowy heights of honor."