The Golden Dawn

One of the oddest things about the whole American story is the fact that a nation completely dedicated to the future has always had a deep sentimental attachment to the past. More than any other people—except perhaps the desert-wandering Children of Israel—the Americans have moved forward with a sense of mission and a belief in a great destiny; but at the same time there has always been the feeling that somewhere to the rear there was a golden dawn, magically preserved on a long-lost horizon, its light coloring the land that lies ahead even though the dawn itself was experienced long ago.

The two things go properly together, for America has always been the land of dreams come true, from the moment when Columbus saw the light of an improbable but authentic landfall glimmering across the loneliness of a dark and hostile sea. Life in such a land can be perilous, to be sure, because dream-shapes change as they become real so that what is finally grasped is never quite like the thing which was originally dreamed; but the experience, net, is all to the good because it does create an ingrained belief in life’s infinite possibilities. A heritage which makes it forever impossible for a people to lapse into acceptance of the confining groove of things-as-they-are is not a bad possession.

The business really began within thirty years of Columbus’ arrival in the West Indies. Strange rumors came in of a fantastic empire on the mainland, a place of towering temples, reeking altars, and inexhaustible wealth; and within decades tough Hernando Cortes had gone into Mexico with a little company of soldiers to seize all of this for the Crown, the Church, and his own private profit.

The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico, by Bernal Diaz del Castillo, translated with an introduction and notes by A. P. Maudslay; introduction to the American edition by Irving A. Leonard. Farrar, Straus and Cudahy. 478 pp. $6.50.

For once reality lived up to the legend. The conquistadors found more than they had heard about. They entered a bizarre kingdom set off with spectacular cities, with gleaming temples set on top of lofty pyramids, a savage land where hideous priests sacrificed whole platoons of captives to nightmarish gods, and where cunning artisans made fabulous ornaments out of gold and silver and precious stones—a place wholly unlike anything anyone had ever imagined before, with wealth enough to enrich the meanest soldier and with the chance of an unpleasant death lurking behind a gleaming façade of jewels and flowers and bright featherwork cloaks. After they had conquered and despoiled and destroyed this kingdom, one of Cortes’s mercenaries, a two-fisted fighting man known as Bernal Díaz del Castillo, sat down in his old age to write his memoirs. Díaz had been a good soldier, but otherwise he had not done too well; he was old, nearly blind, largely disabled, not blessed with much wealth; yet the tremendous event in which he had shared wholly fascinated him, and he wrote a book which has been a primary source for every student of the Conquest of Mexico since then and which is also one of the most moving adventure stories ever written in America.

It is available now to the general reader in two editions: a reprint of the A. P. Maudslay translation, with an introduction by Professor Irving A. Leonard, presented under the title, The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico, and a new translation by Albert Idell titled The Bernal Díaz Chronicles. The Maudslay translation is rendered in highly dignified language and is aimed, more or less, at the scholar; the Idell version is in contemporary vernacular and seems to have been designed for the general reader. Take your choice; either one is good, and either will give you a great story.

For Díaz had something to talk about. Díaz was a professional soldier, tough enough, extremely disillusioned—he had come to see that in this rape of a fabulous empire it was somehow the big shots who came out with a pocketful of gold, while the common soldier had his scars and his memories for his pains—but he is forever interrupting himself with the remark that the marvels he tells about were, after all, real, and that his hitch in the army transported him from ordinary life into something that existed only in romance.

The Bernal Díaz Chronicles, translated and edited by Albert Idell. Doubleday & Co. 414 pp. $5.

This, he keeps saying, I saw myself: this is the way it actually was, these fantastic tales of blood and gold and people who lived by a different book were all true. … “I say again that I stood looking at it and thought that never in the world would there be discovered other lands such as these, for in that time there was no Peru, nor any thought of it. … Gazing on such wonderful sights, we did not know what to say, or whether what appeared before us was real, for on one side, on the land, there were great cities, and in the lake ever so many more, and the lake itself was crowded with canoes, and in the Causeway were many bridges at intervals, and in front of us stood the great City of Mexico, and we—we did not even number four hundred soldiers. … We were amazed and said that it was like the enchantments they tell of in the legend of Amadis, on account of the great towers and cues [temples] and buildings rising from the water, and all built of masonry. And some of our soldiers even asked whether the things that we saw were not a dream.”

This was the golden dawn, and Díaz marched through the exact middle of it, with its terrible light glinting from the blade of his sword; this was the thing that romancers had dreamed of, sharpened and made deadly, great beauty and unspeakable cruelty going hand in hand, wealth beyond dreams lying ready to be taken; and every man who reached out to take it ran the risk that he would be thrown down on a stone altar with the throbbing heart torn out of his breast by a bloodstained hand—and an old man, tired and helpless and stricken with poverty, could look back on it and put it down on paper so that people who came later could understand that all of the myths were true. At the very beginning of the American story, before anyone had imagined places like Pittsburgh or Madison Avenue or the Harvard Yard or the Corn Belt, here was the sign that the wildest of dreams could fall short of reality. The dawn came up like thunder, and the memory of it was enough to stir an old soldier and turn him into a poet.

And this was the genuine sounding of the theme song—the snatch of impossible music that would run under and over everything men would ever do in this new world, the strange blend of disillusioned realism and the confirmation of all the gaudy notions of unsophisticated youth. At the very start, men found that America could go beyond their expectations. It would be full of cruelty and injustice and rapacity, but it would also embody the final laying on of hands on the unattainable, and it would offer cloud-capped towers which, when taken, would provide nothing more than a new place from which to go on to greater heights. Here, at last, the imagination of men was set forever free. The natural corollary, of course, is the warning: Beware what dreams you dream because you are living in a land where they are apt to come true.

And in New England

From New Mexico to New England it is a long way, and the stories of these separate colonies are very different; yet it is possible to suspect that some of the principal actors in Catholic New Mexico and Protestant New England would have understood one another very well, even if their ways of speech and the objects they were trying to attain were in substantial contrast.

In each case the great conditioning factor was the empty American continent itself. What men thought they were doing turned out, in the end, to be quite unlike what they actually did. In each case, America was the place where a fresh start could be made, the land (to repeat) of dreams come true; and in each case it was demonstrated, once more, that the dream you finally lay your hands on is apt to differ substantially from the dream you started out with.

Mr. Perry Miller takes up the New England case in a penetrating book of essays, Errand Into the Wilderness. He undertakes the somewhat knotty task of examining precisely what the earnest theologues of Massachusetts Bay were up to and of assaying the results of their labors.

The Puritans of the Bay Colony, he suggests, came to New England on an “errand” in the old, literal sense of the word; that is, on a mission, which was nothing less than to demonstrate, by erecting a working model in an untracked wilderness where no outside influences could affect them, what the ideal Calvinist theocracy would look like in actual practice.

By and large, they succeeded admirably. But there was a catch in it all. For, as Mr. Miller remarks, the real requirement (if the errand were really to be a success) was that “the eyes of the world be kept fixed upon it in rapt attention.” But as years went on, world Protestantism had other things on its mind.

Under Oliver Cromwell, English Puritanism headed off in a direction very different from the one it had been taking when the first colonists reached Massachusetts Bay; an experiment dedicated to the notion that there could be no such thing as dissent or freedom of worship in the ideal state made its ideal good just in time to see Cromwell (in Mr. Miller’s words) “become a dictator in order to impose toleration by force.” The expedition was a success, but there was nobody left at headquarters to whom a proper report could be made. The Puritans did exactly what they set out to do and then found that the world for whose benefit they were doing it was not especially interested any longer.

Errand Into the Wilderness, by Perry Miller. Harvard University Press. 244 pp. $4.75.

This, as Mr. Miller sees it, changed the whole nature of the New England “errand.” What had begun as a venture with a wholly otherworldly motive was suddenly compelled to become “something with a purpose and an intention sufficient unto itself.”

The venture, in other words, had ceased to be a theological experiment.

Here, in short, was a queer and ironic reversal of the New Mexican experience, where a drive for earthly cities made of gold had to find its meaning in a quest for a city that mortal man can never reach. Yet in a way the experiences were parallel; each group of colonists, balked of what it set out to do, found that men had to search for their goal within themselves. As Mr. Miller says of the New England Puritans:

“Their errand having failed in the first sense of the term, they were left with the second, and required to fill it with meaning by themselves and out of themselves. Having failed to rivet the eyes of the world upon their city on the hill, they were left alone with America.”

Here is a very thoughtful and illuminating book, which subjects the New England story—the early portions of it, at any rate—to a searching examination. It is not precisely hammock reading. Mr. Miller makes demands on his reader, but if they are met he is highly rewarding. He sheds important light on the trials and the accomplishments of these tough Puritan divines, who began as perfectly orthodox CaIvinists and wound up by grappling with “the problem of human comprehension of this mysterious thing which we today call the universe.”