Читать книгу Montezuma: An Epic on the Origin and Fate of the Aztec Nation - Hiram Hoyt Richmond - Страница 3

Table of Contents

From the moment of my earliest acquaintance with Colonial History, I have felt all the pressure of a task laid upon me, tightening its grasp as I reached maturer years; that of an attempt to rescue the Aztecs from their letterless and mythical position in history, to the position which their possibilities at least argue for them; and this feeling has been far less the outgrowth of the enthusiasm awakened for the Aztecs, as the indignation felt at the whole conduct of the Spanish Conquest.

Realizing the gravity of the task, I have been led to carefully weigh and investigate the different theories advanced as to the origin of the Aztecs, and to adopt the argument of the poem as the best ground on which to unite the Sun Worship of the East with the Mythology of of the West.

Reverently, and with a full realization of how great must ever be the distance between the actual work and the ideal of my early inspiration, I lay the gathered chaplet at the shrine of old Chapultepec, and only regret that the fruiting should have fallen so far short of the promise of its blooming.

To Hubert Howe Bancroft the living, and W. H. Prescott the dead, differing as they do in some very material respects, yet essentially the same in spirit, I wish to record my indebtedness for their admirable and exhaustive works that have induced to a final effort the poem of which this is prefatory.

Some years since, I found in an abridged history of the United States, a brief outline that led me back to the Dispersal at Shinar (certainly a safe location for a speculative beginning) for the origin of the Aztec race.

It occurs to me now, with a shade of the ludicrous, that if safety were the all-important thing in the premises, I might have gone back a step farther to the figs and pomegranites of Eden, and prayed for the shade of Adam to cover the exotic which I have humbly tried to rescue from what seems to me to be an undeserved obscurity. The careful analogies drawn between Egypt and the Aztecs by both Prescott and Bancroft could be better met by locating the origin at Shinar than at any other point, as it takes us back to a date where we may consistently locate the Shepherd Kings and the overrunning of Mizraim by them, a part of Egypt's early history which is outlined (more or less briefly) by nearly all early historians.

As to the initial period of Sun Worship and its origin, I could of necessity have but little aid, and if I have seemed a little too speculative, I have only this apology: The prodigy of Egypt's prehistoric development, and the manufacture of glass, antedating historic research. It needs no great imaginative tension to crown some incipient philosopher not only with the discovery of glass, but, that in its proper shape, it could be made to concentrate the solar rays, and produce fire; and at that day and age, what possible superstitions might result from these discoveries!

After the re-establishment of the Mizraim descent, and the consequent expulsion of the "Sons of Lud," the line of their journey is the natural outgrowth of their religious fanaticism. They know that India and the far East are inhabited, and they seek the uninhabited track for their exit.

The Mound Builders seem to be historic cousins of the Aztecs, certainly the superiors of the aborigines of the North and Middle Atlantic.

The expulsion of the Mound Builders will admit of many theories, and I have simply adopted the one that occurred to me as consistent with the Christian inspiration of all great events.

The settlement of Mexico by the Aztecs, (as a branch of the Mound Builders) follows naturally in the wake of previous events, and the chain is thus made complete, with no serious hazard to its consistency as merely speculative drama, leading up to what is plainly historical.

I have striven to be historically consistent, following the letter of events closely, taking conjectural ground in but few instances.

If I have seemed to be censorious, even to rancor at times, I have only given vent to the repressed indignation of Prescott and other authors on the subject of the Spanish Conquest.

The only possible justification for the excesses of Cortez and his adherents, is the age in which the Conquest took place; and those who seek to justify it in this way, point to the opening of the present century, and to Napoleon, decoying the imbecile king and the weak Asturias into abdication and banishment to make room for his brother Joseph. This is a plague-mark upon the present century, and though a plain case of retributive justice through the visiting of the sins of the fathers upon the children, still the fact remains that the attempt to bring right of any multiple of wrongs, must always record a failure.

A sufficient answer to the latitude of the age, is the fact that a corresponding age gave us Plymouth, and not long after Penn's colony; nor can the Spaniards claim the same justification for excesses as these coincident colonists, all of whom had felt the lash of religious intolerance. The Spanish Conquest, antedating the divisions that followed the reformation, has no such covert for their lustful excrescences.

Any system of religious ethics that severs human responsibility from the domain of conscience, and furnishes a market for the indulgences that cover all the excesses of the body politic, cannot be expected to bring forth the best of fruit from a bloom so blighted by human lust, and so blackened by human selfishness.

If, amid all of their intolerance and deceit, they had respected the homely records and the grotesque landmarks of the nation they destroyed, the cavaliers might have shown them as a slight palliation, and at once furnished the historian the shadow of justification for their abuses; but the mental caste that could adopt any, and every device of deception and treachery to accomplish its ends, threw itself at once into the arms of a priestcraft, if possible more implacable than themselves; and obedient to their demands, tore down their landmarks, and ground their records to powder.

Surely, there is no fanaticism like religious fanaticism, and no licentiousness like that of the unbridled devotee of the Church.

Finally, as a whole, I feel confident that my effort will not fail to create food for thought, and eventually justify the effort which called it forth. To a nature partially Huguenot in its origin, and more so in sympathy and inclination, I have tried to add the temperate element that would impart freedom from undue prejudice and passion; but as the work is of necessity vindicatory on the one hand, and repressive on the other, I have been compelled to use good, plain Saxon words in the closing pages, justified only by the verity of their signification.

The body of the work is given in decimeters, varying in only a few cases where the expression seemed to require a different form.

I would rather not close these already extended remarks without recording my testimony, with that of others, of the positive pleasure experienced both in the progress and completion of a work of this character; and if I shall have been as fortunate in securing and retaining an auditory, I shall be twice blessed; for our highest ambition should ever be that of contributing to the happiness of others.

The reward of earnest labor, conscientiously performed, is the prize only once exceeded in the economy of things, and that once beyond the ken of our divulgence; yet, may we not hope that there is no actual severance between the earthly type and the heavenly reality, that the crown honestly won, and the prize worthily gained on earth, may both, retaining their semblance, the more perfectly glow in the clearer atmosphere of heaven.

H. H. R.