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From a photograph by Pach 
 
 WILLIAM JAMES 
 
MEMORIES AND 
 MILESTONES 
 
 BY 
 
 JOHN JAY CHAPMAN 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 MOFFAT, YARD AND COMPANY 
 
 1915 
 
?S 
 
 4- 
 
 
 <T 
 
 Copyright, 191 5, by 
 JOHN JAY CHAPMAN 
 
 All rights reserved 
 
 MAR -5 1915 
 
 ©CI.A397231 
 1U, 
 
PREFACE 
 
 Life is a unity in spite of the lightning 
 changes of scene that flash across its vistas, 
 and shock us with an awe inspiring sense 
 of dislocation. Behind all there is a steady, 
 moving power; and the scenes are related. 
 The whole of any life, — the whole of any 
 epoch, — is past and gone in a moment; 
 and, behold, it then appears to be stamped 
 all over with a kind of identity: it is un- 
 mistakably one thing. But we cannot peep 
 behind this curtain of the future and find 
 out what all our present thoughts signify. 
 Therefore anyone who publishes portraits 
 and memories, or who reprints little ad- 
 dresses upon current history, will do well to 
 refrain from any parade of philosophy in a 
 preface. One of the deepest impulses in 
 man is the impulse to record, — to scratch 
 a drawing on a tusk or keep a diary, to col- 
 lect sagas and heap cairns. This instinct 
 as to the enduring value of the past is, one 
 might say, the very basis of civilization. 
 It is a good sign then when young men 
 
PREFACE 
 
 keep journals and old gentlemen take to 
 publishing reminiscences. It helps the gen- 
 eral atmosphere of thought and enriches 
 everyone a little. A belief in this kind of 
 literary conservation must be my excuse 
 for publishing the ensuing volume. 
 
 VI 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I Art and Art Schools ... 3 
 
 II William James 19 
 
 III Shaw and the Modern Drama 31 
 
 IV Dr. Horace Howard Furness . 45 
 V Henry Grafton Chapman . 61 
 
 VI The Function of the Church 
 
 School 71 
 
 VII Mr. Brimmer 87 
 
 VIII Mrs. Whitman 103 
 
 IX Greek as a Pleasure . . .115 
 
 X Charles Eliot Norton . .129 
 
 XI Ethical Culture .... 149 
 
 XII President Eliot . . . .165 
 
 XIII Notes on the Teaching of 
 
 Art 193 
 
 XIV Maria Weston Chapman . . 209 
 XV Coatesville 225 
 
 XVI Julia Ward Howe .... 235 
 
 XVII The Negro Question . . . 249 
 
 XVIII Alfred Q. Collins .... 259 
 
 vii 
 
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 William James Frontispiece [/ 
 
 FACING 
 PAGE 
 
 Horace Howard Furness . . . . .46^' 
 
 Charles Eliot Norton 130 */ 
 
 Julia Ward Howe 236 ^/ 
 
 IX 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
ART AND ART SCHOOLS 
 
 Address delivered at New Haven on the Forty- 
 eighth Anniversary of the Yale School of Fine 
 Arts, June 8, 1914. 
 
MEMORIES AND 
 MILESTONES 
 
 ART AND ART SCHOOLS 
 
 The Nineteenth Century has prided itself 
 on its critical philosophies. To understand 
 past history has been the peculiar mission of 
 that century. It expounded Greek and me- 
 dieval religion ; it elaborated theories ; it put 
 everything into books. The things it chief- 
 ly valued were its own valuations of the 
 past. The investigator became the Cory- 
 phaeus of the age, and anyone who could 
 propound a new and brilliant critical the- 
 ory was thought a prophet. The intellec- 
 tual leaders of other ages have been artists 
 and saints, but in the nineteenth century the 
 leaders of thought have been professors. 
 
 We are familiar with this condition of 
 
 things; we are accustomed to the bondage 
 
 of doctrine, and we almost forget that the 
 
 natural language of humanity is art, and 
 
 3 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 that every literature of criticism turns very 
 rapidly with the revolving suns into a litera- 
 ture of old opinion. There is not room in 
 the world's ever-active and seething brain 
 for old opinions ; and we may therefore ex- 
 pect that the thought of the nineteenth cen- 
 tury will show as a blank in history. Ideas 
 endure only when they are so stated that 
 they carry a new message to each genera- 
 tion ; and they do this only when their mes- 
 sage is clad in the form of art. 
 
 When the men of the Renaissance wrote 
 their commentary upon Greek art, they 
 wrote it in marble. That is why we read 
 it to-day. When Walter Scott and Victor 
 Hugo issued treatises upon the past they ex- 
 pressed themselves in forms of living, self- 
 sustaining literature. The artist speaks 
 always from the present. 
 
 There is a great illusion, — it is the illu- 
 sion of the nineteenth century, — namely, 
 that a book endures, and that everything 
 must therefore be packed into books. We 
 have wished to record everything in prose. 
 Painting, poetry, religion, history; passion, 
 thought, myth, humor; — our foolish age 
 has believed that it was writing all these 
 things up into linear and enduring prose. 
 Never before was there an epoch stupid 
 4 
 
ART AND ART SCHOOLS 
 
 enough to set out upon such an undertak- 
 ing. The eighteenth century, for all its 
 encyclopaedias, put the arts first, and kept 
 Academies only as convenient depositories 
 for philosophic apparatus. The Academy 
 furnished a house for the telescope, a cata- 
 logue for the picture gallery. But Art still 
 ruled in the imagination of the times. As 
 a consequence of this, all eighteenth-cen- 
 tury art is interesting. But a large part 
 of the art of the nineteenth century lacks 
 resonance and is equivocal, because it has 
 been made by men whose belief in their own 
 vehicle was on the wane. Half their brain 
 has lived in contemporary philosophy, 
 namely in that atmosphere of nineteenth- 
 century thought which puts the critic above 
 the artist, and crows like a cock over the 
 remains of the Parthenon. It was criti- 
 cism that killed art during the nineteenth 
 century. Goethe felt this coming on when 
 he said that he never could have written 
 his early works if, at the time he wrote 
 them, there had existed such an atmosphere 
 of carping criticism as reigned in Germany 
 during his later years. The worship of the 
 work of non-creative minds, — the general 
 public belief that great things were being 
 found out, and that hard work was cultiva- 
 5 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 tion, has led men to forget that at the bot- 
 tom of the world's interest in all of the fine 
 arts lie mysteries which are the source of 
 their power. We are united to the past by- 
 mysteries, which a critical zeal tends to 
 destroy. The critics of painting have pal- 
 sied their own relation to art by their con- 
 scientious work over it. The great illusion 
 that man can seize and hold the truth is 
 what has injured art in the nineteenth cen- 
 tury. This thought makes the vision of the 
 painter rigid, turns the poet into a preacher, 
 and sets the playwright and novelist to work 
 at social problems. It makes the intellec- 
 tual life a treadmill. 
 
 The nineteenth century was an era that 
 had to be passed through. It rescued from 
 oblivion the innumerable neglected master- 
 pieces of other ages, and it has left the mu- 
 seums, and the critical Journals in its wake. 
 But it has also fastened certain bad habits 
 of thought upon the world. 
 
 Oh, let us never say anything critical 
 again, never analyze a picture, or a play, 
 never say something intelligent about an 
 epoch of the past. For this pettifogging, 
 ignorant nosing over the fine arts is what 
 has all but extinguished them in west- 
 Europe. It is noticeable that each of us 
 6 
 
ART AND ART SCHOOLS 
 
 has the disease most acutely in regard to 
 some art with which he is least familiar. I 
 observe, for instance, that if I read a book, 
 I may perhaps say little about it, because I 
 am bookish. But if I go to a gallery of re- 
 cent paintings, — entering thus into a field 
 of which I am perfectly ignorant (I could 
 not draw the portrait of a cat or model a 
 potato), why a whole ready-made avalanche 
 of clever criticism pours from me upon the 
 canvases. This is the destruction of art, 
 this talking about it by people who do not 
 practice it. 
 
 Let our opinions on art be written in 
 paint, and our theories of poetry exhibited 
 in poems having the flesh and body of poetic 
 life. No other criticisms will stand, except 
 those which are done into living art, and 
 are thus, as it were, a part of life itself. 
 
 As crystals form of themselves in a chem- 
 ical mixture when the temperature permits, 
 so talent appears in the world. No one 
 knows what the conditions are that gener- 
 ate talent. Art is a mystery, and springs 
 up out of the shadows, like a mushroom. 
 An artist is a man who has had the good 
 fortune to receive sufficient instruction at 
 one time, and to be sufficiently left to him- 
 7 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 self at another. Severe training and utter 
 neglect, — he must have had both. Depth 
 of feeling, accuracy of intellect, experience 
 in the vehicle, — all these things go together, 
 and there is no royal road to them. And 
 behind them there is the force that somehow 
 works its will and releases a new personality 
 into the world. So far as intelligence can 
 discern, a general popular interest in some 
 form of art precedes the rise of artists. 
 The child of promise must be born near to 
 some master who can teach him the rudi- 
 ments. A village priest teaches him the be- 
 ginnings of harmony, and the nearest man 
 of means pays for sending him to the con- 
 servatory. There must exist a social con- 
 spiracy of assistance, which awaits his com- 
 ing. Some amateurs have, perhaps, be- 
 come interested in reviving mural decora- 
 tion or church music, and have set up a 
 school which catches the young tadpoles 
 of genius in a net and finds a pond for them. 
 Let me give an instance. A church in 
 our village found itself in need of an organ- 
 ist. A boy of twenty musically gifted of- 
 fered himself for employment. The prob- 
 lem was how to fit him for the position. He 
 was about to take correspondence lessons 
 in harmony from a teacher whose adver- 
 8 
 
ART AND ART SCHOOLS 
 
 tisement he had seen in a magazine, when 
 it was discovered that Trinity Church in 
 New York had recently founded a school 
 for organists, where counterpoint was 
 taught, and every classic tradition of church 
 music was preserved. The boy is now 
 earning his living as assistant choir master 
 in a New York church, while he takes the 
 course at the Trinity School which will 
 make him a competent organist. Ten years 
 ago this could not have been done. Our 
 community had not advanced far enough 
 to recognize, save, and protect the early 
 shoots of musical talent. 
 
 A good teacher is like a jailer, with this 
 difference, that his aim is, not to keep per- 
 sons in, but to let them out of prison. The 
 students are constantly fastening the bolts 
 and pulling down the shutters upon them- 
 selves, while the master endeavors to show 
 them how to avoid doing so. His task is a 
 religious one and is as difficult as theology. 
 For he must remain untrammeled while 
 dealing in dogmas. It is all personal work. 
 There is no art in the abstract. 
 
 The problem of society is to let the newly 
 
 forming crystals of talent come easily into 
 
 contact with each other. This was done 
 
 through the studio of the master down to 
 
 9 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 Louis XIV's time, when the state began 
 to take charge of everything. It would not 
 be surprising if humanity should return to 
 the old studio system in case a new age of 
 art should come in. The institutional sys- 
 tem may be found too clumsy a teacher to 
 deal with the higher branches of art. But 
 on the other hand, personal genius is so in- 
 woven with all advance in the fine arts that 
 we cannot dogmatize about ways and means. 
 We know that in the life of the artist pov- 
 erty, obscurity, and loneliness are often not 
 disadvantages but advantages; and early 
 wealth, a conventional education, and so- 
 licitous parents are often not advantages, 
 but disadvantages, which only time and pe- 
 culiar force can overcome. 
 
 In the United States we have been wad- 
 ing our way towards the higher learning 
 through the higher buildings. If you heard 
 of a singing school in Pittsburg it meant a 
 half-million dollars' worth of bricks and 
 mortar. When the New York Amateurs 
 of the Drama founded a National School 
 of Acting, they sank two millions of dollars 
 in an auditorium, — and sold it the next 
 year because the age had provided neither 
 plays, audiences, nor actors. What these 
 gentlemen truly needed was a few good 
 10 
 
ART AND ART SCHOOLS 
 
 teachers and a hired room, with no pub- 
 licity. 
 
 O keep this Yale School of Art a secret. 
 Let the great public first become aware of 
 its existence by finding a man who can 
 paint, and asking him, Where did you 
 learn? 
 
 During the last fifteen years education 
 has made great strides in America. We 
 have made great strides in humility. We 
 have come to see that our education is rudi- 
 mentary and imperfect, that time is re- 
 quired in order that our standards may be 
 raised. As our familiarity with intellect 
 increases we shall unconsciously and inev- 
 itably subserve its laws. As our uncon- 
 scious familiarity with the ways of intel- 
 lect increases, a general consent will be 
 reached without discussion as to many mat- 
 ters which we now regard as problems and 
 paradoxes. During the next fifty years we 
 shall discover that the best thing we can do 
 for the average mind is to give exceptional 
 advantages to the exceptional mind. There 
 is a law of nature at the back of this the- 
 ory, — the law, namely, which Christ re- 
 ferred to in saying that to him that hath 
 shall be given. In America our philosophy 
 of education has often kicked against this 
 ii 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 law, pretending that in America we had 
 found something better. But in the end we 
 shall conform to the law because it is the 
 truth. 
 
 I do not desire to become dogmatic in 
 dealing with so mystical a question as this 
 question of teaching. The truth floats and 
 beckons ; we must be content with half-light 
 and intimations. Education always hovers 
 between two tendencies: the tendency to 
 teach to every pupil a little of something, 
 and the tendency to provide great and rare 
 opportunities for great and rare talents. 
 Primary education is governed by the first 
 tendency, the higher education by the sec- 
 ond. In America our higher education 
 seems to have been too much colored by 
 ways of feeling proper to the elementary 
 school. 
 
 The higher branches of learning are slow 
 in their effect upon the community. They 
 imply time. If you assist a single first-rate 
 mind to develop fully, that mind will do 
 more for the next age than ten thousand 
 second-rate talents, each of which you 
 should assist a little. That mind can be 
 counted on to educate and inspire its own 
 contemporaries. Thus, in a generation you 
 will have reached everyone. We must be 
 
 12 
 
ART AND ART SCHOOLS 
 
 willing to operate down the stream of time. 
 We cannot hope to color all the water of 
 the river as it flows by us ; but we can cast 
 something into the stream which will color 
 it down below. 
 
 At Yale you are engaged in working. 
 Your School is one among many of those 
 little groups of sincere men who are form- 
 ing centers of thought, centers of mu- 
 sic, centers of painting in America. These 
 groups already qualify the age. Our whole 
 conception of America is affected by the 
 mere thought of them. There is, for in- 
 stance, a music school in New York City 
 which is working away unostentatiously 
 and with the modesty of a European school. 
 It might be in Belgium or in Germany. 
 We all have a relation to these groups of 
 craftsmen. They educate us into a respect 
 for the artist. They thus weave us into 
 fabric of the whole coordinate mind of hu- 
 manity. It is only through such men that 
 our country will ultimately come into a true 
 relation with European art and music; for 
 until we have art and music of our own our 
 relation to the arts of Europe must be false 
 and flimsy. The aid which you or I, — I 
 mean the amateurs, — can offer to these 
 groups of men is invisible and yet enormous. 
 13 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 It is the assistance which we give to men 
 when we honor them. 
 
 It would seem as if America's great need 
 of social cohesion had, for a century, ab- 
 sorbed the energies of our own people, so 
 that we can only think in communal terms. 
 All ideas must be justified by an appeal to 
 public spirit: they must be passed by the 
 censor. In America our path towards Art 
 lies through Benevolence. The country 
 now heaves and glows with benevolence 
 and with social movements. If you 
 hold up any one of these movements 
 and search it for intellect you will find very 
 little. You will find crude ideas, defective 
 education, apparent shallowness and a lack 
 of intellectual rigor. And yet all this haze 
 of benevolence is the bed and cradle of in- 
 tellect, the soil in which intellect will spring 
 up later. Peter Cooper and his wife had 
 no knowledge of the arts and crafts, but 
 only a firm faith in the reality of them, and 
 a hovering love for the young people to 
 whom they hoped to throw open new ave- 
 nues of life. And yet to-day the Cooper 
 Union is one of the best schools of crafts- 
 manship in America, a place worthy to be 
 visited by the experts of the old world. 
 
 There is some great law of progress at 
 the back of our present devotion to moral 
 14 
 
ART AND ART SCHOOLS 
 
 causes. Our causes, it may be observed, 
 are themselves becoming more abstract in 
 nature. They are no longer Anti-slavery, 
 Civil Service Reform, Ballot Reform, Tem- 
 perance (though I confess that Woman's 
 Rights still continues). Our present causes 
 are merging into a desire for social service 
 and for the moral and physical improve- 
 ment of everyone. The reformer of to- 
 day wants to uplift other people and make 
 them better. He often rushes out to do 
 this before he knows what he would do. 
 At first sight this condition of things would 
 seem to give no scope for the pursuit of 
 truth for its own sake. It would seem that 
 we seek truth in order that we may use it 
 for somebody's benefit. That subtler, 
 deeper, stronger, more pervading and en- 
 during influence which the artist has upon 
 the world merely from the fact of his ex- 
 istence is all but unknown to our current 
 philosophy. Yet it is this very truth which 
 we are destined to discover in our progress 
 through benevolence toward intellect. 
 
 Our ideas of utility are crude, and much 
 that older countries take for granted we 
 must come upon and learn freshly for our- 
 selves. The great artist is the most edu- 
 cative influence upon the globe. But he 
 15 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 must not and he will not care for educating 
 or for uplifting other people. He cares for 
 truth, and leaves that to do the work. So 
 of the lesser artists, I am in sympathy with 
 them when they neglect the current philoso- 
 phies of benevolence and stick to their 
 crafts. I verily believe that the atmosphere 
 of benevolence in America will not be di- 
 minished but increased as the world of in- 
 tellect appears above the face of the waters. 
 I verily believe that the artists among us 
 will come to be considered, as artists have 
 ever been considered elsewhere, as the ad- 
 vance guards of Civilization. 
 
 16 
 
WILLIAM JAMES 
 
II 
 
 WILLIAM JAMES 
 
 None of us will ever see a man like Wil- 
 liam James again: there is no doubt about 
 that. And yet it is hard to state what it 
 was in him that gave him either his charm 
 or his power, what it was that penetrated 
 and influenced us, what it is that we lack 
 and feel the need of, now that he has so un- 
 expectedly and incredibly died. I always 
 thought that William James would continue 
 forever; and I relied upon his sanctity as if 
 it were sunlight. 
 
 I should not have been abashed at being 
 discovered in some mean action by William 
 James; because I should have felt that he 
 would understand and make allowances. 
 The abstract and sublime quality of his na- 
 ture was always enough for two; and I 
 confess to having always trespassed upon 
 him and treated him with impertinence, 
 without gloves, without reserve, without or- 
 dinary, decent concern for the sentiments 
 19 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 and weaknesses of human character. 
 Knowing nothing about philosophy, and 
 having the dimmest notions as to what 
 James's books might contain, I used occa- 
 sionally to write and speak to him about his 
 specialties in a tone of fierce contempt; and 
 never failed to elicit from him in reply 
 the most spontaneous and celestial gayety. 
 Certainly he was a wonderful man. 
 
 He was so devoid of selfish aim or small 
 personal feeling that your shafts might 
 pierce, but could never wound him. You 
 could not " diminish one dowle that's in his 
 plume." Where he walked, nothing could 
 touch him; and he enjoyed the Emersonian 
 immunity of remaining triumphant even 
 after he had been vanquished. The reason 
 was, as it seems to me, that what the man 
 really meant was always something inde- 
 structible and persistent; and that he knew 
 this inwardly. He had not the gift of ex- 
 pression, but rather the gift of suggestion. 
 He said things which meant one thing to 
 him and something else to the reader or 
 listener. His mind was never quite in fo- 
 cus, and there was always something left 
 over after each discharge of the battery, 
 something which now became the beginning 
 of a new thought. When he found out his 
 20 
 
WILLIAM JAMES 
 
 mistake or defect of expression, when he 
 came to see that he had not said quite what 
 he meant, he was the first to proclaim it, 
 and to move on to a new position, a new 
 misstatement of the same truth, — a new, 
 debonair apperception, clothed in non- 
 conclusive and suggestive figures of speech. 
 
 How many men have put their shoulders 
 out of joint in striking at the phantasms 
 which James projected upon the air ! James 
 was always in the right, because what he 
 meant was true. The only article of his 
 which I ever read with proper attention was 
 " The Will to Believe,'' a thing that exas- 
 perated me greatly until I began to see, or 
 to think I saw, what James meant, and at 
 the same time to acknowledge to myself 
 that he had said something quite different. 
 I hazard this idea about James as one might 
 hazard an idea about astronomy, fully 
 aware that it may be very foolish. 
 
 In private life and conversation there 
 was the same radiation of thought about 
 him. The center and focus of his thought 
 fell within his nature, but not within his 
 intellect. You were thus played upon by 
 a logic which was not the logic of intellect, 
 but a far deeper thing, limpid and clear in 
 itself, confused and refractory only when 
 21 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 you tried to deal with it intellectually. You 
 must take any fragment of such a man by 
 itself, for his whole meaning is in the frag- 
 ment. If you try to piece the bits together, 
 you will endanger their meaning. In gen- 
 eral talk on life, literature, and politics 
 James was always throwing off sparks that 
 were cognate only in this, that they came 
 from the same central fire in him. It was 
 easy to differ from him; it was easy to go 
 home thinking that James had talked the 
 most arrant rubbish, and that no educated 
 man had a right to be so ignorant of the 
 first principles of thought and of the foun- 
 dations of human society. Yet it was im- 
 possible not to be morally elevated by the 
 smallest contact with William James. A 
 refining, purgatorial influence came out of 
 him. 
 
 I believe that in his youth, James dedi- 
 cated himself to the glory of God and the 
 advancement of Truth, in the same spirit 
 that a young knight goes to seek the Grail, 
 or a young military hero dreams of laying 
 down his life for his country. What his 
 early leanings towards philosophy or his 
 natural talent for it may have been, I do 
 not know; but I feel as if he had first taken 
 up philosophy out of a sense of duty, — 
 
WILLIAM JAMES 
 
 the old Puritanical impulse, — in his case 
 illumined, however, with a humor and gen- 
 ius not at all of the Puritan type. He 
 adopted philosophy as his lance and buck- 
 ler, — psychology, it was called in his day, 
 — and it proved to be as good as the next 
 thing, — as pliable as poetry or fiction or 
 politics or law would have been, — or any- 
 thing else that he might have adopted as a 
 vehicle through which his nature could work 
 upon society. 
 
 He, himself, was all perfected from the 
 beginning, a selfless angel. It is this qual- 
 ity of angelic unselfishness which gives the 
 power to his work. There may be some 
 branches of human study — mechanics per- 
 haps — where the personal spirit of the in- 
 vestigator does not affect the result; but 
 philosophy is not one of them. Philosophy 
 is a personal vehicle ; and every man makes 
 his own, and through it he says what he has 
 to say. It is all personal: it is all human: 
 it is all non-reducible to science, and incapa- 
 ble of being either repeated or continued by 
 another man. 
 
 Now James was an illuminating ray, a 
 
 dissolvent force. He looked freshly at life, 
 
 and read books freshly. What he had to 
 
 say about them was not entirely articulated, 
 
 23 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 but was always spontaneous. He seemed 
 to me to have too high an opinion of every- 
 thing. The last book he had read was al- 
 ways " a great book " ; the last person he 
 had talked with, a wonderful being. If I 
 may judge from my own standpoint, I 
 should say that James saw too much good 
 in everything, and felt towards everything 
 a too indiscriminating approval. He was 
 always classing things up into places they 
 didn't belong and couldn't remain in. 
 
 Of course, we know that Criticism is 
 proverbially an odious thing; it seems to 
 deal only in shadows, — it acknowledges 
 only varying shades of badness in every- 
 thing. And we know, too, that Truth is 
 light ; Truth cannot be expressed in shadow, 
 except by some subtle art which proclaims 
 the shadow-part to be the lie, and the non- 
 expressed part to be the truth. And it is 
 easy to look upon the whole realm of Crit- 
 icism and see in it nothing but a science 
 which concerns itself with the accurate 
 statement of lies. Such, in effect, it is in 
 the hands of most of its adepts. Now 
 James's weakness as a critic was somehow 
 connected with the peculiar nature of his 
 mind, which lived in a consciousness of 
 light. The fact is that James was non-crit- 
 24 
 
WILLIAM JAMES 
 
 ical,.and therefore divine. He was forever 
 hovering, and never could alight; and this 
 is a quality of truth and a quality of genius. 
 
 The great religious impulse at the back 
 of all his work, and which pierces through 
 at every point, never became expressed in 
 conclusive literary form, or in dogmatic ut- 
 terance. It never became formulated in 
 his own mind into a stateable belief. And 
 yet it controlled his whole life and mind, 
 and accomplished a great work in the world. 
 The spirit of a priest was in him, — in his 
 books and in his private conversation. He 
 was a sage, and a holy man ; and everybody 
 put off his shoes before him. And yet in 
 spite of this, — in conjunction with this, he 
 was a sportive, wayward, Gothic sort of 
 spirit, who was apt, on meeting a friend, 
 to burst into foolery, and whose wit was al- 
 ways three parts poetry. Indeed his humor 
 was as penetrating as his seriousness. Both 
 of these two sides of James's nature — the 
 side that made a direct religious appeal, and 
 the side that made a veiled religious appeal 
 — became rapidly intensified during his lat- 
 ter years ; so that, had the process continued 
 much longer, the mere sight of him must 
 have moved beholders to amend their lives. 
 
 I happened to be at Oxford at one of his 
 25 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 lectures in 1908; and it was remarkable to 
 see the reverence which that very un-re- 
 vering class of men — the University dons 
 — evinced towards James, largely on ac- 
 count of his appearance and personality. 
 The fame of, him went abroad, and the San- 
 hedrim attended. A quite distinguished, 
 and very fussy scholar, a member of the old 
 guard of Nil-admirari Cultivation, — who 
 would have sniffed nervously if he had met 
 Moses — told me that he had gone to a lec- 
 ture of James's, " though the place was so 
 crowded, and stank so that he had to come 
 away immediately." — " But," he added, 
 " he certainly has the face of a sage." 
 
 There was, in spite of his playfulness, a 
 deep sadness about James. You felt that he 
 had just stepped out of this sadness in order 
 to meet you, and was to go back into it the 
 moment you left him. It may be that sad- 
 ness inheres in some kinds of profoundly 
 religious characters, — in dedicated persons 
 who have renounced all, and are constantly 
 hoping, thinking, acting, and (in the typ- 
 ical case) praying for humanity. Lincoln 
 was sad, and Tolstoi was sad, and many 
 sensitive people, who view the world as it 
 is, and desire nothing for themselves except 
 to become of use to others, and to become 
 26 
 
WILLIAM JAMES 
 
 agents in the spread of truth and happiness, 
 — such people are often sad. It has some- 
 times crossed my mind that James wanted 
 to be a poet and an artist, and that there lay 
 in him, beneath the ocean of metaphysics, 
 a lost Atlantis of the fine arts ; that he really 
 hated philosophy and all its works, and pur- 
 sued them only as Hercules might spin, or 
 as a prince in a fairy tale might sort seeds 
 for an evil dragon, or as anyone might pa- 
 tiently do some careful work for which he 
 had no aptitude. It would seem most nat- 
 ural, if this were the case between James 
 and the metaphysical sciences; for what is 
 there in these studies that can drench and 
 satisfy a tingling mercurial being who loves 
 to live on the surface, as well as in the 
 depths of life? Thus we reason, forget- 
 ting that the mysteries of temperament are 
 deeper than the mysteries of occupation. If 
 James had had the career of Moliere, he 
 would still have been sad. He was a vic- 
 tim of divine visitation: the Searching 
 Spirit would have winnowed him in the 
 same manner, no matter what avocation he 
 might have followed. 
 
 The world watched James as he pur- 
 sued through life his search for religious 
 truth; the world watched him, and often 
 27 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 gently laughed at him, asking, " When will 
 James arise and fly ? When will * he take 
 the wings of the morning, and dwell in the 
 uttermost parts of the sea ' ? " And in the 
 meantime, James was there already. Those 
 were the very places that he was living in. 
 Through all the difficulties of polyglot met- 
 aphysics and of modern psychology he 
 waded for years, lecturing and writing and 
 existing, — and creating for himself a pub- 
 lic which came to see in him only the saint 
 and the sage, which felt only the religious 
 truth which James was in search of, yet 
 could never quite grasp in his hand. This 
 very truth constantly shone out through 
 him, — shone, as it were, straight through 
 his waistcoat, — and distributed itself to 
 everyone in the drawing-room, or in the lec- 
 ture-hall where he sat. Here was the fa- 
 miliar paradox, the old parable, the psycho- 
 logical puzzle of the world. " But what 
 went ye out for to see ? " In the very mo- 
 ment that the world is deciding that a man 
 was no prophet and had nothing to say, in 
 that very moment perhaps is his work per- 
 fected, and he himself is gathered to his 
 fathers, after having been a lamp to his 
 own generation, and an inspiration to those 
 who come after. 
 
 28 
 
SHAW AND THE MODERN 
 DRAMA 
 
Ill 
 
 SHAW AND THE MODERN DRAMA 
 
 "Fanny's First Play," by George Ber- 
 nard Shaw, has the first requisite of a play 
 in that it is very entertaining — " divert- 
 ing " would be the old-fashioned word. It is 
 a lively, and even boisterous, burlesque, and 
 would be a perfect sample of good burlesque 
 writing if the humor of it were always good 
 humor, and if some sort of ethical purpose 
 were not from time to time rubbed in. 
 
 The theme of the play is happy. The 
 hero and heroine are the commonplace off- 
 spring of middle-class British tradesmen; 
 their fathers have been partners in business 
 for years, and their betrothal, which has 
 taken place before the play opens, is but a 
 part of the humdrum world in which their 
 lives are to be spent. An interruption to 
 the idyll takes place, owing to the following 
 circumstances: The hero, through a fight 
 with a policeman, has got himself locked up 
 for a fortnight; the heroine, in a fit of high 
 3i 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 spirits, has gone alone to a dance-hall, and 
 has there become involved in a " raid " of 
 the place. Thus the heroine has also been 
 incarcerated for the same two weeks as the 
 hero. The discovery of these two esca- 
 pades throws both families into convulsions 
 of horror; and each of the four parents of 
 the lovers exhibits a different and amusing 
 variety of wounded conservatism. 
 
 The nature of the hero's escapade has not 
 been innocent, and it brings into the play a 
 young woman of the streets in whose com- 
 pany he has been arrested. The heroine's 
 escapade has been innocent, but brings into 
 the play a Frenchman in whose company 
 she has been arrested and whose appearance 
 gives rise to infinite equivocation and innu- 
 endo. Both Frenchman and street lady are 
 as entertaining as they can be, and every 
 part in the play, as it is given at the Com- 
 edy Theater, New York, is played to per- 
 fection — including the one remaining char- 
 acter of a young butler, who turns out in 
 the end to be the brother of a duke. This 
 butler, by the way, is finally married off to 
 the heroine — after not quite sufficient 
 preparation of the audience for such a 
 denoument. 
 
 Nothing could be more admirable than 
 32 
 
SHAW AND MODERN DRAMA 
 
 this plot as a skeleton for a burlesque. It 
 is obvious, conventional, symmetrical, and 
 just new enough to awaken in any audience 
 agreeable anticipations. I forgot to men- 
 tion that before the curtain goes up, and 
 after it comes down, there are some gentle- 
 men who appear on the stage and discuss 
 the merits of the play, — one being dressed 
 in fancy costume and intended to represent 
 the traditional artistic feeling of Europe 
 in the eighteenth century, and the others be- 
 ing types of the British dramatic critic of 
 the present day. To my mind this prologue 
 and epilogue were not successful, because 
 they were not clever enough. Something 
 dragged, and one wished the talkers would 
 stop. But the dramatic idea of this pro- 
 logue and epilogue was admirable. The 
 play itself is interesting from beginning to 
 end and shows well enough that a conver- 
 sation play, with a well-set-up, cast-iron 
 frame behind the characters, is a good kind 
 of play. It holds its own; it pleases. And 
 one may remark incidentally that the Greek 
 drama very often depends on the same ar- 
 rangement for its success — cast-iron plot 
 behind, character-talking in front. 
 
 Shaw is a sincere playwright, and when 
 we consider the fluffy mediocrity of the old 
 33 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 plays, and of the old-style acting which 
 Shaw's drama supplanted, we cannot help 
 being grateful to him. He has revolution- 
 ized English acting. He has produced act- 
 ors who, within their rather narrow limits, 
 are as good as French actors. Shaw is a 
 sincere artist; he writes for himself and to 
 satisfy himself. He has thus rediscovered 
 one of the psychological secrets of art. The 
 way to interest the world is for a man to 
 write for himself. Shaw, as a man, is in- 
 terested in the contrasts and incongruities 
 of ethical theory which modern (perhaps 
 all) life shows. His mind is satisfied when 
 he has apprehended the irreconcilable con- 
 flicts in the world of morality. As an 
 artist he is satisfied when he has successfully 
 presented one or some of these conflicts. 
 He really seeks nothing beyond this in his 
 art; and yet the fact that he came into no- 
 tice as a social agitator has left its heavy 
 trace on his art: it makes him preach. 
 
 Whether it be preaching or poetry, how- 
 ever, Shaw's work has got him the atten- 
 tion of the world. Any group of educated 
 people anywhere will be thrown into ex- 
 cited discussion by almost any bit of Shaw's 
 work. This shows not only that Shaw is a 
 very powerful and remarkable being, but 
 34 
 
SHAW AND MODERN DRAMA 
 
 also that his work bears a peculiar and vital 
 relation to the passing moment. Some peo- 
 ple think that Shaw's purpose is to amuse 
 the fools and to bewilder the thinkers. My 
 own belief is that Shaw wants merely to 
 get heard of and to make money. Social- 
 ism and play-writing are his rattle. When 
 he was young and poor he agitated it 
 loudly ; and now that he is rich and famous 
 he knows how to do nothing else except to 
 work this rattle. You cannot say he is a 
 man without heart: he is the kindliest of 
 men. But he is a man without taste or rev- 
 erence. He does not know that there are 
 things which cannot be made funny. He 
 is a man in whose composition something is 
 left out. You cannot blame him, any more 
 than you can blame the color-blind. He is 
 beauty-blind, and amuses himself with see- 
 ing what grotesques he can pick out of the 
 carpet of life. 
 
 The objections to Shaw are thus seen to 
 be not dramatic, but personal, and again, in 
 a sense, not personal, but generic and of the 
 age. Shaw's crude and cruel treatment of 
 humanity — all done in the name of Fabi- 
 anism (whatever that is), the somewhat 
 loathsome touch of the social reformer who 
 has worn off the fine edges of his feelings 
 35 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 by contact with grossness (we find this 
 touch sometimes in a certain type of clergy- 
 man), keep sending chills of an unpleasant 
 kind through a sensitive auditor, and chills 
 of a very agreeable kind through the auditor 
 who is deficient in human feeling or defi- 
 cient in artistic experience. I suppose the 
 fault of Shaw is like the fault of Ibsen. 
 Ibsen is not content unless he has rasped our 
 feelings. Shaw, to be sure, can laugh, and 
 is, to my mind, a thousand times a better 
 man and better artist than Ibsen, who can 
 only scowl. But Shaw has Ibsen's method. 
 It was Ibsen who first found out that the 
 public was callous. Ibsen reasoned thus: 
 "If you want to give emotion to the aver- 
 age playgoer you must take a rusty blade 
 from an old razor, attach it to a brick, and 
 therewith suddenly shave off one of a man's 
 toes. That is art." Shaw has the same 
 rake-and-saw theory. He cannot mention 
 adultery (and it is his chief theme) without 
 seeming to soil the whole of human nature 
 in doing so. 
 
 In all this obtuseness Shaw is a child of 
 the age, and his popularity depends upon 
 this very crudity. If Shaw should touch 
 human nature with the loving hand of, say, 
 Moliere, or present his characters in the 
 36 
 
SHAW AND MODERN DRAMA 
 
 transparent and pleasing atmosphere of 
 sound-hearted humanity, his peculiar audi- 
 ence to-day would not understand him. He 
 would lose his charm for his public; I say 
 not for all the public (witness the charming 
 plays that succeed), but for his public. 
 Whatever Hamlet may have intimated to 
 the contrary, caviare is what half the mil- 
 lion wants to-day. We must have mustard 
 at every course. We like the butter to be 
 a little rancid, and humor seems flat unless 
 it contains just a little tang of doubt as to 
 the fundamental truth of virtue and honor. 
 Such a public takes the romance out of its 
 theater; and the loss is particularly visible 
 in the romantic roles — namely, in the 
 young characters. 
 
 " Fanny's First Play " contains four ad- 
 mirable middle-aged persons, kindly han- 
 dled — three of them could not be better. 
 The fourth, the religious woman, is only 
 painful because she is rendered unkindly. 
 Shaw is afraid that we shall not see the 
 point unless he overdraws her a little. Some 
 people tell me that Mrs. Knox is not in- 
 tended to be a caricature, but a serious por- 
 trait of humanity. This amounts to saying 
 that Shaw's harshness comes from the lack 
 of fine perception, not from malice. It 
 37 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 may be so; but Mrs. Knox's portrait re- 
 mains a caricature. But the young people ! 
 The mushy boy ; the flat heroine, who " sees 
 life " as it were by accident, and then takes 
 the bit in her teeth and proclaims some sort 
 of half-considered " freedom/' She is sup- 
 posed to be very virtuous, yet her virtue is 
 not agreeable; she is supposed to be inno- 
 cent, yet somehow she seems corrupt. 
 What is it that these young persons lack? 
 Why, they lack feeling. The girl has no 
 gospel: she is a bold-faced jig. She really 
 isn't a character at all, but is like a face 
 drawn with one scratch of chalk, which 
 shows only a single eye and but half an ear. 
 The boy hero is a puppy without sentiments. 
 The butler is perhaps intended to typify 
 wisdom and goodness. One cannot tell. 
 As a butler of comedy he is perfect. Let us 
 leave him at that. 
 
 During the performance that I witnessed 
 I observed about fifteen young girls sitting 
 in the row in front of me, who devoured all 
 this medley of twentieth-century confusion 
 with eyes of rapturous interest. They 
 were the graduating class from a fashion- 
 able school, and this was part of their " fin- 
 ishing." Their parents in Oshkosh and 
 Patagonia will be delighted when the mail 
 38 
 
SHAW AND MODERN DRAMA 
 
 brings them word that the school is keeping 
 their daughters in touch with European cul- 
 ture. It must be remembered that the 
 most corrupt touch in the play consists in 
 the fact that it is supposed to be written 
 by a young girl. Hence girls flock to see it. 
 
 And this recalls to me a strange thing 
 that has been happening for some years past 
 to the young girls in New York City. The 
 dress and carriage of the just-grown-up 
 misses there, I mean of the fashionable 
 ones, is such as to suggest an ambition on 
 their part of seeming to be worse than they 
 are. The expression of their faces — 
 which, by the way, are often painted — is 
 what the older dramatists would have desig- 
 nated as " wanton." And yet a baby fresh- 
 ness and youthful emptiness peeps through 
 the veneer of crime. Surely this class of 
 boarding-school girl is a strange product of 
 contemporary life. 
 
 I suspect that, at maturity, some of these 
 girls may be found in the divorce courts, 
 whether as parties or as co-respondents. 
 The row of them that watched " Fanny's 
 First Play" took the play seriously — viz., 
 as a very good joke. And every time a ref- 
 erence to adultery was made by the actors, 
 the girls giggled in a knowing manner. At 
 39 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 one of the wittiest points in the play, where 
 the butler gives a tip to the Frenchman to 
 the effect that the little street lady is what 
 in France is so decently and accurately 
 called a iille de joie, my whole row of young 
 ladies burst into uncontrollable gayety, as 
 if they had never heard anything more 
 lively. 
 
 Now what did these girls know about 
 the world (so much more than I did), that 
 they laughed at a sally which rather shocked 
 me? How did they ever get so far along 
 in a knowledge of the demi-monde? And 
 were they right in seeing a good picture of 
 life in the crude and blatant immorality of 
 Shaw ? The fact is that these girls are not 
 only being corrupted but deceived. Their 
 feather-brained parents and guardians are 
 feeding the creatures to Moloch and Astarte 
 because it is fashionable to be immoral. 
 No doubt there could be found among these 
 very innocents many girls who would like 
 to remain honest women, even in thought, 
 if they had but known such a thing were 
 possible in modern days. It is an interest- 
 ing and yet awful glimpse into every-day 
 life that we get through the minds of these 
 virgins. The play, the name of the play, 
 40 
 
SHAW AND MODERN DRAMA 
 
 and the presence of the girls — all these ele- 
 ments are symptomatic and inevitable. 
 
 During the last thirty years there has 
 been a great demand in Europe for coarse 
 literature, obvious, crude, and bold — fit- 
 ted for the appreciation of luxurious and 
 materialistic persons, of ignorant persons, 
 of fatigued persons. New wealth joins 
 forces with effete culture in search of sen- 
 sation. The increasing demand for pi- 
 quancy which such an audience implies, has 
 led to an ever-increasing grossness of con- 
 ception on the part of the artists. Wher- 
 ever the relations of the sexes were con- 
 cerned, this intensification has led, of 
 course, to pictures of female depravity at 
 younger and ever younger ages. It seems 
 as if the limits of indelicacy had now been 
 reached by this school of play-writing (un- 
 less childhood is to be attacked), and we 
 may expect an emotional revival. 
 
DR. HORACE HOWARD 
 FURNESS 
 
IV 
 
 DR. HORACE HOWARD FURNESS 
 
 Dr. Furness was at the time of his death 
 the most famous of American scholars. 
 The sixteen great volumes of his Variorum 
 Shakespeare are like the Fondaco dei Te- 
 deschi at Venice, — a casket and a monu- 
 ment, a thing of beauty and a symbol of 
 ancient wealth. 
 
 In one of his prefaces Dr. Furness says 
 that every textual variant of the volume in 
 question has been thrice verified by himself. 
 These textual variants or alternate readings 
 are the ashes of the various texts that have 
 successively been evolved and destroyed by 
 one and another of Shakespeare's editors 
 since the earliest times ; and these ashes are 
 preserved, lest perchance a little scrap of 
 gold should somewhere be left among them, 
 or lest there should lurk in them some gleam 
 of the life of that phoenix that flew forth 
 out of them. 
 
 But the labor of endless textual detail is 
 45 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 only one feature of Dr. Furness's work on 
 Shakespeare's monument. The other sides 
 of his work are less dreadful to think of. 
 His aim was to bring the substance of all 
 the books ever written about Shakespeare 
 into the compass of a single edition. Any 
 other man would have attacked his work like 
 a beaver. Dr. Furness attacked it like a bee. 
 His sunny disposition turned the gigantic 
 work into pleasure. And here a strange 
 fact may be perceived — that Dr. Furness 
 ended by weaving his own character and 
 personality into this edition as completely 
 as if he had been writing his memoirs, or 
 making a portrait of himself for posterity. 
 Furness's notes and glossaries abound in 
 that playful tenderness which I feel sure 
 was the characteristic quality of Shake- 
 speare himself. I am certain that an un- 
 willingness to hurt anyone's feelings was the 
 most noticeable quality in Shakespeare, and 
 that this is why Shakespeare was so often 
 called " gentle " by his contemporaries. 
 (Imagine a stage-manager who should be 
 nicknamed " gentle " to-day !) 
 
 If, as I just said, Dr. Furness has written 
 
 himself into these volumes, it is because in 
 
 dealing with the Shakespeare legends he 
 
 only takes what he loves, and he only loves 
 
 46 
 
From a photograph by Gutekunst 
 
 HORACE HOWARD FURNESS 
 
HORACE HOWARD FURNESS 
 
 thyme and sweet-william. If a subject dis- 
 pleases him, he drops it. For instance, he 
 cannot bear to speak ill of such a good 
 Elizabethan as John Payne Collier; and he, 
 therefore, frankly says that no discussion of 
 the Collier forgery question can be looked 
 for from him. This is not what is called 
 scholarship; but it is something better than 
 scholarship, it is character, it is tempera- 
 ment, it is vitality. 
 
 No great scholar has ever written such a 
 good commentary on Shakespeare as Dr. 
 Furness has written ; because all great scho- 
 lars are apt to become bores. It is really 
 their duty and their destiny to be bores. 
 Even A. C. Bradley, the latest and greatest 
 of Shakespearian scholars, is just a little, 
 slightly a bore. The note of virtuosity is in 
 him. Dr. Furness was really engaged in ar- 
 ranging, condensing, and transcribing the 
 things that he thought vital in Shakespeare's 
 literary history. He was one kind of a 
 scholar; but he belonged to that type and 
 species of scholarship of which Bishop Percy 
 and Walter Scott are examples, the species to 
 whom literature is food and drink. To 
 some modern scholars, literature is a dead 
 body, or at least a subject for vivisection 
 — never a live animal to be stroked and 
 47 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 talked to, befriended, lived with, laughed 
 and cried over. 
 
 Furness's tone about his own views is so 
 modest that he almost seems to have no 
 views of his own; and when he suggests an 
 idea of his own, he barely hazards it, and 
 that in the fewest words. What great 
 scholar ever did the like? Dr. Furness 
 collects all the bones and tidbits from three 
 hundred years of Shakespearian contro- 
 versy; and having laid them before you, 
 scampers away with a jest. The result is 
 that he has written enchanting commenta- 
 ries which frame Shakespeare with a genial 
 sort of foolery that is near kin to Shake- 
 speare's own spirit. 
 
 This Variorum Edition will cause many 
 old Shakespeariana to go out of print. The 
 positive results of many a great commenta- 
 tor's life may be embodied in an improved 
 text; and the wagon-loads of disquisition 
 which at first were essential, soon become 
 superfluous through their very success. 
 The same reasoning holds good in regard 
 to the theories which course like dolphins in 
 Shakespeare's wake, theories as to the chro- 
 nology of the plays, theories as to the 
 sources of their plots, and the metaphysics 
 of their characters. A brochure upon any 
 
HORACE HOWARD FURNESS 
 
 such topic will in a few years shrink and dry- 
 up, till it can be carried in a mere footnote. 
 Indeed, any idea must be quite monumental 
 at the beginning of its career, in order that 
 posterity shall afford it more than an aster- 
 isk. 
 
 The notes and disquisitions in the Vari- 
 orum Edition give you all you are ever 
 likely to want of a host of old worthies and 
 worthiesses who strutted their little day, and 
 penned with quill pens and steel pens their 
 various comments. I love the race of men 
 who write notes on great books, whether on 
 Dante or on Shakespeare. They collect 
 miscellaneous information and they chatter 
 like happy magpies. They keep literature 
 alive, like Darwin's earthworms, by creep- 
 ing down out of sight and bringing new soil 
 to the top. Without them some poets would 
 be incomprehensible within a few decades 
 after death. Dante would be unread to- 
 day, Chaucer and Shakespeare would be al- 
 most gone, and Byron would be on the road 
 to oblivion. To put all the Shakespeare 
 chatterers into one great aviary, to tame 
 them, docket them, assign them their 
 perches and index them — this was the 
 work of Dr. Furness's life. The Variorum 
 is really a Shakespeare library; and no pri- 
 49 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 vate person has need to encumber his shelves 
 with more authorities than this edition sup- 
 plies. If a man wants to make a beast of 
 himself, let him go to a public library. 
 
 My acquaintance with Dr. Furness was 
 slight, or rather, I should say, it was short, 
 and did not occur till 19 12, when he was in 
 his seventy-ninth year. But the man him- 
 self cast back such a light on his books, and 
 his books now begin to cast forward such a 
 light on the man, that his image is very clear 
 in my mind. It is the image of the perfect 
 scholar, and of the great gentleman, through 
 whom there yet shines a crystal idea of 
 something nobler than either. He was all 
 his life a man of various social activities 
 and of great influence ; and this contact with 
 life gave him a robustness and rotundity of 
 nature which literary men often lack. 
 
 He certainly was the most picturesque old 
 gentleman that I have ever known. He was 
 short and stout — his head, with its large 
 dome, was fringed with the most brilliant 
 white hair — immaculate, gleaming hair. 
 His gold eyeglasses, which were very trans- 
 parent and which magnified the gray eyes 
 behind them, his elegant, delicate silver ear- 
 trumpet — (more like some elfin horn, or the 
 ornament of a fairy king or goblin herald, 
 50 
 
HORACE HOWARD FURNESS 
 
 than a necessary instrument), that horn 
 which was always at hand, always being 
 adjusted to receive good news from the 
 guest — his wonderful neatness and trim- 
 ness — as if his waistcoat and watch-chain 
 had been burnished upon him — as if his 
 clothes were made of bronze, or as if he 
 were a drawing by Ingres — all these things, 
 as well as the smiling trustfulness (like that 
 of a good child) with which he welcomed 
 everyone, took him out of the actual. You 
 could not believe that he was true. He was 
 as a picture, or as a character of the imag- 
 ination. Of course he really did belong to 
 a familiar epoch ; but somehow his deafness 
 had isolated him and surrounded him with 
 an invisible hothouse. There was a bloom 
 upon him; he radiated a sort of heaven-sent 
 bonhomie. I am sure that if I had seen him 
 in a railroad station without knowing who 
 he was, I should have followed him home, 
 tracked him to his habitat, so as to assure 
 myself that he was an earthborn creature. 
 
 Think of such a man's having lived in the 
 America of to-day! He might have come 
 out of London in 1811 ; he might have lived 
 in Edinburgh in 1830. He was like Charles 
 Lamb; he seemed to be clad in knee- 
 breeches; he was all leisure, all literature, 
 51 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 all tenderness for the feelings of others. I 
 am sure that this quality of hating to hurt 
 anyone's feelings, of avoiding the unpleas- 
 ant, must somewhere, somehow have run 
 into vice with Dr. Furness. It is wrong to 
 be so tender as he was. 
 
 Dr. Furness, as everyone knows, was 
 deaf — so very deaf that one had to speak 
 into his silver ear-trumpet and speak quite 
 loudly in order to reach him. Yet his deaf- 
 ness never separated him from the rest of 
 society, but on the contrary it joined him 
 to others. His expression of perfect be- 
 nevolence and perfect accord, as he surveyed 
 the dinner-table, his smile of expectation as 
 he caught your eye, gave you something to 
 say. You could not be dumb in his pres- 
 ence. In fact, his deafness had the very 
 opposite influence to that which deafness 
 usually has: it drew you out. He elicited 
 extravagant sallies ; he invited foolishness : 
 and when foolishness came, he welcomed it 
 as the Father in the parable welcomed the 
 Prodigal. One knew all the while that 
 somewhere in the middle of all this gayety 
 there lay a great renunciation. This power 
 to give and take innocent pleasure is always 
 bought with a great price. A big lump sum 
 has been paid down at some time in the past, 
 52 
 
HORACE HOWARD FURNESS 
 
 so great that the interest of it supports the 
 donor forever after; he is care- free. 
 
 Dr. Furness had cunning ways, he did 
 cunning things; but they were always very 
 clever. He himself was never deceived 
 for a moment. He understood his droller- 
 ies well enough. When, for instance, I 
 asked him why it was, or why he thought it 
 was, that Fanny Kemble had singled out 
 just him as the person to whom she should 
 give Shakespeare's gloves — he assumed the 
 attitude of the ingenue in old English 
 comedy — put his knuckles to his lips, 
 looked archly at the ceiling, bent his head 
 from side to side — " I don't know, I don't 
 know." A lifelong familiarity with old 
 English stage businesses had given him quite 
 a battery of odd little gestures and tones of 
 voice, which were as natural to him as they 
 were unexpected by everyone else. 
 
 Dr. Furness had habits of a clockwork 
 regularity. He rose at a certain hour, 
 whatever it was, to the minute, and ap- 
 peared at breakfast, which was a stately and 
 sumptuous meal, long, luxurious, and social. 
 Then he suddenly disappeared, and I don't 
 know what he did for several hours. He 
 performed his Shakespearian work in the 
 S3 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 middle of the night. After sitting up crack- 
 ing jokes, or reading aloud, till twelve or 
 one, he dismissed everyone and sat down to 
 work till cock-crow. His library was of 
 that sort which is added to the house as a 
 unity — is lighted from the top and sur- 
 rounded inside with a balcony. The room 
 was full of memorials, pictures, and photo- 
 graphs, and was lined with all the books 
 about Shakespeare, I suppose, in the world. 
 In a small vault or inner sanctuary beyond, 
 a fire-proof holy of holies, he kept his first 
 editions. He had all the folios and a great 
 many of the quartos. (I'm not sure that it 
 is possible to have them all.) Here were 
 kept other treasures more remarkable still — 
 namely, fragments of Shakespeare's mul- 
 berry tree, and a pair of gloves which origi- 
 nally belonged to Shakespeare's theatrical 
 properties, and which, after the playwright's 
 decease, were shipped to Avon from London 
 together with the rest of his belongings. 
 These gloves are perhaps the most precious 
 personal relic in the world. I do not know 
 what doubts scholars may throw on their 
 authenticity ; but their history is well known 
 and forms a part of the annals of the Brit- 
 ish stage. At any rate, I felt in looking on 
 54 
 
HORACE HOWARD FURNESS 
 
 them an overwhelming belief in them — a 
 pang of belief, such as no other personal 
 relic ever gave me. 
 
 I cannot say that I always agree with Dr. 
 Furness's views upon Shakespeare's char- 
 acters. This is a subject upon which the 
 clodhopper has rights of opinion; and some 
 of Dr. Furness's theses seem to me to reflect 
 his own temperament too closely — as, for 
 instance, his views on the love affair between 
 Anthony and Cleopatra. I must confess 
 that his opinions here seem to me to be mis- 
 judged and even fantastic. Dr. Furness's 
 romanticism has misled him. It is himself, 
 [not Anthony, and not Shakespeare] that 
 the seraphic Doctor has depicted in his 
 rhapsodical preface to his play. And yet 
 this same enthusiasm which, in this case, be- 
 trays Dr. Furness is the pervading cause of 
 his charm. Dr. Furness is never really in- 
 terested in anything except the poetic kernel 
 of Shakespeare. He deals with the other 
 parts because they must be dealt with. But 
 the reason for all the husk is not to be found 
 in the husk; the reason lies in the poetry. 
 Furness never forgets this ; he is in love all 
 the time. He had the sort of adoration for 
 Shakespeare that a schoolboy has for an 
 elder brother. When this quality gets into 
 55 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 a book of any sort, the book becomes happy 
 and vigorous. " Isn't he a glorious fellow ? 
 Did you ever hear anything like him?" 
 This is what Furness seems to be constantly 
 saying. 
 
 Such is the general nature of Dr. Fur- 
 ness's contributions to Shakespeare's criti- 
 cism. They sound so small and are so 
 tremendous. For I suppose that the sun- 
 light hidden everywhere in these big yellow 
 volumes is enough to warm the earth. It 
 will surely affect the disposition of all future 
 commentators; and even the philologist, the 
 comparative grammarian, the Indo-Ger- 
 manic person may be softened, tinged, sweet- 
 ened, and made into something more nearly 
 resembling a human being, through contact 
 with the unscientific, non-conclusive intellect 
 of Horace Howard Furness. 
 
 A short time before his death, Dr. Furness 
 sent me a copy of his Phi Beta Kappa ad- 
 dress entitled, " Shakespeare, or What You 
 Will " ; and in thanking him for it I sent him 
 the verses printed below, which thus be- 
 came the occasion of this paper. His death 
 fell like a curtain, unexpectedly, without ill- 
 ness, without premonitory old age; and, as 
 it fell, it left him in our imagination just 
 56 
 
HORACE HOWARD FURNESS 
 
 as he had always appeared, standing in a 
 sort of radiance. 
 
 " Yes, I have seen the wreath of woven flowers 
 That in your garden (which is Shakespeare's 
 mind) 
 
 Have blossomed freshly through the dewy hours, 
 And which the deaf, old gardener smiled to find. 
 
 " Laughed as he found them — saved and wound and 
 gave them: 
 (The richest trophy that his life could bring), 
 Shakespeare's they are, and were, and he shall have 
 them 
 Forever as a fragrant offering. 
 
 " So, on thy bier, old servant, tried and tender, 
 Some loving hand may lay a paler sheaf; 
 
 For none but Shakespeare might thy crimson render, 
 Or match in words the greenness of thy leaf." 
 
 ST 
 
HENRY GRAFTON CHAPMAN 
 
V 
 
 HENRY GRAFTON CHAPMAN 
 
 Henry Grafton Chapman, who died in 
 his fifty-third year in January, 191 3, was 
 one of those quiet men who seem to bear no 
 relation to the age they are born in. By 
 his endowments, his tastes, and his educa- 
 tion he was fitted to be an amateur of a kind 
 very common in Europe, — one of the studi- 
 ous, well-nigh learned children of culture, 
 who love books, pictures, music, philosophy, 
 the lamp, and the quiet conclave with infi- 
 nite good talk. If Henry Chapman had had 
 the fortune to have been born in Europe or 
 in China, and to inherit money, his life 
 would have been a record of cheerful suc- 
 cess, even as it was, in America, a record of 
 cheerful toil. 
 
 For some reason there was a glory about 
 his boyhood. He was the prize boy of his 
 set; brilliant things were predicted of him 
 by everyone. His talents and charms, his 
 goodness and his good looks set off, as with a 
 61 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 foil, a moral worth which everyone found 
 in him. A singular sweetness and gentle- 
 ness of disposition remained to him all his 
 life. It survived the more ambitious quali- 
 ties with which we had all endowed him in 
 his teens. It gilded his life and made his 
 friends forgive him everything; for he was 
 the most negligent of men. You could not 
 see him unless you looked him up and dug 
 him out from among his books and papers. 
 He would hold you in converse on a corner 
 of Broadway at midnight with a discussion 
 about Plato, and would never miss you if he 
 saw you not again for fifteen years — when 
 he would resume the discussion with the old 
 fervor. His talk was ready, apt, amusing, 
 drenched in reading. He was always writ- 
 ing plays which were never produced, and 
 essays just to clear his thoughts. He al- 
 ways had many varieties of tales, poems, 
 and literary ventures on hand. Whenever 
 I met him I wondered why I didn't see 
 more of him. But he was hard to see more 
 of: he was elusive. He sought his own 
 habitat, and would never come out of it, 
 save on compulsion. 
 
 The course of his experiments in life, be- 
 fore he settled down to steady work at liter- 
 ature, might easily be paralleled in the lives 
 62 
 
HENRY GRAFTON CHAPMAN 
 
 of many men of letters in all countries. 
 After Harvard College and the Harvard 
 Law School, came work in law offices, a 
 few discouraging years at the bar, a few 
 other years spent in business ventures. 
 Then five years of organized reform. In 
 this latter field my brother did valuable 
 work, and for some years he was extremely 
 active at Albany as an agent of the Civil 
 Service League. He was also the editor of 
 the League's newspaper. Both his legal 
 training and his literary facility came into 
 play in these avocations. Mr. George Mc- 
 Aneny writes me: 
 
 " His quiet influence during the period of 
 his active touch with public affairs did a 
 great deal for the betterment of things in 
 this town. I knew him best during his 
 secretaryship in the Civil Service Reform 
 League, to the work of which he gave a de- 
 voted order of service — just as his grand- 
 father, John Jay, as a member of Governor 
 Cleveland's first Civil Service Commission, 
 had given before him. He made ' Good 
 Government/ the organ of the League, a 
 much more serviceable organ than it ever 
 had been before, adding to its influence 
 everywhere. He proved, too, a most valu- 
 63 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 able aid in the handling of legislation affect- 
 ing the Civil Service, proposed from year to 
 year at Albany, — always, I believe, with 
 good result. He went about everything 
 quietly, but he did a lot of useful work." 
 
 Henry Chapman certainly was fitted to 
 be a journalist of the first order, but he 
 lacked the impulsion; and I cannot blame 
 him for deserting reform, since this led to 
 his taking up a kind of work for which he 
 had a real gift — namely, translation. 
 
 All his life long my brother wrote verses 
 which were marked by singular ease and 
 grace. He was the producer of the occa- 
 sional verses demanded by his college class, 
 by the Porcellian Club, by the B K, etc. 
 He could write any species of verse, and 
 he loved to do so. His ear was true and 
 very experienced. He knew a little Latin 
 and Greek, and a great deal of French and 
 German, which languages he had learned as 
 a boy in Europe. He could write French 
 and German, and could read, you might say, 
 any modern language ; for he had a passion 
 for etymology and was always pushing his 
 studies further in this field. He had a wide, 
 miscellaneous reading in English, French, 
 and German, but his main hobby was 
 64 
 
HENRY GRAFTON CHAPMAN 
 
 modern philosophy, upon which he loved to 
 hold forth. 
 
 In his later years he supported himself 
 by translating libretti and songs. Dr. Baker, 
 the musical adviser of G. Schirmer, with 
 whom Henry was most closely associated 
 in this work, writes as follows in the Bulle- 
 tin of New Music: 
 
 " In the death of Henry Grafton Chap- 
 man, which occurred on January 16 in New 
 York, the house of G. Schirmer mourns the 
 loss of a friend and gifted coadjutor, a man 
 to whom the musical world owes a debt of 
 gratitude and respect. Of highly versa- 
 tile talent, Mr. Chapman's life-work — the 
 work which shall live after him — was final- 
 ly found in the poetic reproduction in Eng- 
 lish of those choice poems by foreign 
 writers to which music has been set by com- 
 posers of genius. 
 
 " Let none regard this work as a matter of 
 small moment, as something to be tossed off 
 in idle hours, or as something of low degree 
 not to be ranked with the finer products of 
 literary labor. It is true that, only too fre- 
 quently, a ' good working translation ' is the 
 utmost ambition of the English versifier; a 
 version which will ' sing well/ which rhymes 
 65 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 fairly well, and does not conflict too glar- 
 ingly in accentuation with the original; — 
 as for ' sense ' and ' poetic feeling/ these 
 are made wholly secondary considerations, 
 if considered at all. 
 
 " Mr. Chapman's work was on a different 
 plane. He entered at once into the mood 
 and spirit of the poem before him. Equally 
 at home in styles naive, sentimental, humor- 
 ous, capricious, or passionate, he then, by 
 some genial alchemy of which he possessed 
 the secret, transmuted the exotic prototype 
 into English verse often equal in excellence 
 to, and not seldom surpassing, the original in 
 poetic flow and fervor. He still observed the 
 meter and the accent, and the rhyme, too, 
 wherever possible, but rendered these sub- 
 ordinate to the thought and expression, using 
 them, like the foreign authors, as a vehicle 
 for ideas and emotions, not as a jingle to fit 
 the music. In raising the translation of 
 poems, penned by great writers and vivified 
 and embellished by great tone-poets, from 
 the level of hack-work into the realm of art, 
 Mr. Chapman has rendered inestimable serv- 
 ice to the art and practice of song in the 
 English language. So long as many of the 
 finest vocal gems were accessible only in the 
 foreign originals or mediocre translations, 
 66 
 
HENRY GRAFTON CHAPMAN 
 
 they could not be fully appreciated and en- 
 joyed by the large majority of our singers ; 
 but with this exquisite music wedded to real 
 poetry, the value of such songs has been 
 enhanced beyond computation. 
 
 " By the foregoing remarks no disparage- 
 ment is intended of numerous sporadic suc- 
 cessful attempts at translation, made and 
 making by other English writers. The 
 point is, that no other musical translator has 
 accomplished a tithe of Mr. Chapman's 
 achievement in this field. In the brief space 
 of about eight years he finished for the firm 
 of G. Schirmer between seven and eight 
 hundred songs, ballads, arias, choruses, and 
 the like; twelve oratorios and cantatas 
 (sacred and secular) ; and nine complete 
 operas, including works so widely divergent 
 in character as Debussy's * Pelleas et Meli- 
 sande ' (Maeterlinck), Leoncavallo's ' Pa- 
 gliacci,' and Wagner's Tristan und Isolde/ 
 And in how masterly fashion did he over- 
 come the immense difficulties presented by 
 the various masterworks ! — difficulties 
 which can be realized only by those who 
 have essayed similar tasks. In his best mo- 
 ments it is as if, upborne by the inspiration 
 of the poem, he rose with the authors them- 
 selves to their own height and surveyed the 
 67 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 lyric or dramatic situation with the same 
 lofty passion, the same swift and sure 
 glance. From the simplest folk-song to the 
 sublime complexities of * Tristan/ he made 
 each passing mood his own. He did not 
 roughly l pluck the heart ' from out the 
 stranger verses; he intimately blended their 
 essence, their soul, with his own spirit, and 
 poured the mingled tide into a mold of fine- 
 ly wrought English. To their inspiration 
 he lent his own; and many of the poems so 
 molded are genuine works of genius. What 
 he could do when inspired solely by the 
 music, without the transcription of others' 
 thoughts and effusions, is shown in his de- 
 lightful original verses accompanying the 
 ' Blue Danube ' waltzes." 
 
 68 
 
THE FUNCTION OF THE 
 CHURCH SCHOOL 
 
 Address to the boys at St. Paul's School, Con- 
 cord, N. H. 
 

VI 
 
 THE FUNCTION OF THE CHURCH 
 SCHOOL 
 
 If you have ever taken a walk in the woods 
 with a naturalist or a hunter, you must have 
 felt what ears, what eyes, what senses the 
 man had. You must have felt that he was 
 walking in a magic world, among sights and 
 sounds that you could not catch, a world 
 throbbing with idea and wonderful with 
 reality. Now all of education may be 
 thought of as a means of giving to youth 
 the keys of the different worlds that exist 
 about us, — exist all together, one inside the 
 other, like the celestial spheres of the old 
 Astronomy, — worlds of different sorts of 
 reality, different kinds of intellect, — every- 
 one of them as real and as thrilling to the 
 soul that lives in it as the woods are to the 
 naturalist or to the hunter, — a place where 
 the air is filled with meaning and where 
 every sound, every leaf that falls or twig 
 that cracks in the distance, brings a message 
 7i 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 to the listener, a summons, an idea, — com- 
 munication with the universe. 
 
 In the A B C stage of education the mean- 
 ing of it all is not very apparent. Now and 
 then there is born a child of genius who 
 takes a passionate interest in the alphabet 
 and knows by instinct that the letters on his 
 blocks, or the drawing of a horse on his 
 slate, or the strange dots and lines of his 
 first music lesson are mystic things which 
 put him in touch with all intellect, all his- 
 tory, all religion, — all the gigantic forces 
 of human life and destiny. But for the 
 most part children have to grind forward 
 without knowing very clearly what it is all 
 about, or why they are put through the regi- 
 men. The mind is so complex, and all these 
 various spirit worlds are so strangely in- 
 terlocked with each other, — and besides this, 
 so little is known about youth and develop- 
 ment, — that you can never be quite sure 
 that you are on the right track. When you 
 try to fit education to the individual, you 
 must keep a loose rein, and remember that 
 your knowledge of the individual is very 
 shadowy, and your knowledge of what 
 comes next, of what the creature will turn 
 into next, is very shadowy. You may be 
 feeding a caterpillar under the belief that it 
 72 
 
THE CHURCH SCHOOL 
 
 is a silk-worm, and behold it turns out to be 
 a June bug. The surest thing is to follow 
 general principles and general traditions. 
 Even this is very unsure ; but it is less unsure 
 than anything else. All of you boys have 
 been getting the sort of education that has 
 been gradually evolved and invented for 
 boys; and it all bears some relation to the 
 immense antiquity out of which it comes 
 down to us, and to the heights and depths of 
 life, the totality of human experience, of 
 which it forms a part. You must make the 
 best out of it that you can. You see, educa- 
 tion is merely the attempt to prevent the 
 youth from missing his birthright, — to pre- 
 vent him from going by his destination in 
 the night, while he holds a ticket for the 
 great festival in his sleeping hands. 
 
 I am now fifty years old, and I find in 
 going back to school and college and in meet- 
 ing my old classmates, how grateful they are 
 to their schools and colleges, how they hug 
 the little scrap of insight which destiny ac- 
 corded them, their glimpse into the peep 
 show. They were given just one look, and 
 then they were seized by the shoulder and 
 hurled into practical life, the life of business, 
 of self-support, of unidea'd labor, in which 
 there was little time to do more than oc- 
 73 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 casionally remember that peep show. I fear 
 that the same experience awaits many of 
 you. It is because a little education is so 
 infinitely much greater than none at all that 
 you are here. It is because the beginnings 
 of education, — no matter how great, — may 
 be got at St. Paul's School, that you are 
 here. 
 
 You must not expect to understand very 
 much about school just yet. The general 
 rule seems to be that we do not understand 
 our experiences until they have become past 
 history. For instance, you will find old men 
 describing their school days and describing 
 how they parted from their parents, describ- 
 ing the holidays, and giving in the recital 
 the very atmosphere of reality and of ro- 
 mance, — of human life, — which at the mo- 
 ment there was no time for. Yet somehow 
 the great romance was alive and was going 
 on in those little boys. It is a very rare mat- 
 ter when any of us at any time in life sees 
 things as they are at the moment. This 
 happens at times of great spiritual exalta- 
 tion, when our minds are so awakened, and 
 the inner and half-slumbering part of us is 
 so awakened that we become aware of what 
 is going on about us and of the infinite great 
 worlds of force, of feeling and of idea in 
 74 
 
THE CHURCH SCHOOL 
 
 which we live, and in the midst of which 
 we have always been living. These worlds 
 are really in progress all the time; and the 
 difference between one man and another, or 
 the difference in the same man at different 
 times, is the difference in his awareness of 
 what is happening. 
 
 I used to wonder what it was in Beetho- 
 ven that was so impressive and why we are 
 so moved by his music. About what is he 
 talking; and where does it all go when he 
 stops? There is a sense in which Beetho- 
 ven's music is always going on within us. 
 Those inner chords are forever vibrating, 
 that mystery play is forever on the stage, 
 that paean going up: those human strains 
 are being given off by the fibres within us 
 all the time. And Beethoven's awareness 
 of this music has enabled him to let these 
 strains become expressed and continued out- 
 ward into sound. He did not exactly make 
 that music ; but merely had the art to trans- 
 mit it, — to allow it to have its way through 
 him. The old poetic metaphors about in- 
 spiration express the dynamics of an eternal 
 transmission of power from soul to soul, 
 and express them very well. 
 
 I am speaking all this time in terms of 
 education; but I am really thinking about 
 75 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 religion. Now religion is not so much a 
 thing by itself as a way of feeling, an in- 
 ward experience as to the nature of life, 
 which colors and changes the world. It is 
 a personal experience. No one can describe 
 it or convey it to another. There has al- 
 ways been this incalculable element about re- 
 ligious experience. The wind bloweth 
 where it listeth — even so is everyone that 
 is born of the spirit. Religion is the con- 
 sciousness of the presence of God. It often 
 descends upon people in trouble, in moments 
 of crisis. When all else is taken, it rushes 
 in — I should say, seems to rush in ; for it 
 is really always present in all men, — only 
 disguised and concealed by the clouds of 
 other interests and occupations. 
 
 You boys must often wonder, as I used 
 to wonder in this room, what it is all about ? 
 — What is this religion that seems to be 
 of so much importance? It is evidently at 
 the bottom of St. Paul's School. The 
 founders are founding it, the rectors are 
 preaching it, the choirs are singing it. We 
 walk it in and out of chapel, and rustle it 
 in hymn books and undergo it in reproach- 
 ful lectures for our misconduct. Some peo- 
 ple seem to believe that it is pocketed in 
 scriptural texts, and surely fitted into the 
 76 
 
THE CHURCH SCHOOL 
 
 catechism. All this language of religious 
 feeling that surrounds you at St. Paul's 
 School is the language of the mystery of 
 life. That mystery will endure forever. It 
 will outlast contemporary science, and over- 
 shadow future science. It comes to you in 
 the voice of many generations speaking 
 about the profoundest truths of life. You 
 are here living in the sound of that voice. 
 You hardly understand it; you hear it un- 
 consciously ; at times you catch a few sylla- 
 bles that seem intelligible, seem meant for 
 you — they are somehow communications 
 from the great power in the midst of which 
 our life goes on, the power which drives and, 
 is our life. If there were any sure way by 
 which the child could be put into conscious 
 relation with God, — if he could be shown 
 these mysteries, as he may be led out and 
 shown a waterfall, — then all this machinery 
 would not be needed : — all this literature, 
 this music, discipline, prayer, praise and 
 worship of God might be dispensed with or 
 replaced. But, as the old Jews used to say 
 " No man hath seen God at any time." This 
 whole matter is not a thing by itself which 
 can be grasped. It is a part of everything 
 else. It underlies all thought : it is something 
 which grasps us. When it comes, it comes. 
 77 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 It is not a universal experience. Some peo- 
 ple, great people, men of power and sanctity, 
 who fill the world with good deeds, and 
 fill us who gaze upon them with a sense of 
 religion, — have lived without that sense 
 themselves. The power that works in them 
 is veiled from them. 
 
 There is one danger that hangs about re- 
 ligion : it hangs about science, about thought, 
 about human character,— the danger of 
 feeling sure one is right. The evils that fol- 
 low in the wake of this danger are so univer- 
 sal that perhaps we ought to think of the 
 whole matter as a law of nature. If a man 
 begins to believe that he holds the truth fast, 
 holds it in a formula that is like an inde- 
 structible casket, then immediately the casket 
 begins to dissolve, and we discover that the 
 truth never was in his casket at all, but be- 
 hind it, — as it is behind all things. There 
 is a sort of docility of mind, a knowledge of 
 our own impotence, that is very near to the 
 threshold of intellectual vision and to the 
 threshold of religious feeling. Whenever a 
 man has this sentiment very strongly, people 
 almost always give him credit for being 
 somehow a religious person — even if the 
 man protests he is not interested in religion. 
 It seems to be true that great intellects are 
 78 
 
THE CHURCH SCHOOL 
 
 almost always filled with this sense of not 
 quite understanding what truth is, of being 
 powerless and ignorant. Emerson said that 
 it has always been the mark of an intellect 
 of the first order that a man should feel 
 about the world as if the explanation of it 
 could not be given here ; but that the whole 
 matter must draw its meaning from some- 
 thing else, something we do not know. The 
 people who feel like this are not always con- 
 scious of God. I would not cite them as 
 examples of religious feeling. I cite them 
 as examples of that docility which is very 
 near to religion. This thing is very easy 
 to lose. I have often thought that this 
 docility which evaporates so easily may be 
 referred to in the text " The fear of the 
 Lord is the beginning of wisdom." Perhaps 
 the text means, " The consciousness of God 
 is the first step in an understanding of the 
 universe." 
 
 A man who feels this freshly, realizes its 
 mystery, and will not wish to cram the ex- 
 perience down the throat of another. But 
 with thinking comes certitude, and with cer- 
 titude comes error. It is quite strange to 
 notice that the attitude of many modern 
 scientists towards contemporary religious 
 thought is identical with the attitude of the 
 79 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 mediaeval papacy towards heresy. The 
 world to-day is full of professors and stu- 
 dents of science who would gladly perish in 
 the market-place, and at the stake, if they 
 could thereby advance the cause of science 
 by an iota. Many of these men dread the 
 older church teachings only because they 
 have a fierce conviction that those church 
 dogmas inevitably lead to the unhappiness of 
 the people. The state of mind of these 
 scientists is the same state of mind which a 
 perfectly holy pope lived in with regard to 
 heresy, — viz. : — a fierce hostility to some- 
 thing which he felt sure must lead to eternal 
 unhappiness. Both sets of men, both the 
 pope and the scientist have lost the fresh- 
 ness of their feeling through hard thinking; 
 and each in setting up a monopoly, a sort of 
 tyranny. The docility has died out of each 
 of them. 
 
 Indeed docility is dying out in each one 
 of us all the time ; and it has to be renewed 
 every morning. And so, indeed, it is being 
 renewed : it is being freshly born constantly 
 in new and younger men. And whenever 
 one of these tyrannies or monopolies is set 
 up, truth always finds means to move out 
 from under the edge and dominion of the 
 tyranny, and to establish its camp or king- 
 80 
 
THE CHURCH SCHOOL 
 
 dom in the breasts of humble people who 
 know little of theology or little of science. 
 Here then is another law of nature. The 
 faith that is given to each of us is medicine 
 to the un faith of the world. We are the 
 cure. 
 
 Behind all the visions of prophets, the 
 aims of churches, the struggles of teachers, 
 behind apparent progress and retrogression 
 there are great waves of faith that beat 
 through humanity, — you might call them 
 apparitions of God, — epochs when the mi- 
 raculous nature of the world is understood, 
 and mystic sayings become clear as print. 
 Such an epoch is coming over the world at 
 this moment. I cannot walk down the street 
 or open a letter from a friend without mur- 
 muring, " Prophets and kings have desired 
 to see the things that ye see, and have died 
 without seeing them." We have been re- 
 turning to the apostolic age. Physics and 
 metaphysics have of late joined hands to 
 proclaim an unthinkable power visibly rul- 
 ing all things. 
 
 I am constantly meeting people who heal 
 the sick through prayer and live in a whole- 
 hearted simplicity of feeling which brings to 
 mind New Testament times. I am think- 
 ing of individual men and women, not of 
 81 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 any church; for they frequently belong to 
 no church, but are mere children of the New 
 Testament. These people appear to me to 
 be extremely unlike the mediaeval people. 
 They are more vigorous, more at one with 
 life, more courageous, unconcerned, sup- 
 ported by faith. The mediaeval mind was 
 always a little terrified, and there is some- 
 thing sickly about the mediaeval feeling for 
 the miraculous, — something that is often 
 sentimental, often hysterical, often childish. 
 The enormous emotionalism of the Middle 
 Ages is generally tinged with a hot-house 
 element of willful intensity, which is very 
 different from the natural human feeling 
 of the earliest Christians and the strong 
 faith of the latest. Then, too, the preoccu- 
 pation with church discipline which fills the 
 intervening centuries, makes pictures in our 
 imagination which do not fit in with the 
 Bible pictures. It seems as if the teach- 
 ings of Christ had not been understood since 
 that first century until to-day, — as if that 
 teaching were, within the past few years, 
 beginning to affect our minds in the right 
 kind of way. During all those centuries 
 between the crucifixion and to-day, Christ's 
 teaching was administered and used as a 
 drug. But now men are more willing to let 
 82 
 
THE CHURCH SCHOOL 
 
 it do its own work. It is better understood. 
 It is seen to be a part of the light and air, 
 of the palpitation of life, of the machinery 
 of the universe. 
 
 S3 
 
MR. BRIMMER 
 
vn 
 
 MR. BRIMMER 
 
 Martin Brimmer was the finest gentleman 
 that I have ever known intimately; and I 
 never met him without feeling that I myself 
 was a boor, but that this was of no conse- 
 quence, because his breeding and goodness 
 sufficed to cover my nakedness. I might 
 gambol or even wallow, but he would blos- 
 som in the perfection of self-effacing cour- 
 tesy. 
 
 He was the best of old Boston; for he 
 was not quite inside the Puritan tradition 
 and was a little sweeter by nature and less 
 sure he was right than the true Bostonian 
 is. He was a lame, frail man, with fortune 
 and position ; and one felt that he had been a 
 lame, frail boy, lonely, cultivated, and nurs- 
 ing an ideal of romantic honor. There was 
 a knightly glance in his eye and a seriousness 
 in his deep voice that told of his living, and 
 of his having lived always, in a little Camelot 
 of his own. He was not quixotic, but he 
 87 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 was independent. There were portcullises 
 and moats and flowered gardens around him. 
 He was humble with a kind of Hidalgo 
 humility, — the humility of a magnificent 
 impoverished Portuguese Duke. There was 
 nothing sanctimonious about his mind, and 
 this is what really distinguished him from 
 the adjacent Bostonian nobility. 
 
 In looking at the eighteenth century por- 
 traits of Puritan Elders, I have often re- 
 flected that the Puritans were traders. 
 Whatever they may have been when they 
 first landed, they soon became keen-eyed and 
 practical, hard and cold. Their resemblance 
 to the old Venetian merchants may be 
 traced in the Doge's Palace, where the 
 cold, Yankee faces loom down familiarly on 
 the shuddering American tourist. I could 
 attach to almost every portrait in Venice an 
 honored Puritan name; and, with a little 
 study and reflection, I could tell how each 
 pictured aristocrat must have made his 
 money. There was in Mr. Brimmer noth- 
 ing of that austere look which comes from 
 holding on to property and standing pat. 
 And besides this, he was warm; not, per- 
 haps, quite as warm as the Tropics, but very 
 much warmer than the average Beacon 
 Street mantel-pieces were. He would dis- 
 
MR. BRIMMER 
 
 course and laugh heartily about these 
 mantel-pieces, — instead of turning haughty 
 and assuming a look of profaned intimacy, 
 if anyone noticed the absence of fire in 
 them. There was a spark of fight too in 
 Mr. Brimmer; as I found to my cost once, 
 when I received a letter from him beginning, 
 " Sir," in the old dueling style, and more 
 beautiful in its chirography than anything 
 a merely democratic age can produce. 
 
 At the time I knew him best, he was no 
 longer young, and was the figure-head of 
 philanthropy, art and social life in Boston. 
 Mrs. Brimmer loved luxe. Her banquets 
 were as dignified and well mounted as such 
 things can possibly be; and the banquets 
 were followed by ceremonial receptions of 
 intimate friends : dear people they were, too. 
 The whole procedure was accompanied by a 
 certain gorgeousness and parade, which 
 used to terrify me, and not me only ; for the 
 whole of Boston was at that time awed by 
 the splendor of these parties, yet proud of 
 their grand manner. When I went to Lon- 
 don a few years later, I saw some old- 
 fashioned coachmen with round wigs, — I 
 think they were made of glass, — and I sug- 
 gested that Mrs. Brimmer ought to put some 
 of these wigs on her coachmen; — but this 
 89 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 was never done. The wigs, however, were 
 on the banquets ; and the old-fashioned fam- 
 ily servants, the inner domestic reality of 
 everything in the household, made it a most 
 notable establishment. 
 
 Mr. Brimmer ate no more than a bird, 
 and smoked thin, straw-colored cigars. He 
 cared nothing for luxury, but moved in it 
 as an old lord might move in a castle, just 
 because it was there : to him it was his attic. 
 His clothes were remarkable. They came 
 from England, and were of the finest stuffs, 
 and of the ancientest models ; and they hung 
 upon him negligently. This, by the way, 
 was characteristic of the true old Bosto- 
 nians. They got their clothes from Poole; 
 but they never tried them on. Yet, instead 
 of making a ridiculous figure in the gar- 
 ments, they dignified their apparel. They 
 wore their clothes well; and I have seen 
 octogenarian millionaires, with youthful 
 hose well saved upon their shrunk shanks, 
 pacing Beacon Street like old masters. Say 
 what you will, there was something strong 
 about the old Commonwealth; and, as it 
 melted slowly into modern times, I watched 
 and treasured the apparition. It was a 
 great relief to me, as a college lad who was 
 passing through many wrestlings of the 
 90 
 
MR. BRIMMER 
 
 spirit over shirts and pumps, and who 
 thought there might exist some dreadful 
 law of correctness in the higher circles of 
 society, — it was a great relief to me, after 
 I had conscientiously bought a white tie of 
 the proper contemporary cut, to find that 
 Martin Brimmer had done no such thing. 
 Here was the finest gentleman I had ever 
 seen ; but when he wanted a tie, he caused a 
 valet to open a trunk and to pull from the 
 bottom of it a tie of seventeen years be- 
 fore. Mr. Brimmer put on the tie none too 
 carefully; and came down stairs with a 
 grave courtesy. The Italian nieces adjusted 
 his tie, the red silk drawing-room with the 
 statue of Story's Cleopatra was thrown 
 open, and the great world of little Boston 
 arrived with its arms outspread. 
 
 Mrs. Brimmer afforded ideal contrasts to 
 her husband. She was large, imposing, 
 handsome, blonde and infantile. Her 
 cheeks had never been roughly visited by 
 the winds of heaven. Indeed she was one 
 of those people whom the world instinctively 
 surrounds with a hedge of protection. Her 
 dearest friends never quite told her the 
 truth; and I am sure that, in childhood, 
 her playmates must always have petted her 
 and given her the prettiest string of beads. 
 91 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 She was a queen-bee, twice as large and 
 twice as handsome as other women ; and she 
 wore Damascened brocades and ostrich 
 feathers, and had eyes as blue as the sky. 
 
 That age was an age of witticisms and of 
 personal hits, which were recorded and 
 handed about. To-day the taste for bon- 
 mots has waned, and if anyone should bring 
 such a thing as a witticism into a drawing- 
 room, people would balk at it and regard it 
 as an old snuff-box. But in those days, 
 sallies of wit were correct and conventional. 
 Dr. Holmes and Tom Appleton and Judge 
 Hoar were the professional wits of Bos- 
 ton, just as Evarts and Travers were 
 the professional wits of New York. 
 Behind these veterans there were hun- 
 dreds of skirmishing humorists who made 
 social life agreeable. Evening receptions 
 were regarded as a natural form of 
 amusement ; people stood in a pack, and ate 
 and drank, and talked volubly till midnight. 
 And they enjoyed it too. There was a zest 
 in it. I don't know why the world has be- 
 come so dull of recent years, and society so 
 insipid. People in Boston in the Eighties 
 knew how to enjoy themselves. 
 
 There seems to exist a great invisible 
 sponge that is always passing forward and 
 92 
 
MR. BRIMMER 
 
 back across society and wiping out coteries 
 and traditions. It never succeeds in obliter- 
 ating all of cultivation or all of happiness, 
 yet it seems forever on the point of doing 
 so. One of the staple illusions of middle 
 life is the vision of a Vanishing Past. The 
 experience must be classed with youth's il- 
 lusions of an oncoming Roseate Future: 
 both visions are normal. Indeed it is the 
 vision of the Vanishing Past that has caused 
 me to write these sketches. I am afraid 
 that I may forget those vivid scenes of youth 
 unless I write them down. They have risen 
 in my memory recently, as the mirage rises, 
 — ever at a fixed distance from the be- 
 holder ; and I fear they may disappear again 
 as I move farther away from them. Per- 
 haps there is nothing of monumental inter- 
 est in these balls, weddings and tea parties 
 that I attended in Boston as an undergradu- 
 ate, — except as all things have historic in- 
 terest. Boston was a family, — a club, — 
 and is so still. Some people resent the fam- 
 ily atmosphere of Boston ; but I always liked 
 it. The people there speak of " Cousin 
 John " and expect you to know to whom they 
 refer. But this is charming! Someone 
 has said that Boston was the only city in 
 the world where when two ladies meet in 
 93 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 the street, one says, "How is he?" The 
 great business of Bostonians was to place 
 values upon everything in the world, with 
 conscientious accuracy. Professor Norton 
 once said to me on the steps of Sanders 
 Theatre, after a performance of Beetho- 
 ven's " Eroica Symphony," that, after all, 
 the " Sentiment "of the funeral march was 
 a little " forced." This was charming, too. 
 Of course it is not great or of the great 
 world. And yet I know that in Paris and 
 Berlin, in Oxford and Munich, there are 
 constantly arising cliques and coteries that 
 go on in the same sort of exclusive way. A 
 sect arises whose pursuit it is to praise Cim- 
 abue or damn Handel. I knew of a French 
 artist of whom great things were expected, 
 who could only laugh when Michael Angelo 
 was named. Michael Angelo made him 
 laugh. He could do nothing but laugh. It 
 was Boston's foible to set metes and bounds 
 to everything : that was the game which we 
 played; but it was a good game, and the 
 players were among the best-hearted people 
 in the world. 
 
 Mr. Brimmer's cultivation was, as has 
 been seen, not of the Bostonian brand. He 
 had no pose of any kind, no ambition. His 
 cultivation was unconscious. 
 94 
 
MR. BRIMMER 
 
 He was as much at home with a Turk as 
 with an Englishman, and had the natural 
 gravity which marks the Asiatic. He could, 
 upon occasion, be severe and masterful ; and 
 at such times his thin jaw would protrude 
 beneath his falling mustache. In that age 
 the wandering Englishman of fashion was 
 apt to drop in upon an American dinner- 
 party in his traveling jacket. One such of- 
 fender Mr. Brimmer caused to ascend in the 
 elevator to become arrayed in a suit from 
 the antique and honorable wardrobe of the 
 house, before being admitted to the feast. 
 I am sure that the host spoke with the 
 sweetness of King Arthur and Galahad in 
 making the suggestion to the stranger. 
 
 Mr. Brimmer's most powerful quality 
 was his patience. He could endure and go 
 on enduring almost to eternity. To a man 
 of his delicate physique and inner sensitive- 
 ness, the jolting of life must ever have been 
 painful; and he seemed often to be in pain; 
 but whether it was physical pain or mental 
 pain was hard to guess. Of all the virtues 
 the virtue of patience is most foreign to 
 youth: his power of patience impressed 
 me and awed me. I am quite sure that 
 if I should see him again I should be 
 as much at the mercy of his superiority and 
 95 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 of his quietude as I was at the age of twen- 
 ty-three. 
 
 I will not attempt to describe Mr. Brim- 
 mer's public activities. Everyone revered 
 him and regarded him as a model citizen, 
 the benefactor and manager of museums 
 and colleges. I only knew his social life. 
 He must always have stood by himself : he 
 seemed not to belong to any of the existing 
 Bostonian types. He told me that, at some 
 period during the war, when the cause of 
 the North looked particularly hopeless, he 
 had been at a dinner where many of the 
 most prominent men in Boston were gath- 
 ered to consider the military situation. It 
 was a formal occasion, at which men gave 
 their views seriatim. He was the only man 
 present who thought the war could be 
 pushed to a successful issue. Perhaps in 
 every generation there are solitary men, 
 who live like sentinels within their own 
 thoughts, watching the world. Their very 
 lack of personal aim makes them significant. 
 They exert an influence that is peculiarly in- 
 definable. They qualify other men. 
 
 The Brimmers had no children; but their 
 household, and indeed the whole little king- 
 dom that went with it, was greatly warmed 
 and caused to glow by the presence of the 
 96 
 
MR. BRIMMER 
 
 two Italian nieces. Each of these girls 
 grew up to be a remarkable woman, and died 
 early, leaving a great gap behind her, and 
 people looking up into heaven. I must 
 speak of them in this place, however, not so 
 much for their own sakes as because they 
 were a part of Mr. and Mrs. Brimmer. 
 They were the life of the establishment ; and 
 all the horses and carriages, banquets and 
 ceremonies, all the empty childless wealth of 
 the Brimmer household was glorified by 
 their presence. These young ladies were in 
 reality only half Italian, but they looked 
 wholly Italian, and they were in themselves 
 thoroughly foreign. The woman of north- 
 ern Europe is, after all, a washed-out affair. 
 Compared to the Mediterranean woman, she 
 is a drudge and a good creature merely. 
 The southern woman is an independent 
 spirit. In spite of the Greek theories as to 
 the suppression of the sex, Phaedra, Medea 
 and Sappho were as little suppressed as it is 
 possible to be. They had freedom of 
 thought and of conduct. Shakespeare's 
 women owe their charm to this quality of 
 freedom. He filched the type out of south- 
 ern stories, and he dressed it in northern in- 
 nocence. These two girls then, who looked 
 like figures out of the Vita Nuova, brought 
 97 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 with them from Italy the daring of a coun- 
 try where a woman is as good as a man, 
 while they inherited in their own natures 
 and from their American ancestors a sort 
 of Anglo-Saxon piety. They were or- 
 phans, devout Protestants, much traveled, 
 very good looking, rounded and spontane- 
 ous, modest and yet frankly emotional, 
 forthcoming and yet remote. I shall not 
 forget the first time that I saw them both. 
 It was at one of the great social functions 
 I have spoken of and at the moment when 
 the family were awaiting the arrival of the 
 crowd. The girls stood before the fire- 
 place, supporting the household like caria- 
 tyds and moved about through the rooms 
 like some new kind of nymphs; — but not 
 at all like the nymphs of Diana, rather like 
 nymphs of Ceres and Proserpina which the 
 God Pan had let loose in Boston. 
 
 These young girls hung garlands about 
 the declining years of their aunt and uncle, 
 being as devoted as daughters could have 
 been ; and then they vanished, almost at the 
 same time that the old people died. Thus 
 the whole structure of that enchanted pal- 
 ace, with its gates and gardens, its old serv- 
 ants, and stately banquets, its rose bushes 
 and aviaries, and with the old Knight Brim- 
 98 
 
MR. BRIMMER 
 
 mer and the two beautiful Italian girls, — 
 seemed to fall together and disappear in a 
 night. How they arose, I never knew, nor 
 how they vanished. 
 
 The following lines were written at the 
 time of his death: 
 
 The mask of life is fallen. Behold the 
 
 man 
 
 Such was he, and so is. How easily 
 Do all the accidents of earth drop off. 
 And as they fall, the Immortality 
 The soul departs to, shines through the clay. 
 Severe, calm, dominant : a general. — 
 Frail, yet the very manifest of Power. — 
 A look of life-long conquest on his brow. 
 Christ Militant, Thy soldier as he lies ! 
 Not for our eyes this bearing, but for Thine. 
 
 99 
 
MRS. WHITMAN 
 
VIII 
 
 MRS. WHITMAN 
 
 Social talent is a true and a rare thing; 
 and though it may contain some tincture of 
 ambition, as talent always does, this is but 
 a small part of the phenomenon. The es- 
 sence of it is a reverence for the talents of 
 other people, a belief in the powers of oth- 
 ers, a spiritual hospitality — which discov- 
 ers that other people are remarkable and 
 almost makes them so by lavishing an in- 
 credible faith upon their development. 
 
 The earliest reputation that Mrs. Whit- 
 man achieved was that of being an unknown 
 lady from some savage town, — Baltimore, 
 perhaps, — who had appeared in Boston. 
 It was not many years, however, before she 
 had become a center of social influence, and 
 of that peculiar kind of social influence in 
 which there are strands of art, idealism, — 
 intellect. The reason for her enduring con- 
 quest was that her chief interest always 
 lay with the young. Thus the future was 
 with her. 
 
 103 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 The discovery must every day be made 
 afresh that conversation is the life of liter- 
 ature, and perhaps of all the fine arts. 
 Writing is a sort of conventional lie, and a 
 rather dangerous one. The very greatest 
 men never write at all. But there is an es- 
 sential truth about conversation, which is 
 due to its fluid non-conclusiveness. Talk 
 leaves every question open : and every ques- 
 tion really is open. This is what is meant 
 by the so-called " art of conversation." 
 Plato knew the secret, and often resorts to 
 a sort of laborious equivocation in order to 
 keep life in his dialogues. The man who 
 writes always wants to conclude something 
 instead of being content to lay it bare. But 
 ideas sprout best after they have arisen and 
 have been plowed under in conversation. 
 Without this, they are apt to spread with a 
 sickly luxuriance into unprunable philoso- 
 phy, — dogmatic, difficult and falser than 
 flippancy itself. 
 
 I have sometimes thought that one dif- 
 ference between French and German liter- 
 ature is that the Frenchman is always in a 
 parlor ; while the German, on the other hand, 
 lives in the mining-camp of his profes- 
 sion. Of course there are German poets 
 and novelists who deal with social life; but 
 104 
 
MRS. WHITMAN 
 
 the Hewers and diggers of the race are al- 
 ways encroaching; they occupy history, 
 they invade journalism, they set up their 
 barracks around philosophy. They have 
 destroyed the German language; and all 
 this because they work in silence. Good 
 style is founded on speech. It is a weak- 
 ness in our colleges that the students are al- 
 ways scribbling in the lecture rooms. The 
 fountain pens should be taken from them 
 at the doors of the class rooms. Exam- 
 inations ought to be oral where possible, and 
 nothing ought to be found on an examina- 
 tion paper except what has been threshed 
 out in open discussion. If we could go one 
 step further and forbid the professors to 
 read their remarks from manuscript, we 
 should take a long stride towards the life of 
 the intellect. 
 
 It must be my excuse for this long pref- 
 ace that Mrs. Whitman was one who, some- 
 how, represented a rediscovery of the im- 
 portance of conversation. It was the 
 intrinsic nature of the woman rather than 
 any special intention that led her to take the 
 course she did. Clever men love to be ap- 
 preciated, and when, as rarely happens, a 
 woman is found with so much enthusiasm 
 for intelligence that she turns a special re- 
 105 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 flector upon anyone possessing it and gives 
 him the shock and glow of recognition, the 
 clever men will flock about her, and a sort 
 of salon will arise. It was not men alone 
 whom Mrs. Whitman fascinated by her 
 sympathy. She subdued every sort of per- 
 son, especially old ladies, especially young 
 school girls, especially her own incorrupti- 
 ble contemporaries, who had never known 
 such a creature before, but who sooner or 
 later lay in chains to her resourceful per- 
 sonality. 
 
 I remember a curious Bostonian cock- 
 fight at her studio, where Professor Royce 
 and Judge Oliver Wendell Holmes were 
 pitted against each other to talk about the 
 Infinite. Royce won, of course, — some- 
 what after the manner of Gladstone, — by 
 involving the subject in such adamantine 
 cobwebs of voluminous rolling speculation 
 that no one could regain his senses there- 
 after. He not only cut the ground from 
 under everyone's feet; but he pulled down 
 the sun and moon, and raised up the ocean, 
 and everyone was shipwrecked and took to 
 small planks and cups of tea. 
 
 Mrs. Whitman was surrounded by gen- 
 iuses. I didn't always believe in the rest 
 of them, but I believed that somehow I must 
 106 
 
MRS. WHITMAN 
 
 be a good one, — not so great as she be- 
 lieved, but still something quite considera- 
 ble in my own way. She had an unterri- 
 fied way of dealing with social life that 
 would have made her a force in any com- 
 munity. If James Russell Lowell came to 
 town, she would give a dinner party of 
 twelve young people to meet him. He 
 played up considerably upon one such occa- 
 sion, though in a manner that was more his- 
 torically interesting than socially pleasant. 
 This was at the end of his life, when he 
 wore a high hat with British obstinacy, and 
 looked askance at the Common. He ex- 
 actly resembled the portraits which we see 
 of him on the calendars. And when some 
 nice Senior from Harvard ventured to 
 launch a very decent remark in his direc- 
 tion, Mr. Lowell corrected his grammar 
 and delivered a lecture upon the uses of 
 "shall" and "will." This was "Seeing 
 Boston" with a vengeance; and yet who 
 would not be glad to carry about with him 
 the recollection of the megaphone? 
 
 Mrs. Whitman used, in entertaining, to 
 mingle old and young together. To do this 
 is the first requisite of agreeable society, 
 and the only way of civilizing the younger 
 generation. Wherever the practice falls 
 107 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 into disuse, the boys and girls will run to 
 seed as they grow up. Young people are 
 naturally barbarians; and unless they are 
 furnished with examples of good manners 
 they soon become negligent, unashamed and 
 illiterate. They forget those reserves 
 which embody the traditions of centuries, 
 and which add charm and intensity to so- 
 cial enjoyment. They would forget read- 
 ing and writing, history, clothes, the multi- 
 plication table and how to tell time, if they 
 were entirely abandoned by their elders. 
 Well-bred older persons unconsciously dom- 
 inate the imagination of the young, and in- 
 form them as to many matters without ut- 
 tering a word. In this way good traditions 
 are preserved. The civilizing process goes 
 forward in the drawing rooms of every 
 country in Europe ; but in America the prac- 
 tice prevails of leaving the young people to 
 themselves. The consequence is that the 
 children of our nicest families often behave 
 as if they had never seen an educated per- 
 son or entered a drawing room. The 
 young savages are at Coney Island now, 
 and will be at Hayti to-morrow, unless the 
 custom is revived of bringing old and young 
 together for the amusements of life. 
 
 This lack of social training in our young 
 108 
 
MRS. WHITMAN 
 
 people is, by the way, merely a sample of 
 our great national defect. If one were to 
 give, in a single word, the difference be- 
 tween Europe and America, the word would 
 be training. What we need most in every 
 department of life, — in scholarship, in sci- 
 ence, in journalism, in administrative busi- 
 ness and in the decorative arts, — is train- 
 ing. Neither aptitude, intellect, nor ambi- 
 tion; neither love nor religion is lacking to 
 us. Our great need is a need of training. 
 
 It was not through any pedagogic theory, 
 however, that Mrs. Whitman was led to 
 mingle old and young at her parties. She 
 was devoted to the individuals that she 
 asked to her house ; and that was the whole 
 secret of their being there. 
 
 There are people whose interests and af- 
 fections lie in the world of personality, to 
 whom the whole of life is made up of peo- 
 ple. Mrs. Alice Freeman Palmer (whom I 
 never met) was such a woman. Not 
 thoughts, not ideas, not religions, but peo- 
 ple made the universe for her ; and this gave 
 her incommunicable, unimaginable access to 
 people's hearts. She held the keys of them, 
 — thousands of keys to thousands of indi- 
 viduals, — and they each felt themselves to 
 be understood when they met her ; they felt 
 109 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 as it were, in contact with the power that 
 made them. This sort of entry into peo- 
 ple's minds Mrs. Whitman also had, though 
 it was in a field of life quite different from 
 Mrs. Palmer's field. Her province was 
 both wider and narrower than Mrs. Pal- 
 mer's. But for each of these women, peo- 
 ple made up life. If you will consider 
 the great permanent, practical needs of the 
 world, you will see that one of them is the 
 need of such focal personalities as these. 
 Our University towns to-day are little Mec- 
 cas for young enthusiasm. How sad is it to 
 see the ignorant freshmen wandering about 
 Harvard Square — and to find the same 
 men again as Seniors, often wandering back 
 to their distant homes, having found the 
 cribs at Harvard but not having found any- 
 one who could teach them how to draw 
 down the fodder. Benevolence alone will 
 not make a teacher, nor will learning alone 
 do it. The gift of teaching is a peculiar 
 talent, and implies a need and a craving in 
 the teacher himself. 
 
 It would be impossible to say how much a 
 whole generation, of whom I was one, owed 
 to Mrs. Whitman; for her activity intro- 
 duced us to one another and brought us 
 forward. She would take no end of 
 no 
 
MRS. WHITMAN 
 
 trouble. For years after many of us had 
 left Boston, upon hearing that one of us 
 was to pass through the town, she would 
 improvise a meeting of the twenty persons 
 the visitor most desired to see there. When 
 she died a whole society seemed to be sud- 
 denly extinguished. Vesuvius had covered 
 the town of Boston, and we went about pok- 
 ing among the ashes to find each other in 
 holes, corners and side streets. 
 
 I find again and again in writing these 
 memories that the most telling personalities 
 I have known often, upon reflection, 
 vaguely suggest tragedy. But tragedy is 
 too strong a word; — perhaps renunciation 
 or apparent failure would be better. The 
 men and women who make the best boon 
 companions seem to have given up hope of 
 doing something else. They have, perhaps, 
 tried to be poets and painters; they have 
 tried to be actors, scientists and musicians. 
 But some defect of talent or of opportunity 
 has cut them off from their pet ambition, 
 and has thus left them with leisure to take 
 an interest in the lives of others. Your 
 ambitious man is selfish. No matter how 
 secret his ambition may be, it makes him 
 keep his thoughts at home. He is putting 
 pennies in the slot for himself every few 
 in 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 moments. What sort of a man is that, 
 then, to open one's heart to? He would 
 be sure to advise you to take a liver-pill and 
 to think no more of the matter. But the 
 heartbroken people, — if I may use the 
 word in a mild, benevolent sense, — the peo- 
 ple whose wills are subdued to fate, give 
 us consolation, recognition and welcome. 
 There is nothing that we can do for such 
 natures in return save to accept the situa- 
 tion and be thankful. 
 
 112 
 
GREEK AS A PLEASURE 
 
IX 
 
 GREEK AS A PLEASURE 
 
 I know not how it may be with other men, 
 but to me, poetical translations of the Greek 
 tragedians have ever been one of the disap- 
 pointments and annoyances of life. The 
 great reputations of the originals stand out 
 as a never-dying taunt and challenge, luring 
 on the adventurous soul. As he approaches 
 the Greek text, these poetical versions 
 pounce forward upon him, seize, bewilder, 
 fatigue and out-weary him with their thou- 
 sand-fold flounces and flappings of literary 
 contrivance. They dance like gypsies and 
 pose like models, till he retires to his tent in 
 disgust — retires miles and miles away, to 
 his rightful avocation, to family life, poli- 
 tics and modern literature. Then again, it 
 may be years later, on some fine day his at- 
 tention is again caught by the looming Co- 
 lossi afar off behind the huts of the prepos- 
 terous scholars, and again he glances to- 
 wards ^schylus, Sophocles, Euripides. 
 115 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 Now there is a mean, sneaking, and de- 
 spised band of hackmen, who, for a few 
 pence stand ready to give one a near view of 
 the great figures. I mean the literal trans- 
 lators, and formerly these honest villains 
 would really bring one up to the great crea- 
 tures and show one something of their anat- 
 omy. To be sure, you were not in good 
 society while with the Bohns — -you were 
 not in literature, but you got a whiff and 
 inkling that was of mighty interest; you 
 got a Greek feeling, a gritty taste of truth ; 
 you could imagine the poetic form as read- 
 ily as you could imagine the theatrical set- 
 ting. I have noticed with alarm in more 
 recent years, a growing tendency of the uni- 
 versities to suborn these useful hacks and 
 to dress them in belles lettres. The varlets 
 now wear shirt frills. The good old 
 tramp translators are going out; and the 
 Colossi are being enclosed by a syndicate of 
 impenetrable literary ambition. It is a vain 
 solace to remember Edward Fitzgerald and 
 Gilbert Murray — and if you will, Brown- 
 ing, Swinburne, Matthew Arnold and the 
 other translators of genius, who have en- 
 riched the English language with transfu- 
 sions of amazing beauty, drawn from the 
 Greek. The value of such men is a value 
 116 
 
GREEK AS A PLEASURE 
 
 added to modern life and to English liter- 
 ature. It all tends to advertise, yet to ob- 
 scure, the Greek. They are in an uncon- 
 scious conspiracy to befool the world with 
 new sorceries, and to enclose the oracles 
 with an interpretation so dazzling and so 
 engaging as to balk the curiosity of half the 
 world. 
 
 When I made this discovery, I deter- 
 mined to learn Greek, or at any rate to read 
 Greek by the light of every facility except 
 literature — a little of it anyway — a play, 
 half a play, a speech, a couplet — something 
 that was in itself the thing I sought, and 
 not a rendering of it. I had recourse to the 
 garret of memory and there I found a small 
 seedbag of moldy Greek, and with this I be- 
 gan experiments. On reexamining the first 
 readers and easy grammars which my whole 
 generation had been put through, it seemed 
 to me that they were admirable primers. 
 None need be better. Then why did I not 
 know Greek? The reason was that I had 
 never followed up the beginnings. I had 
 never read a page of Greek out of natural 
 curiosity, nor had I ever seesr anyone else 
 do such a thing as to read Greek for pleas- 
 ure. If anyone will read ten pages of Eng- 
 lish in the manner in which the schoolboy 
 "7 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 is taught Greek, he will see why Greek is 
 dropped by the boy as soon as possible. 
 Let anyone analyze ten pages of English, 
 answer grammatical questions upon it, let 
 him be asked to parse and give the parts of 
 irregular verbs, to distinguish between vari- 
 eties of subjunctive, and he will begin to 
 loathe English literature. For some deep 
 psychological reason the best books to con- 
 strue are often dull books. Perhaps an 
 amusing book might distract the student's 
 attention. Caesar's Commentaries is the 
 dullest book in Latin. It is like making a 
 road to read it. It is not a book; it is a 
 stone-crushing machine. The teacher, a 
 two-dollar-a-day man, stands beside the ma- 
 chine and runs it. And this is the Classics. 
 It may be asked, At what point should 
 the reading for pleasure begin? It should 
 begin at about the second lesson, when some 
 entertaining sentence or verse should be 
 learned — as the Lorelei is learned on the 
 first day of German. A little of the lan- 
 guage should be put in alive into the child's 
 mind each day; and the grammar should 
 then come behind and sweep up, and ex- 
 plain ; it should be kept as a necessary uten- 
 sil. This relationship should be maintained 
 throughout life; and the attention should be 
 118 
 
GREEK AS A PLEASURE 
 
 kept on the meanings which occur in sen- 
 tences and verses, rather than on the shad- 
 ows of them which the grammars have 
 worked out. The reason why the cart is 
 put before the horse in classical education 
 is that the grammarians through whose ad- 
 mirable labors it is that we possess the class- 
 ics at all, have always been interested in the 
 cart. It has been their province to study 
 out a rule; and they have interposed this 
 rule between us and the language. They 
 have done it with the best intentions. 
 
 There is another circumstance which 
 largely accounts for our inherited misteach- 
 ing of Latin and Greek. The learned world 
 has been digging out the classics for the last 
 four hundred years; and the ideals of the 
 learned world are accurate scholarship and 
 scientific precision. It is probably right 
 that the learned world should have such 
 ideals — or should have had them during 
 this epoch. And yet accurate scholarship 
 and scientific precision are illusions in the 
 case of language, and there is no scholar 
 living who could write a page of Greek 
 without making ludicrous errors — errors 
 of the sort that the Anglo-Indian makes in 
 writing English, which he has learned from 
 books. If even Mr. Mackail or Gilbert 
 119 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 Murray or Nauck, that great, horrible 
 mythic monster — should spend a whole 
 day in dove-tailing phrases which they had 
 fished out of Plato or Thucydides to make 
 an essay of, the chances are that any Athe- 
 nian would laugh five times to the page 
 over the performance. 
 
 If the whole subject were dealt with more 
 lightly, if Greek were treated as, say, French 
 is treated by Frenchmen and Italian by Ital- 
 ians, hundreds of boys would learn Greek 
 with delight and read it easily all their lives, 
 progressing from the simpler authors to the 
 more difficult ones as one goes from iEsop 
 to Thucydides. The whole parade of accu- 
 racy should be deliberately subordinated, 
 and allowed to take its rank in each pupil's 
 mind according to his ambition, destination 
 and disposition. If a boy is going to be- 
 come a teacher of Greek he must take the 
 grammar seriously, but if he only wants to 
 read Greek as he reads French he can get 
 on with a very distant salute to many charm- 
 ing questions. 
 
 There should be a great Reader in large 
 print, made up of bits and fragments — 
 dotes, verses, scenes from the dramatists, 
 fragments of Plutarch, Homer and Herod- 
 otus. And the boys should be encouraged 
 1 20 
 
GREEK AS A PLEASURE 
 
 to read in this book small bits at a time, and 
 easy bits first. And the teacher should be 
 satisfied when the sense is understood and 
 should push the boys on to read and to read, 
 and not to bother about the grammar. 
 Enough grammar will filter into them by de- 
 grees to make them understand the construc- 
 tions — and what else is grammar for ? Let 
 the tutor have no ambition to make the boys 
 write Greek. The desire to write Greek is 
 an exotic thing. If a boy has it, let him be 
 encouraged, of course; but let it not be 
 forced upon the next boy. As a matter of 
 fact, the best way to learn to write any lan- 
 guage is to read plenty of it ; to learn frag- 
 ments by heart, and fill the mind with the 
 sound of it; then to write it by ear; and 
 thereafter to work up the grammar in cor- 
 recting what has been written. This is the 
 way to learn French or German; why not 
 Greek? Language is a thing of the ear, 
 and is most easily learned by the ear, and 
 in quantities. Let the children have more 
 Greek, and ever more Greek, and let gram- 
 mar and critical analysis be kept for dessert. 
 When one thinks of the thousands of 
 teachers who are obliged to plod year after 
 year through the same portions of Xeno- 
 phon and Virgil and through the same 
 
 121 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 scenes of Homer, just because of the fear 
 of the Learned World lest the boys should 
 learn the wrong kind of Greek — when one 
 sees the stunting of intelligence, the dead- 
 ening of interest that must come from such 
 a process — one does not, wonder at the de- 
 cay of Greek in our universities. We have 
 been doing what is hard; we ought to do 
 what is easy. 
 
 This long preface may introduce a few 
 brief remarks upon the pleasure and instruc- 
 tion a man may get from a language which 
 he understands in an imperfect, self-taught 
 way. A person who knows, or thinks he 
 knows, no Latin may experience this pleas- 
 ure by looking over a collection of Latin 
 phrases and proverbs. His brain is fed and 
 transformed by a new stimulus. No one 
 need apologize for attacking the classics in 
 the spirit of amateur curiosity. It was in 
 this manner that Goethe read them. Nor 
 need we believe that their gifts and their in- 
 structions are poured out in proportion to 
 the accuracy of the recipient's education in 
 grammar. There are fountains which are 
 closed through the study of grammar as 
 well as fountains which are opened. A be- 
 lief in the importance of grammar often 
 acts as a grating between mind and litera- 
 
 122 
 
GREEK AS A PLEASURE 
 
 ture. There is, to be quite frank, a certain 
 amount of humbug about all grammar. 
 This was true in the time of Protagoras 
 and Aristotle, and became more true as the 
 study was more seriously pursued in the Al- 
 exandrine epoch, and as the hardy scholars 
 began to erect wire nettings in the window 
 frames fronting the landscapes of litera- 
 ture. 
 
 The modern science of grammar, which 
 is based upon a mediaeval edition of Alexan- 
 drine conceptions, seems to have lost none 
 of the rigidity, fussiness and conceit of the 
 Alexandrine epoch. We are obliged to 
 come at Greek poetry through this medium 
 — which did not exist when the poetry was 
 written; but which has been developed and 
 added to, as one of the side products of 
 Western education. Its relation to ancient 
 poetry and to ancient ways of feeling grows 
 falser as time goes on. In the time of the 
 Greek tragedians noun and verb and ad- 
 jective and conjunction, as we know them, 
 existed not. Greek adjectives are half 
 nouns, pronouns are voices, and might 
 easily be called so; prepositions are moody, 
 bat-like things, and ought probably to be 
 called moods. The verbs turn into nouns 
 upon the slightest provocation, and the case- 
 123 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 endings attract and eat each other up with 
 whimsical facility. All is done for the sen- 
 timent of the ear, nothing for rule, all is 
 governed by a supergrammatical instinct, 
 which the modern mind can neither practice 
 nor understand. All the words in Greek 
 take their meanings from each other to an 
 extent not easily conceivable. Their wings 
 are in motion like butterflies that will not 
 alight. The air is full of the petals of par- 
 ticles for which we have no modern equiva- 
 lents and which yet flutter and wheel with 
 an inner poetry and an inimitable logic of 
 their own. We were men before we were 
 scholars, and therefore these things affect 
 us like music. 
 
 The grammarian, with his immense cabi- 
 net of miniature surgical instruments, at- 
 tacks this fairyland. He weaves about it 
 a whole underworld of weird, unearthly, 
 morbid wisdom. Grammar is a strange 
 study which clouds the mind like opium. 
 A language is invented, dark and technical, 
 like mediaeval law, like mediaeval theology, 
 an ontological language which moves among 
 half -understood and awesome realities — 
 like Dante in purgatory. It is this gloomy 
 and fascinating tongue which the students 
 learn — a tongue much harder than Greek, 
 124 
 
GREEK AS A PLEASURE 
 
 and possessing a literature many times as 
 large as classical Greek literature and made 
 up entirely of grammars. This cabalistic 
 language is ever pushed forward by the 
 scholars. 
 
 Everything that has ever been written 
 about the Classics has had its influence in 
 bringing us to them. Let us accept all this 
 steering with gratitude, and come into port. 
 Let us shut our guidebooks, and look at the 
 works and fragments of antiquity with all 
 our eyes. 
 
 125 
 
CHARLES ELIOT NORTON 
 
X 
 
 CHARLES ELIOT NORTON 
 
 Professor Charles Eliot Norton was 
 an important influence in undergraduate 
 life when I was at Harvard; in some ways 
 he was the most important man there. He 
 took a personal interest in the student. You 
 heard about Goodwin; you heard about 
 Lane; but you knew Norton. Everyone 
 knew him. He was an academic power of 
 the first magnitude, a great individuality 
 through whom the best traditions of Amer- 
 ican college life were continued. He gave 
 to his students not only what he knew, but 
 what he was. To do this implies greatness ; 
 and it is really by this kind of greatness 
 that men are judged, whether they be teach- 
 ers or men of action: it is this unique part 
 of a man that makes his value. If we cast 
 an eye back over the last half -century in 
 America we shall not see so many great in- 
 dividualities that we are tempted to pass 
 by or forget the figure of a great professor. 
 129 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 Our age has been an age of management, 
 not of ideas or of men. Our problems have 
 been problems of transportation and hous- 
 ing, not of thought. Our great men have 
 been executive persons, whose merit was to 
 serve the public convenience in practical 
 ways. Our greatest pedagogues have gen- 
 erally been mere administrators. As for 
 teaching in the mystical and personal sense 
 — teaching in its religious and spiritual 
 meaning — we have not had time for it. 
 Yet there have been a few sages even in our 
 generation. Some of them have been mas- 
 ters and under-masters in schools; some of 
 them have been private persons — mere 
 characters of eminence. Let us acknowl- 
 edge our debt to these men as we should to 
 a spirit; for through them we are united 
 to the larger interests of humanity, and our 
 children's heritage has passed through their 
 devout hands. 
 
 One of these sages was Professor Nor- 
 ton. I would not call him a world sage, 
 or a key to humanity at large, but a local 
 sage, and a key to his own epoch. How 
 well he fitted into his times may be seen in 
 his immediate usefulness; and by the light 
 of this hint we may study the state of cul- 
 ture in the America of his day. The most 
 130 
 
From the bust by Victor B. Brenner 
 
 CHARLES ELIOT NORTON 
 
CHARLES ELIOT NORTON 
 
 powerful part of his work was not that 
 which played directly on the great public 
 through his writings ; it lay in his enormous 
 influence over the youth who sat under him ; 
 and his image as it rises out of the past car- 
 ries inspiration to professors everywhere. 
 He was a man of much complexity of dis- 
 position, and it is impossible for anyone 
 to give a true account of him who knew him 
 as slightly as I did. But I will tell my im- 
 pressions of him — both the earlier ones 
 and the modifications of them which came 
 about through time. For, as Norton grew 
 older, the core of him began to shine 
 through its coverings; and at the age of 
 eighty he was plainly nothing else than a 
 darling old saint, with a few sophistical hob- 
 bies which, when you went to see him, he 
 drew from his cabinet and showed you with 
 glee — old philosophical gimcracks. These 
 things you perceived at once to be of no 
 importance ; while the man himself was 
 everything. 
 
 In 1880 he was a man of fifty-three whose 
 face showed immense character. He had 
 the stoop of the student, the measured, ac- 
 curate speech of the New England man of 
 letters, a manner of speech, indeed, which 
 betrayed all things at a clap. It betrayed 
 131 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 early piety, later skepticism, the interest of 
 the amateur in the fine arts, consciousness of 
 caste, immense force of character, and a 
 fundamental goodness. His speech both 
 betrayed and concealed a personal feeling 
 of interest and kindliness, a real unselfish- 
 ness and power of sacrifice which was the 
 mainspring of his life and was the cause of 
 its immense utility. 
 
 Yet in spite of his forthcoming quality 
 there was in Norton something that balked. 
 If Goethe could say of Schiller that he was 
 like a camel, I may be permitted to say of 
 Norton that even his greatest admirer or 
 best friend felt in him an element of mulish- 
 ness which nothing could quell or guide save 
 the power that made him. He was not a 
 bad mule; he was good; but you felt that 
 he was putting his feet down somewhere 
 and was prepared to resist. Even before 
 you spoke you received an ultimatum. 
 
 This was merely the vestibule of Norton. 
 Many people never got beyond this vesti- 
 bule; but turned away resentfully from the 
 polite, sardonic, patronizing smile of the 
 host, and from the assumption that there 
 was a sanctuary somewhere hidden within 
 the house. They left him standing with the 
 doorknob in his hand. Many men remem- 
 132 
 
CHARLES ELIOT NORTON 
 
 bered this vestibule all their lives thereafter, 
 and could never speak peaceably of Norton. 
 Those who pushed forward boldly, how- 
 ever, and came to close quarters and even to 
 hard knocks, liked Norton. They found 
 frankness behind his sophistication, reli- 
 gion behind his irreligion, and bonhomie 
 behind his crudeness. 
 
 Norton's sense that he had a mission 
 probably arose out of his clerical caste, and 
 from the strong aristocratic feeling of those 
 old Puritan first-families, who felt that they 
 must be leaders in Israel. And he did have 
 a mission too, though his mission was of a 
 humbler sort than his exterior proclaimed; 
 and his function more closely resembled 
 that of an expert librarian than that of a 
 Taoist priest. With regard to Norton's 
 original piety and its transformation into a 
 militant skepticism, — the tradition was that 
 he had been, in his earliest years, the perfect 
 young saint of Unitarianism ; but that con- 
 tact with freethinkers during a visit to Eng- 
 land, and the loss of his young wife had up- 
 set his faith. The sense of his vocation, 
 however, survived the change in his faith, 
 as so often happens; and a slight hostility 
 to Christianity thereafter tinged his mind. 
 i33 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 These things, however, had happened in the 
 dark ages, long before I was in College. 
 
 At the time I first knew him he was a 
 widower, and his many children surrounded 
 his board and filled his comfortable old 
 mansion at Shady Hill. To this home he 
 brought many a student for dinner or for 
 supper with the family. There was noth- 
 ing he would not do in the way of opening 
 books, and of showing objects and inducing 
 his children and his young guests to talk 
 upon literature and on the topics of the day. 
 The household itself made a happy picture, 
 and one of Norton's passions was to fill his 
 house with the poor and the needy. On 
 Christmas Day he made of Shady Hill a 
 refuge for all the students who came from 
 such distances that they could not go home 
 for the holidays. But Cambridge was not 
 Norton's only home. He had a country 
 house at Ashfield, Massachusetts, and in 
 this community he made of himself a village 
 sachem, a friend of the country-folk. 
 There was held at Ashfield a yearly harvest- 
 home feast at which he used to preside and 
 George William Curtis and other worthies 
 used to make speeches. It was a charming 
 and a sincere celebration, and showed that 
 134 
 
CHARLES ELIOT NORTON 
 
 rarest of all phenomena in America, the re- 
 lation of the man of intellect to the soil. 
 He did these things in the aristocratic man- 
 ner. Indeed, he was a grand exemplar of 
 a dignified and ancient race. If he stopped 
 to talk to an old neighbor in the country, 
 it was with the graciousness of a prince; 
 if he gave a lecture before the audience of 
 a rural lyceum, he distributed his thoughts 
 like largess. Behind his aristocracy of 
 breeding, moreover, there was manhood, 
 sincerity, good feeling, — the instinct of hu- 
 man solidarity. 
 
 We all know what solidarity of innate 
 power arises out of the family feeling of 
 class and county. Tiny nations and small 
 cities have had it. It is the foundation of 
 art and of character. It is the invisible arm 
 behind the stroke of wit. It stages intel- 
 lect and makes every man speak with the 
 voice of a nation. Without this reservoir 
 of sentiment behind and above him a man 
 is a bag of clothes and his personality is tin- 
 sel. The constant change of habitat of men 
 in this country, and our jumble of national- 
 ities, is like the tossing of the Persian 
 princes in a blanket: it makes men aliens 
 and non-conductors; they die for lack of 
 rest in one another. 
 
 135 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES ■ 
 
 Norton knew or felt this and he fastened 
 himself to the ground by such anchors as 
 he had inherited or had forged for himself. 
 This instinct was part of the strong side of 
 him and it coexisted, as we shall see later, 
 with a habit of caviling at his own nation, 
 as if he were some sort of foreign-born 
 macaroni. To do this, however, is a hu- 
 man foible to which any man may fall a 
 victim. I had a classmate at college who 
 had never been far from South Boston, and 
 one evening while dancing at the Dorches- 
 ter Assembly he slipped and fell to the 
 ground. He arose at once with great 
 aplomb, remarking, coldly, " These cursed 
 American floors ! " 
 
 Esthetically Norton was weak; he had 
 the stiff New England brain which (nat- 
 urally) had never come in contact with the 
 fine arts in childhood, but had learned them 
 as a grown man learns French. He was 
 thus in the position of a demonstrator or 
 magician in regard to all the subjects which 
 became the passion of his life. He han- 
 dled these subjects well; he was not a part 
 of them. Most of us occupy the same 
 somewhat tragic relation to the plastic arts, 
 and we have grown astute to discount our 
 own impressions and to remember the com- 
 136 
 
CHARLES ELIOT NORTON 
 
 plexities of the matter. The American 
 scholar of to-day is modest about Italy. But 
 the pioneer American scholar who discov- 
 ered the fine arts and returned to America 
 from a North Pole expedition to Italy, 
 where he had found them and staked them 
 out — could not know his own limitations. 
 It always requires a long time for a young 
 nation to become initiated into the fine arts. 
 
 Before settling down at Harvard, Nor- 
 ton had not only discovered the fine arts in 
 Italy, but he had fallen in with that brave 
 band of Britishers who had also discovered 
 the fine arts (especially the fifteenth cen- 
 tury), and he became a friend of Ruskin, 
 and of all those extremely purposeful, ar- 
 tistic, and literary English people — the pre- 
 Raphaelites. It was a band or gang that 
 he joined in England. That was the 
 trouble with it — it was a movement. Nor- 
 ton stood toward this group of men in the 
 position of a satellite — so strongly marked 
 was the division in him between a powerful 
 moral nature (which was never satellite to 
 anything or to anybody) and a slightly 
 flimsy esthetic understanding, which in 
 early manhood had fettered him to this 
 school. 
 
 It was probably this scholastic attitude 
 137 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 which offended the young and not unself- 
 conscious student who accepted the hospital- 
 ities of Shady Hill, yet winced under the 
 powerful preciosity of its master. There 
 was something in all the members of the 
 Boston Clique of Letters which at the age 
 of twenty I deeply resented. With the ex- 
 ception of Holmes (for Emerson did not 
 belong to Boston), the Boston Pundits had 
 a pose. I rather believe that all literary sets 
 have a pose, just as actors often have; and 
 to persons who know the world a pose is a 
 pardonable weakness. But the pose of the 
 litterateur appears to the very young person 
 to be case-hardened and supercilious. Pro- 
 fessor Norton was particularly kind to me 
 and often asked me to his home; and yet 
 I did not more than half like him. If he 
 handed you a curio or a remark, it was done 
 with the assumption that he knew more 
 about such things than you could ever 
 know. He had that false relation to the 
 things of the mind — you might call it the 
 Platonic relation, for Plato is the greatest 
 exponent of it — a relation which assumed 
 that they were playthings and that he knew 
 the game. 
 
 The man who dealt with ideas in this pat- 
 ronizing manner was no mere dilettante, 
 138 
 
CHARLES ELIOT NORTON 
 
 He was a patriot whose health had disqual- 
 ified him for military service, but who had 
 served his country throughout the war in 
 the arduous, obscure, and useful work of- 
 the Loyal Publication Society. He was a 
 whole-hearted man whose devotion to his 
 friends, whose public spirit, whose recti- 
 tude and simplicity of life, ranked him with 
 the Good Man of the Psalms and with the 
 Staunch Citizen of Horace. 
 
 Everything that Norton did had a certain 
 natural force in it. He belonged to the 
 Puritan race and was first cousin to Presi- 
 dent Eliot. He shared with Eliot a pity for 
 the poor, an extreme tenderness and good- 
 ness toward poor students. He shared with 
 Eliot an incorruptible obtuseness as toward 
 things unborn — things creative, poetic, and 
 of the temperament. In fact, he was very 
 like Eliot. He resembled Eliot in his ef- 
 fectiveness; and — since I have put it off 
 till now — I must say that Norton's life- 
 work consisted in making the unlettered, 
 rough youth of America understand that 
 there were such things as architecture, paint- 
 ing, and sculpture. Norton could do this 
 on a grand scale, to two hundred men at 
 once ; he did it as a giant crane-shovel digs 
 the Panama Canal. He did it with great 
 139 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 strokes of natural power, often with tears 
 in his eyes, sometimes with sarcasm, some- 
 times dogmatically, but always successfully. 
 More men have told me what Norton did 
 for them in opening their understanding to 
 the influence of art than have ever spoken 
 to me of all the rest of Harvard's profes- 
 sors put together. 
 
 It was strange to see doctrine which — 
 intellectually speaking — was a thin wash 
 of estheticism, being ladled out like hot sal- 
 vation to the hungry and shivering youth of 
 America. Yet the sincerity on both sides 
 was perfect, and the needs both of the giver 
 and of the receivers of the doctrine were 
 satisfied. It was only equality that Norton 
 did not understand ; to suppliants he was as 
 sweet as summer. 
 
 He had another quality which combined 
 oddly enough with his zeal. He loved to 
 tease; he was naughty. He liked to use 
 his skepticism in religious matters as a prod 
 to excite conventional-minded persons; he 
 liked to make disparaging remarks about his 
 countrymen and about their all-too-obvious 
 deficiencies. The enjoyment of a notoriety 
 which came out of these smart sayings and 
 old-maidish whimsicalities of opinion must 
 be classed as a weakness in Norton; but it 
 140 
 
CHARLES ELIOT NORTON 
 
 must also be classed as a trifle. His social 
 contemporaries were apt to have a sneer for 
 him, because from his early youth he had 
 gone his own gait and followed the bent of 
 his own character and talents. The most 
 famous of these jibes deserves to be re- 
 corded for its own sake. A college-mate of 
 Norton's while traveling in Italy wrote 
 home to a friend, " At Florence I ran across 
 Charles Norton — sowing his tame oats/' 
 It seems to me now that the idiosyncrasies 
 of such a man (especially in America) are 
 in themselves a blessing to his generation; 
 or, at any rate, that all of Norton's foibles 
 were as nothing compared with his merits. 
 In England and France people take pride in 
 the mental nodosities of their great men; 
 people know that character and eccentricity 
 go together. At the time I first knew him 
 Norton was often designedly irritating; and 
 it required more philosophy than most 
 Americans are masters of to forgive him 
 for his sallies. 
 
 As for Norton's yeoman's work in trans- 
 lating Dante, in writing memoirs of his 
 friends, in editing letters, in providing pref- 
 aces for many kinds of works, in being an 
 accurate scholar and faithful slave to good 
 literature, I think no one can deny that his 
 141 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 times are in debt to him. He was one of 
 our best men in those fields of work. Here, 
 too, in editing and writing (as in teaching), 
 he had a genius for utility. He regarded 
 himself as a useful drudge, and up to his 
 very last hours he was engaged in serving 
 the cause of sound scholarship to the utmost 
 of his power. 
 
 During his last years he lost all his acidity 
 and he retained all his affectionateness. He 
 must have found out that his earlier exclu- 
 siveness and pose of cultivation were not 
 worth keeping up, for they dropped from 
 off him, and left him rosy. He was a beam- 
 ing little old gentleman with a note as sweet 
 as an eighteenth-century organ — such an 
 organ as you find in the hallway of an Eng- 
 lish country house — mellow, gentle, and 
 touching in the extreme. He remembered 
 his scholars and welcomed them back; he 
 always made time to see them, and he really 
 became beautiful as a picture and a pres- 
 ence. Happy are they who have him to look 
 back upon in their lives. 
 
 One of Professor Norton* s latest labors 
 was the preparation of that series of Heart 
 of Oak Readers for school children which 
 have made the work of the schoolmaster 
 easy. This graduated series of readers re- 
 142 
 
CHARLES ELIOT NORTON 
 
 minds one by its perfection of those French 
 text books containing morceau choisis, in 
 which the talent and industry of a lifetime 
 and the extended range of a learned man's 
 mind have been employed in choosing ex- 
 tracts for children to study. You think you 
 are reading a book of stray passages ; yet so 
 subtly are the pieces chosen for their his- 
 toric interest, for their emotional appeal, for 
 their poetic merit, that you are really being 
 played upon at first hand by master minds 
 of literature. . 
 
 Men's characters come to us from their 
 graves. For life is dazzling and complex: 
 we cannot grasp it, we never understand the 
 heart-in-action. But when the heart has 
 stopped beating forever we turn to the lamp 
 and the manuscript. Some artist pulls aside 
 a curtain and shows us the man. He be- 
 comes better known to posterity than he was 
 to his intimate friends. If we could know 
 the living as we know the dead, and meet 
 them in that realm of the intellect in which 
 we find their pictures, memoirs and souls' 
 histories, human intercourse would be tinged 
 with perpetual romance. I can, for in- 
 stance, at this moment, feel how Norton in 
 his later years would have been amused at 
 the descriptions of his more crabbed period. 
 i43 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 He would have laughed at the tale of his 
 own foibles. Nay further, it is plain that 
 upon very little provocation he would have 
 laughed at himself at any time during his 
 life. Thus in taking a telescopic view back- 
 ward through a man's whole life, we may 
 catch for a moment, a glimpse of what no 
 one could guess who saw only a part. At 
 the time events are happening they are 
 dumb ; and refuse to give up their meaning. 
 But afterwards they begin to give out 
 thoughts and half-thoughts in flashes. 
 
 How impossible is it to predict which of 
 two young men has the main talent — 
 which of them will end by establishing 
 himself and forcing his times to accept him. 
 The greatest talent of all is a talent for life; 
 and this often lies hidden under a mound of 
 golden inertia, or of frivolity and incom- 
 petence, and is brought to the surface by 
 those slow upheavals which run through the 
 world and bring the slow men to the top. 
 When I look at a row of little boys I often 
 wonder which one of them it is who is hid- 
 denly in touch with the enduring powers of 
 the world, and how they will each look forty 
 years later. There seems to exist no key to 
 these enigmas. The dunces of genius and 
 the real dunces look very much alike; and 
 144 
 
CHARLES ELIOT NORTON 
 
 boys of brilliant promise cannot be prophet- 
 ically classified. 
 
 Professor Norton was certainly a man of 
 long wind and endurance; and he lived to 
 impress himself and establish himself, to 
 survive and continue till he appeared to be 
 one of the chariot- wheels of society, and his 
 whole life seems like a triumph. 
 
 145 
 

ETHICAL CULTURE 
 
XI 
 
 ETHICAL CULTURE 1 
 
 Among all the changes of creeds and of 
 customs, there are in any society always two 
 types of men. There is the man of good 
 conduct, whose life illustrates moral truth, 
 and there is the religious person who con- 
 sciously experiences moral truth. Even in 
 ancient Egypt or in ancient Rome these 
 types must have existed — the ethical per- 
 son and the religious person. And if we 
 were forced to choose between them we 
 should prefer the man of conduct to the 
 man of feeling. We reverence the good 
 man who is not interested in religion more 
 than the religious person who is not good; 
 and in so doing we cast a doubt upon all 
 dogmatic formulations of truth. There is 
 
 1 This address was delivered in a course (before 
 the Ethical Culture Society in New York) where 
 each lecturer assigned some book to be read in con- 
 nection with the lecture. The New Testament was 
 the book recommended. 
 
 149 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 something in religion which can only be ex- 
 pressed through conduct. This is the rea- 
 son for parables, which are mere pictures of 
 conduct, and leave the mysteries of faith 
 unsolved. We may consider ethics as life 
 in the round, or as religion in practice. 
 The distinction is convenient, but not ulti- 
 mate. It is easy to see that ethical conduct 
 must somehow be a form of religion. Any 
 statement of ethical truth comes into com- 
 petition with religion. Your Ethical So- 
 ciety, for instance, treads on the toes of the 
 churches. The teaching that goes on in 
 this building is, in a sense, religious teach- 
 ing. By calling it ethical you do not pre- 
 vent it from being a branch and form of 
 religion. 
 
 Ethics is separated from religion very 
 much as the churches are separated from 
 one another — by wavy lines of prejudice 
 and education. It is with these lines that 
 we have to do. It is they that rule our 
 philosophy; I do not say that they rule our 
 lives so much as they rule our statements. 
 There is a realm of discussion, and it is in 
 this realm of dissension that words be- 
 come important. Words are powers — like 
 water power and electricity; and we find 
 them running and circulating about the 
 150 
 
ETHICAL CULTURE 
 
 world with natures and meanings of their 
 own which we cannot control. History has 
 determined the matter and has bound us up 
 as with chains in the meanings of these crea- 
 tures, words. For instance, anyone to-day 
 who uses the word God is talking Hebrew, 
 not the Hebrew of Palestine, but that He- 
 brew of modern accent, with two thousand 
 years of Western Christianity in its voice. 
 You cannot wash the significance out of the 
 word nor cast another meaning upon it, 
 though you speak with the tongue of genius. 
 The quandary of the scholar becomes very 
 apparent when he translates the Greek and 
 Roman classics. In this case the modern 
 writer has difficulty in attributing to the 
 pagan gods the right kind of divinity. 
 When he uses the God with a capital G in 
 depicting classic mythology, he not only 
 gives us a qualm on behalf of Jehovah, but 
 he does a refined kind of violence to the 
 pagan myth. He owes two apologies. 
 
 Symbols mean so much, and become so 
 identified with particular causes that we fear 
 to use them. The thing we are afraid of 
 is lest they shall use us. Every man I meet 
 is afraid of a different kind of a surplice. 
 Some dread gestures, as implying they know 
 not what of dogma or claim. To bow at 
 151 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 the creed or not to bow gives equally sin- 
 cere shivers to opposing classes of persons, 
 who in dress, food, and moral code are in- 
 distinguishable. How explain these laby- 
 rinthine antipathies, this deadly war of ma- 
 sonic signs and murderous shibboleths? 
 Each one of them must for explanation 
 be looked up historically. Each one 
 of them has a most simple explanation 
 — an explanation in fact. Some disagree- 
 able episode is at the back of each and 
 every ebullition of sentiment. These ran- 
 cors are the fumes of old controversy. 
 We are still carrying on the animosi- 
 ties of the wars of religion. The Refor- 
 mation is still in progress. The smell 
 of incense continues for generation after 
 generation to arouse the strongest animosi- 
 ties known to human nature. The Gothic 
 Church may crumble, but the sentiment of 
 hostility to all it once typified endures. So 
 also the counter sentiment of attachment to 
 it and hatred of the Reformer endure. If 
 I am a Roman Catholic I may not sing 
 " Lead, kindly Light " till after Newman's 
 conversion. To do so might imply some- 
 thing that I do not mean. Thus are we 
 all slaves to formula, and slaves to the fear 
 of formula — slaves as it were to history. 
 152 
 
ETHICAL CULTURE 
 
 Thoughts like these passed through my 
 mind as I left this building the last time I 
 was in it. The occasion was about a year 
 ago. I had come here to attend a lecture of 
 one of your foremost teachers — one of the 
 pillars of the Ethical Society, and one of 
 the most notable saints in the city. This 
 man was lecturing to young men on Epicte- 
 tus. It was a strange academy — a kind of 
 mad tea-party. The students were most of 
 them muscular young Hebrews, with an im- 
 mense reverence for their instructor's char- 
 acter and a marked skepticism as to his 
 modes of reasoning. Not one in the room 
 — myself least of all — knew anything 
 about Epictetus. The system of in- 
 struction was as follows : — The master read 
 a few sentences out of Epictetus, and then 
 asked a question of the nearest Hebrew. 
 If the teacher did not like the answer he re- 
 ceived — and he never did like it — he flung 
 the young Hercules to the ground and 
 pounded his head with the volume till the 
 boy cried for mercy. Then he patted the 
 boy's shoulder, gave him an affectionate 
 hug, the protagonists took their places 
 again, and the seance was resumed. At 
 times the contagion of argument spread, 
 and the whole class fell upon the floor in 
 i53 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 melee, while Epictetus scored a touch-down. 
 At the end of the lesson we were not 
 fatigued, but exhilarated. It was good to 
 have been there. These boys went home 
 stirred and filled with vitality. I under- 
 stood why it was that the Ethical Society 
 was one of the religious bodies which con- 
 stantly sends forth young men into prac- 
 tical reform work. 
 
 During the conference I kept muttering 
 to myself from time to time, " Why Epicte- 
 tus?" You see I was trying to fix my 
 mind on Epictetus and to remember who he 
 was. Of course some word was mentioned 
 now and then about morality and religion, 
 duty, service, and so forth; but I could not 
 seize or identify these flying thoughts. I 
 knew that I had read about all these things 
 somewhere before, but I could not remem- 
 ber where it was. At last my eye caught 
 sight of a small gray volume, which did not 
 look like a book, but like — like an object, 
 a clothes-brush perhaps. It was a little 
 hotel Bible, which was part of the furniture 
 of the room, but which had not been noticed 
 or mentioned during the proceedings. It 
 seemed to be shrinking and fading away. 
 I picked it up. It was quite illegible and 
 had never been legible. No wonder the vol- 
 i54 
 
ETHICAL CULTURE 
 
 ume had never been opened. Yet it was 
 there — a Bible. There in that little wizened 
 package lay the great Hebrew mind, the 
 only mind that is worthy to be called mind 
 at all, so far as Ethics goes, the fountain 
 of all enduring ethical thought, the source 
 of all enduring ethical power. There lay 
 the ABC of Western religion, if one de- 
 sired the historic view; there the symbols 
 of living ethical faith — that faith which 
 is the nearest one we could reach if we 
 threw a stone out of the window. I am 
 speaking of the whole Bible, the Hebrew 
 contribution to the world, the Old and New 
 Testaments as a single body of thought. 
 For the philosophic content and the mode 
 of looking at life is the same in all parts 
 of Jewish literature. It is impossible to 
 understand the New Testament except 
 through the Old, and vice versa. 
 
 In the class-rooms of the Ethical Society 
 the Bible seemed to be a thing aloof — per- 
 haps a delicate subject. Why was this? 
 Because Christ was rejected by the Jews 
 two thousand years ago, and because Christ 
 said many things that people have since 
 disagreed about. The prejudices of the 
 Ethical Society are easily explained. It 
 was founded in the nineteenth century, 
 155 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 chiefly by Hebrews, and in order to rescue 
 ethical truth from the clutches of dogma 
 — the dogmas of Western Christianity and 
 Western Judaism. The clouds that hung 
 about its birth trouble the manhood of the 
 Society. The same thing is true of the 
 Protestant Episcopal Church. The same 
 thing is true of all churches and of all in- 
 stitutions : their origins limit their influence. 
 Their origins live along with them and 
 cramp their mind. 
 
 The Ethical Society was to have been 
 pure intellect, and lo, it is almost as full of 
 prejudices as the next religious body. This 
 is no one's fault; it is a process in human 
 affairs. 
 
 I will tell you another anecdote which il- 
 lustrates the reverse action of Ethical force, 
 that is to say, it illustrates how benevolence 
 is able to make use of all sorts of creeds, 
 races, and dogmas without causing any 
 trouble. The story is also about Jews. A 
 very important Hebrew in Chicago, a man 
 of great benevolence and vast wealth, 
 wanted to help the Southern negroes. He 
 got the negro question on the brain. He 
 found by consulting with the best authori- 
 ties that the most valuable thing he could 
 do for the negroes was to raise the char- 
 156 
 
ETHICAL CULTURE 
 
 acter of the white men at the South. One 
 way of doing this was through the 
 Y.M.C.A. So then this Hebrew of the He- 
 brews subscribes enormous sums to found 
 white Christian Associations (from which 
 negroes are excluded) as his best way of 
 reaching negro conditions. It required the 
 discovery of America to provide a field 
 which should show up phenomena of this 
 kind. The real forces of goodness and bad- 
 ness run right through every person and 
 every institution, and the notion of segre- 
 gating truth into churches, schools, and 
 theories is becoming visibly more absurd as 
 the years go by. 
 
 There is no doubt that humanity is held 
 apart by dogmas and statements of truth, 
 by attempts to define truth. Humanity is 
 drawn together by warm-hearted conduct. 
 And yet the conduct we approve often rests 
 upon dogmas which we do not approve. 
 The dogmas then are as important as the 
 conduct. While reasoned and sensible 
 statements of Ethical truth seem well 
 enough for a certain class of minds, there 
 are great realms of power where Ethics 
 does not run. Nay, if you examine closely 
 you will find that these sensible statements 
 are always criticisms and qualified accept- 
 157 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 ances of religious truth. They are finger- 
 posts pointing to religion. 
 
 Moral truth is born in the form of reli- 
 gion. Afterwards comes ethical theory 
 and rakes in the ashes for precepts. You 
 cannot run the Salvation Army upon Ethi- 
 cal statements, nor abolish Slavery through 
 Ethical Culture. The movement would 
 have to be heated and vaporized into steam 
 power before its blows would tell. In the 
 process God would be discovered. Pure 
 Ethics has a weak voice. She has no poets 
 of high rank, no prophets with heart-cleav- 
 ing words. She is a handmaid, a note at 
 the bottom of another's text. Ethics has a 
 weak voice, it is true, and has said little of 
 importance to humanity or about humanity ; 
 but she has a strong hand and has done 
 much for humanity. She sometimes saves 
 the fragments where theologies clash and 
 hope to destroy one another. But let me 
 tell you my belief. Without Theology she 
 would perish, for Ethics is a feeble plant, 
 hardly self -perpetuating. Ethics must 
 draw constant life from religion — and 
 ever new life from new religion, or it be- 
 comes a husk, and humanity discards it. 
 
 If these things are true, then your Eth- 
 ical Society must live by becoming to some 
 158 
 
ETHICAL CULTURE 
 
 extent a Theological Institute. Nay, it is 
 one already. Your programme this win- 
 ter shows eighteen meetings of which the 
 subjects have been announced. Ten con- 
 cern Robert Browning; one is on Dante. 
 Now Browning and Dante are pure Theol- 
 ogy. Thus Ethical theory camps out on 
 the abandoned farms of Theology. 
 
 The thing I would say to you young peo- 
 ple is this: Pursue the road you are in. 
 Follow the stream to its source. Read 
 Browning and Dante and Milton and then 
 go to the source of them, which is the New 
 Testament, and read that. Read it not 
 merely for Ethics, but unreservedly for all 
 that comes out of it. If Theology comes 
 to you out of it — and it will — accept it, 
 and have no fear of it. The fear men have 
 of Theology is due to the political abuses of 
 the past. We go on trembling at the robe, 
 after the tyrant is dead. Some people fear 
 candles on an altar. There is no harm in 
 candles. If you light candles each one of 
 you on the altar of his own heart, there will 
 be more light in the world. 
 
 Those dim poets, Dante and Browning, 
 
 shed a light and show a sort of beam out of 
 
 the infinite; but you must be a beam in 
 
 yourself, and not fear the glow and heat 
 
 i59 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 that may come from a deeper understanding 
 of life — when it begins to reach you from 
 behind the poets. 
 
 There has recently been an age of ag- 
 nosticism: it is closing. An age of faith 
 is in progress. The Desert of Agnosticism 
 has been crossed; and some of those lead- 
 ers who helped multitudes to pass across it, 
 were destined not to enter the promised land 
 themselves. Such men are ever among the 
 greatest of their generation. I am think- 
 ing of William James, who was in himself 
 more than he either saw or thought. At 
 the time he was writing I saw in him only 
 the ineffectual thinker, but later I came to 
 see in him the saint. The fear with which 
 his mind was tinctured was the very vice of 
 which I should accuse the Ethical Society 
 — a fear of the symbols of religion. His 
 heart had been a little seared by early ter- 
 ror. The intellectual part of him was en- 
 feebled by the agnosticism of 1870. And 
 yet what difference did it make ? Some sort 
 of light shone out of his cloud as he took 
 his way across the sands, and men followed 
 him. I speak of him here, because his life 
 is a type of mystery. He is there before 
 us, but he can no more be grasped than a 
 phantom. 
 
 160 
 
ETHICAL CULTURE 
 
 We also, in like manner, are mysteries, 
 and our words, deeds, and notions are 
 merely phantoms. Behind each one there 
 is something which others see better than 
 the man himself sees. The controlling ele- 
 ment in our lives is unknown to us. All 
 our language is personal; we cannot hand 
 our faith to another. This has always 
 been true. Even in the Middle Ages when 
 faith was theoretically uniform it was al- 
 ways practically individual. Every mind 
 has a law of its own. The idiom of it is 
 formed slowly in each one of us and must 
 be waited for patiently. You must not ac- 
 cept another man's terms of thought or 
 sacrifice the integrity of your mind at any 
 time. It may be that you are not destined 
 to experience religion. Very well, accept 
 this destiny; acceptance is the beginning 
 as it is the end of religion. We must each 
 walk our own path and move in that direc- 
 tion where glimmers the dawn — or what 
 looks like the dawn leaving the rationale of 
 our conduct to the outcome. By following 
 our inner feeling, no matter how quaintly 
 it may express itself, or how remote it may 
 seem from the usual modes of expression, 
 we shall set ourselves on the road towards 
 the great discoveries. I say, accept your 
 161 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 powerlessness and accept your peculiarities. 
 There was no one ever exactly like you. 
 No wonder, then, that other people's state- 
 ments mean little to you. Those state- 
 ments may hereafter come to mean 
 something, by looming up behind the things 
 that have been revealed to you through 
 your own conduct. All the great temples 
 have been dedicated to this same inner God, 
 and have been builded in this silence. The 
 secret of the heart — a thing personal and 
 intimate — being expressed, stated perhaps 
 with diffidence, turns out to be the great 
 lamp of truth, an axis on which human life 
 turns, and has ever turned. 
 
 The New Testament is the Thesaurus of 
 sacred wisdom compared to which there is 
 no book or monument that deserves to be 
 named. It is a personal record and con- 
 tains things — one might say — almost too 
 personal to be published. Of this nature 
 is its importance, and from this source — 
 neither from Church nor from commenta- 
 tor — flows its power. 
 
 162 
 
PRESIDENT ELIOT 
 
XII 
 
 PRESIDENT ELIOT 
 
 For half a century President Eliot was 
 one of the great personal figures in Amer- 
 ican life. He was known to every man in 
 America and to many people in Europe. 
 Everyone has an interest in such a charac- 
 ter; especially in America, where men are 
 too much alike and great individuals are a 
 rarity. Every one of us bears a relation 
 of some sort to any great character who has 
 lived in the immediate past. This must be 
 my excuse for setting down a few remarks 
 and hair-brained reminiscences which recall 
 President Eliot to my mind. Many of 
 them are, perhaps, links in my own history 
 rather than in his. 
 
 There is another good reason for writing 
 about Eliot. He was not a political figure, 
 nor an artist, nor a thinker : he was the em- 
 bodiment of a mood of the American peo- 
 ple, a sincere, important, and yet passing 
 mood : and he belongs to a class of men who 
 165 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 fill a great place in the public eye and are 
 suddenly and ungratefully forgotten; — 
 the class of worthies. Twenty-five years 
 from now, young men will be shamelessly 
 asking, " Who was President Eliot ? " And 
 therefore many monographs and sketches 
 of him ought to be written at once. 
 
 Eliot's prominence is connected with the 
 rise of the new education, that system or 
 that blind battling" for light, which began in 
 America during the seventies, when the 
 opinion prevailed that the commercial 
 growth of the United States, — our growth 
 in population and in wealth, — 'Compelled 
 the pulling down of the old buildings and 
 old curricula, and the making of all things 
 anew. I have heard William James say, 
 " Yes, yes, we must have large things first, 
 size first; the rest will come." This was 
 the unspoken philosophy, the inner com- 
 pelling, dumb thought of the epoch; and 
 Eliot, when he was chosen President of 
 Harvard in 1870, dedicated his life to the 
 idea. He was shouldering, as it turned 
 out, not only Harvard College but the 
 higher education of the whole country. 
 Before his day no one used to ask who was 
 President of Harvard University. At the 
 close of his day the President of Harvard 
 166 
 
PRESIDENT ELIOT 
 
 was a national figure, and the Presidents 
 of all the other Colleges in the country were 
 persons to be reckoned with. Let us not, 
 however, credit too much to any one man. 
 Transformations in the popular imagination 
 use men, choose figure-heads, subdue indi- 
 viduals to their will. Eliot was the non- 
 pareil schoolmaster to his age, — an age that 
 worshiped the schoolmaster and clung to 
 him. The recent rise of Woodrow Wilson 
 in political life is connected with the same 
 deep educational impulse. 
 
 I will begin by recalling a few of the so- 
 cial conditions in Cambridge thirty years 
 ago; for while such matters seem to be su- 
 perficial, they really result from causes that 
 are deep and old, causes of national signifi- 
 cance. 
 
 In my undergraduate days (1880- 1884) 
 there was a tacit understanding at Harvard 
 that social intercourse between the faculty 
 and the students was bad form. Louis 
 Dyer was at that time a young assistant pro- 
 fessor, and he had either been to Oxford, or 
 else he had read about Oxford. He held 
 the belief that it was well for the boys to 
 meet the tutors and professors ; and he used 
 to give smoking-parties in his room and to 
 make himself personally agreeable to the 
 167 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 students. The boys thought this a clumsy 
 sort of joke, and the College authorities 
 thought it — I don't know what — but they 
 soon stamped him out; and he went abroad 
 and afterwards lived for many years in Ox- 
 ford, beloved by all, surrounded by the aca- 
 demic atmosphere which he had once fool- 
 ishly tried to improvise at Harvard. I have 
 often thought of Dyer, and of his gentle- 
 ness, and of the way he blew the cigarette 
 smoke out of his nose. He was a little like 
 one of those mild mythological animals in 
 "Alice in Wonderland," sweet as summer, 
 and, as it were, harmless, — in fact, a crea- 
 ture that presented a strange contrast to the 
 cynical professors and the brute students at 
 Harvard College. He faded away with his 
 charming grin and, by good luck, I saw him 
 again at Oxford twenty-five years later, a 
 few weeks before his death. Louis Dyer 
 represented the " false dawn " of the social 
 idea at Harvard. This idea was vigorously 
 carried out by the authorities a few years 
 later when they made the discovery that 
 something was wrong at Harvard, that no- 
 body loved anybody there, and that the 
 thing to do was to give weekly teas at 
 Brook's Hall, to ask everyone, to get la- 
 dies from Boston, Bishops from anywhere, 
 168 
 
PRESIDENT ELIOT 
 
 social people at any cost, social talent to 
 bridge the gulf between instructors and in- 
 structed. Nobly they labored. It was 
 shoulder-to-shoulder, never say die, love 
 one love all, more tea, more ladies. The 
 whole movement was sincere in the extreme ; 
 it was a real dawn, somewhat grotesque 
 and naive, — (as if Phoebus should take 
 down the shutters, and Aurora bang the 
 doors open and proclaim the day ;) but Har- 
 vard has been a more human place ever 
 since. Indeed, what Harvard truly needed 
 was the outside world, — ladies, Bishops 
 and tea. Perhaps all institutions need 
 these same things. 
 
 There was one comic element about this 
 social revival at Harvard, — viz., the flying- 
 wedge endeavor to make out that President 
 Eliot had been Phoebus all along, and was 
 standing effulgent with social love in his 
 heart, loving the boys, encouraging the pro- 
 fessors, shedding influence. Now as a 
 matter of fact, President Eliot was the 
 spiritual father of the glacial era thereto- 
 fore in progress, he was the figure-head of 
 those previous dreadful times; and I have 
 sometimes stopped to shake hands with him 
 because I thought it was right ; — and also, 
 I confess, because I thought it would cause 
 169 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 him pain. Such is the silliness of the un- 
 dergraduate mind. The trustees, the ladies, 
 bishops and steerers of Harvard, having 
 received new warmth themselves from what 
 Milton calls the " mellowing year," got at 
 President Eliot and thawed him out. They 
 told him he was the best fellow in the 
 world, they told the world that he had a 
 heart of gold and was a misunderstood 
 person; — and the thing was done. Pres- 
 ident Eliot responded to the treatment; he 
 glowed, he beamed. He really did have a 
 warm place in him, and they moved this 
 round in front where people could see it 
 and feel it; and, by Jove, the New Legend 
 was launched. 
 
 There was something in this legend, too. 
 Besides the warmth that comes from suc- 
 cess and from middle-life, there had always 
 been more geniality in Eliot than most peo- 
 ple supposed. If the same process of in- 
 caloration that Eliot received from his 
 friends could have been applied to Emer- 
 son, to Hawthorne, and to James Russell 
 Lowell, they would have glowed also. In- 
 deed, while Lowell was in England where 
 he was properly petted, he grew forthcom- 
 ing and hearty, — qualities he soon lost 
 upon returning to America and experienc- 
 170 
 
PRESIDENT ELIOT 
 
 ing the formal and reverential manners of 
 his compatriots. I make no doubt that 
 George Ticknor, Robert C. Winthrop, John 
 Quincy Adams, yes, Edward Everett him- 
 self would have turned a rosy hue and put 
 forth green branches if they could have 
 been x-rayed with warm social feeling, 
 coming from a hot source of divine love. 
 But such a thing was not known in their 
 day. I have an instinctive suspicion that 
 it was Alice Freeman Palmer who intro- 
 duced this elemental heat into Boston in the 
 late eighties, but upon this subject I am im- 
 perfectly informed. 
 
 The Doctor Eliot who first swam into 
 my undergraduate ken as the martinet who 
 stalked across the yard, and who was tra- 
 ditionally regarded as an important, hos- 
 tile, and sinister influence, — a sort of Dick- 
 ens-like haunted-man, — was a very remark- 
 able person. His voice was remarkable, — ■ 
 a low vibrant, controlled, melodious, voice 
 that seemed to have so much reverence in 
 it, the voice, you would say, of a cultivated 
 man. And yet President Eliot had not the 
 point of view of a cultivated man, nor had 
 he reverence for cultivation per se. He re- 
 garded cultivation somewhat as Michael 
 Angelo regarded the painting of the Vene- 
 171 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 tian school, — as a thing fit for women. 
 Life was greater than culture. No ideals 
 except ideals of conduct had reality for him. 
 Literature and philosophy and all that were 
 the names of things in bottles to him. I'm 
 not sure that there was not in him a touch 
 of jealousy, a Puritan dread of the Hu- 
 manities. With this was combined a truly 
 unique pity for poverty in any student, and 
 a truly pious belief in education as a 
 means of self -advancement. And let us 
 pause here to note that in all this Eliot 
 was a sincere, spontaneous representative 
 of the average American. By some acci- 
 dent which separated him from his own 
 class, — for New England possessed many 
 men with the old-fashioned feeling for the 
 Humanities, — he became representative of 
 the country at large. 
 
 If there was about Doctor Eliot an ab- 
 sence of cultivation, there was the presence 
 of force. The voice was force; its vibra- 
 tions were the vibrations of force. The 
 modulations of it were modulations of 
 force, the melody was the melody of force. 
 Behind it there was a two-handed engine of 
 human pertinacity, an intellect very accu- 
 rately limited and a genius for the under- 
 standing of men. 
 
 172 
 
PRESIDENT ELIOT 
 
 I will give an instance of his clairvoyance 
 in matters of character. When I was half- 
 way through college my family lost money. 
 I was on the verge of leaving Harvard. 
 News of the situation somehow reached 
 Eliot, and he sent for me and offered me 
 tutoring. It appeared that a certain young 
 loafer (whom I will not name, as he be- 
 came through the incident and has remained 
 ever since, a valued friend) required the 
 services of a mental puncher of some sort 
 to force him to work. It must be remem- 
 bered that I did not belong to the working 
 classes in college ; and never dreamed of tu- 
 toring anyone. I really was not competent 
 to do proper tutoring. But this kind of a 
 boosting job was within my powers. I had 
 not known that it was within my powers, 
 but Doctor Eliot knew it; and I did such 
 wonders with my young renegade, and he 
 gained such unheard-of marks in the ensu- 
 ing examinations, that both he and I have 
 lived on the memory of those intellectual 
 triumphs ever since. At the time I speak 
 of there must have been a thousand under- 
 graduates in the academic department, and 
 Doctor Eliot had the reputation of not 
 knowing one man from another. This an- 
 ecdote is one out of hundreds. In every 
 173 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 walk of life, in all his dealings with men, 
 Doctor Eliot was doing such things every 
 day. His greatness lay in his handling of 
 men. 
 
 He had his policies, which, as I conceive, 
 were to make Harvard large and well- 
 known. Besides this matter he had his 
 " Elective System," which I have never un- 
 derstood, but which seems to have been a 
 corollary from the axiom " size first." It 
 was imagined that a university must be a 
 place where everything was taught, and 
 that all sorts of departments ought to be 
 opened at once. It was perfectly natural 
 that America, looking at Germany, and bent 
 upon swallowing the whole of learning at 
 one gulp, should invent some sort of great 
 fair, where the students were to come and 
 take their fill, following their own election 
 under some sort of supervision. The thing 
 which nobody seems to have thought of 
 was the relation which any foreign Uni- 
 versity bears to the average literacy of the 
 country it serves. Perhaps our pedagogues 
 neglected this consideration with their eyes 
 open. They conceived that a University 
 need provide opportunities merely, and that 
 the students would do the rest. Now in 
 Germany, where every student is already a 
 174 
 
PRESIDENT ELIOT 
 
 highly educated person, who knows what 
 he wants and knows how to work, such a 
 system is admirable. But in America, 
 where the boys come up to college with bro- 
 ken sets of rudimentary reminiscence, and 
 without knowing what they want or 
 how to get it, the great need in any Uni- 
 versity is the need of good teaching. We 
 have found this out since those days; and 
 we have discovered it largely through the 
 strong-handed, logical power with which 
 Harvard pursued the other path and took 
 the consequences. So, also, in the en- 
 deavor to introduce research work, and to 
 put a premium on the original thesis, it was 
 surely natural to imitate Germany, and to 
 forget that not even the immensely high 
 average of general education among the 
 Germans is sufficient to prevent much of 
 their research work from being a stench in 
 the nostrils, — an agony under the long-suf- 
 fering moon. A special thesis should be 
 the work of a ripe scholar, — if possible of 
 a man who also knows the world. But 
 ought we to set a man to making original re- 
 searches in anthropology and Hindu-meta- 
 physics when he has had no experience of 
 life and only a class-room knowledge of 
 books ? 
 
 175 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 Eliot's greatness, however, lay not in his 
 conceptions, — which were simple enough, 
 and sometimes, as many have thought, mis- 
 taken; but in his power to carry them 
 through. The circumstances required the 
 construction of a one-man machine. It 
 may be remarked parenthetically that all 
 rapid changes in society come about through 
 the creation of a one-man machine. This 
 is the only way in which executive business 
 on a large scale can be done quickly. A 
 true University, on the other hand, can 
 never rest upon the will of one man. A 
 true University always rests upon the wills 
 of many divergent-minded old gentlemen, 
 who refuse to be disturbed, but who growl 
 in their kennels. Now Eliot was a serv- 
 ant of his age, and his age commissioned 
 him to refashion Harvard within a life- 
 time. 
 
 Administrative talent means the power to 
 serve unseen masters, to know by instinct 
 what can be done and to do it, to weigh op- 
 ponents, thwarting some, conciliating oth- 
 ers; deceiving some, destroying others. 
 And all the while in the background of the 
 great administrator's mind lie the great 
 forces which he is really serving, — the po- 
 litical forces, the millions of clients, the 
 176 
 
PRESIDENT ELIOT 
 
 practical world of his day. A thinker may 
 reach mankind through his books: he may 
 live in ideas which are realized only in a 
 later generation or are never realized at all. 
 He is bound to his age by no ties except met- 
 aphysical ties. But an administrator, how- 
 ever able, can accomplish only that which 
 the work-a-day world of his day will per- 
 mit him to accomplish. If he tries to do 
 more he will be turned out of office. In 
 the case of Doctor Eliot the subjection of 
 the administrator to his age was especially 
 apparent; for Eliot's first great need was a 
 leed of money ; and money could only come 
 from State Street and from Wall Street, 
 and could only be expended in ways which 
 the business men of America approved. 
 The money question is the key to Doctor 
 Eliot's career, merely because it is the key 
 to his epoch. His very extraordinary na- 
 ture could, I believe, have ruled a seven- 
 teenth-century theocracy. He cared noth- 
 ing for money; he cared merely for power. 
 But power in the United States between 
 1 870-1910 meant money power: therefore 
 Eliot's nature took on a financial hue. 
 
 I remember being surprised and a little 
 shocked at the first speech I ever heard from 
 him. It was, I think, at a great Harvard 
 177 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 function in Memorial Hall, perhaps in con- 
 nection with the 250th Anniversary of the 
 College. Eliot seemed to dwell upon noth- 
 ing but money. Figures were in every cli- 
 max ; not figures of speech, but Arabic, dec- 
 imal symbols of value. And his words 
 were music to the audience ; every statement 
 was greeted with applause. I came to re- 
 flect afterwards that it was only by such 
 music as this that the wine could be drawn 
 from the cask. Eliot in his financial rhapso- 
 dies drew golden tears down Pluto's cheek, 
 and he built his College. The music was 
 crude: it was not Apollo's lute: it was the 
 hurdy-gurdy of pig-iron and the stock yards. 
 To this music rose the walls of Har- 
 vard, and of all our Colleges, — our solemn 
 temples, theaters, clinics, dormitories, mu- 
 seums. So also of the somewhat Coryban- 
 tic advertising that Eliot inaugurated and 
 which still continues in milder form, the 
 clubs, parades, intelligence offices and boat 
 rides, the Harvard Brigade that beats up 
 trade for the College, — foolish would be 
 the man who should blame any individual 
 for these things (as I have often done). 
 They are the symbols of contemporary 
 America, — inevitable, necessary, the por- 
 178 
 
PRESIDENT ELIOT 
 
 tals of the future. As for Eliot's share in 
 all of them, all one can say is, " What won- 
 derful manipulation of an era, what mas- 
 terly politics!" If you find in Pindar's 
 odes the intimate longings of the Greek na- 
 ture, you will find in Eliot's reports the 
 throb of the American heart; you will find 
 in his propaganda the genius of the Amer- 
 ican people of his epoch. These are the 
 reasons why Eliot became one of the great 
 figureheads of the age. 
 
 One can never really explain a man, or 
 track talent to its lair; and all attempts to 
 do so are works of the imagination. No 
 one can follow the currents of influence 
 that run between a man and his antagonists, 
 or between a man and his followers. All 
 that we ever really do in such cases is to 
 state the problem. I have always been sur- 
 prised at the influence exercised by Eliot 
 over his contemporaries, some of whom 
 seemed to be his equals in moral force and 
 his superiors in power of thinking. They 
 regarded him as divinely commissioned, 
 and they stood aside. They withheld their 
 judgment in a manner which I thought al- 
 most immoral; but I see now that this was 
 merely a phenomenon of the. epoch. 
 179 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 These men adored Eliot ;. to them he was 
 great and good and magnanimous, — a be- 
 ing superior to themselves. 
 
 Such an ascendency was not gained in 
 a moment, but grew up during many years, 
 and resulted from many different qualities 
 in Doctor Eliot. It was accomplished by the 
 glamour of his personality, by the general 
 belief in his righteousness, and in his humil- 
 ity, by his appeal to ethnic loyalty (Har- 
 vard and New England), and most of all, it 
 was accomplished through the fact that 
 Eliot was a man of destiny and these other 
 men were inquirers. There were, of 
 course, quarrels in the camp of Harvard; 
 there was opposition; there was hostility as 
 deep as life on the part of many strong per- 
 sonalities. But there never was a death- 
 grapple (I mean defiance, resignations, 
 pamphlets), between Eliot and a man of the 
 first rank. Those whom he could not con- 
 trol, he side-shunted in some way that left 
 them harmless. The men of the first rank 
 he hypnotized. To be sure, they didn't quite 
 know, as we do to-day, what was happen- 
 ing, and what conditions would be left be- 
 hind; but they would have let him do any- 
 thing. I have listened to some of these 
 men in open-mouthed wonder when they 
 180 
 
PRESIDENT ELIOT 
 
 expounded their views on President Eliot. 
 The aged Emerson was one of Eliot's ad- 
 mirers. They put Emerson on the Board 
 of Trustees of Harvard and he used to wan- 
 der about Cambridge casting his innocent 
 benediction upon the work of reorganiza- 
 tion. " But why, but why," asks the cas- 
 ual observer, " do I detect a note of dis- 
 approval in this description of what was 
 happening at Harvard ? " In order to an- 
 swer this question one must recur to gen- 
 eral ideas. A college is the home of scho- 
 lastic influence, and scholasticism means 
 leisure. Leisure is a plant of slow growth, 
 hard to domesticate in any hurried, new 
 and commercial society. Cultivated men 
 are men of whims and tastes, of enthusi- 
 asms and of special talents. Cultivation 
 cannot be dragooned. It must be humored. 
 The little sprouts and spears of true uni- 
 versity life that had slowly and painfully 
 taken root about Harvard Square during 
 two hundred years, were destroyed at the 
 behest of our great ignorant National 
 Board of Improvements. It was heart- 
 rending, but inevitable. If Eliot had not 
 done it, the age would have found a man 
 that would. The way this system works in 
 crushing talent is somewhat as follows: — 
 181 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 Let us suppose that there is, in a certain 
 University, a young instructor of promise 
 in the field of English literature. Shall he 
 be advanced? Of course he shall. But 
 it appears that he has opinions with regard 
 to the new gymnasium that are opposed to 
 the views of the Control. He can write 
 and speak: he is a forcible person. How 
 then can we advance him? His advance- 
 ment would put our whole administration 
 in jeopardy. On the contrary, let him un- 
 derstand that in this college there is no fu- 
 ture for him; then he will quickly depart 
 and leave us to carry on our important 
 projects. Can we leave an ivy-mantled 
 tower in the midst of our New Boulevard? 
 This is the way that progress looks upon 
 cultivation. It is a strange thing how 
 vice always strikes at the heart. Not only 
 vice, but mere error works a blight: some 
 policy which seems harmless, or seems to 
 be mistaken in only one of its aspects, turns 
 out to involve death-doing consequences. 
 Sometimes a lack of tact — or what seems 
 a mere lack of tact — comes between a 
 character and its destiny; or a man dies 
 from a cold in the head. So this harmless- 
 seeming error in the choice of young pro- 
 182 
 
PRESIDENT ELIOT 
 
 fessors did, in fact, generate a poison which 
 deadened the whole of education. 
 
 What is the most important thing in edu- 
 cation? It is the relation between teacher 
 and pupil. Here is the focus of the whole 
 matter ; this tiny crucible must boil, or your 
 whole College will be cold. The Business 
 Era chilled this heart-center of University 
 life in America; because, during this Era, 
 natural law operated to bring the youngest 
 scholars under the control of unenthusiastic 
 instructors. Persons of individual power 
 were the very ones who were discharged. 
 Thus the instructors, — -without anyone's 
 being aware of it, — were being picked out 
 because of their unenthusiasm. So terrible 
 is natural law. 
 
 There is, however, a truer and more aw- 
 ful aspect of the matter. The system 
 stamped out private mind in our colleges. 
 It attacked the soul of the individual in- 
 structor through its control over his liveli- 
 hood. This is the great historic crime of 
 the world, the crime of churches, empires, 
 tyrannies; and it has been the great crime 
 of our commercial epoch in America. It 
 has been a successful crime and it has im- 
 poverished the intellect and chilled the char- 
 183 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 acter of our teaching classes for a genera- 
 tion. 
 
 Let us return to Doctor Eliot. Every 
 generation is a secret society, and has incom- 
 municable enthusiasms, tastes and interests 
 which are a mystery both to its predecessors 
 and to posterity. There is a Zeitgheist at 
 the bottom of all hero-worship. Heroes 
 are created by the puffing up of faith out of 
 the soil, — a spontaneous exhalation from 
 contemporary, spiritual conditions. The 
 essence of hero-worship seems to be this : — 
 the worshiper is convinced that what the 
 hero is about to do is for the best: the wor- 
 shiper backs and indorses his champion by 
 instinct and before the act. A slight paral- 
 ysis of the judgment in the worshiper is 
 what creates the situation. How this par- 
 alysis arises it is impossible to say ; but any- 
 one who has ever felt the joy of even a 
 momentary paralysis of the judgment, — 
 of even a momentary belief in any hero, — 
 can understand the rise of all heroes. The 
 pleasure that lives in the spontaneous act 
 of worship brings the hero into existence. 
 Those men who evoke such worship must 
 be allowed their special rank. This does 
 not mean, however, that these men will 
 permanently interest the world. The only 
 184 
 
PRESIDENT ELIOT 
 
 thing it certainly proves in them is an in- 
 ordinate and tremendous vitality. 
 
 Everything about Eliot was vital. His 
 wonderful low voice, his benignant smile, 
 a smile that was assured, well-poised and 
 habitual, could not be forgotten. To talk 
 with him was to be played upon by a foun- 
 tain of genial force. It was not quite nat- 
 ural force. Perhaps you felt just a touch 
 of control, as if you were toeing drawn in 
 somewhere. Perhaps you questioned 
 " Why this benevolence ? " or feared he 
 might be crediting you with almost too 
 much assent to his own view of the world; 
 — as a very motherly nurse might smile on 
 a new-born babe with rather more approval 
 than the child thought was called for by the 
 circumstances. Yet the principal experi- 
 ence was one of pleasure. As for the gen- 
 eral impression you had in your mind, when 
 you thought of Eliot's position in the world 
 of Boston; — a little nimbus of glory al- 
 ways seemed to enclose him. He was the 
 victim of a general apotheosis. He was 
 really a king of men in his generation. 
 
 It was interesting to see a man so dis- 
 tinctly of the. past as Eliot was, both in ex- 
 ternals and in internals, take the lead in the 
 nineteenth century. He had the formality 
 185 
 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 of manner which belonged to 1820, — the 
 formality of the man who never was young, 
 but must have been a precisian in his earli- 
 est days. He had the temperament of the 
 ecclesiastic, of the Archbishop, the mission- 
 ary, the General of an Order. What is it 
 that such men accomplish? They unify, 
 they spread a standard. They are great 
 yeomen, who brand wild cattle and build 
 fences. The savage, terrible hordes of 
 America waked up in 1870, to the impor- 
 tance of salvation by education. Perhaps 
 they valued education too highly, and in 
 their ignorance demanded more than even 
 education can give. Yet these hordes were 
 ingenuous in their desire to be saved. As 
 the Frankish tribes in the sixth century sub- 
 mitted to Rome, so the Americans in the 
 nineteenth submitted to Massachusetts. 
 The creatures were received and taxed, 
 schooled and attended to. Some lowering 
 of old standards, some loss of cultivation 
 (let us hope only temporary), ensued as a 
 matter of course. Yet the whole process 
 was important, significant, big with influ- 
 ence upon the future. The Pope during 
 this epoch was Charles William Eliot. 
 
 It is hard to get far enough away from 
 the canvas to take any general view of such 
 186 
 
PRESIDENT ELIOT 
 
 a subject as education. Education means 
 everything. 
 
 I remember the expectations with which 
 I entered College, the vistas of Classical 
 reading, of historical discussion, of scien- 
 tific thought that rose in my mind when I 
 thought of Harvard. I supposed that all of 
 this delightful exploration into the uni- 
 verse would go forward accompanied by 
 the genial assistance of elder people and by 
 the joyous emulation of younger ones. 
 Not school hours and recitations, but after- 
 noon walks, suppers and excursions, con- 
 versation and experimental essay, the crit- 
 ique, the daring paraphrase, lived in my 
 mind as the probable stage-settings and ve- 
 hicles of academic education. I suppose I 
 had read about such things in books and 
 memoirs. After the first cold douche and 
 shock of arrival in Harvard College was 
 past, however, I became as hardened as the 
 rest. By the time I came to know Louis 
 Dyer he seemed to me to be a quixotic per- 
 son. Just as your nicely-brought-up little 
 boy comes back out of the street and utters 
 vulgar bombast in the drawing room, so did 
 I adopt the tone of Harvard College and 
 patronize (I remember the feeling), yes, 
 patronize this excellent gentleman, Louis 
 187 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 Dyer, who was trying to recall me to my 
 own tastes and beliefs. 
 
 The ladies'-tea era and the young men's 
 Christian era, which I have mentioned, did 
 not come into blossom while I was an under- 
 graduate, but a few years later, and as a 
 reaction from the awful bleakness that was 
 just setting in in my day. No one can deny 
 the wholesomeness of this drawing-room 
 movement, yet no one can doubt its inade- 
 quacy. Young college men can get a great 
 deal from drawing rooms and from tea, 
 and from bishops ; but their real social needs 
 are best supplied by hard-thinking, highly- 
 educated men, not too much older than 
 themselves, who live and work and think 
 with them. Such men impart their ideals, 
 their knowledge, their benevolence, to the 
 students in the very act and process of col- 
 lege life and work. The sudden discovery 
 by certain philanthropists that the social side 
 of education was all but extinct at Harvard, 
 led to the formation of brigades and broth- 
 erhoods whose members went out and 
 brought in the half-frozen students, much 
 as the Salvation Army sends out persons 
 with stretchers to bring in the victims of 
 alcoholism. 
 
 The times called for such emergency 
 188 
 
PRESIDENT ELIOT 
 
 work, and perhaps some deep instinct told 
 the educators that if they should direct their 
 steps straight toward Humanity, they would 
 find the humanities. 
 
 In recent years it has been discovered on 
 all hands that what our colleges need is 
 " inspired teachers." Harvard gave a 
 prize to an essay on this subject not long 
 ago. But how to find such teachers is the 
 question. They cannot be ordered by the 
 gross from the factory. They must be dis- 
 covered, one by one, and brought home 
 from the woods and swamps, like orchids. 
 They must be placed in a conservatory, not 
 in a carpenter-shop; and they must be hon- 
 ored and trusted. They must be allowed 
 to teach their own subjects in their own 
 ways, and to hold and express private opin- 
 ions about University management. Such 
 men can never be introduced into our col- 
 leges except through a widespread " inspi- 
 ration " on the part of everyone in the coun- 
 try as to what education means. I think 
 I see a College president of the old style, 
 after he has obtained a finely recommended, 
 young, " inspiring " teacher, and has dis- 
 covered that the teacher's " inspiration " 
 slops over into practical matters, and affects 
 College management. The president would 
 189 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 regard himself as false to his trust unless 
 he took immediate steps to restrict, curtail 
 and qualify that young man's inspirations. 
 No, no! There will be no volcanic change 
 in university conditions in America. The 
 elements that control the situation are ele- 
 ments which change very slowly. The 
 American people must come to value learn- 
 ing for its own sake before we can hope 
 for scholars as the managers of our educa- 
 tion. 
 
 When a Museum of Fine Arts is founded 
 in a Western city it is at first managed by 
 business men, because there are no experts 
 at hand. As time goes on, however, 
 trained scholars and competent persons are 
 gradually found, to whom the institution is 
 entrusted for management. This illustra- 
 tion may give us an allegory of the whole 
 recent history of American education. 
 Business men have run the colleges because 
 business was predominant. The time is 
 coming when our colleges will be run by 
 scholars because the people trust the schol- 
 ars. We already see the beginning of this 
 epoch in instances which require no cita- 
 tion; and we may be content as to the gen- 
 eral direction in which the forces are mov- 
 ing. 
 
 190 
 
NOTES ON THE TEACHING 
 OF ART 
 
XIII 
 
 NOTES ON THE TEACHING OF ART 
 
 You must improve the road bed without 
 stopping the trains. Every artistic labor 
 should have meaning; and scales should 
 never be played as mere gymnastic exer- 
 cises; there must be music in them. 
 The difficulty in all training is that we are 
 obliged to take up a part at a time, although 
 the essence of every artistic appeal is unity. 
 The academic mind dissects the unity into 
 elements for purposes of discussion. The 
 problem is dissolved and dealt with in 
 pieces. It is stated as grammar, counter- 
 point, etc. Herein lies an illusion: because 
 all this analysis is always powerless to catch 
 the essence. Therefore in teaching the 
 analysis you must remember that it is a 
 husk. You must remember that this critical 
 view exists merely for purposes of discus- 
 sion. Criticism is powerless to reach art. 
 Art itself proceeds in a region quite beyond 
 the reach of other expression save itself. 
 193 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 The child does not know this. The child 
 likes the rule. He longs to make art easy. 
 He will go astray and become a brilliant 
 pupil and an empty artist, unless his mind 
 is encouraged to keep the grammar sub- 
 ordinate. 
 
 Your form must be perfect, of course. 
 That is nothing. That is merely like " dear 
 sir," or " yours truly " — the symbol of a 
 species of intercourse. Any stammering or 
 equivocation here casts on your meaning a 
 doubt which is avoidable. It must be 
 brushed away quietly, and without with- 
 drawing the attention from the main cur- 
 rent of idea — as a pianist finds his place on 
 the keyboard without looking at his hands. 
 
 The eternal secret is that life runs, and 
 is never caught. Art is a chase. It shows 
 the direction; it suggests; it follows; it in- 
 dicates. But the secret remains a secret, 
 the experience an experience. If it were not 
 so the world would be fuller than it is of 
 master-pieces, and the mystery of existence 
 would be explained. 
 
 The question, then, at any moment with 
 any pupil is, How much can he carry to- 
 day? Is he a great river of force and filled 
 with ideas of his own — an advanced stu- 
 dent, ambitious, classical-minded? Then 
 194 
 
THE TEACHING OF ART 
 
 let him wreak his power on the most refined 
 problems of technique — questions that 
 vexed Phidias. These things are what he 
 comes prepared for. He is their scholar. 
 But you will find that good artists, both 
 great and small, are good because, from 
 their earliest years, they have not taken in 
 more than they could digest. They are in 
 the saddle and have always been in the 
 saddle. There has been an artistic impetus 
 in their lives which subordinated their 
 knowledge to their spirit. 
 
 Now in teaching a child, the unity of his 
 own mind must never be broken. He must 
 find his harmony and his grammar by de- 
 grees — discover and accept and utilize them 
 in the course and process of his own ex- 
 periments. He must never be made to 
 think that these rules of the art are external 
 realities which must be dominated; because 
 this is not so. They are internal realities 
 which must be approached as part of his 
 own nature. 
 
 Though Aquinas and Beethoven should 
 combine to tell me the contrary, I say that 
 if you take a child's mind thoroughly apart, 
 he will be apt never to get it together again. 
 The professors and analysts and teachers of 
 painting are cases in point. These are men 
 195 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 who have believed in the dislocations of the- 
 ory. Their attention has been unshipped. 
 They have stopped to state the rule, and 
 their machinery will not go on again. The 
 rules of art, which are, properly speaking, 
 merely mnemonic aids to indicate the where- 
 abouts of certain invisible and unimagi- 
 nable forces, have been treated by these men 
 as categorical realities. Thus a teacher 
 dies easily, and easily kills others. There 
 are those he cannot kill. But there are 
 many he can. The unity of a child's mind 
 is, to some extent, attacked by all teachers 
 except the greatest. The rules, after all, 
 are not gods, but servants; and they must 
 be kept below stairs in their true position 
 as servants. This makes them easy — easy 
 to remember, easy to apply. 
 
 In many recent Latin grammars, de- 
 signed for the smallest children, the custom 
 has come in of giving the usage first, and 
 following it up on the next day with the 
 statement of the rule. The child learns 
 phrases one day, grammar the next. This 
 is right. This method keeps the child in- 
 formed that the rule is not the truth, but 
 merely an easy way of recalling the truth. 
 No one can speak by rule. We speak by 
 impulse. We must not have — we must 
 196 
 
THE TEACHING OF ART 
 
 never have had — a set of rules standing 
 between our impulse and our expression. 
 
 Let us now remember that composition 
 is a habit — creation is a habit. In the act 
 and process of it, so many extraordinary 
 powers come into play that it can never be 
 done properly except unconsciously, and 
 through the vital force. The flow of life 
 must never be stopped. When a man or a 
 child is working, there is a unity revolving 
 in the back of his head which contains the 
 solution and will provide a result consistent 
 with every law of art and full of new fire 
 besides — if you will but respect it, and 
 take its hints. He must be led to see the 
 classic analysis come and go behind his own 
 phenomena — merge and swim in his own 
 vision. This will make him dissatisfied 
 with his own work unless that work has the 
 classic quality, unless every atomic force is 
 accounted for in the outcome, and every 
 column adds up ioo. But such a result 
 must be arrived at by a natural process, or 
 it will never be quite beautiful or quite true. 
 
 The transference of a mood into a work 
 of art always involves an element of 
 miracle. It contains something new — a 
 surprise. The artist has had supernatural 
 aid ; something has been done for him. 
 197 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 There has been one moment of the uncon- 
 scious; and then plain sailing. The mood 
 was a unity, and the product is a unity. 
 Between the two the thunderbolt fell. This 
 is true even of slight works of art — even of 
 epigrams. There is a miracle — an incom- 
 prehensible communication of force. This 
 is due to the fact that the unity has not been 
 broken. Musicians like Von Bulow, who 
 have taken music all apart and then put it 
 together again, never play quite right. The 
 thing should never have lain in pieces in 
 their mind. 
 
 If, then, you have a child to teach who 
 is easily discouraged, do not extinguish him. 
 It may be true that the great artists could 
 not be extinguished. But the chances are 
 that your child is not a great artist. This 
 much, then, remains true in the belief — so 
 wide spread and so pernicious — that art 
 is all genius and that training takes away 
 originality. I am here speculating as to 
 the nature of those men's minds who do, 
 in fact, become artists. And it seems to 
 me that such people have had from youth 
 upward a core of their own. A child must 
 have enough to build on. He must play 
 about and start a method of his own, a 
 germ' point, a point of departure — some- 
 198 
 
THE TEACHING OF ART 
 
 thing, anything that grows. It may be in 
 melody, it may be in portraits, or verses in 
 the style of Addison; unless he has a nest- 
 egg of this kind he will never be an artist. 
 This plasm is part of the immortal web of 
 the universe. All you can do is to steer 
 nutriment towards it. 
 
 There are as many kinds of good teach- 
 ing as there are personal equations between 
 a master and a pupil. By mere silence a 
 teacher of genius may affect the whole fu- 
 ture of a child's mind. I do not believe 
 that it is necessary for the formal to swamp 
 the vital even for half an hour. The mat- 
 ter comes up very acutely in violin teaching, 
 and I have often watched with concern the 
 sort of attention which teachers fix upon 
 arms and legs. These attitudes must be as- 
 sumed of course, but it should be so man- 
 aged as not to break the thread between the 
 child's mind and the sky. 
 
 By a slight change of vocabulary, we 
 
 may regard art as all technique. Certainly 
 
 all of these matters consist of doing or of 
 
 arranging some mechanical thing which 
 
 gives a certain effect ; of screwing up a peg, 
 
 darkening a shadow, lengthening a pause. 
 
 But if you insist upon regarding art from 
 
 this point of view, nevertheless you have 
 199 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 to confess ignorance as to what it is that 
 produces the thing we want. All of the 
 rules and regulations may be obeyed and yet 
 in the outcome we are not satisfied. The 
 rules give us a barmecide feast, because that 
 technique which does the magic is un-get- 
 at-able. We thus find ourselves farther 
 away from an understanding of the matter 
 than if we had accepted its mystery at the 
 beginning. 
 
 It is, perhaps, from some such point of 
 view as the foregoing that we ought to ap- 
 proach the great subject; although it would 
 be absurd to stop here and neglect other 
 aspects of the case. Most men have noth- 
 ing to say. They will under no circum- 
 stances become artists. They may hope to 
 be craftsmen ; they may gain a little insight 
 into the subject which shall tinge their gen- 
 eral education. Or they may become 
 teachers or writers. A school of art be- 
 sides developing creative artists, enlightens 
 the community in many other ways. It is 
 a focus of pure intellect, and qualifies so- 
 ciety. It sends out journeymen, critics, ex- 
 perts, evangelists, heralds of freedom, men 
 of courage, men of knowledge, standard 
 bearers of civilization. It is a school of 
 character and of philosophy; of language 
 
THE TEACHING OF ART 
 
 and articulation; of religion and progress. 
 The great artist implies and requires this 
 whole hierarchy, which exists beneath him, 
 of equally sincere but less gifted persons. 
 
 Let no one undervalue the aesthetic im- 
 pulse, or disparage the crude beginnings of 
 art. Any finger-post of art shines with 
 ethereal fire though it be " flute-playing 
 taught here," on a signboard in Omaha. 
 How much is any mind liberalized by even 
 a short apprenticeship to any branch of art ! 
 An academy of design does as much for the 
 cause of clear thinking as a college of phil- 
 osophy. Nothing so stimulates the mind 
 as creative endeavor; and the methods of 
 study in science should be modeled after 
 those of a good art-school. Here we have 
 the cue to any pupil's approach towards any 
 study, namely : it should be through succes- 
 sive original investigations tempered by 
 text books. The psychological problem is 
 the same in the study of science as of art 
 — to keep the old formulations fluid, to 
 possess them and use them, without being 
 possessed or ruled by them. In the realm 
 of science and of art nothing is fact, all is 
 hypothesis, all is symbol. 
 
 Teaching is a personal matter and must 
 ever remain so. Schools are only valuable 
 201 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 because they house persons. It is consola- 
 tory to remember how easily art springs up 
 when the conditions are right, and how a 
 school of landscape painting may sometimes 
 proceed out of a small town which had no 
 apparent or peculiar advantages in the mat- 
 ter. This is because some man has begun 
 to think and to experiment, to make 
 sketches, to live in his work and carry for- 
 ward speculations of his own. His pupils 
 take up the argument, and, for a time, life 
 is blown into it; we know not how, there is 
 the breath of art in it. 
 
 I do not mean to disparage academies. 
 All the buildings and endowments, all the 
 circulars, prospectuses, must go forward. 
 But let us also be prepared to find that here 
 and there a talent is maturing in solitude, 
 or an artist is working out his destiny, who 
 has only a shred of education to connect 
 him with the artistic traditions of the great 
 world. 
 
 Since we are walking with a divining 
 rod, seeking art, wondering what it is, how 
 it arises, how to identify it, holding up a 
 finger to the wind, standing breathless in 
 the heart of the forest to catch the note of 
 the hidden thrush — I will say what comes 
 to me — and that most vaguely on the gen- 
 
 202 
 
THE TEACHING OF ART 
 
 eral subject; for the arts and crafts all 
 differ from one another — and differ espe- 
 cially in technicality. The art of making 
 a violin must be learned in a shop; but the 
 art of poetry may be picked up by practice 
 and on the sly. Architecture is organized ; 
 literature is greatly disorganized. The 
 arts, moreover, play into each other's hands 
 in strange ways, and the excitement they 
 convey takes new forms upon new soils. 
 The introduction, for instance, of foreign 
 music has an immediate influence on the 
 temperament and philosophy of any people, 
 and is very likely to become visible in belles- 
 lettres and fiction. Walter Scott left many 
 traces upon the painting of Continental 
 Europe; Piranesi, upon the domestic furni- 
 ture of the entire Western world. The 
 subject lies in a region beyond the reach of 
 accurate study. The reality and the im- 
 portance of it is apt to be brought home to 
 us through meeting some talented child to 
 whom the language of one of these arts is 
 native and necessary. We begin to look 
 with his eyes, to hear with his ears, and, be- 
 hold, we gain an introduction to new 
 worlds. Here now lies a practical matter; 
 for the future of art depends upon the edu- 
 cation of infants. 
 
 203 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 There is one plain rule for the discovery 
 of artistic talent : the child is found at work, 
 scribbling or strumming or drawing. He is 
 inseparable from practice. He is already 
 in the traces, he needs only guidance. You 
 may supply materials ; interest you need not 
 supply, he is already under the spell. There 
 are threads of golden woof and web that 
 gleam, appearing and disappearing in the 
 air — seolian harps placed in the windows 
 of life. These are the visions of human- 
 ity, the visions of former artists. The 
 whole world is full of them. They hang 
 from the rafters like magic spider-webs to 
 catch the imagination of youth. Here is 
 glittering apparel which the child feels to be 
 his own, and would put on immediately. 
 
 Now what is the relation between the long 
 years of drudgery that must, as a rule, be 
 gone through, and the ultimate heaven of 
 creative work? This question cannot be 
 answered simply. Great diligence in tech- 
 nical matters has some relation to remote 
 spiritual interests; and a passion for exacti- 
 tude in the drawing of an apple will issue 
 in some sort of force in the painting of a 
 crucifixion. Literature seems to be even 
 more mysterious than the other arts; and 
 the relation between careful writing and the 
 204 
 
THE TEACHING OF ART 
 
 development of power is here very obscure 
 and yet very certain. It always seems as if 
 the talented child were already in charge of 
 a spirit which we could not see, who whis- 
 pered to him that this digging must be done 
 for the treasure. It seems to be unques- 
 tionable that those remotest and most happy 
 touches of genius which one would say, no 
 study could come at, no experience suggest, 
 are the very ones which are due to a knowl- 
 edge of the craft, to long experience and 
 private endeavor. 
 
 The handling of difficulties seems to be 
 the road to facilities. Something crudely 
 and honestly analyzed cracks the shell of 
 the mystery; and an impersonal artistic 
 treatment becomes the vehicle of the most 
 personal kind of expression. Thus the 
 limitations — namely, those very conditions 
 which constitute technique — give rise 
 through compression to the soul of the 
 work. 
 
 The artist's education, which comes from 
 constant work, involves, somehow, the re- 
 cording of ever-increasing depths of per- 
 sonal vision and of private history. At last 
 nature brings her gifts on a silver salver 
 to the perfect artist and puts her words in 
 his mouth. He thinks he is merely pursu- 
 205 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 ing the solution of a problem, and, in effect, 
 he is unrolling the hidden tapestries of his 
 own soul. What portions of his work 
 ought one to consider as technical? What 
 portions as non-technical? I do not know; 
 nor can anyone imagine. 
 
 Teaching consists in helping the pupil's 
 mind towards an understanding of itself. 
 A moderately endowed mathematician may 
 teach a child of mathematical genius, and 
 teach him well. So may a teacher of gram- 
 mar, or of music, or of architecture teach 
 things far beyond his own powers of ac- 
 complishment. He suggests and inspires. 
 This is a very consolatory reflection ; and it 
 is indeed true that the academic person may 
 carry the fire of Prometheus in a rod of 
 fennel. The people who do this have the 
 quality of genius about them: they are 
 teachers of genius. They cannot create, 
 and yet then can transmit, they can illu- 
 mine. In their own peculiar way they are 
 artists too — or at any rate, prophets of art. 
 
 206 
 
MARIA WESTON CHAPMAN 
 
XIV 
 
 MARIA WESTON CHAPMAN 
 
 Maria Weston Chapman deserves a 
 medallion in the historic hall of her genera- 
 tion. Indeed she looked and bore herself 
 like bronze and marble, and made upon all 
 observers the impression of heroic woman- 
 hood. There are women who have a 
 maturity in their walk even in their teens, 
 and who carry a girlish bearing into old 
 age. There is a unity and a focus in their 
 being which makes them distinguished. In 
 all they do or say there is some natural 
 force which is inevitable and spontaneous. 
 All this is largely a matter of physical en- 
 dowment, and goes with abundant health. 
 In my grandmother's case it went with a 
 kind of victorious beauty which became ac- 
 centuated as the " cordage of the counte- 
 nance " declared itself in her latest years. 
 
 As a small child I was immensely im- 
 pressed with her. I had never seen anyone 
 209 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 like her. She looked like a cameo, and yet 
 had a buoyant — I had almost said bound- 
 ing — quality which cameos do not suggest. 
 Many persons in her generation were im- 
 posing, but she was the first of them that 
 I ever saw, and this gave me a new idea of 
 how people of the great world might or 
 ought to appear. She had a talent for con- 
 duct, she had a genius for appearance. 
 She was exactly fitted to lead a cause; and 
 the cause of Abolition, which broke into 
 flame during her girlhood, was a most per- 
 fect and typical example of what a cause 
 can be. It was a religious awakening. It 
 began with great and sudden fervor in the 
 breasts of a few people, and worked in such 
 a manner as to separate these people from 
 the rest of the community. To awaken the 
 rest of America became their one idea. 
 Converts came to them, as is usual in such 
 cases, chiefly from the humbler classes ; and 
 the emotional fervor of the movement 
 burned with a steady heat for thirty years, 
 till in one way or another every individual 
 in the nation was reached by it. The 
 Abolitionists are sometimes blamed for 
 causing the war; but the real cause of the 
 war was human nature. The war was the 
 final working out of a great change. Aboli- 
 
 210 
 
 , 
 
MARIA WESTON CHAPMAN 
 
 tion was merely the symptom that a change 
 had begun. 
 
 Mrs. Chapman was an early convert, and 
 was well fitted to take the lead in such a 
 movement, or, more accurately speaking, to 
 stage and conduct the cause; for Garrison 
 was her leader, and she was in every sense 
 a standard-bearer and a lieutenant, — never, 
 properly speaking, the leader. She was al- 
 ways handsomely dressed, smiling, domi- 
 nant, ready to meet all comers. She en- 
 tered a room like a public person. She was 
 a doughty swordswoman in conversation, 
 and wore armor. There was something 
 about her that reminded me of a gladiator, 
 and I sometimes wondered how she had 
 ever borne children at all and whether she 
 had nursed them, or had just marched off 
 to the wars in Gaul and Iberia, while the ur- 
 chins were being cared for by a f reed-woman 
 in the Campania. She was fond of chil- 
 dren nevertheless, and used to invite her 
 grandchildren to come to her room, where 
 she would inaugurate the most ceremoni- 
 ous and important sessions of book-cover- 
 ing, and the making of scrap-books, cuttings, 
 and pastings. The gum-arabic must be 
 bought and melted down on the previous 
 day, the figured papers and prints were pro- 
 
 211 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 duced from European sources, and the 
 whole manufacture was conducted with 
 pomp and mystery. She used to read 
 Shakespeare to us when the youngest was 
 about three, and she would arrange the 
 drawing-room to represent the stage. She 
 had Caesar on his bier covered with dra- 
 pery, and a bit of hidden marble to repre- 
 sent his Roman nose. When she read 
 aloud she was so particular about the state 
 of her voice, her enunciation, and her de- 
 livery that she would eat no dinner before a 
 performance, but take only the juice of a 
 lemon — as if she were to sing in grand 
 opera. 
 
 I think that her temperament and phy- 
 sique must in early life have marked her as 
 a figure-head, and that the many years she 
 afterwards spent in Europe as the represen- 
 tative of a cause gave her, perhaps, the 
 habit of the part. She was, in fact, an em- 
 bodiment; and this is the reason why her 
 presence conveyed more than her spoken or 
 written words, and why people were so as- 
 tonished at her, and have left so many de- 
 scriptions of her. At the basis of her ef- 
 fectiveness was a perfectly phenomenal 
 fund of physical health. She was beam- 
 ing and ruddy down to her last days — for 
 
 212 
 
MARIA WESTON CHAPMAN 
 
 she was nearly eighty when she died, and 
 had spent many years toward the end of her 
 life in nursing a paralyzed brother. 
 
 One great and rare merit she shared with 
 Garrison. When their cause triumphed 
 they retired, and both of them deserve in 
 this to be canonized for their good taste, — 
 a virtue not always found in Abolitionists. 
 She retired, then, and lived in Weymouth, 
 Massachusetts, for twenty years or more, 
 with a mother and several sisters, all of 
 them highly educated, bookish people, and 
 two of them, Anne and Dora Weston, 
 staunch anti-slavery veterans. The house 
 was full of souvenirs of Europe, and of 
 presentation copies of the works of mid- 
 century European writers. To be an exile 
 for opinion's sake is the best introduction 
 to the liberals of all foreign countries; and 
 Paris, during the Second Empire, contained 
 many distinguished Frenchmen who felt 
 that they too were in exile. The French in- 
 tellectuals were hospitable to the leaders of 
 American anti-slavery, who, so far as social 
 life went, found in France more than they 
 had lost at home. 
 
 All the glamour and excitement of life 
 must have gone out of it for my grand- 
 mother with the close of the war; yet she 
 213 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 continued to live as freshly and to talk as 
 gladly as if some persecution were still in 
 progress, and she were Joan of Arc on the 
 way to the pyre. 
 
 Certain .failings she had, — perhaps I 
 ought rather to call them never-failings. 
 The sword would leap from the scabbard 
 at any allusion to past controversy in which 
 she or Mr. Garrison had been concerned, 
 or in which anyone in the world had held 
 opinions condemned by the Garrisonians. 
 The sword of Gideon flashed with unabated 
 grace. The indignation was as fresh as 
 manna in Arabia — renewed with every 
 matin. She really believed that the mem- 
 ory of the wicked should rot, and that the 
 wicked were — almost everyone in the past, 
 and a good many among the survivors. If 
 Channing had been wrong in 1828, she 
 would excoriate him in 1882. If Sumner 
 had hesitated at some moment to see the 
 white light of truth, then his bones must be 
 dragged from their resting place and his 
 habitation become a dunghill. Among the 
 true, inner-seal Garrisonians the wrong 
 kind of anti-slavery was always considered 
 as anti-Christ; and the feats of memory 
 which the Old Guard of Abolition exhib- 
 ited with regard to the ins and outs of an- 
 214 
 
MARIA WESTON CHAPMAN 
 
 cient controversy went far to explain the 
 survival of Homer's poems throughout the 
 long centuries before writing was invented. 
 So, as by fire, are certain things burned into 
 men's souls. 
 
 I must here sorrowfully record a distinc- 
 tion between my grandmother and Garrison 
 himself. Garrison was never rancorous, at 
 least he was never really rancorous. His 
 rancor was political and done for effect. 
 He assumed a tone of malevolence for rhe- 
 torical reasons. Now, my grandmother 
 became, by a kind of necessity, more re- 
 ligious than the Pope himself. She was a 
 partisan: she had not the liberty which the 
 leader enjoys of changing her mind, or of 
 being inconsistently good-humored when 
 she felt like it. She was a halberdier and 
 body-guard. She never seemed to disa- 
 gree with Mr. Garrison or to turn a crit- 
 ical eye on him. I believe it would have 
 done them both good if she had lifted 
 her battle-ax against the hero now and 
 then. 
 
 For twenty-five years she was manager 
 of the Annual Anti-slavery Bazaar which 
 raised the funds for the cause. Europe 
 was laid under contribution for interesting 
 and odd things, which should draw Pro- 
 2iS 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 Slavery Boston to the booths. The prepa- 
 ration for the great Fair went on pretty 
 steadily during the rest of the year, and 
 this branch of anti-slavery propaganda was 
 useful in keeping the liberals in Europe in 
 touch with our struggle. Mrs. Chapman 
 edited a little annual volume or keepsake, 
 called " The Liberty Bell," which contained 
 many articles by herself. As the executive 
 of an unpopular cause her business was to 
 be always in good spirits, always in the 
 right, always insuperably competent. It 
 is clear that her activity belongs to a 
 very noble species of political activity rather 
 than to the field of philosophy. The 
 religion of labor makes character, but is 
 injurious to mind. And I cannot help 
 thinking of all the anti-slavery people as 
 being earth-born, titanic creatures, whom 
 Nature spawned to stay a plague — and 
 then withdrew them, and broke the mold. 
 Heroic they remain. 
 
 It will be remembered that our struggle 
 over slavery showed up the organized 
 churches of Christianity in a terrible light. 
 What was the use of such churches as ours 
 were shown to be ? Where was Christ to be 
 found in them? If an Abolitionist were 
 by nature a mystic, or an evangelical person 
 216 
 
MARIA WESTON CHAPMAN 
 
 (like Garrison or S. J. May), he naturally 
 took refuge in the New Testament itself. 
 If he were by nature neither mystical nor 
 romantic, he was apt to become a stoic ; and 
 it was to this class that my grandmother 
 belonged. We may see the same tendency 
 exhibited on a great scale in the history of 
 France. The hold which the classics have 
 on the French temperament is due to this, — 
 that the French are not sufficiently emo- 
 tional to be in sympathy with Hebrew 
 thought: it offends them. The morality 
 of France is stoical. My grandmother 
 was, in her endowments, and in her limita- 
 tions, very much such a person as a virtuous 
 stoic of the ancient world may have been. 
 Her religion was a totality as to conduct, 
 but was fragmentary in statement. It was 
 made up of proverbs, poems, and anecdotes 
 from all ages, — wisdom-scraps of an en- 
 couraging and militant nature. When the 
 original Garrisonians began their work in 
 1832 they supposed that slavery would fall 
 before their strokes in a very few years, — 
 five or ten perhaps. And so subtly does the 
 alchemy of activity sustain hope, that they 
 never for a moment lost their conviction 
 that victory was imminent, throughout the 
 thirty years during which victory kept re- 
 217 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 ceding before them like the mirage of water 
 in the desert. They only wondered at the 
 delay. 
 
 A Cause like this solves all questions 
 whether they be matters of metaphysical 
 doubt or of practical life. One's business 
 is ruined, of course. A child dies; alas, it 
 is severe, but let the Cause consume our 
 grief. All social ties were snapped long 
 ago; it is a trifle. The old standard-bear- 
 ers are dropping out from time to time 
 through death ; peace be unto them, we have 
 others. 
 
 The discipline of such a life — so unu- 
 sual, so singular — wore down men and 
 women into athletes; the stress made them 
 strong. Thus the anti-slavery fighters 
 grew hardy through a sort of Roman en- 
 durance, which shows in their physiog- 
 nomy. It is this force behind the stroke of 
 fate that we see in people's faces, — the 
 power behind the die that mints them. 
 
 A very notable feature in my grand- 
 mother's life was her friendship with Har- 
 riet Martineau, whose literary executor she 
 afterwards became. The friendship was a 
 flawless and enduring union. It began in 
 1835, and was a source of unalloyed happi- 
 218 
 
MARIA WESTON CHAPMAN 
 
 ness to both women; it ended with Miss 
 Martineau's death in 1876. The attach- 
 ment was accompanied by independence on 
 both sides, but my grandmother used to 
 speak of Harriet Martineau with the same 
 sort of reverence that Miss Martineau uses 
 in speaking of her. 
 
 At one time Miss Martineau thought of 
 coming to America to work in the Aboli- 
 tion cause. She writes : " The discovery 
 of her [Mrs. Chapman's] moral power and 
 insight were to me so extraordinary that, 
 while I longed to work with and under her, 
 I felt that it must be morally perilous to 
 lean on any one mind as I could not but 
 lean on hers." 
 
 The beginning of their intimacy was not 
 without dramatic interest. When Miss 
 Martineau arrived in this country on a 
 pleasure trip, at the age of thirty-three, she 
 was probably the best known, and certainly 
 the most powerful woman in England. Her 
 writings and her opinions had brought her 
 unprecedented popularity both in that coun- 
 try and in America. It was therefore of 
 great importance to the struggling Aboli- 
 tionists to gain her adherence to their cause. 
 My grandmother wrote to Miss Martineau 
 219 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 while the latter was on her travels in the 
 South, but received a rebuff from the au- 
 thoress. 
 
 The time soon came, however, when Miss 
 Martineau felt forced by her conscience to 
 support the unpopular and hated cause of 
 Abolition. She was, as she says, unexpect- 
 edly and very reluctantly, but necessarily, 
 implicated in the struggle. The occasion 
 of her declaration of faith was a meeting 
 of the Ladies' Anti-slavery Society at the 
 house of Francis Jackson on November 18, 
 1835. She accepted an invitation to this 
 meeting, to the great scandal of her Boston 
 hosts. She attended the meeting and, when 
 called upon, gave, in a few words, the enor- 
 mous prestige of her name to the cause. 
 This cut short her social career in America, 
 and she became the victim of every kind of 
 vilification. She understood this conse- 
 quence and did not enjoy it, for it ruined 
 her trip and prevented her seeing American 
 social life. 
 
 But the greater moral triumph at the back 
 of this small unpleasantness was also un- 
 derstood both by Miss Martineau and by 
 the audience of women in the hushed par- 
 lor of Francis Jackson, at the time she ex- 
 pressed her anti-slavery conviction in a few 
 220 
 
MARIA WESTON CHAPMAN 
 
 solemn words. It must be noted parenthet- 
 ically that everyone who speaks of my 
 grandmother always dwells upon the way 
 she looked. It is her looks that they can- 
 not forget. 
 
 Miss Martineau in her account of the 
 meeting at Mr. Jackson's says : " When I 
 was putting on my shawl upstairs, Mrs. 
 Chapman came to me, bonnet in hand, to 
 say, ' You know we are threatened with a 
 mob again to-day : but I do not myself much 
 apprehend it. It must not surprise us ; but 
 my hopes are stronger than my fears.' 
 
 " I hear now, as I write, the clear silvery 
 tones of her who was to be the friend of the 
 rest of my life. I still see the exquisite 
 beauty which took me by surprise that day ; 
 the slender, graceful form, the golden hair 
 which might have covered her feet ; the bril- 
 liant complexion, noble profile, and deep 
 blue eyes; the aspect meant by nature to be 
 soft and winning only, but that day (as ever 
 since), so vivified by courage, and so 
 strengthened by upright conviction, as to 
 appear the very embodiment of heroism. 
 ' My hopes/ she said as she threw up her 
 golden hair under her bonnet, ' are stronger 
 than my fears.' " 
 
 In the same account Miss Martineau de- 
 221 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 scribes the extreme tension that existed con- 
 cerning her own attitude toward Abolition. 
 No one knew just where she stood, or what 
 she was going to say. She describes also 
 the wave of emotion that swept over the lit- 
 tle assemblage upon her unequivocal an- 
 nouncement of her hatred of slavery, and 
 continues : " As I concluded Mrs. Chap- 
 man bowed down her glowing face on her 
 folded arms, and there was a murmur of 
 satisfaction through the room, while out- 
 side, the growing crowd (which did not, 
 however, become large) was hooting and 
 yelling and throwing mud and dirt against 
 the windows." 
 
COATESVILLE 
 
XV 
 
 COATESVILLE 1 
 
 We are met to commemorate the anniver- 
 sary of one of the most dreadful crimes in 
 history — not for the purpose of condemn- 
 ing it, but to repent of our share in it. We 
 do not start any agitation with regard to 
 that particular crime. I understand that an 
 attempt to prosecute the chief criminals has 
 
 The explanation of Mr. Chapman's prayer meeting 
 in Coatesville, besides what he says in his address 
 following, is best given in these words of his own 
 taken from a letter: 
 
 " I was greatly moved by the Coatesville lynching 
 at the time it occurred, and as the anniversary 
 came round my inner idea began to force me to do 
 something. I felt as if the whole country would be 
 different if any one man did something in penance, 
 and so I went to Coatesville and declared my inten- 
 tion of holding a prayer meeting to the various busi- 
 ness men I could buttonhole. Then there appeared 
 an extraordinary thing — the outcome of the lynch- 
 ing, i. e., that there is a reign of terror in Coatesville 
 at this moment. If you speak of it you are sus- 
 pect . . . The daily local newspaper at first refused 
 
 1 Reprinted from Harper's Weekly. 
 225 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 been made, and has entirely failed; because 
 the whole community, and in a sense our 
 whole people, are really involved in the 
 guilt. The failure of the prosecution in 
 this case, in all such cases, is only a proof 
 of the magnitude of the guilt, and of the 
 awful fact that everyone shares in it. 
 
 I will tell you why I am here; I will tell 
 you what happened to me. When I read 
 in the newspapers of August 14, a year ago, 
 about the burning alive of a human being, 
 and of how a few desperate, fiend-minded 
 men had been permitted to torture a man 
 chained to an iron bedstead, burning alive, 
 thrust back by pitchforks when he strug- 
 
 to mention the lynching in the notice of the prayer 
 meeting, but, finally, it was printed on the first page 
 for two successive days. Everyone in the city knew 
 of it. A friend of mine came over from New York, 
 and we did hold the meeting in an unused store — a 
 prayer meeting with Bible readings, addresses, 
 prayer, silent prayer, and a talk on the whole matter. 
 Two persons came : one an anti-slavery old Negress, 
 who lives in Boston and was staying in Coatesville; 
 the other a man who was, I think, an ' outpost ' find- 
 ing out what was up. We held the meeting just as 
 if there was a crowd, and I delivered my address. 
 There was a church meeting going on opposite to us, 
 and people coming* and going and gazing, and our 
 glass front windows revealed us like Daniel when 
 he was commanded to open the windows and pray." 
 226 
 
COATESVILLE 
 
 gled out of it, while around about stood 
 hundreds of well-dressed American citizens, 
 both from the vicinity and from afar, com- 
 ing on foot and in wagons, assembling on 
 telephone call, as if by magic, silent, 
 whether from terror or indifference, fasci- 
 nated and impotent, hundreds of persons 
 watching this awful sight and making no 
 attempt to stay the wickedness, and no one 
 man among them all who was inspired to 
 risk his life in an attempt to stop it, no one 
 man to name the name of Christ, of human- 
 ity, of government! As I read the news- 
 paper accounts of the scene enacted here in 
 Coatesville a year ago, I seemed to get a 
 glimpse into the unconscious soul of this 
 country. I saw a seldom revealed picture 
 of the American heart and of the American 
 nature. I seemed to be looking into the 
 heart of the criminal — ■ a cold thing, an 
 awful thing. 
 
 I said to myself, " I shall forget this, we 
 shall all forget it; but it will be there. 
 What I have seen is not an illusion. It is 
 the truth. I have seen death in the heart 
 of this people." For to look at the agony 
 of a fellow-being and remain aloof means 
 death in the heart of the onlooker. Reli- 
 gious fanaticism has sometimes lifted men 
 227 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 to the frenzy of such cruelty, political pas- 
 sion has sometimes done it, personal hatred 
 might do it, the excitement of the amphi- 
 theater in the degenerate days of Roman 
 luxury could do it. But here an audience 
 chosen by chance in America has stood 
 spellbound through an improvised auto-da- 
 fe, irregular, illegal, having no religious 
 significance, not sanctioned by custom, hav- 
 ing no immediate provocation, the audience 
 standing by merely in cold dislike. 
 
 I saw during one moment something be- 
 yond all argument in the depth of its signif- 
 icance. You might call it the paralysis of 
 the nerves about the heart in a people habit- 
 ually and unconsciously given over to selfish, 
 aims, an ignorant people who knew not 
 what spectacle they were providing, or what 
 part they were playing in a judgment-play 
 which history was exhibiting on that day. 
 
 No theories about the race problem, no 
 statistics, legislation, or mere educational 
 endeavor, can quite* meet the lack which that 
 day revealed in the American people. For 
 what we saw was death. The people stood 
 like blighted things, like ghosts about Ache- 
 ron, waiting for someone or something to 
 determine their destiny for them. 
 
 Whatever life itself is, that thing must 
 228 
 
COATESVILLE 
 
 be replenished in us. The opposite of hate 
 is love, the opposite of cold is heat; what 
 we need is the love of God and reverence 
 for human nature. For one moment I 
 knew that I had seen our true need; and I 
 was afraid that I should forget it and that 
 I should go about framing arguments and 
 agitations and starting schemes of educa- 
 tion, when the need was deeper than educa- 
 tion. And I became filled with one idea, 
 that I must not forget what I had seen, and 
 that I must do something to remember it. 
 And I am here to-day chiefly that I may 
 remember that vision. It seems fitting to 
 come to this town where the crime occurred 
 and hold a prayer-meeting, so that our 
 hearts may be turned to God through whom 
 mercy may flow into us. 
 
 Let me say one thing more about the 
 whole matter. The subject we are dealing 
 with is not local. The act, to be sure, took 
 place at Coatesville and everyone looked to 
 Coatesville to follow it up. Some months 
 ago I asked a friend who lives not far from 
 here something about this case, and about 
 the expected prosecutions, and he replied 
 to me : " It wasn't in my county," and that 
 made me wonder whose county it was in. 
 And it seemed to be in my county. I live 
 229 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 on the Hudson River; but I knew that this 
 great wickedness that happened in Coates- 
 ville is not the wickedness of Coatesville 
 nor of to-day. It is the wickedness of all 
 America and of three hundred years — 
 the wickedness of the slave trade. All of 
 us are tinctured by it. No special place, no 
 special persons, are to blame. A nation 
 cannot practice a course of inhuman crime 
 for three hundred years and then suddenly 
 throw off the effects of it. Less than fifty 
 years ago domestic slavery was abolished 
 among us ; and in one way and another the 
 marks of that vice are in our faces. There 
 is no country in Europe where the Coates- 
 ville tragedy or anything remotely like it 
 could have been enacted, probably no coun- 
 try in the world. 
 
 On the day of the calamity, those people 
 in the automobiles came by the hundred and 
 watched the torture, and passers-by came in 
 a great multitude and watched it — and did 
 nothing. On the next morning the news- 
 papers spread the news and spread the par- 
 alysis until the whole country seemed to be 
 helplessly watching this awful murder, as 
 awful as anything ever done on the earth; 
 and the whole of our people seemed to be 
 230 
 
COATESVILLE 
 
 looking on helplessly, not able to respond, 
 not knowing what to do next. That spec- 
 tacle has been in my mind. 
 
 The trouble has come down to us out of 
 the past. The only reason that slavery is 
 wrong is that it is cruel and makes men 
 cruel and leaves them cruel. Someone may 
 say that you and I cannot repent because 
 we did not do the act. But we are involved 
 in it. We are still looking on. Do you not 
 see that this whole event is merely the last 
 parable, the most vivid, the most terrible 
 illustration that ever was given by man or 
 imagined by a Jewish prophet, of the rela- 
 tion between good and evil in this world, 
 and of the relation of men to one an- 
 other ? 
 
 This whole matter has been an historic 
 episode; but it is a part, not only of our 
 national history, but of the personal history 
 of each one of us. With the great disease 
 (slavery) came the climax (the war), and 
 after the climax gradually began the cure, 
 and in the process of cure comes now the 
 knowledge of what the evil was. I say 
 that our need is new life, and that books 
 and resolutions will not save us, but only 
 such disposition in our hearts and souls as 
 231 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 will enable the new life, love, force, hope, 
 virtue, which surround us always, to enter 
 into us. 
 
 This is the discovery that each man must 
 make for himself — the discovery that what 
 he really stands in need of he cannot get 
 for himself, but must wait till God gives it 
 to him. I have felt the impulse to come 
 here to-day to testify to this truth. 
 
 The occasion is not small; the occasion 
 looks back on three centuries and embraces 
 a hemisphere. Yet the occasion is small 
 compared with the truth it leads us to. For 
 this truth touches all ages and affects every 
 soul in the world. 
 
 232 
 
JULIA WARD HOWE 
 
XVI 
 
 JULIA WARD HOWE 
 
 The great Doctor Howe, whose figure tow- 
 ers over little Boston, was a man in middle 
 life, and was well understood by Europe 
 and America to be one of the world's wise 
 men, when he married a New York girl of 
 remarkable beauty, wit and wealth. This 
 was in the year 1843. It made little differ- 
 ence to Dr. Howe where he lived, or what 
 circle, he moved in ; but when he threw in his 
 fortunes with the anti-slavery outcasts and 
 Beacon Street looked askance at him, it 
 made this difference to his wife, that she 
 never really became a Bostonian. She 
 lived, however, to become one of the best 
 known personalities in the town, and to 
 have a little court of her own. There was 
 something about her which attracted indi- 
 viduals of all conditions, from foreign pa- 
 triots, — the residuaries of Dr. Howe's rev- 
 olutionary interests, — to the most modern 
 representatives of every social reform. 
 235 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 Her own people had been bankers, with 
 harps and marble statues in their salons. 
 Singing, and Italian lessons, and the pro- 
 vincial splendors of early New York had 
 been hers ; and after her marriage with Dr. 
 Howe, she had traveled with him abroad 
 and had seen many of the celebrities of 
 Europe at a time when genius was in bloom 
 there. 
 
 Apart from all this, she was in herself a 
 daughter of the great liberal epoch of the 
 nineteenth century which produced Bright, 
 Garrison, Garibaldi and a whole race of 
 lesser social missionaries who felt that they 
 were marching to music, and who never 
 doubted that clouds would break and truth 
 triumph in the end, — men and women 
 whose idealism and whose belief in the des- 
 tinies of mankind bound them into a sort of 
 brotherhood in world politics. She had, at 
 any rate, lived among the heroes of her 
 time, and she retained to the end a bigness 
 and heroic outlook upon life which belonged 
 to the epoch of her youth. Furthermore 
 she was a poetess. In early married life 
 she published a volume or two of verse, 
 which were read and admired by the world 
 of American letters, and the luster of which 
 never quite left her. Neither she nor her 
 236 
 
From a photograph by Altman 
 
 MRS. JULIA WARD HOWE 
 
JULIA WARD HOWE 
 
 circle ever forgot that there were laurels on 
 her brow. 
 
 It must be remembered also that she con- 
 tinued in her own person the traditions of 
 the Transcendentalists, whose school of 
 thought became submerged in the welter of 
 the anti-slavery struggle. She was a friend 
 and disciple of Emerson and felt, as indeed 
 every transcendentalist felt, that she had a 
 metaphysical creed to expound. If the 
 writings of this school have left little that is 
 powerful except the Essays of the master 
 himself, nevertheless the spirit of the Over- 
 soul became expressed in the lives of many 
 of his contemporaries. I have known peo- 
 ple who wrote philosophy very ill, who yet 
 seemed to have received a kind of heavenly 
 message from stepping in and out of Emer- 
 son's library. This species of Emersonian- 
 ism clung to Mrs. Howe. 
 
 Some serene element of the successful 
 person, who lives above circumstance, shone 
 out of her conversation, — which was, by 
 the way, extremely unlike the Concord 
 school of talk. She was always a doughty, 
 gallant battler in the drawing-room, with 
 the old style of attack. She feutered her 
 lance, as was the custom of the forties, and 
 rode her charger straight at the opponent. 
 237 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 The accidents of the world, which had 
 swept away wealth and had left her only a 
 modest little house, and a scanty income, 
 had taken nothing from her. She had al- 
 ways lived in mansions of her own. Her 
 guests were kings and queens to her. If the 
 door had been opened by a charity girl with 
 a wooden leg, and, the meal had consisted of 
 a chop on a trencher, the guest would still 
 have felt that he was being welcomed with 
 reverence and was feasting with Hafiz and 
 Melchior. There are people in whom spir- 
 itual experiences dissolve self -consciousness, 
 so that all humanity walks for them on the 
 same social plane. Such was the ideal of 
 the antique philosophers, and Mrs. Howe, 
 in a certain way, reminded one of those an- 
 cients. Ben Franklin had the same quality 
 in his old age, — a quality which no one 
 ought to attain to in youth; for youth is 
 properly dedicated to error. When Mrs. 
 Howe was young, she was so high-spirited 
 and self-willed that she sometimes became 
 a problem to her friends. Old ladies have 
 told me about her romanticism and her un- 
 controllability. I knew her only in old age, 
 and when her chief characteristic was an 
 unfailing gayety. It was strange that a 
 woman of causes, whose main business was 
 238 
 
JULIA WARD HOWE 
 
 to worry politicians, arouse the people and 
 do in fact the most unpleasant things a 
 woman can do, never should have betrayed 
 those traces of the work which are seen in 
 almost all public spirited women. 
 
 Mrs. Howe was liberal, spontaneous, 
 feminine. Her supreme endowment was 
 her health. She had the domed brow and 
 the bonhomie of a woman who has never 
 been sick. Such people are ever younger 
 than their children; for their children soon 
 grow up into sad, practical men and women, 
 while they themselves retain the buoyancy 
 of youth. The world cannot teach them 
 sorrow. Mrs. Howe thus became the pet 
 of her numerous children, at the same time 
 that she was the Mother Superior of the 
 latest generation of nonconformist philan- 
 thropy in Boston. She accepted both posts 
 with enthusiasm. 
 
 Her power of enjoyment was a natural 
 advantage, like a large fortune or a great 
 talent, and it was really this force that made 
 her beloved. If she had a weakness, it was 
 the weakness of almost all leaders, the habit 
 of accepting adulation from insignificant 
 people, whom she suffered to rest in the be- 
 lief that she was a prophetess. But she 
 did this so innocently, and humbly, that I 
 239 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 cannot feel sure that her own hopes and il- 
 lusions as to her greatness were not a part 
 of her charm. 
 
 The marvel of her was that she should 
 never have been influenced by Boston. She 
 was not even irritated by the self-sufficiency 
 of Bostonians, by that slight mental cramp 
 in them which is a grief to many of their 
 sincerest admirers. Of course everybody 
 in Boston knew her. One couldn't help 
 knowing her. The policemen knew her; 
 the school-children sang her " Battle Hymn 
 of the Republic " ; the statesmen, scholars, 
 scientists, and publicists for a generation 
 regarded her as one of their cherished in- 
 stitutions and as a pillar of the crumbling 
 world.; Individual Beacon Street knew 
 her, but not collective Beacon Street. To 
 collective Beacon Street she was persona 
 non grata. I remember being a little 
 shocked at the way certain very nice people 
 used to speak of her; though in retrospect, 
 the prejudice which good society has against 
 non-conforming greatness, appears in the 
 light of agreeable local color. 
 
 I have often lain awake at night wonder- 
 ing what was the matter with Boston. At 
 such times, anecdotes creep out of corners 
 in my memory and throw doubtful gleams 
 240 
 
JULIA WARD HOWE 
 
 of light on possible solutions. But I can- 
 not catch and chain these ideas. One of my 
 classmates, a modest youth from South 
 Carolina, when he was a Freshman at Har- 
 vard, walked into the bosom of a great Bos- 
 ton drawing-room with his overshoes on. 
 All the family were seated about, — the 
 aged and distinguished grandparents, the 
 model father, the benignant mother, and 
 many appropriate children of all ages. 
 My friend was unconscious of his predica- 
 ment, young and modest. Summoning all 
 of his imperfect Southern breeding, he did 
 his best with the hard beginnings of cheer- 
 ful talk. But he felt an oppression in the 
 air, then a wave of sympathy, — a sense of 
 humiliation, — a waiting fear. He saw that 
 the younger members of the family were 
 in hurried consultation about something, 
 which he prophetically knew concerned him- 
 self. The suspense became unbearable, 
 and at last an appropriate child of the fam- 
 ily group drew him aside and whispered to 
 him the awful truth. My friend told me 
 the story the next day, and I knew instantly, 
 and I know now, that the solution of Bos- 
 ton lay beneath my hand if I had but the 
 wit to see it. But what is it? 
 
 Clarence King told me that he happened 
 241 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 to be in Boston in 1870, when Bret Harte 
 first appeared upon the extreme Western 
 horizon, with his " Luck of Roaring 
 Camp," and the rest of his wonderful earli- 
 est work in his hand. King at once became 
 an object of interest in Boston because he 
 knew Bret Harte, and was taken to lunch 
 with the famous Saturday Club at the Par- 
 ker House, where Longfellow, Holmes, 
 Emerson, Lowell and the other immortals 
 resorted for pie and for celestial converse. 
 Mr. Longfellow, who was the most gra- 
 cious gentleman that ever lived, turned to 
 King and asked in regard to Bret Harte — 
 " But is he a genius ? " Longfellow pro- 
 nounced the word " ge-ni-us," and quietly 
 paused for a reply. King said, " Why as 
 to that, Mr. Longfellow, everybody knows 
 that the country possesses no three-sylla- 
 bled genius outside of Massachusetts." 
 "Did they laugh?" I asked of King. 
 " Not a smile," he said. a But afterwards, 
 Dr. Holmes came round during the coffee 
 and cigars and pressed my hand quietly and 
 told me that that was a good thing I had 
 said to Longfellow." 
 
 In this anecdote, we get very near the se- 
 cret. Why didn't those gentlemen laugh? 
 They were the wittiest set in America, fond 
 242 
 
JULIA WARD HOWE 
 
 of laughing, collected at lunch for the very 
 purpose of joking. Yes, but not at them- 
 selves; and not in response to the jest of a 
 new, raw outsider. Had Dr. Holmes him- 
 self made the quip, it would have been re- 
 peated all over Boston. But they were not 
 prepared to laugh before knowing whether 
 Clarence King was a wit. Where was his 
 certificate? And who let him in, anyway? 
 The great, terrible, important powers of 
 the world, like social caste and religious 
 domination, always rest on secrets. A man 
 is born on the wrong side of the street and 
 can therefore never enter into certain draw- 
 ing-rooms, even though he be in every way 
 superior to everyone in those drawing- 
 rooms. When you try to find out what the 
 difference is between him and the rest, and 
 why he is accursed, you find that the reason 
 is a secret. It is a secret that a certain kind 
 of straw hat is damnable. Little boys 
 know these things about other little boys. 
 The world is written over with mysterious 
 tramp-languages and symbols of Masonic 
 hieroglyphics. I know these things because 
 I belong to the Masonic Lodge of Massa- 
 chusetts. By the accident of birth I am in- 
 side Boston (^Eschylus says that relation- 
 ship is a tremendous force) . I am inside of 
 243 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 Boston, and I am going to divulge; the 
 meaning of every Masonic symbol which. I 
 can decipher. 
 
 Boston has always been a hieratic aris- 
 tocracy. Its chief rulers were parsons in 
 the eighteenth century, and business men in 
 the nineteenth. But you may take it for 
 granted that there was always a pharisaical 
 clique in the middle of Boston, a clique of 
 elders. The anthropologists have no doubt 
 a name for the gang-instinct and cryptic 
 passion that binds thieves together, and fills 
 the words " he is one of us " with so much 
 religious power. Now, amid all the down- 
 fall of Puritanism, and of the old Boston 
 cultivation, the inner core of a loyalty to a 
 local priesthood still rules the city; and, on 
 the whole, rules it well. Social Boston is a 
 religious society, so also in business Boston, 
 so is sporting Boston, so is literary Boston. 
 If you know the town well, you will often 
 find persons there who are not of the caste. 
 Their countenances do not fall at the men- 
 tion of Moses and Aaron, and they wear no 
 phylacteries. You will generally find that 
 such people are mere sojourners in Boston; 
 their fathers and grandfathers came from 
 elsewhere. 
 
 One should immerse one's self occasion- 
 244 
 
JULIA WARD HOWE 
 
 ally in some hieratic influence in order to 
 understand how vulgar and disgusting any 
 merely personal virtue appears in the eyes 
 of the faithful. The devout Protestant is, 
 to the devout Catholic, a gross and boorish 
 person. 
 
 The na'ture of Mrs. Howe's social talents 
 was not acceptable to the taste of Boston. 
 Her house was full of Persians, Arme- 
 nians, and the professors of strange new 
 faiths. I think it was her followers rather 
 than herself that displeased the Bostonians. # 
 She sat at the gate and entertained all men, 
 including a lot of people who Boston 
 thought ought not to be entertained. But 
 there she sat, nevertheless, — all courage, all 
 wit and all benignity, and so will the image 
 of her ever remain in the minds of the thou- 
 sands of those who knew her. 
 
 245 
 
THE NEGRO QUESTION 
 
XVII 
 
 THE NEGRO QUESTION 
 
 I come here with some reluctance this even- 
 ing; because I do not wish to be obliged to 
 make up my mind about the race question. 
 In making up one's mind, one closes one's 
 mind ; and this race question, — which is no 
 more than the struggle between Good and 
 Evil put into visible shape, — can only be 
 settled from moment to moment by any one 
 of us. In so far as we ourselves are per- 
 fect, we settle it for the moment. 
 
 The history of the United States down 
 to about 1870 is a history of this particular 
 struggle between good and evil. Our con- 
 stitutional questions, Secession, the Civil 
 War, Reconstruction, — all the heat and 
 agony of our political life during seventy 
 years, came out of this negro question. 
 Since 1870, the negro question has ceased 
 to be the pivot upon which our whole civili- 
 zation turned, and has sunk to the position 
 249 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 of being the chief among the great prob- 
 lems before us. It is a problem that has 
 been clearly recognized and is being nobly 
 met by the whites and by the blacks alike. 
 Christianity, training, and education — 
 these things are the solution, these things 
 are the need of all of us. If we keep our 
 individual minds clear of all rancor, time 
 will do the rest. 
 
 I believe that no race ever had a better 
 hero than the colored race has to-day in 
 Booker Washington. He is the embodi- 
 ment of what all of us ought to be in regard 
 to this question : not only the negro but the 
 white man looks upon him with reverence, 
 and learns from him to be patient, to put 
 away animosity, to have faith in God, to 
 pursue inflexibly processes which operate 
 slowly. 
 
 The two races in America are spiritually 
 in contact and can only improve in unison. 
 Therefore when an Association of this kind 
 is formed for " the advancement of the col- 
 ored race," it might just as well be called 
 " for the advancement of the white race." 
 I suppose that you all understand this. 
 
 There is a great law governing the meet- 
 ing of races. When a powerful race meets 
 a helpless race, two things happen. First 
 250 
 
THE NEGRO QUESTION 
 
 there is a carnival of crime. Cruelty and 
 oppression take place: some men in each 
 race become evil and hard-hearted. But 
 the reverse also happens thereafter; good- 
 ness and mercy are developed: certain men 
 become saints and heroes. Now in Amer- 
 ica we had two hundred and fifty years of 
 the epoch during which both races were be- 
 ing injured by contact with one another, 
 both were being made miserable, both bru- 
 talized, and in consequence of this very 
 epoch of slavery our whole land to-day is 
 still full of hard, hard hearts. 
 
 But the tide seems now to be running the 
 other way, and the pressure created by the 
 living together of the two races seems to be 
 generating virtue. The educators and mis- 
 sionaries, the philanthropists and thinkers 
 have sprung up in America and have de- 
 voted themselves to the negro question. 
 They form a sort of army. There are apos- 
 tles and servants of Christ among us who 
 have been called into being through this 
 very question, and whose existence gives 
 dignity to our whole civilization. They 
 have not solved the question as yet. The 
 depravity of the blacks and the lynchings by 
 the whites have not ceased. Burnings of 
 negroes at the stake still draw upon our na- 
 251 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 tion the contempt and horror of mankind. 
 But the spirit that is to put an end to these 
 things has already been born. 
 
 True reform comes slowly; and no race 
 was ever freed except by its own ef- 
 forts, — no man saved except through him- 
 self. Therefore, when I hear of the strug- 
 gles which the poor negroes are making in 
 the South, to civilize and to educate them- 
 selves, when I hear of how they eke out il- 
 liberal public grants with mites saved out of 
 their poverty, of how they are long suffering 
 and reasonable, — I say to myself, This was 
 worth waiting for. These people are sav- 
 ing themselves. They will obtain the 
 money which they need, and will use it 
 rightly. The same thought is of harder aj>- 
 plication to the lynching question. The 
 communities where lynching occurs can 
 only recover their power of self-govern- 
 ment through their own efforts. The 
 flower must grow out of the soil. The man 
 on the spot who is a part of the community 
 where lynching is threatened, must risk his 
 life or lay his life down freely in defense of 
 law. A mere willingness on the part of 
 one man to do this will generally stop a 
 lynching. And you will observe that this 
 spirit is beginning to manifest itself among 
 252 
 
THE NEGRO QUESTION 
 
 our people, and will end by preventing the 
 atrocities. 
 
 I used to bewail the present legacy of the 
 Slave-trade as much as the original iniquity 
 of it. The fact that the negroes are here 
 at all seemed almost to over-punish Amer- 
 ica for the crime of their importation. I 
 used to think that the consequences which 
 that crime entailed in the perpetuation 
 among us of passions fierce and base, and 
 in the mingling of races that are better 
 apart, were pure evils, — ghastly never-end- 
 ing punishments. But now I believe that 
 it is foolish to argue in such a manner as 
 this about historic things. The subject is 
 beyond our comprehension. What we 
 think the greatest evils in our minute lives 
 often bring to us the greatest blessings. It 
 may be so with nations. 
 
 The race question certainly puts each of 
 us to the alternative of becoming a great 
 deal holier, a great deal kinder, a great deal 
 deeper in character, or else of being brutal- 
 ized to some extent. We have not yet got 
 free from some of the intellectual conse- 
 quences of slavery. The old cruelty of the 
 plantation is gone, and yet I sometimes hear 
 rich people in club-rooms arguing about the 
 negro question in a spirit, and from a point 
 253 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 of view, that indicates an intellectual in- 
 jury. My own friends sometimes show 
 scars of the mind in dealing with the negro 
 question. They become for a moment like 
 sixteenth-century pirates, — their eyes glit- 
 ter, and they talk tyranny. Yet these men 
 are now mere relics. The newer age shows 
 ever fewer of the type. Such meetings as 
 this show that the American people are 
 choosing the upward path. Hardly a day 
 passes but we see new proofs that America 
 will solve her race question in the only way 
 it can be solved, — through herself becom- 
 ing more gentle and more intelligent. 
 
 Our progress in this direction is slow; 
 the path leads upward at a very small an- 
 gle. But let us remember that slowness of 
 growth is what America most needs in all 
 directions. In everything we have grown 
 up too quickly. To-day all things among 
 us go crashing forward too quickly. We 
 should not desire sudden changes, even for 
 the better. Sudden changes signify short- 
 lived events. Therefore, if we see steady 
 improvement going forward anywhere, let 
 us rejoice that it goes forward slowly, so 
 that its roots may sink deep, and all nature 
 may accommodate herself to the change. 
 Thus will the good things become perma- 
 nent. 
 
 254 
 
THE NEGRO QUESTION 
 
 Isaiah says in a text that is too seldom 
 quoted : " He that believeth shall not make 
 haste." Those words seem to suggest the 
 very patience which is the national endow- 
 ment of the negro race. We see the virtue 
 to-day in the meek and sturdy spirit with 
 which the leaders of that race are building 
 up schools and sending out missionaries. 
 They are men of long wind and great faith. 
 They refuse to be drawn into controversy 
 or to take part in occasional excitement. 
 They realize the nature of their work. 
 They have studied their problem with the 
 passion of their souls, and they understand 
 it. And we, who belong to the white race, 
 may herein find our best lesson. We also 
 must have long wind and perfect faith. 
 We must be as patient, and school ourselves 
 as thoroughly as they. 
 
 255 
 
ALFRED Q. COLLINS 
 
XVIII 
 ALFRED Q. COLLINS 
 
 Alfred Collins was a man of remarkable 
 talents, and he belonged by nature to at 
 least two of the great spiritual cliques of 
 the world. The first of these cliques was a 
 worship of intellectual accuracy, and the 
 second was a passion for art. He was one 
 of the first generation of idealists that arose 
 after the Civil War, and through whose la- 
 bors new life has been poured into our ar- 
 chitecture, politics, charity and education. 
 He was to have been the painter of this 
 epoch ; as McKim became its architect. He 
 was to have filled out the niche of painting 
 in the temple of the new idealism. To such 
 a destiny, at any rate, we assigned Collins, 
 when I first knew him; and although he 
 never attained to the rank we dreamed of, 
 nevertheless he became one of the most suc- 
 cessful portrait painters of his day, and was 
 regarded by a circle of contemporary art- 
 ists as a high priest of technical endeavor, 
 — a spirit of unpurchasable integrity, whose 
 work astonished and inspired. His por- 
 traits were not numerous, yet he always had 
 staunch clients behind him, who were con- 
 259 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 vinced of his importance. Their confidence 
 was, I believe, largely due to the steady and 
 generous admiration of other painters, an 
 admiration which was a credit to the times. 
 
 Alfred Collins was a lad without means, 
 born in a land which seemed to possess 
 neither art nor aspirations for art, whose in- 
 habitants would not recognize talent if it 
 should appear, and would be apt to discrim- 
 inate against their own countrymen when- 
 ever this was possible. I knew the genera- 
 tion of artists in America to which Collins 
 belonged, and, with regard to most of them, 
 the struggle always seemed too severe. 
 Our public had neither knowledge nor sym- 
 pathy, nor money to give to these men. 
 They seemed to be drawing upon a vacuum 
 in trying to paint at all. Yet there was in 
 America, at that time, an undoubted im- 
 pulse toward painting, which sent these men 
 to France, the art-center of the period. 
 
 Collins started in life as a bank clerk in 
 Boston. His mind, however, was as non- 
 commercial as if he had always lived in a 
 Spanish Convent. His intellectual outlook 
 was unblemished. He was sent to study in 
 Paris by Mr. Quincy Shaw of Boston. 
 Collins and his compatriots arrived in Paris 
 during an epoch when the arts were de- 
 260 
 
ALFRED Q. COLLINS 
 
 dining, in fact when the old craftsman's 
 formulas were being thrown away, and 
 caustic, dissolvent criticism was in the air. 
 The pupils in the studios of the great French 
 painters were not taught how to paint, so 
 much as how to analyze. I met Collins on 
 his return from his long apprenticeship in 
 Paris, and I sat at his feet for many years, 
 listening to the true doctrine; — and yet it 
 is only by chance, and a day or two ago, that 
 I happened to recollect the very first impres- 
 sion I got from him. It was this : — 
 " Why didn't they teach him painting in 
 Paris ?" I should have thought a man 
 would come back from abroad knowing his 
 trade. But the truth is that in about 1840 
 the whole world forgot the trade of por- 
 traiture. To know what that trade once 
 was like one must look at the portraits of 
 for instance, — Harding, or of any second or 
 third rate French or English painter of the 
 mid-century, — of some man who earned his 
 livelihood by supplying the market with por- 
 traits. The man has a style and a recipe. 
 He is not very ambitious as to method; he 
 does not experiment; he paints. 
 
 But the newer painters sought the higher 
 branches, and lost the ABC. A great 
 critical world-influence, which began in the 
 261 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 eighteenth century, was drawing to a focus 
 and strangling art in Paris at the very mo- 
 ment when ignorant, enthusiastic young 
 America arrived there. Young America 
 came away with a mouthful of ashes. We 
 arrived just as the feast was over. We 
 needed the rudiments and we received the 
 leavings. We needed milk and porridge, 
 and we received a cup of black coffee and 
 a cigarette. 
 
 Collins had a chiseled brow, a straight 
 nose and blazing eye and was extraordina- 
 rily handsome before he became heavy. At 
 the age of twenty-eight, however, when I 
 first knew him, he had a chin and a frame 
 more suitable to a man of forty than of 
 thirty. He was of very powerful build, 
 he knew how to box, punch the bag and 
 wrestle, and he loved feats of strength in 
 the studio. He was a bon vivant, and 
 would make a preliminary study for a feast, 
 as a painter makes a sketch for a picture. 
 He had the subtlety of an animal in under- 
 standing character, and he observed delicate 
 traits like a criminologist. He was always 
 bursting with enthusiasm and gave of him- 
 self. He had so much personal force and 
 conversational power that to his admirers 
 
 he became a deity, — to those who disliked 
 262 
 
ALFRED Q. COLLINS 
 
 him, an egotistical doctrinaire. His super- 
 abundant physical energy became a source 
 of weakness, — as happens with many peo- 
 ple, who pass through youth without being 
 forced to learn the art of resting. He re- 
 minded one always of the statue of the 
 wrestler, and was prepared to solve all ques- 
 tions by wrestling. 
 
 Collins felt he was destined to rediscover 
 painting. He was to recover the practices 
 of the great masters of Italy and Holland, 
 and to justify them by the science of the 
 nineteenth century. 
 
 That all good art was based on scientific 
 truth, he never doubted. He had the whole- 
 hearted belief in psychology, which tinged 
 the minds of young men of promise in his 
 day. All the new sciences were to bring us 
 nearer to all the old arts. Collins would 
 spend a month of study over some effect of 
 light in Rembrandt, or in seeking the secret 
 of a Rubens drapery. He felt that neither 
 accident nor ethical intention was behind 
 great painting, but only an understanding of 
 the laws of vision. Ruskin and the senti- 
 mental writers were poison to him. He 
 thought that all merit was the result of 
 technical excellence, and he regarded the 
 moral feelings which art arouses in the lay- 
 263 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 man as most dangerous guides to the study 
 of painting. 
 
 He read books upon the eye and upon re- 
 fractions of light; he experimented with 
 colored objects. He often approached the 
 subject from the standpoint of a physicist; 
 but he was too much of an artist, and his 
 interests were too metaphysical for him long 
 to remain a physicist. 
 
 In his late years he told me that he had 
 started out with a belief in realism. He had 
 staked his all upon this. He had clutched 
 realism, and held it with might and main in 
 his clenched fist, — till at last he began 
 gradually to open his hand, and there was 
 nothing in it: realism had vanished under 
 inspection. Another of his early enthusi- 
 asms was for high lights. He would place 
 a hard featured old lady under a tremen- 
 dous blaze of light, and paint her till the 
 values hurt your eyes and hurt your feel- 
 ings. If you should suggest that the world 
 would never put up with anything so ugly, 
 he would smile with commiseration, or else 
 roar with anger. He was on the path to- 
 wards Leonardo. He cared nothing about 
 the old lady, or her family or her well- 
 wishers, or about the critics and contem- 
 porary mousers in the drawing-room. The 
 264 
 
ALFRED Q. COLLINS 
 
 picture was a mere experiment, a reaction, 
 a page in a notebook. 
 
 If Collins had a defect, it was a lack of 
 humility. He couldn't bear to think, and 
 he wouldn't stop to imagine that perhaps he 
 might be altogether on the wrong track 
 about something. He never discovered the 
 unconscious. To him art was something 
 that could be found out. The unity of light 
 was a calculated, predetermined thing. 
 Sentiment was a danger, temperament was 
 a danger, all must be science. So far as 
 technical skill went, he always drew like a 
 master, and could at times, paint like a 
 master. But his search for perfection 
 ruined his power to finish. He had no trade 
 sense, no sense of the " good enough," no 
 conscience as to his duty to provide some- 
 thing or other that would pass muster. He 
 sought the absolute, and would work for six 
 months at a portrait and then abandon it, 
 because he could not find a cue which any 
 half hour's inspiration might bring. 
 
 His main thesis, and I must say that it 
 profoundly affected me at the time he ex- 
 pounded it and has influenced all my be- 
 liefs ever since, — was that beauty must 
 not be sought as an end in itself: beauty 
 was a result. You must seek truth. For 
 265 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 instance, in writing or in speaking, you 
 must always try to give the idea with 
 accuracy. If you pursue this course, a 
 certain grace will arise out of your suc- 
 cess in giving the thought. But you must 
 not try to be graceful; or you will become 
 affected. He disliked artists who con- 
 sciously adopted any style. Style should be 
 merely the result of doing one's best with 
 the problem. If a thing were perfectly 
 painted, it would have no style. Style is 
 error, — just as personality is error. 
 Nevertheless, the more you avoid the per- 
 sonal, the more will the note of personal 
 conviction be in your work. By neglecting 
 style you attain to style. In all these mat- 
 ters Collins was dealing with the most pro- 
 found metaphysical truths. 
 
 He was always interested in abstract 
 thought; and I cannot but believe that peo- 
 ple's influence is in proportion to their power 
 of abstract thinking; or at least that some 
 very strong wave of force goes out from 
 anyone who is excited by abstract ideas. 
 Collins' ambition was abstract. He wanted 
 to redeliver to mankind the Promethean art 
 of painting; and he suffered as much as if 
 he had already done this, and were being 
 punished by Zeus for it. He had the ob- 
 266 
 
ALFRED Q. COLLINS 
 
 stinate pride, the incorruptibility of a being 
 who should propose to be the first man, — 
 the one unbought spirit in the universe. 
 
 Under different conditions of education 
 and surroundings the vast force that was in 
 Collins would have issued in pictures. 
 But in spite of his impassioned study and his 
 ceaseless experiments, he never perfected his 
 vehicle, nor did he ever quite know what he 
 wanted to say. There was impediment in his 
 thought. He saw much and thought much 
 — perhaps he saw and thought too much. 
 For some reason, hidden in the very bosom 
 of his age and of his country, his mind was 
 prone to produce the philosopher's, rather 
 than the painter's solution of a problem. 
 His talk would connect itself easily with the 
 metaphysical discussions of all ages; but, 
 so far as painting went, the tradition was 
 broken; there was a link gone between his 
 work and the old work. 
 
 Thoughts like these would flit through 
 my mind as I watched him paint and wished 
 I knew enough of the art to understand his 
 procedure. Painting itself is a sequent and 
 consistent symbolism, that goes back to the 
 beginning of time. Any new branch of it is 
 deeply connected with the old roots; and 
 those souls to whom painting is a natural 
 267 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 language have ideas that can be expressed 
 only in the terms of that art. When I 
 heard this brilliant creature talk, I used to 
 think that if he could say it all in paint, he 
 would be as great as Velasquez. But he 
 had set himself a task that could be accom- 
 plished only in a sympathetic age. 
 
 Collins' method of painting gave the in- 
 tellect more than it could do. He supposed 
 that he must both see and translate upon the 
 instant: the values of the sitter must be 
 transformed into art then and there. To 
 Collins every picture was a new problem, 
 as. great as the whole of mathematics. Now 
 the great painters have not painted in this 
 way. They have dished out a spoonful of 
 beaten-up eggs, ready for the fire, added a 
 pinch of parsley, and served hot. Each 
 one of them had a personal language of his 
 own, which he had worked out during his 
 whole lifetime, and which answered his 
 needs. Collins, on the other hand, was al- 
 ways seeking. 
 
 And yet here too we face a sort of 
 strange paradox; for in being the thing he 
 was, Collins broke barriers and blazed paths 
 which required just this kind of a man. 
 Society through its opposition compelled 
 this form of explosion. 
 268 
 
ALFRED Q. COLLINS 
 
 I am convinced that in some essential way- 
 he was on the right track. The art of the 
 world is a game of hide and seek. It blos- 
 soms, it springs up in nooks and corners, it 
 dies away, it reappears. Some men search 
 and find it not ; others find and value it not. 
 This causeless, impersonal, fanning of the 
 spirit into flame, which leaves a picture or a 
 sonnet behind it has something to do with 
 the technique of craft; but philosophy has 
 never been able to discover where craft ends 
 and genius begins. The great artist, during 
 the great epoch, pursues his work, dies and 
 leaves the matter a mystery, — over which 
 the artists, amateurs and thinkers of later 
 times grope, probe and experiment. 
 
 A renaissance almost always begins in 
 an attempt to recover lost arts. New art 
 grows out of old art, as a graft on an old 
 stock. The forms, to be sure, change under 
 the hand of the master. Orpheus takes up 
 Pan's pipes, and they are transformed into 
 an organ under his touch. 
 
 There was some sort of buzzing gadfly 
 of destiny behind Collins that awakened 
 many other persons besides myself to a con- 
 ception of what painting is. He taught us 
 that painting was filled with a force like the 
 sun, that it was intelligent, articulated, 
 269 
 
MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 
 
 freighted with indestructible meaning, and 
 was one of the things of greatest conse- 
 quence in the world. I could not myself 
 read these beliefs in Collins' paintings; but 
 the effect that his work and even fragments 
 of it, often had upon painters made me see 
 that somehow the beliefs must be expressed 
 there for those who could read. 
 
 THE END 
 
 270 
 
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