The Professor is a young man, but he had so obviously the misfortune
of growing up too early that he seems already like a mournful relic
of irrevocable days. His ardent youth was spent in that halcyon time
of the early nineteen-hundreds when all was innocence in the heart of
young America. “When I was in college,” the Professor often says, “all
this discussion of social questions was unknown to us. The growing
seriousness of the American college student is an inspiring phenomenon
in our contemporary life.”
In those days the young men who felt an urge within them went in for
literature. It was still the time when Presbyterian clergymen and
courtly Confederate generals were contributing the inspiration of
their ripe scholarship to the younger generation. It was the time
when Brander Matthews still thrilled the world of criticism with his
scintillating Gallic wit and his cosmopolitan wealth of friendships.
The young men of that time are still a race apart. Through these
literary masters they touched the intimate life of literature; they
knew Kipling and Stevenson, Arthur Symons and the great Frenchmen, and
felt themselves one with the charmed literary brotherhood throughout
the world. It was still the time when, free from philosophic or
sociologic taint, our American youth was privileged to breathe in from
men like Henry van Dyke and Charles Eliot Norton the ideals of the
scholar and the gentleman.
The Professor’s sensitive talent soon asserted itself. With Wordsworth
he had absorbed himself into the circumambient life of nature and
made the great reconciliation between her and man. With Shelley he
had dared unutterable things and beaten his wings against the stars.
With Tennyson he had shuddered pensively on the brink of declining
faith. With Carlyle he had felt the call of duty, and all the revulsion
against a sordid and mechanical age. With Arnold he had sought the
sweetness and light which should come to him from knowing all the best
that had been said and thought in the world. The Professor had scarcely
begun to write verse before he found himself victor in a prize poetry
contest which had enlisted the talent of all the best poets of America.
He often tells his students of the intoxication of that evening when
he encircled the dim vaulted corridors of the college library, while
his excited brain beat out the golden couplets of the now celebrated
“Ganymede.” The success of this undergraduate stripling fell like
a thunderbolt upon the literary world. Already consecrated to the
scholar’s career, he found fallen upon him the miracle of the creative
artist. But Shelley and Keats had had their greatness very early, too.
And when, at the early age of twenty-three, the Professor published
his masterly doctoral dissertation on “The Anonymous Lyrics of the
Fourteenth Century,” he at once attained in the world of literary
scholarship the distinction that “Ganymede” had given him in the world
of poetry.
His career has not frustrated those bright promises. His rare fusion
of scholarship and genius won him the chair of English Literature in
one of our most rapidly growing colleges, where he has incomparable
opportunities for influencing the ideals of the young men under him.
His courses are among the most popular in the college. Although
his special scholarly research has been devoted to pre-Elizabethan
literature, he is at home in all the ages. His lectures are models of
carefully weighed criticism. “My purpose,” he says, “is to give my
boys the spirit of the authors, and let them judge between them for
themselves.” Consequently, however much Swinburne may revolt him, the
Professor expounds the carnal and desperate message of that poet with
the same care which he gives to his beloved Wordsworth. “When they have
heard them all,” he told me once, “I can trust my boys to feel the
insufficiency of any purely materialistic interpretation of life.”
Impeccable as is his critical taste where the classics are concerned,
he is reluctant about giving his opinion to those students who come
for a clue through the current literary maze. Stevenson was early
canonized, and the Professor speaks with charm and fulness upon him,
but G. B. S. and Galsworthy must wait. “Time, perhaps,” says the
Professor, “will put the seal of approval upon them. Meanwhile our
judgment can be only tentative.” His fine objectivity is shown in those
lists of the hundred best books of the year which he is sometimes
asked to compile for the Sunday newspapers. Rarely does a new author,
never does a young author, appear among them. Scholarly criticism, the
Professor feels, can scarcely be too cautious.
The Professor’s inspiring influence upon his students, however, is not
confined to his courses. He has formed a little literary society in the
college, which meets weekly to discuss with him the larger cultural
issues of the time. Lately he has become interested in philosophy.
“In my day,” he once told me, “we young literary men did not study
philosophy.” But now, professor that he is, he goes to sit at the feet
of the great metaphysicians of his college. He has been immensely
stirred by the social and moral awakening of recent years. He willingly
allows discussions of socialism in his little society, but is inclined
to deprecate the fanaticism of college men who lose their sense of
proportion on social questions. But in his open-mindedness to radical
thought he is an inspiration to all who meet him. To be radical, he
tells his boys, is a necessary part of experience. In professorial
circles he is looked upon as a veritable revolutionist, for he
encourages the discussion of vital questions even in the classroom.
Questions such as evolution, capital punishment, free thought,
protection and education of women, furnish the themes for composition.
And from the essays of the masters--Macaulay, Huxley, John Stuart Mill
and Matthew Arnold--come the great arguments as freshly and as vitally
as of yore. Literature, says the Professor, is not merely language; it
is ideas. We must above all, he says, teach our undergraduates to think.
Although the Professor is thus responsive to the best radicalisms of
the day, he does not let their shock break the sacred chalice of the
past. He is deeply interested in the religious life of his college.
A devout Episcopalian, he deplores the callousness of the present
generation towards the immemorial beauty of ritual and dogma. The
empty seats of the college chapel fill him with dismay. One of his
most beautiful poems pictures his poignant sensations as he comes
from a quiet hour within its dim, organ-haunted shadows out into the
sunlight, where the careless athletes are running bare-leggedly past
him, unmindful of the eternal things.
I think I like the Professor best in his study at home, when he talks
on art and life with one or two respectful students. On the wall is
a framed autograph of Wordsworth, picked up in some London bookshop;
and a framed letter of appreciation from Richard Watson Gilder. On the
table stands a richly-bound volume of “Ganymede” with some of the very
manuscripts, as he has shown us, bound in among the leaves. His deep
and measured voice flows pleasantly on in anecdotes of the Authors’
Club, or reminiscences of the golden past. As one listens, the glamor
steals upon one. This is the literary life, grave, respected, serene.
All else is hectic rush, modern ideas a futile babel. It is men like
the Professor who keep the luster of scholarship bright, who hold true
the life of the scholar and the gentleman as it was lived of old. In a
world of change he keeps the faith pure.