We meet on a solemn occasion.
One has recently disappeared from our midst whose work was a model;
whose life, too, was a model; whose benign influence, exerted for many
years from the seclusion of a quiet retreat, was felt far beyond the
limits of his own country; whose views, always expressed in the gentlest
terms, will outlive the thunder of many a noisy writer, as ever-renewing
flowers survive earthquakes.
A member of the American Philosophical Society, founded in his own city
by Franklin "to promote useful knowledge," Furness was true to the motto
of the society and lived the life of a true philosopher. I call him
Furness, without Doctor or any other title, not because he is no more,
but to obey a request of his. "I do not like titles in the republic of
letters," he wrote me in the early times of our acquaintance; "if you
will drop all to me, I will do the same to you. One touch of Shakespeare
makes the whole world kin."
All those whom the spirit of philosophy has penetrated and who stanchly
adhere to its ideal count among the noblest types of humanity and,
whatever their rank in life or the period when they lived, resemble each
other. When Furness died numerous eulogies, biographies, and portraits
of him, penned, many of them, by the hands of masters, were published. I
wonder if any better resembled him than this one:
"Remember his constancy in the fulfilling of the dictates of reason, the
evenness of his humor at all junctures, the serenity of his face, his
extreme gentleness, his scorn for vainglory, his application to
penetrate the meaning of things. He never dismissed any point without
having first well examined and well understood it. He bore unjust
reproaches without acrimony. He did nothing with undue haste.... A foe
to slander, he was neither hypercritical, nor suspicious, nor
sophistical. He was pleased with little, modest in his house, his
clothing, his food. He loved work, ate soberly, and thus was able to
busy himself, for the whole day, with the same problems. Let us remember
how constant and equable was his friendship, with what open mind he
accepted a frank contradiction of his own views, with what joy he
received advice that proved better than his own, and the kind of piety,
free from all superstition, that was his. Do as he did, and your last
hour will be comforted, as his was, by the conscience of the good
accomplished."
In those higher regions where true philosophers live, equality reigns;
they resemble each other by their virtues; this portrait, which, to my
mind, gives such a vivid idea of the life Furness led at Wallingford,
near Philadelphia, was drawn eighteen centuries ago, by that noblest of
antique minds, Emperor Marcus Aurelius, describing his predecessor, the
first of the Antonines, he who, on the last night of his life, being
asked for the password, had answered: "Æquanimitas."
After studies at Harvard and Philadelphia and a visit to Europe and the
Levant, having taken such part in the Civil War as his infirmity allowed
him, a happy husband, a happy father, Horace Howard Furness decided to
devote his life to the "promotion of useful knowledge." He withdrew, in
a way, from the world, settling in a quiet retreat, and started on his
life's work with the equipment of a modern scientist and the silent
enthusiasm, the indefatigable energy of mediæval thinkers, the compilers
of _Summæ_ of times gone, regretting nothing, happy with his lot, at one
with that master mind of old English literature, the author of _Piers
Plowman_. "For," said centuries ago the man "robed in russet,"
"If heaven be on this erthe · and ese to any soule,
It is in cloistre or in scole · be many skilles I finde;
For in cloistre cometh no man · to chide ne to fihte,
But all is buxomnesse there and bokes · to rede and to lerne."
Such a cloister, with ease to his soul, with buxomness, with books to
read and learn, was for our departed friend his house in Wallingford,
where he lived surrounded by that extraordinarily gifted family of his:
a wife to whom we owe the Concordance to the poems of Shakespeare, a
sister who translated for him the German critics, sons and a daughter
and a sister's relative[250] who have all made their mark in their
country's literature. There, for years, he toiled, never thinking of
self nor of fame, busy with his task, and even in his seclusion, with
his tenderness of heart and ample sympathies, listening to
The still sad music of humanity.
What that task was all the world now knows. A passionate admirer of
Shakespeare, he wanted to make accessible to all every criticism,
information, comment, explanation concerning the poet which had appeared
anywhere at any time. Each volume was to be a complete encyclopædia of
all that concerned each play. The first appeared in 1871, the sixteenth
is the last he will have put his hand to.
In the introduction to each volume, his purposes and methods are
explained, and never has any writer more completely and more unwittingly
allowed us to look into his own character than Furness when writing
what he must have considered his very impersonal statements. What
strikes the reader, before all, is the philosophical spirit which
pervades the whole work. A worthy member of the American Philosophical
Society, he wanted to be "useful." Lives are and will be more and more
encumbered; the acquisition of knowledge should, therefore, be made more
and more easy of reach. "To abridge the labor and to save the time of
others" was, said he in his first volume, what impelled him to write. No
pains of his were spared to lessen those of others. And all specialists
know the extraordinary reliability of his texts and statements.
"Nowhere, perhaps," Sir Sidney Lee wrote in his _Life of Shakespeare_,
"has more labor been devoted to the study of the works of the poet than
that given by Mr. H.H. Furness, of Philadelphia, to the preparation of
the new Variorum edition."
The labor was one of love, and a lover naturally forgets himself for the
beloved one. Furness tried not to show the ardor of his sentiments; but
it now and then appears, usually in small details when he would, more
naturally, be off his guard. Shakespeare calls Cæsar's Ambassador
Thidias, and not Thyreus, as the later-day editors do, under pretense
that it was the real name. They are wrong: "Shakespeare in his
nomenclature was, as in all things, exquisite.... For certain reasons
(did he ever do anything without reason?) he chose the name of
Thidias...."
In the privacy of intimate correspondence Furness would be more
outspoken, being not restrained by the thought that he would be imposing
his own views upon the mass of readers. On Cleopatra, about whom I had
risked opinions somewhat different from his, he wrote me--it seems it
was yesterday: "Of course, Shakespeare's Cleopatra is not history. But
who cares for history? Of this be assured, that, if you had lived with
her as I have for two years, you would adore her as deeply as I do."
The truth is that, as he said, he actually _lived_ with the personages
of the plays, and he rapturously listened to those far-off voices, which
came clearer to his infirm ears than to those of any one of us, meant
only for commonplace uses. He had a better right than any to form an
opinion, but was ever afraid to seem to force it on others. Of his
edition itself he had written: "I do not flatter myself that this is an
_enjoyable_ edition of Shakespeare. I regard it rather as a necessary
evil."[251] On another occasion, having been criticised about a certain
statement of his, he wrote: "I now wish to state that my critic was
entirely right and I entirely wrong." His work was a work of love, but
it was also a work of reason, as befits a philosopher. He leaned
throughout toward conservative methods, which have doubtless the fault
of attracting less tumultuous attention to the worker: a great fault in
the eyes of the many, a great quality in Furness's own.
His shrewd good sense, seconded by a no less enjoyable good humor, never
failed him. When he began, one important question had first to be
decided: would he admit in his work only textual and philological
criticisms or also æsthetic criticism, mere poetry, sheer literature? To
many the temptation would have been great to exclude the latter, the
fashion being among the most haughty, if not the most learned, of the
learned to doubt the seriousness, laboriousness, usefulness of any who
can enjoy, in a play of Shakespeare's, something else than doubtful
readings and misprints. This school is less new than is generally
believed, and in his _Temple du Goût_ Voltaire had already represented
the superb critics of the matter-of-fact school answering those who
asked them whether they would not visit the temple:
"Nous, Messieurs, point du tout.
Ce n'est pas là, grâce à Dieu, notre étude;
Le goût n'est rien, nous avons l'habitude
De rédiger au long, de point en point,
Ce qu'on pensa, mais nous ne pensons point."
The fact is that, as Furness well perceived from the first, the two
elements should no more be separated than soul from body. Without
accuracy, literary criticism is mere trumpery; without a sense of the
beautiful, mere accuracy is deathlike. Much so-called æsthetic
criticism, wrote Furness, "is flat, stale, unprofitable.... But shall we
ignore the possible existence of a keener insight than our own?... Are
we not to listen eagerly and reverently when Coleridge or Goethe talks
about Shakespeare?"
With such a rule in mind he made his selections, pruning what he deemed
should be pruned: "_rejectiones et exclusiones debitas_," as Bacon would
have said. But one more kind of thing he excluded, and this is an
eminently characteristic trait of his. His gentleness (not a weak, but a
manly one) rebelled at others' acerbity, and when he saw appear that
unwelcome and somewhat abundant element in modern criticism, he simply
left it out: no admittance for any such thing within the covers of a
gentleman-scholar's gentlemanly and scholarly work. True it is that,
while Shakespeare is the author most read--after the Bible, it is also
the one about which the most furious and unchristian disputes have been
waged--after the Bible. The Philadelphia scholar wanted all the critics
admitted within his fold to keep the peace there, and he adopted the
following rule: "First, all unfavorable criticism of fellow critics is
excluded as much as possible.... To confound Goethe, Schlegel, or Tieck
is one thing, to elucidate Shakespeare is another." He went even
further, and since he could not quote whole books and had to select,
"the endeavor," he said, "in all honesty has been to select from every
author the passages wherein he appears to best advantage." What critic,
then, can be imagined so blind to the service rendered, so much in love
with his own harshness, that would not feel toward Furness as Queen
Katharine toward Griffith:
After my death I wish no other herald,
No other speaker of my living actions,
To keep mine honor from corruption,
But such an honest chronicler as--_Furness_.
His friendly appreciation of French critics (who, with all they lacked
in early days, were, after all, the first to form, outside of England,
an opinion on Shakespeare, the oldest one being of about 1680) cannot
but touch a French heart. "It has given me especial pleasure," he said
in the Introduction to his first volume, "to lay before the English
reader the extracts from the French; it is but little known, in this
country at least, outside the ranks of Shakespeare students, how great
is the influence which Shakespeare at this hour is exerting on French
literature, and how many and how ardent are his admirers in this
nation." He had even, at a later date, a good word for poor Ducis and
his Hamlet, a Hamlet truly Ducis's own.
Nor shall I ever forget in what tones, amidst friendly applause, the
great scholar spoke of France in his own city of Philadelphia, at the
memorable gathering of April 20, 1906, when, in accordance with the will
of the nation as expressed by Congress, a medal was offered to my
country to commemorate her reception of Franklin at the hour when the
fate of the States was still weighing in the balance.
In the early years of manhood one sees, far ahead on the road, those
great thinkers, scientists, master men, tall, powerful, visible from a
distance, ready to help the passer-by, like great oaks offering their
shade. They seem so strong, so far above the common that the thought
never occurs that we of the frailer sort may see the day when they will
be no more. Who was ever present at the death of an oak? Whoever thought
that he could see the day when he would accompany Robert Browning's
remains to Westminster or mourn for the disappearance of Taine or Gaston
Paris? The feeling I had for them I had for Furness, too. Was it
possible to think that this solid oak would fall?
He himself, however, had misgivings, and it seemed, of late years, as if
the dear ones who had gone before were beckoning to him. "Do you
remember," he wrote me in 1909, "my sister, Mrs. Wister, to whom I had
the pleasure of introducing you at the Franklin celebration? I am now
living under the black and heavy shadow of her loss. She left me last
November, solitary and alone, aching for the 'sound of a voice that is
silent.'" And at a more recent date: "I have been so shattered by the
blows of fate that I doubt you'll ever again receive a printed
forget-me-not from me."
And now, in our turn, members of the American Philosophical Society,
members of the Shakespeare Societies of the world, members innumerable
of the republic of letters, we too ache for "the sound of a voice that
is silent." On the signet with which he used to seal his letters,
Furness had engraved a motto, which is the best summing up of Emperor
Marcus Aurelius's firm and resigned philosophy: "This, too, will pass
away."
For him, too, the august sad hour struck. But so far as anything in this
fleeting world may be held to remain, so long as mankind shall be able
to appreciate honest work honestly done, the name of Furness will not
pass away, but live enshrined in every scholar's grateful memory.