The Goethean face and figure of Louis Agassiz were in those days to be
seen in the shady walks of Cambridge to which for me they lent a
Weimarish quality, in the degree that in Weimar itself a few years ago, I
felt a quality of Cambridge. Agassiz, of course, was Swiss and Latin,
and not Teutonic, but he was of the Continental European civilization,
and was widely different from the other Cambridge men in everything but
love of the place. “He is always an Europaen,” said Lowell one day, in
distinguishing concerning him; and for any one who had tasted the flavor
of the life beyond the ocean and the channel, this had its charm. Yet he
was extremely fond of his adoptive compatriots, and no alien born had a
truer or tenderer sense of New England character. I have an idea that no
one else of his day could have got so much money for science out of the
General Court of Massachusetts; and I have heard him speak with the
wisest and warmest appreciation of the hard material from which he was
able to extract this treasure. The legislators who voted appropriations
for his Museum and his other scientific objects were not usually lawyers
or professional men, with the perspectives of a liberal education, but
were hard-fisted farmers, who had a grip of the State’s money as if it
were their own, and yet gave it with intelligent munificence. They
understood that he did not want it for himself, and had no interested aim
in getting it; they knew that, as he once said, he had no time to make
money, and wished to use it solely for the advancement of learning; and
with this understanding they were ready, to help him generously. He
compared their liberality with that of kings and princes, when these
patronized science, with a recognition of the superior plebeian
generosity. It was on the veranda of his summer house at Nahant, while
he lay in the hammock, talking of this, that I heard him refer also to
the offer which Napoleon III. had made him, inviting him upon certain
splendid conditions to come to Paris after he had established himself in
Cambridge. He said that he had not come to America without going over
every such possibility in his own mind, and deciding beforehand against
it. He was a republican, by nationality and by preference, and was
entirely satisfied with his position and environment in New England.
Outside of his scientific circle in Cambridge he was more friends with
Longfellow than with any one else, I believe, and Longfellow told me how,
after the doctors had condemned Agassiz to inaction, on account of his
failing health he had broken down in his friend’s study, and wept like an
‘Europaer’, and lamented, “I shall never finish my work!” Some papers
which he had begun to write for the Magazine, in contravention of the
Darwinian theory, or part of it, which it is known Agassiz did not
accept, remained part of the work which he never finished. After his
death, I wished Professor Jeffries Wyman to write of him in the Atlantic,
but he excused himself on account of his many labors, and then he
voluntarily spoke of Agassiz’s methods, which he agreed with rather than
his theories, being himself thoroughly Darwinian. I think he said
Agassiz was the first to imagine establishing a fact not from a single
example, but from examples indefinitely repeated. If it was a question
of something about robins for instance, he would have a hundred robins
examined before he would receive an appearance as a fact.
Of course no preconception or prepossession of his own was suffered to
bar his way to the final truth he was seeking, and he joyously renounced
even a conclusion if he found it mistaken. I do not know whether Mrs.
Agassiz has put into her interesting life of him, a delightful story
which she told me about him. He came to her beaming one day, and
demanded, “You know I have always held such and such an opinion about a
certain group of fossil fishes?” “Yes, yes!” “Well, I have just been
reading------‘s new book, and he has shown me that there isn’t the least
truth in my theory”; and he burst into a laugh of unalloyed pleasure in
relinquishing his error.
I could touch science at Cambridge only on its literary and social side,
of course, and my meetings with Agassiz were not many. I recall a dinner
at his house to Mr. Bret Harte, when the poet came on from California,
and Agassiz approached him over the coffee through their mutual
scientific interest in the last meeting of the geological “Society upon
the Stanislow.” He quoted to the author some passages from the poem
recording the final proceedings of this body, which had particularly
pleased him, and I think Mr. Harte was as much amused at finding himself
thus in touch with the savant, as Agassiz could ever have been with that
delicious poem.
Agassiz lived at one end of Quincy Street, and James almost at the other
end, with an interval between them which but poorly typified their
difference of temperament. The one was all philosophical and the other
all scientific, and yet towards the close of his life, Agassiz may be
said to have led that movement towards the new position of science in
matters of mystery which is now characteristic of it. He was ancestrally
of the Swiss “Brahminical caste,” as so many of his friends in Cambridge
were of the Brahminical caste of New England; and perhaps it was the line
of ancestral pasteurs which at last drew him back, or on, to the
affirmation of an unformulated faith of his own. At any rate, before
most other savants would say that they had souls of their own he became,
by opening a summer school of science with prayer, nearly as consolatory
to the unscientific who wished to believe they had souls, as Mr. John
Fiske himself, though Mr. Fiske, as the arch-apostle of Darwinism, had
arrived at nearly the same point by such a very different road.