In the death of Judge Rearden the world experienced a loss that is
more likely adequately to be estimated in another generation than in
this. A lawyer dies and his practice passes to others. A judge falls
in harness, another is appointed or elected, and the business of the
court goes on as before, frequently better. But for the vacant place
of a scholar and man of letters there are no applicants. To him there
is no successor: neither the President has the appointing power nor
the people the power to elect. The vacancy is permanent, the loss
irreparable; something has gone out of the better and higher life of
the community which can not be replaced, and the void is the dead man’s
best monument, invisible but eternal. Other scholars and men of letters
will come forward in the new generation, but of none can it be said
that he carries forward on the same lines the work of the “vanished
hand,” nor declares exactly those truths of nature and art that would
have been formulated by the “voice that is still.”
In that elder education which was once esteemed the only needful
intellectual equipment of a gentleman, those attainments still
commonly, and perhaps preferably, denoted by the word “scholarship,”
Judge Rearden was probably without an equal on his side of the
continent. Except by his habit of historical and literary allusion—to
which he was perhaps somewhat over-addicted—and by that significant
something, so difficult to name, yet to the discerning few so obvious,
in the thought and speech of learned men, which is not altogether
breadth and reach of reason nor altogether subtlety of taste and
sentiment—in truth, is compatible with their opposites—except for these
indirect disclosures he seldom and to few indeed gave even a hint of
the enormous acquired wealth in the treasury of his mind. Graduated
from a second-rate college in Ohio with little but a knowledge of
Latin and Greek, a studious habit and a disposition so unworldly
that it might almost be called unearthly, he pursued his amassment
of knowledge with the unfailing diligence of an unfailing love, to
the end. He knew not only the classical languages and many of the
tongues of modern Europe, but their several dialects as well. To know
a language is nothing, but to know its literature from the beginning,
and to have incorporated its veritable essence and spirit into mind
and character—that is much; and that is what Rearden had done with
regard to all these tongues. Doubtless this is not the meat upon which
intellectual Cæsars feed; doubtless, too, he did not make that full
use of his attainments which the world approves as “practical,” and
at which he smiled in his odd, tolerant way, as one may smile at the
earnest work of a child making mud pies; yet his was not altogether a
barren pen. Of Bret Harte’s bright band of literary coadjutors on the
old _Overland Monthly_ he was among the first and best, and at
several times, though irregularly and all too infrequently, he enriched
_The Californian_ and other periodicals with noble contributions
in prose and verse. Among the former were essays on Petrarch and
Tennyson; the latter included a poem of no mean merit on the Charleston
earthquake, and another which he had intended to read before the George
H. Thomas Post of the Grand Army of the Republic, but was prevented by
his last illness. Read now in the solemn light that lies along his
path through the Valley of the Shadow, the initial stanza seems to have
a significance almost prophetic:
Life’s fevered day declines; its purple twilight falling,
Draws lengthening shadows from the broken flanks;
And from the column’s head a viewless chief is calling:
“Guide right—close up the ranks.”
Some of his papers for the Chitchat Club could not easily be matched
by selections from the magazines and reviews, and if a collection were
made of the pieces that he loved to put out in that wasteful way we
should have a volume of notable reading, distinguished for a sharply
accented individuality of thought and style.
For a number of years before his death Rearden was engaged in
constructing (the word writing here is inadequate) a work on Sappho,
which, as I understand the matter, was to be a kind of compendium of
all the little that is known and pretty nearly all the much that has
been conjectured and said of her. It was to be profusely illustrated by
master-hands, copiously annotated and enriched with variorum readings—a
book for bookworms. Of its fate I am not advised, but trust that none
of this labor of love may be lost. A work which for many years engaged
the hand and the heart of such a man can not, of whatever else it may
be devoid, lack that distinction which is to literature what it is to
character—its life, its glory and its crown.
1892.