"Are you willing to write an appreciation of what his influence in those
early days meant to you?"
So the letter read, telling me of the Charles E. Putney memorial. And
shall I be frank enough to add that for a moment the question rather
floored me? For while youth is very susceptible to influences, of many
sorts, youth is not much more conscious of them than the beanstalk of
the pole. Yet almost immediately it came back to me that a few days
before that letter arrived, a group of men were chatting in a Washington
club--among other things, about the value and results of formal
education. And, agreeing that few people ever pick up at school or
college anything which in later life they can put their finger on, that
for many people the so-called higher education is a pure waste of time,
I added, "The only man who ever taught me anything was a Greek teacher I
had at a preparatory school in Vermont."
That Greek teacher was Mr. Putney. Perhaps Greek is no longer taught
at the Academy. I don't know. It is not the fashion nowadays. But I
am somewhat concerned that it has ceased to be the fashion. And the
foundation of the feeling I have about it was laid, in great part, at
St. Johnsbury. On that, at any rate, I can put my finger. It may not
have been Mr. Putney who first sowed in the mind of one of his pupils
the consciousness that history is a very long drawn out affair; that it
did not begin in A. D. 1776, or in A. D. 1492, or even in A. D. 1. For
before that pupil trod the banks of the Passumpsic he happened to have
visited the shores of the AEgean. To him, consequently, the Anabasis and
Homer were more real than otherwise they might have seemed--though Mr.
Putney had the gift of making those old stories real.
But of one thing I am quite sure. Mr. Putney gave me my first sense of
language as a living and growing organism, come from far beginnings; and
he first made me see in the English language, in particular, a stream of
many confluents. This is the chief reason why it seems to me a disaster
that the classics are passing out of fashion. For with them all true
understanding of our rich and noble tongue seems fated to pass out of
fashion. To be too much bound to the past is of course an unhappy thing.
Each generation must live by and largely for itself. Yet does it not
profit a man to be aware that knowledge is an ancient and gradual
accumulation, to gain an outlook upon the cycles of history and upon the
human experiments that have succeeded or failed, to be able to trace
the sources of this or that element in science, in law, in art? And how
shall he really know the language he speaks without some acquaintance
with the languages which have chiefly enriched it--not only French and
German, but Latin and Greek as well?
This Mr. Putney had the art of making his pupils feel. I remember how he
used to pick words to pieces and squeeze out for us the inner essence of
their meaning. One example in particular has always stuck in my memory:
pernicious. And I can still hear Mr. Putney's voice translating it for
us: "Most completely full of that which produces death." That word has
had an interest for me ever since--akin to the respect which Henry James
later instilled into me for the adjective poignant, which he declared
should be used only once or twice in a lifetime. What is more, I have
never lost the habit Mr. Putney enticed us to form, of picking words
to pieces for ourselves. There is no better way of extracting shades of
meaning. But that way is closed to those who have no Greek.
Mr. Putney was, in short, my first humanist--though that word didn't
come to me till another day, when I began to read about the Renaissance.
But he was more than a humanist. He was humane. He was human. That
underlay the fact that, with the affectionate disrespect of youth, he
was known among ourselves as "Put." Disrespect, however, was never what
we felt toward the principal of the Academy. Indeed, the first time
I ever saw him, when I was a new boy of sixteen, he impressed me as
being a rather awesome person. As long as I knew him his dignity and
his firmness never failed to impress me. Yet about that dignity there
was nothing aloof. That firmness was not hardness; it had no cutting
edge. He meant what he said. That was all. No idle or disobedient boy
flattered himself that "Put" was to be trifled with. Every boy felt,
however, that "Put" was just. Firm as he was, he had too a great
gentleness. And I think he had the kindest and most patient eyes I ever
looked into. They were very shrewd. They could look through a boy as if
he were made of glass. But they were also very wise, and they knew how
to overlook a great deal of folly and thoughtlessness. Moreover there
was in the bottom of them a twinkle--of a most individual kind. It was
no broad Irish twinkle, nor yet an ironic Latin twinkle. You saw it
sometimes when you had made a particularly egregious translation; but
it didn't dishearten you.
I have never forgotten that quiet, that comprehending, that rare
twinkle. After all, what happier light could a man cast on the cloudy
ways of youth--or shed upon his own character?