You have not asked me to speak to you this morning about Mr. Putney
because I can tell you anything about him which you do not already know.
In fact it does not matter very much who speaks to you about him. You
only wish to have an occasion to recall a familiar and delightful and
impressive teacher. You wish someone to do what Mark Antony did for the
Romans and tell you what you yourselves do know and enable you to repeat
the experience of Samson's mother in the scriptures who said about the
angel's visit, "The man came to me who came to me the other day."
You have set me a difficult and an easy task. Difficult because you knew
the man and open your ears for words good enough to speak about him, and
easy because you knew the man and can yourselves supply what I may miss,
and smooth my awkwardness by the harmony of your own recollections.
You might be interested to hear something about Thomas Arnold of Rugby,
Tom Brown's teacher, or about Bronson Alcott who had such strange ways
in discipline, requiring an offending pupil to punish him, holding out
his own hand for the ferrule; or about Tagore in India who requires his
boys to go out early in the morning to sit for half an hour under some
bush or tree for quiet meditation. Talk about these men might perhaps
appeal to your general interest in teachers and teaching, but what you
crave this morning is different. You wish to repeat the experience of
Achilles who slept beside the many-voiced sea, the _Polu phloisboio
Thalasses_, and dreamed that his slain friend Patroclus came back to
him:
"Like him in all things--stature, beautiful eyes
And voice and garments which he wore in life
A marvellous semblance of the living man."
Or the experience of Peter when his Master appeared to him and freshened
the old love and admiration and moved him to carry on the Master's
service in his own life.
You have set me a very difficult task but when I give you an inch you
will take an ell. Where I stumble you will walk with sure step. If I
am too much like Hamlet with old Polonius saying this cloud is like an
elephant or a camel, you will see a cloud like that which went before
the Israelites in the desert--a high spiritual presence to guide them.
A few days ago he was here. The memory is full of life. His stalwart
figure clothed with gentlemanly care and taste, his bearing and movement
so fine, so dignified, so courteous and so pleasant. His voice so
special to him, with all harshness fined out of it, tuned as their
voices are who have in their spirits the accent and habit of good will.
And that fine face, the out-of-doors sign of good thinking and good
feeling, practiced long and become a second nature. That shapely,
well-proportioned, roomy head with its glory of white hair. He had, it
seemed to me, in his physical presence the charm of old age without
its weakness. He was not a sentimental, flowery man. He was naturally
perhaps like the rock in the desert which Moses struck and drew water
from it. The rock did not look as if it hid a fountain of living water,
but he took duty to wife. He loved to do his duty. He could not be
comfortable in any other course and doing his duty became his joy, his
life. Wherever you found him, in school, in church, in the state, in the
Grand Army, he was at his post, on guard, awake, alert, devoted. He did
not go with the crowd into the Civil War. He thought alone and deeply.
He weighed the matter by himself. He compared his obligation to his
father on the old farm with the call of the Union and concluded that
he ought to go. After a long life of fidelity to obligation he could not
breathe easily in any other atmosphere. He went simply and straight to
his post with his whole gift and might. Duty--
"Stern lawgiver! Yet thou dost wear
The Godhead's most benignant grace;
Nor know we anything so fair
As is the smile upon the face,
Flowers laugh before thee on their beds,
And fragrance in thy footing treads.
Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong,
And the most ancient heavens through thee are fresh and strong."
Mr. Putney was an instructive teacher. Some of you know it. Many old
pupils gratefully acknowledge his service. Both in the classroom and in
private personal contact he had an enthusiasm for teaching. He managed
to secure knowledge of what he taught. He was interested in his pupils
and he was interested in his subject and interested in bringing the two
together. Teaching I should think would be difficult without all of
those interests. No doubt Mr. Putney had a gift for teaching, but in
teaching as in other kinds of work one does much to make one's own gift.
Barring conspicuousness for a calling, this creative energy is the man
himself. I like to remind young people of this fact because they are
wondering what they will do in life; what they are fitted to do. With
some reservations it may be said that one becomes fitted to do whatever
one determines to do with one's whole mind and soul and strength. Think
how hit or miss our choices often are. Accidental circumstances or
chance openings when we are looking around for a job, something which
happens to be in the air when we come on the stage have more to do with
our first choices than any supposed genius for this or that.
When men and women who have begun their career in this quite casual
manner succeed, then people say they have a remarkable gift for their
work. The gift in a very real and large sense is the creation of their
own energy. I believe that it was so with Mr. Putney. He was diligent
and faithful in his calling and his calling opened its treasures to him.
You remember what the Scripture says: "No man having tasted old wine
straightway desireth the new for he saith the old is better." Mr. Putney
illustrated the saying. There was a graciousness, a consideration, a
pleasantness and good will in his ripe age which made it beautiful and
drew warm personal feeling to him. A custom of the heart grew up about
his name. Some of you loved him. That feeble old soldier whom he visited
every Sunday afternoon is lonely without him. He had "that which should
accompany old age, as honor, love, obedience, troops of friends." Not a
few boys and girls have reason to remember with tenderness his delicate
and patient sympathy.
I received a circular the other day signed by my old teacher of
mathematics. I have not seen him for nearly forty years but reading
his words, seeing his name I lifted him again before my mind as if
I sat again before him in the Albany Academy. I recall his bodily
presence, his voice, his manner. I am grateful for his clear, and to me
inescapably conclusive teaching, and something I cannot analyze came
back to me--perhaps I should better say, came over me for my debt to him
has been growing all these years. Something of him has taken root in my
life and grown and borne fruit. In youth we take such influences for
granted. We are careless about them. We absorb them without thanks. But
the years bring thought and thought reveals service and we are grateful.
"All my best is dressing old words new
Spending again what is already spent
For as the sun is daily new and old
So is my love still telling what is told."
In coming years some of you will be thinking and saying about Mr. Putney
with growing appreciation what some who are now in the thick of life are
already saying in the words of Scripture "Demetrius hath good report of
all men and of the truth itself: yea, and we also bear record."