I wish to pay my tribute to the memory of a Scottish-American friend of
mine who died five years ago, a man of a character extraordinarily and
intensely human, in spite of the fact that he was classed by obituary
articles in England among the twelve most learned men of his time.
It would do no honor to Thomas Davidson's memory not to be frank about
him. He handled people without gloves, himself, and one has no right
to retouch his photograph until its features are softened into
insipidity. He had defects and excesses which he wore upon his sleeve,
so that everyone could see them. They made him many enemies, and if
one liked quarrelling he was an easy man to quarrel with. But his
heart and mind held treasures of the rarest. He had a genius for
friendship. Money, place, fashion, fame, and other vulgar idols of the
tribe had no hold on his imagination. He led his own life absolutely,
in whatever company he found himself, and the intense individualism
which he taught by word and deed, is the lesson of which our generation
is perhaps most in need.
All sorts of contrary adjectives come up as I think of him. To begin
with, there was something physically rustic which suggested to the end
his farm-boy origin. His voice was sweet and its Scottish cadences
most musical, and the extraordinary sociability of his nature made
friends for him as much among women as among men; he had, moreover, a
sort of physical dignity; but neither in dress nor in manner did he
ever grow quite "gentlemanly" or _Salonfähig_ in the conventional and
obliterated sense of the terms. He was too cordial and emphatic for
that. His broad brow, his big chest, his bright blue eyes, his
volubility in talk and laughter told a tale of vitality far beyond the
common; but his fine and nervous hands, and the vivacity of all his
reactions suggested a degree of sensibility that one rarely finds
conjoined with so robustly animal a frame. The great peculiarity of
Davidson did indeed consist in this combination of the acutest
sensibilities with massive faculties of thought and action, a
combination which, when the thought and actions are important, gives to
the world its greatest men.
Davidson's native mood was happy. He took optimistic views of life and
of his own share in it. A sort of permanent satisfaction radiated from
his face; and this expression of inward glory (which in reality was to
a large extent structural and not "expressive" at all) was displeasing
to many new acquaintances on whom it made an impression of too much
conceit. The impression of conceit was not diminished in their eyes by
the freedom with which Davidson contradicted, corrected and reprehended
other people. A longer acquaintance invariably diminished the
impression. But it must be confessed that T. D. never was exactly
humble-minded, and that the solidity of his self-consciousness
withstood strains under which that of weaker men would have crumbled.
The malady which finally killed him was one of the most exhausting to
the nervous tone to which our flesh is subject, and it wore him out
before it ended him. He told me of the paroxysms of motiveless nervous
dread which used to beset him in the night-watches. Yet these never
subdued his stalwartness, nor made him a "sick-soul" in the theological
sense of that appelation. "God is afraid of me," was the phrase by
which he described his well-being to me one morning when his night had
been a good one, and he was feeling so cannibalistic that he thought he
might get well.
There are men whose attitude is always that of seeking for truth, and
men who on the contrary always believe that they have the root of it
already in them. Davidson was of the latter class. Like his
countrymen, Carlyle and Ruskin, he felt himself to be in the possession
of something, whether articulate or as yet articulated by himself, that
authorized him (and authorized him with uncommon openness and
frequency) to condemn the errors of others. I think that to the last
he never fully extricated this philosophy. It was a tendency, a faith
in a direction, which gave him an active persuasion that other
directions were false, but of which the central insight never got fully
formulated, but remained in a state which Frederic Myers would have
called subliminal. He varied to a certain extent his watchwords and
his heroes. When I first knew him all was Aristotle. Later all was
Rosmini. Later still Rosmini seemed forgotten. He knew so many
writers that he grew fond of very various ones and had a strange
tolerance for systematizers and dogmatizers whom, as the consistent
individualist that he was, he should have disliked. Hegel, it is true,
he detested; but he always spoke with reverence of Kant. Of Mill and
Spencer he had a low opinion; and when I lent him Paulsen's
Introduction to Philosophy (then just out), as an example of a kind of
eclectic thought that seemed to be growing, and with which I largely
sympathized, he returned it with richer expressions of disdain than
often fell even from his lips: "It's the shabbiest, seediest pretence
at a philosophy I ever dreamed of as possible. It's like a man dressed
in a black coat so threadbare as to be all shiny. The most
poverty-stricken, out-at-elbows thing I ever read. A perfect monument
of seediness and shabbiness," etc.
The truth is that Davidson, brought up on the older classical
traditions, never outgrew those habits of judging the world by purely
aesthetic criteria which men fed on the sciences of nature are so
willing to abandon. Even if a philosophy were true, he could easily
fail to relish it unless it showed a certain formal nobility and
dogmatic pretension to finality. But I must not describe him so much
from my own professional point of view--it is as a vessel of life at
large that one ought to keep him in remembrance.
He came to Boston from St. Louis, where he had been teaching, about the
year 1873. He was ruddy and radiant, and I soon saw much of him,
though at first it was without the thoroughness of sympathy which we
afterwards acquired and which made us overflow, on meeting after long
absences, into such laughing greetings as: "Ha! you old thief! Ha! you
old blackguard!"--pure "contrast-effects" of affection and familiarity
passing beyond their bounds. At that time I saw most of him at a
little philosophical club which used to meet every fortnight at his
rooms in Temple Street in Boston. Of the other members, J. Elliot
Cabot and C. C. Everett, are now dead--I will not name the survivors.
We never worked out harmonious conclusions. Davidson used to crack the
whip of Aristotle over us; and I remember that, whatever topic was
formally appointed for the day, we invariably wound up with a quarrel
about Space and Space-perception. The Club had existed before
Davidson's advent. The previous year we had gone over a good part of
Hegel's larger Logic, under the self-constituted leadership of two
young business men from Illinois, who had become enthusiastic Hegelians
and, knowing almost no German, had actually possessed themselves of a
manuscript translation of the entire three volumes of Logic, made by an
extraordinary Pomeranian immigrant, named Brockmeyer. These disciples
were leaving business for the law and studying at the Harvard
law-school; but they saw the whole universe through Hegelian
spectacles, and a more admirable _homo unius libri_ than one of them,
with his three big folios of Hegelian manuscript, I have never had the
good fortune to know.
I forget how Davidson was earning his subsistence at this time. He did
some lecturing and private teaching, but I do not think they were great
in amount. In the springs and summers he frequented the coast, and
indulged in long swimming bouts and salt-water immersions, which seemed
to agree with him greatly. His sociability was boundless, and his time
seemed to belong to anyone who asked for it.
I soon conceived that such a man would be invaluable in Harvard
University--a kind of Socrates, a devotee of truth and lover of youth,
ready to sit up to any hour, and drink beer and talk with anyone,
lavish of learning and counsel, a contagious example of how lightly and
humanly a burden of erudition might be borne upon a pair of shoulders.
In faculty-business he might not run well in harness, but as an
inspiration and ferment of character, as an example of the ranges of
combination of scholarship with manhood that are possible, his
influence on the students would be priceless.
I do not know whether this scheme of mine could under any circumstances
have been carried out. In point of fact it was nipped in the bud by T.
D. himself. A natural chair for him would have been Greek philosophy.
Unfortunately, just at the decisive hour, he offended our Greek
department by a savage onslaught on its methods, which, without taking
anyone's counsel, he sent to the _Atlantic Monthly_, whose editor
printed it. This, with his other unconventionalisms, made advocating
his cause more difficult, and the university authorities, never, I
believe, seriously thought of an appointment for him.
I believe that in this case, as in one or two others like it, which I
might mention, Harvard University lost a great opportunity.
Organization and method mean much, but contagious human characters mean
more in a university, where a few undisciplinables like T. D. may be
infinitely more precious than a faculty-full of orderly routinists. As
to what Davidson might have become under the conventionalizing
influences of an official position, it would be idle to speculate.
As things fell out, he became more and more unconventional and even
developed a sort of antipathy to all regular academic life. It subdued
individuality, he thought, and made for Philistinism. He earnestly
dissuaded his young friend Bakewell from accepting a professorship; and
I well remember one dark night in the Adirondacks, after a good dinner
at a neighbor's, the eloquence with which, as we trudged down-hill to
his own quarters with a lantern, he denounced me for the musty and
mouldy and generally ignoble academicism of my character. Never before
or since, I fancy, has the air of the Adirondack wilderness vibrated
more repugnantly to a vocable than it did that night to the word
"academicism."
Yet Davidson himself was always essentially a teacher. He must give
forth, inspire, and have the young about him. After leaving Boston for
Europe and Africa, founding the Fellowship of the New Life in London
and New York (the present Fabian Society in England is its offshoot),
he hit upon the plan which pleased him best of all when, in 1882 or
thereabouts, he bought a couple of hundred acres on East Hill, which
closes the beautiful Keene Valley in the Adirondacks, on the north, and
founded there, at the foot of Hurricane Mountain, his place "Glenmore"
and its "Summer School of the Culture Sciences." Although the primeval
forest has departed from its immediate vicinity, the region is still
sylvan, the air is sweet and strong and almost alpine in quality, and
the mountain panorama spread before one is superlative. Davidson
showed a business faculty which I should hardly have expected from him,
in organizing his settlement. He built a number of cottages pretty in
design and of the simplest construction, and disposed them well for
effect. He turned a couple of farm buildings which were on the grounds
into a lecturing place and a refectory; and there, arriving in early
April and not leaving till late in November, he spent the happiest part
of all his later years, surrounded during the summer months by
colleagues, friends, and listeners to lectures, and in the spring and
fall by a few independent women who were his faithful friends, and who
had found East Hill a congenial residence.
Twice I went up with T. D. to open the place in April. I remember
leaving his fireside one night with three ladies who were also early
comers, and finding the thermometer at 8 degrees Fahrenheit and a
tremendous gale blowing the snow about us. Davidson loved these
blustering vicissitudes of climate. In the early years the brook was
never too cold for him to bathe in, and he spent days in rambling over
the hills and up the glens and through the forest.
His own cottage was full of books whose use was free to all who visited
the settlement. It stood high on a hill in a grove of silver-birches
and looked upon the Western Mountains; and it always seemed to me an
ideal dwelling for such a bachelor-scholar. Here in May and June he
became almost one with the resurgent vegetation. Here, in October, he
was a witness of the jewelled pageant of the dying foliage, and saw the
hillsides reeking, as it were, and aflame with ruby and gold and
emerald and topaz. One September day in 1900, at the "Kurhaus" at
Nauheim, I took up a copy of the Paris _New York Herald_, and read in
capitals: "Death of Professor Thomas Davidson." I had well known how
ill he was, yet such was his vitality that the shock was wholly
unexpected. I did not realize till that moment how much that free
companionship with him every spring and autumn, surrounded by that
beautiful nature, had signified to me, or how big a piece would be
subtracted from my life by its cessation.
Davidson's capacity for imparting information seemed endless. There
were few subjects, especially "humanistic" subjects, in which at some
time or other he had not taken an interest; and as everything that had
ever touched him was instantaneously in reach of his omnipotent memory,
he easily became a living dictionary of reference. As such all his
friends were wont to use him. He was, for example, never at a loss to
supply a quotation. He loved poetry passionately, and the sympathetic
voice with which he would recall page after page of it--English,
French, German, or Italian--is a thing always to be remembered. But
notwithstanding the instructive part he played in every conceivable
conversation, he was never prolix, and he never "lectured."
From Davidson I learned what immunities a perfect memory bestows upon
one. I never could discover when he amassed his learning for he never
seemed "occupied." The secret of it was that any odd time would do,
for he never had to acquire a thing twice over. He avoided stated
hours of work on principle. Reprehending (mildly) a certain chapter of
my own on "Habit," he said that it was a fixed rule with him to form no
regular habits. When he found himself in danger of settling into even
a good one, he made a point of interrupting it. Habits and methods
make a prisoner of a man, destroy his readiness, keep him from
answering the call of the fresh moment. Individualist _à outrance_,
Davidson felt that every hour was an unique entity, to whose claims one
should lie open. Thus he was never abstracted or preoccupied, but
always seemed, when with you, as if you were the one person whom it was
then right to attend to.
It was this individualistic religion that made T. D., democrat as he
nevertheless was, so hostile to all socialisms and administrative
panaceas. Life must be flexible. You ask for a free man, and these
Utopias give you an "interchangeable part," with a fixed number, in a
rule-bound organism. The real thing to aim at is liberation of the
inner interests. Give man possession of a _soul_, and he will work out
his own happiness under any set of conditions. Accordingly, when, in
the penultimate year of his life, he proposed his night-school to a
meeting of young East-Side workingmen in New York, he told them that he
had no sympathy whatever with the griefs of "labor," that outward
circumstances meant nothing in his eyes; that through their individual
wills and intellects they could share, just as they were, in the
highest spiritual life of humanity, and that he was there to help them
severally to that privilege.
The enthusiasm with which they responded speaks volumes, both for his
genius as a teacher and for the sanity of his position. A small
posthumous book of articles by Davidson and of letters written from
Glenmore to his class, just published, with an introduction by his
disciple Professor Bakewell,[2] gives a full account of the experiment,
and ought to stand as a model and inspirer to similar attempts the
world over. Davidson's idea of the universe was that of a republic of
immortal spirits, the chief business of whom in their several grades of
existence, should be to know and love and help one another. "Creeds
are nothing, life is everything. . . . You can do far more by
presenting to the world the example of noble social relations than by
enumerating any set of principles. Know all you can, love all you can,
do all you can--that is the whole duty of man. . . . Be friends, in
the truest sense, each to the other. There is nothing in all the world
like friendship, when it is deep and real. . . . The divine . . . is a
republic of self-existent spirits, each seeking the realization of its
ideas through love, through intimacy with all the rest, and finding its
heaven in such intimacy."
We all say and think that we believe this sort of thing; but Davidson
believed it really and actively, and that made all the difference.
When the young wage-earners whom he addressed found that here was a man
of measureless learning ready to give his soul to them as if he had
nothing else to do with it, life's ideal possibilities widened to their
view. When he was taken from them, they founded in New York the Thomas
Davidson Society, for study and neighborhood work, which will probably
become perpetual, and of which his epistles from Glenmore will be the
rule, and keep the standards set by him from degenerating--unless,
indeed, the Society should some day grow too rich, of which there is no
danger at present, and from which may Heaven long preserve it. In one
of his letters to the Class, Davidson sums up the results of his own
experience of life in twenty maxims, as follows:
1. Rely upon your own energies, and do not wait for, or depend on other
people.
2. Cling with all your might to your own highest ideals, and do not be
led astray by such vulgar aims as wealth, position, popularity. Be
yourself.
3. Your worth consists in what you are, and not in what you have. What
you are will show in what you do.
4. Never fret, repine, or envy. Do not make yourself unhappy by
comparing your circumstances with those of more fortunate people; but
make the most of the opportunities you have. Employ profitably every
moment.
5. Associate with the noblest people you can find; read the best books;
live with the mighty. But learn to be happy alone.
6. Do not believe that all greatness and heroism are in the past.
Learn to discover princes, prophets, heroes, and saints among the
people about you. Be assured they are there.