Chapter C: A B (4)

In the summer of 1857 Mr. Rolfe was invited to take charge of the high school at Lawrence, Massachusetts, on a larger scale than the Dorchester institution, and was again promoted after four years to Salem, and the next year to be principal of the Cambridge high school, where he remained until 1868. Since that time he has continued to reside in Cambridge, and has devoted himself to editorial and literary work. His literary labors from 1869 to the present day have been vast and varied. He has been one of the editors of the “Popular Science News” (formerly the Boston “Journal of Chemistry”), and for nearly twenty years has had charge of the department of Shakespeareana in the “Literary World” and the “Critic,” to which he has also added “Poet-Lore.” He has written casual articles for other periodicals. In 1865 he published a handbook of Latin poetry with J. H. Hanson, A. M., of Waterville, Maine. In 1867 he followed this by an American edition of Craik’s “English of Shakespeare.” Between 1867 and 1869, in connection with J. A. Gillet, he brought out the “Cambridge course” in physics, in six volumes. In 1870 he edited Shakespeare’s “Merchant of Venice” with such success that by 1883 he had completed an edition of all the plays in forty volumes. It has long been accepted as a standard critical authority, being quoted as such by leading English and German editors. He was lately engaged in a thorough revision of this edition, doing this task after he had reached the age of seventy-five. He has also edited Scott’s complete poems, as well as (separately) “The Lady of the Lake” and “The Lay of the Last Minstrel”; an _édition de luxe_ of Tennyson’s works in twelve volumes, and another, the Cambridge Edition, in one volume. He has edited volumes of selections from Milton, Gray, Goldsmith, Wordsworth, and Browning, with Mrs. Browning’s “Sonnets from the Portuguese.” He is also the author of “Shakespeare the Boy,” with sketches of youthful life of that period; “The Satchel Guide to Europe,” published anonymously for twenty-eight years; and a book on the “Elementary Study of English.” With his son, John C. Rolfe, Ph. D., Professor of Latin in the University of Pennsylvania, he has edited Macaulay’s “Lays of Ancient Rome.” He has published a series of elementary English classics in six volumes. He has also supervised the publication of the “New Century _édition de luxe_” of Shakespeare in twenty-four volumes, besides writing for it a “Life of Shakespeare” which fills a volume of five hundred and fifty pages, now published separately. It is safe to say that no other American, and probably no Englishman, has rivaled him for the extent, variety, and accuracy of his services as an editor.

This work may be justly divided into two parts: that dealing mainly with Shakespeare, and that with single minor authors whose complete or partial work he has reprinted. In Shakespeare he has, of course, the highest theme to dwell on, but also that in which he has been preceded by a vast series of workmen. In these his function has not been so much that of original and individual criticism as of judiciously compiling the work of predecessors, this last fact being especially true since the printing of the Furness edition. It is in dealing with the minor authors that he has been led to the discovery, at first seeming almost incredible, that the poems which most claimed the attention of the world have for that very reason been gradually most changed and perverted in printing. Gray’s “Elegy in a Country Churchyard,” for instance, has appeared in polyglot editions; it has been translated fifteen times into French, thirteen into Italian, twelve times into Latin, and so on down through Greek, German, Portuguese, and Hebrew. No one poem in the English language, even by Longfellow, equals it in this respect. The editions which appeared in Gray’s own time were kept correct through his own careful supervision; and the changes in successive editions were at first those made by himself, usually improvements, as where he changed “some village Cato” to “some village Hampden,” and substituted in the same verse “Milton” for “Tully” and “Cromwell” for “Cæsar.” But there are many errors in Pickering’s edition, and these have been followed by most American copies. It may perhaps be doubted whether Dr. Rolfe is quite correct in his opinion where he says in his preface to this ode, “No vicissitudes of taste or fashion have affected its popularity”; it is pretty certain that young people do not know it by heart so generally as they once did, and Wordsworth pronounced its dialect often “unintelligible”; but we are all under obligation to Dr. Rolfe for his careful revision of this text.

Turning now to Scott’s “Lady of the Lake,” which would seem next in familiarity to Gray’s “Elegy,” we find scores of corrections, made in Rolfe’s, of errors that have crept gradually in since the edition of 1821. For instance, in Canto II, l. 685, every edition since 1821 has had “I meant not all my _heart_ would say,” the correct reading being “my _heat_ would say.” In Canto VI, l. 396, the Scottish “_boune_” has been changed to “_bound_” and eight lines below, the old word “_barded_” has become “_barbed_”; and these are but a few among many examples.

When we turn to Shakespeare, we find less direct service of this kind required than in the minor authors; less need of the microscope. At any rate, the variations have all been thoroughly scrutinized, and no flagrant changes have come to light since the disastrous attempt in that direction of Mr. Collier in 1852. On the other hand, we come to a new class of variations, which it would have been well perhaps to have stated more clearly in the volumes where they occur; namely, the studied omissions, in Rolfe’s edition, of all indecent words or phrases. There is much to be said for and against this process of Bowdlerizing, as it was formerly called; and those who recall the publication of the original Bowdler experiment in this line, half a century ago, and the seven editions which it went through from 1818 to 1861, can remember with what disapproval such expurgation was long regarded. Even now it is to be noticed that the new edition of reprints of the early folio Shakespeares, edited by two ladies, Misses Clarke and Porter, adopts no such method. Of course the objection to the process is on the obvious ground that concealment creates curiosity, and the great majority of copies of Shakespeare will be always unexpurgated, so that it is very easy to turn to them. Waiving this point, and assuming the spelling to be necessarily modernized, it is difficult to conceive of any school edition done more admirably than the new issue of Mr. Rolfe’s volumes of Shakespeare’s works. The type is clear, the paper good, and the notes and appendices are the result of long experience. When one turns back, for instance, to the old days of Samuel Johnson’s editorship, and sees the utter triviality and dullness of half the annotations of that very able man, one feels the vast space of time elapsed between his annotations and Dr. Rolfe’s. This applies even to notes that seem almost trivial, and many a suggestion or bit of explanation which seems to a mere private student utterly wasted can be fully justified by cases in which still simpler points have proved seriously puzzling in the school-room.

It has been said that every Shakespeare critic ended with the desire to be Shakespeare’s biographer, although fortunately most of them have been daunted by discouragement or the unwillingness of booksellers. Here, also, Mr. Rolfe’s persistent courage has carried him through, and his work, aided by time and new discoveries, has probably portrayed, more fully than that of any of his predecessors, the airy palace in which the great enchanter dwelt. How far the occupant of the palace still remains also a thing of air, we must leave for Miss Delia Bacon’s school of heretics to determine. For myself, I prefer to believe, with Andrew Lang, that “Shakespeare’s plays and poems were written by Shakespeare.”

XXII

GÖTTINGEN AND HARVARD A CENTURY AGO

GÖTTINGEN AND HARVARD A CENTURY AGO

“Whene’er with haggard eyes I view
This dungeon that I’m rotting in,
I think of those companions true
Who studied with me at the U-
niversity of Göttingen,
niversity of Göttingen.”

To the majority of Harvard graduates the chief association with Göttingen is Canning’s once-famous squib, of which this is the first verse, in the “Anti-Jacobin.” But the historical tie between the two universities is far too close to be forgotten; and I have lately come into possession of some quite interesting letters which demonstrate this. They show conclusively how much the development of Harvard College was influenced, nearly a century ago, by the German models, and how little in comparison by Oxford and Cambridge; and as the letters are all from men afterwards eminent, and pioneers in that vast band of American students who have since studied in Germany, their youthful opinions will possess a peculiar interest.

The three persons through whom this influence most came were Joseph Green Cogswell, Edward Everett, and George Ticknor, all then studying at Göttingen. It happens that they had all been intimate in my father’s family, and as he was very much interested in the affairs of the college,—of which he became in 1818 the “Steward and Patron,” and practically, as the Reverend A. P. Peabody assures us,[22] the Treasurer,—they sent some of their appeals and arguments through him. This paper will consist chiefly of extracts from these letters, which speak for themselves as to the point of view in which the whole matter presented itself.

It will be well to bear in mind the following details as to the early history of these three men, taking them in order of age. Cogswell was born in 1786, graduated (Harvard) in 1806, was tutor in 1814-15 (having previously tried mercantile life), and went abroad in 1816. Ticknor was born in 1791, graduated (Dartmouth) in 1807, went to Germany in 1815, and was appointed professor of Modern Languages at Harvard in 1817. Everett was born in 1794, graduated (Harvard) in 1811, and went abroad on his appointment as Greek professor (Harvard) in 1815.

The first of these letters is from George Ticknor, and is a very striking appeal in behalf of the Harvard College Library, which then consisted of less than 20,000 volumes, although the largest in the United States, with perhaps one exception.

GÖTTINGEN, May 20, 1816.

As you have talked a good deal in your letter about the college
and its prospects, I suppose I may be allowed to say a few
words about it in reply, though to be sure I have already
said more than was perhaps proper in one like myself, who am
not even a graduate there, and shall very probably get no
other answer to what I may venture to say hereafter than that
I should do better to mind my books, and let those who are
intrusted with the affairs of ye (_sic_) college take care
of them. I cannot, however, shut my eyes on the fact, that
one _very_ important and principal cause of the difference
between our University and the one here is the different
value we affix to a good library, and the different ideas we
have of what a good library is. In America we look on the
Library at Cambridge as a wonder, and I am sure nobody ever
had a more thorough veneration for it than I had; but it was
not necessary for me to be here six months to find out that
it is nearly or quite half a century behind the libraries of
Europe, and that it is much less remarkable that our stock of
learning is so small than that it is so great, considering the
means from which it is drawn are so inadequate. But what is
worse than the absolute poverty of our collections of books
is the relative inconsequence in which we keep them. We found
new professorships and build new colleges in abundance, but
we buy no books; and yet it is to me the most obvious thing
in the world that it would promote the cause of learning and
the reputation of the University ten times more to give six
thousand dollars a year to the Library than to found three
professorships, and that it would have been wiser to have spent
the whole sum that the new chapel had cost on books than on a
fine suite of halls. The truth is, when we build up a literary
Institution in America we think too much of convenience and
comfort and luxury and show; and too little of real, laborious
study and the means that will promote it. We have not yet
learnt that the Library is not only the first convenience of
a University, but that it is the very first necessity,—that
it is the life and spirit,—and that all other considerations
must yield to the prevalent one of increasing and opening it,
and opening it on the most liberal terms to _all_ who are
disposed to make use of it. I cannot better explain to you the
difference between our University in Cambridge and the one
here than by telling you that here I hardly say too much when
I say that it _consists_ in the Library, and that in Cambridge
the Library is one of the last things thought and talked
about,—that here they have forty professors and more than two
hundred thousand volumes to instruct them, and in Cambridge
twenty professors and less than twenty thousand volumes. This,
then, you see is the thing of which I am disposed to complain,
that we give comparatively so little attention and money to
the Library, which is, after all, the Alpha and Omega of the
whole establishment,—that we are mortified and exasperated
because we have no learned men, and yet make it _physically_
impossible for our scholars to become such, and that to escape
from this reproach we appoint a multitude of professors, but
give them a library from which hardly one and _not_ one of them
can qualify himself to execute the duties of his office. You
will, perhaps, say that these professors do not complain. I
can only answer that you find the blind are often as gay and
happy as those who are blessed with sight; but take a Cambridge
professor, and let him live one year by a library as ample and
as liberally administered as this is; let him know what it is
to be forever sure of having the very book he wants either to
read or to refer to; let him in one word _know_ that he can
never be discouraged from pursuing any inquiry for want of
means, but on the contrary let him feel what it is to have all
the excitements and assistance and encouragements which those
who have gone before him in the same pursuits can give him,
and then at the end of this year set him down again under the
parsimonious administration of the Cambridge library,—and I
will promise you that he shall be as discontented and clamorous
as my argument can desire.

But I will trouble you no more with my argument, though I
am persuaded that the further progress of learning among us
depends on the entire change of the system against which it is
directed.

The next extract is from a letter of Cogswell’s, and gives a glimpse at the actual work done by these young men:—

GÖTTINGEN, March 8, 1817.

I must tell you something about our colony at Göttingen before
I discuss other subjects, for you probably care little about
the University and its host of professors, except as they
operate upon us. First as to the Professor (Everett) and Dr.
Ticknor, as they are called here; everybody knows them in this
part of Germany, and also knows how to value them. For once
in my life I am proud to acknowledge myself an American on
the European side of the Atlantic: never was a country more
fortunate in its representation abroad than ours has been in
this instance; they will gain more for us in this respect than
even in the treasures of learning they will carry back. Little
as I have of patriotism, I delight to listen to the character
which is here given of my countrymen; I mean as countrymen, and
not as my particular friends: the despondency which it produces
in my own mind of ever obtaining a place by their sides is
more than counterbalanced by the gratification of my national
feelings, to say not a word of my individual attachment. You
must not think me extravagant, but I venture to say that the
notions which the European literati have entertained of
America will be essentially changed by G. and E.’s [Ticknor’s
and Everett’s] residence on the Continent; we were known to be
a brave, a rich, and an enterprising people, but that a scholar
was to be found among us, or any man who had a desire to be a
scholar, had scarcely been conceived. It will also be the means
of producing new correspondences and connections between the
men of the American and European sides of the Atlantic, and
spread much more widely among us a knowledge of the present
literature and science of this Continent.

Deducting the time from the 13th of December to the 27th of
January during which I was confined to my room, I have been
pretty industrious; through the winter I behaved as well as
one could expect. German has been my chief study; to give it a
relief I have attended one hour a day to a lecture in Italian
on the Modern Arts, and, to feel satisfied that I had some
sober inquiry in hand, I have devoted another to Professor
Saalfeld’s course of European Statistics, so that I have
generally been able to count at night twelve hours of private
study and private instruction. This has only sharpened not
satisfied my appetite. I have laid out for myself a course of
more diligent labors the next semester. I shall then be at
least eight hours in the lecture rooms, beginning at six in
the morning. I must contrive, besides, to devote eight other
hours to private study. I am not in the least Germanized, and
yet it appalls me when I think of the difference between an
education here and in America. The great evil with us is, in
our primary schools, the best years for learning are trifled
and whiled away; boys learn nothing because they have no
instructors, because we demand of one the full [work?] of
ten, and because laziness is the first lesson which one gets
in all our great schools. I know very well that we want but
few closet scholars, few learned philologists, and few verbal
commentators; that all our systems of government and customs
and life suppose a preparation for making practical men,—men
who move, and are felt in the world; but all this could be
better done without wasting every year from infancy to manhood.
The system of education here is the very reverse of our own:
in America boys are let loose upon the work when they are
children, and fettered when they are sent to our college; here
they are cloistered, too much so I acknowledge, till they
can guide themselves, and then put at their own disposal at
the universities. Luther’s Reformation threw all the monkish
establishments in the Protestant countries into the hands of
the Princes, and they very wisely appropriated them to the
purposes of education, but unluckily they have retained more of
the monastic seclusion than they ought. The three great schools
in Saxony, Pforte, Meissen, and ⸺ are kept in convents, and the
boys enjoy little more than the liberty of a cloister. They are
all very famous, the first more particularly; out of it have
come half of the great scholars of the country. Still they are
essentially defective in the point above named. Just in the
neighborhood of Gotha is the admirable institution of Salzmann,
in a delightfully pleasant and healthy valley; his number is
limited to thirty-eight, and he has twelve instructors,—admits
no boy who does not bring with him the fairest character: when
once admitted they become his children, and the reciprocal
relation is cherished with corresponding tenderness and
respect. I should like to proceed a little farther in this
subject, but the bottom of my paper forbids.

The following is from Ticknor again, and shows, though without giving details, that the young men had extended their observations beyond Göttingen:—

GÖTTINGEN, November 30, 1816.

DEAR SIR,—On returning here about a fortnight since, after a
journey through North Germany which had occupied us about two
months, I found your kind letter of August 4 waiting to welcome
me. I thank you for it with all my heart, and take the first
moment of leisure I can find in the busy commencement of a new
term, to answer it, that I may soon have the same pleasure
again.

You say you wish to hear from me what hours of relaxation
I have, and what acquaintances I make, in this part of the
Continent. The first is very easily told, and the last would
not have been difficult before the journey from which I have
just returned; but now the number is more than I can write or
you willingly hear. However, I will answer both your inquiries
in the spirit in which they are made.

As to relaxation, in the sense of the word in which I used to
employ it at home,—meaning the hours I lounged so happily away
when the weariness of the evening came, on your sofa, and the
time I used to pass with my friends in general, I know not how
or why, but always gayly and thoughtlessly,—of this sort of
relaxation I know nothing here but the end of an evening which
I occasionally permit myself to spend with Cogswell, whose
residence here has in this respect changed the whole color of
my life. During the last semester, I used to visit occasionally
at about twenty houses in Göttingen, chiefly as a means of
learning to speak the language. As the population here is so
changeable, and as every man is left to live exactly as he
chooses, it is customary for all those who wish to continue
their intercourse with the persons resident here to make a call
at the beginning of each semester, which is considered a notice
that they are still here and still mean to go into society.
I, however, feel no longer the necessity of visiting for the
purpose of learning German, and now that Cogswell is here
cannot desire it for any other purpose; have made visits only
to three or four of the professors, and shall, therefore, not
go abroad at all. As to exercise, however, I have enough. Three
times a day I must cross the city entirely to get my lessons.
I go out twice besides, a shorter distance for dinner and a
fourth lesson; and four times a week I take an hour’s exercise
for conscience’ sake and my mother’s in the riding-school. Four
times a week I make Cogswell a visit of half an hour after
dinner, and three times I spend from nine to ten in the evening
with him, so that I feel I am doing quite right and quite as
little as I ought to do in giving up the remaining thirteen
hours of the day to study, especially as I gave fourteen to it
last winter without injury.

The journey we have lately taken was for the express purpose
of seeing all the universities or schools of any considerable
name in the country. This in a couple of months we easily
accomplished, and of course saw professors, directors, and
schoolmasters—men of great learning and men of little learning,
and men of no learning at all—in shoals.

This is from Cogswell again, and is certainly a clarion appeal as to the need of thoroughness in teaching and learning:—

GÖTTINGEN, July 13, 1817.

I hope that you and every other person interested in the
College are reconciled to Mr. Everett’s plan of remaining
longer in Europe than was at first intended, as I am sure
you would be do you know the use he makes of his time, and
the benefit you are all to derive from his learning. Before
I came to Göttingen I used to wonder why it was that he
wished to remain here so long; I now wonder he can consent
to leave so soon. The truth is, you all mistake the cause of
your impatience: you believe that it comes from a desire of
seeing him at work for and giving celebrity to the College,
but it arises from a wish to have him in your society, at
your dinner-tables, at your suppers, your clubs, and your
ladies, at your tea-parties (you perceive I am aiming at Boston
folks): however, all who have formed such expectations must be
disappointed; he will find that most of these gratifications
must be sacrificed to attain the objects of a scholar’s
ambition. What can men think when they say that two years are
sufficient to make a Greek scholar? Does not everybody know
that it is the labor of half a common life to learn to read
the language with tolerable facility? I remember to have heard
little Drisen say, a few days after I came here, that he had
been spending eighteen years, at least sixteen hours a day,
exclusively upon Greek, and that he could not now read a page
of the tragedians without a dictionary. When I went home I
struck Greek from the list of my studies; I now think no more
of attaining it than I do of becoming an astrologer. In fact,
the most heart-breaking circumstance attending upon human
knowledge is that a man can never go any farther than “to know
how little’s to be known”; it fills, then, the mind of scholars
with despair to look upon the map of science, as it does that
of the traveler to look upon the map of the earth, for both see
what a mere speck can be traveled over, and of that speck how
imperfect is the knowledge which is acquired. Let any one who
believes that he has penetrated the mysteries of all science,
and learnt the powers and properties of whatever is contained
in the kingdoms of air, earth, fire, and water, but just bring
his knowledge to the test; let him, for example, begin with
what seems the simplest of all inquiries, and enumerate the
plants which grow upon the surface of the globe, and call them
by their names, and, when he finds that this is beyond his
limits, let him descend to a single class and bring within
it all that the unfathomed caves of ocean and the unclimbed
mountains bear; and as this is also higher than he can reach,
let him go still lower and include only one family, or a
particular species, or an individual plant, and mark his points
of ignorance upon each, and then, if his pride of knowledge is
not humbled enough, let him take but a leaf or the smallest
part of the most common flower, and give a satisfactory
solution for many of the phenomena they exhibit. But, you will
ask, is Göttingen the only place for the acquisition of such
learning? No, not the only, but I believe far the best for
such learning as it is necessary for Mr. E. to fit him to make
Cambridge in some degree a Göttingen, and render it no longer
requisite to depend upon the latter for the formation of their
scholars: it is true that very few of what the Germans call
scholars are needed in America; if there would only be one
thorough one to begin with, the number would soon be sufficient
for all the uses which could be made of them, and for the
literary character of the country. This one, I say, could
never be formed there, because, in the first place, there is
no one who knows how it is to be done; secondly, there are no
books, and then, by the habits of desultory study practiced
there, are wholly incompatible with it. A man as a scholar
must be completely _upset_, to use a blacksmith’s phrase; he
must have learnt to give up his love of society and of social
pleasures, his interest in the common occurrences of life, in
the political and religious contentions of the country, and
in everything not directly connected with his single aim. Is
there any one willing to make such a sacrifice? This I cannot
answer, but I do assure you that it is the sacrifice made by
almost every man of classical learning in Germany, though to be
sure the sacrifice of the enjoyments of friendly intercourse
with mankind to letters is paying much less dear for fame here
than the same thing would be in America. For my own part I am
sorry I came here, because I was too old to be _upset_; like a
horseshoe worn thin, I shall break as soon as I begin to wear
on the other side: it makes me very restless at this period of
my life to find that I know nothing. I would not have wished to
have made the discovery unless I could at the same time have
been allowed to remain in some place where I could get rid of
my ignorance; and, now that I must go from Göttingen, I have no
hope of doing that.

The following from Edward Everett carries the war yet farther into Africa, and criticises not merely American colleges, but also secondary schools:—

GÖTTINGEN, September 17, 1817.

You must not laugh at me for proceeding to business the first
thing, and informing you in some sort as an argument, that, if
I have been unreasonable in prolonging my stay here, I have
at least passed my time not wholly to disadvantage,—that I
received this morning my diploma as Doctor of Philosophy of
this University, the first American, and as far as I know,
Englishman, on whom it has ever been conferred. You will
perhaps have heard that it was my intention to have passed
from this University to that of Oxford, and to have spent this
winter there. I have altered this determination for the sake
of joining forces with Theodore Lyman at Paris this winter;
and as he proposes to pass the ensuing summer in traveling in
the South of France, I shall take that opportunity of going to
England. It is true I should have liked to have gone directly
from Göttingen to Oxford, to have kept the thread as it were
unbroken, and gone on with my studies without any interruption.
But I find, even at Paris, that I have no object there but
study; and Professor Gaisford, at Oxford, writes me that it
is every way better that I should be there in summer, as the
Library is open a greater part of the day. Meanwhile, I try to
feel duly grateful to Providence and my friends at home to whom
I owe the opportunity of resorting to the famous fountains of
European wisdom. The only painful feeling I carry with me is
that I may not have health, or strength, or ability to fulfill
the demands which such an opportunity will create and justify.
More is apt to be expected in such cases than it is possible
to perform; besides that, after the schoolmaster is prepared
for his duty, all depends upon whether the schoolboy is also
prepared for his. You must not allow any report to the contrary
to shake your faith in my good-will in the cause. Some remarks
which I committed to paper at the request of my brother upon
the subject of a National University,—an institution which by
exciting an emulation in our quarter would be the best thing
that could happen to Cambridge,—have, I hear, led some good men
to believe that I was for deserting the service at Cambridge
still more promptly than I had done at Boston,—a suggestion
certainly too absurd to have been made, or to need to have been
contradicted. However, still more important than all which
national or state universities can do themselves immediately,
is the necessity we must impose on the schools of reforming
and improving themselves, or, rather, are the steps we must
take to create good schools. All we have are bad, the common
reading and writing ones not excepted; but of schools which we
have to fit boys for college, I think the Boston Latin School
and the Andover Academy are the only ones that deserve the
name, and much I doubt if they deserve it. There is much truth
in the remark so constantly made that we are not old enough
for European perfection, but we are old enough to do well all
it is worth while to do at all; and if a child here in eight
years can read and speak Latin fluently, there is no reason
why our youth, after spending the same time on it, should
know little or nothing about it. Professional education with
us commences little or no earlier than it does here, and yet
we approach it in all departments with a quarter part of the
previous qualification which is here possessed. But also it is
the weakness of mankind to do more than he is obliged to. The
sort of obligation, to be sure, which is felt, differs with
different spirits, and one is content to be the first man in
his ward, one in his town, one in his county, another in his
state. To all these degrees of dignity the present education
is adequate; and we turn out reputable ministers, doctors,
lawyers, professors, and schoolmasters,—men who get to be as
wise at ye (_sic_) age of threescore as their fathers were at
sixty, and who transmit the concern of life to their children
in as good condition as they took it themselves. Meanwhile, the
physical and commercial progress of ye (_sic_) country goes on,
and more numerous doctors and more ministers are turned out,
not more learned ones, to meet it. I blushed burning red to
the ears the other day as a friend here laid his hand upon a
newspaper containing the address of the students at Baltimore
to Mr. Monroe, with the translation of it. It was less matter
that the translation was not English; my German friend could
not detect that. But that the original was not Latin I could
not, alas! conceal. It was, unfortunately, just like enough
to very bad Latin to make it impossible to pass it off for
Kickapoo or Pottawattamy, which I was at first inclined to
attempt. My German persisted in it that it was meant for Latin,
and I wished in my heart that the Baltimore lads would stick to
the example of their fathers and mob the Federalists, so they
would give over this inhuman violence on the poor old Romans. I
say nothing of ye (_sic_) address, for like all [illegible] it
seems to have been ye (_sic_) object, in the majority of those
productions, for those who made them to compliment, not the
President, but themselves. It is a pity Dr. Kirkland’s could
not have been published first, to serve as a model how they
might speak to the President without coldness on one side and
adulation on the other, and of themselves without intrusion or
forwardness.

The following letter transfers Edward Everett to Oxford, and gives in a somewhat trenchant way his unfavorable criticisms on the English universities of that day. He subsequently sent his son to Cambridge, England, but it was forty years later:—

OXFORD, June 6, 1818.

I have been over two Months in England, and am now visiting
Oxford, having passed a Week in Cambridge. There is more
teaching and more learning in our American Cambridge than
there is in both the English Universities together, tho’
between them they have four times Our number of Students. The
misfortune for us is that our subjects are not so hopeful. We
are obliged to do at Cambridge [U. S.] that which is done at
Eton and Westminster, at Winchester, Rugby, and Harrow, as well
as at Oxford and Cambridge. Boys _may_ go to Eton at 6, and
do go often at 8, 10, and of Necessity before 12. They stay
there under excellent Masters, 6 Years, and then come to the
University. Whereas a smart clever boy with us, will learn out,
even at Mr. Gould’s, in 4 Years, and it was the boast of a very
distinguished Man Named Bird [Samuel Bird, H. C., 1809], who
was two Years before me at Cambridge, that he had fitted in
160 days. And I really think that I could, in six months teach
a mature lad, who was willing to work hard, all the Latin and
Greek requisite for admission.

This letter from Cogswell refers to George Bancroft, who was subsequently sent out by Harvard College, after his graduation in 1817, that he might be trained for the service of the institution.

GÖTTINGEN, May 4th, 1819.

It was truly generous and noble in the corporation to send out
young Bancroft in the manner I understand they did; he will
reward them for it. I thought very much of him, when I had
him under my charge at Cambridge, and now he appears to me
to promise a great deal more. I know not at whose suggestion
this was done, but from the wisdom of the measure, I should
conclude it must be the President’s; it is applying the remedy
exactly when it is most wanted, a taste once created for
classical learning at the College, and the means furnished for
cultivating it, and the long desired reform in education in my
opinion is virtually made; knowledge of every other kind may be
as well acquired among us, as the purposes to which it is to
be applied demand. We are not wanting in good lawyers or good
physicians, and if we could but form a body of men of taste and
letters, our literary reputation would not long remain at the
low stand which it now is.

It appears from a letter of my father’s, fourteen years later (November 21, 1833), that, after four years abroad, Mr. Bancroft’s college career was a disappointment, and he was evidently regarded as a man spoiled by vanity and self-consciousness, and not commanding a strong influence over his pupils. My father wrote of these two teachers:—

CAMBRIDGE, MASS., 21 Nov., 1833.

Cogswell at New York to negotiate. He is much better fitted
for a City. He loves society, bustle, fashion, polish, and
good living. He would do best in some Mercantile House as a
partner, say to Bankers like Prime, Ward, and King. He was at
first a Scholar, a Lawyer in Maine. His wife dying,—sister to
Dr. Nichols’ wife (Gilman),—Mr. C. went abroad. Was supercargo,
then a residing agent of Wm. Gray’s in Europe, Holland, France,
and Italy; was a good Merchant; expensive in his habits, he
did not accumulate; tired of roving, he accepted the office
of Librarian here. He would not manage things under control
of others, and so left College and sat up Round Hill School.
His partner, Bancroft,—an unsuccessful scholar, pet of Dr.
Kirkland’s, who like Everett had four years abroad, mostly
Germany, and at expense of College,—came here unfit for
anything. His manners, style of writing, Theology, etc., bad,
and as a Tutor only the laughing butt of all College. Such an
one was easily marked as unfit for a School.

From whatever cause, he remained as tutor for one year only (1822-23), leaving Cambridge for the Round Hill School.

It would be curious to dwell on the later influence upon the college of the other men from whom so much was reasonably expected. Ticknor, the only one who was not a Harvard graduate, probably did most for Harvard of them all, for he became professor of Modern Languages, and introduced in that department the elective system, which there became really the nucleus of the expanded system of later days. Everett, when President, actually set himself against that method when the attempt had been made to enlarge it under Quincy. Cogswell was librarian from 1821 to 1823; left Harvard for the Round Hill School, and became ultimately the organizer of the Astor Library. Frederic Henry Hedge, who had studied in Göttingen as a schoolboy and belonged to a younger circle, did not become professor until many years later.

But while the immediate results of personal service to the college on the part of this group of remarkable men may have been inadequate,—since even Ticknor, ere parting, had with the institution a disagreement never yet fully elucidated,—yet their collective influence both on Harvard University and on American education was enormous. They helped to break up that intellectual sterility which had begun to show itself during the isolation of a merely colonial life; they prepared the way for the vast modern growth of colleges, schools, and libraries in this country, and indirectly helped that birth of a literature which gave us Irving, Cooper, Bryant, and the “North American Review”; and culminated later in the brilliant Boston circle of authors, almost all of whom were Harvard men, and all of whom had felt the Harvard influence.

XXIII

OLD NEWPORT DAYS

OLD NEWPORT DAYS

It was my good fortune, after discharge from the army during the Civil War, to dwell for a time under the hospitable roof of Mrs. Hannah Dame, in Newport, Rhode Island. Passing out of the front door one day, just as its bell rang, I saw before me one of the very handsomest men I had ever beheld, as I thought. He wore civilian dress, but with an unmistakable military air, and held out to me a card of introduction from a fellow officer. He had been discharged from the army on the expiration of his term of service with the regiment he had commanded in Frémont’s Mountain Department. Being out of employment for a time, and unsettled, as many of us were at that period, he came back to his early training as a market gardener, and, having made the professional discovery that most of the cabbages eaten in Boston were brought from New York, while nearly all the cauliflowers sold in New York were sent thither from Boston, he formed the plan of establishing a market garden midway between the two cities, and supplying each place with its favorite vegetable. This he did successfully for ten years, and then merged the enterprise in successive newer ones. In these he sometimes failed, but in the last one he succeeded where others had failed yet more completely, and astounded the nation by bringing the streets of New York into decent cleanliness and order for the first time on record. This man was Colonel George Edward Waring.

One of his minor achievements was that of organizing, at his house in Newport, the most efficient literary circle I ever knew, at a time when there were habitually more authors grouped in that city than anywhere else in America. But before giving a sketch of these persons, let me describe the house in which he received them. This house had been made internally the most attractive in Newport by the combined taste of himself and his wife, and was for a time the main centre of our simple and cordial group. In his study and elsewhere on the walls he had placed mottoes, taken partly from old English phrases and partly from the original Dutch, remembered almost from the cradle as coming from his Dutch maternal grandfather. Thus above his writing-desk the inscription read, _Misérable à mon gré qui n’a chez soi où estre à soi_ (Alas for him who hath no home which is a home!). Under the mantelpiece and above the fireplace was the Dutch _Eigen haasd iss goud waard_ (One’s own hearth is worth gold). In the dining-room there was inscribed above the fireplace, “Old wood to burn, Old wine to drink, Old friends to trust.” Opposite this was again the Dutch _Praatjes vullen den buik neit_ (Prattle does not fill the box). On two sides of the room there were, “Now good digestion wait on appetite, and health on both,” and also “In every feast there are two guests to be entertained, the body and the soul.” In almost every case the lettering of these mottoes was made into a decoration with peacock’s feathers, and formed a series of charming welcomes quite in harmony with the unfailing cordiality of the host and the fine and hearty voice of the hostess.

It was at this house that there were to be found gathered, more frequently than anywhere else, the literary or artistic people who were then so abundant in Newport,—where no other house was to be compared with it except that of Mrs. Howe, who then lived in the country, and had receptions and a world of her own.

We had, for instance, Dr. J. G. Holland, now best known as the original founder of the “Century Magazine,” then having but a fugitive literary fame based on books written under the name of Timothy Titcomb and entitled “Bitter-Sweet” and “Kathrina, Her Life and Mine.” He was personally attractive because of his melodious voice, which made him of peculiar value for singing on all boating excursions. There was Edwin P. Whipple, a man reared in business, not literature; but with an inexhaustible memory of books and a fertile gift for producing them, especially those requiring personal anecdote and plenty of it. There was Dr. O. W. Holmes, who came to Newport as the guest of the Astor family, parents of the present English author of that name. At their house I spent one evening with Holmes, who was in his most brilliant mood, at the end of which he had talked himself into such an attack of asthma that he had to bid adieu to Newport forever, after an early breakfast the next morning.

There was the Reverend Charles T. Brooks, a man of angelic face and endless German translations, who made even Jean Paul readable and also unbelievable. There was Professor George Lane, from Harvard, a man so full of humor that people bought his new Latin Grammar merely for the fun to be got out of its notes. There was La Farge, just passing through the change which made a great artist out of a book-lover and a student of languages. He alone on this list made Newport his home for years, and reared his gifted and attractive children there, and it was always interesting to see how, one by one, they developed into artists or priests.

There was George Boker, of Philadelphia, a young man of fortune, handsome, indolent, as poetic as a rich young man could spare time to be, and one whose letters now help to make attractive that most amusing book, the “Memoirs of Charles Godfrey Leland.” There was my refined and accomplished schoolmate and chum, Charles Perkins, who trained himself in Italian art and tried rather ineffectually to introduce it into the public schools of Boston and upon the outside of the Art Museum. There was Tom Appleton, the man of two continents, and Clarence King, the explorer of this one, and a charming story-teller, by the way. Let me pause longer over one or two of these many visitors.

One of them was long held the most readable of American biographers, but is now being strangely forgotten,—the most American of all transplanted Englishmen, James Parton, the historian. He has apparently dropped from our current literature and even from popular memory. I can only attribute this to a certain curious combination of strength and weakness which was more conspicuous in him than in most others. He always appeared to me the most absolutely truthful being I had ever encountered; no temptation, no threats, could move him from his position; but when he came in contact with a man of wholly opposite temperament, as, for instance, General Benjamin F. Butler, the other seemed able to wind Parton round his fingers. This would be the harder to believe had not Butler exerted something of the same influence on Wendell Phillips, another man of proud and yet trustful temperament. Furthermore, Parton was absolutely enthralled in a similar way through his chief object of literary interest, perhaps as being the man in the world most unlike him, Voltaire. On the other hand, no one could be more devoted to self-sacrifice than Parton when it became clear and needful. Day after day one would see him driving in the roads around Newport, with his palsy-stricken and helpless wife, ten years older than himself and best known to the world as Fanny Fern,—he sitting upright as a flagstaff and looking forward in deep absorption, settling some Voltairean problem a hundred years older than his own domestic sorrow.

I find in my diary (June 25, 1871) only this reference to one of the disappointing visitors at Newport:—

“Bret Harte is always simple and modest. He is terribly tired of ‘The Heathen Chinee,’ and almost annoyed at its popularity when better things of his have been less liked”—the usual experience of authors.

I find again, May 15, 1871: “I went up last Wednesday night to the Grand Army banquet [in Boston] and found it pleasant. The receptions of Hooker and Burnside were especially ardent. At our table we were about to give three cheers for Bret Harte as a man went up to the chief table. It turned out to be Mayor Gaston.” This mistake, however, showed Harte’s ready popularity at first, though some obstacles afterwards tended to diminish it. Among these obstacles was to be included, no doubt, the San Francisco newspapers, which were constantly showered among us from the Pacific shores with all the details of the enormous debts which Bret Harte had left behind him, and which he never in his life, so far as I could hear, made a serious effort to discharge. Through some distrust either of my friendship or of my resources, he never by any chance even offered, I believe, to borrow a dollar of me; but our more generous companion, George Waring, was not so fortunate.

Another person, of nobler type, appears but imperfectly in my letters, namely, Miss Charlotte Cushman. I find, to be sure, the following penetrating touches from a companion who had always that quality, and who says of Miss Cushman, in her diary: “She is very large, looks like an elderly man, with gray hair and very red cheeks—full of action and gesture—acts a dog just as well as a man or woman. She seems large-hearted, kind, and very bright and quick—looks in splendid health. She will be here for this month, but may take a house and return.” This expectation was fulfilled, and I find that the same authority later compared Miss Cushman in appearance to “an old boy given to eating apples and snowballing”; and, again, gave this description after seeing Miss Cushman’s new house: “The wildest turn of an insane kaleidoscope—the petrified antics of a crazy coon—with a dance of intoxicated lightning-rods breaking out over the roof.” This youthful impulsiveness was a part of her, and I remember that once, as we were driving across the first beach at Newport, Miss Cushman looked with delight across the long strip of sand, which the advancing waves were rapidly diminishing, as the little boys were being driven ashore by them, and exclaimed, “How those children have enjoyed running their little risk of danger! I know I did when I was a boy,” and there seemed nothing incongruous in the remark, nor yet when she turned to me afterwards and asked, seriously, whether I thought suicide absolutely unpardonable in a person proved to be hopelessly destined to die of cancer,—a terror with which she was long haunted. Again, I remember at one fashionable reception how Miss Cushman came with John Gilbert, the veteran actor, as her guest, and how much higher seemed their breeding, on the whole, than that of the mere fashionables of a day.

Kate Field, who has been somewhat unwisely canonized by an injudicious annotator, was much in Newport, equally fearless in body and mind, and perhaps rather limited than enlarged by early contact with Italy and Mrs. Browning. She would come in from a manly boating-trip and fling herself on the sofa of the daintiest hostess, where the subsequent arrival of the best-bred guests did not disturb her from her position; but nothing would have amused her more than the deification which she received after death from some later adorers of her own sex.

I find the following sketches of different Newport visitors in a letter dated September 2, 1869:—