nauseated by the "fastidious virginity" of A. C. Benson's "Arthur Hamilton"; who found the self-analytic inaction of the nineteenth century "shocking"; who declared that a life of idealistic inaction, though noble, was "tragic"; who yearned for an "active struggle with the life we are born to, a full sense of all its temptations, of all its earthly significance as well as of its spiritual"; and who had to express his longing for adventure and reality by carrying on A. S. Hill's tradition of "clearness, force and elegance" and by play-acting in "Raleigh in Guiana." Do not doubt that he felt the huge irony of his pose as the preserver of the sacred traditions of the historical Puritans, he who expressed his aspiration for an immortal life in a letter to Judge Grant as follows: "If good on earth, I am now persuaded, I may live again as a golden carp in some everflowing fountain of sound French vintage, not too dry."
I never met Barrett Wendell to speak to him till 1918, when I sat next him at a Phi Beta Kappa dinner in Cambridge. He offered me his flask to tincture the ice water which had then come into vogue, and I, in exchange, offered him some compliments on the course to which I had listened in 1904. He flashed on me his quick blue eye and exclaimed, truly enough: "What, you were never any disciple of mine!" Since Mr. Howe's book has revealed to me the man's honest struggle for reality in an environment which almost stifled him, I am ready to revise my relationship to him and to declare myself a disciple of the Wendell who said: "God help me, I don't want to be a humbug!"
