Critical Woodcuts/Barrett Wendell
THE most fascinating aspect of American life to-day is the ascent into articulate self-consciousness of that element of our people which Emerson called "the Jacksonian rabble," and the relative decline toward artistic inexpressiveness of that element which Barrett Wendell called the "better sort." I have been reading two recent biographies which, taken together, give one the personal significance and intimate human meaning of this phenomenon. The first records the rise of a Mid-Western waif to success in business, and then his soul-shattering discovery that he is the typical American of our day, and that he is under a kind of divine obligation to become an artist and to reveal his soul in art. I refer to Sherwood Anderson's "A Story Teller's Story," a beautiful book, moving and significant. The second biography records the rise of a well-derived, well-bred Boston boy to be a professor of English at Harvard, and then his gradually strengthening conviction that he is the last of the New England gentlemen—a sobering and saddening thought, mitigated in his case by his belief that a hundred years hence, if all goes well with the Republic, the typical American will be such a man as he has been. I refer to Mr. Howe's life of Barrett Wendell, which is likewise a beautiful book, moving and significant.
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I am glad that writing this biography fell to Mr. Howe. He is at the same time the most modest editor and one of the finest masters of the biographic art now practising in America. A New Englander and a Harvard man, full of Latin piety toward the men and mores and institutions which for three hundred years have had their center in his corner of Massachusetts, he has sat up there in Boston for decade after decade, like an infatuated and self-effacing recording angel, editing Beacon Biographies, "The Harvard Alumni Bulletin," "The Harvard Graduates' Magazine," "The Atlantic Monthly," the lives and letters of Phillips Brooks and Charles Eliot Norton, the monumental tomes of "The Memoirs of the Harvard Dead in the War Against Germany," "Memories of a Hostess" and the like. In much of this work there has been for Mr. Howe great labor, a beautiful service of commemoration, and a minimum of personal glory. In performing it, however, Mr. Howe has perhaps become the mind of our times most fully and constantly aware of the meaning of Harvard College and New England as elements in the historic, intellectual, literary and social life of the nation. His latest biography proves, moreover, to any discerning eye, proves by all sorts of subtleties in the composition, that he himself has achieved a certain blessed critical detachment from the traditional Boston outlook—or should not one rather say, the traditional Boston inlook—thinking of that rapt and reverent contemplation of the umbilicus which conceivably some colonial Yankee skipper imported from the Orient?
At this point I wish to say a word, by way of sidelighting, about my own feeling for Mr. Howe's subject. I love New England with all my heart, tenderly and sentimentally, and with that protective and jealous passion which resents a slurring word from one who has not so loved her. But since the current mode of contemplating one's grandmother has come in, since several years ago I heard James Harvey Robinson, in the picked diction of Columbia University, characterize all hitherto recorded history as "bunk," I have lain awake night after night foreseeing the devastation which is going to be wrought the moment that it occurs to some young man, bred in Professor Robinson's school, to deal with the "awful majesties" of New England's Great Age as Lytton Strachey and Ford Madox Ford and Max Beerbohm have dealt with the Victorians and Pre-Raphaelites.
If I, or any man who thought of Barrett Wendell merely as a Harvard professor, had attempted to produce his "spitting image," what sort of caricature would our treacherous memories and our still more treacherous "realistic method" have produced? Well, I am afraid we should have seized upon some quite inadequate statement of his idiosyncrasy, trimmed it up in his abundant external eccentricities and thus have made a figure of considerable interest to his former students and perhaps to his colleagues, but of very mild concern to the public at large. To be more specific, it would be easy to make a brilliant caricature of this subject entitled either "A Harvard Professor" or "The Last of the Brahmins"—attenuations of humanity, neither of which could have stirred a deeper emotion in the vast democratic laity than amusement.
Mr. Howe saw both these opportunities. He proved his greatness as a biographer by dismissing them both in favor of a far more difficult task, namely, to show Barrett Wendell attempting to become an honest man, though a professor and a conservative! He has accomplished what he set out to perform. He has consequently produced a far more complex character than most people suspected Barrett Wendell to be—a character far more complex, perhaps, than Barrett Wendell himself thought he was, and certainly far less simple, firm, homogeneous and robust than the impression of himself which in later years he tried to stamp upon his contemporaries.
Mr. Howe's Wendell is no mere glorified schoolmaster but a man rich in humanity, full of temperamental impulses, of humor, of self-questioning, of self-distrust, and, what is most surprising, he abounds in that humility which is one infallible mark of a truly great spirit. I shall perhaps shock some of his friends by this comparison; but I insist upon it as the point of significance in my original juxtaposition of the two names: Barrett Wendell exhibits the same religious humility before his ideal of a good man that Sherwood Anderson exhibits before his ideal of a great artist. The first man's final conclusion is that a respect-worthy human character is the finest work of art. The second man's conclusion is that the finest works of art far transcend in value the most respect-worthy human characters. The conflict between the old times and the new is there. By an adequate and essentially noble presentation of the whole case for the old times, Mr. Howe has made of its representative a figure of almost tragic interest, with an appeal to readers who may never have heard of his classroom, with an appeal to exactly the sense that Sherwood Anderson's narrative so deeply touches—the sense for a high adventure in very difficult circumstances.
In a brief review one cannot even attempt to imitate the delicate art, intricate, lucid, economical, by which Mr. Howe keeps the soft play of life on his subject from his childhood to his old age in a succession of pictures from all points of view, constantly changing yet cohering in effect like those moving screens which exhibit the unfolding of a plant from seed to flower. The essence of his art is motion and the scrupulous avoidance of a stated thesis and a fixed portrait. I am enamored of the skill with which the thing has been done, but when I try to suggest what has been done I fall at once into violations of the principles which govern the art that I admire. I snatch a single picture from the moving series; to correct its incompleteness I snatch another, and juxtapose the two in a glaring contrast; and truth with her infinite gradations escapes me.
As a small boy Barrett Wendell appears to have been a little prig, encouraged at the age of nine, with the other boys in his private school, to write out for their master "our different opinions about gentlemen, and how to distinguish them from other persons." Mr. Howe quietly connects this childish exercise with the question proposed in the famous "English Composition": "What does a man mean, for example, who asserts that another is or is not a gentleman?" The constant recurrence of that question to Wendell's mind might easily be seized upon by a thesis-writer as his complete and adequate "explanation." It might be said, for example, to explain his "Literary History of America," with its tremendous emphasis upon the pure and blameless Harvard gentlemen who produced "the Renaissance of New England," and its dismissive gesture toward the rest of the country as a territory socially yet unborn and therefore possessing, for literature, no significance, or almost none.
Even within the sacred pale of New England, and among Harvard's own graduates, Wendell draws social distinctions like a lady. He anticipates the absurd snippiness of Mrs. Gerould in finding Thoreau and Alcott underbred and distasteful by reason of a vulgar "self-assertiveness," alarming to people "of sagely conservative habit." He asserts that it requires a hundred years to form a genuine American. He traces his own ancestry to the seventeenth century, revels in his connection with the best families of Massachusetts, delights in adorning the walls of his study with pictures of ten generations of his line, and performs a pious pilgrimage to the grave of his Dutch ancestor. He publishes a tract against the usurpations of the workingman, and hotly resents the iniquity of his standing in a street car while a man with a dinner pail occupies two seats. The death of Queen Victoria occasions in him an "overwhelming sense of personal bereavement"; he regards her life as "surely the most noble in modern times." In the midst of a war "to make the world safe for democracy" he rises in Sanders. Theater to deliver as his last message to the Phi Beta Kappa Society his repudiation of the ideal of democracy, his adherence to the ancient, "traditional," aristocratic republicanism. Meeting his colleague, Professor Merriman, he engages in this dialogue:
Barrett Wendell: In all the twenty-five years you have known me, Roger, have you ever heard me utter one liberal sentiment?
Professor Merriman: Not one, sir.
Barrett Wendell: Thank God!
In quite innumerable ways Mr. Howe demonstrates that Wendell was a bigger and better man than that. I don't mean to be paradoxical when I find the most important tokens of Wendell's humanity not in his fortunate and effective and happy external career but in a series of his failures and in the record of impulses which bore little fruit.
The tragedy of his life, and of this he was conscious, was that he became a product of his environment and lacked the initiative, the force, and the courage significantly to alter it. In his early manhood, it is clear that he desired to be a man of his times. At college, perhaps still in a somewhat "cocky" and snobbish fashion, which prevented his attaining the social success achieved there by football captains, he was an iconoclast, an enemy of Philistinism, and, significantly, a founder of "The Harvard Lampoon." Religiously "emancipated," he felt himself as a junior so much out of sympathy with his family that he thought he should "split" if he had to spend his summer vacations with them.
What a young man in that state craves is self-expression and an independent career. His family headed him toward the law, and he humiliatingly failed at the bar examinations. He tried to be a novelist, and he failed. He tried to be a practical dramatist, and he failed. He accepted a Harvard instructorship, and remained in it, because he had been unable to break into the life of his times at any other point, not because he yearned to spend his lifetime teaching boys.
I suppose Harvard is as "free" a university as there is in the country, and only men who have worked there can know how unfree the freest university is, how oppressively it constrains all but the most potent spirits to conform to its type. Barrett Wendell, like William James, was, or became, a potent spirit, and both men were indulged rebels in Cambridge. It is the glory of Harvard that, though she laughs at her rebels and lets them understand that rebellion can never be taken seriously, she does indulge them. Wendell shows little of the self-complacency attributed to the don; he is never proud because he is a professor; he is proud only of being himself, though a professor.
From the outset to the end he was quite out of sympathy with the Germanized scholarship regnant during his time at Cambridge. "God knows," he would say, perhaps with veiled reference to Professor Kittredge, "God knows I am no scholar." At Harvard he always had a feeling that he was "academically out of it"; and till he lectured with plaudits at the Sorbonne perhaps he never had the gratifying sense of being taken quite seriously, by a competent audience, as a man of letters. In 1880 he declared to his friend Stimson:
It is maddening to have to do one's best work in an amateurish way, if not actually on the sly—at the risk of having fingers pointed at you if you are found out.
That was the penalty he paid for trying to be a man of letters in a university. In 1881, struggling over the academically unsanctified business of trying to write a novel, he composes as an epitaph for himself "He lacked the courage to do good or evil." Gradually he resigns himself to doing no evil. In 1893 he regrets his doubtful, reactionary temper: "Such moods as mine are not things that literature demands." A few weeks later he unbosoms himself to Mr. Robert Herrick:
Shut up here in New England, and getting less and less discontented with its daily repetition of things no one outside cares for, I find myself, as I read your letter again, wishing to goodness I had had the luck and the pluck to give and take in a world where something was a-doing.
Returning from lecturing in France, he develops skepticism about his life work, and an acute distaste for teaching: "Harvard stifles me, more than I expected."
It was at about this time, between 1904 and 1906, that I heard him speak on French life, and attended, as a "listener" his course of lectures on the disintegration of the English national temper in the seventeenth century. Mr. Howe describes him well as he appeared in those years:
Well proportioned of figure, of moderate height, shapely of head, tawny bearded, with quick blue eyes, alert and responsive in personal encounter, the man of the world rather than the professor in general appearance.
He entered the lecture room with a cane, in a cutaway coat and spats, with the air of an Anglicized Boston man of letters who had crossed the Charles to speak to the boys about life. As he proceeded to his desk we noticed that his hair was parted down the back of his head to his collar. He plucked his glasses from their hook, somewhere about his waistcoat, and diddling them on the end of his forefinger, began to speak in his highly mannered voice, with frequent breaks into falsetto, something like this:
You can't, you know, always tell the truth. It isn't polite or expedient. Three-fourths of the time I don't feel at all like coming over here. And God knows that three-fourths of the time you would probably rather be anywhere than here. But if we acted on those feelings you would be called before the dean, and I should be told that I could devote my energies to something else.
The formal dress, decorous aspect and little affectations of the man were in delicious contrast with the opening speech, and, indeed, with the entire point of view in the course. The man's mind was lucid, honest, virile, burly and absolutely untrammeled; his speech likewise. "Literature," he said, "was the meaning of life"; and he was not afraid to face life's meaning or to express it in round terms—so long as he dealt with its meaning in the seventeenth century.
I can suggest the flavor of this series of lectures by a few extracts from my own memoranda: "In 1642 the drama was so dead that it stank in the nostrils of London." "The Puritan thinking himself a sharer in the will of God believes himself required to force his will on others." Occasionally there was an excursus: "Vox populi, vox Dei means that if you can get a majority of trades unions on your side that's just what God wants." Speaking of the central figure in his course, he observed: "It is remarkable that Milton could approach so close to modern culture and still believe literally in the Scriptures. How can you take your Maker and dress him up in pretty verses? I recall, you know, hearing a discourse on Christ's feeling when he rode into Jerusalem on the ass. I have known a man in the Harvard pulpit who tried to enter into the mind of Christ rather, you know, than into that of the ass . . . Heaven knows we could have spent three years on Milton. . . . Now, Hobbes, whatever else the fellow was, you know, was a big, hotblooded Elizabethan. When he gets onto God it's rather funny. You can't get the size of God's finger nails; it's no use trying. Abstract right was as purely a thing of the imagination as the finger nails of God. . . . Now, Baxter gives you, like all these Puritans, you know, an account of all his infernal maladies. They fancied, you know, that prayer and fasting could move their bowels. Baxter tried it. In the morning he was saved. There was another case where God interfered. . . . The Puritans were capable of great junks of attention to godly matters; it was as natural to them as eight hours of sleep are to me. . . . God knows what positive truth is. God knows that the effort to make idealism prevail in this world came to grief."
There speaks Barrett Wendell of the later time, being himself in the class-room. That is the Wendell who said: "The dominant figure in any time is sure to be of it." That is the Wendell who recognized Tolstoy as the greatest realist of the age; Wagner as the greatest artist of modern times; Whitman as a man who could "make you feel for a moment how even the ferryboats plying from New York to Brooklyn are fragments of God's eternity"; and "Huckleberry Finn" as "that amazing Odyssey of the Mississippi." That is the Wendell who found our New England literature pallid with our "national inexperience"; who was 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!"