That dialogue suggests pretty well, I imagine, the sort of impression that Barrett Wendell consciously strove to produce: a fastidious, defiantly snobbish and very hard-shelled traditional New England gentleman.
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.
