A Williams Anthology Part 29

V. HAMILTON WRIGHT MABIE

WILLIAM M. GROSVENOR '85

It would be easy enough for me to study critically Mr. Mabie's books, for he has written many and they are well known and widely read; I might give you a criticism of him as thinker and author. If criticism is, (as I believe Matthew Arnold once defined it) the discerning of the characteristic excellencies in things, I could easily show you the charm of Mr. Mabie's English, the wide range of his culture, the sweetness and light of his interpretations of nature and human life.

But this is rather a brief tribute to the man himself whom we sons of Williams have known and admired these many years, and this or any like tribute, however inadequate, will serve to pay a little of the debt we owe him for all that he is and all that he has done.

Born in 1846, he graduated from college in 1867 and from the Columbia Law School in 1869. As I graduated eighteen years later, I never knew him in those earlier days. But the law did not claim him; almost at once he turned to literature, for that clearly was his G.o.d-given apt.i.tude. For nearly thirty years he has been an editor of the _Christian Union_, which afterward became the _Outlook_.

... The boy is father to the man. The gentleness, the refinement, the generous outlook on life, the genial friendliness, have only grown into n.o.bler forms through the strenuous years. But he is an editor as well as a litterateur. He has had his share in the fight to preserve our national ideals. The years have put iron into his soul and strength into his judgments, and the sweetness has become only the pleasing incas.e.m.e.nt of the strong medicine which our social and political life so often needs. So his personal influence has grown in weight and effectiveness. Mr. Mabie is serving the state, the church, human society, in all the wide range of its interests, with singular efficiency and is quietly achieving many very useful things; and withal it is done with methods that are constructive and with the gentle arts of a gracious persuasiveness and a winning courtesy.

May he have many years of rich and fruitful work, and a golden harvest of all the good deeds he has sown!

VI. HENRY LOOMIS NELSON

JULIAN PARK '10

To some of the college body the name of Henry Loomis Nelson is nothing more than a name, but the three upper cla.s.ses, especially that considerable portion of them who at one time or another came under his influence, will not soon allow the memory of his personality to pa.s.s.

The facts of his life are simple enough and as well known; the fruits of that life would take many pages to set forth. His power as educator, journalist, and man of public affairs reached infinitely further than most of us, who first saw in him the man of even, witty temperament, were used to realize.

Professor Nelson was graduated with the cla.s.s of 1867, later taking the M.A. degree; the college further honored him and itself by conferring the degree of L.H.D. in 1902. Together with Mabie and Stetson of his cla.s.s, he organized a little circle for literary discussion; and that group, each afterward to attain eminence, showed more vital interest in art and letters than can be found to-day. After taking his law degree at Columbia he went to Was.h.i.+ngton as newspaper correspondent and there began a great series of political and economic writings. Called to the editorial chair of _Harper's Weekly_ in 1895, he resigned it after four years because, he said, he felt that he would be false to his own convictions if he wrote those of the publisher, false to the publisher if he used the magazine to voice his own. His writings include also a novel as well as treatises on political science. In 1902 he came back to his alma mater as head of the department of Government. He died on February 29, 1908.

In his devotion to the ideals of Williams as he saw them, Dr. Nelson was, many have said, more distinguished by manly but quiet zeal than any other graduate of his prominence in public life. He stood for scholars.h.i.+p, fine scholars.h.i.+p of course, but even above that he put honor, a gentleman's code of honor. He was unconditional in his contempt for hedging, for trickery, for meanness. Constantly he showed himself an idealist, as in his advocacy of an absolute honor system.

But in all there was the play of a shrewd wit, the touch of sureness, lacking sn.o.bbery, of the man who knows where he stands, and a love of entertaining others. For only six years we knew him as a teacher, but the time was long enough for many of his ideals and ideas to take root, and the fruit of them will long be apparent.

VII. HARRY PRATT JUDSON

GEORGE EDWIN MACLEAN '71

Harry Judson entered Williams from Stillwater, New York, and it was said that he made the best entrance examinations ever pa.s.sed up to that time. Immediately upon his graduation, the third in his cla.s.s, in 1870, he taught public school in Troy, and was initiated as a reformer in munic.i.p.al politics when Troy was infamous for corruption.

The second public era of his life, 1885 to 1892, witnessed his introduction to the West as professor of history in the University of Minnesota. This was the time of the refounding of that inst.i.tution under the beginning of President Northrop's administration, to whom Professor Judson became a right hand. His career is an ill.u.s.trious example of one rising slowly and patiently through every grade of the public school system, to its crown in the highest grades in the state university. It must have been of inestimable worth to him to become familiar with the genius of a state university, so peculiarly a people's inst.i.tution and so characteristic of the middle West.

Unconsciously he was preparing for crowning his career in the new University of Chicago. It is not strange that, in 1889, three years before he became a member of the university's first faculty, President Harper's attention was attracted to him, and he brought the early drafts of his plan for a herculean university to Professor Judson for criticism. When the inner history of that university is written, in my opinion, the world will be surprised to learn of the contribution of Professor Judson, who was Dr. Harper's Secretary of the Interior from the beginning. What Mr. Rockefeller was as a silent partner in money matters, Dr. Judson was in matters of the mind.

As dean of the Faculty of Arts, Literature, and Science from 1892 till his accession to the presidency, he was in admirable training for that office. His facility in using his knowledge, his versatility of powers, fired by an innate energy, regulated by steadiness of purpose, and aimed at the highest ideals, make his name synonymous with efficiency incarnate. His modesty equals his ability. Harper stands as an heroic figure, a Napoleon with visions of educational conquest, selected by the far-seeing Rockefeller to build a university in the center of the nation and to give the West intellectual self-respect.

With the same keenness of vision Mr. Rockefeller and the trustees selected as Dr. Harper's successor a human figure, one in almost every way a contrast to Dr. Harper; an Elisha succeeding an Elijah and fitted to balance and round out the creative stage in a university to be not only the biggest but the best in the West. Williams as the mother of many educators must place the name of Judson beside that of Mark Hopkins.

VIII. CHARLES CUTHBERT HALL

SOLOMON BULKLEY GRIFFIN '72

Dr. Hall was born in 1852, and died within a short time of two of his best and best-known college friends, H.L. Nelson and Isaac Henderson, on March 15, 1908. On being graduated from Williams in 1872 and from the Union Seminary, his first pastorates were spent in Newburgh, N.Y., and in Brooklyn, whence he was called to the presidency of Union Seminary in 1897. The most brilliant of his achievements was perhaps embodied in his two trips to India as the Barrows lecturer of the University of Chicago;--he had a wonderful apt.i.tude in applying the principles of Christianity to an alien civilization. A cla.s.s-mate, the editor of the _Springfield Republican_ is the author of the tribute to his memory which follows.

It is around the thought of Cuthbert Hall the college boy, rather than the distinguished president of a great seminary and all the rest, with the world so much his parish, that any word of loving memory shapes itself. He was refined and winning. If ever the sunlight of a gracious nature touched any youth, it rested on him; the unworthy and the trivial pa.s.sed him by. His adjustment of values even then was mature and firm. His literary taste and product were superior. He was a natural gentleman, and that meant a Christian by all the call of his nature. Love of the fine, the high, the genuine, and the generous, was instinctive. His breadth of charity and welcome for knowledge in youth became the distinction of his manhood.

Qualities were conspicuous in his life that bound worldlings to him in a bond of fellows.h.i.+p that grappled the best that was in them. Goodness of his sort is commanding--the practical power of a pure life is a pulpit a.s.set that reenforces the spoken word beyond all human calculation. Under his leaders.h.i.+p Union Seminary could not have been other than liberal and sympathetic toward devout scholars.h.i.+p that might seem to threaten the ancient foundations of faith.

When a cla.s.s-mate late in life found repose in the Roman church, Dr.

Hall could see and say that such anchorage was best for his friend.

All paths that led to trust in G.o.d and the strengthening of the essentials of character were allowable in the brotherhood of the service of humanity.

The world of scholars.h.i.+p has its arrogancies--sometimes it is critical over-much, intolerant toward the lesser requirements of busy men outside. This man never lost touch with men as they pa.s.sed. His own a.s.surance of belief was a flame which lighted many torches. It was a sane and a glad evangel that he gave to his students, and brought in almost constant and always ardent addresses to the youth of many colleges.

Intellectual integrity was joined in him with the finest spiritual apprehension and expression, so that he was qualified to carry a message to the cultivated of India, where he got his mortal hurt. In the knightly loyalty with which he labored his zeal was a highly tempered blade. He respected all faiths, but an abiding a.s.surance of the supremacy of the service of Christ gave him unwavering serenity and poise. It is easy to think of Charles Cuthbert Hall entering the Supreme Presence reverently, unafraid, rejoicing, as naturally as a child would come home.

IX. BLISS PERRY

CARROLL LEWIS MAXCY '87

The subject of this brief sketch may indeed be termed a Williams man both by heredity and by environment. He pa.s.sed his boyhood and early youth under the very shadow of our hills; and his father, Professor A.L. Perry, was for years the most widely known as well as the most generally loved of its faculty.

Bliss Perry was born in 1860; after graduation, in 1881, he became instructor in English and elocution at his alma mater and in 1886 was advanced to the full professors.h.i.+p. In 1893 he accepted a call to the same chair at Princeton. Six years later he was appointed to the editors.h.i.+p of the _Atlantic Monthly_, thus becoming one of a famous line of editors including Lowell, Howells, and Aldrich. He remained at the head of the _Atlantic_ for just ten years, resigning in August 1909 to devote himself wholly to the duties of the chair of English literature at Harvard, which he had accepted two years before and which had already been filled by Longfellow and Lowell. The year 1909-1910 he spent abroad as Hyde lecturer at the Sorbonne.

Professor Perry's publications extend over the fields of fiction, criticism, and the occasional essay. His _Study of Prose Fiction_, a clear exposition of narrative writing, is one of the best-known college textbooks on the subject. His _Walt Whitman_ is without doubt his most careful and elaborate critical work and is a recognized authority. The _Amateur Spirit_, a series of familiar essays, shows Professor Perry at his best and should be read especially by those who delight to study the personality of an author as revealed in his work.

But whatever fame Professor Perry may have attained in the fields of literature, to Williams men he is the teacher. In _The Amateur Spirit_ he has written: "Your born teacher is as rare as a poet.... Once in a while a college gets hold of one. It does not always know that it has him, and proceeds to ruin him by over-driving, the moment he shows power; or to let another college lure him away for a few hundred dollars more a year. But while he lasts--and sometimes, fortunately, he lasts till the end of a long life--he transforms the lecture-hall as by enchantment. Lucky is the alumnus who can call the roll of his old instructors, and among the martinets and the pedants and the piously inane can here and there come suddenly upon a man; a man who taught him to think, or helped him to feel, and thrilled him with a new horizon."

Those of us who have been under Professor Perry's instruction in the cla.s.s-room must smile to note how--all unconsciously--he has here portrayed what we know him to be. Scholarly in his tastes, clear in his thinking, simple and direct in the expression of his thought, and always human in his personality, he "taught us to think, he helped us to feel, and he thrilled us with a new horizon." To us he seemed the ideal teacher, and as teacher and as man withal he has won the loyalty of Harvard, Princeton, and Williams men alike.

SUGGESTIONS

OVER THE HILLS

G.B.D.

"Mister," my companion in the smoking-car addressed me rather timidly, "hev you ever bin to Ebenezer?"