Mary Hallock Foote - "In Exile and Other Stories"

George Borrow - "Lavengro"

John Esten Cooke - "Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee"

John Beatty - "The Citizen Soldier"

Memories and Studies

W >> William James >> Memories and Studies




In all such events two things must be distinguished--the moral service
of them from the fortitude which they display. War has been much
praised and celebrated among us of late as a school of manly virtue;
but it is easy to exaggerate upon this point. Ages ago, war was the
gory cradle of mankind, the grim-featured nurse that alone could train
our savage progenitors into some semblance of social virtue, teach them
to be faithful one to another, and force them to sink their selfishness
in wider tribal ends. War still excels in this prerogative; and
whether it be paid in years of service, in treasure, or in life-blood,
the war tax is still the only tax that men ungrudgingly will pay. How
could it be otherwise, when the survivors of one successful massacre
after another are the beings from whose loins we and all our
contemporary races spring? Man is once for all a fighting animal;
centuries of peaceful history could not breed the battle-instinct out
of us; and our pugnacity is the virtue least in need of reinforcement
by reflection, least in need of orator's or poet's help.

What we really need the poet's and orator's help to keep alive in us is
not, then, the common and gregarious courage which Robert Shaw showed
when he marched with you, men of the Seventh Regiment. It is that more
lonely courage which he showed when he dropped his warm commission in
the glorious Second to head your dubious fortunes, negroes of the
Fifty-fourth. That lonely kind of courage (civic courage as we call it
in times of peace) is the kind of valor to which the monuments of
nations should most of all be reared, for the survival of the fittest
has not bred it into the bone of human beings as it has bred military
valor; and of five hundred of us who could storm a battery side by side
with others, perhaps not one would be found ready to risk his worldly
fortunes all alone in resisting an enthroned abuse. The deadliest
enemies of nations are not their foreign foes; they always dwell within
their borders. And from these internal enemies civilization is always
in need of being saved. The nation blest above all nations is she in
whom the civic genius of the people does the saving day by day, by acts
without external picturesqueness; by speaking, writing, voting
reasonably; by smiting corruption swiftly; by good temper between
parties; by the people knowing true men when they see them, and
preferring them as leaders to rabid partisans or empty quacks. Such
nations have no need of wars to save them. Their accounts with
righteousness are always even; and God's judgments do not have to
overtake them fitfully in bloody spasms and convulsions of the race.

The lesson that our war ought most of all to teach us is the lesson
that evils must be checked in time, before they grow so great. The
Almighty cannot love such long-postponed accounts, or such tremendous
settlements. And surely He hates all settlements that do such
quantities of incidental devils' work. Our present situation, with its
rancors and delusions, what is it but the direct outcome of the added
powers of government, the corruptions and inflations of the war? Every
war leaves such miserable legacies, fatal seeds of future war and
revolution, unless the civic virtues of the people save the State in
time.

Robert Shaw had both kinds of virtue. As he then led his regiment
against Fort Wagner, so surely would he now be leading us against all
lesser powers of darkness, had his sweet young life been spared. You
think of many as I speak of one. For, North and South, how many lives
as sweet, unmonumented for the most part, commemorated solely in the
hearts of mourning mothers, widowed brides, or friends did the
inexorable war mow down! Instead of the full years of natural service
from so many of her children, our country counts but their poor
memories, "the tender grace of a day that is dead," lingering like
echoes of past music on the vacant air.

But so and so only was it written that she should grow sound again.
From that fatal earlier unsoundness those lives have brought for North
and South together permanent release. The warfare is accomplished; the
iniquity is pardoned. No future problem can be like that problem. No
task laid on our children can compare in difficulty with the task with
which their fathers had to deal. Yet as we face the future, tasks
enough await us. The republic to which Robert Shaw and a quarter of a
million like him were faithful unto death is no republic that can live
at ease hereafter on the interest of what they have won. Democracy is
still upon its trial. The civic genius of our people is its only
bulwark, and neither laws nor monuments, neither battleships nor public
libraries, nor great newspapers nor booming stocks; neither mechanical
invention nor political adroitness, nor churches nor universities nor
civil service examinations can save us from degeneration if the inner
mystery be lost. That mystery, as once the secret and the glory of our
English-speaking race, consists in nothing but two common habits, two
inveterate habits carried into public life,--habits so homely that they
lend themselves to no rhetorical expression, yet habits more precious,
perhaps, than any that the human race has gained. They can never be
too often pointed out or praised. One of them is the habit of trained
and disciplined good temper towards the opposite party when it fairly
wins its innings. It was by breaking away from this habit that the
Slave States nearly wrecked our Nation. The other is that of fierce
and merciless resentment toward every man or set of men who break the
public peace. By holding to this habit the free States saved her life.

O my countrymen, Southern and Northern, brothers hereafter, masters,
slaves, and enemies no more, let us see to it that both of those
heirlooms are preserved. So may our ransomed country, like the city of
the promise, lie forever foursquare under Heaven, and the ways of all
the nations be lit up by its light.



[1] Oration at the Exercises in the Boston Music Hall, May 31, 1897,
upon the Unveiling of the Shaw Monument.

[2] G. W. James: "The Assault upon Fort Wagner," in _War Papers read
before the Commandery of the State of Wisconsin, Military Order of the
Loyal Legion of the United States_. Milwaukee, 1891.




IV

FRANCIS BOOTT[1]

How often does it happen here in New England that we come away from a
funeral with a feeling that the service has been insufficient. If it
be purely ritual, the individuality of the departed friend seems to
play too small a part in it. If the minister conducts it in his own
fashion, it is apt to be too thin and monotonous, and if he were not an
intimate friend, too remote and official. We miss direct discourse of
simple human affection about the person, which we find so often in
those lay speeches at the grave of which in France they set us nowadays
so many good examples. In the case of the friend whose memory brings
us together on the present occasion, it was easy to organize this
supplementary service. Not everyone leaves musical compositions of his
own to fill the hour with. And if we may believe that spirits can know
aught of what transpires in the world which they have forsaken, it must
please us all to think how dear old Francis Boott's shade must now be
touched at seeing in the Chapel of this university to which his
feelings clung so loyally, his music and his life at last become the
subjects of cordial and admiring recognition and commemorated by so
many of his neighbors. I can imagine nothing at any rate of which the
foreknowledge could have given him deeper satisfaction. Shy and
sensitive, craving praise as every normal human being craves it, yet
getting little, he had, I think, a certain consciousness of living in
the shadow. I greatly doubt whether his daydreams ever went so far as
to let him imagine a service like this. Such a cordial and spontaneous
outgoing towards him on our part would surprise as much as it would
delight him.

His life was private in the strongest sense of the term. His
contributions to literature were all anonymous, book-reviews chiefly,
or letters and paragraphs in the New York Nation on musical or literary
topics. Good as was their quality, and witty as was their form,--his
only independent volume was an almost incredibly witty little book of
charades in verse--they were too slight in bulk for commemoration; and
it was only as a musical composer that he touched on any really public
function. With so many of his compositions sounding in your ears, it
would be out of place, even were I qualified, to attempt to
characterize Mr. Boott's musical genius. Let it speak for itself. I
prefer to speak of the man and friend whom we knew and whom so many of
us loved so dearly.

One of the usual classifications of men is into those of expansive and
those of conservative temper. The word conservative commonly suggests
a dose of religious and political prejudice, and a fondness for
traditional opinions. Mr. Boott was a liberal in politics and
theology; and all his opinions were self-made, and as often as not at
variance with every tradition. Yet in a wider sense he was profoundly
conservative.

He respected bounds of ordinance, and emphasized the fact of limits.
He knew well his own limits. The knowledge of them was in fact one of
the things he lived by. To judge of abstract philosophy, of sculpture
and painting, of certain lines of literary art, he admitted, was not of
his competency. But within the sphere where he thought he had a right
to judge, he parted his likes from his dislikes and preserved his
preferences with a pathetic steadfastness. He was faithful in age to
the lights that lit his youth, and obeyed at eve the voice obeyed at
prime, with a consistency most unusual. Elsewhere the opinions of
others might perplex him, but he laughed and let them live. Within his
own appropriated sphere he was too scrupulous a lover of the truth not
to essay to correct them, when he thought them erroneous. A certain
appearance comes in here of a self-contradictory character, for Mr.
Boott was primarily modest and sensitive, and all his interests and
pre-occupations were with life's refinements and delicacies. Yet one's
mind always pictured him as a rugged sort of person, opposing
successful resistance to all influences that might seek to change his
habits either of feeling or of action. His admirable health, his sober
life, his regular walk twice a day, whatever might be the weather, his
invariable evenness of mood and opinion, so that, when you once knew
his range, he never disappointed you--all this was at variance with
popular notions of the artistic temperament. He was indeed, a man of
reason, no romancer, sentimentalist or dreamer, in spite of the fact
that his main interests were with the muses. He was exact and
accurate; affectionate, indeed, and sociable, but neither gregarious
nor demonstrative; and such words as "honest," "sturdy," "faithful,"
are the adjectives first to rise when one thinks of him. A friend said
to me soon after his death: "I seem still to see Mr. Boott, with his
two feet planted on the ground, and his cane in front of him, making of
himself a sort of tripod of honesty and veracity."

Old age changes men in different ways. Some it softens; some it
hardens; some it degenerates; some it alters. Our old friend Boott was
identical in spiritual essence all his life, and the effect of his
growing old was not to alter, but only to make the same man mellower,
more tolerant, more lovable. Sadder he was, I think, for his life had
grown pretty lonely; but he was a stoic and he never complained either
of losses or of years, and that contagious laugh of his at any and
every pretext for laughter rang as free and true upon his deathbed as
at any previous time of his existence.

Born in 1813, he had lived through three generations, and seen enormous
social and public changes. When a carpenter has a surface to measure,
he slides his rule along it, and over all its peculiarities. I
sometimes think of Boott as such a standard rule against which the
changing fashions of humanity of the last century might come to
measurement. A character as healthy and definite as his, of whatsoever
type it be, need only remain entirely true to itself for a sufficient
number of years, while the outer conditions change, to grow into
something like a common measure. Compared with its repose and
permanent fitness to continue, the changes of the generations seem
ephemeral and accidental. It remains the standard, the rule, the term
of comparison. Mr. Boott's younger friends must often have felt in his
presence how much more vitally near they were than they had supposed to
the old Boston long before the war, to the older Harvard, to the older
Rome and Florence. To grow old after his manner is of itself to grow
important.

I said that Mr. Boott was not demonstrative or sentimental.
Tender-hearted he was and faithful as few men are, in friendship. He
made new friends, and dear ones, in the very last years of his life,
and it is good to think of him as having had that consolation. The
will in which he surprised so many persons by remembering them--"one of
the only purely beautiful wills I have ever read," said a
lawyer,--showed how much he cared at heart for many of us to whom he
had rarely made express professions of affection.

Good-by, then, old friend. We shall nevermore meet the upright figure,
the blue eye, the hearty laugh, upon these Cambridge streets. But in
that wider world of being of which this little Cambridge world of ours
forms so infinitesimal a part, we may be sure that all our spirits and
their missions here will continue in some way to be represented, and
that ancient human loves will never lose their own.



[1] An address delivered at the Memorial Service to Francis Boott in
the Harvard Chapel, Sunday, May 8, 1904. Printed in 38 _Harvard
Monthly_, 125.




V

THOMAS DAVIDSON: A KNIGHT-ERRANT OF THE INTELLECTUAL LIFE.[1]

I wish to pay my tribute to the memory of a Scottish-American friend of
mine who died five years ago, a man of a character extraordinarily and
intensely human, in spite of the fact that he was classed by obituary
articles in England among the twelve most learned men of his time.

It would do no honor to Thomas Davidson's memory not to be frank about
him. He handled people without gloves, himself, and one has no right
to retouch his photograph until its features are softened into
insipidity. He had defects and excesses which he wore upon his sleeve,
so that everyone could see them. They made him many enemies, and if
one liked quarrelling he was an easy man to quarrel with. But his
heart and mind held treasures of the rarest. He had a genius for
friendship. Money, place, fashion, fame, and other vulgar idols of the
tribe had no hold on his imagination. He led his own life absolutely,
in whatever company he found himself, and the intense individualism
which he taught by word and deed, is the lesson of which our generation
is perhaps most in need.

All sorts of contrary adjectives come up as I think of him. To begin
with, there was something physically rustic which suggested to the end
his farm-boy origin. His voice was sweet and its Scottish cadences
most musical, and the extraordinary sociability of his nature made
friends for him as much among women as among men; he had, moreover, a
sort of physical dignity; but neither in dress nor in manner did he
ever grow quite "gentlemanly" or _Salonfaehig_ in the conventional and
obliterated sense of the terms. He was too cordial and emphatic for
that. His broad brow, his big chest, his bright blue eyes, his
volubility in talk and laughter told a tale of vitality far beyond the
common; but his fine and nervous hands, and the vivacity of all his
reactions suggested a degree of sensibility that one rarely finds
conjoined with so robustly animal a frame. The great peculiarity of
Davidson did indeed consist in this combination of the acutest
sensibilities with massive faculties of thought and action, a
combination which, when the thought and actions are important, gives to
the world its greatest men.

Davidson's native mood was happy. He took optimistic views of life and
of his own share in it. A sort of permanent satisfaction radiated from
his face; and this expression of inward glory (which in reality was to
a large extent structural and not "expressive" at all) was displeasing
to many new acquaintances on whom it made an impression of too much
conceit. The impression of conceit was not diminished in their eyes by
the freedom with which Davidson contradicted, corrected and reprehended
other people. A longer acquaintance invariably diminished the
impression. But it must be confessed that T. D. never was exactly
humble-minded, and that the solidity of his self-consciousness
withstood strains under which that of weaker men would have crumbled.
The malady which finally killed him was one of the most exhausting to
the nervous tone to which our flesh is subject, and it wore him out
before it ended him. He told me of the paroxysms of motiveless nervous
dread which used to beset him in the night-watches. Yet these never
subdued his stalwartness, nor made him a "sick-soul" in the theological
sense of that appelation. "God is afraid of me," was the phrase by
which he described his well-being to me one morning when his night had
been a good one, and he was feeling so cannibalistic that he thought he
might get well.

There are men whose attitude is always that of seeking for truth, and
men who on the contrary always believe that they have the root of it
already in them. Davidson was of the latter class. Like his
countrymen, Carlyle and Ruskin, he felt himself to be in the possession
of something, whether articulate or as yet articulated by himself, that
authorized him (and authorized him with uncommon openness and
frequency) to condemn the errors of others. I think that to the last
he never fully extricated this philosophy. It was a tendency, a faith
in a direction, which gave him an active persuasion that other
directions were false, but of which the central insight never got fully
formulated, but remained in a state which Frederic Myers would have
called subliminal. He varied to a certain extent his watchwords and
his heroes. When I first knew him all was Aristotle. Later all was
Rosmini. Later still Rosmini seemed forgotten. He knew so many
writers that he grew fond of very various ones and had a strange
tolerance for systematizers and dogmatizers whom, as the consistent
individualist that he was, he should have disliked. Hegel, it is true,
he detested; but he always spoke with reverence of Kant. Of Mill and
Spencer he had a low opinion; and when I lent him Paulsen's
Introduction to Philosophy (then just out), as an example of a kind of
eclectic thought that seemed to be growing, and with which I largely
sympathized, he returned it with richer expressions of disdain than
often fell even from his lips: "It's the shabbiest, seediest pretence
at a philosophy I ever dreamed of as possible. It's like a man dressed
in a black coat so threadbare as to be all shiny. The most
poverty-stricken, out-at-elbows thing I ever read. A perfect monument
of seediness and shabbiness," etc.

The truth is that Davidson, brought up on the older classical
traditions, never outgrew those habits of judging the world by purely
aesthetic criteria which men fed on the sciences of nature are so
willing to abandon. Even if a philosophy were true, he could easily
fail to relish it unless it showed a certain formal nobility and
dogmatic pretension to finality. But I must not describe him so much
from my own professional point of view--it is as a vessel of life at
large that one ought to keep him in remembrance.

He came to Boston from St. Louis, where he had been teaching, about the
year 1873. He was ruddy and radiant, and I soon saw much of him,
though at first it was without the thoroughness of sympathy which we
afterwards acquired and which made us overflow, on meeting after long
absences, into such laughing greetings as: "Ha! you old thief! Ha! you
old blackguard!"--pure "contrast-effects" of affection and familiarity
passing beyond their bounds. At that time I saw most of him at a
little philosophical club which used to meet every fortnight at his
rooms in Temple Street in Boston. Of the other members, J. Elliot
Cabot and C. C. Everett, are now dead--I will not name the survivors.
We never worked out harmonious conclusions. Davidson used to crack the
whip of Aristotle over us; and I remember that, whatever topic was
formally appointed for the day, we invariably wound up with a quarrel
about Space and Space-perception. The Club had existed before
Davidson's advent. The previous year we had gone over a good part of
Hegel's larger Logic, under the self-constituted leadership of two
young business men from Illinois, who had become enthusiastic Hegelians
and, knowing almost no German, had actually possessed themselves of a
manuscript translation of the entire three volumes of Logic, made by an
extraordinary Pomeranian immigrant, named Brockmeyer. These disciples
were leaving business for the law and studying at the Harvard
law-school; but they saw the whole universe through Hegelian
spectacles, and a more admirable _homo unius libri_ than one of them,
with his three big folios of Hegelian manuscript, I have never had the
good fortune to know.

I forget how Davidson was earning his subsistence at this time. He did
some lecturing and private teaching, but I do not think they were great
in amount. In the springs and summers he frequented the coast, and
indulged in long swimming bouts and salt-water immersions, which seemed
to agree with him greatly. His sociability was boundless, and his time
seemed to belong to anyone who asked for it.

I soon conceived that such a man would be invaluable in Harvard
University--a kind of Socrates, a devotee of truth and lover of youth,
ready to sit up to any hour, and drink beer and talk with anyone,
lavish of learning and counsel, a contagious example of how lightly and
humanly a burden of erudition might be borne upon a pair of shoulders.
In faculty-business he might not run well in harness, but as an
inspiration and ferment of character, as an example of the ranges of
combination of scholarship with manhood that are possible, his
influence on the students would be priceless.

I do not know whether this scheme of mine could under any circumstances
have been carried out. In point of fact it was nipped in the bud by T.
D. himself. A natural chair for him would have been Greek philosophy.
Unfortunately, just at the decisive hour, he offended our Greek
department by a savage onslaught on its methods, which, without taking
anyone's counsel, he sent to the _Atlantic Monthly_, whose editor
printed it. This, with his other unconventionalisms, made advocating
his cause more difficult, and the university authorities, never, I
believe, seriously thought of an appointment for him.

I believe that in this case, as in one or two others like it, which I
might mention, Harvard University lost a great opportunity.
Organization and method mean much, but contagious human characters mean
more in a university, where a few undisciplinables like T. D. may be
infinitely more precious than a faculty-full of orderly routinists. As
to what Davidson might have become under the conventionalizing
influences of an official position, it would be idle to speculate.

As things fell out, he became more and more unconventional and even
developed a sort of antipathy to all regular academic life. It subdued
individuality, he thought, and made for Philistinism. He earnestly
dissuaded his young friend Bakewell from accepting a professorship; and
I well remember one dark night in the Adirondacks, after a good dinner
at a neighbor's, the eloquence with which, as we trudged down-hill to
his own quarters with a lantern, he denounced me for the musty and
mouldy and generally ignoble academicism of my character. Never before
or since, I fancy, has the air of the Adirondack wilderness vibrated
more repugnantly to a vocable than it did that night to the word
"academicism."

Yet Davidson himself was always essentially a teacher. He must give
forth, inspire, and have the young about him. After leaving Boston for
Europe and Africa, founding the Fellowship of the New Life in London
and New York (the present Fabian Society in England is its offshoot),
he hit upon the plan which pleased him best of all when, in 1882 or
thereabouts, he bought a couple of hundred acres on East Hill, which
closes the beautiful Keene Valley in the Adirondacks, on the north, and
founded there, at the foot of Hurricane Mountain, his place "Glenmore"
and its "Summer School of the Culture Sciences." Although the primeval
forest has departed from its immediate vicinity, the region is still
sylvan, the air is sweet and strong and almost alpine in quality, and
the mountain panorama spread before one is superlative. Davidson
showed a business faculty which I should hardly have expected from him,
in organizing his settlement. He built a number of cottages pretty in
design and of the simplest construction, and disposed them well for
effect. He turned a couple of farm buildings which were on the grounds
into a lecturing place and a refectory; and there, arriving in early
April and not leaving till late in November, he spent the happiest part
of all his later years, surrounded during the summer months by
colleagues, friends, and listeners to lectures, and in the spring and
fall by a few independent women who were his faithful friends, and who
had found East Hill a congenial residence.

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