John Fiske's Simplicity

THROUGH all the comment called out by the death of John Fiske runs the note of tribute to his simplicity and his lovableness. Both qualities sprang from the same root, — that of a hearty, lusty nature that took life at first hand, and lived it not merely with zest, but with positive gusto. His abounding vitality and robust common sense recalled continually the old English worthies, like Samuel Johnson and Fielding and Steele, who have drawn so largely on the love of generations, — men of more primitive sort than are common in our day, who lived much by eating and drinking, and touched the world hand to hand. So with Fiske. He came to close quarters with life, and had a large and joyous relation with it through his senses. With his feet thus firmly planted on the earth, he practiced a comfortable devotion to the present hour, and lived with a measure of contentment and delight unknown to men of lesser breadth of nature. He was largely independent of the hampering circumstances of environment; for he made his own surroundings, much as a great tree in the forest does, and would, one imagines, have been essentially the same man in any time or land.

It is no matter for wonder that the writing of so substantial, capacious, and sure-footed a man should be marked by a noble simplicity and clarity. The same quality made Fiske one of the most readable of historians that made him an incomparable friend. It was his interest in men and motives rather than in events, — the instinct by which he struck for the things most humanly interesting, the main trend of motives and causes in history, and let the details settle into their places. The story told of him by a friend, that when he was fourteen he formed the design of tracing out the course of God’s providence in history, gives the key to his life work. He was even then possessed by the consuming interest in the drama of human progress that furnished the motive for most of his later work.

Touching life as he did through his sensibilities rather than his theories, his simplicity was that of a child, — the simplicity of the heart, the disposition, the temperament. He seems to have grown up harmoniously, and his childhood so to have lost itself in his maturity that he retained all his life much of the child’s fresh and spontaneous spirit, — a fund of expectancy and a constant readiness for new interests. In him to a striking degree the child was father to the man, and he kept to the last a strain of unquenchable boyishness. He was incapable of affectation ; though pleased with praise, unmindful of dignities, and little concerned with formality or convention. His burly, bulky figure, that infallibly reminds one of Boswell’s lovable hero, whom at so many points he resembled, sheltered a jovial soul, one that met life like a call to dinner, and whose appetite for living never failed.