As Seen by a Disciple: President Eliot

I

THIS paper is avowedly personal. Through many years I had the inestimable privilege of seeing, day by day, a great man at his work. In a capacity subordinate but informal, I was brought into constant contact with him. We discussed subjects so varied that I saw him in many aspects; and, as he revealed himself more and more, I came to the belief which I still hold that I never knew a nobler man. The deeper springs of his character I shall not try to sound at present, though what I tell of him may from time to time reveal them. I have especially in mind his everyday humanity, his lighter moments, his sense of fun, his occasional misapprehensions in their comical contrast to the habitual clearness and spaciousness of his mind, his persistent prejudices, which, however, could not in an individual case cripple his instinct for justice. By stringing together some personal experiences, I hope to throw certain sidelights on his social and academic character.

A year or two after graduation, I applied to him for a tutorship in Greek. Tutors in those days were appointed for terms of three years. I was young, inexperienced, and afraid, and undoubtedly made a bad impression on him. He gave me no encouragement at all. Yet Greek was prescribed to Freshmen and tutors had to be found. The academic year for the upper classes began on Thursday; for Freshmen, some of whom were examined for admission in the last three days of the week, it began on the following Monday. On Saturday half of the Freshmen had not been provided with a tutor in Greek. At my midday meal on Saturday, my brother, then a tutor in mathematics, brought me an oral order from the President to begin work on Monday. Obviously the President had nourished till the fifty-ninth minute of the eleventh hour the hope of finding somebody else.

Scared but happy, I went to him. ’This appointment,’he said, ‘is for one year. Mr. Croswell and Mr. J. H. Wheeler are abroad; and the college will employ either of those persons in preference to you.’

Here I first came upon that directness which some people called brutality but which was merely the courageous kindness of sincerity. Courageous because few older men, with dispositions not positively ugly, will disappoint a young man’s ambition without shading the truth a little. Those words burnt into me for life, as clear now as when they were spoken, more than fifty years ago. When I repeated them to him in his extreme old age, he smiled benignantly. ‘That was pretty rough,’ he said. I had learned, long since, that it was not. It had the wholesome bitterness of a tonic. I began to know the President as a man to whom I or anyone might go for criticism and be sure of getting it unadulterated either with sentimental weakness or with personal ill-will. Nor was there anything haphazard in his characterization: by instinct and training he was a critical observer of men. Reverend George A. Gordon writes of meeting him, always with pleasure, and always with a sense of being ‘appraised.’ In Faculty meetings he suffered men to talk as long as they would; he was appraising them. At the age of ninety or more, he remarked, ‘I don’t see why Dr. [MacFie] Campbell comes to see me so often. He observes me very closely; he little knows that I observe him equally closely.’ Constant research in character, constant sharpening of an inborn talent for observation, and constant practice in the vigorous niceties of speech gave to his sketches of character both authority and pungency; and when occasion required, sometimes when it merely offered, he would tell people what he thought of them — precisely and unmistakably — sparing neither them nor himself in the clear air of truth. Hence those who had not educated their sensitiveness into an element of strength, who were as yet unable to feel a bracing effect of frankness toward themselves, condemned as cold and harsh what he had schooled himself to tell and what it might be no small part of their own schooling to hear.

Direct speech, at any cost, was an article of his faith. He was as ready to receive it as to give it. At a meeting of graduate students, while I was talking with the professor who had made the address of the evening, President Eliot came up to disagree with him face to face. The attack, though not personally hostile, was energetic. ‘I said to myself,’ he declared, ‘the trumpet gives an uncertain sound.’ The lecturer, in the nervous weariness that follows nervous effort, was not quite ready for a series of comments like that. ‘Excuse me, Mr. Eliot,’ he said, ‘but this is a subject on which I know more than you.’ The President’s face showed no trace of resentment, for the excellent reason that there was none to show. He had heard a sincere and devoted man tell him a plain truth. In such an utterance from such a man he saw nothing unbecoming. He wanted a certain sound from the trumpet, and he got it.

I remember my surprise when Professor George Herbert Palmer told me that President Eliot was the easiest of men to talk with if you knew what you wished to say. I was probably a little skeptical, because unable to think of Professor Palmer, an acknowledged master of speech, as finding it hard to talk with anybody; but Professor Palmer was right. To this great and formidable being the humblest man’s opinion, plainly expressed, was of interest. Only those who were frightened into incoherence, or those who postponed their thinking till they were seated in his office, were sorry that they had come; and even they, in his later years, might almost feel at home.

Yet there can be no greater mistake than to think of him as naturally imperturbable. With all his magnificent self-control, he revealed, now and then, the thinness of the crust which covered a volcanic fire. In discussing his reputation for coldness, he recalled a Faculty meeting at which a professor was speaking offensively. ‘I held the arms of my chair,’ said the President, ‘and held them tighter and tighter as he went on; and, at last, one of the arms broke. That was not cold!’

His reply to his cousin, Professor Charles Eliot Norton, at a Commencement ceremony of Radcliffe College, no one who heard it will forget. Professor Norton was the orator of the day, giving the audience the quintessence of Nortonian philosophy perfectly expressed. He talked of ‘this vulgar, half-civilized America.’ He named a few great books that every young woman whom he addressed should have in her library, the Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius, for example. After him President Eliot was called on for a speech. Commencement at Radcliffe is only a day before Commencement at Harvard. President Eliot, though sure to be called on, could not be expected to have an address prepared; and indeed few men with preparation could speak as well as he without it. In his first sentence he spoke of himself as ‘appalled’ that his ‘rude speech’ should follow the polished periods of Professor Norton. He then invited the audience to take note that whatever of beauty, refinement, and culture they found in that gathering and ceremony was American. He continued with ‘American’ as a sort of triumphant refrain; he proceeded to the principles of American democracy.

‘And where,’ he cried, ‘can these principles be found? In the pages of one little book — in the four Gospels of the New Testament. I trust that you have already added that little book to your library.’ He sat down, tremendously applauded.

Never before or since have I heard two speakers show so much of themselves in so short a time, each so near his oratorical best. And the man whose eloquence had fired every hearer went home to say penitently, ‘I’ve been fighting again.’

At times, especially in his earlier years, his directness of speech caused needless irritation and may well have cost him friends. A rich gentleman whose estate bordered the property of the College complained to him of a high pile of wood or lumber close to the line that divided the estates. ‘I told him,’ said the President, many years later, ‘that if he objected to the College’s woodpile, the College would gladly buy his land. That,’ the President added, ‘was a bad break.’

Few men could better illustrate what is vulgarly known as ‘coming down to brass tacks.’ Professor W. R. Spalding, trained, as he says, by his father not to waste the time of important people, presented Mr. Eliot with a carefully wrought plan for improvement in the Department of Music. ‘Mr. Spalding,’ said the President, ‘your argument is cogent and conclusive. Good morning.’

The Class of 1872 on its twenty-fifth anniversary gave to the College a clock for the tower in Memorial Hall. The striking of this clock was a great annoyance to Professor Shaler, who declared that he heard it every hour in the night. ‘I told the Corporation,’ he said, ‘that it would have to choose between me and three thousand pounds of brass.’

This bit of dialogue is reported: —

Professor Shaler: ‘If that clock is n’t taken out I shall go.’

President Eliot: ‘Where will you go, Mr. Shaler?’

One thinks of Gilbert’s —

I remember well an occasion when the hose was turned on me. As Dean of the College I was telling the Faculty at the final meeting of the year the records of those candidates for the degree of A.B. who had not met all the requirements. One youth was still deficient in Freshman prescribed English, in which he had failed annually. I believe that in other respects his record was clear. When presenting his case I had to admit his apparent hopelessness in this one subject; but I must have laid such stress as I could on what he had accomplished. And the President said, ‘Jones, described as an illiterate person, is recommended for the degree of Bachelor of Arts.’

II

It was Mr. Eliot’s classmate, Professor Adams Sherman Hill, who made the remark (attributed to another man) that the President had a sense of humor, but you ‘could n’t count on it.’ That he had it is made obvious by what I have already told. When it showed itself in words, his instinct for the close-fitting word was strikingly effective. Of a mean-looking poster inviting new students to the hospitality of a reception, he said, ‘It has a very bleak appearance.’ Of the magenta handkerchiefs bought for the crew in which he rowed, he said that, though they were the origin of Harvard crimson, the color was purely accidental; ‘it might just as well have been blue.’ Of a proposal to dispense with all grades for records of students’ work, reporting nothing but ‘passed’ or ‘failed,’ he said, ‘I fear that it would subject our students to too great a strain on their higher motives.’ Of a hot-tempered professor, he observed, ‘You know, Mr. Briggs, that it is easy to touch a match to him.’ I remember his showing me certain inscriptions that he had written for an arch at the World’s Fair in Chicago. When I asked him whether they would fill what I understood to be the allotted space, he answered, ‘Oh, the arch is all covered with women and horses.’ Harvard men he characterized as ‘less glowing and gregarious’ than Yale men. Commenting on a certain student from a standard Boston family, he said, ‘He appears to be the possessor of but two adjectives, “ bully” and “rotten.” ’ When I asked him about X’s Class Day oration, he answered, ‘Robust commonplace.’ Of a graduate who had written somewhat irresponsibly about Harvard, he observed, ‘He is not a scientific person.’ Of the place to which women were relegated when waiting for books in the University Library, he said, ‘A pen is provided for them.’ Of a graduate student who planned to leave Harvard for work in Professor X’s laboratory at a distant university, he said, ‘Taking the laboratory and Professor X together, I see no reason for the change.’ In Faculty meeting when a certain professor asked him a question, he branched off to a quite different matter, attacking a committee of which the professor was a member. Then suddenly turning back to the question, he said, ‘Did Professor X get what he wanted?’ When Professor Norton had proposed that the memorial to Phillips Brooks should take the form of a sadly needed University Library, the President remarked, ‘I see no reason why he should hitch his particular little wagon to that particular star.’ ‘We have nominated Wendell for a professorship,’ he said one day. ‘He expects opposition in the Board of Overseers; but I can conceive of no effective opposition.’ ‘Do you mean Mr. S.?’ said I. ‘I thought they had made it up.’ ‘For external use,’ said the President. One of his famous sayings is: ‘If you are a college president, they not only say you lie; they prove it!’

Once a year the presidents of New England colleges used to meet at one of the colleges — each president taking with him one professor — for the discussion of college problems. I remember that the first item of a long programme which we were to dispose of in a day and a half was: ‘What studies should a man who is going to be a minister pursue in college?’ I remember, too, a pardonable saving clause in the opening prayer: ‘May our conclusions be best — so far as we come to any conclusions.’ We sat like a class of boys each of whom was ‘called up’ by the presiding officer for an opinion on every item in the programme. ‘Must we speak on every question?’ I said to President Eliot. ‘Oh no; you may pass as you do in euchre.’

In an address to the business men of Harvard Square, he told of Harvard Square in its earlier days and of the permission that he got from President Walker to put gas into Holworthy Hall as an experiment. ‘Those pipes in Holworthy Hall,’ said he, ‘still belong to the Cambridge Gas Company; but I doubt if they know it.’

One variety of his humor I did not discover till long after he had resigned. Through his secretary he had asked me to see him at his house for the discussion of some college matter. On the day before our meeting one of his daughters-in-law was my neighbor in a street car. ‘I hear that you are to see President Eliot to-morrow,’ she said. We then fell to talking about him. I told her that I had not gone to see him since his retirement; that I had formed the habit of not going to him without a commanding reason, for I knew that he was beset with unsparing visitors and it was somebody’s business not to bother him unnecessarily. I told her also that long ago, when I had said to his newly appointed secretary, Mr. Clymer, ‘How is the President?’ Mr. Clymer answered, ‘Lovely.’ I told her that the word, as applied to Mr. Eliot, had startled me then, and that I had since learned how fitly it was chosen. On the next day, when I presented myself at the appointed hour, I was greeted thus: —

‘I’ve been hearing strange stories of you. I hear that you have determined not to come to see me unless you have to.’

The unexpectedness of this sally tied my tongue, I fear. He made some polite remark to the effect that I was always welcome and proceeded: —

‘I hear, also, that you were surprised when you heard the word “lovely” applied to me.’ Silence. ‘You thought it inappropriate!'

Only those who know his deliverycan do justice to this little speech. Later I learned that the mood of it was not uncommon with him. He was amusing himself with a benignant sort of teasing. Here was a man of ninety ‘kidding’ a man of seventy, much as a sprightly and experienced girl might tease an embarrassed boy, younger than herself, whom she knew to admire her and over whom chance had given her a delicious advantage.

He loved to tell experiences which amused him and told them with full appreciation of their humorous side. One of these experiences was the acquisition of Austin Hall: —

Mr. Austin (meeting the President in the street): ‘What does the University need most now?’

Mr. Eliot: ‘A new building for the Law School.’

Mr. Austin (after hesitation): ‘I’ll give it. I hate a lawyer like the devil!'

Yet I can see justification of Professor Hill’s remark about the sense of humor. When Mr. Eliot was president of the Harvard Phi Beta Kappa he invited Professor E. K. Rand to speak at the chapter’s annual dinner, and assigned as a subject the durable satisfactions of life. The annual dinner used to be celebrated for its wit. The oration and the poem might be tragedies; the dinner was the satyr drama. As a dinner, in the eating sense, it was not highly esteemed; but as a playground for the wit of such men as Joseph H. Choate, Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar, and Edward Everett Hale it was worth starving at. Professor Rand, whose sense of humor is unquestioned, said to himself, ‘This time I am to be the serious man.’ Later, when the President called on one man after another and every man spoke on the durable satisfactions of life, Professor Rand was smitten with the awful truth that the President had planned to deal with the durable satisfactions by an unendurable symposium. Walking with the President after the dinner, he got a new and durable satisfaction in the President’s happy reflection on it, ‘No humor!’

At a meeting of the Faculty Dr. Sargent was telling of thefts from lockers in the gymnasium. ‘The other day,’ he said in an expressionless tone, ‘a man was found there with his hand in the pocket of an instructor. He did not secure anything.’ This was too sudden for the Faculty, who laughed loud and long; but the President sat erect and stern as a rebuke to us foolish children, even as Mrs. Eliot, who surely did not lack humor, sat when her husband, conferring the degree of LL.D. on President Taft, described him in all ways as ‘robust,’and Mr. Theodore Roosevelt exploded and Sanders Theatre broke into a roar.

Again I cannot resist the temptation of relating an experience of my own. Through many years, in one capacity or another, I had to write official reports for publication and to submit them in manuscript to the President. They were serious documents, probably as serious as anything that I ever put into print; but they did now and then allow what was amusing in the academic situation to express itself — never, I think, without a serious underlying purpose. Whether I was right or wrong I do not know, and I had rather not consider here. I do know that I was not convinced when with damning solemnity he said, ‘There are passages in your report that would make a reader smile!’ ‘Tell him,’ said a colleague, ‘that there are passages in his that would make a reader laugh right out’; and he told how the President had characterized a man who had attacked the work of the Harvard Observatory as ‘an astronomer of merit.'

Nor was I convinced by the President’s argumentative illustration. He pointed out to me that there was something in my mind which expressed itself in charades and that this something should not intrude into such serious matter as official reports. ‘The American people,’ he said, ‘like their serious matter and their humor separated.’ This proposition he illustrated by a story of the late Sherman Hoar, ’82, who made a name for himself in politics at an exceptionally early age, and whose political opponents twitted him because of his youth. Mr. Hoar, the President said, made one campaign speech in the hall of a Sunday School. Seeing ‘Suffer little children to come unto me’ on the wall above him, he remarked to the audience that he had been derided for being young; ‘but,’ he said, as he pointed to the wall, ‘here at least I shall be welcome.’ After the meeting a member of the committee in charge told him that this sort of thing would n’t do. From which the President argued that Americans wish humor and serious matter to be separated. Possibly they do. I, as an American, should like the colored supplement to be separated into outer darkness. The significance of my story lies in the blindness of such a man as Mr. Eliot to what made Mr. Hoar’s remark offensive, and in the fallaciousness of such an argument as a support for his proposition. Throughout his career, it was easy to puncture his reasoning. He won his causes, not by logic but by personal force, instinct for the right, noble ardor for truth and freedom.

III

It seems queer to say of this great man, reputed cold, that his power in argument was less intellectual than personal and emotional (in the best sense of that word). Personal force of character he had beyond nearly all men; intensity of feeling, disciplined by resolute self-control, gave to his speech an immense background of reserve. Logical consistency, some of us thought, he had not. To draw an illustration from football (not, by the way, his favorite sport), he had developed a magnificently strong offense and let defense take care of itself. In the eagerness of debate he repeatedly laid himself open to a reductio ad absurdum. In behalf of a three-year degree he used arguments which, if pushed to their logical conclusion, would wipe out the College altogether. His mind was essentially affirmative.

At a dinner in honor of a Harvard crew, the President, after paying his disrespects to football, exalted rowing, in which he himself was proficient. ’You work together,’ he said; ‘you work hard; and you work for the honor and glory of your college. What finer pleasure can there be than that?’ Here was one of the best speakers in the world commending rowing in contrast to football, with praise every word of which might be applied to football itself.

The late Clinton H. Scovell told of a dinner at which President Eliot was combated by Frederick P. Fish, who, it would seem, disposed of the President’s argument completely. When Mr. Fish sat down, Mr. Eliot asked and received permission to speak a second time. Without attempting to refute Mr. Fish, he began all over again, speaking so warmly and impressively that he apparently won the debate. Mr. Scovell expressed surprise at his method. ‘That,’ said Dean Ames, ‘is what he has been doing all his life.’ He was one who

Yet few men were more generous to opponents; for besides his innate nobleness he had the trained capacity of an ardent listener, eager to learn the opinion of any serious opponent and the reason for it. I have heard that, when he was between eighty and ninety years old, he attended a conference which threatened to end without giving Mr. George L. Fox time for saying what he wished to say. Mr. Fox moved that the discussion should be continued at the next annual meeting, and added that he himself was accused by his friends of using not a rapier but a bludgeon. President Eliot, who had just made a speech, rose calmly and said, ‘I hope that Brother Fox will not have the discussion postponed but will say now what he has to say; for I may not be here next year and I should like to be present. And I do not at all mind his using a bludgeon.’

His genuine interest in the opinion of any intelligent human being gave him an amusing and not undeserved reputation for curiosity. He himself told how his hired man at Mount Desert, looking at a portrait of him, exclaimed, ‘That’s him, only he ain’t asking no questions’; and people tell of his lifting the cover of a neighbor’s saucepan as he passed through her kitchen. After a successful opening of the College chapel at the beginning of the academic year, one of the clergymen, filled with enthusiasm, went straight to Phillips Brooks’s rectory to report the meeting. ‘It was so fine,’ he said, ‘to see President Eliot standing there and singing

‘Asking questions, as usual,’ said Mr. Brooks.

All in all he was probably the finest speaker I have ever heard. He was utterly free from oratorical insincerity and even from oratorical and elocutionary mannerisms such as most speakers develop with advancing years. Though his speeches must be numbered by thousands, they were to the last as natural as they were strong. His voice was rich music; his enunciation was perfect in its self-effacing accuracy; his bearing was stately. When he felt strongly and exercised self-command, his speech had the ominousness of suppressed passion. With all his minute practicality he was possessed of a high idealism. In the Middle Ages, he said, men gave their allegiance to an idealized person, a king or a lord; now they give it to a personified ideal, a country or a college.

His practicality and his idealism met in his views of scholarships and prizes. Scholarships were, in his opinion, financial aids for poor boys, not prizes which might be given to rich ones. His idealism in this matter he expressed with his customary disregard of proving too much. He had, he said, the Greek idea of a prize — for example, a laurel wreath, simple, not costly, perishable. To this remark, which he made at a meeting of the Faculty, Professor Morris Morgan retorted that ‘money does n’t last a bit longer.’

His moral idealism cropped out oddly in his views of poetry. ‘ His only use for poetry is ethical,’ said a member of the Faculty. I believe he thought and said that Whittier’s poetry was as good as Homer’s. His attitude toward poetry is illustrated by an experience of mine with him in a small club. Membership involved the giving of a dinner to the club, and an hour’s performance of some kind by the host, usually an exposition of something in his own field of scholarship. Put to my wit’s end for subjects that I dared offer these men, nearly all of whom were specialists and my seniors, I took ‘The Clerkes Tale,’giving each man a copy and reading the tale aloud, to show, if I could, the beauty of Chaucer’s verse when pronounced with approximation to the sounds of the words in his day.

Though quite free from fear that these specialists would be disturbed by flaws in my pronunciation, I was apprehensive. I had heard one member call ‘The Man of Lawes Tale’ ‘puerile.’ Even so, I was not prepared for the outburst of President Eliot: —

‘Can you give me any reason, Mr. Briggs, why that should be preserved as literature? There is no poetry in it. The man is a miserable rascal!' and more to the same effect.

Words fail me now as they failed me then. ‘The Clerkes Tale’ stirred in him nothing but righteous indignation, not merely at Walter but at Chaucer — if not at the luckless protagonist of the evening. No one who heard him then would ever call him cold. Here I may interject another bit of his literary criticism: ‘I can’t read Miss Wilkins, she’s so squalid.’

A kind of self-possession in matters which it is hard for some of us to take calmly caused him to say now and then what, looked at without his personal context, seemed cold-blooded. I had been skeptical about the University’s à la carte restaurant when used by our poorer undergraduates, especially by needy Freshmen. Some of us who have always had enough to eat would yet find it hard to indulge ourselves in wholesome variety if every day at every meal we saw the printed price of everything we were eating. A high-strung boy, when he faces a minutely portioned bill of fare, without money enough to see his way through the college year, is in danger of ordering the same five-cent portion every day; or, if for variety he takes a ten-cent portion of something else, he is in danger of counteracting by extra worry the extra value of the food. When I imparted to Mr. Eliot my fears in such a case, he said, ‘If he doesn’t lose weight, he’s all right. And, if he weighs himself every week, — and he’s a foolish fellow if he does n’t! —’ Here my recollection of his words has gone; but the reader can readily supply the apodosis.

To discover the golden minimum in food by watching one’s weight and (so to speak) by eating to it, was, in President Eliot’s mind, a fascinating and quite unemotional problem; yet no man’s emotion was stirred more deeply or more efficiently in behalf of a boy who was struggling for education. When he heard that a young lover of botany who had but one arm was likely to be shut out from the study of it in college because unable to meet the requirements of the laboratory, he exclaimed vehemently, ‘If that boy wants botany, he shall have it!’

When he had summoned to his house a disciplinary officer to talk with the mother of a disgraced boy, he suddenly left the room. When the mother had gone, Mrs. Eliot apologized for his withdrawal. The distress of these mothers, she said, was more than he could bear. ‘That was not cold.'

Few men are more quickly responsive to misfortune; few men have kinder hearts. I remember well how in my Sophomore year he left his house to be occupied by a student with smallpox. He was then a widower, living with his two boys.

Professor Emerton, after Mr. Eliot’s resignation, published some personal recollections of him. Mr. Eliot wrote that Mrs. Eliot and he had read them, sometimes with laughter and sometimes with tears; and Professor Emerton responded that he believed the tears were not unhappy ones. Later, when Mr. Eliot was leaving Professor Emerton’s house after a meeting of ‘The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel among the Indians and others in North America’ and his host had escorted him to his car and the car was starting, he put his head out of the doorway: ‘You were right,’ he said. ‘The tears were not unhappy ones.’

His tenderness showed itself in minute care of those, young or old, for whose welfare he regarded himself as at any time responsible. When he sent me on my first long trip as a delegate of the University, he expounded to me the advantage of ventilating my berth by putting a pencil under the window. His constant friend, Dr. Henry Pickering Walcott, who graduated from Harvard College five years later than he, visited him at Mount Desert — I think, in 1925. As Dr. Walcott was starting for a homeward-bound boat on a nasty day, Mr. Eliot was putting on his overcoat; and when the doctor asked him why, he replied, ‘I am going to the boat with you.’ The doctor remonstrated: ‘I have had a perfect visit; if you go out with me, I shall be worried all the time for fear you’ve caught cold.’ Nevertheless Mr. Eliot, who was then ninety-one, went down with the doctor to the boat. There they met Dean Sperry, to whom Mr. Eliot said, ‘Here is an old gentleman going up in the boat; and you must take good care of him.’ Even as he was dying, he commented on the relative convenience of different days for his death to the plans of doctors who visited him at Mount Desert. He decided on which day he was to die, and was, I believe, but one day off in his reckoning.

IV

President Eliot’s feeling about youth and age, like many of his other feelings, was both endearing and amusing. Beyond any other man whom I have known (except possibly Theodore Roosevelt) he believed in youth. I think he would subscribe to the words of a recent novelist: ‘After all, if wisdom is the knowledge of how to live, one need be no wiser at fifty than at twenty. An ability to count the cost may cause one to miss the heights, while foolish youth may reach the top without knowing how he got there. But he has arrived, and it is no use for middle age to shout through a megaphone that he has no right to be where he is.'¹ He had faith that youth would be its own best guide in electing courses of study. In a published report to the Overseers he informed them that the Overseers — some, at any rate — were of an age to learn about the College from their sons and grandsons. One effect of this public information was a vote of the Overseers requiring the President to submit his annual reports to them in proof. Another effect, I believe, was the election of some younger men who became active in opposing the President’s policies — an opposition which he was too large-minded to resent. For many years he was accused of packing the Faculty with young men to push his pet measures. One eminent Overseer, to illustrate the truth of this charge, mentioned the appointment of Barrett Wendell. This gentleman could not have hit on a more triumphant vindication of the President or a more striking exposure of his own ignorance. Barrett Wendell was as courageously independent as any man who ever breathed. He seemed positively to enjoy being in a minority of one, and would beard any lion in or out of his den. Some of his intuitions and prophecies were so true and so unsupported that I used to call him Cassandra.

When President Eliot had allowed those members of the Faculty who opposed his scheme for a three-year college degree to use the University printing office for the publication of their argument, he read the printed signatures. ‘That will put a stop to one lie,’ he exclaimed. ‘Look at those young men!'

As he believed in youth, so he appeared to disbelieve in old age. His cousin, Professor Norton, kept open house on Christmas Eve to all members of the University who might be away from home. There was never a more charming host. He had a personal word for every man who came in. Then he read from the New Testament the Christmas story; then he talked for a few minutes on any serious subject that was in his mind; then he invited his guests to a supper such as many of them had never known. A few ladies and a few instructors were there as aids.

On the morning after one of these receptions, at which the host had deplored certain tendencies of our nation, his portrait appeared on the front page of a daily newspaper with some such heading as this: —

PROFESSOR NORTON

Says that we are the Wickedest Nation in the World

Some embryo journalist had violated the professor’s hospitality. When I next met the President I expressed my disgust at the student’s ill-breeding and my regret for the whole matter. I was scarcely prepared for his reply: ‘Oh, well, everybody understands that he is over seventy.’ He himself must have been, at this time, well along in the sixties; he remained as President till he was seventy-five; he kept on writing till shortly before he died at ninety-two. His implied generalization about old age was another instance of his proving too much.

He was a very old man indeed when his son, going to see him and finding him somewhat excited, asked him what the matter was.

‘They want me to talk at the Institute of Technology.’

‘You’d better do it, since you used to teach there.’

‘Yes! But they want me to talk about “old times.” I want to know what they are going to do next!'

Many years ago I heard him express a dread of surviving his powers; toward the end of his life, he said, ‘I find it harder to control my thoughts; that is, I find it harder to keep out the disagreeable things’: but his mental activity was extraordinarily lasting. From his seventieth birthday anniversary, when the congratulation that he prized most was Mrs. Whitman’s single leaf of laurel, to his ninetieth, which was celebrated in Sanders Theatre and the College Yard, and through the few years that remained to him, he thought and worked and maintained in a marked degree that power of perfect phrasing, that vigorous directness of speech and action, that lovable individuality, which overpowered all who came near him. At seventy-two he was operated on in Ceylon for a bad case of appendicitis. Later, he wrote, ‘After all I lost but twenty-seven days. The experience of those days was to me altogether novel and possibly improving.’ He was not the man to let surgery for appendicitis get away from him without yielding something to his insatiable thirst for knowledge. He consented to the celebration of his ninety years ‘provided that the exercises shall be brief and not of a mortuary character.’ When he was ninety-one, a Harvard man, taking his photograph for a film, suggested his whittling. ‘That is a good idea,’ said Mr. Eliot. As he pulled down a twig and began to whittle, he observed, ‘I suppose that you will write a caption, “Spare the rod and spoil the child. ” ’ When the photographer asked him whether he was ‘a movie fan,’ he answered, ‘I abhor them.’

Economy was born in him and trained there. A deficit of forty thousand dollars in a college year struck him with horror. ‘Mr. Eliot,’ said his wife, ‘calls up the heads of Departments and asks them to economize. They all say that they can’t economize; and then Mr. Eliot goes round and turns down the gas.’

His far-reaching and detailed economy found delicious expression in connection with some Russian tea sent by a grateful father to the Dean of the College. The mistaken benevolence of parents may sorely embarrass the Dean with gifts which he cannot refuse without hurting their feelings, yet, as a disciplinary officer, cannot safely or even honorably accept. A certain undergraduate on probation for a low record in studies had complicated his academic position still further by typhoid fever, which naturally kept him out of the classroom for a long time and made him unable to work. During his sickness the Dean had corresponded with the father; and on his recovery the father sent to the Dean five two-pound cans of Russian tea. It occurred to the Dean that if neither he himself nor the small board which determines a student’s standing accepted the tea, — if it did not become the property of a disciplinary individual or a disciplinary committee, — it might, if the father approved, be used by the Faculty before Faculty meetings when tea was regularly served. It might thus, as a gift to the Dean, be diluted into insignificance, and need not, as it were, be thrown back in the father’s face. Since the Dean had never known (to this day he does not know) the source of the tea provided for the Faculty, he consulted President Eliot about his scheme. The President’s decision was instantaneous and unassailable: ‘It will accustom the Faculty to a higher grade of tea than they will have when it is gone.’

When Albert Bushnell Hart was a young instructor, giving a single college course, someone asked President Eliot why the College did not supply lectures in American history. The President’s answer combined appreciation with thrift: ‘What’s the use of paying a man two hundred dollars for a lecture? We have an admirable course in American history, and we pay only eight hundred for it.’

Economy certainly overreached itself when one of the most brilliant teachers in America, working at Harvard as Instructor for a pitifully small salary, had the offer of twice as much, with an Assistant Professor’s title, at another university. We had a large deficit; nothing could be done. Mr. Eliot did not deny that the man was worthy to be head of a department at any university in the United States; but again, we had a large deficit ; nothing could be done. A very few years later, when the man had become reconciled to his new position, in which he was not merely appreciated but put on the straight road to promotion, President Eliot called him back, this time to a full professorship, and even at that price had great difficulty in getting him. As a financial transaction, the conduct of this case is comparable to purchase of the Sibylline Books.

V

‘Every man,’ said the late Professor James B. Greenough, ‘needs a few good sound prejudices to keep him steady.’ The prejudices of the strong man are sure to be strong; and such were the prejudices of President Eliot. One of his closest friends and disciples has observed that there seemed to be two spots in which his mind lacked its usual clearness — the spots representing athletics and the Episcopal church. Outside of rowing (which he loved) and tennis (which, I suspect, he took on trust), he had little faith in intercollegiate athletics, and, in spite of the fact that he has said, in his reports, some of the finest things ever said of them, a curious misunderstanding of their nature. Like many lesser persons, he seemed ready to decry them as body opposed to mind, yet to regard all strategy in them — I had almost said ‘all intelligence’ — as damning proof of dishonesty. Many years ago when standards of athletics were at their lowest, when first-year Law Students from other colleges were eligible to our Freshman teams, and loosely attached persons of several varieties were eligible to our University teams, the Harvard Law School maintained a category of Special Students, to whose academic employment it gave scant attention. The tuition fee of a hundred and fifty dollars secured for the man who paid it (or for whom it was paid) comparative immunity from the ordinary exactions of a Faculty, and the right to compete for membership in athletic teams. At a Faculty meeting the President had been commenting on the shabbiness of the University baseball team, which was undeniable. Finally he spoke of one man in the team who was, he said, a Special Student in the Law School, but never attended his classes. ‘The students,’ he added, ’like him because he is “up to all the professional tricks.”’ After the meeting, Barrett Wendell and I went to Mr. Eliot, saying in effect: ‘We know little about that player and care little about him; but we have seen him play ball many times, and have never seen him do anything mean or dirty.’ The President drew himself up in the magnificent attitude that was all his own and exclaimed with triumphant finality, ‘Why! They boasted of his making a feint to throw a ball in one direction and then throwing it in ANOTHER !’ He was superb. It was as if he said, ‘You young men don’t know what you are talking about,’ yet said it with regal courtesy. Still again, he maintained that the manly way to play football is to attack the strongest part of the opponent’s line. In athletics, as in everything else, his fight was a fight for righteousness; but his logic in regard to athletics, if carried to its legitimate conclusion, would probably have condemned him as a trickster in his dominoes with Mrs. Eliot after lunch.

One of his difficulties in thorough understanding of certain sports was the inability of his eyes to follow the course of a ball. A long discussion of football in one of his annual reports was read so widely that nothing but a second edition could satisfy the demand for it. It contains many good and one or two eloquent passages; but he had never seen a game of football. Later he was persuaded by Professor Beale to see one game. That, unhappily, was in the era of mass plays, with only five yards to advance for a first down — in the period when football was least interesting to watch and most difficult to follow closely. Unluckily, also, the score was 0 to 0. Between the halves the President remarked, ‘An interesting game, Mr. Briggs, but very inferior to a yacht race.’

Sometime before his famous discussion of football was published, he said to me, suddenly, —

‘What’s the difference between football and prize-fighting?’

Knowing as little of the latter as he knew of either, I tried to answer.

‘Prize-fighting,’ he retorted, ‘develops some admirable qualities — alertness, courage.’

I had made, and could make, no headway; but when the report appeared I was pleased to read, —

‘Whereas in prize-fighting, with which it has been unjustly compared, football,’ etc., etc.

He had worked out an answer to his question. Prize-fighting demands severe bodily injury of an opponent. Bodily injury in football is incidental and — in theory, at least — accidental. A later report summed up with stinging conciseness Harvard’s conduct of athletics: ‘Unintelligent and therefore unsuccessful.’

His anti-Episcopal prejudice, no doubt a straight inheritance from Puritan ancestors, cropped up at all times and seasons. He seemed scarcely able to think of the Episcopal church without exhibiting his disapproval of it; and anyone accustomed to hearing him speak could tell, to a moment, when he sighted it as he was speaking, He was worried if he thought that many clerks in the College office were Episcopalians. When the Dean of Radcliffe College, Miss Agnes Irwin, was an Episcopalian and the mistress of the first Radcliffe dormitory, Miss Eliza Hoppin (a warm friend of his and Mrs. Eliot’s), was an Episcopalian, and when he seemed bound to believe that the Secretary, Miss Coes, was an Episcopalian — though she was not — and when it was proposed to appoint Miss Grace Machado, an Episcopalian, as mistress of the second dormitory, ‘Grace Eliot Hall,’ his anxiety was both painful and funny. When the Episcopal Club of Boston was so rash as to make him its guest at dinner, he told it that he had observed in the Episcopalian preachers at Harvard an ‘economy of intellectual effort.’ It is said that, somewhat later, the Reverend Winchester Donald of Trinity Church, Boston, after hearing President Eliot speak at a meeting, told him how much he had enjoyed the address: ’I enjoy it more every time I hear it; and this is the third time.’ Dr. Donald’s audacity was surpassed only by that of the unsteady undergraduate who when the President said to him, ’Are you drinking now, Smith?’ replied, ‘Not so early in the morning, thank you.’

The most noteworthy exhibition of Mr. Eliot’s feeling toward the Episcopal church occurred at the dinner celebrating what was supposed to be the three-hundredth anniversary of John Harvard’s birth. Bishop Lawrence, after handsomely appreciative words about Mr. Eliot, who presided, expressed the opinion that there had been room for John Harvard in the Church of England, and that the ecclesiastics of John Harvard’s day made a mistake in allowing him and others like him to leave that church. When the Bishop had finished speaking, the President sprang to his feet: ‘John Harvard was a Dissenter: I therefore call on the Reverend Dr. Gordon, of the Old South MEETING HOUSE.’ Dr. Gordon’s speech, having a touch of the fine old Covenanter, stirred the President more deeply still, with a militant enthusiasm: ‘What Dr. Gordon has said recalls a remark of Emerson’s, that a man, to be a man, must be a Dissenter!’

On the question whether smoking should be allowed in Phillips Brooks House, he remarked that the question was one of sect; the Episcopalians wish to smoke; the others do not.

Yet, when he had time to consider, no prejudice could block his friendship with an individual or his devotion to the University; for his ruling passion was what Adams Sherman Hill has called ‘his passion for justice.’ No personal dislike of the Episcopal church could deter him from inviting Phillips Brooks to take charge of the University Chapel. I have heard him tell of his call on Dr. Brooks when the invitation had been sent. He found him agitated.

‘Does the Corporation understand that I am a Trinitarian?’

‘Yes, and for anything we know, you may be a Calvinist.’

‘No, thank God, not that!’

Frequently the language in which he bestowed honorary degrees gave an inkling of personal feeling. Dr. William Reed Huntington, whose parishioners are said to have infested Wall Street, was ‘an abundant fountain in a thirsty land’; Henry Cabot Lodge, after serving for eleven years in the Senate of the United States, had ‘long vistas of generous service still inviting him.’ The President’s speech at a special meeting for the award of an honorary degree to Prince Henry of Prussia was a masterpiece of what his old friend Dr. Walcott called ‘the audacity of oratory.’ The ancient federation of our States welcomed the young German federation. The reason for conferring the degree seemed half apologetic, laying stress on the fact that the Prince’s grandmother was English. Later, at a dinner in the Prince’s honor, the President’s speech — of some forty minutes, I believe — dwelt proudly on the blessings of democracy.

For many years he conducted his part of the Commencement ceremony in Latin, with the English pronunciation which most scholars had abandoned long before. ‘Expectata oratio in lingua vernacula a Jones.’ Candidates for degrees were summoned in Latin to come and receive them. The summons ended with ‘accedant.’ On one occasion the medical candidates, not understanding Mr. Eliot’s Latin (or perhaps any other), failed to accede. One youth, in everyday business clothes, took his stand on the platform alone and faced the President. The President repeated his formula two or three times without a single further accession. At last the youth, strained to the breaking point, turned his back to the President, walked to the edge of the platform, and beckoned to his distant classmates. The audience also was strained to the breaking point, and broke. The next year, the President spoke English only.

In writing of degrees, I cannot ignore a correspondence that I had with him in the summer of 1898. At my summer home in the woods of Plymouth, Massachusetts, I got a letter from Mr. E. B. Barton, a young graduate, whose diploma, testifying that he had received the degree of A.B., had been eaten by rats in Wadsworth House. He petitioned for another diploma in its place. As I knew that the President’s objection to duplicating a diploma was almost Draconian in its rigidity, I had scarcely a shred of hope for Mr. Barton; but I did write to Mr. Eliot, then at Mount Desert, suggesting that, since Wadsworth House was a College building, the rats might be regarded as our own rats, for whose conduct toward Mr. Barton the College was responsible. I have rarely been more surprised than when I read his reply.

NORTH-EAST HARBOR, MAINE
August 23, 1898
DEAR MR. BRIGGS:
I think we might issue another diploma to E. Blake Barton on the ground you mention — our own rats. I think there must have been an unexpected irruption of rats in Wadsworth House, for I never heard of any there before. I will write to the Bursar about them by this mail.

The remainder of the letter deals with other subjects. If I wrote immediately to Mr. Barton, as I believe that I did, my exultation was premature. Another surprise was in store for me. So soon after the first letter that even now its promptness is unintelligible, I received a second one: —

NORTH-EAST HARBOR, MAINE
August 25, 1898
DEAR MR. BRIGGS:
I have changed my mind about Barton’s diploma. Mr. Cutler [the head janitor] reports that a person who has used Barton’s room in Wadsworth House during vacation left crackers and cheese in the room. It is probably A. Z. Reed. This food attracted the rats and mice. No other damage has been done in Wadsworth House. I think Barton will have to content himself with a certificate.

The writer then turned to another matter.

VI

President Eliot had a conservative strictness about social propriety. In extremely hot weather, when many students, taking their long final examinations, wore neither waistcoats nor coats, but shirtwaists, he declared the custom ‘indecent.’ Yet he himself, in the early part of his presidency, had horrified a certain conservative element in the neighborhood, when ‘the young President of Harvard’ was denounced for riding horseback on Sunday.

He was concerned about every word spoken or written by any representative of the College, never checking free speech, but scrutinizing every word and every pronunciation. He was so worried when one of our ablest and finest men said ‘tremenjous’ that he suggested correcting him by an anonymous letter! A story of Mr. Jerome Greene’s shows the President’s shrewd and discriminating interest in the English used by students. When Mr. Greene was busy with Mr. Eliot in the back parlor of the President’s house, the maid announced Mr. (let us say) Jones, of the Law School. Looking in the University catalogue, Mr. Greene discovered that there were two Joneses in the Law School, one from Bowdoin College, the other from a college in the Middle West, which we will call X. Going to the visitor in the front parlor, Mr. Greene asked whether he himself might not tell him what he needed to know, since the President was busy. The visitor answered, ‘It seems like it was between he and I.’ When Mr. Greene had transmitted this answer and Mr. Eliot had gone to see the student, Mr. Greene, to his great amusement and delight, heard in the President’s far-reaching voice, ‘Good morning, Mr. Jones. You are from X College, I believe.’

I need not dwell again on the quality of his own English. Now and then it seemed a trifle formal. When he ran his sailboat on a rock at Mount Desert, he remarked, ‘I was aware of the proximity of the rock; but I mistook the tide.’ Someone has happily likened to his diction a bit of English from Franklin’s autobiography about the joy of suddenly seeing land ‘to those who had been so long without other prospects than the uniform view of a vacant ocean.’ This is the kind of English that, with his presence and his voice, made him in a class by himself as a platform orator.

A story from the Boston Latin School shows, among other things, that his excellent delivery was acquired early in life. A few years ago a boy in the Boston Latin School wished to declaim a passage from a speech of Henry Clay’s but could not find the book which contained it. Mr. Pennypacker, then the headmaster, suggested that President Eliot might be able to tell where he could find a copy of the book, and gave the boy a letter of introduction to the President. The President did not know where a copy could be found. ‘But that need make no difference, Mr. S.,’ he said. ‘I spoke that passage at the Latin School in 1849; I will dictate it to my secretary and give the manuscript to you.’ These things he did. In the archives of the Latin School Mr. Pennypacker found a programme showing that Charles William Eliot had declaimed that speech in 1849; and on the programme in the handwriting of Francis Gardner, the headmaster, was written against the name of Eliot ‘First Prize.’

In the hundreds of times that I have heard him speak I can remember only two when he flagged; one at the opening of the Semitic Museum; the other at a Radcliffe Commencement. At the latter ceremony, Mrs. Louis Agassiz, President of the College, had enumerated the gifts of the year. Mr. Eliot, called on to speak, began thus: ‘That was a very interesting list of gifts that your President reported to us — all from women.’ Then he said that all these women had got the money from their husbands. Then — and then only — in forty years of the finest speaking I have ever known, he sparred for time: ‘Why did these women give this money? What was their object? What was their purpose? What did they give it for?’ Their object I do not now remember. I can think only of the utter weariness which could reduce a perfect orator to the slow and intermittent enunciation of four successive questions with precisely the same meaning.

As an administrator, despite his interest in detail, he gave singularly few orders. He was far removed from what is now called an ‘efficiency system.’ He would put several persons into closely related positions, give each, perhaps, a few general directions, and let them work out their mutual relation as best they could. Sometimes it caused embarrassment; now and then it caused a dispute: but on the whole it proved effective under a man like him.

From 1871 — when my class, newly admitted as Freshmen, went in single file to a room in University Hall and shook hands with the young President — till 1925, when he sat in his own house, a very old man, benignant yet high-spirited still, and still ready to fight for every great cause, I have watched, first with boyish fear, then with a young assistant’s mingled fear and pride, then with no fear at all but with constantly increasing pride and gratitude and love, this greatest of all the men whom I have known. What I have said in this paper may help those who saw him only at a distance, and saw in him little but austerity and energy, to learn how human he was.

‘It has once or twice been my fortune to be run over by Charles William Eliot,’ said a man who had resigned from the Harvard Faculty and was speaking where President Eliot was none too popular; ‘but let me tell you one thing: he never worked for Charles William Eliot.’ Nothing truer was ever said. He is one whom the angel would write down, not, it may be, as one who loved his fellow men, though he gave his life to their advancement, — for, democrat as he was, he had a certain aristocratic discrimination, though he never sacrificed his conscience to it, — but as one who used his gigantic powers in the determination to give every man a chance; who tenderly loved his family and his friends; who neglected no duty to home, to college, to country, or to the world; a true evangelist who preached the intellectual emancipation of all mankind.

I cannot leave him without quoting a letter which he wrote not long after Mrs. Eliot’s death. Mrs. Briggs and I were in the habit of sending to Mrs. Eliot every summer a bunch of sabbatias from Plymouth. In the summer after her death we sent to him what, if she had lived, we should have sent to her. Then came a letter with that clean, firm signature which was his till the end.

Your sabbatias — of the most perfect color — reached me yesterday morning in fine condition, and were placed in five suitable vessels on the family dining table on a broad piazza commanding very beautiful prospects. There can be no more appropriate and delightful memory of Mrs. Eliot’s body and soul, on earth or in heaven.