"Kitty" of Harvard

by ROLLO WALTER BROWN

1

THERE could be no doubt about the matter: George Lyman Kittredge consisted of more than one man. Just how many men were required to constitute him, nobody seemed able to say. But that he was not less than two, everybody who knew him was ready to admit.

The first of these two — the one he was most widely thought of as being — was the “Kitty” of Harvard Hall. Undergraduates with vivid imaginations made sketches of the old building on the point of blowing up, with zigzag electric fragments of Shakespeare — “Kitty" spelled it “Shakspere” — shooting from windows and roof, whenever “Kitty” held forth. To many of them for a lifetime the total meaning of Harvard Hall was “Kitty.”

The sight of him as he came to the ten o’clock class was in itself something that had to be recognized as dramatic. In the pleasant autumn or spring, men stood high on the steps or out on the turf in front and watched in the direction of Christ Church to see who could catch the first glimpse of him.

“There he comes!” somebody called, and then everybody who was in a position to see watched him as he hurried breezily along — a graceful tallish man in very light gray suit and gray fedora hat, with a full square beard at least as white as his suit, who moved with energy, and smoked passionately at a big cigar. Students used to say that he smoked an entire cigar while he walked the short distance along the iron fence of the old buryingground and across the street to Johnston Gate. But as he came through the gate he tossed the remnant of his cigar into the shrubbery with a bit of a flourish, and the students still outside hurried in and scrambled up the long stairway in order to be in their places — as he liked — before he himself entered. If any of them were still on the stairway when he came in at the outer door like a gust, they gave way and he pushed up past them, and into the good-sized room and down the aisle to the front, threw his hat on the table in the corner, mounted the two steps to the platform, looked about with a commanding eye, and there was sudden silence and unrestrained expectancy.

“Any questions?” he asked — meaning questions about matters considered at the last meeting of the course. After five minutes of these questions he was ready to begin.

The play under consideration was Macbeth —let us say; and he was ready to take up Act III. Always his method was a careful examination of every line, every significant word, with a running commentary on problems of drama and theatre. At the end of the year we were supposed to know five plays — sometimes a sixth—so thoroughly that in the final examination we could spot any line or piece of line that he quoted (usually about sixty), tell what came just before and after, who said the words and to whom, and be able to comment on whatever was significant in the passage. Then there were somewhat more than six hundred lines of memory passages. And there were books of assigned reading. Even the least wise in the course filled margins of their copies of the text, and pages of gummed interleaving paper, with notes against an oncoming evil day.

“Now,” he said, after he had read and commented upon Banquo’s opening speech, and had reminded us once more that Macbeth is a swiftmoving play, “there are three very important questions on this next page. They are neatly imbedded, yet for the purposes of the play, they stand out in red ink. What are they?” — and he glanced up and down the class list — “Mr. Howard.”

Mr. Howard — it might have been Cabot or Flynn or Jones — did not seem to be present.

“ Mr. Howard?” “Kitty” repeated, with the slightest trace of irritation in his voice.

When there was still no response he suddenly exploded. “The college office had two ghost men on my list for two or three weeks before I could get them off! Is this Mr. Howard another?”

There was no response.

“Is there anybody in this room who knows anything about this spook Mr. Howard?”

There was not a murmur, seemingly not even a breath, among the hundred and more students.

He slapped the book down on his desk so sharply that some of the men in the front row jumped. “By heavens, this is not to be endured! I asked a perfectly decent question, and I am going to have an answer if I have to take a poll of the entire class!”

A man back in the middle of the room hesitantly lifted a hand. “I am Mr. Howard.”

“Then why didn’t you answer?”

“I was not prepared.”

“Kitty” flew into so vast a rage that even the top of his head was ruddy. “Well, couldn’t you at least have identified yourself? Stand up, Mr. Howard” — and he made a movement as if to step down off the platform — “so that this class can see who you are. And” — after Mr. Howard had very promptly stood up—“you are to come over to Sever 3 at twelve o’clock and expostulate with me — in the Elizabethan sense.”

He picked up the book and in a twinkling went on, quite as if nothing unusual had happened, to point out that the three questions down the page were the ones that Macbeth asked Banquo: —

“Ride you this afternoon?”

“Is’t far you ride?”

“Goes Fleance with you?”

And then in an engaging smoothness of temper and in flowing brilliance he commented on one passage after another, made compact explanation of linguistic details, reminded us that it was not the words that had become obsolete that made the most trouble for us in understanding Shakespeare, but the words that had not become obsolete, and otherwise rounded out the whole of the scene until we felt as if we must be knowing the play somewhat as the audience knew it when it was originally produced.

He came to a very brief stage direction. “Note that Shakespeare is usually brief. If Mr. George Bernard Shaw had been writing that stage direction, he would have filled a page, at least.”

There was a flutter of mirthfulness. It was the style then to laugh at any mention of this new playwright, as though of course he could not be much.

“Incidentally,” he said, as he paced the platform, “there are other differences between William Shakespeare and Mr. Shaw.”

There was greater mirthfulness still; and time flowed on harmoniously.

Some professor of economics had great charts and maps on rollers all over the front of the room, and there were two or three long gracefully sloping pointers at hand. “Kitty” picked up one of these and used it as a staff-like cane as he paced back and forth and commented. He was magnificent. He was an Anglo-Saxon king speaking to his people.

Once in his march as he socked the royal staff down, it came in two where there was a knot in the wood, and he made a somewhat unkingly lurch A few students snickered very cautiously.

He glowered upon them. “You have a fine sense of humor!” Then without taking his eyes off the humbled faces, he drew his arm back as if he were hurling a javelin, and drove the long remnant of the pointer into the corner of the room. “Now laugh!” he dared them.

It was always a double experience. “Kitty” might suddenly step out of the Elizabethan world and pounce upon some man and scare him until he was unable to define the diaphragm — it once happened—and require him to come to the next meeting “prepared to discuss the diaphragm” as a preliminary to an hour of King Lear. No man might feel altogether sure that he would escape.

Once “ Kitty” read with such a poetic impression of reality that a man who was later to be widely known as a magazine editor sat lost in rapturous enjoyment. Suddenly “Kitty” stopped. “Now what is the commanding word in that passage” — and he picked up the printed class list and let his eye run down over the names— “Mr. . . . Smith?” “Mr. Smith” had been so rapturously lost that he did not even know where the passage was. A neighbor whispered the number of the line to him and he answered correctly, “Why — ‘God.’ ” “Don’t you ‘Why — God’ me!” “Kitty” stormed back at him; and then gave him such a dressing down for using the unnecessary word as he had never known, so that he always had that to carry along with his memory of the perfect reading.

On another occasion “ Kitty” picked up the class list, started on the R’s, became interested in one man’s brilliant answers to his rapid-fire crossexamination, and left the rest of the R’s dangling in suspense throughout the three remaining months of the year.

Men knew that he was a miracle man, and thought it worth accepting all hazards in order to possess some part of his basic richness of life. They completed the year, grumbled a little about the mark he gave them — there were few A’s—and very probably came back the next year to study the alternating group of plays. In that case they had the thorough knowledge of ten or eleven plays, instead of five or six; they knew eleven or twelve hundred lines of good passages by heart ; they had vast information about drama and theatre and sources and language and Elizabethan life; and they had interesting fragments of such a store of miscellaneous knowledge and wisdom as they had not supposed until last year could be the possession of any one human being.

2

THAT was one of the men in the total George Lyman Kittredge. That part of him could not be brushed aside as if it were not an essential part. It was. But it was the more external part. Many of the men in the course in Shakespeare knew this well enough. They saw that it was their irresponsibility, or laziness, or grotesque ignorance, that touched him off into his tantrums. His disgust and amazement and scorn were release for a sensitive mind — usually in need of sleep — whose everyday high level made it impossible for him not to suffer in the presence of unlimited imperfections. And his graduate students who had never taken the course in Shakespeare found it difficult to believe the wild stories about him. For to them he was a courteous gentleman who begged them to smoke some of his good cigars, and know that they were potential scholars about to be admitted to the most honorable company of men on earth.

His courtesy did not prevent him from exercising the dominant mind. When a student explained somewhat fearfully that he had noticed in the dictionary that a certain word was accented on the second syllable, “Kitty" said, as he put the word down on the back of an envelope, “That’s wrong; I’ll see that that is changed.” Through generations of Shakespeare students — and his place on the board of editors of one dictionary — he caused a shift in preference to the pronunciation of “Elizabethan" with an accented long e in the middle. But he could never establish “Shakspere" as a preferred spelling.

Sometimes, too, his overpositiveness came back upon him in ironic ways. He insisted on withholding a degree from a man for insufficient acquaintance with the drama who later became a national figure in playwriting. He once prevented a man from receiving honors in English with whom ten years later he marched down the aisle at a university commencement where both received honorary degrees— the young author and the white-haired professor.

Men who were chiefly concerned with the literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries very justly felt that he placed heavy emphasis on the early centuries. But he insisted that the early centuries were of the utmost importance, and that they were full of interest. The age of Chaucer, he contended, was closer to us than the age of Pope. Always there were students who had looked upon Chaucer as some vague accident back there on the edge of the pure night of the Dark Ages, and for a time they sat skeptical, although they assumed that Chaucer was somebody about whom they should know a little.

But when they listened to Professor Kittredge — or “Mr. Kittredge” — they saw the age of Chaucer coming to such vividness of view that they had to admit that it. outshone the nearer centuries in brightness. He invited them to see that “the spirit of radicalism was abroad in the land. To describe as an era of dumb submissiveness the age of Wyclif, and John Huss, and the Great Schism, of the Jacquerie in France and Tyler and Ball in England, is to read both literature and history with one’s eyes shut. . . . It was a scumbling and unquiet time when nobody was at rest but the dead. In a word, it was a good age to live in, and so Chaucer found it.”

And so they found it — and the heroic world of Beowulf, and the world of English and Scottish popular ballads, and all the other less familiar worlds to which he introduced them. Something of his own vividness had gone into his original exploring, and now something of it went into the revelation of what he had discovered.

But whatever the area in which he for the moment was occupied, he was engaged in perhaps the most difficult — and most desperately needed — of all educational endeavors in the United States; that is, in having pure scholarship recognized as a source of life for all men. Scholarship is the final high honesty. Men worked with Professor Kittredge— always the least bit awesomely — and came to feel how great was the disgrace of a human mind that let itself be content with anything short of the completest disinterested understanding.

From his fortunate position he all the while was sending out great numbers of men to important college and university posts. They were such men as John M. Manly, of the University of Chicago, one of his earliest students; Walter Morris Hart, of the University of California; John Samuel Kenyon, of Hiram College; Karl Young, of Yale; Carleton Brown, chiefly of Bryn Mawr; John A. Lomax, of the field of American ballads and folk songs; John Livingston Lowes, who came back from Washington University to teach in the Yard for the rest of his active life — and write The Road to Xanadu.

At times the objection made its way back to Cambridge that some of his disciples were not important men of this kind, but only “little Kittredges.” And sometimes the reports were true. If men are basically small they are sure to adopt the accessible mannerisms of anyone whose superior qualities are out of reach. But Professor Kittredge’s distinguished former students constituted a great company. In Texas, in Iowa, in Pennsylvania, in California, men accustomed to the axe-togrind sort of thinking, in what they called the practical world, looked upon these honest scholars as an ultimate standard of excellence to be applied in matters of every perplexing sort.

And in Professor Kittredge it was more than honesty; it was high faith in honesty. His former students often traveled a thousand miles — sometimes farther — to have his counsel when they were in doubt. A young professor in a Midwestern college had confided in an older man in one of the chief universities of America about an original project that he had in mind for the next year, and then found that the older man had immediately hurried off a young colleague to work at the idea and be first in the field. Sleepless, the young professor went to consult someone who was wise.

Professor Kittredge sat erect and smoked at a great fragrant cigar and listened in silence until the man was through. Then he said without a moment’s hesitation: “Don’t let the matter trouble you for one minute. And don’t modify your plans — not by as much as a hair. Scurvy business of that kind doesn’t work out — in the end. It is not the other man’s idea; he is working at it because his chief suggested it to him. He will make little of it. The idea is yours, from the inside of you, and consequently you will be aware of all sorts of possibilities in it that the other man, whoever he is, will never see.” And when it turned out precisely so, Professor Kittredge said with a trace of a smile round his eyes and down into his while beard, “We have to count on its being like that.”

3

HE GAVE his complete self to the world of the teacher. He required nothing else. In it he had labor and recreation and profound joy — without end. For forty-eight years (1888-1936) he taught at Harvard. He never took a sabbatical year of leave, nor a half-year. He did not like to have breaks in his work. He did not like to go off to other universities to lecture in term-time. He made a number of trips to Europe, but with one exception he made them in the summer vacation period. England was his great fascination east of the Atlantic. When he was made an honorary fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, he was delighted and proud. When Oxford wished to confer on him an honorary degree he felt highly honored, of course. But the great joy of work was at home.

In this world of the teacher to which he was devoted, he carried on endless research. When he was confronted by the teacher’s much discussed choice between teaching and research, he said, “Thank you, I’ll take both.”

In his own explorations the range that he covered was so wide that some persons actually believed that there were at least two persons named G. L. Kittredge writing at the time. He was interested in such matters as Increase Mather’s views on smallpox, the ballads of Kentucky, the vocabulary of the Australasians, the history of witchcraft, the history of words for popular reading, cowboy songs, the early Teutonic notions of immortality, the toad in folklore, Chaucer on marriage, the history of religion, and scores of subjects thought of as more strictly within the field of language and literature. And his books ranged from Chaucer and His Po-etry to The Old Farmer and His Almanack — and manuals of grammar and composition for high schools.

It was at Barnstable, down on the Cape, that he was able to do much of his own work. For there he had long summer weeks that were little interrupted. If one chanced to be at the house on Hilliard Street in Cambridge just when he was about to go away for the summer, one might well decide that he was leaving for all time, so completely did he seem to be transferring his scholarly effects. Eventually he built a study a little away from the house in Barnstable so that he might work in entire seclusion, with only the cheerful voices of his children and their friends on the tennis court to remind him pleasantly — if he heard them at all —that he was not completely isolated in time and space.

On the Cape, too, he could be elementally refreshed. On the Cape, he was happy to say, he — or his son — had come upon the perfect pessimist, a native who grew chickens. When it was suggested that a few chicks just outside a coop were sturdy youngsters, the native replied, “Yes, but the trouble is, the old hen hatched out six, and by God all of them have died on me but five.”

The Cape was heaven for work; yet back in Cambridge in the autumn he carried his own work right along with his teaching — and thereby constantly gave his teaching enrichment. He moved briskly from his classroom to Gore Hall, and very quickly disappeared. Then one came upon him somewhere deep in the stacks, lost to the immediate world over a puzzling text or fat galleys of proofs. The library was nothing musty and dead for him. It was man recorded. When the great new Widener Memorial Library was spoken of as an elephant among the other buildings in the Yard, he asked, “What, if it is? You could destroy all the other Harvard buildings to the northward, and with Widener left standing, still have a university.”

If days were not long enough, always there were nights. Like Charles Péguy, he considered night as the part of existence that holds everything together, that is sacred to man “wherein he accomplishes his being.” But for Professor Kittredge this was not to be done through sleep; it was to be done through work.

For many years one of his intimate friends walked from Boston to Cambridge on Sunday afternoon, had supper with the Kittredges, and then the two read Greek together till eleven o’clock — as relaxation. But that still left the body of the night ahead. So, too, was it when his “ballad course” met at his house in the evening, and some of the most enthusiastic lingered a little in the big study. It was when his own house had become quiet, and the lights in houses everywhere were beginning to disappear, and the roar of the city had lost its nearness, and the world was otherwise losing the last signs of its daytime confusion, that he knew freedom. In the enveloping quiet he could give himself to work without fear of distraction. If he felt the need of diversion, he could read one more detective story.

When Mrs. Kittredge chanced to know at two or two-thirty or three in the morning that he was still at work, she would slip down and remind him that it was time for him to be getting some sleep. Very obediently he would go off to bed for the rest of the night. In the course of years, Mrs. Kittredge wearied a little of making the trip downstairs and had an electric bell installed with a button by her bed. But he did not like it. In the perfect quiet of night it made him jump. Sometimes nobody reminded him that he ought to be in bed, and he did not think of the matter himself; and when Thomas the chore man slipped into the study at six in the morning to build a new fire, there sat Professor Kittredge peacefully asleep in his comfortable chair before the empty fireplace, with one hand clutching a book on the arm of the chair as firmly as if he were awake. On such a night he did not get to bed at all.

4

WHEN a vivid man does a sufficient number of things that are unfailingly characteristic, legend begins to attach itself to his name. And when he lives on and on through one college generation after another until men who were in his classes almost a half-century before come back to visit their grandsons in the freshman class and find him still teaching with the same old fire, the contributions of legendary instance mount till they const itute a kind of running supplemental biography.

Men argued over the original color of his hair and beard, for he was gray — or white so early that nobody could quite remember him when he was not gray or white. They liked to speak, too, of the fact that “Kitty” never bothered with any degree except an A.B. They laughed over the gushing woman who asked in disappointment why he had never taken a Ph.D., and his supposed reply: “Who would have examined me?” Or they repeated the story of the famous woman college president who wished a Harvard man as an instructor in English, but said she could not consider anyone who lacked a Ph.D., and of Charles Townsend Copeland’s stentorian reply to her: “Thank God, then we’ll not lose Kittredge!”

Legend was helped, too, by the fact that in his highly charged life there was always unpredictable heartening for the less positive, the less courageous. When a frightened young candidate for honors in English had to say in reply to a question, “I’m afraid I can’t answer; I have not read all of Wordsworth,” Professor Kittredge brought him quickly to life and confidence by replying: “Neither have I! I couldn’t be hired to!” When the efficiency experts were rising up everywhere in institutions, and one of them asked Professor Kittredge just how many hours and minutes it took him to prepare one of his “lectures” on Shakespeare, he replied: “I refuse to answer. It’s one of my trade secrets.” Then he relented and said, “Just a lifetime — can’t you see that?” When graduate students in the field of English made their way to Professor K. G. T. Webster’s house at Gerry’s Landing for a relaxing great dinner and then a joyous session on the third floor in a room that some of the guests thought of as an Anglo-Saxon mead-hall, Professor Kittredge was always so full of wit and generosity of spirit that the guests were stirred to believe they could face anything.

So there he was, about to be seventy-five, full of fiery power, and seemingly without a thought that he had already taught ten years past the usual retiring age. He walked energetically through the traffic of Harvard Square and the policeman said bravely but so that Professor Kittredge would be sure not to hear: “Be a little careful there, Santa Claus!” In the Yard the general assumption seemed to be that nobody quite dared to tell him that he must retire.

On his seventy-fifth birthday when he went to his class at Radcliffe, the girls had put seventy-five magnificent crimson roses on his desk.

What was this they had done? Often enough he had scolded them. Sometimes he had walked out on them when they did not come up to his expectations in brilliance. And now they had remembered him in this fashion. They had almost taken an unfair advantage of him—so startling was it all. He told them — and suddenly he was deeply touched — that he found it difficult to express his great appreciation. “If it, would help, I’d declare a holiday. And I do hereby declare a holiday.” Then quite as suddenly he recovered his usual manner, looked up, and said with a self-defiant kind of smile: “Now if only some of you will tell me how to get them home without looking like a bridegroom!”

At home he admitted modestly to his wife that not every man received that many roses from his girl students on his seventy-fifth birthday. In the afternoon when one of his former students and his wife dropped in to offer best wishes, he was in the happiest of moods. He told them how near he had come to being born on the twenty-ninth of February. He admitted in great joviality that undergraduates had at times led him to make “characteristic remarks" and do characteristic things,” and he drew out of the past a few instances himself. Yes, he supposed he would be giving up teaching sooner or later, for he had in mind finishing that annotated edition of such plays of Shakespeare as had interested him most, and that would keep him busy for a number of years ahead.

And so it did.