Arts and Letters

In the records of this Academy and of the Institute from which its members are drawn there are few instances of election to both bodies in the same year. One such instance is that of Abbott Lawrence Lowell, whose membership in each began in 1910. His distinguished predecessor at the head of Harvard University, Charles W. Eliot, had declined membership in both. "The uses to which these new organizations can be put," he wrote to Richard Watson Gilder in 1908, "are not at all clear in my mind. Nevertheless, I dare say the young men, like yourself, are quite right in organizing these two bodies devoted to letters and the arts, and in endeavoring to find real functions for them." If President Eliot's allegiance to the Academy of Arts and Sciences founded in 1780 deterred him from association with this much younger Academy, President Lowell suffered no such inhibition.

His election, however, took place in the very year after he became President of Harvard, and the duties of his office left him little time to explore the real functions of any academy but his own. In 1931, two years before his retirement, he wrote the Commemorative Tribute to Edward Channing—the warm-hearted expression of a discerning friend. This is included in our 1942 volume of Tributes. In 1940 he joined eagerly with the opponents of a change in the relation between the Institute and the Academy. There are no records of further participation in their affairs.

Though Lowell was a man of the most definite local—in his case Bostonian—qualities, his contribution to the life of his time far transcended any local boundaries. He was born (December 13, 1856) and died (January 6, 1943) in Boston, and passed all of his eighty-six years there. Under his predecessor the institution of which he was president for twenty-four years had started well on its way of transition from the New England college to the national university into which, under his successor, it has still more obviously grown. In this process President Lowell's administration of Harvard played a vital intermediate part. The books he wrote, especially The Government of England, in which an American studied the British system somewhat as Lord Bryce studied ours, gave further evidence of the extended horizons of his mind. Of this there was another token in his untiring efforts, in collaboration with President Taft, during the first World War, to prepare the way for a League of Nations. With such interests as these, it was impossible to remain provincial, though it must be admitted that some Bostonians achieve that distinction in spite of everything.

President Lowell's biographer will have a varied story to tell, with Harvard at the hub of it, spokes of some diversity, and a firm surrounding rim of personality. In the brief compass of this memoir, it would be futile to attempt more than a suggestion of the variety to which I have alluded. Let me dwell especially, then, on certain aspects of President Lowell's personality as I was fortunate enough to see it expressed in word and deed over a considerable period of time. To this end I am permitting myself to draw upon an article I wrote for the Boston Globe within a few days of his death, and a shorter contribution to the Harvard Alumni Bulletin a little later. Thus a few passages of personal remembrance may speak for essential elements of character.

First of all, I remember walking with President Lowell on Naushon Island some ten or twelve years ago, and asking him to tell me how it was that he could come so quickly to important decisions, for his decisions were of an extraordinary quickness, and incidentally of a high percentage in rightness. "That is perfectly simple," he answered. "Everyone has his own pattern of thinking, and can see immediately when a given question comes up what relation it bears to that pattern. Either it fits or it doesn't. The decision can then come at once."

This seemed at the time a casual offhand answer, and it remained in my mind as such until I found in a book of President Lowell’s, What a University President Has Learned, published several years after our conversation, a passage dealing with this very matter and his reply to my inquiry. "The benefit of a pattern in our sense," he wrote, "is great." This pattern is not rigid; its details are fluid and must be kept so. But, he went on, "with a pattern of this kind it is comparatively easy to decide quickly the value of any proposal made."

This instance of relatively recent years leads me back to my first meeting with Mr. Lowell, then a young lawyer in his State Street office, more than half a century ago. Barrett Wendell—if I may repeat what I have said before in print—had advised me to apply to him for an article needed for the Harvard Monthly. He wrote it, and, under the title of "The Choice of Electives" it appeared at the forefront of the October, 1887, issue of that since defunct periodical. It may now be found as the first paper in his book: At War with Academic Traditions in America.

The point of recalling it now is that it illustrates the early formation of one of his most cherished patterns. It outlined with perfect clearness the first major change in educational method which he put into effect when he became President of Harvard more than twenty years later. It foretold the departure from the Eliot system of almost unlimited election of studies, and the ideal of learning "something about everything and everything about something." A new pattern for Harvard, a Lowell pattern, was already in the making.

The book which begins with this pioneering paper ends with a "Declaration of Principles to be read each year to the Selected Candidates received into the Society of Fellows," a foundation of his own conception and most liberal endowment. In this Hippocratic oath of scholarship, he admonished his neophytes: "You will seek not a near but a distant objective, and you will not be satisfied with what you may have done. All that you may achieve or discover, you will regard as a fragment of a larger pattern of the truth which from his separate approach every true scholar is striving to discover."

Again the pattern! And throughout the book, in articles, addresses, passages from annual reports, pattern after pattern unfolds itself. Thus the book is at once educational history and autobiography. The principles on which the changes wrought by Lowell at Harvard are based were almost invariably discussed as principles before the support of opinions and funds to put them into effect was found.

Freshman halls, tutors, general examinations—one can but begin to enumerate them. The miraculous appearance of a Yale benefactor, Edward Harkness, and the building of the houses of residence for undergraduates near the end of Lowell's presidency, seem parts of a college fairy tale. Yet in the very book to which I have referred, you will find a passage from an address delivered by Professor, not yet President, Lowell, at Yale in 1907, outlining with an almost uncanny accuracy of detail the very project in which the generosity of a Yale graduate and the planning of a Harvard president have now been joined to most fruitful purpose.

Only a few years ago Lowell told me a story of himself and Harkness. While the houses were building they walked together one day looking at the progress of the work. (And if Lowell did not lead Harkness over some ticklish plank walks in mid-air the occasion was unique.) In the course of their walk, Harkness took Lowell's arm and said he had one request to make—that one of the new buildings should be called "Lowell House." "Certainly," said Lowell, "if you will agree to naming another 'Harkness House'." At this, Lowell remembered, Harkness jumped away as if he had been stung by a viper. "No, absolutely no," he declared.

There is now, of course, as there certainly should be, a "Lowell House," and it has always seemed to me that, in view of Harkness' s first unheralded call at Lowell's office, there was a singular fitness in placing the Lowell family motto, "Occasionem Cognosce," over the main entrance to this patronymic house. Might not an undergraduate of the present day be forgiven for translating it, "Fall on the ball"?

The book containing the "Declaration of Principles" for young scholars contains also many declarations of Lowell's own principles in the field of education. High among these stood the thesis that scholarship itself is an object deserving the best efforts of the young—a counsel of perfection, if you will, but one to which the undergraduates of his day did pay some attention.

Of all his declarations his positive stand for "academic freedom" took an immediate place as a classic of educational principle. The teacher, he maintained, is entitled to every freedom of expression in his classroom for the teaching of his own subject. Outside the classroom his liberty must be that of every other intelligent citizen.

His firmness on these points had a clear illustration at the time when certain members of the Harvard Board of Overseers took alarm at the teachings of Professor Harold J. Laski. It was then, I well remember, that President Lowell said to me, again while we were walking together, "If the Overseers ask for Laski's resignation, they will get mine." There cannot be the slightest doubt that he meant it.

Outside the province of education, Lowell played the full part of a public-spirited citizen, with a strong sense of responsibility, ready to incur all manner of exertions, apparently indifferent alike to the praise or blame called forth by his efforts. There is a well-authenticated story of a Harvard professor, intimate with Lowell, who asked him if he was ever troubled by sleepless nights. Lowell could recall only two such nights. The first, he said, followed the decision of the Massachusetts Supreme Court against the merger of Harvard with the neighboring Institute of Technology—an object peculiarly dear to his heart. "What caused the second sleepless night?" his friend asked. "The second?" said Lowell; "why, really, I can't remember."

Lowell used to say that college students under his presidency of Harvard could not be counted upon, as students of an earlier generation could, to respond to appeals for more creditable effort on the score that something was expected of them as the sons and grandsons of men whose standards were high. He himself lived fully up to a notable inheritance of devotion to public service. He was, besides, in the tradition of nineteenth century Harvard presidents—Quincy, Everett, Eliot, the last of whom he resembled most closely in that his greatest service of all was rendered to Harvard.

In other fields, there were, for example, his labors on behalf of the League to Enforce Peace, which led President Taft to define him as "the most effective man" in their common cause. He was not given to regrets or explanations, but out of the thirty-one "Eminent Republicans" who urged the election of Harding as a step towards bringing the United States into a League of Nations he was one of only two, I believe, who made any public acknowledgment of the disillusionment they had suffered. In his relations with the world-shaking Sacco-Vanzetti case there was never a sign of inward questioning with regard to his own course. At the complete sacrifice of personal plans, he undertook the alien and uncongenial task of chairman of a commission to pass on the widely doubted fairness of the trials of two Italians accused of murder. In the face of the strong feeling bound to exist on both sides of such an issue, Lowell was entirely willing to abide, without a word of self-justification, by the results of his own thinking. No flaw in an integral honesty of purpose came into question even with those to whom his conclusions were least acceptable. If he felt the irony of the fact that in large sections of the public this case made his name better known than all his scholarship and all his work for education, he kept the feeling to himself.

To return to the idea of a pattern, it must be said that the pattern of Lowell's personality and work was of a singular unity and consistency. An utter integrity of thought and word, a quality of tenderness, even of humility, which those who saw nothing but his exterior could never have suspected, entered essentially into the pattern. His compass needed few corrections for variation.

Ideas interested him, in general, more than persons. His mind was stored, far beyond any common capacity, with historical, scientific, and miscellaneous knowledge. His use of anecdote and illustration, applicable to almost any situation, was almost as extensive, if not so racy, as Lincoln's. He had his pet formulae, like that of his title for an imaginary Ph.D. thesis—on the Antennae of the Paleozoic Cockroach.

As he talked before his own fireplace his manner and method differed hardly at all from those of his public appearances. There was the same dignity, and not too much of it, with friends and general audiences.

One summer at Cotuit, on Cape Cod, a hotel near his house took fire, and a strong wind from the north was carrying burning brands in the direction of the Lowell cottage. To this I repaired, hoping faintly to be of some help there.

I asked for Mr. Lowell and was directed to the roof, on which brands were indeed falling. An employee of the place stood near a chimney, with a rope around his waist. One or two others, protected in like manner, were wetting down the shingles.

On the very edge of the roof I discovered Mr. Lowell eagerly at work. "I wish I could get him to use a rope like the rest of us," exclaimed the employee. In this wish I shared heartily, for it would not have surprised me at all to see the President of Harvard University, nimble-footed as he was, slip off into the night and be no more seen.

Quite without fear of danger or consequences, Lowell was doing with all his might the thing that came to hand. I like to remember the scene as typical of the man, and of the pattern of his whole life.