Arts and Letters

Agnes Repplier, senior member of the Academy of Arts and Letters, died on December 30, 1950, at the advanced age of ninety-six. In 1935 she had received The Gold Medal award for Essays and Belles-lettres. As that award indicates, she had written on a variety of subjects (not always perhaps subjects of her choice). She had published, among several other biographies, lives of Miss Agnes Irwin, once her teacher in Philadelphia, and later the first Dean of Radcliffe College, Père Marquette, Mère Marie of the Ursulines. She had produced a book entitled Philadelphia, the Place and the People. She had made contributions to, or written prefaces and introductions for, works put together by others. But all such information about her tends to distract attention from the one important aspect of her career. Her reputation reposes, and will continue to repose, upon her essays.

She is thus a phenomenon of some distinction; for she is the only woman essayist of repute in the whole range of American literature. If we expand the view to include the modern literature of England, she may properly be compared—and contrasted—with later women like Virginia Woolf, Miss Bowen, and a few others; but in sheer quantity of production she surpassed them all. Her literary activity extended over forty-five consecutive years, with no very perceptible interruptions. Her essays number nearly two hundred; but in spite of their variety of subject and of their occasional inconsistencies, the style marks them as the work of a single hand. It would have been of no use for Miss Repplier to wear a mask of anonymity or to adopt a pseudonym, since no attentive reader could have failed to recognize her corrosive wit. She was ever a partisan, contentious and outspoken, who never courted popularity. Well, are not these the very qualities that frequently distinguish the person who, as we say, was "born to write"—such an author, I would say, as we read with amusement and profit, even when we know that he is wrong? Such is William Hazlitt, who holds our close attention at the very moment when he is most annoying. Such is Gilbert Chesterton. Such the incalculable Shaw. Miss Repplier, too, can be at once apt and sarcastic. It must be conceded that she used (so to say) a good deal of acid on the plate, as when, for example, she described this very Academy as "a dissolving view of elderly gentlemen and empty chairs."* We wince at the mot, but smilingly admit its aptness.

All Miss Repplier's writing is the product of an eager, tireless, and discursive mind. In her reading—and she was perpetually reading—she was always on the watch, ready to spring with feline suddenness upon a rash opinion or treacherous anecdote, which might serve her later in some caustic essay.

I remember to have heard her, in the course of a highly-seasoned lecture, dismiss Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe with a single venomous anecdote which at once and forever soured my esteem for that earnest and successful novelist. The anecdote I have forgotten.

In an essay entitled "The Masterful Puritan,"** she assembled so damaging a series of incidents that the reader is tempted to inquire if there may not perhaps be something to be said on the other side, or possibly he falls to wondering what there could have been in the "masterful" person that caused the civilization which he founded and symbolized to endure and even to flourish. There is in the essay an anecdote of one Dinah, an aged slave-girl, whose Puritan master left directions in his will that if she survived him she should be sold, and the money realized spent for Bibles to be distributed among his descendants. Can it be that Agnes Repplier (of Philadelphia) did not intend that the Pilgrim Fathers should have the best of it?

In order to appreciate the peculiar nature of Agnes Repplier's achievement it is essential to know something of her irregular education and her triumph over it. She was sent first, as a child of eleven, to the Convent School of the Sacred Heart, called Eden Hall; later she attended Miss Irwin's school for girls in Philadelphia. In neither did she complete the requirements. I shall speak of these two matters in reverse order.

Because of her remarkable acumen, her rich and carefully-nurtured memory, and her unwearied industry, one is seldom conscious of her lack of a formal education. Yet she had been excluded from Miss Irwin's school, when only a little over sixteen, and no effort was made to ameliorate this misfortune. It was a severe blow, but her native independence and self-reliance saved her, and in time she was able to prove herself capable of making good what she lacked by hard labor and diligent reading. She learned quickly, and if she felt the necessity, could undergo an amount of sheer drudgery worthy of a candidate for a college degree.

Months of research must have gone into her account of the growth and popularity of tea-drinking in England from the early eighteenth century onwards. Her book on that esteemed beverage is a series of essays which she entitled To Think of Tea. It contains some two hundred pages, though the manuscript, written in her bold and beautiful hand, runs to 519 numbered leaves. She reviews every aspect of her subject with the passion of an addict, and one refrains from calling the book a treatise only because it is so continuously entertaining. In its pages of course one meets Dr. Johnson and Mrs. Thrale, William Cowper and Lady Austen, Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, and many others.

Of the schooling which she had at Eden Hall, we fortunately have her own account in a series of sketches or narrative essays (if one may use the term) called In Our Convent Days, dedicated to her lifelong friend, Mrs. Joseph Pennell, who appears in the book under her Christian name of Elizabeth. Elizabeth is represented as cool, staid, and self-possessed, in contrast to the impulsive Agnes (two years her junior) and the romantic and ill-adjusted girls in the small circle to which they all belonged. Miss Repplier never wrote a more amusing book than this, and the picture of the mind and heart of young girls is a psychological study which it would be difficult to parallel.

Eden Hall was the strictest kind of a conventual school, from which all worldly interests were rigorously excluded, but the girls had their moments of excitement and even of mischief. They were, says the author, "entrenched in the citadel of childhood," but no walls can exclude human nature, and out came all its familiar traits, love and hatred and self-sacrifice, and longing for the unattainable, interest in the opposite sex, and even at times, "a distaste for piety."

It is not inconsistent to dwell on this remote period in the life of our essayist, for in her record of it she betrays her childish but permanently implanted opposition to all control—she was active in every mischievous evasion of the school routine—which led to the termination of this the earliest phase of her education. She did not like to be led by the hand, and in later life was not given to heading "movements." The feminists (as anybody may guess by reading her essay "Woman Enthroned") did not take her into camp. She would choose and tread her own way.

Yet somehow she can speak of the "convent that I loved," and deplore the changes that have come over it. So here is something almost paradoxical, a rebellious independence set over against a confident conservatism. It is characteristic of her in childhood, in maturity, and in age. It was only on rare occasions that she analysed her own state of mind. But in her essay (from Points of Friction, p. 90) entitled "Consolations of the Conservative," she has a contrast between the progressive and the conservative which shows how far to the right, despite her abiding wilfulness, lay her instinctive sympathies. I cannot do better than to quote the contrast:

If he [the conservative] be hostile to the problematic, which is his weakness, he is passionately loyal to the tried and proven, which is his strength. He is as necessary to human sanity as the progressive is necessary to human hope.

These words may not be "congenial to the modern mind," but there is surely something here that it is well to ponder. And so with this her credo we commit her to the future.

*In a letter to Mrs. Vanamee, November 15, 1935.

**In Under Dispute, Boston, 1924.