Arts and Letters

Gildersleeve began, as Oliver Wendell Holmes would have us all begin, by choosing his ancestry wisely. He was of good Anglo-American stock, tempered by enough of French blood to leaven the heavy Anglo-Saxon or Germanic paste. Nor, to take the second topic of Greek panegyric and of Taine's philosophy of literature, was the environment unfavorable. To a Matthew Arnold, a small Southern city of the 1830s would seem provincially far, indeed, from the centre. But if the Old South had little systematic and critical scholarship, it had in spots a very genuine personal culture of an old-fashioned type. Of no spot was this more conspicuously true than of Charleston, as those who cannot pursue their researches further may learn in Professor Trent's Life of Simms, where we get a glimpse of the "gentlemen and scholars" with whom young Gildersleeve, just returned from Göttingen with a German degree, foregathered in Russell's bookshop on King's Street.

To have been born in that little Charleston, son of a father who preached the gospel and edited religious newspapers, can be regarded by no sane American critic as a "handicap" in the long race of the distinguished career that was to follow. Provinciality and narrowness, if such they were, could be shed as the life moved on to widening and ever wider circles of experience and influence. But the foundations of character and intelligence remained fixed. Like the spirit of a youth that means to be of note, Gildersleeve began betimes. He was a precocious boy, and legends are told of his translating Anacreon at the age of 14, and of the extent of his undergraduate reading in French and Italian. He was graduated from Princeton at the age of 18, and he received his doctor's degree from Göttingen with a dissertation de Porphyrii studiis Homericis.

This, too, was a favorable conjunction. The examples of Hamilton, Jay, Jefferson, and others of the elder statesmen show that the old-fashioned American college could train men. But to come to it too old, or to linger in it too long would produce the type which the Greeks satirize as "the late learner." Escaping from it at the age of 18, Gildersleeve used it for what it was—a preparatory school—and found his ideals of scholarship under the very different teaching of what his idealizing memory styles "the serene wisdom of Boeckh, the vehement affluence of Karl Friedrich Hermann, the rapt vision of Welcker, the inspired swing of Ritschl."

The young graduates of the old American college—the Lanes, the Childs, the Whitneys, the Gildersleeves, the Goodwins—were naturally much more impressionable by German scholarship than the more sophisticated products of the new American universities who made the German pilgrimage from 1880 to 1914. And the Germany which they knew and fondly remembered all their lives was the good old kindly gemütlich Germany, to which the group of Americans that celebrated the sixtieth anniversary of Gildersleeve's Göttingen degree in 1913 looked back for the last time, perhaps with some illusions, but which we cannot be mistaken in thinking was something different from the schneidig Germany of the Pickelhaube and of industrial and imperialistic expansion.

To Gildersleeve the scholarship and the life of that older Germany were a revelation and an inspiration of which he always treasured the grateful memory and about which he overflowed in anecdote and reminiscence to congenial auditors. The division of the records of the mind brought by the great war was to him, as to many other American scholars, an irreparable tragedy that in his less cheerful moods darkened his later years. He could not agree with his German friends, and he would not vilipend the culture to which he owed so much.

It would be a mistake, however, to suppose that Gildersleeve belonged to that too common type of American students who were overwhelmed and dominated by the erudition of the Germans. His keen intelligence, the range of his reading, and above all his growing superiority in accurate knowledge of the Greek language preserved him from that. Popular American usage calls any scholarship German that is minute, erudite, and highly specialized. In this sense, Gildersleeve, when he pleased, was a scholar of the German type. He continued to read widely in the new German philology, followed it with friendly but penetrating and critical comment in the pages of Brief Mention and satirized its excesses and vagaries with dazzling wit in his second Presidential address before the American Philological Association (Oscillations and Nutations of Philological Studies. Johns Hopkins University Circulars. No. 150, March 1901). But he never succumbed to the weakness of its more recent developments, the pyramiding of hypotheses and the supporting of conjectures by misconstruing Greek. He knew Greek too well for that.

The first three years after Gildersleeve's return to America were spent in study, writing, and tutoring, I learn from the memorial notice published in the American Journal of Philology, January 1924, by his colleague, Professor C. W. E. Miller. They were, Professor Miller tells us, "years of bitter waiting. Gradually despairing of a classical career, the young doctor was launching out into literary life when, in the autumn of 1856, he was elected Professor of Greek in the University of Virginia."

At the University of Virginia he spent twenty years—for many men a lifetime, of teaching, but for him only the preparation for the more conspicuous career which opened when he was called to organize the department of Greek in the newly established Johns Hopkins University in 1876.

In his first Presidential address before the American Philological Association in 1878 he describes himself as one of those "who, for a large segment of their intellectual existence, were cut off not only from contact with those who were pursuing the same line of study and pressing forward toward the same ideals, but cut off from new books, new journals, every sign of life from without, now by the pillar of fire which is called war, now by the pillar of cloud which is called poverty." But the final effect of such temporary limitation depends upon the man. It was by "intensive" reading of the Greek texts in these years, as he himself elsewhere hints, that he acquired the sure feeling for the language that gave him confidence to conduct the first graduate Greek seminar which this country had known, and four years later to found and edit the first American Journal of Philology.

It was in these years, also, during his tenure of the additional Chair of Latin, 1861-1867, that he prepared what remains the most readable and stimulating and perhaps the best of Latin grammars. To this period likewise belong most of the papers republished in Essays and Studies (1890), and originally contributed to the Southern Review. Among these the essays on Lucian, Apollonius of Tyana, and the Emperor Julian are still readable and instructive, though Gildersleeve's mature judgment found defects in them, due to his lack of access to libraries, and would probably have softened the harshness of some of his estimates of pagan criticism of life in Lucian and of pagan virtue in Marcus Aurelius.

The pleas for the classics and the papers on education included in the same volume leave little for later American scholars to say on these topics, though they must continue to make reply to the twentieth century counterparts of one "Jacob Biglow, M.D., Boston, 1867," who assailed the classics with "a vivacious ignorance" which Gildersleeve rebuked more in sorrow than in anger. In re-reading these papers I am even more impressed by the writer's good sense than by the wit and imagination of which his pupils and admirers think first.

If I may supplement the inadequacy of this sketch by generalization about Gildersleeve's life, it seems to sum itself in the statement that he was first a typical Southern gentleman, then a great American—a great American scholar—and lastly, by virtue of diversity of opportunity and the fortunate prolongation of the powers of maturity into extreme old age, an inspiring example of continuous development and growth beyond the years in which we ordinarily look for growth.

He was a typical Southern gentleman. It is pleasant to recall this at a time when so much of the wit, the literary smartness, and the exuberant comminatory vocabulary of the self-appointed guides of the undergraduate intelligentsia, is devoted to the sneering disparagement of all things American, the minimization of American scholarship, the lampooning of the narrow pioneer and provincial American culture, the denunciation of American puritanical morality, and more particularly to vilipending of the South, which by a curious revenge of the whirligig of time has remained or become a chief stronghold of the old-fashioned Americanism that is as a red rag to the bullies of a cosmopolitanized criticism.

But this is no place for the controversy which such fulminations are perhaps intended to provoke, and Gildersleeve himself has set us a better example in the mildness and sweet reasonableness, under far greater stress of temptation, of his own reply to similar taunts. "Southern men," he writes in The Creed of the Old South, "were proud of being gentlemen, although they have been told in every conceivable tone that it was a foolish pride." "But the very pride," he gently replies, "played its part in making us what we were proud of being, and whether descendants of the aforesaid deboshed younger sons of decayed gentry, of simple English yeomen, of plain Scotch Presbyterians, and sturdy stock of Huguenots of various ranks of life, we all held the same standard."

I have neither the knowledge nor the pen to portray the old-fashioned type of Southern gentlemen whom I divined beneath the more sophisticated Gildersleeve of the maturity that I knew. As Mark Twain once said, the native novelist is the only expert authority in such matters. I could only touch on a few suggestive traits—the delicate sensitiveness of honor which felt a stain like a wound; the framework of dignity and courtesy encompassing all the wit and colloquial ease of his conversation; the reticence, which was not secretiveness, about the deeper things; the unfailing and delightful gallantry which no refined woman ever misunderstood or feared. One little endearing touch is perhaps not too trivial for mention. In some of our later conversations I noticed, or fancied that I noticed, what I had never observed before—an occasional recurrence or recrudescence of a recognizable Southern accent. Perhaps it was the call of the motherland as he drew nearer home.

I do not know how far he enlarged the bounds of the perhaps slightly "fundamental" theology and philosophy of life that were his from his father and the environment of his boyhood, and of which one may fancy we discern the surviving traces in the harshness of his early judgment of pagan moralities and pagan ersatz-makeshifts for religion in the articles on Lucian, Marcus Aurelius, and Apollonius of Tyana in Essays and Studies.

But my guess is that his development in this respect was the gradual and painless ripening and growth of a larger tolerance, and if in the process he experienced any of those spiritual crises described by Mr. Gosse's Father and Son and in so many Victorian autobiographies, he consumed his own smoke. In any case he retained a working faith in stabilized ideals and standards of conduct and thought, and he was never allured or besotted by philosophies whose pragmatic result is that one thing is as true as another, that beauty is only the expressiveness of the ugly, and that there exists no practical criterion of choice between what are euphemistically styled the many group moralities of the many kinds and classes of men. But though in all fundamentals what the latest emancipated criticism would stigmatize as a provincial and puritanical American moralist, in the minor aesthetics and conduct of life he was anything but a puritan, as those who have sat at meat with him and enjoyed still more the after feast of reason and flow of soul happily remember.

We distinguished perhaps somewhat fancifully the original type of the Southern gentleman from the mature American in Gildersleeve. All such classificatory divisions put asunder what God and nature have joined together, but this one points, however arbitrarily, to one or two things it is needful to get said. The first is that Gildersleeve felt no incompatibility between loyalty to his most sacred memories and the larger American patriotism which the irresistible course of history and the beautiful necessity to which Emerson chants a characteristic hymn have happily made possible and imperative for us all. There was no room for rancor in his spirit and all his utterances on that unhappy but happily cemented division were informed not only with tact but with a depth and nobility of feeling that touched the hearts as well as commanded the assent of the most impassioned partisans of either part.

And the second point is, that by the maturing experience of the long years, by varied travel and study and intercourse with the scholars of all nations, and it may be by the opportunities of his life work in the earliest of American universities and in the mediating city Baltimore, Gildersleeve developed into what it is pleasant to believe is the ideal type of the cultured and scholarly American. While never compromising his fundamental Americanism, he became in all good and desirable senses of the word more truly a cosmopolitan, more truly a citizen of the entire intellectual world, than often happens with European scholars, or is ever possible for those Americans who forget that the true citizen of the world must be at home in his own country too, and that "that man's the best cosmopolite who loves his native country best." We like to think that in the measure of their lesser capacities this is characteristic of other American scholars who, remaining unspoiled Americans, love the great tradition of English literature and politics, cherish grateful memories of formative study in Germany, and have taught themselves to appreciate and in some slight degree to emulate something of the superior lucidity, delicacy, penetration, and refinement of French intelligence and taste. Whatever the deficiencies of our positive achievements, the best type of American scholar combines these four loves, loyalties, and admirations in a measure possible to no other cosmopolite.

To follow out these thoughts and try to trace in Gildersleeve' s work the currents of the German, French, and English affluents of the broad and deep stream of his culture would be the task of a critical study of his scholarship for which this is not the place. Gildersleeve regarded the technical study of syntax as a means to the end of a finer literary expression. In his hands it became that—for to a sufficiently delicate appreciation there is no absolute demarcation between syntax, idiom, and artistic phrasing, between the vesture or rather the body of the thought and the thought itself. And Gildersleeve combined in rare, perhaps unique, degree the power of penetrating logical analysis with the sentiveness of the born literary critic to shades of meaning and beauty of expression.

Indeed, he sometimes said that his own native bent was to literature rather than to mere scholarship, and he half regretted that he was deflected from the orbit by the weightier or heavier attractions of teaching and investigation. He was not mistaken in this self-estimate. The natural gifts of an endowment for literature were his in rich measure—the prodigious verbal memory that enabled him to amuse himself with tours de force of vocabulary twenty years beyond the age at which Emerson's memory for words failed him, the facility of associations that manifested itself in the unexpected juxtapositions, the picturesque yet pertinent imagery and the unfailing flow of ideas that made notable his conversation, his letters, and the slightest product of his pen. His use of these gifts did more to humanize American classical scholarship than a score of explicit pleas and conventional dissertations on the soulfulness of the Greek genius could have done. For he touched nothing that he did not electrify as well as adorn, and the deadest subject lived by the indescribable relish and tang imparted to it by his wit, his metaphor, his power of incisive, pregnant, antithetic, and memorable statement.

The number of things that his discursive facility of association brought to the surface of his unpremeditated talk was as marvelous as is the wealth of matter in the apparent incoherence of the form in his Atlantic Monthly papers on a Southerner in the Peloponnesian War and My Sixty Days in Greece. We cannot regret that he did not always tame this luxuriance of nature with the pruning hook of Horace and Boileau, though we commend that more prudent course to some of his students and imitators. His nonchalance in this respect exposed him to the snipings of minor critics, and few things piqued him more than the Saturday Reviewer's pronouncement on the ground of a single gypsy phrase in his Pindar, "a symphony in God and blood," that his style was atrocious. Nothing could be more unfair.

But literature, like the law, is a jealous mistress, and Gildersleeve's work in this kind remained a by-product of a life absorbed in teaching, editing, and investigation. It is not for this reason insignificant. The Essays and Studies have been widely read by scholars at least, and are still good reading. The Introduction to the Pindar contains several brilliant and memorable pages. His Presidential Addresses to the American Philological Association blend wit and definitive good sense in a fashion of which he only had the secret. Hellas and Hesperia is a delightful example of the mellow discursiveness of a full and richly stored mind. The Index Scoliodromicus or criss-cross index to the non-syntactical miscellanies dispersed through the Brief Mentions of forty years will guide the literary epicure to many a tit-bit. The Creed of the Old South is an American classic, and has recently been reprinted as such in Mr. Christopher Morley's collection of modern essays.

I shall not attempt by the method of Taine to explain Gildersleeve's literary output as an inevitable product of the man, the environment, and the epoch; nor make those spectroscopic analyses of his style in which with the aid of Dionysius of Halicarnassus his own measurements of the diction of Plato and Pindar and the Attic orators vied with the invisible gratings for which the Johns Hopkins department of Physics was famed.

But there is one fancy of my own which it would be interesting to develop if time allowed. It is that the best guide to our conjectures of the kind of writer that Gildersleeve would have been if he had devoted himself unreservedly to letters would be a Plutarchian parallel between him, our foremost scholar, and our foremost man of letters, Lowell.

I would not push such a parallel to the point of a Fluellen parody; but the common traits of native endowment and acquired culture and style multiply when our attention is directed upon them. There is the irrepressible fertility in what matter-of-fact readers and pedestrian critics might deem imperfectly apposite ideas. There is the wit genuine and spontaneous but also sometimes curiously and eruditely elaborated with a recondite ingenuity that puzzles the reader and disconcerts the critic who does not recognize the sources. There is the inimitable gift for thinking in imagery which I should be prepared to maintain was rarely exercised by either at the expense of either logic or good taste, but which it must be admitted has sometimes misled imitators of Lowell and pupils of Gildersleeve who strive to bend the bow of Ulysses.

There are the many reminiscences in Gildersleeve's writings of the images, the quips, the turns of phrase, in Lowell's earlier essays, which singly trivial would collectively establish an "influence" in a doctoral dissertation.

There is the wealth of allusion to the two classical and the chief modern literatures which the culture of a long life of reading and study made natural to each but which offends as pedantry critics who date literature from the year 1911 (or is it 1908?) and who have ingeniously and ingenuously substituted lists of one another's names for the old-fashioned allusiveness to world literature whose decay Gildersleeve wittily deplored in one of his latest Brief Mentions. There is the occasional violation of academic and professional dignity by the very exuberance of these qualities which shocks finical critics, but which in fact both Lowell and Gildersleeve knew how to repress when their own canons of taste told them that it would be inopportune. There is little or nothing of it in Lowell's Commemoration Address or in the great speech on Democracy, very little in the papers which Gildersleeve contributed to the Atlantic, nothing at all in the noble and dignified Creed of the Old South.

I hope no surviving Southern Fire Eater will resent this comparison. Gildersleeve himself did not. For once when I suggested it and told him I was prepared to maintain it in true thesis fashion, he smiled and half assented.

He read the first Biglow Papers at Berlin in 1850. There was a time when they were of course estranged. But Lowell's magnificent Palinode to Virginia bridged the aloofness if some of the scars remained. And the fascinating story in the Creed of the Old South of their intercourse when Lowell lectured in Baltimore fills me with retrospective yearnings to have been an overhearer of the conversation of the two Americans to whom I owe most and whom in the domain of literature and scholarship I most admire.

To return to the life. During the fifty years of American classical scholarship for the history of which I may be permitted to refer to my sketch in the Transactions of the American Philological Association for 1919, the figure of Gildersleeve dominated throughout. At first he seemed to tower almost alone. His was the Greek "seminary," the one centre of research and critical study in the Greek language and literature. His students were in demand to fill the Greek chairs of every self-respecting college. His journal was the one publication to which ambitious young scholars looked. His Pindar was the best American edition of any Greek poet, his Persius and Justin Martyr were models of editing, their notes crammed with nuggets of erudition which he cached there. His applause was most prized, his censure most feared.

Honors came thick and fast, corresponding membership in foreign academies, honorary degrees from Oxford and Cambridge, and half a dozen of the leading American universities, including the University of Chicago, where he upset academic dignity by holding the audience that filled the tent of those days convulsed with laughter for an hour, election to the American Academy, recognition by European scholars, tributes of love and admiration from the growing body of his own students throughout the country, the rare compliment of a second election to the Presidency of the American Philological Association.

It was a long life, and happy "as for a man," in the qualification of Aristotle's Ethics. If the last years were not wholly free from suffering, Carlyle has warned us that the exit of every mortal is in a fiery chariot of pain. The years, of which the sensualist says, "I have no pleasure in them," were for Gildersleeve solaced by the loving tendance of a devoted family, and cheered at each recurring anniversary with testimonies of honor and affection from his university, his city, his colleagues and pupils throughout America, his friends and admirers throughout the world such as have fallen to the lot of no other scholar of our time. The infirmities of extreme age, the defect of hearing which forced him at last to give up teaching, the failing eyesight which deprived him of a scholar's chief consolations in retirement, he bore not only bravely and without complaint but cheerfully.

They did not affect the vigor and clearness of his intelligence, which he preserved by a mental gymnastic through the watches of sleepless nights that would have exhausted ordinary men in their prime, but did not weary that tireless mind. The friends who came to entertain his enforced idleness found him still the best of company, and were themselves entertained by his unfailing flow of wit, anecdote, and reminiscence. And so he revealed aspects of character which those who had thought mainly of the brilliancy of his intellect might otherwise not have known, and crowned his life with the only guerdon of praise that remained for him to win. He showed us how the truly brave and great-souled man endures what must be and awaits the inevitable end.

And at the service held in his honor at Baltimore by the university of which he had so long been the pride, it was universally remarked that the speakers with unconcerted unanimity dwelt not so much on the wit, the brilliancy, the scholarship, which they took for granted, as on the moral qualities of the man, the teacher, the companion, the helper, the friend.