Arts and Letters

*With certain variations of form and content this tribute is presented both at the American Academy of Arts and Letters and at the Massachusetts Historical Society.

The following lines of rhythmic prose—for they are nothing more than that—are taken from a small book, Personae Gratae, printed late in 1953 to be read especially by my lenient friends. I venture to present them as an introduction in general terms to what I should like to say more specifically in prose that does not bear even the outward semblance of verse.

Whether in his book or in himself
Are we to find the veritable man?
Not often does he show the same in both.
Now one there is, one who could Gladly Teach,
Who taught us all, both through his written word
And through the life he led,
What this our soil may still produce:
The strength and beauty of his native hills,
The essence of sound learning—
Father and college equal tutors here—
Sports in a simpler time,
Humors of countryside and village,
The sympathies of faithful friendship,
The spirit of a liberal, innocent
Of all desire to tear the existing order
Up by the roots—

Thus furnished forth he took his way
Through ancient halls of learning
In both worlds, New and Old,
With bypaths into other fields of thought,
Drawing upon his wells of knowledge,
And spicing all that he imparted
With the authentic flavor of himself.

Just as the air of westward mountainsides
Gives its particular tang
To fruitage grown thereon,
His own New England uplands
Gave to his thinking and his speech
A man-to-man conveyance
Few could resist.

So ran the tale, not for the Psalmist's three
But four score years and more than ten—
While youth in him was wise beyond its years,
And then when age was held at bay
By something of the glow and warmth of youth.

After Bliss Perry's death his brother Lewis wrote to me: "I think Bliss was the most modest man I have ever known. He accomplished a lot, and always seemed to be finishing things. He had them finished before he began to talk about them." His autobiography, And Gladly Teach, without any flourish of trumpets, does present an extraordinary array of experiences and accomplishments begun and finished. Scholar, teacher, editor, lecturer, he stepped easily from one function to another. To show for much of his work in these capacities, there is a considerable shelf of books bearing his name on their title-pages either as editor—over and above his ten years of editorship of the Atlantic Monthly—or as author. Besides the many volumes edited for school, college, and general use, there were some twenty of his own authorship—fiction, essays, biography, and autobiography. One misses only the title of a single book of poetry.

In this brief tribute it would be superfluous to recite many of the biographical details embedded in And Gladly Teach. Yet a few dates and a statement of his relations with the American Academy of Arts and Letters should be given.

He was born at Williamstown, Massachusetts, November 25, 1860, eldest son of Arthur Latham Perry, economist and longtime professor at Williams College. The title of this father's biography by his son Carroll, A Professor of Life, might have been applied also to Bliss Perry, himself the son, brother, father, uncle, and grandfather of teachers, surely a teaching family if there ever was one. He was graduated at Williams in 1881, became a professor of English there, at Princeton, and at Harvard. Honorary doctorates were bestowed upon him by seven American universities.

Midway through his decade of service as editor of the Atlantic Monthly he was elected, in 1905, a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and in 1910, when this editorship came to an end, he was elected to the Academy. Clear witness to the seriousness with which he took his obligations to this body appears in the fact that he contributed to its transactions memoirs of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, John Burroughs, Woodrow Wilson, W. C. Brownell, Henry James, Marion Crawford, William Vaughn Moody, and Julia Ward Howe. In 1919 he delivered the Blashfield Address on "The Academy and the Language," and in 1924 an Academy lecture on "Kinship and Detachment from Europe in American Literature." He served, moreover, on the Education and Radio Committees. Membership in the Academy has seldom been marked by so much authorship on its behalf.

Such a record is hardly more than suggested in the pages of And Gladly Teach. What is more manifestly to be found in that delightful book is the self-portrayal of a remarkable character, admirable for the effective uses to which native powers were put, and lovable for the spirit in which both duties and pleasures were shared with others.

In the life and character of Bliss Perry there was a unity which, granting the uniting of good qualities, produces the best of human results. His beginnings were fortunate—with parents commanding both affection and respect, in a household and small country town and college community where interests of the mind and spirit were paramount. All outdoors beckoned him. He collected butterflies. He learned early, and continued through life, the joys of a fisherman. A notable baseball player in college, he turned in the course of nature to golf, and enjoyed it till he could no longer stride the links. One detects the budding sportsman in a story of his boyhood—that the possession of his first shotgun so delighted him that he took the weapon to bed with him. Such tenderness could be offset by righteous indignation, as when he saw a bully on a ball-field tormenting one of his younger brothers, and felled him on the spot with a furious blow on his temple.

The lithe, athletic body, more than six feet in height, which he carried well poised through life, gave an impression of capacity to hit hard blows. Yet there was something in the handsome, serious face, the twinkling eyes, the sympathetic voice and friendly smile which gave assurance that his real strength lay in the ways of peace rather than violence. He did not hesitate to call himself "a life-long pacifist," and even before giving his whole allegiance to the League of Nations he identified himself actively with earlier agencies for the promotion of world peace. The physical aspects on which I have touched seemed indeed the outward expression of his spiritual qualities.

Even as Sarah Orne Jewett liked—one could not be sure just how consciously—to suggest by word, accent, or inflection, a Down-East origin, so Perry, in circles however academic and sophisticated, seemed to enjoy representing himself as a product of a simple old New England. That he did by reminiscence and anecdote of village, school, and college mates—all of an authentic flavor which persisted throughout his life.

In one particular the unity I have noted seemed broken. That was in the relation between his early graduate studies and the full practice of his profession as a teacher. In accordance with the fashion of the time he felt—when he was promoted from an instructorship to a professorship at Williams and given two years' leave of absence for special training—that these studies, though their subject was English, should be pursued at German universities. The result was a complete concentration, at Berlin and Strasbourg, upon philology rather than literature. The mastery of Anglo-Saxon, Gothic, Old and Middle High German, doubtless trained him in the plodding work of higher scholarship. It did not divert him, when the time for teaching came, from his natural bent away from scholastic texts to living letters. There was no Ph.D. to testify to his qualifications for any college teaching. This was true also of Wendell, of Kittredge, and of Copeland, the second of whom could have decked himself out with this apparatus much more easily than the third. Yet here, with Perry, were four notable teachers, contemporaries at Harvard, who managed to dispense with what had become in their day a sine qua non for starters in the academic race.

His choice of Germany as the scene of his studies was by no means unaffected by the fact that Miss Annie L. Bliss, of the New Haven family whose name the elder Perrys had bestowed upon their eldest son, was going at about the same time to Berlin to study music. They were engaged to be married when she preceded him to Germany, and promptly upon their return, in the summer of 1888, their happiest of long married lives, blessed with two daughters and a son, began.

Looking closely into And Gladly Teach one encounters many details of Bliss Perry's career. The wide range of his employments has already been suggested, and in this place no more is needed than to offer some general reflections which they provoke. It may be observed, for example, that while he was a professor at Princeton he enjoyed close contacts with both Grover Cleveland and Woodrow Wilson, and that he sympathized with the political views of both. His one foray into practical politics had to do with Wilson at the time of his ill-fated request for the election of a Democratic Congress in the autumn of 1918. As one who joined him in this foray, I feel the more bound to mention it. Wilson had enunciated his Fourteen Points, but had not yet begun in Paris his fight for the League of Nations. He wanted and greatly needed the support of his own party in Congress. There were those, not natural adherents of David I. Walsh, then running for the Senate, who found themselves responsive to Wilson's plea. Accordingly they signed their thirteen names—more impeccably Bostonian in general than Perry's and mine—to a political advertisement in the local press on November 4, 1918, under the conspicuous heading, "President Eliot and Other Independents Ask the Voters to Support President Wilson by Voting for David I. Walsh for United States Senator." Beneath these words appeared in three paragraphs a specific "Appeal to the Citizens of Massachusetts" to join the Independents. I do not remember that we claimed the distinction of having elected Walsh. But there he was, securely seated for what proved to be a long time. The scorn and horror with which many of our more respectable friends regarded us at first must have been mitigated a little later when Walsh abandoned the very stand the Independents had expected of him, and joined Senator Lodge as an antagonist of the League. The Boston Evening Transcript, hitherto as intense a foe of Walsh as it was a friend of Lodge, closed an editorial when both the Massachusetts Senators arrayed themselves definitely against the League, with a triumphant declaration that there they stood, shoulder to shoulder, two noble sons of Massachusetts! A happy day for the Transcript, but with sobering implications for the Independents who may, all innocently, have contributed something to the creation of a new Castor and Pollux. Perry and most of the rest of us were cured of meddling in political affairs.

The area of controversy, whether in or out of politics, was alien territory for Bliss Perry. There was little or nothing of it in his books. His brother Lewis has been heard to say that on the roads of life green lights have always been more apparent to him than red. Perhaps this expressed a family characteristic. In Bliss Perry's books perhaps the nearest approach to controversy may have come in his life of Walt Whitman (1906), in which the true Whitmanites and the uncommitted were disturbed equally by under- and over-praise. I remember Perry's amusement in repeating, soon after the book appeared, a dictum of his employer, Henry O. Houghton, returning to his office after lunching, as usual, nearby. "Mr. Perry," he said, "your book about Walt Whitman is much deplored at the Union Club." There could have been no such reservation about his other biographies. Chief among them was the life of a beloved friend, Henry Lee Higginson (1921). There was, besides, for a more limited audience, the biography (1933) of his Cambridge neighbor, Richard Henry Dana, and there were many shorter memoirs produced for the two Saturday Club volumes, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and other media of publication. Indeed a substantial book could be made of his shorter biographical writings.

Nor were these that I have named by any means all. In the Index of And Gladly Teach, under the several headings of "Books," "Essays," "Biographical Sketches and Addresses," "Prefaces," and "Books Edited," fifty titles are listed. Like Cotton Mather, he might have defined himself as Fructuosus.

Books, persons, and pastimes—especially that of fishing in Pools and Ripples (1927)—were his themes. It was only in And Gladly Teach that he admitted the reader to a certain sense of personal nearness to a pipe-smoking, golfing, angling, God-fearing, church-going friend! Those who knew his voice can hardly help feeling that those who knew it not must hear it in the pages of this book. In them he speaks, as he rarely did in person, of his travels and such experiences as his Exchange Lectureship (1909-10) at the Sorbonne and the French provincial universities. Both in and out of the book he appears a friend surrounded by friends. As President of two Boston clubs, the smaller, graver Saturday Club, and the larger, gayer Tavern, he demonstrated the charm of his quiet, humorous speech, fraught with sincerity, and a modest avoidance of allusion to the "personages" whom he could not exclude from his autobiography. His talk and the best of his writing bore a strong resemblance to each other. What he said and his way of saying it—simply, directly—were also closely related. It was thus, rather than through profundities and subtleties, that he held his large audiences of the general public and in his crowded college classes.

The gift of teaching may well have been his greatest gift to his generation. As one who never heard him address a class of college students let me turn to an appreciative pupil for a long-sustained remembrance. It is taken from a letter in The New York Times by Mr. J. Donald Adams, who was graduated from Harvard forty years ago last June. Thus he wrote, immediately upon Perry's death:

We who sat under him admired Bliss Perry for the force and clarity of his mind, for his keen perceptions and for his generous human understanding. And we felt instinctively, I suppose, that he was no dry-as-dust scholar, no pedant and no bloodless dissector of literature (of which we have too many today), but a well-rounded human being, a man whose warm and humorous personality gave life and interest to whatever he touched. We shall always remember the quizzical smile as well as the logical sequence and the sharp illumination of his lectures….

He was not, to us, "just a teacher," but it was just as that that he would want to be remembered. It would be a sorry day for American education if it should ever cease to produce men of his mold.

Multiply by thousands the retention of such memories as these. They constitute an invisible monument calling for no description in words.