Arts and Letters

There are men who do important and interesting work in the world, whose personalities loom larger through the years than do any of their performances. Brander Matthews was one of these. No matter what he wrote or how excellent it may have been, no matter what he taught or how abundant an inspiration it was, the personality of the man puts it all into the shade. His manner, his merriment, and his charm were all his own, and were never failing. By good fortune he wrote for us an autobiographical sketch which he called These Many Years. He gave to it, as subtitle, the words "Recollections of a New Yorker." And a New Yorker he certainly was, in some respects the last of his kind.

Those mingled Scottish and English strains which gave to America its possibilities as well as its ideals and so much of its competence, united to produce this charming man and to guide his feet toward the metropolitan city which he truly loved and mightily adorned. One does not easily think of Brander Matthews as finding the home of his father's origin on Cape Cod, but there it was. From a parentage in which New England and Virginia were mingled, our dear friend and associate of so many years was born in New Orleans when the Nineteenth Century had just passed its middle point. But neither Cape Cod nor Virginia nor New Orleans was the suitable setting for this amazing personality. He was a cosmopolitan by his very nature and through his every taste, and it was only one of the world's capitals which could lure and hold him.

He probably was the first youth, and doubtless one of the very few youths, to be consciously educated and trained for the highly exclusive profession of millionaire. His father, who was a man of immense wealth as fortunes were counted in those days, and who would be deemed a very rich man even now, told his son repeatedly that he need never work for a living, but must fit himself to care for the great properties which his father possessed. All through his undergraduate days in Columbia College, and during his subsequent study of the law, Brander Matthews was fitting himself to pass through life as an educated gentleman possessed of a vast fortune which he should be competent to manage. Hardly had he entered upon this attractive task, however, when the fates decided that his life was to be something wholly different. They swept away his father's fortune, reduced the family possessions to practically nothing, and invited the young man to turn his attention to making a living by his own efforts. Most men confronted by such a situation would almost certainly lapse into a state of despair and helplessness, or become bitter cynics with no interested concern for life or for their fellow men. Not so Brander Matthews. He paid little more attention to this astonishing happening than if he had merely stumbled and fallen while walking through his father's garden. He picked himself up, metaphorically tightened his belt, took pen in hand, and started to make a living by the practice of the art of letters. His early travels in England and in France, the delightful acquaintance with men of letters and of the arts which he had been enabled to make, all now stood him in good stead. His dominant interest was the literature of the drama, whether creative or critical. With the French drama, both classical and contemporary, he became quickly familiar. With the playwrights of the day, whether to be found in Paris, in London, or in New York, he was speedily intimate companion and friend. His name as author became known, his reputation grew, and the livelihood of which he had gone in search came into his happy possession.

No one ever heard Brander Matthews refer to the dashing of the cup of gold from his lips, save with philosophical detachment or in amused contemplation. Even had the Golden Calf been in his possession, he was not the sort of man ever to fall down and worship it.

Forty years ago, when Columbia University was in the building, it was my fortune to propose to the governing authorities that provision should be made to have English literature taught and interpreted not simply by academically trained scholars, but also by men who were themselves of established and growing reputation in the world of letters, whether critical or creative. Once this proposal was accepted, it was yet my official duty to seek for the individuals who might best satisfy the requirement which had been set. The two who were selected, George Edward Woodberry and Brander Matthews, both became members of the Academy, both became distinguished in high degree, and both wrote their names high on the roll of honor of the University which was so fortunate as to secure their glad and notable service.

Brander Matthews hugely enjoyed his academic life and associations. He formed every sort and kind of intellectual contact. He attracted to his lectures and intimate discussions the most ambitious and eager students from all parts of this country and from many other countries as well. He never permitted himself to be cast in the traditional academic mold. He did not know how to be solemn or aloof or distant or coldly disinterested. That rich and delightful personality of his poured itself over everything which he said and did. At one moment those who were following his words were convulsed with laughter; at another their eyes were fixed upon him with rapt attention.

Brander Matthews knew and had known every man of letters of importance in this country, in Great Britain, and in France, for full forty years. He could relate personal anecdotes concerning them, each and all. He described incidents of their lives and work which made them live again, really live, in the hearts and minds of the younger generation which crowded about him. His friends were legion, and on their roll are many names celebrated in more lands than one. This delightful man moved through the years on intimate terms with Mark Twain and Howells, with Lowell and Henry Cabot Lodge, with George William Curtis and John Hay, with Richard Watson Gilder and Thomas Bailey Aldrich, with Edward L. Godkin and Edmund Clarence Stedman, with Edwin Booth, Coquelin, and Henry Irving, with Henry James and Austin Dobson, with Andrew Lang, Thomas Hardy and Laurence Hutton, with Sir Martin Conway and Edmund Gosse, with H. C. Bunner and George Du Maurier, with Florence and Sothern and Crane and Gilbert, with Theodore Roosevelt and Rudyard Kipling. What other life than his was set in such a firmament of brightly shining stars? He instructed, inspired, and stimulated, not tens or hundreds, but actually thousands, of the ambitious youth of this land who had a wish to gain some true insight into the significance of letters, and to be led up to the high places from which they could look out upon the undying achievements of the spoken and the written word.

Brander Matthews took the keenest interest in his fellow workers in letters. He was an unfailing ornament of the old and famous Saturday night gatherings at the Century, and never missed a stated dinner of the Round Table. He was a familiar figure at the Saville Club in London and later at the Athenaeum. Literally he rocked the cradle of the Authors' Club, of the Players, and of this Academy. His place was never vacant when the members of the Academy assembled, and no mind among all its membership was more alert than his, to seek out ways and means of new and broader and higher usefulness.

Brander Matthews was truly a New Yorker. He loved the metropolitan city, its good cheer, its joyousness, its liberality, its openmindedness, its varied companionships, and its enjoyments. Isolation had no charms for him. The country was merely a delightful place from which to come back to town. He wished to be where men were, where power was generated, and where great deeds were planned and done.

There are men of letters, fortunately, of every sort and of every kind. It would not be easy to trace relationship between an Emerson and a Whitman, or between a Browning and a Kipling. Yet they are each and all men of letters of the highest order of excellence, and each and all have carved their names on the undying roll of literature's immortals. Brander Matthews eludes classification or comparison. He was unique—unique in the circumstances of his education and early training, unique in what the world thought was the calamity which overtook him, unique in the fashion in which he turned himself with persistent cheerfulness to his new and unexpected task, unique in the quality and character of his academic service, unique in his odd and inviting intermingling of creative and critical writing with many-sided and keenest human interest, unique in his good humored faith in mankind, unique in the strong affections which his friends had for him and he for them, unique in the place which he holds in the hearts of all of us and on the rolls of this Academy.