Arts and Letters

It is but a short time since Dr. Furness was himself called upon to deliver a commemorative address in honor of a fellow-member of our body, Henry Charles Lea. I cannot forbear making a brief quotation from what was then said of one friend by another who was so soon to follow in his footsteps:

"A man's light [as Jeremy Taylor says] burns awhile and then turns blue and faint, and he goes to converse with spirits: then he bonds his taper to another." But where shall we find him who is worthy to accept Lea's taper? Of him who shall venture to hold it, it will crave wary walking to keep its flame as pure and bright as when it illumined the pages beneath Lea's own hand.

And warily must a man walk, as critics have often found to their cost, who will try to estimate Lea's work in its full profundity. If I had to pick out his salient characteristic, I should say that it was honesty; strict, uncompromising devotion to truth. He had two sides to his public life, the practical and the scholarly; yet in each of them the same fundamental characteristics were manifest. As a practical man of affairs he stood for honest government; as a scholar and writer he stood for honest treatment of history.

Those of us who have ever tried to write history, even on a small scale, know how hard this is. It is so easy to generalize on inadequate evidence, and so vastly laborious to hunt down facts which may in the end run counter to our own prepossessions, that most men, especially if they have the gift of literary style, incline toward the smoother path. This temptation must have been particularly subtle in the case of Lea. For he did not approach the History of the Inquisition, or the various other topics of medieval and modern jurisprudence which he treated, in the spirit of a mere chronicler. It was for principles, not for facts, that he cared. The instinct of generalization was strong within him. The ethical element was over before his mind. Yet with all these excuses for preferring what is commonly called the philosophic treatment of his subject, he kept himself to the strictly historic one. Lea showed us how history ought to be written, and he showed us the resolution with which a true man of letters can resist the temptation to write it otherwise.

We can well close this tribute with the words of Mr. James Bryce, himself a shining example of the combination of honest citizenship and honest scholarship: "I may sum up the impression which Mr. Lea's intellectual character and attitude leave upon his readers, and left most of all upon those who knew him personally, by saying that he loved truth with a whole-hearted devotion."