Arts and Letters

Henry Osborn Taylor belongs to the scant but distinguished line of American private scholars in the succession of Prescott and Parkman—investigators, who being able to pay their own way, never offered their necks to the academic yoke.

He was born on December 5, 1856, in New York, on 10th Street when that was still well uptown. His people were in easy circumstances and of the best social position. A boyhood in city preparatory schools offers few features, but the summer exodus to the family farm at Cobalt, Connecticut, meant the adventure of the little steamer that plied from Peck Slip to Hartford, and put a small boy ashore at a deliciously small hour of the morning. From the fine stone farm house, which later became the modest mansion, Knowles House, the fields sloped down gently between groves to reach the Connecticut, where its tides sweep through a forest gorge. The farm itself provided the joys of haymaking, berry picking, comradeship with simple men and patient animals, primal experiences which were later to serve well the future historian of civilization.

The normal progress of a New York boy of Yankee breed towards Harvard was broken by a curious restlessness. At fifteen he persuaded his parents to let him enter a shipbroker's office. There he read furtively Bain's Intellect and Senses, Hallam's History of Mediaeval Literature, and Gray's Botany. To escape ship-brokerage he joined his brother in the Nevada mining town of Austin, serving as a bookkeeper. While finding out that the move was a mistake, he read such books as John Halifax, Gentleman, and Flint's Physiology; the sixteen-year-old lad reveals the insatiable intellectual curiosity that ever marked the mature man. On August 2, 1873, one reads in his diary that he has decided to "leave this rough life and become a gentleman." Badly interrupted studies involved a somewhat heroic compensatory course of tutoring.

Entering the class of 1878 at Harvard, he passed, according to his own account, a somewhat solitary four years, yet winning the friendship of Barrett Wendell and the future poet-critic George E. Woodberry. In Henry Adams' course on American History, young Taylor gained lasting notions of methods of research; in Charles Eliot Norton's famous course on the Fine Arts he learned ideals of culture. On graduation in 1878 he proudly wore a Phi Beta Kappa key. His senior essay, under Henry Adams, "Constitutional Development in the Colonies," was accepted by the Magazine of American History.

Early in his college years he had chosen the law for his profession, with visions of public usefulness and political prominence. A year at the Columbia Law School produced ambitions for broader studies in Europe. Europe to a studious young American in the late '70s meant just Germany, and the young man added to wide and liberating travel two semesters of assiduous study of Roman Law at Leipzig. In far different activities, Taylor never failed to acknowledge the value of these studies—the discipline of following out clear principles to their practical application, as compared with the clever and empirical allegation of judicial precedents. In 1881, at twenty-five, he took, as first honor man in his class, the LL.B. at the Columbia Law School, and set up his office.

Mr. Taylor was never the sort of person who left things as he found them, and it was wholly characteristic that within two years of entering practice he published The Law of Corporations, in which he carried through our tangle of ad hoc legislation the clear analyses of the Roman Law. It passed through five editions and I believe is still a standard in its field. The study and practice of the law, while enlisting his interest and promising prosperity, failed to satisfy his ambitions. In January 1885, his twenty-ninth year just passed, he jotted down in his diary what was to be the program for all his subsequent activity:

"The conception of what must be either a great book or a total failure [it was neither, he wrote over forty years later]. In my mind I call it The Ideals of Mankind. Its purpose will be to show what men throughout the past have desired as best; not desired trivially or sensually, but what they have thought to be best and highest, of most absolute worth, and therefore aimed at. The thought of the book glows within me. I have begun reading and thinking for it, starting with old Sanscrit Indian thought." After ten years of joyous study, the two thick volumes of Ancient Ideals, a Study of Intellectual and Spiritual Growth from Early Times to the Establishment of Christianity, made their quiet but effective appearance. Early in their preparation an opportune legacy had enabled the author to close his law office. There had been a humanitarian adventure of several years' duration, in the leadership of a boys' club on Tompkins Square.

Ancient Ideals, as its author objectively admitted, while not a masterpiece, was emphatically far from a failure. There was the obvious disadvantage that the Oriental chapters had to be written at second hand, from translations. As the survey moves into the Greek and Roman field, where the author commanded the languages, the work gains authority and charm. Even now after forty-six years I doubt if there exists in English a better brief survey of the relation between the Hellenistic philosophies and the formulation of the Christian faith. More important, the author here worked out the method later to be more effectively used—that of letting the ancient sages speak for themselves in abundant and skilfully chosen quotations. In reading this book one should not fail to note that it was finished in years when the writer had temporarily returned to something like orthodox Christianity. But through varying phases of doubt and disbelief in creeds, it would be impossible to find a moment when Henry Osborn Taylor's feelings were other than Christian. His ultimate position might be briefly described as one of devout and prayerful Theism colored by strong Christian sympathies.

After Ancient Ideals the small but meaty book The Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages, 1901, was an affair of only four years of assiduous labor. The scholarship devoted to the task is thorough and profound, and while, especially in the field of the arts, later research has largely superseded certain chapters, this book remains the best survey in English of what we may call Dark Age culture, and it amply earned the author the accolade of "Master" which it drew from his former teacher, Henry Adams. It passed through four editions, a remarkable record of usefulness and longevity for a book of this sort.

Ten more years of work resulted in the two thick volumes of The Mediaeval Mind: a History of the Development of Thought and Expression in the Middle Ages—the author's most widely-read book. Here the boy who in his 'teens was reading Hallam's History of Mediaeval Literature came fully to his own. There was and is nothing in English that makes the noble quest of the Middle Ages for a perhaps impossible intellectual and religious certitude, so clearly and persuasively reveal itself. In that moment when the established "philological syndicate" in our universities was romantically exaggerating the generally rather slight value of mediaeval literature in the vernacular, Mr. Taylor went unswervingly to the real point, that the best thinking and choicest feeling of the Middle Ages was with singularly few exceptions expressed in its Latin literature. Thirty years ago it required a kind of genius to form a judgment that now seems obvious, if only because meanwhile there have been thousands of good readers of The Mediaeval Mind. For ten years with unfailing gusto Mr. Taylor read up and down the Patrologia Latina and kindred massive tomes, giving the gist of chapters where the gist was enough, now and then pouncing on a passage eloquent enough to call for translation—a descriptive and objective method on the whole, but description resting on fine literary discrimination, objectively always conscious of implicit human values and ever fraught with personal sympathy and admiration.

Midway in the preparation of his magnum opus, at forty-nine, Henry Osborn Taylor exchanged an apparently confirmed old bachelorhood for the hand and heart of Julia Isham. There had been earlier devotions, candidly and charmingly avowed in his autobiography, Values and Verities. Indeed, as he has somewhere written, an ideal devotion to a good and lovely woman was from his youth a primal need of his being. This capacity for devotion was finally focussed in an ideal marriage. Lovely in person and in intelligence, admirably generous and sympathetic in public and private relations, Julia Isham's wealth raised her husband's modest prosperity to something like affluence. The spacious apartment appropriately overlooking the mediaeval mass of Bertram Goodhue's St. Bartholomew's, Knowles House, at Cobalt (enlarged into an unpretentious mansion, with delectable dependencies in the way of guest houses amid gardens) offered a constant and thoughtful hospitality to guests who were personages in science and letters, to guests who were merely aspiring, to guests who needed only quiet with untaxing cordiality. Julia Isham knew the value of her husband's historical works, shared his predilections with the most intelligent sympathy—and left him as free to pursue his scholarly task as he had been in old bachelorhood.

Well before the ink on the proof sheets of The Mediaeval Mind had dried, Mr. Taylor had started another comprehensive work which appeared nine years later, in 1920, under the title Thought and Expression in the Sixteenth Century. The scope of the book was broader than the title, for the whole period ordinarily called the Renaissance—a term Mr. Taylor disliked, as denying historic continuity—was treated. In comparison with The Mediaeval Mind the theme was unfavorable, in a measure uncongenial. There was lacking that coherence which religious endeavor had brought to the Middle Ages; there were already a number of excellent books on the subject. Mr. Taylor could bring to this well-worked theme only his rare gift of selective documentation and a fuller attention to scientific matters than his predecessors had devoted. So Thought and Expression perhaps has made less general impression than Ancient Ideals and The Mediaeval Mind. Yet as a specialist in the Renaissance I know of no book in the field that provides better stealing, while, more broadly, Mr. Taylor brought out with peculiar emphasis the prophetic, one may say the incipiently modern quality of much Renaissance thinking and feeling.

He was now sixty-four, with a life-work, the quantity and quality of which only a few professional scholars have surpassed, behind him. He had earned release from the long days at the New York Public Library, and a reasonable enjoyment of his slowly and solidly won prestige. While I sometimes regret that he did not round out his survey of civilization with two more thick volumes on modern ideals, I believe he was wise in regarding the purely historical part of his work as finished. Then I recall that in the handful of small books which were the recreation rather than the task of his later years, Mr. Taylor after all discussed discerningly many of the leading ideas and discoveries of modern times. These little books also represented the need of synthesis, of pulling together as functioning forces the ideals which he had earlier treated descriptively. In particular these little books, which perhaps represent his highest literary accomplishment, gave him the opportunity to express his final religious convictions, and this he did rather by charming and very personal adumbrations, than by the customary formulations. I feel some treason to my friend in now attempting even a loose formulation of deep experiences which he chose to leave undefined. Yet the matter is interesting as locating the last ditch of a naturally devout soul in a time of much doubt and negation. Perhaps Mr. Taylor's last ditch was that of such great Victorians as Tennyson. He believed in a God who, while not omnipotent, was good, powerful, and purposeful. He believed in prayer as worship of this God, even if one asked for nothing and was not sure that such prayer was heard. He believed that Christ was our fullest revelation of God as Ruler and Father. He held hope that by some providential economy personal influence may be immortal, but in his latest thinking he felt that the human individual was not fitted for immortality. I fancy his final religious position was not far from that of the God-intoxicated Jew, Spinoza, of whom he wrote with admirable insight and sympathy in Human Values and Verities.

As a philosopher he held that the proper human aim was a stable and noble happiness, that such happiness could only be attained by the satisfaction of all our faculties—mental, volitional, emotional. I cannot recall that he ever quoted Pascal, yet I know that he would have agreed with the sage of Port Royal that "The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know." All the same, there was much of the rationalist in him. While unwilling to deny the affirmations of hope and aspiration, he felt they must ultimately be referred to reason as a sort of Supreme Court, but a court that should act not too legalistically, but with tenderness and respect for all human needs.

This is not the time to enumerate these little and charming books. Especially noteworthy among them perhaps is that tiny classic of an autobiography, Values and Verities, with its accompanying volume of general commentary under the same title, and his last book, A Historian's Creed. The latter contains what seems to me his finest and most personal achievement simply as a man of letters, the essay "'The Soul of Archilochus." In it is imagined the soul of the Greek poet surviving through the centuries, ever responding to new and finer ideals. It is a precise and eloquent allegory of the author's own pilgrim's progress through the aspiring ages, It was a fitting valedictory, and the dedication always moves me as do certain ineffable brief lyrics—

TO THE MEMORY
OF MY WIFE
JULIA ISHAM
A LITTLE BOOK
TO
SO GREAT A MEMORY

Mr. Taylor was a tiny, agile, at times peppery man. When I first met him he was in the early fifties, and he seemed to me then to be in hale and frosty old age. Twenty-five years later, and until the illness of his penultimate year, he seemed to me to grow no older in body or mind. He was kindly, but on occasion could be waspish and a little formidable. "My mind is tolerant, but my temper is not," he has written several times and most self-understandingly in his autobiographical pages. He never learned to bear fools gladly. As his contemporaries passed on, he easily made friendly relations with young persons, but he insisted that only such of the young as had read The Mediaeval Mind should be asked to tea. In his last two years, after the death of his wife and an almost miraculous rally from a prostrating pneumonia he was ready and even glad to go to an unknown, perhaps to no destination. It was enough that he had lived so richly and abundantly.

He never sought honors, but they came to him manifold, and he frankly enjoyed them—honorary doctorates from Wesleyan, Columbia, and Harvard, membership and often office in esteemed scholarly societies here and abroad. When less than a year before his death I had the high privilege of proposing him for our membership, I found that several of my colleagues to whom I wrote in his behalf supposed he had been long a member, but, like too many of us, had the bad habit of not attending meetings. At our last meeting he made a brief and amiable appearance, but he never physically occupied his chair, No. 47. But for the tablet on chair 47 bearing his name, and that name on our rolls, our annals would be much the poorer.