Arts and Letters

Henry van Dyke was first of all and foremost the preacher, though a man of "many tasks of different kinds," done all with high distinction and supreme grace—a preacher and a teacher, poet, diplomat, fisherman, yet ever a preacher whose voice (in Tennysonian phrase) the "rolling air" still keeps in the memory of the living. And he was a doughty fighter in these several fields: in the pulpit, in the press, in the stream, in the lecture room, in public affairs. In his later years when occupying the chair of English Literature in Princeton University he was wont to speak of himself as a "teacher of reading." He who is truly able to teach reading and incite a love of it, as he did, "should have rank," as some one has said, "at the head of the entire teaching faculty." Virginia Woolf says in her Second Common Reader,

I have sometimes dreamt that when the day of Judgment dawns and the great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards—their crowns, their laurels, their names carried indelibly upon imperishable marble—the Almighty will turn to Peter not without a certain envy when He sees us coming with our books under our arms: "Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them here. They have loved reading."

I have here the "dummy" of a little book which I myself printed, entitled Books, Literature and the People, a discourse which he made at the first meeting of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. There is time for only two short paragraphs in definition of literature:

Every one knows what books are. But what is literature? It is the ark on the flood. It is the light on the candlestick. It is the flower among the leaves: the consummation of the plant's vitality, the crown of its beauty, and the treasure-house of its seeds.

Literature is made up of those human writings which translate the inner meanings of nature and life, in language of distinction and charm, touched with the personality of the author, into artistic forms of permanent interest. The best literature, then, is that which has the deepest significance, the most perfect style, the most vivid individuality, and the most enduring appeal to the human mind and heart.

Henry van Dyke was most widely known as a lover of nature—of forest and stream, mountain and sea. But with all his love of the out-of-doors, he was a man of the city. Even in his Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land he sings his Psalm of Great Terrestrial Cities, as John sang of the Celestial City in the solitude of Patmos. "How wonderful are the cities that man has builded," he exclaims—

Their names are like mighty enchantments…. They shine from far, sitting beside the great waters…. They spread out their splendor along the rivers…. Yet every one of them is full of trouble and toil…. And their makers run to and fro within them…. Abundance of riches is laid up in their store houses…. Yet they are tormented with fear of want. The cry of the poor in their streets is exceeding bitter.

And then he exclaims: "O God of wisdom, Thou hast made the country. Why hast Thou suffered man to make the town?" God's answer as he heard it, was: "Surely I am the maker of men. And in the heart of man I have set the city."

He did not, when first called to the City of New York, decline, as did the prophet Jonah when commanded to go to Nineveh, "that ancient great city." Nor did he sit in an academic booth, as did Jonah, to see what would become of the city, when it had not done all that the preacher had demanded of it. This city was indeed set in his heart and though he spent his later years outside of it, he was ever turning his face toward it and considering its salvation. He was man of the multitudes as well as of the solitudes. He sought the latter not to escape from responsibility but to prepare himself to serve the former with greater joy and power. Voices may cry in the wilderness but they must reach the cities before their gospel can become a great moving spiritual force in the world. Euripides said that it was requisite to one's happiness to be born in a famous city. That is no longer true, if ever it was. Yet it is significant that the place of ultimate happiness is pictured as a city.

But he was, too, a world-citizen, known and beloved of many peoples. The Netherlands received him proudly as minister from the New Netherlands. France remembers him as a lecturer in her universities. Britain gave him her highest academic degrees. But above all he was a pilgrim-citizen of the world. In one of his poems he wrote:

Thou hast taken me into the tent of the world, O God,
Beneath thy pavilion I have found shelter.
Therefore thou wilt not deny me the right of a guest.

And the Lord of the Tent made answer:

In this tent of the world I will be brother to thy bread
And when thou farest forth I will be thy companion forever.

In the season when the tulips used to bloom in Union Square we remember how weary seemed to him the parade, how weary books and weary trade and how he wished for fishing, for which the month of May was made. But, after all, that was but his brief avocation, his "off days." He was first and last a "fisher of men," and, as was happily said by the New York Sun, St. Peter must have given him special and a double welcome.

A "minister" he was in the noblest import of the word, a "minister of God," a minister of his country, to which he gave distinguished service in the administration of his sometime neighbor, Woodrow Wilson, a minister of humanity in his eloquent spoken and written word.

He sent me his last poem (and when he wrote it he said to his son that it would doubtless be his last, as it proved to be) addressed to the President of the United States, “To Our New Pilot,” and published only three weeks before Dr. van Dyke's death. As a Lieutenant-Commander in the Navy during the War, and as the teller of the tale of Gran' Boule, he knew the language of the sea and ships. It is his last word to his country and his captain, beginning

O Pilot, in this dim, distressful day
Called to the helm, let nothing you dismay!

Nearing port at eighty, last November at the Academy meeting, as you may recall, he said of life that it was "well worth the cruise." And no doubt what he said of the Other Wise Man he would have said of himself: that if he could live his earthly life again he would not have it otherwise than it had been. At any rate, that is what we, in gratitude and praise, would say today.

Of all that he wrote I should wish to have written the poem "The White Bees" which he read to me before its publication and in it (as I re-read it after his death) I found lines that sing what I should wish to have written as his epitaph:

Friendliness and blessing followed in his footsteps;
Happier were the dwellings wheresoe’er he came;
Little children loved him and he left behind him in the hour of parting
Memories of kindness and a godlike name.