Arts and Letters

The other day one of our members defined these tributes for me. He said they were not supposed to be estimates of the work of the subject but rather fraternal expressions, and there never could have been a man who was more fit for these than our fellow member, Mark Antony De Wolfe Howe. Named after his father, the Bishop of Central Pennsylvania, Mark Howe described himself as a "personist." He made up the word on the analogy of Justice Holmes's "ideaists" and "thinksters," meaning to characterize himself as one who was at home "neither in the abstractions of philosophy nor in the mechanics of cold fact." He could always resort with pleasure to the contemplation of persons, a wide area for reflection and study. While he could recall human beings who were quite unbearable, there were more upon whom his thoughts dwelt with refreshment; and with these, and the interests of verse, not to be compared with poetry, he said, most of his many books were concerned. "The biographical part of literature," Dr. Johnson remarked once, "is what I love most," and this was the part to which Mark Howe made many memorable additions.

It might have been supposed, from most of his subjects, that Mark Howe was a Bostonian born. He was, in fact, a Rhode Islander of long descent, but, growing up in Pennsylvania, he went to Lehigh University before he ever had a glimpse of Harvard. Yet he became, more than anyone else, the historiographer of Boston, arriving at a time that was not too late for the embers of a great tradition to have lost their warmth and light. Indeed, this member of the Harvard Board of Overseers, this director of the Boston Athenæum, this trustee of the Boston Symphony Orchestra was a chief heir of the tradition. But no man could have been less fusty than Mark Howe, who gloried in having parted company with the cautious views of his early years. I remember lunching with him in a Boston club where he pointed out the only other Democratic member. It was Gluyas Williams, the cartoonist, who was fast asleep. Mark reported the feeling of another member who had gone to the dining room and found only one vacant seat, which he had refused to occupy. It was Mark Howe's seat, and, this member said, "He's tainted." I never knew anyone with a more enlightened pleasure in the company of all sorts and conditions of men.

Mark Howe maintained the conception of verse as "public" and "familiar," and, along with various historical books, he wrote many biographies: lives of Phillips Brooks, George Bancroft, Charles Eliot Norton, James Ford Rhodes, Barrett Wendell, and, especially perhaps, John Jay Chapman. In A Venture in Remembrance, he referred to these as entitling him to "that pale immortality of footnotes which may speak for me hereafter." He meant that these books were indispensable to the literary historian who generalized from his particularizations; but in some cases they were superlatively well done, so as to stand independently as works of art. With his perennial gift of the right word and the happy phrase, Mark Howe united the best of our literary past, its fullness, humanity, and warmth, with the living present. Perhaps no other writer had lived so sympathetically through so many decades of the life of this country—for he died at the age of ninety-six—keenly aware of them all and binding them together with his wit and his love of humankind. As a man he surely deserved the tribute of the philosopher Whitehead. Whitehead said the Earth's first visitors to Mars should be persons likely to make a good impression, and when he was asked "Whom would you send?" he replied, "My first choice would be Mark Howe."