Arts and Letters

Stuart Pratt Sherman was elected to chair 49 on the 22nd of February, 1923. He was at this time the head of a department of Literature in the Illinois State University and the youngest member of the Academy. Although a New England man by birth and training, he had been for nearly seventeen years a citizen of the Middle West.

He was known to few of the Academy personally but all knew and valued his work. From his cloistered life in Urbana he had, from time to time, sent to the Eastern press volumes of critical essays whose grace of style and careful scholarship had won for him wide distinction. He was accepted as an admirable link between the Old Criticism and the New, between the East and the West. My acquaintance with him was limited to a few meetings at luncheon or at the Club. For the personal items of this brief memorial I am dependent upon those who were his companions and his students in the West.

That his work as a professor in the University of Illinois was valuable, Dr. Babcock, Dean of the College of Liberal Arts, bears witness: "Sherman was more than a great, gifted, penetrating essayist and critic of literature. He was a forceful, versatile, incisive, and understanding critic of life, a nobly stimulating teacher, and a loyal colleague and friend, who shared generously the riches of his spirit and sympathy."

At the time of his death much was said of his popularity as a teacher, and of his presence and his power in the lecture room. Allan Nevins, one of his auditors, writes: "He possessed a quality of personality which caused him to stand out from the general faculty ranks. Stern, reserved, a little sardonic in bearing, he had none of the ordinary professorial arts of popularity. He sought no contacts with students not registered in his courses. Within his classroom, he was impersonal, businesslike, and averse to any display of wit, geniality, or eloquence."

His method of conducting the one advanced course which I took under him was to read careful lectures in a monotonous voice without encouraging discussion. He was never electric, and he was certainly not an absorbing teacher, yet, in an austere sense, he was infinitely stimulating. His fine seriousness, his intensity of purpose, the beautiful precision of his mind, his recurrent moments of profundity, and his ironic scorn for the shallow or insincere gradually kindled all of his students who were worth kindling."

Although a man of books, an insatiable reader, a devoted student, Sherman was a lover of woodland life. He puts this in his note book: "Where did it come from, this taste for the wild? I have not been accustomed to think of myself as a nature lover, but when I come to review the times I have spent in camping and tramping in one place or another, I see that the strain of liking for out-of-door life runs pretty much through the years from the first."

It was this liking for the primitive which led him to build a summer home in a secluded colony on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan. This cluster of cottages as simple as pioneer cabins, was known as "The Professors' Colony" and stood in the midst of an unbroken forest of birch, beech, and maple, on a grassy bank overlooking a wide, clean, sandy beach.

In a quiet, almost lonely spot he built his cabin, "and there, of a summer morning, he could be found at work in his little study clad in khaki trousers and a soft shirt, with a flowing magenta-colored windsor tie, filling unending pages with his minute script."

"It is surprising even to one who was in intimate contact with him through all these summers," writes Franklin Scott, "to find on reflection in how many ways he was active. One summer he covered the walls of his cottage with crayon drawings of the flowers to be discovered in the woodlands and meadows of the region. Another year, he piled up in his study innumerable boxes of insects; a fairly comprehensive collection of the multitude available. He was very fond of a few games. He would pitch horseshoes by the hour. He was a good tennis player, and his desire to add that game to the resources of Dunewood led him to take the initiative in building a concrete court. He worked tremendously at this task, trundling in a wheel-barrow all of the material from the mixer to the workers who were laying the floor.

"No one was more at home in a canoe than he. He made one trip of fifty miles along the winding and dangerous Manistee River. He enjoyed using his strength not only in the ways already mentioned, but in chopping wood and in gathering piles of driftwood on the beach.

"He was a leader on all occasions that brought the community together. In the blueberry picnics, in the community suppers on the beach, and in the Sunday evening 'sings' held in the only cottage that afforded a piano. He had been a member of the glee-club in Williams College and of the Choral Society of the University of Illinois, and he lost no chance to enliven an evening with songs of which he knew an astounding number. One of the regular features of our summer life in Dunewood was the impromptu singing around the great fire of driftwood after the beach supper was over. With a piece of driftwood as a baton he would stand in the circle of his friends and with his deep bass voice lead the singing until all other voices failed.

"He liked to organize and take part in costume parties and dramatic performances. He played with great spirit and effectiveness the part of Jacques in a beautiful production of As You Like It. In a more rollicking spirit he took the part of Juliet in a burlesque of Romeo and Juliet and on rainy evenings he often read aloud to the assembled neighbors from whatever book he happened to be interested in or working on at the time."

In this pleasant and peaceful round of winter teaching and summer recreation and writing, he spent nearly twenty years, steadily refusing to consider any change, but in 1924 an offer of such magnitude came to him that he was forced to accept it. That he did so with a painful sense of doubt is evidenced by these words which he put into his diary: "When last night there came over me like a strong wave a sense of all I should leave and lose in personal relations to the young men who are coming here, and the good eager students, and some of the devoted townspeople, and one's old friends and colleagues, and the University itself, with its fine promise of natural growth and expansion, and now this morning that the lilacs and spires are beginning to bud and the larches are vivid green in the forestry, and the clean blue of the sky overhead,—it hurt."

In reading these lines, I realize, as I did not at the time, the pain which preceded his removal to New York. I recall writing to him a letter of congratulation and a prediction of a larger usefulness, for I believe that in taking an editorial position of such distinction he was mounting to a larger pulpit than any university could offer. In his answer he raised a note of question which I did not fully understand then but which is clearer to me now. He was suffering the agony of being uprooted at a time when youthful adaptability was beginning to fail.

He was cordially welcomed to the East by his journalistic associates but some of his readers feared a decline from the dignity, restraint, and grace which had made his books so notable. I think he had some such fear himself, for he gave to his reviews such labor that they kept the high level of his essays—they were essays—written in the seclusion of his study, unhurried and serene. With the scholar's love for style, and standing for nobility of purpose, he maintained, even in the midst of increasing critical tumult and confusion, the high standards of a lineal descendant of Emerson and Lowell.

He was not profoundly affected by the journalistic trend of his time and his continued defense of the founders of American literature is distinguished by its loyalty as well as by its delightful humor. He was the Puritan man of letters broadened by contact with the West and stimulated by the opposition of his cynical contemporaries.

He was a believer in progress but he demanded an orderly progress. He believed in honoring those who had built acceptably in the past and he, himself, built on his predecessors, secure in the knowledge that permanent forms of national literature are not dependent upon momentary acclaim. That he was influenced by contemporary judgments is true, but no critic of his day kept so high a plane of reasoned praise. He knew other ages, and other literary fashions. He was in possession of comparative estimates which kept a check on his enthusiasms of the moment. He sometimes wrote of these habits of thought but he was too much the student of history to shout with the crowd. He felt deeply the spirit of the time but a humor which sprang from comparative ideas kept him to a course which the future will largely respect.

In almost the latest entry in his note-book, he registered a vow: "I am going to write, so far as possible, for the rest of my life, about happiness and where it is, and how to get there, and any paragraph that I write shall have the word, or the record of happiness in it. This I went out in the wilderness and dwelt forty years to learn." It is our misfortune that his untimely death made these resolutions of such short service.

In all that he said he remained soundly and nobly progressive. A citizen of the New Time rather than a citizen of a new place, he succeeded in winning the respect even of those who are disposed to make light of scholarship. As I read the wit, the grace, the humor of his comment he seems as much alive as when I knew him. It is not safe to predict long life to any man's books in these days of the radio and moving picture, but Sherman's critical estimates have in them something akin to the master spirits of the past. He voiced a certain phase of criticism and can not be overlooked in any estimate of our time.

One of the few meetings I had with him was on the top of a Fifth Avenue bus, and, for some reason which I do not understand even now, he opened his heart to me in such fraternal spirit that I, during that hour, added affection to the admiration in which I already held him. I saw him in something the same guise as that in which his neighbors at Dunewood beheld him, a homely, sincere, and unassuming Midlander, homesick and dreaming of his quiet camp above Lake Michigan. A few months later when I read in the morning paper the news of his tragic death by drowning, I was glad of that last confidential talk, for in it I got beneath the critic and found a neighbor and a friend.