Arts and Letters

When the National Institute of Arts and Letters decided that the time was ripe for the founding of an American Academy of Arts and Letters, it selected seven of its members and empowered them to select eight others. Thomas Raynesford Lounsbury was one of the eight thus chosen, and he was therefore one of the first fifteen original members of the Academy. He was faithful in his attendance at our annual meetings, journeying to Washington, to Philadelphia, and to Chicago, and enriching our programs on two occasions by papers of characteristic interest.

He was born on the first of January, 1838, and he was graduated from Yale when he was twenty-one. He labored for a year or two on the American Cyclopedia, edited by Ripley and Dana. At the outbreak of the Civil War he enlisted in the 126th New York Volunteers, serving to the end. At Gettysburg his regiment was deployed down the slope of Cemetery Ridge, the men being so exhausted that they went to sleep, despite the noise of the terrific artillery duel which preceded Pickett's charge.

Shortly after the end of the war Lounsbury was called to an instructorship in the Sheffield Scientific School of Yale; and to the Sheffield School and to Yale he rendered devoted service for nearly forty years. He was made professor of English in 1871; and in 1906 he was regretfully allowed to retire into the innocuous desuetude of the emeritus professor. Always indefatigable in research and in the accumulation of information scientifically verified, he was regretfully hampered in the later years of his life by a failing of sight, which forced him to limit his hours of labor. Yet he retained to the end his cheery good humor and his keen interest in life. Although he was seventy-six when he came to the meeting in New York in November, 1914, he seemed to be as full of vitality as ever. He survived until the following spring, dying in April, 1915.

At the time of his lamented death the position held by Professor Lounsbury was without parallel. He was recognized as the chief of all the scholars who in Great Britain and in the United States had devoted themselves to what is known in university circles as "English," and he was the final survivor of those of this group of students who maintained a commanding place in the two halves of the subject, in the history of the English language and in the history of English literature in both its branches, British and American. No other English scholar on either side of the Atlantic could speak with equal authority about both the language and the literature.

His brief history of the English language is a little masterpiece of carefully controlled information and of marvelously lucid exposition; and he followed this with later discussions of usage, of pronunciation, of spelling, and of Americanisms and Briticisms. These several books were the result of widespread and incessant investigation; they were solidly rooted in knowledge; they were informed with wisdom; and they were illumined by both wit and humor. Never was there a student of linguistics less pedantic than Lounsbury, or more human in his understanding of the essential fact that speech is the possession of the people as a whole and not an appanage of the self-appointed grammarians. In all his discussions of the English language, its idioms and its orthography; Lounsbury was as independent and as individual as he was as a biographer. He was willing to stand up and be counted in the company of the much decried spelling reformers. He attacked the Tories who ventured to defend our complicated and chaotic spelling, employing all the weapons furnished him by his erudition and his wit. Ten years ago he was one of the organizers of the Simplified Spelling Board, and for several years he served as its president, lending to the cause the weight of his authority and of his character.

The same sanity and good humor, the same comprehensive thoroughness, the same untiring industry in getting at the exact facts, the same sagacity in interpreting these facts anew, characterized his many contributions to the history of English literature. He mastered his successive subjects with the meticulous accuracy of a conscientious man of science, and he presented the results of his labor to the reader with the skill of an accomplished man of letters. His own task was hard in order that our work might be easy. He began his career as a biographer with his cordial and delightful study of Fenimore Cooper. He erected an enduring monument in the three solid tomes of his Chaucer. He devoted several volumes to the vicissitudes of Shakespeare's fame. He narrated with a host of new facts the early years of Browning's poetic activity, and he left incomplete at his death his final study of the slow and steady rise of the reputation of Tennyson.

He left it incomplete only in so far as it was unfinished and in part unrevised. But it is not a fragment; it covers the ground thoroughly as far as he had carried his work. It is larger in scope than a mere biography of Tennyson. It is this first of all, of course, but it is also a searching analysis of the literary history of Great Britain in the third, fourth, and fifth decades of the last century, made possible at the cost of tremendous labor in examining the files of a host of dead-and-gone periodicals. The result of this indomitable research, carried on unflinchingly despite many disadvantages, is a masterly reconstruction of the circumstances of English literature in the thirty years during which Tennyson was gaining the unchallenged position he occupied in the final thirty years of his life.

Nowhere does the author allow himself to be choked by the dust of the back-numbers he disturbed from their silent sleep. Everywhere he retains control of his vast mass of material, and everywhere does he handle it with a fine artistic sense of its significance. Everywhere does he reveal his own fundamental characteristics, his fairness, his tolerance, his transparent honesty, his understanding of human nature, and his omnipresent sense of humor. He is never overcome by the burden of his material; he is never hurried, and he conducts his leisurely inquiry in accord with his large and liberal method. He knew that he had a long job to do, and he did it as he felt that it ought to be done. What is more, he did it once for all; and most unlikely is it that any later delvers into this period will be able to add anything significant, or will find any occasion to modify the judgments here expressed.

Nor is it likely that critics of another generation will be tempted to attack the main positions taken by Lounsbury in his earlier studies of Chaucer, of Shakespeare, of Browning, and of Fenimore Cooper. Whatever memorial he was about to build, Lounsbury always sank his foundations down to bed-rock.

His position among American scholars was lofty, and it will be long before his authority will be in any way diminished. In fact, one might well apply to him a remark he himself made about Tennyson: "Every great writer attains in time to a certain wealth of reputation, not indeed an unearned increment, but an amount of compound interest which has been accruing since the investment was first made."