John Fiske: An Appreciation

ONE of the many sources of regret for the untimely death of John Fiske is that the world is without the autobiography which he meant to write and for which he had begun to make preparation. Curiously enough, although one wearies of a man who talks about himself, the man who takes a pen in his hand and writes about himself is sure to be interesting; and if this autobiography had been written it would have been exceptionally so, as a record of Fiske’s solid work and of his ever growing intellectual interests, Moreover, it would have had a charm not always found in a man’s account of his own life; it would have been the work of a writer wholly devoid of self-consciousness. Fiske would have described his career precisely as he described historical events, without personal feeling. The book would have been frank, not glozing over his mistakes, and displaying here and there a most fascinating naïveté. The incidents of his life would have been recounted with an honesty which men generally exhibit only when discussing their friends. We should have enjoyed reading his correspondence with some of his distinguished contemporaries, — this may yet be given to the world, — but we should have liked to hear his full account of their talks with him. Some of his sketches, notably the one on Huxley, may serve to show how well he would have performed this task. We should have had the uneventful but instructive story of a studious life and a picture of the man set before us not only in what it said, but in what it betrayed unconsciously of the writer’s character : that is what makes an autobiography the most delightful reading in the world.

At present the best record of John Fiske is to be found in the solid volumes with which his untiring industry has enriched the world. In them the reader sees the man as he lived, with his many interests and sympathies, his wide and searching vision, his learning and wisdom. One readily perceives his inspiring optimism and his crystalline honesty. These qualities are manifested by a most pellucid style. Philosophy, history, literature, music, of the things of this world, attracted him, while at the same time he wrote with due reverence of the future life of man and of the race. These are large subjects, and his readers know well with what breadth of mind he treated them. His own nature was large and generous; he was a robust genius; his sturdy vigor carried him over great tracts of thought. His boyish aim was omniscience, and if he stopped this side of it, he went far in search of his ideal before the miserable shortness of human life put an end to his studies.

There are different ways of looking at the world, and there is something to be said in favor of the large way; at least it has the charm of rarity. There is no one final form of expression, and every generation demands that its opinions and yearnings shall be expressed in its own way; yet always the man with a broad vision, with abundant knowledge and wide sympathy, holds a place among the benefactors of his kind. The simplicity of Fiske’s nature shows itself in his style, which is clear, uniform yet without monotony, serving as the least opaque veil between the writer and the reader. There are no signs of a struggle for expression, no indications of painful toil; the hasty reader might imagine that such writing flowed from the pen as easily as one’s own signature. To a certain extent one so thinking would be right, for nothing could exaggerate Fiske’s facility of composition. His manuscript grew beneath his pen exactly as it was printed ; there are very few erasures, no signs of wrestling with a reluctant thought, no additions. This accuracy was of course partly the result of constant practice, but its main cause was the clearness of his thought. His method was the outward sign of the way that his mind worked. It moved as a vast machine moves, with a great, simple uniformity, and without fatigue. He did not perceive by flashes of illumination but by steady observation, and his style expresses both the ease and the massiveness of his mental processes.

He possessed a wonderful memory, which retained a distinct impression of even the New England weather of many years, of trivial as well as of important incidents, of pages of his favorite authors, of the names, faces, and characters of long - departed servants. Not even Macaulay’s schoolboy had a greater command of those facts for which the rest of us have to turn to a cyclopaedia. His vast stores of reading were thus always at hand; and what he read was not merely stored, it was understood. When he sat at his desk to write, he never wrapped up his message in what is called fine language; his work did not smell of the lamp, nor did it have the air of being handed down by a superior being who lived on an inaccessible height. It was like the talk of a well-informed, intelligent man conversing with his friends; it was like his own talk, without affectation and without pedantry. This simplicity won for him readers who would have been repelled by a more pompous and less sympathetic style.

It was at the home of his grandparents, on the bank of the Connecticut, at Middletown, that his boyhood was passed. There he studied as few boys study, and laid the foundations of his future learning. His intellectual acquisitiveness began early, and he speedily became known to his elders as a most promising boy. They aided and encouraged him with the caution which elders are prone to exhibit in their relations with the young. When he sorely wanted a Greek lexicon, they reasoned with him and counseled him to make no rash decision ; but in time, persuaded by his arguments and assiduities, they consented, and he was happy. Where he received steadier guidance was in matters not profane. He was constant in attendance at church ; he sang in the choir; he listened to many long sermons, and early encountered all that is least attractive in New England piety. He was still young when he began to react against the severity of the tenets that he was taught, much to the distress of his elders, who lamented what -they supposed was the result of indiscriminate reading. Undoubtedly his appetite for books had led him into acquaintance with ways of thought that could not commend themselves to the community in which his boyhood was passed. The reading habit he had formed early, as his yearning for a Greek lexicon shows; he studied with precocious vigor. He used to tell a story of the alarm that filled him when he read the memorials of the early New England colonists. At last he ventured to communicate to his grandmother the terror he felt from reading the accounts of Indian attacks upon outlying villages, and his dread lest a similar bloody fate should be overhanging Middletown. She tried to cheer him, and assured him that there was really no danger from that quarter. “ But, ” he replied, “ that is what they used to say before the massacre at Deerfield, ” and he refused to be comforted. His grandmother was right, however, and he was spared to study further. There still survives the memory of a projected universal history, built upon the conservative authorities current in small New England towns. He devoured every book on which he could lay his hands, reading not for amusement, but to build up a mighty structure of knowledge.

To Harvard College, which he entered as a sophomore in 1860, he brought not only the required preparation, but also an amount of information which was unusual among applicants for admission. From college, too, he carried away stores of learning which had not been acquired in the classroom alone; for the curriculum of that time was better adapted to giving young men a slight notion of the supposed essentials of a gentleman’s education than to supplying the wants of an eager student. The required work he performed with commendable industry, but the real advantage of the place was that it gave him an opportunity to follow his own devices. He was free to grapple with a large library, and this he did not unsuccessfully. He was an omnivorous reader, and at that time filled with a youthful desire to acquire all knowledge. He studied philosophy, history, science, the languages, as if he were himself a university; it would perhaps be irreverent to say that possibly some of his instructors possessed a slenderer equipment of learning. I remember seeing him when he was a student at Cambridge, and how I gazed upon his gaunt frame and pallid face with awe; for he was said to read and study fifteen hours a day, and to be far advanced in atheism, — a sort of Cambridge, Massachusetts, Faust. In the eyes of some, Herbert Spencer was his Mephistopheles.

It was by an excess of zeal in his studies that he acquired this evil fame as an atheist, —— a reputation that long stood in his path, though at last he succeeded in living it down. It happened in this way. It will be remembered that until recently all the students of Harvard College were required, under severe penalties, to attend church twice every Sunday, — a rule which, in their opinions, sadly embittered the day. Fiske, who was averse to losing so much time, though he necessarily complied with the law, carried a book with him to church, and was detected in reading it. When charged with this crime, he readily acknowledged his guilt, but at once complicated the question by a misplaced appeal to the liberality which he supposed to underlie an austere mien. He imagined that since Harvard College, as a fountain of Unitarianism, was regarded throughout the country as lamentably unorthodox, his offense would be readily pardoned by fellow freethinkers. Greatly to his surprise, nothing of the sort happened; the authorities refused to wink at this bit of sacrilege. They displayed the utmost orthodoxy, and indignantly disowned any sympathy with Sabbath-breakers. He barely escaped rustication, and all he got from his appeal was his evil reputation as an atheist.

While in college and the Law School he wrote a few papers for the Harvard Magazine, but his most important work was done for the National Quarterly Review, now extinct, the North American Review, and the Atlantic Monthly. These articles already manifested his wide learning and his power of grasping large subjects. He was at the Harvard Law School from October, 1863, till January, 1865, and was admitted to the Suffolk Bar in July, 1864. He was for six months in an office in Boston, and for four months in 1865 he had there an office of his own; but his legal work was slight: he had one excellent case, which was settled out of court, and he drew one deed, for which he was never paid. On the 1st of October, 1865, he abandoned jurisprudence, having decided to devote himself to literature.

In 1867 he established himself in Cambridge, which remained his home for the rest of his life, and there he worked faithfully. The Darwinian theory, as it was then called, had attracted him from the first; it found him young, eager for truth, and exceptionally well supplied with information by which to test that fascinating hypothesis, and the spreading of its method and lessons seemed to him a noble task.

In June, 1869, he was appointed a university lecturer at Harvard, and for about two years he gave to small audiences courses of lectures that formed the foundation of his Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy. He read them, too, in Boston, to a small but faithful band of listeners, and in New York and Milwaukee. The editor of the New York World at that time was an admirer of Fiske, and published his lectures in that paper. The book itself, after much revision, was published in 1874, in two stout volumes.

Already there had appeared, in the autumn of 1872, a small volume, Myths and Myth-Makers, which indicated the line of thought that inspired Fiske, and displayed his value as an interpreter of intricate investigations to simpler readers. It was not a mere evisceration of ponderous tomes that he gave to the public, not a hare translation of difficult lore into plainer language, but rather an exposition of severe work with an abundance of intelligent comment. His style was admirably suited for the task he had undertaken, with its simplicity and unflickering steadiness. No difficulties were avoided; they were calmly, patiently explained; the reader was, as it were, taken by the hand and led at an easy pace, sharing Fiske’s comprehension of erudite subjects as well as his intelligent contributions to the subjects under discussion. It would be unfair, however, to speak of this book and the succeeding volumes of collected essays as mere guides to the inexperienced reader ; they have, indeed, a distinct value for experts. An intelligent man even trying simply to state another’s hypothesis must inevitably enrich it with some novel suggestion from his own ingenuity or knowledge. The mere restatement will put some points in a new light, and especially would this be the case when the subject had passed through Fiske’s powerful and well-informed mind. He not only clarified what had been obscure ; he brought new illustrations from the storehouse of his own learning and kindly criticism.

Of the usefulness of such work it would be hard to say too much. A writer who treats high subjects without pedantry and in a style intelligible to all, never arousing hostility or causing fatigue, does excellent work. He creates a public eager to know, anxious at least to contemplate vast truths. Scholars, if they do not hate the crowd, often despise it, and the influence of their lessons suffers in consequence. Fiske’s whole life was spent in spreading learning, — a task which was most congenial to his cheery optimism, his thorough democracy, and his abounding good nature. Frequently a learned man respects only learning and those who possess it, and among those he does not forget to count himself. Fiske adored learning and respected learned men, but he loved those who wanted to learn, and he never thought of himself.

The essays on Myths are not the last word on that intricate subject which has aroused the imagination of investigators, because in science as elsewhere there is no last word. They offer a good statement of the various questions treated as they were understood by advanced students some thirty years ago, with enough illustrations from Fiske’s own study to make the volume a valuable original contribution to a fascinating subject. But obviously it was scarcely from the publication of good books on matters of erudition that Fiske could support his family, and all this time he was casting about for some fixed position. In 1870 he had been appointed instructor in history at Harvard College for a few months ; but when his nomination to a permanent position came up, a little later, it was rejected, if the rumors of the time were true, on account of his alleged atheism; of his competence there was of course no question. The odium was all the greater because he had become the champion of the novel and dangerous school of evolution, then in disrepute. Nor was this the only door shut to him. It was not until he had become famous in other cities, mainly in the West, that he was a welcome lecturer in Boston. The courses of lectures that he gave there, before his merits were overwhelmingly acknowledged, were but meagrely attended. He was thought by many to be a mere iconoclast, an utterer of novel and irreverent doctrines. It having been decided by those in authority that this born teacher should not teach, it was further decided, with that intelligence which is not rare in this world, that, though unfitted by his shocking principles to give instruction from books, he might at least catalogue them, and in 1872 he was appointed assistant librarian of Harvard College, a position which he held until 1879.

This ingenious method of encouraging learning did not wholly break up his more important work. He was able at times to get away to expound the doctrines now sufficiently familiar, and to his zeal in publishing and expounding them their familiarity is in great measure due. He was asked to deliver courses of lectures in a number of Western cities where there prevailed a wholesome intellectual curiosity, and at last he felt free to abandon the librarianship. Then began his arduous career as a lecturer. Every winter he set forth with a bag full of manuscript, which he read to eager audiences. Friends in Boston enabled him to give lectures there, but his severest work was elsewhere. One consequence of this enforced travel was that no man of letters in America has ever been so well known as Fiske, or, one might add, has so well known his own country. First and last, he journeyed over almost all of it, arousing great intellectual interest, disseminating much information, while also learning much about the great public. He kept in touch with the people in a way impossible to a student in his library. This was of course a clear advantage, and accounts for a good part of Fiske’s sympathy with his readers, for his clear comprehension of the best way in which to address them. Still, like every other good thing it had its disadvantages. No strength but his could have endured the perverse diet, the more than tropical heat of American trains and houses in winter, the tawdry discomforts of the hotels. These campaigns told even upon him. Yet for years the res angusta drove him forth at the beginning of the winter, to be gone till the following spring. Much of his work was thus read before publication to a great number of hearers.

In this way a public was trained to take an interest in important subjects. Much was done in preparing the American people to accept new modes of thought, and it is not unlikely that to his work in American history is due some of the new interest in that subject. This cumbersome method of reaching the public was then not without results, but it is sad to think how much time was lost in attaining them. One bit of statistics will show how busily he worked. Between 1888 and 1893 he lectured five hundred and seventy-seven times on American history, fourteen times on philosophy, six times on musical subjects, and preached ten times — the atheist! — in Unitarian pulpits. This list shows his diverse interests, which may be gathered, too, from the variety of the essays in their collected form. Not all concerned themselves with science. Especially good was whatever he wrote about music, a theme he was most capable of treating; for his knowledge was far beyond that of the amateur and was respected by professional musicians. He really understood the art and loved it. It was not merely a favorite relaxation : he composed songs and a mass which interested competent authorities. So long as he had time for anything but work he was a listener at concerts, and always there was nothing that could give him greater delight than an evening of music. It is only to be regretted that he had no opportunity to write more about this subject.

The essays are mainly concerned with severer topics, and show what lines his investigations had been following. Thus in the Excursions of an Evolutionist we find more than traces of the philological studies that had for a long time occupied him. For many years he had been studying Sanskrit and the various problems that the new science of language was presenting. In The Unseen World, again, we find his preliminary studies for a life of Christ, a subject that long haunted him. He had long looked forward to a period of rest, which would have been one of happy toil in the preparation of this book. As he puts it himself, in a footnote to the article on the Jesus of History: “These defects I hope to remedy in a future work on Jesus of Nazareth and the Founding of Christianity. . . . This work has been for several years on my mind, but it may still be long before I can find the leisure needful for writing it out. . . . The projected work . . . will have a much wider scope [than the articles], dealing on the one hand with the natural genesis of the complex aggregate of beliefs and aspirations known as Christianity, and on the other hand with the metamorphoses which are being wrought in this aggregate by modern knowledge and modern theories of the world.” From his other work we may judge how well he would have treated this subject, — with what carefully accumulated knowledge, and with what abundant illustrations from his wide reading, and with what an excellent method he would have presented his material. But it was not to be; the book was only planned. It is but an illustration of the fullness of Fiske’s preparation for work. In a way it was a disadvantage to him, for there are always people to charge with superficiality the man who knows several things well, while they are contented with the one who knows but one thing, and that ill. It was hard for him, too, to know exactly in what direction he should turn to utter his message. In his magazine articles he had covered a good deal of ground, but they were a comparatively broken and incoherent means of expression. He wanted to speak at some length. The outlet that he found for himself was in writing history, for which his whole life had been a preparation.

In 1879 he gave a course of lectures on American history in the Old South Meeting House in Boston, dealing with the discovery and colonization of America. At that time, the influence of the centennial exhibition in Philadelphia and the sudden prominence of the country as a source of food ’supply for the world gave Americans a new consciousness of their importance, and they turned with great interest to the study of their past. There was a demand for a coherent exposition of American history such as John Fiske was especially able to give; for nothing could equal the clearness of his statement of facts or of his explanation of their underlying causes. At once he made his mark.

At the request of Mr. Huxley he repeated the course at University College, London, and with such success that he was invited to give another, the next year, before the Royal Institution. These lectures, three in number, afterwards appeared in print in a small volume entitled American Political Ideals, viewed from the Standpoint of Universal History. The theory there expounded of the origin of the town meeting has been modified by later investigations, as he himself states in the preface of 1885, when the book was published, but it is impossible not to be impressed by the massiveness of the second lecture, which sets forth the difference between the Federal Union and the similar efforts of Greece and Rome. The treatment was well suited to the subject, with a great reach of vision and an admirable coherence of reasoning. For too long a time American history had been a chronicle of wars. Here its relation to the great movements of mankind was briefly but clearly shown; it ceased to be a somewhat provincial record, and became part of a greater and wider sequence. Many of his qualities are to be seen in this little book. In the last lecture one sees his cheeriness, his unflinching optimism, his good-natured treatment of his audience, — all traits that fitted him for a popular lecturer. That he was popular there can be no doubt. From the moment that he began his lectures on historical subjects there was a steady call for them from all parts of the country outside of Boston, where there is sometimes a surfeit of instruction. In 1881 he delivered a series of lectures at Washington University, St. Louis. In 1884 he was appointed non - resident professor of American history, and on his way thither and back he lectured at many intervening towns. Often he went farther, to the Pacific Coast. Into an hour ’s talk he would pack a mass of compressed information in orderly arrangement, with a careful and most lucid explanation of the relation of the events recounted to history at large. This was his especial gift, that he always, however minute the subject, treated it as part of universal history. In this way he not only popularized American history : he dignified what had appeared to be matters of only local interest, not by an unseemly oratorical assertion of their importance, but by showing that in a scientific exposition nothing was petty; that all the threads of a tangled skein could be unwound, and were all of importance.

He was never obscure and was never tedious. Doubtless the habit of reading his lectures aloud to so many hearers confirmed him in his skill in avoiding these two perils; for an intelligent speaker always feels the lack of a responsive echo from his audience, and is on his guard against it. A writer sometimes perceives his own shortcomings only too late. In Fiske’s lectures there were no moments when one failed to understand, and depended on the familiar feeling that one would catch the thread a moment later, but all was clear from the first moment to the last. One might differ from Fiske in the interpretation of facts, but one never failed to understand him. It was not merely his habit of reading his books first as lectures that explains this lucidity, however much it may have helped it, because he was never obscure. His own clearness of mind made all that he wrote intelligible. His marvelous power of simplification enabled him to arrest the attention of his hearers or readers, and to lead them through the centuries, seeing with Fiske’s eyes unsuspected analogies and hidden causes. No more delightful expounder ever lived. One may praise a man in this way, it is to be hoped, for the possession of certain qualities without being suspected of making an occult attack on other men for possessing different qualities; there is always room in the world for the simultaneous existence of many kinds of merit. The excellence that Fiske attained was aided by the unusual amount of collateral information that he brought to the treatment of the subject that he was discussing, and by the powerful intellect that saw things large. It is the breadth rather than the intensity of his view that we admire, though perhaps the ease of his style and the largeness of his vision incline us to overlook the solid ground on which his work rests. The rough justice of the world always makes us ready to mistake smoothness for weakness, and ease for superficiality.

Gradually Fiske’s historical work shaped itself into a definite plan to write a complete history of America that should be something like J. R. Green’s Short History of the English People; but this fell through, and he determined to write a series of separate volumes which should form a coherent record of the whole subject, very much as Parkman’s monographs present a complete chronicle of the struggle between Great Britain and France for supremacy in America. The first to appear was The Critical Period of American History, 1783—1789, which was published in 1888. Like its successors it was built upon a series of lectures which had been read before different audiences. As Fiske explained in the preface, the book “makes no pretensions to completeness, either as a summary of the events of that period or as a discussion of the political questions involved in them. I have aimed especially at grasping facts in such a way as to bring out and emphasize their causal sequence, and it is accordingly hoped that the book may prove useful to the student of American history.” That it has proved useful cannot be denied: a book that amasses considerable information, that abridges many volumes full of confusing facts, and presents a complicated period in broad and clearly perceptible outlines, so that the real significance of the events is clear, may justly be called a useful book. Readers need a guide to point out what is of true importance; it is essential that the guide should be the right one, and Fiske never failed to grasp many facts and to explain them intelligently.

The next volume to appear was The Beginnings of New England, a subject that had not escaped the attention of historians and others. It retold, with characteristic fullness of explanation, the story of the planting of the New England colonies. What distinguishes this from other excellent histories treating the same subject is the first chapter, in which Fiske developed at some length a few pages of his Destiny of Man, dealing with the difference between the Roman and the English methods of nation-making. The facts of the early history of New England were tolerably familiar, especially to New Englanders and their descendants, but one is safe in saying that he set these facts in their relation to universal history as no writer before him had done. As an ornithologist will pick up a feather and describe the bird and the family of birds, so Fiske could pick up a stray and unprepossessing fact, and starting from this he would wind into a subject, explaining and illustrating in a thousand ways to the delight of his reader, who was filled with new information and new sympathies.

In The War of Independence, a slender volume of less than two hundred pages, he made not so much a sketch of the Revolution as an explanatory comment upon the well-known events of that period, and a comment especially intended for the young. The book was of the nature of an experiment and was to be followed, if successful, by others. Possibly, however, the young person takes more interest in knowing what happened than in seeking the reasons for what happened. Studying the causes of things seems, when acquired at all, to be the last result of education, and it may be that this volume is of more use to teachers than to pupils. What he here told very briefly was set forth at greater length in the two volumes of The American Revolution, published in 1891. In the preface he states the principle on which the whole series rested, namely, that his “design was not so much to contribute new facts as to shape the narrative in such a way as to emphasize relations of cause and effect that are often buried in the mass of details.” He says further, in speaking of the success which certain parts of the book had met when read as lectures, “I was greatly surprised at the interest thus shown in a plain narrative of events already well known, and have never to this day understood the secret of it.” Yet it is not so mysterious to others, who perceive that the familiar facts, which lay raw and incoherent in every one’s mind, were illuminated and set in order by Fiske’s learning and intelligent arrangement.

To a rigid adherent of the noble school of historical work which worships Ranke, this intrusion of the popular element seems possibly a lamentable thing. That this strain in Fiske’s work won it popularity is undeniable; but in itself popularity is not a bad thing; it is mischievous only when bad things are popular. While Fiske’s interpretation of history, philosophy,and science interested the multitude unaccustomed to intellectual work, it also fascinated students; and it is a worthy aim to please all without a sacrifice of dignity. At times Fiske indulged in little outbursts of petulant remonstrance at what he regarded as dangerous and superfluous absurdity, but he never wrote down to an audience; he rather moved with his readers, making himself plain by the clearness of his thought and of his style. Every grown man retains the sensitiveness of a child to any attempt to allure him by a willful descent to his supposed level, and resents it. When Fiske avowedly wrote for children, as in The War of Independence, his mind moved in its customary grooves ; the difference of treatment lay in the omission of many events, not in any sacrifice of his method.

It is not necessary to speak of each of his histories in turn, — they are practically separate chapters of one large history; yet it is impossible not to call attention to the massive dignity of The Discovery of America, the solidest of the whole series. Here we have Fiske at his best, full of learning, with the wise text rippling over a bed of suggestive notes. The subject is itself a greater one in the world’s history,and is treated with ample fullness and a constant intelligence. What an excellent thing intelligence is in a book is too often forgotten by both writers and readers.

While he was starting the historical series, he was also beginning what proved to be another series of monographs on theological and philosophic subjects. The first of these, published in 1884, was The Destiny of Man, viewed in the Light of his Origin, —a singular book for an alleged atheist to write. Still we must remember what Fiske says in this significant little book : “Though the freethinker is no longer chained to a stake and burned, people still tell lies about him, and do their best to starve him by hurting his reputation.” Fiske had long been the victim of this form of malignant persecution, with what justice is obvious. This little cluster of volumes, thrown off in the intervals of almost unceasing work, shed light not merely on his learning, but on the fundamental seriousness and earnestness of his nature. The problems, the most difficult and the most important of those that face us, he approaches with due reverence, and discusses with the sincerity that was the foundation of his character. Possibly, had he lived longer, he might have returned to a fuller exposition of the principles here briefly stated; but his message of hopefulness was at least clearly given to the world, and perhaps its brevity makes it only the more impressive. Certainly no one can read these essays and their interesting prefaces without renewed respect for their author as a student and as a thinker.

The doctrine of evolution found in him one of its most ardent defenders and most thorough expounders. It came into force just when Fiske was growing up, and enabled him to coördinate what were already very considerable acquirements. All that he wrote was permeated with its spirit. To its influence we may ascribe a good part of his never failing optimism. He was able to look forward with enviable confidence to the exclusion of evil from the scheme of things, with the apparent support of an irrefutable hypothesis and all the cheerfulness of an exceptionally happy temperament. His physical health, his exceptional strength, his great powers of endurance, his untiring capacity for work, his lack of irritability, enabled him to look at things largely ; but it was the joyousness of the new philosophy that especially animated him, and he conveyed to his readers his own delight in his work.

Untiring he certainly was; with every one of the last twenty years of his life shortened by his enforced journeyings, he was compelled to work incessantly while at home. In his house at Cambridge he had formed a delightful library, and there he sat in a little alcove, working till late in the night, his only exercise being to cross the room for a book or a pipe. Outdoor exercise he almost entirely abandoned under stress of work and increase of size which made movement difficult. Near his library was a small conservatory which was under his special care, and there he liked to pass a few moments in the intervals of his work. In another room was the piano, on which he would at times play a little to rest his mind, to change the current of his thoughts. On Sundays he would see his friends, who retain the tenderest memory of talks with him, when he would wind deep into a subject, illuminate it with solid learning easily borne and with merry humor; he was the most charming of companions, frank, honest, sympathetic, absolutely devoid of vanity, always cheerful. When things went ill with him, as they did for many years before his merit was recognized, and he was looked down upon as a somewhat dangerous person, he never lost heart. When Tyndall came to this country to lecture, he and Fiske could laugh together at the accusation of atheism which was brought with some success against the American. They both knew how full of fine irony life is. When Fiske became famous and honors were crowding upon him, he enjoyed them without undue elation. He thought of what he hoped to do, not of what he had done.

Thomas Sergeant Perry.