A Schoolmaster
THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB
JAMES GREENLEAF CROSWELL was by birth and descent a New Englander. He was the grandson of old Simon Greenleaf, a professor of law, who taught in the Harvard Law School some seventy or eighty years ago. Professor Greenleaf wrote a book on the law of evidence, which at once took rank as a classic, and stands on every lawyer’s bookshelf next to Rent and Blackstone. Greenleaf is to the law of evidence what Cicero is to oratory, or Moliere to comedy; his name is known wherever the English race has carried the Common Law. There is a tradition, piously handed down at the Harvard Law School, that old Greenleaf was endowed with many social gifts, — entertaining, humorous, witty and delightful, when out of the lecture room. He is entitled to be kindly remembered, for he put all his dryness into his book, and becpieathed the graces of his mind to his grandson.
James Croswell was born at Portland. He graduated at Harvard College in 1873, studied abroad for some years in Germany, and then returned to Harvard to serve as instructor and assistant professor in the Classics. In 1887 he left Cambridge and went to New York to become head master of the Brearley School for Girls. In that position he remained until his death.
The part of the schoolmaster is anomalous. It belongs to a category of its own. Nature creates the relation between child and parent, brother and sister, niece and spinster aunt, and feels her responsibility; she strengthens the bond by instinct on the one side, by dependence on the other. The ties between friend and friend are wrought by mutual attraction and voluntary choice; they need no tending, no corroborant artifice. The relation between schoolmaster and pupil is of a third sort, created neither by Nature, nor by voluntary choice. It is rarely enriched by affection, or made capable of enduring beyond graduation day. The relation is difficult because it is anomalous; and at best seldom attains to the fine perfection of which it might be capable. The reason for this maladjustment is, that the business of a schoolmaster is neither a trade nor a craft; it is an art which requires a delicate sensitiveness, a half-divine intuition, and a self-consecration, hard to find among men and women. Now and again there is a favorable juncture of the stars, and a schoolmaster is born. That is a rare event and should be celebrated with rejoicings.
Is there a scene in one of Plato’s dialogues, — or does a misty memory of undergraduate Greek lead me astray, — in which Socrates and his friends discourse upon the one person necessary to the welfare of a state? One speaker declares that the priest, who performs the sacred ceremonies and hands down the sacred traditions, is the one necessary man. A second maintains that it is the general who defends the State from its enemies; a third, that it is the poet whose verses shall glorify the City to after-times. But Socrates says that the one man needful is the schoolmaster, since he combines the functions of the other three: he defends the State better than the general, because he forms that which is the real strength of the State — the character of its people; he prepares for the future glory of the City quite as well as the poet, for he instils decorum, and breeding into the parents of future citizens; he exercises the functions of a priest, for day by day he ministers to the souls of his pupils. And (if I am right) Socrates goes on to say that the teacher must be rich in insight and wisdom, firm of character, kindly in disposition, gentle in manner, quick to praise every excellence, slow to blame any fault, a lover of innocence, beauty, and unselfishness; indeed a man who loves these qualities so much that, like a bee hunting for honey in a hollyhock, he comes out covered with their golden pollen.
Such a schoolmaster was James Greenleaf Croswell. How did it come about? How did Nature so happily divine the needs of hundreds of unborn girls, and bestow upon a youth, long before their birth, the qualities that should make him their spiritual guide, their worldly philosopher, their tender friend? How much did he owe to old Simon Greenleaf and his Puritan progenitors? How much to the New England atmosphere? How much to Harvard College and familiar intercourse with the Classics? His education — if the tree may be judged by its fruit — was admirable. He was bred on Homer, Plato, and Aristophanes; he w’as on terms with the Bible, that to a modern youth would seem of fanat ical familiarity; and upon this cultivation, like jewels enhanced by their setting, sparkled his native humor, irony, and genial human sympathies.
The habit of his mind did not seem like that of a native New Englander. One would have thought he had been born in Ephesus and had paced the Ionian shore with Heraclitus, watching the dark purple outline of Samos against the golden glory of the setting sun, and discoursing on the universal flux of things. Or, he might have been a pupil of Plato, meditating upon t houghts of the master in company with seekers after truth from Argos and Thebes, or serenely holding the balance while they disputed with sout hern heat upon the nature of the soul. Socrates would have rejoiced in him. One can see in the mind’s eye that ugly, awkward, inspired old man, just back from a hot walk to the Piraeus, pausing on the threshold of a disciple’s house to survey the assembled guests with an eager eye, hoping to discover Croswell among them. Must we not believe that Pythagoras was right? Did not Croswell once sit in that immortal company, bandying wit, exchanging playful or daring hypotheses, and unraveling the high concerns of the spirit?
Croswell was an admirable schoolmaster because he was an admirable friend; he was serious and inspiring in the weightier concerns of friendship, and nimble as Quicksilver in performing its lighter obligations. His company metamorphosed a walk in the city, so (hat on coming home you vaguely felt that you had been strolling down a country lane; it would have made a dentist’s parlor a place of agreeable expectancy; at a teetotal dinner, if talk, imagination, and hilarity are evidence, it turned water into time-honored Falernian. He was supremely indifferent to the vulgar prizes of life; he probably did not know whether you possessed them or not; he was taken up with the knowledge that you and he were companions in the marvelous experience of life, and that you were in need of stimulus, appreciation, encouragement. He gave prodigally of his best; and displayed a lowly and surprised gratitude for any sympathy returned. He imparted wisdom, as fire its heat, by mere proximity. In his friendship and daily behavior, there was no trace of his profession; nevertheless he taught everybody who knew him one great lesson, — a lesson emphasized by that sad, interesting, noble face which recalled the effigies of Lorenzo de’ Medici, — that pain, heroically borne, is the greatest of teachers, and that without its lessons the education of the soul remains incomplete.
Our civilization lays stress on things quite different from those on which Socrates and Plato laid stress; it seldom recognizes schoolmasters as the most important men in the State; it does not care overmuch for simplicity, modesty, or indifference to notoriety and applause; it pays little heed to the sower who quietly sows the seed of what men live upon; it values other things more congenial to it. So Croswell departed from us quietly, modestly, as he lived; leaving hundreds of girls and young women with richer lives because he lived, and many men wondering at their good fortune to have had such a friend, and rejoicing in a wealth of happy memories.
H. D. S.