Paul Shorey

I

THE shrinkage of classical studies during the last fifty years in the field of education is comparable to the disappearance of the buffalo from the prairies in earlier days. Long ago Greek and Latin ceased to be undisputed masters of the grazing grounds. Year by year their terrain grows more restricted; but they have not yet come as near extinction as did the buffalo, and the mental attitude which leads to the public interest in the preservation of game birds and the gorilla will maintain sanctuaries for the study of the classical tongues. Their survival has been helped by ancillary subjects, first philology, then ethnology, now chiefly archæology. It is of interest in these circumstances to study a man with a mind of great distinction, fully aware of what is going on in the world and not liking much of it, widely read in many fields, who believed that the neglect of the classics is a calamity, and who was ready and able to assume the offensive with devastating effect.

Paul Shorey was born in Davenport, Iowa, in 1857. The family moved to Chicago, where he had his early education. He graduated from Harvard in 1878. He read law for two years in his father’s office in Chicago, being admitted to the bar in 1880. But the practice of law had little appeal, and he soon went to Germany, where, after studying at various universities, he took his doctorate at Munich in 1884.

There are certain illuminating comments, gathered here and there from his writings, to be made on this compact little summary of his early years. Indeed the most logical way to make a portrait of a man like Shorey would be to present a mosaic of his own words. His life was of the mind and his adventures were those of the soul among masterpieces, though he disliked Anatole France so much, in spite of his Latinity, that I have a qualm in using the phrase. He explains that his youthful environment was so liberal that he was not obliged by the law of reaction to become a radical in later life. ‘I was not brought up,’ he says, ‘on the Main Street of Gopher Prairie or Winesburg, Ohio. I was not told that it is sinful to play cards or drink beer or dance or smoke cigarettes or exhibit your ankles. I was not compelled to memorize the Catechism. . . . Instead of prescribed Josephus or Fox’s Book of Martyrs I read The Origin of Species aloud to my mother at the age of nine. As John Stuart Mill modestly observed of Plato’s Theœtetus, which his father made him read at six or eight, I am not sure that I understood it all.’

As a schoolboy he went through his Shelley stage and his Herbert Spencer stage. At Harvard he was set to read Schopenhauer and von Hartmann, and he found the Harvard professors ‘even then more intelligent than their failure to educate Henry Adams makes them appear.’ And at Harvard he was allowed to find his way to Plato. ‘Plato taught me the meaning of reasonable argument and delivered me from Herbert Spencer by the remark that when you meet disciples who proclaim that their guru is omniscient, there is always some illusion or hocus-pocus involved.’ Such were Shorey’s infantile fixations.

It is obvious that he did not care to devote his life to law, since he soon abandoned it, but I think his writings show that the law was not altogether uncongenial, that he had what we call the legal mind, that he would have been eminent at the bar had he stuck to it, and that in his controversial writing the careful preparation of his case, the study of every possible move of his adversary, and the jeu servé of his dialectic are not unrelated to his legal training. He says in Platonism and the History of Science: ‘Critical judgment of the meaning of books, documents, the written word, is one of the latest, rarest and most easily lost of human attainments. Lawyers cultivate it with great precision in a narrow field.’ During the course of his law studies he was sufficiently interested to coöperate in the translation of the third volume of von Holst’s Constitutional History of the United States.

It is the lawyer in Shorey who bids us distinguish between intemperate thought and intemperate language, as when the London Times reviewer describes as outrageous Henry Arthur Jones’s address to Bernard Shaw beginning, ‘Face me and answer me, most poisonous of all the poisonous haters of England.’ This style, comments Shorey, will injure Jones’s case with those readers who cannot be brought to see that intemperate speech is not so much saying a thing intemperately as saying an intemperate thing. ‘By this interpretation everything that Mr. Bernard Shaw writes is more intemperate than Mr. Jones’s fiercest denunciation of him.’ A nice point for the jury.

Many a defendant in court, however confident of his case, has doubtless been amazed at its full beauty as displayed by his learned counsel. Few defendants, I fancy, could have been more gratified than Mr. Bryan if he had lived to read Shorey’s defense of him at the bar of public opinion, printed in the Atlantic Monthly of October 1928 under the title ‘Evolution — A Conservative’s Apology,’ a striking example of his forensic skill. First he makes evolution as conceived by the popular mind ridiculous. ‘Evolution has a good press. . . . There is, in fact, no cause that is so immune from criticism to-day, that is so sacred a cow. . . . An ambitious young professor may safely assail Christianity or the Constitution of the United States or George Washington or female chastity or marriage or the defense of your native land or the acceptance by the university of the interest and dividends that pay his salary. . . . But he must not apologize for Bryan. . . , It is not done.’ He then distinguishes between the careful, critical, controlled science of the laboratory and the extension to the philosophy of the layman of a helpful working hypothesis. He remarks that ’Mr. Bernard Shaw’s preface to Back to Methuselah is far sillier and, for all its flashes of epigram, more muddle-headed than anything in Bryan.’ And then the eloquent peroration: ‘What ground for rejoicing is there in the philosophy of those who persistently admonish undergraduates that any doctrine but uncompromising mechanism is adverse to the progress of science, and that there must be no implication of any break between man and the animals in either biology or psychology? If that teaching is true, the only logical position is despair or forgetfulness of both past and future in the present, or the silent disdain of the French philosopher poet: —

As to Shorey’s German studies, we may say of him as he said of Gildersleeve: ‘He was, when he pleased, a scholar of the German type, but he never succumbed to the weakness of its more recent developments, the pyramiding of hypotheses and the suppositing of conjectures by misconstruing Greek. He knew Greek too well for that.’ He was, he says, ‘over-fitted’ at Harvard for what he found in Germany. He went through the forms, and wrote in excellent Latin his doctoral dissertation, De Platonis Idearum Doctrina, thus taking the first overt step on the road which was to lead him not only to the position of one of the world’s authorities on Plato, but to the formation of his steadfast philosophy of life.

II

After Shorey’s return to this country, he taught Greek and Latin at Bryn Mawr College from 1885 to 1892. Not only from the point of view of his fortunate students at Bryn Mawr but from his own point of view this statement needs a good deal of expansion. Speaking at Bryn Mawr in 1922 on the occasion of Miss Thomas’s retirement from the presidency, he said: ‘It happens that to me, an uprooted, detached, MiddleWestern Yankee American, the tower of Bryn Mawr, glimpsed from Rosemont on the Pennsylvania Railway, is the only local association in the world that quickens my pulse.'

Through Miss Thomas’s genius for selection, the opening year of Bryn Mawr, 1885, saw in the faculty a group of young men and women of an intellectual standing out of all proportion to Bryn Mawr’s endowment. Most, of these were within a few years drawn away to high positions in the universities. A large proportion became outstanding figures in their several fields. One of them, incidentally, became president of the United States. As the number of students was small, we were taught in small classes by these unusual people in person. I was a freshman in 1885; I knew little of the working of colleges, nothing of colleges for women (I had never seen a college girl until I became one), and I took for granted the heady brew that was my daily drink, and supposed, until further knowledge of the university world showed me otherwise, that all freshmen were taught in small classes by teachers of the first order of distinction.

We had other instruction in Greek and Latin. Early Bryn Mawrtyrs will remember the source of it with affection, but I have space to speak of none but Shorey. Greek and Latin at that time were perfectly respectable subjects; nobody challenged their commanding position in education. And in Shorey’s view they were not only the vehicles of great literature but the fount and origin of all the great literature of Europe. Thus we were not so much aware of reading dead, effete, negligible stuff as of dealing with the earliest examples of a continuous tradition. With Latin, Shorey worked forward and back — back to the Greeks, forward to the Italians, the French, the Germans, the English. The stack of books under his arm which was an unalterable part of his silhouette on the campus became something of a joke, but we had sense enough to know that those books were forming a life line to keep us from, drowning in the great stream of European culture.

Shorey was short and wiry in build. All his movements were quick. Even such static features as his spectacles and his pointed beard seemed to radiate vitality. He entered the classroom each time as vigorously as if he had never done such a thing before and were charmed by the novelty of it. With him came an atmosphere of urgency, the sense that life is short.

Plato lays it down, and it is a hard saying, that one of the essential qualities of a philosopher is a retentive memory. This quality Shorey was born with, and it had already in 1885 extended itself over a wide field. Later it became truly formidable. It was at our service at Bryn Mawr. Another of his natural gifts was a sense of rhythm. From Pindar to Catullus he showed us the meaning of metrical form. Let no one picture one of Shorey’s Latin classes as a group of young women sighing over Lesbia’s sparrow, but as wrestling with all the metres, learning the Odes by heart, reciting the Carmen Saeculare antiphonally, and shuddering from a false quantity as from an adder.

I do not wish to imply that all became accomplished Latinists; each cup took as much as it could hold. While I have been writing this paper I have received letters from his students of those days, most of them expressing that great debt, never to be directly repaid, that one owes to a great teacher; but there are adverse critics, too. One says he gave all his attention to the best students, leaving the poorer ones to perish in the wilderness. Perhaps he did, and it may be pedagogically indefensible. Or is it? Another writes that she learned very little Latin and Greek from him because he was so intent on getting good English translations, and that he did not teach her to think but intensified her natural tendency to absorb other people’s ideas.

Both these points, I fancy, are well taken. I was not intelligent enough to notice them for myself. I accepted his assumption that we knew Latin and Greek and struggled to justify the assumption; I shut my eyes and opened my mouth for the reception of his ideas and strove to assort and relate them. Well, all this happened when we were very young, Shorey as well as his students. He liked teaching serious, enthusiastic, hard-working girls, for such were college girls in that early time; and his edition of the Odes and Epodes of Horace is dedicated to the Bryn Mawr students of those years.

But if Shorey loved and admired the Latin writers, took infinite pains in cultivating our ear for them by admirable reading of their lovely rhythms and by admirable translations into equivalent English metres, so that his students felt ever after that Latin verse in general wras, as Morley said of Horace’s Epistles, ‘a delicious kind of writing that never has been and never can be excelled,’ he still never lost sight of the derivative character of Latin literature as a whole. He was already primarily a Hellenist. Tired of the pother and fuss made over the imaginary difficulty of learning Greek, due to the wasteful methods of teaching in the schools, he called for volunteers to help him demonstrate how quickly the thing can be done. Four such volunteers started in January, from scratch, not. knowing even the alphabet. They were carrying their routine college work as well. In June an examination was set for them by another instructor. All passed with high marks, and three of them went on to majors in Greek.

In my senior year I was one of a small class who read Plato’s Republic with him. I remember it fell to my lot to translate the closing passage ending ‘and thus both here and in that journey of a thousand years, whereof I have told you, we shall fare well.’ As we shut our books on what is surely the greatest prose ever written by man, I felt I had come in sight of a solution of the riddle of the world. My sense of obligation to Shorey crystallized at that moment and has never dissolved.

When the University of Chicago was founded in 1892, the president of the new institution, William Rainey Harper, gathered together a group of good men to form the first faculty. Among them was Shorey, called to a professorship of Greek. Soon afterward, in 1895, he married one of his graduate students, Miss Emma Gilbert, who had come to the new institution as fellow in Latin. At the University of Chicago, Shorey continued to pursue his research and to teach almost until the time of his death on April 24, 1934. Due expansion of these sentences would be an account of a life so fruitful, so full of the radioactivity we may nearly call genius and of the personal features we call character, that one would have to be half scholar, half novelist, to achieve it.

Let it be said, in the first place, that his marriage was of the most fortunate; in the second place that he became by virtue of his position ever more emphatically a Hellenist and by virtue of his taste and convictions a Platonist.

Shortly after removing to Chicago he suggested that I apply for a fellowship in Greek there, which I did, successfully, in 1893. Thus, after a few years of study abroad and of teaching, I was again in touch with him and better able to appreciate him. It was interesting to note that his classroom methods were as well adapted to men as to girls, to graduates as to undergraduates. One of the men who studied with him at Chicago long after my time, President George Norlin of the University of Colorado, said of him: ‘Paul Shorey was the greatest teacher I have ever known. Research was an effortless habit of his ever-growing mind; writing beautiful prose was an unfailing delight; but his greatest joy was in his teaching. At first I thought he meant to dazzle us, but I was wrong. He was doing what the great teacher does. He was relating the subject in hand to the past and present, giving it its due place both as a product and as an influence. And what we students got from Shorey above all was a sense of humanism as a continuing tradition.’

I agree with Dr. Norlin that Shorey enjoyed himself most as a teacher, and his tradition as a great teacher will be handed on by all who wTere ever taught by him. But during these years he was also wrriting and publishing at a great rate. For twenty-five years he edited Classical Philology, and no number appeared without a contribution from him, an article, a note, a text criticism, or a review. His status as one of the authoritative Platonists was established in 1903 by his treatise called The Unity of Plato’s Thought. I suppose the world in general is not excited by the fact that there have been from time to time attempts to arrange the chronology of Plato’s works on the basis of this or that theory of shifts in his point of view. Certainly in some of his dialogues Plato talks about the famous ‘ideas’ and in others he does n’t. In some dialogues he seems more representative of Socrates than in others. It is a great game, capable of endless variations, like the game of splitting up the Homeric poems.

Renan, speaking of the classics, says that one of the reasons they are good reading is that they are not ‘ professional, confessional, or passional.’ I am inclined to think that Shorey was a Unitarian professionally, confessionally (by heredity at least), and passionally. Of Homer’s unity, with necessary qualifications, he had n’t a doubt. Of Plato he felt that he belonged to the class of thinkers whose philosophy was fixed from their first maturity rather than to the class of those who receive a fresh revelation every decade. He held that Plato is the wisest of philosophical writers because he has no philosophy, but simply a method of philosophizing. It would be idle to catalogue the works in which Shorey defends and attacks with the swordplay of d’Artagnan. Diès, the distinguished French Platonist, discovering them and studying them with delight, celebrates them in one of the Rude Bulletins. ‘ C’est à tous les amis du Platonisme et des lettres anciennes,’ he says, ‘que je serais heureux d’avoir, non pas révilé, mais rappele, ce qu’a fait pour Platon Tun des plus alertes, des plus clairs et des plus français parmi ces “ cosmopolitan scholars” des Universités d’ Amérique.’

III

In 1930 the first volume of Shorey’s translation of the Republic appeared in the Loeb Library. The second volume appeared in 1935, after his death. Of the great Jowett translation of the dialogues through which most people know Plato he had spoken generously when reviewing the third edition: ‘It is not given to every man to compose (in original or in translation) five volumes of English prose of unfailing propriety, lucidity and charm, never deviating into vulgarity or rhetoric, but always preserving as by Hellenic instinct the just mean and the exquisite urbanity of the best literary society. If we except the English Bible, it is probably safe to say that no modern literature possesses any translation of like extent and literary excellence.’ And of Jowett’s own utterance, ‘Who can read unmoved the lovely passage . . . in which the translator takes leave of his laborious task and reluctantly severs his lifelong communion with the spirit of the greatest teacher who has ever appealed to the reason of man? This beautiful page will remain classic; it marks the supreme perfection of nineteenth-century English prose.’ But this tribute is succeeded by nine pages of notation of errors of translation, three pages treating of those found in the Republic. There was room in the world for another English version of this work.

According to the plan of the Loeb Library, and to Shorey’s own programme, there is no place in his book for voluminous analyses and commentaries like those of Jowett, but the two introductions, to the first and second volumes, have the authentic Shorey ring. In a review of Humanism and America, Shorey said, ‘I personally prefer more trenchancy, concreteness and a greater wealth and range of illustration.’ Those qualities are present in these introductions. As for the notes printed at the bottom of the pages, I began recently to glance through them for old time’s sake, and soon sat down to read them from end to end. They arc learned, brief, lucid; they knit together the ancient and the modern, and they are amusing. One example, volume one, page 67; ‘Justice not being primarily a self-regarding virtue, like prudence, is of course another’s good. Cf. Aristotle, Eth. Nic. 1130 a 3; 1134 b 5. Thrasymachus ironically accepts the formula, adding the cynical or pessimistic comment, “but one’s own harm,” for which see 392 B, Eurip. Heracleid. 1-5, and Isocrates’ protest (viii 32); Bion (Diog. Laert. iv.7.48) wittily defined beauty as “ the other fellow’s good”; which recalls Woodrow Wilson’s favorite limerick, and the definition of business as “l’argent des autres.”’

Plato’s banishment of the poets from his ideal city is as good a starting point as any for the mention of an odd thing that happened in Shorey’s development, a failure of sympathy for the contemporary. Of Plato’s puritanic decision Shorey says: ‘It was his own sensitiveness that made him fear its [poetry’s] power. He himself wrote verse in his youth. His imagery, the invention of his myths, and the poetic quality of his prose rank him with the world’s major poets. He quotes poetry with exquisite and fond aptness throughout his wordings. And there are no more wistful words than his dismissal of the supreme poet, Homer.’

Shorey never banished poetry from the kingdom of his mind. But as far as I can gather from his printed words the great stream of creative work which had carried his spirit through the centuries began, in the nineties, to disappear, as far as he was concerned, in the sand, or, even earlier, to bear poisonous germs in its current. The Russians? He said to the students of Durham University: ‘I like to believe also that you are immune to the still more dangerous infatuation for things Russian that has even found expression in the Atlantic Monthly. Whatever the artistic charms of a few exceptional books, a people who could produce or complacently contemplate its own image in such a literature was headed towards the abyss.’ And in his article on ‘Literature and Modern Life,’ printed in the Atlantic, he said, ‘There must be some cause and effect between the doom that overtook educated Russians and the thoughts, the images, the formulas, in which their literature had been steeping their minds for fifty years.’ Mr. Louis Untermeyer’s list of the poets of 1927 amused him: ‘This recalls to a classicist Hesiod’s innocent remark that there are three thousand slim-ankled daughters of Nereus whose names it is difficult for a mortal man to remember, though the neighbors who dwell round about know them.’

Three classes of contemporary writers he dismisses, the intellectually inadequate, those primarily interested in sex, and the ‘progressive.’ I think we are driven to conclude that mere contemporaneity in itself was somehow distasteful to Shorey; that is to say, that he objected to things in modern writers that he did not object to in the classics. Under the first head we cannot make a comparison because a very small proportion of the merely silly in classical literature has come down to us from the great periods; we have chiefly the best of it to deal with, so that Shorey’s objection to the mediocre does not apply. But the frank treatment of sex is found in authors concerning whom Shorey has no caution to give. He greatly admired Aristophanes and translated him wittily, with true humor and with a selective tact that avoided offense. But it cannot be said that Aristophanes had a Victorian standard of propriety. Of Plato himself Athenæus remarked that he wrote worse things in the Symposium than the poets he banished. Shorey has no complaint to make of the Symposium, but when Proust writes of these things they are nauseating.

As to ‘progress,’ the Greeks certainly set the ball rolling. They first of men, as Sir Henry Maine and Marett pointed out, exploded the tabu and realized that social and political arrangements are man-made and can be modified by men. Granted that the Greeks made a poor showing as political organizers. The democracy that put Socrates to death disgusted Plato and Shorey. ‘There is nothing sound or right in any present politics,’ says Plato (Shorey concurring). ‘I say the philosopher remains quiet, minds his own affair, and, as it were, standing aside under shelter of a wall in a storm and blast of dust and sleet, is content if any way he may keep himself free from iniquity through this life and take his departure with fair hope when the end comes.’ Nevertheless the men of Marathon fought for government by the consent of the governed. We can’t have it both ways. ‘Progressive’ society may go backwards as often as forwards, but the alternative, as we see today, is to lie down and yield to Darius.

To show how unsettling for his day was Plato’s own programme, and also to show Shorey’s talent for condensation, I am tempted to quote his summary of the contents of the Republic. ‘The conception of society as an organism, with the dependence of laws and institutions upon national temperament and customs, the omnipotence of public opinion, the division of labor and the reasons for it, the necessity of specialization, the formation of a trained standing army, the limitation of the right of private property, the industrial and political equality of women, the reform of the letter of the creeds to save the spirit, the proscription of unwholesome art and literature, the reorganization of education, eugenics, the kindergarten method, the distinction between higher and secondary education, the endowment of research, the application of the higher mathematics to astronomy and physics — all this and much more may be read in it by him who runs.’

It was all very well to administer such shocks to the fourth century before Christ in Athens, but an equally daring programme to-day would not have suited Shorey at all. He spent a great deal of energy in trying to make his students turn back with him and realize what sort of reading was for their own good. ‘ They have all the catchwords of Nietzsche’s, Freud’s, and Schopenhauer’s lightest and most cynical essays at their tongues’ end, but have never read a line of John Stuart Mill. Mill is out of fashion — there is no other reason. For there is quite certainly no better, saner, more edifying, instructive, disciplinary, and formative reading for a young man than the four volumes of Mill’s Essays and Dissertations .’ No doubt.

This paradoxical attitude of Shorey’s is associated in my mind with that of another eminent scholar of our day, quite different from that of Shorey, but as interesting in its way. A. E. Housman, according to his biographer, said that a scholar had no more concern with the merits of the literature with which he deals than Linnæus or Newton with the beauties of the countryside or of the starry heavens. Thus he wrote The Shropshire Lad with one hand and emended texts with the other, letting neither know what the other was doing.

IV

‘I have but twice,’ wrote Shorey in jesting earnest, ‘had the good fortune to speak on the popular side of any question ; once when we were at war, and once at Hull House when I told an audience of Greeks that trailing clouds of glory did they come from Greece, which was their home. But otherwise all my life I have been defending lost causes, leading forlorn hopes, and protesting against the excesses of contemporary fads and fashions.’ If this statement were taken literally, one would be surprised at the apparent appetite of all sorts of audiences for a presentation of the unpopular side. He was in demand as a speaker on serious occasions and on festive ones. He spoke wittily always and to the point. He was chosen to give the Phi Beta Kappa address at Harvard in 1931. He took his turn at the Harris Lectures at Northwestern University, the Turnbull Lectures on poetry at Johns Hopkins, the Sather Lectures in California, the Lowell Lectures in Boston. In 1913 he was the Roosevelt Exchange Professor in Berlin, where he lectured in German.

In 1924 he lectured on Aristotle at four Belgian universities and was awarded the rare distinction of an honorary degree from the University of Liége. In Paris he delivered a lecture in French on the rôle of philosophy in French literature. He was made Associé de l’Académie Royale de Belgique. He received a dozen degrees in the United States. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

If in spite of this volume of enthusiastic recognition Shorey had the feeling of being in general on the unpopular side, this was, I suppose, based partly on his temperamental dislike of the contemporary point of view and partly on his struggle to arrest the decay of classical studies, expressed constantly in his speech and writings, but perhaps most emphatically in his The Assault on Humanism, printed as several consecutive papers in the Atlantic Monthly and then published as one of the Atlantic Monographs. This vigorous document was not primarily a reassertion of the unique excellence of the classics. Things had gone too far for that. Shorey was fighting with his back to the wall against the final attack of the ‘ moderns,’ the movement to expel Latin from the schools. It is here, I think, that he gave the supreme example of what he could have accomplished at the bar. He had read the whole literature of his opponents’ case and was ready to meet them point by point. He said some hard things about President Eliot and Mr. Flexner and had some hard things said about him in return. Randolph Bourne derided him. He became a synonym for the fossilized. ‘Ain’t he mediæval?’whispered an unknown lady to Mrs. Shorey while both were listening to one of his addresses.

But wherever the multitudes of his students went they carried his name and fame. Better than his formal arguments for the classics was the demonstration he gave in every classroom and on every platform of what classical culture should mean. The lassitude born of routine could get no hold on him. His discouragements themselves were vivacious. Sometimes his students were glassyeyed with apprehension, for he could be formidable, but they never felt his mind faltering in attention to their efforts, however inept. And for a successful response on the part of a student he seemed to feel a personal gratitude, as if his life had been made happier by it. The friendship that grew up in the classroom between him and every responsive student was carried outside it.

Two examples of his warm-heartedness that have come to me while I have been engaged in writing about him are both picturesque and typical. One has to do with a wedding. A man and a girl, both graduate students of Shorey’s, became engaged. ‘We were both temporarily homeless,’ writes the fiancé, now administrator of a girls’ school. ‘We planned to go alone to some minister, go through the ceremony prosaically, and dash off on a train. Dr. and Mrs. Shorey intervened. Our wedding, they said, must be something to look back to, a memory to be cherished. Their home was ours for that day, the big sunny living room was decorated with roses — pink, single-petaled they were, and very fragrant; our best-loved friends were there, and there were even presents and a wedding breakfast.’

The other example has to do with a funeral. A friend who, apparently, was a backslider from the religious ideas of his family was buried from Dr. Shorey’s house. A witness writes: ‘The minister, his mother’s pastor and therefore chosen, was incredibly inept, to put it mildly — intimated that if saved he would owe it to his mother’s prayers. Paul came forward and said that he could not let his friend go from his house for the last time on that word, and for ten or fifteen minutes he spoke. There was no breaking down, no hesitation — nothing further invidious toward the clergyman — just a marvelous recital that was like watching the restoration of u damaged picture, or rather like Socrates coming to the rescue of the argument. His face was quite white, but his voice never trembled. H. B. said as we drove to the cemetery, “When I die I want a professor of Greek to speak for me."'

A quite different episode illustrates one of the most attractive traits in human nature — an amiable inconsistency. There were several grounds on which Shorey disapproved of Gilbert Murray, although he did not sympathize with Shaw’s remark concerning him: ‘Few Greek professors know Greek, and none of them know anything else.’ But Murray is one of those who rend Homer asunder. Moreover, he has secured a prodigious prestige for Euripides, whom Shorey thought the least of the dramatists. When Plato in the Republic says, ‘Not for nothing is tragedy in general esteemed wise, and Euripides beyond other tragedians,’ Shorey’s note is, ‘This is plainly ironical and cannot be used by the admirers of Euripides.’ Elsewhere Shorey remarks that Euripides is as full of ideas as Bernard Shaw, which, coming from him, is abusive language. Also Murray is tainted with Jane Harrison’s doctrine of the twofold aspect of Greek religion, which was anathema to Shorey. The notion that the first chorus of (Edipus the King is full of ‘hoots and cries’ intended to ward off pestilence was more than he could bear. And finally Murray’s internationalism was not in harmony with Shorey’s opinions. But, in the summer of 1916, Shorey and Murray both gave lectures at Columbia University. They became friends at once.

I cannot prove or believe that Shorey changed his mind altogether about Murray’s heresies, but I note that whereas before that date he called The Rise of the Greek Epic ‘fantastic,’ he wrote later, ‘If you turn to Professor Murray’s delightful Euripides and His Age, you will read that Euripides is the child of a strong and splendid tradition and is, together with Plato, the first of all rebels against it.’ It would be hard to think of a greater compliment from Shorey to Murray (and Euripides) than this coupling of the most admired authors of both men.

Professor Murray writes me that after the meeting in 1916 he sent Shorey one of his books with a friendly inscription. ‘He wrote me a charming letter cursing himself for having written a violent and, as he now thought, unjust attack on the book.’

Shorey’s last major work, What Plato Said, was published in 1933, the year before his death. With the completion of this book he enjoyed a good fortune not always granted to wide, subtle, and many-sided thinkers: he presented as a whole the main results of his lifework while his powers were still at the full. It contains, in the author’s words, ‘a resume of the entire body of the Platonic writings.’ His general view of the relation of the dialogues is reaffirmed, and there is the customary aura of cross reference and analogies, ancient and modern, which was the atmosphere in which Shorey’s mind breathed. This work was published in his seventy-fifth year. The Rockefeller Foundation furnished him with secretaries and research assistants; the readers and compositors of the University of Chicago Press cooperated to extirpate errors from some twenty thousand references. But the verve and fire are Shorey’s. It is not an old man’s book. The immense learning drawn upon is as readily available as if it had been acquired the week before, and he is ready to fight the old battles at the drop of the hat.

I used to think that when the time came the words fittest to be spoken about Shorey would be the lines from one of the poets to whom he would have given a passport to his city of the mind; and we should say of him that he had so striven that

But the forts of folly have become as strong as the Maginot Line. And what news have we of a projected rescue? Hero and there are people who read Greek as innocently as they read French or English. Lawrence of Arabia and Ronald Storrs, among the distractions of war, quarreled over the relative merits of Theocritus and Aristophanes. But the New York Times of April 1, 1938, says that at. the beginning of the century the average college student had two Greek courses in his four years. Ten years later it was down to one course per man. In 1920 it was down to one Greek course for one out of every five college students. The laurels have long been cut down, and with them have gone many pleasant woodland walks. Now that the heavy timber too has disappeared from all the mountainsides, we have to look forward to the dust bowl. It is possible that we are already in it. I now think the words for Shorey are those of Socrates, who, when facing death, said he would willingly die many times for the privilege of talking with the great dead. Whether Shorey is so engaged or whether he is enjoying the dreamless sleep that Socrates envisaged as an alternative, he is faring well.