Bliss Perry

by ROLLO WALTER BROWN

BLISS PERRY lived actively for most of a century, and came to be much in the thought of America. His years as he lived along in them seemed to possess a great evenness of quality, lint now when it is possible to consider his experience in its completeness, one quarter-century in the second half of his long life emerges as a period specially impressive.

Everything he brought to this mature period from his youth was New England — New England at its best. His father was a warm-tempered SeotchIrish professor of economies and history at Williams College. His mother was a serene, thoughtful woman known to everyone for her graciousness. The half-dozen children one girl — and these parents const it uted what the youngest son once declared was “the most human family that ever was.” Sometimes at the table — another brother has recorded — when the arguing promised to become riotous, the father slapped his list down and cautioned: “Remember, this is a Christian family! Now go ahead!” He and his wife promoted freedom, but they also kept their children reminded that there was something in life of undeniable size and importance.

Bliss Perry, older than his brothers but younger than his sister, lived with awareness in this world of bright horizons where human existence was treated as something very honorable. and studied and fished and hunted and observed the lives of birds and other wild creatures until he was a gawky boy ready for boarding school. Then boarding school — Greylock Institute, only a little more than out of sight of his father’s house —was just as essentially New England as home had been. And Williams College was a continuation of this New England of open skies and invitations to meditate. From birth he had lived where it was taken for granted that things of the mind, of the spirit, must have first consideration.

He taught for a time with unusual success at Williams, the family college. Then for several years he taught at Princeton Eniversity, where he was likewise successful, and honored, and much remembered.

For ten years he was editor of the Atlantic (18991909). The Victorians of the nineteenth century had thinned out, and in America the young novelists and poets of the twentieth century had not yet found their voice. Yet in the one decade he attracted to the Atlantic men and women who gave a rich and diversified record of the literary, intellectual, and political life of the time in America, with some points of view from elsewhere in the world well presented.

His contributors included John Burroughs, Brooks Adams, Grover Cleveland, Henry James, Booker T. Washington, A. Lawrence Lowell, Charles Eliot Norton, Gamaliel Bradford, Charles W. Eliot, Edmund Gosse, Edith Wharton, Sarah Orne Jewett, Lafcadio Hearn, William James, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, William Vaughn Moody, Mary Johnston, John Buchan, Alice Meynell, Woodrow Wilson, Paul Elmer More, Samuel McChord Crothers, Agnes Repplier, Havelock Ellis, Jack London, William Dean Howells, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, and on and on.

Copyright 1954, by The Atlantic Monthly Company, Boston 16, Mass. All rights reserved.

The editor himself contributed many interesting papers that in his books are still much read. And all the while he was trying to have the Atlantic speak openly in a controversial world— to the exlent that at least once, according to his own account, he tendered his resignation, only to have it declined the next morning.

Yet it was in the period that followed his editorship, the period of leaching in the Harvard Yard - where he confessed feeling somewhat alien for a time —that his life reached its impressive culmination.

His presence at Harvard resulted from an unusually happy conjunction of circumstances. President Charles W. Eliot believed that Harvard’s Department of English, notable as it was, was heavily weighted with a Germanic scholarship which not only placed great emphasis on courses in the philological, but often made matters of language dominant in courses supposedly devoted to literature. There was no one spreading comprehensively over the whole range of modern literature as Longfellow and Lowwell had had the privilege of doing if they wished. The world was changing, and perhaps it was as well that no one was trying to do just, what had been done at the earlier time. But there was need of someone, President Eliot fell, who could quicken undergraduates by giving them expansile views and vital glimpses of greatness in the held of English.

And here was Bliss Perry, living just up the street in Cambridge while he edited the Atlantic in Boston. He had had a turn at study in Germany himself, while it was so much the thing to be done, but he seemed in no way to be out of balance. He was a scholar in his own field, he had had excellent experience in college teaching, he had had much acquaintance as an editor with “live" literatture, and he had a natural enthusiasm for youth and life. President Eliot was sure that Bliss Perry could bring a certain toning-up to Harvard, and Bliss Perry seemed not too hard to convince.

2

ME CAME to the regular appointment, — after some earlier substitute lecturing in the Vard — in 1907 when he was in his forty-seventh year. In a year or two he was to give up all connection with the Atlantic and be wholly in the field of teaching.

His appearance in itself at this time was enough to suggest that probably once more President Eliot had been fortunate in noting the qualities in a man that might merge in making him an unusual teacher. For as Bliss Ferry moved across the Yard toward his classroom he was very quietly a convincing figure. He was two inches over six feet — and he walked as if of course he customarily arrived somewhere. Although he never seemed to be trying much to recognize anyone, there was a great kindness in his face and somehow in the unrigid, inclined manner in which he moved. His firm and slightly extended chin and the intentness of his blue eyes gave him an interesting look of determined elairv oyance.

The files of Harvard catalogues reveal how diverse were the early courses that he offered. He dealt with the literature of the eighteenth century; with types of fiction, Continental as well as English — in a course in Comparative Literature; with political satire; with lyric poetry; with Carlyle; with Tennyson. In the end, though, he seemed to find his deepest satisfaction in the undergraduate course listed as English 41, and described in the catalogue as “History of English Literature from the Elizabethan times to the present,” and in a graduate course in Emerson — the first Emerson course, he believed, in an American university.

Undergraduates have all sorts of reasons lor taking the courses they elect. But one experience they have very much in common—just as a part of the pushing new life within them; they like to feel forward movement, the sweep ot things, so that they can believe that life marches — whether or not the march brings them to easy final examinations. Men in Harvard College who were not concentrating in the field of English, as well as many who were, felt drawn to this man who was able to contribute the feel of life to whatever he touched. When he stood before them, tall and friendly and virile, as if he were very glad to be there, and — perhaps with his head tilted a little to one side— revealed to them through very clearly enunciated speech the large views in literature and the inmost qualities of men of stature, even the laziest undergraduate among all the many who were not lazy felt the tingling of new life.

They listened. They passed the word along that here wits a man with something important to say. More and more kept electing the course until as many as five or six hundred were appearing at the beginning of the year. Once when he went to it first meeting and found students everywhere and was greeted joyously, he said, “Gentlemen, this is a calamity!” And the students knew he was not saying anything meant to be discreditable to anybody. But according to his own account he decided to limit the course 1o a lecture hall that seated only three hundred.

He experienced a vast and very honorable repute, and like any other sensitive, intellectually honest human being — like William James, for instance — he was deeply concerned that the repute be deserved. This cheerful body of young life, two mornings every week, let him know that much was expected of him. Deep in the fastness of his own study he prepared the lectures as painstakingly as if they were to be delivered before the most exacting of audiences — as they were to be. For the young have their own sensitivities. They listened until their silence seemed absolute while he spoke on— let us say—Wordsworth and read from his poetry. Then often they broke into spontaneous applause at the end. Not every university teacher, however brilliant, finds his way in such degree to undergraduate sincerity.

Yet nothing in the satisfaction afforded by this course seemed ever to reduce his profound interest in Emerson. Before he was seventeen — he has mentioned the matter in his autobiographical And Gladly Teach — he discovered Emerson and was “intoxicated.” To at least one of his Cambridge neighbors the intoxication seemed steadily to become more complete throughout a long life. It may be that in the end his Emerson Today will be his most prophetic book. Emerson was no dead transcendentalist, no sweetened medicine good only for adolescents. He was a skilled craftsman, a discerning biographer, a shrewd thinker on the times, even a kind of premonitory herald of the philosophic-scientific strugglers for light who were to appear in the twentieth century.

Historically, Emerson had emerged from his long Harvard eclipse. The university had forgotten his outspoken words — for instance, about how Harvard College “gagged and stifled” the prophets and poets — and, much through the efforts of Hugo Münsterberg, had built Emerson Hall. Bliss Perry could now speak about Emerson and feel sure that he would be heard.

His students quickly discovered how much there was of Emerson to know, and how little, how next to nothing, they had known — not only of Emerson, but of their own country as it had been when Emerson was young, when he was middle-aged, when he was elderly. They read Emerson’s essays; his biographical studies; his poetry; his journals. And Bliss Perry took them out to Concord to learn more. They could see with their own eyes and with their best imaginations what the community had been like when Emerson was a part of it, what his neighbors had been like, and something of what he must have been like in the flesh, since here was his son Dr. Edward Emerson to greet them and contribute something of his own — the Dr. Edward Emerson who had devoted so many years to editing his father’s work. Bliss Perry’s knowledge and understanding of Emerson seemed so complete and so quintessential that one of his students declared, “He got it by osmosis, not out of books.” At Concord many of them thought they were having some small part of such an experience themselves. In any event, they were coming to know Emerson.

3

THEY knew that Bliss Perry was a great teacher. But as in the case of any other great teacher, they found it next to impossible to agree on what made him so.

They read And Gladly Teach when it appeared in 1935, and hoped that he had there revealed the secret. They found the book fascinating, but the secret did not stand revealed. They should not have expected to find it—not neatly packaged. All that the teacher puts into his teaching will seem to different persons to be of different proportionings. And often the best of teaching appears only in incidental observations, in asides casually uttered but never to be forgotten, in something that just crops out in the teacher’s day-by-day work at his job. Least of all is it to be expected that the teacher himself will openly set down how the magic is achieved, for often enough he is quite unaware at the time that he is doing anything magical.

The revelation comes — in so far as it ever comes — through unanticipated overtones that later seem only evidences of the teacher’s good sense; through the attitude always maintained by the teacher toward the taught; through what he does as supplementary to his teaching; through restorative concerns when he is entirely away from the world of the classroom.

The overtones made it easy enough to feel the first purpose of all Bliss Perry’s teaching: he was an awakener. If he had put up in his classroom the lines from Thoreau’s “Inspiration” that he enjoyed quoting,

he would have had a perfect record of what he was bringing to pass in the lives of the students before him, “After I had listened to him for an hour,”said one of them who himself was to become a teacher of great individuality, “I wanted to get over to the library and read every book in it.”

His own aliveness had an extraordinary contagion. It was in his earnestness, as if the literature he discussed were a matter of life and death — as he knew it was. In Princeton the family had always remembered how he had paced back and forth, back and forth, his hands clasped behind his back, his face expressing profound intensity, when he had finished reading Tess of the D’Urbervilles and was trying to absorb the jolt of Hardy’s final paragraph about the President of the Immortals and Tess. It was in his instinctive feeling for the emotional tone of the class, as when he spoke of the youthful Keats as “Johnny Keats,”and left no one believing that he had done any violence to the emerging poet. It was even in the examinations he set for his courses. He wanted these young men to extend themselves. “If you were writing to an intelligent foreigner who knew English but happened to be ignorant of the literature produced in England between 1550 and 1700, what authors or works would you chiefly recommend to him, and what reasons would you give him for your selections?" In the answers to that question it would be possible to discern all sorts of alivenesses — or deadnesses — never to be revealed by a student’s check of “True" or “False” on a mimeographed sheet of statements prepared by somebody else.

He would keep the bright flame burning. Very gently in the lobby of the bank he could touch the shoulder of the young author of a book just out and say, “It’s a work of art.”He could call up a candidate who had failed in his Ph.D. examination and say, “Don’t take the matter too seriously. Plenty of good men have had the same experience.”And to a young man called a way on account of death he could suggest that he would be glad to help with money for the long trip, since he kept aside a modest fund for students who faced emergencies.

His own writing was of the kind to contribute to good teaching — not anything ground out merely loanable him to say that he had “produced.”He tried some fiction—early. He devoted an entire volume to Whitman when it was not yet in style to say much of anything about Whitman - especially to his credit. He published a volume entitled A Study of Prose Fiction that was read widely. He wrote on The Amateur Spirit and The American Mind. He published two biographical volumes; a volume of essays and addresses called The Praise of Folly; one on fishing called Pools and Ripples; Emerson Today; And Gladly Teach — and much besides. By no stretch of the imagination could his writing be looked upon as the kind that dulls the human interests of the teacher.

It was through golf and fishing that he kept himself well renewed. Once when he was sixtytwo or sixty-three he decided to learn to drive a car. But he was altogether lacking in the mechanical sense. Painfully he tried to visualize the workings of a gasoline engine; studiously he made drawings of the old-style H gearshift. And he ventured on the road. When, though, he had brought terror to enough animal life, had swept through enough forbidden areas, and finished off by crashing across an open manhole that had a sawhorse over it and heard much shouting from the rear, he decided to have someone else do the driving.

Always, though, he could fish. But where. Well, wherever there was fishing — in Vermont, in New Hampshire, in Maine, in Canada, in Ireland. Some of his friends declared that he did not so much as require fish in order to have a good time. But they exaggerated. He did require the excitement of making catches. His great humanitarian reverence for life seemed never to be working when he fished. Vet his friends were not altogether wrong. In the solitude of the open, he was so completely at home that he could forget anything. Once while he and a friend sat in a rowboat in the quiet of evening on a Vermont lake and fished for homed pout, he suddenly remembered that he was supposed to be lecturing in a neighboring church. He somehow got to the lecture — as he always did. But fishing was as restful as that.

Thus he lived actively, and now and then said something or did something which revealed that he was a teacher by nature. Could anyone do anything more permanently satisfying than teaching? Well, he doubted it. And was there a better place for teaching than at Harvard? Well, he doubled that, too, though he always recalled with great pleasure his quiet, immense years at Princeton. On Commeneement Day in 1925, when he was in his sixtyfifth year, be stood in the shadow of Sever Hall and with eloquent voice and youthful face told the assembled alumni that the Harvard that had honored him with a degree in the morning was a teacher’s paradise.

In this “paradise" he taught on until he was in his seventieth year. Then one day — it comes to teachers — he had to meet his last class. He went through the hour. His students were even more appreciative than they were ordinarily. He told them that he did not like good-byes. And they agreed. His son had very unobtrusively slipped into a corner of the hall. “How about a little golf this afternoon?” he asked at the end of the hour. Bliss Perry thought nine holes would he just right. And on a course that he had never played, he came in with the low score, 42-46. That was how he was still feeling about, some matters.

4

FOR nearly a quarter of a century after that last day of teaching, and for almost two decades after he had written the last chapter in his last book — And Gladly Teach—he lived ahead with interest. The man who had brought him to Harvard regretted at ninety that no one had ever made a thorough study of the total experience of growing old, especially no one who was having the experience himself. Bliss Perry would have been the perfect man to make such a study had he chosen to do so. For he continued to be mentally very active, he was aware of what, was happening to him, and he saw-sometimes with sadness, sometimes with humor — what was taking place in the world in which an old man was obliged to live. Best of all, he was unshrinking in his honesty in considering the entire situation.

When he was eighty, one day at the end of a fishing trip he said to his son as they made their way out of the depths of northern Maine, “No more fishing for me, Boy. Legs getting a little tired.” And the matter was settled.

He moved into the little-considered world beyond what is called ripe old age. Most younger persons shy away from any thought of it, for it is a world of departures, and gives an impression of life’s impermanence. But the man who is living in it cannot shy away from it, and Bliss Perry did not so much as try. It was one of the facts that a man solidly grounded in Now England might not be expected to say much about; but occasionally he did let enough slip out to reveal that he knew where he traveled. He gave up going to the Tavern Club, where he had once been president, and when he was urged to go again he spoke with the brevity of full consideration: “No. Too many ghosts.”

But if he found it a world of departures, he found it also a world of additions. Living beyond ripe old age provides one with a kind of magic advantage over younger contemporaries, and Bliss Perry enjoyed this advantage—placed pleasantly in his keeping by time — in more than ordinary degree, He could smile a kindly smile when he heard men and women talking about doing research on — lot us say — Woodrow Wilson. For he had taught at Princeton with Woodrow Wilson when they both were young. He had lived while Abraham Lincoln was living. United he was past twenty, Emerson still lived. He lived through the mature years of Whitman and Browning and Tennyson and Christina Rossetti and Ibsen and Tolstoy. He saw the rise of Hardy. He was himself born only three years after Conrad, and watched with excitement for every new Conrad story. In all, he had come to possess a vast fund of cherished knowledge that his juniors had to hunt for, and that he was happy to contribute when they sought him out.

What he was thinking about, what he believed, usually had to be extracted from him bit by bit. He had once written a short story called “Jepson’s Third Adjective” which his son always liked. Jepson was an inquisitive college student who went right on asking questions after he was out of college and was a busy physician. He was looking for three adjectives that would sum up life — for just what was life like? He found life “droll”; and much later, “pitiful”; and then, after he had seen a boy plunge into the water ahead of a ferryboat to save his dog, and a workingman had in a flash saved both the boy and the dog, he thought he had the third. Life was “droll,” and “pitiful,” and — “divine.” When Bliss Perry was a very old man, his son — wishing much to know — asked, “Dad, is that your own philosophy?”

Very briefly, almost impatiently, he replied, “Well, I wrote the story, didn’t I?”

On those increasingly rare occasions when he appeared in Harvard Square, he moved along as if he were the least bit older than he once was. But when he met someone out of the past his face was instantly bright and boyish, and he was again the alert middle-aged teacher.

When he was ninety and obliged to be without the wife who for sixty years had lived so devotedly in charge of his household, he wrote from Milton in reply to one of his students who had sent him a birthday letter: “I am in fairly good shape except for ‘wobbly’ knees which restrict my walking to very short and level distances. My daughter, who lives with me here, drives me around the Blue Hills region on pleasant days, and luckily I can read, eat, and sleep all I desire. Not a very heroic existence! . . . I do hope that everything is going well with you personally, and that your birthdays, as they come along, will be as happy as mine.”Constantly such letters were going out to former students who had had to tell him how much he was in their thought — and since typewriters were to him in the bothersome class of automobile mechanisms, the letters were in his own hand.

He had a sharp eye on the human situation, too, and sometimes made comments. When he was ninety-one he wrote a two-sentence letter to one of the Boston newspapers: “Will you allow a man who has read your Mail Bag letters for many years to risk a single generalization? Very few men and no women write well when they are angry.”

And always he could settle back and enjoy his pipe and his reading. He tried the new books, he reread the good ones that would always be new. When he was well past ninety he read from two hundred to four hundred pages a day. He could sit and reflect, too, on this or that detail of his long life, especially on the truly humorous that he had encountered and saved up. He would sit comfortably and contemplate things amusing and satisfying until the deep wrinkles of enjoyment completely surrounded his eyes.

He heard men exalting the excellencies or the necessity of some new despair they thought it was new — and he was not too much disturbed. For he hail more evidence than they had. Why did they not try living a little with the clearerminded—with the greatest poets, the greatest novelists, the greatest dramatists, the greatest satirists, the greatest essayists? In their presence, if a man had a little New England granite in his soul to hold the sunlight, might there not be less necessity for despair—or no necessity at all? So he left the despair to others and went on enjoying the bright Indian summer that belongs by right to the man who has helped generations of the young to have glimpses of things as true as anything they may reasonably hope to find.