FEW years ago a distinguished scholar, now dead, wrote an erudite and important book, a real contribution to our knowledge of English literature. In talking with him a few weeks later I congratulated him on the enthusiastic review which Barrett Wendell had written. "Yes," he said, "it was more than kind. It will make many read the book. But, although Wendell was only generous in his comments, the review made me feel personally insignificant. My book was the result of years of patient study. Every theory was tested by the theories of other students; every conclusion was laboriously worked out; but the great figures in the book move in a vacuum, the poems which they produced were sung in solitude. Barrett Wendell read in two or three hours the result of my years of study and grasped the meaning of the whole period, the vital meaning which I had failed to see. My book, I think, is a worthy example of the work of a patient but uninspired scholar. The review was a work of genius."

In a sketch of this kind it is impossible even to touch on many of the characteristics, intellectual or personal, of Wendell's extraordinarily vivid personality, but this perhaps salient characteristic, brought out in the conversation recorded, is the epitome of his peculiar genius. He had the amazing faculty of seeing and of making others see the essential meaning of things. He always saw life as a whole and recognized literature as a part of life. He interpreted literature by history and history by literature. Homer was not merely a poet, the greatest of all ages, who happened to be of Greek blood; he was the voice of Greek civilization. Dante was not merely the greatest of Italian poets;

he was the spokesman of the passionate spiritual life of the Middle Ages. Shelley was not merely the writer of exquisite lyrics; his poems were the expression of the revolt of a generation that saw visions, and crashed through all the barriers of formalism to realize them. Barrett Wendell is not the only professor who has realized this interdependence of literature and life. Everybody admits it, theoretically, but he made it the heart of his teaching. Therefore his teaching was vital. He was no word-grubber, no student of historical grammar, although he had a surprisingly accurate knowledge of the technicalities of his profession. By interpreting literature as a part of life he made it live in his lectures and in his books.

Whatever the man saw he saw vividly. An historical period was to him like a great picture, full of minute details all of which fitted naturally into the composition, all leading the eye and the mind to the dominant figure or meaning of the whole. These pictures were all, it must be remembered, compositions in the technical sense of the word. They were never mere agglomerations of figures, independent and placed at haphazard. Every figure, on the contrary, had its definite place and its definite meaning in the whole. Wendell's mind was orderly, and, vividly as he saw each detail, he never saw it except as part of the whole, one element that made the meaning of the whole clear and vital, either as an integral though subordinate part, or through contrast. Life is never completely logical. If it were it would be completely dull, and the honest student of life values the occasional contradiction and the obtrusive paradox. I think that few men have possessed a literary-historical mental picturegallery so extensive, so vivid, and so true.

But to possess such a gallery is one

thing. To be able to exhibit it is quite another. Wendell could describe as vividly as he saw, could impart as clearly as he himself realized. The reason for this was that he considered language to be used successfully in accord with the measure of its success in interpreting thought. He had no use for verbal decoration that was not structural. It was as ugly, he said, as the jig-saw work on midVictorian sideboards. His own language was simple, and at the same time careful. He used adjectives sparingly but chose them with the utmost niceness. Every word was expressive and the total effect was therefore impressive. Above all he never wrote except when he had something that he thought worth saying, whether it were a moral to enforce or a scene to describe.

One of the most vivid pictures I have in my own mind, quite as vivid as any memory of a personal experience, is that of a calm young Buddhist priest, dressed in a vivid green robe, sitting quietly in the shadow of a temple near Bombay but roused to sudden and delighted vitality at the mention of Professor Lanman, a distant and personally unknown American who was, however, like the priest, a student and a lover of Sanscrit. The man was pictured in a casual sentence Wendell wrote me from India, but he has forever become a part of my gallery of life. Just as clear, moreover, are the great and small figures of seventeenthcentury England, now long dead even to the imagination of most twentieth-century Americans, but not so to those of us who studied English literature under Wendell. Cromwell and Archbishop Laud and Milton and John Donne are, to us, not only real people but, what is still more extraordinary, they typify the course of human thought. As their words were interpreted by Professor Wendell we, his students, lived in their time, understood, according to our several intelligences, what they were, why they existed, and why just those men were inevitable at that particular period of time. I have often wished that he had followed in Landor's footsteps and written another series of "Imaginary Conversations." They would have been less fine only because they would have appeared

to be imitative. The characters would have been living and real. Of this I am sure because I never knew any one who could so completely adopt the point of view of the man whom he was trying to interpret. But this he always did with the purpose of making others understand. He presented a thesis accurately and fully whether he agreed with it or not because he wanted to play fair. To him there was no amusement in setting up puppets to knock down. In brilliantly interpreting a period, therefore, he made his students or his readers see the issues as clearly as he saw them himself. In support of an historical or a moral thesis he neither asked nor gave quarter. An excellent example of this is the chapters concerning Puritanism in "The Temper of the Seventeenth Century in English Literature." Wendell's sympathies were naturally with the Cavaliers; he believed to use his own words-that "rights" were supremely worth preserving because they were the result of normal human traditions and the normal human instinct, and that they could never be replaced by "right" arbitrarily imposed on society by self-constituted interpreters of the divine will. Yet no Roundhead could have more convincingly expounded the Puritan view of life. This fair play, this lucid and forceful presentation of the other side, made his defense of his own position absorbingly interesting both in his books and in his lectures.

The ability to see from the other fellow's point of view, however, never made Wendell vacillating in his own position. This was the result of inheritance, training, surroundings, and independent thinking. He was as truly a product of his own time and place as were Pope and Thackeray of theirs. Some, who disagreed with him, said that he should have lived a century ago, that he was oldfashioned, but this was generally because they found his simple and straightforward philosophy inconveniently difficult to refute. His thinking was robust and he detested weak and watery thinking in others. Sometimes this made him appear an unsympathetic teacher, and it is only fair to say that where he suspected sham he was unsympathetic. I have seen students come from a conference with him

become a mighty force because its varied appeal so far transcends that of the printed page. He detested the trash, sentimental or pernicious or merely silly, that is supposed to "rest the tired business man," and insisted that this pampered individual would quickly respond to the appeal of something better. Real rest is not caused by anæsthesia of the intellect. Believing, therefore, in the drama as a potent social force, and in will ingness on the part of his fellow human beings to respond cordially to the best that can be given them, he did not confine study of the drama to the explanation of ancient texts, but preached and taught the upbuilding of a worthy modern drama. He believed that even the play in verse was rather sleeping than dead, and if his own worthy attempt to revive the form in "Raleigh in Guiana" was not welcomed by theatrical managers, he still lived to see other modern plays in verse make a success on Broadway. Professor Baker, who has so enthusiastically adopted the idea of dramatic regeneration and so successfully taught the technic of play-writing, would be the last to deny that his inspiration came originally from his former teacher and senior in the Harvard faculty.

In estimating his own achievements no man was ever more modest than Wendell. I have heard him say that all his years of effort to teach young men how to write were pure waste. He believed this because he was acutely conscious of the failures and because he sometimes forgot the mental immaturity of the men under him. He said always that a man could not write unless he had something to say, and forgot that many boys of twenty literally have nothing to say, because they have thought nothing out or else are too shy to try to express their budding thoughts. It was often long after these boys had left Harvard College that the effect of the teaching became evident. "The best style," Wendell always said, "is that which most completely expresses the thought." He ruthlessly excised the pretty words that were designed to hide the poverty of matter, cut down exuberance to the bare bones of truth, laughed his students out of their conceits and their attempts at fine writing. At the same

time he gave sincerest praise where praise was due. It was praise that made his students glow with satisfaction because they knew he never stooped to flattery. Many a man, years later, when he has written something that he had to say because he believed it true, and therefore worth saying, has read it over with the silent question: "Would Mr. Wendell think this well done?" If it was honest work. if the language was the medium for the expression of clear thinking, he knew the answer would be in the affirmative. If, on the contrary, he was candid enough to admit that the language was a veil to hide shoddy thinking, his knowledge of Wendell's contemptuous condemnation was often sufficiently vivid still to make him tear the manuscript in two. I say this from personal experience, and I have heard many another make the same admission. Wendell's book on English composition set new and saner standards; his influence as a teacher has prevented the publication of much that was meretricious, and has improved the standard of much that has been put into print.

There was no undue pride in authorship, for Wendell's modesty extended to his estimate of his own writing. Only a few weeks before his death he said that his last splendid book, that finely discriminating study of the sources of English literature, was bound to be a failure, that he had lost his grip. He had not then seen the enthusiastic reviews which brought a surprised happiness into the last days of his life. Of his literary work, he said that he had tried too many different forms to be completely successful in any. "If you must write novels," he said to me one day, "stick to novels and do not try anything else. You may gain the imagination that you lack now and that I lacked when I tried my hand at novels. I have let myself be enticed by too many subjects." This was perhaps fortunate, since he probably would not have become a novelist of the first rankat least not one with popular appeal. I say this at the risk of being misunderstood because, to be the author of a "bestseller" is not considered in literary circles to be a sign of eminence. Wendell, I think, took the right view of popularity. He despised the man who "wrote down'