Chapter IX: Bliss Perry

CARROLL LEWIS MAXCY '87

The subject of this brief sketch may indeed be termed a Williams man both by heredity and by environment. He passed his boyhood and early youth under the very shadow of our hills; and his father, Professor A.L. Perry, was for years the most widely known as well as the most generally loved of its faculty.

Bliss Perry was born in 1860; after graduation, in 1881, he became instructor in English and elocution at his alma mater and in 1886 was advanced to the full professorship. In 1893 he accepted a call to the same chair at Princeton. Six years later he was appointed to the editorship of the _Atlantic Monthly_, thus becoming one of a famous line of editors including Lowell, Howells, and Aldrich. He remained at the head of the _Atlantic_ for just ten years, resigning in August 1909 to devote himself wholly to the duties of the chair of English literature at Harvard, which he had accepted two years before and which had already been filled by Longfellow and Lowell. The year 1909-1910 he spent abroad as Hyde lecturer at the Sorbonne.

Professor Perry's publications extend over the fields of fiction, criticism, and the occasional essay. His _Study of Prose Fiction_, a clear exposition of narrative writing, is one of the best-known college textbooks on the subject. His _Walt Whitman_ is without doubt his most careful and elaborate critical work and is a recognized authority. The _Amateur Spirit_, a series of familiar essays, shows Professor Perry at his best and should be read especially by those who delight to study the personality of an author as revealed in his work.

But whatever fame Professor Perry may have attained in the fields of literature, to Williams men he is the teacher. In _The Amateur Spirit_ he has written: "Your born teacher is as rare as a poet.... Once in a while a college gets hold of one. It does not always know that it has him, and proceeds to ruin him by over-driving, the moment he shows power; or to let another college lure him away for a few hundred dollars more a year. But while he lasts--and sometimes, fortunately, he lasts till the end of a long life--he transforms the lecture-hall as by enchantment. Lucky is the alumnus who can call the roll of his old instructors, and among the martinets and the pedants and the piously inane can here and there come suddenly upon a man; a man who taught him to think, or helped him to feel, and thrilled him with a new horizon."

Those of us who have been under Professor Perry's instruction in the class-room must smile to note how--all unconsciously--he has here portrayed what we know him to be. Scholarly in his tastes, clear in his thinking, simple and direct in the expression of his thought, and always human in his personality, he "taught us to think, he helped us to feel, and he thrilled us with a new horizon." To us he seemed the ideal teacher, and as teacher and as man withal he has won the loyalty of Harvard, Princeton, and Williams men alike.

SUGGESTIONS

OVER THE HILLS

G.B.D.

"Mister," my companion in the smoking-car addressed me rather timidly, "hev you ever bin to Ebenezer?"

I looked at him a moment: kindly eyes, tanned face, grizzled beard; clothing of that indescribable, faded greenish brown which had lost all resemblance to its original color.

"Yes," I answered, "I've been there a number of times."

A moment's pause; then, "Quite a sizeable place, so folks say."

I assented, wondering what was to come.

"An' to think I've never seen it--never bin to Ebenezer in all my life, an' I live right back here a piece, not ten miles over the hills from Ebenezer. But if this here train stays on the track till we git there," he added with some pride, "I'm goin' to see it.

"I'm goin' to see Ebenezer, jest to think of it! Well sir, it makes me all het up. Many's the time when I come in fr'm chores, I'd set by the fire an' read the _Ebenezer Weekly Review and Advertiser_; an' there I'd see, 'Ebenezer items: Squire Hodge's store painted; the Ebenezer Dry Goods Emporium moved into new and more commodorious quarters,' et cetery. Then I'd say to Mandy, 'Mandy, some day we'll go to Ebenezer.' But we never went. Well, I s'pose it's all fer the best." He sighed and shook his head.

"But I'm goin' to see it all now." He brightened up again. "Yes, sir, poor Mandy's fixed so she can't leave the house now, kind of laid up with rheumatiz. A spell back, though, when our daughter got married, an' time kind o' hung heavy on our hands, Mandy says, 'Why don't you go alone, pa? Now's a good chance. So I fixed things up spick an' span, an' Nancy--that's our girl--come over this mornin' to stay with her ma, an' I--well, it'll be grand! D'you s'pose I c'n see it all in one day?"

"Oh, yes."

"Well," he sighed contentedly, "that's good. Say, you've bin awful good to me, tellin' me all about Ebenezer. I'm glad I met some one who's had experience in such a big town." Silence for a minute. Then he leaned over confidentially.

"D'y' know, it sort o' seems 's though the sunshine was a leetle bit brighter to-day than usual, all on 'count of my goin' to Ebenezer. Only I wish Mandy c'd be along."

"Ebenezer!" yelled the brakeman. "Ebenezer!"

_Literary Monthly_, 1906.

A NEW LIFE IN READING

J.O.S.E.

When we were at home the gas always went out at a certain time, and if we were tempted to finish just one more chapter of _Coral Island_ or _Out on the Pampas_, we needs must steal a candle from the pantry stock and furtively read by its flickering light. Our own sense of danger, together with the imaginative effect wrought upon our excitive minds by the dancing candlelight and the awesome shadows of the still house, gave a strange relish to our childhood reading.

At boarding-school we found (among its other strange things) the electric light. At nine-thirty the bell in the chapel sounded taps, and all the lights in the school were extinguished simultaneously. Then the master would make his rounds and find the whole school evidently asleep in their beds. But presently doors would open and books would be read by the light in the hall. Still we had that same adventurous feeling in our readings, still that sweet taste of stolen fruit.

When we were graduated from the boarding-school, put away the proverbial childish things, and came to college, we were given a freedom such as we had never had before. No interfering master, no provoking lack of light to annoy us. We could burn our lamps all night, and receive no paternal rebuke or master's chastisement. And now, though there is none of that sweetness of stolen fruits, none of that creeping insecurity of former readings, there is an undisturbing, quiet secureness that makes our books more living to us. Now, when all the dormitory is asleep; when the lighted windowpanes have ceased to cast their gleams upon the snow; when the streets are deserted, the pool-rooms closed, and the last good-fellow has gone to bed, and only oneself is awake, then we have the full enjoyment of our quiet study lamp-light. We may yawn once or twice, a creak on the stair may startle us,--but we do not go to bed. We reach out our hand for some favorite volume, Stevenson's _Garden of Verses_, _Underwoods_, or Emily Bronte's _Wuthering Heights_: and read far on into the night towards cock-crow. We mingle our reading with dreams, and read on and on, finding a new feeling in our book: we find the author's deeper meaning. Our reading is undisturbed by the ghost-creep of childhood and the adventuresome daring of boarding-school. Formerly we had the mere tale or story; now we feel in a small degree the soul-expression of the writer--an indefinable, will-o'-the-wisp sort of thing; a something not always caught, but that strange intangible something which lends the spark of immortality to the master creations.

_Literary Monthly_, 1909.