Chapter V: on Greeley is prime, but it is hardly true to say (4)

These girls make a happy family of elder and younger sisters, the elder feeling strongly responsible for the physical, intellectual, and spiritual welfare of the younger, the younger bound to heed the precepts and to follow the examples of the elder. They are closely linked by observance of a ritual which is said to be beautiful and uplifting. One enthusiast writes me: “That mere girls could have written our rituals, given expression and symbol to our creeds and initiation ceremonies, seems almost impossible, yet a proof of the divinity of clear-eyed womanhood.”

They are said to be outspoken in criticizing one another in the light of their ideals, meek in accepting criticism. One chapter even went to the length of establishing after its service a special meeting in which members were subjected to the fire of anonymous criticisms from their fellows, and so set to cure dominant faults. They manage their own household and business affairs with a precision and technic alarming to read about. They learn independence and self-reliance, on the one hand; self-control and a graceful yielding to the will of the majority on the other.

Their friendships are more loyal than the outsider can well imagine. Pushed to extremes, this loyalty even led, in one instance, to a concealment of theft and a levying of contributions to make up the loss; in two other cases cited, to expulsion from a chapter for “loose morals,” with, however, a rigid silence in the presence of outsiders as to the cause.

Indeed, life in the chapter-house seems to call out most of the virtues--unselfishness, neatness, tidiness, promptness, and general efficiency. In this college home, which to the fraternity girls is far more the vital center of their college experience than the classroom or the laboratory, there is much exchange of hospitality between chapters and individuals. Members of the faculty and distinguished guests are entertained. The girls are at the opposite pole from the poor student who cooks her own breakfast in her room, from the unfortunate “barb” who is left to the promiscuous friendships of the cheap boarding-house. They learn to plan a successful dinner, to pacify an enraged cook, to distinguish between porterhouse and sirloin, to lay out money to the best advantage in entertainment, to undertake without a quiver a reception for a thousand guests with only an afternoon of actual preparation. They learn to preside and to receive with grace and charm, to deal tactfully with many temperaments, to shuffle guests. Briefly, they become skilled in the complete art of the social game.

To sum up, according to the claims made for the fraternity girl in the handbook of her organization; she develops individuality and the power to lead; she acquires invaluable business training and womanly charm. She is given a wider outlook over the field of collegiate education than her less fortunate sisters; she is blessed with congenial friendships that amount almost to a continuance of family relationships, and “whatever the line of service to which she may consecrate herself,” she “will always be a success.”

This is a composite picture, made up from scores of glowing accounts of the benefits of the system. Is it true?

Certainly the shield has a reverse side. Over against the select fraternity of the pillared porch, let us place that which, during a severe winter, had to go outside the pale and take in new members in order to pay the coal bill. Let us also remember the chaperon who is also the cook, and does not appear at functions.

“Good-looking?” Yes, I have heard of a would-be chapter that was almost excluded from the national organization because the photograph sent on showed that they did not do their hair becomingly; and they were solemnly admonished to this effect in a type-written letter!

“Well-dressed?” One would scarcely believe the difference it makes to a “rushee” whether she is wearing a smart fall hat or a summer left-over; and if her belt pin should one day fail to do its duty, her cause might as well be lost. One method of choosing likely members is to send delegates to the station to observe the new girls as they arrive. There is witnessed the triumph of the tailored suit over the dowdy frills of the country dressmaker, of the suitcase that has lived abroad over the bulging valise that is packed with home-grown apples and home-made cookies.

“All-round?” Yes, with possibly a slight depression on the side of scholarship. I have heard of a good many cases in which girls were dragged out of the mire of conditions and hauled through their college course by the zeal of fraternity sisters pulling all together for the glory of the chapter. They have ideals of scholarship, indeed they are trying to establish a standard for admission, and they even carry off a share of the honors; but, on the whole, their social mind interferes with the scholastic attitude, and prevents over-application to mental effort.

“Rich?” Not necessarily; yet would not the girl who drives her own automobile have some advantage over the one who works her way through college, and the girl whose parents have a delightful home most suitable for “rushing” purposes near the campus be preferred to any sweet madonna-of-the-boarding-house? I heard only the other day how an initiation fee was raised to five times its original amount on the plea, “The girls will appreciate it _so_ much more if they have to pay a _lot_!”

“Family?” Not at all, yet I know of a girl who was rushed hard and as suddenly dropped because it was discovered that her father had been a butcher; of another, who was regarded as eligible until it was found out, what neither her name nor her features suggested, that her really distinguished family was of Jewish strain.

These instances must be set over against the ideal picture of the governor’s daughter and the milliner’s child, the mother’s helper and the patrician of the South, scrubbing floors together.

Family jars, I am told, are beneath the dignity of the fraternities. It is difficult not to be skeptical as to the power of the ritual or of the pin to keep twenty healthy girls from splitting into factions over nothing at all; but even if outer harmony is maintained, is it conceivable that there should not very often be discomfort and even actual suffering among the minority? Suppose a chapter one year includes twelve students and eight butterflies, and the next year changes to three students and seventeen butterflies? What of the occasional “mistake”? I know a Theta girl whose mother was a Beta, but this fact was not discovered by the Betas until she was pledged. “What a pity!” they lamented; but “What an escape!” said she. As it happened, she felt entirely at home with the Thetas and could not bear the Betas; but suppose the situation had been reversed! She would have had no remedy except to withdraw, which would have made her painfully conspicuous and set everybody to wondering about the reason, or to change her college. But a girl out of harmony with a crowd and obliged to live with them in intimate association, is greatly to be pitied, whether she conforms or holds her own. What is to be said of the ethics of forcing an Episcopalian to dance in Lent against her strong religious scruples? Can it be doubted that such a minority often yields its own convictions to keep pace with the others, or, not yielding, is painfully out of step?

As to the wonderful ritual devised by “clear-eyed womanhood,” I have heard it also described as “childish,” “poppycock,” “bunk.” The ideals are necessarily those of immaturity, and have all the vagueness and some of the wrong-headedness of youth. “They are not harmful,” writes a dean, a fraternity woman who is familiar also with a college where no fraternities exist, “except that they are sentimental.” I take this to mean that they are more suited to discourses at fraternity banquets, as a kind of leaven to reminiscences of good old times, than to practical application outside the fraternity world.[3] That they may “have a dynamic force upon character” is doubtless true of the persons who do not develop beyond the stage at which they are propounded; that they lead to much real kindness among fraternity sisters in time of illness and trouble need not be doubted. But a loyalty which hides a thief and turns her loose in the world without warning may be a dangerous thing, and when it expels a girl for “loose morals,” and gives no further explanation, it is cruel, if the term means cigarettes or slight indiscretions with men, and dangerous if her character is such that she ought not to be allowed to remain on the campus.

“Manage their own households and business affairs?” Yes, but a peep behind the scenes reveals a case of cutting out breakfast to save up for a tea, of giving a formal dinner and living on bread and potatoes for a week to make up the expense. An inspector’s story hints that this business management is not unlike the average amateur performance. A dean, herself a fraternity woman of many years’ experience, writes: “Usually ... the accounts of such an organization are not so well looked after as those of the more general women’s organizations in which less of the ‘family’ idea prevails,” and “the business training of these undergraduates” ... is “probably inferior to that gained by officers in such bodies as the Women’s League, the Young Women’s Christian Association, the Student Government Association, or the boards of college publications.”

Then are the conclusions quoted by the handbook as to the influence of the fraternities on their members warranted by the facts? Do they cultivate individuality? How is it possible? In the first place, the fraternity girl is essentially “clubable”; and by the statute of limitations in personality she is bound to be more conventional, yes, even more superficial in her attractions, than the girl who is strongly individual. The fraternities are admitted to be groups in which like seeks like, and the whole flock aims to induce still greater likeness to the pattern of the group. The girl with a streak of genius cannot easily find her like, so she flocks not at all; the poor, proud girl fears patronage, and will not; the awkward, ill-bred country girl can’t; the dig dare not for fear of missing some intellectual good thing. All these must develop more or less as individuals; but the fraternity girl, unless she enters as an individual strong enough to dominate her companions, must herself be dominated by them.

“Cultivate leadership?” Probably, in that they give to all their members in some measure the poise that comes only from an assured social position; and poise is the first requisite for leadership. Again, the fraternity girl who takes a leading part in outside college activities has always an advantage in that she does this with the backing of her group, who are all prepared to do team-work when occasion demands.

In the same way, it is only the few that from the first show executive and business ability who get much training in these directions through fraternity membership.

As to the wide outlook over the field of collegiate education, it is limited in two ways: first, in that the fraternity women are more or less segregated from the other students, and second, in that they do not come into contact at all with the great women’s colleges, Vassar, Wellesley, Smith, Radcliffe, and Bryn Mawr.[4]

GAMMA PHI BETA DELTA GAMMA
ALPHA PHI KAPPA KAPPA GAMMA
ALPHA CHI OMEGA CHI OMEGA

A GROUP OF WOMEN’S FRATERNITY HOUSES (UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN)]

Then is the fraternity woman bound to be a success? Few of them, even while they claim inestimable benefits inexplicable to the outsider, say this. Some of them think that when the admitted defects in the system are removed, when rushing is prohibited, when pledge-day is postponed until the new students have had time to find themselves intellectually and socially and to make their friends, when a uniform scholarship standard and uniform house-rules are enforced, it will make for the finest type of womanhood.

“ONE METHOD OF CHOOSING LIKELY MEMBERS IS TO SEND DELEGATES TO THE STATION TO OBSERVE THE NEW GIRLS AS THEY ARRIVE”]

Doubtless there is need of these things. When rushing reaches the point of tying a girl in the rooms of a fraternity house until she puts on the fraternity-badge, it is time to take measures. When of two girls who are intimate friends, one is pledged because she knows better how to make use of her good points, while, with the breaking up of their friendship, the other, made of equally fine stuff, is left forlorn because she lacks an intangible something that attracts all the girls in a chapter, or has an intangible something that repels one member of it, a remedy should be found. When a popular girl has an engagement for five nights in a single week, or averages from sixty to eighty “dates” in a year, it almost looks as though scholarship needs attention. When the chaperon exerts her influence from the kitchen, and social events are untrammeled as to numbers and hours and expense, it is almost time for a reform. In other words, while there are chapters that are almost wholly admirable in their constituency and conduct, there are also others that reflect in the miniature college world the pace of the civilization about them.

But if all these reforms were accomplished,--and it is difficult to see how enough pressure can be brought by the National Pan-Hellenic to do this except sporadically,--the evils of the system remain as before, inherent and ineradicable. As regards those within, the fraternity idea means _type_; as regards those outside, it means _caste_.

“You’d never think Caroline was a Chi Chi, would you? She ought to have been a Tau Tau!” is overheard on the campus. What does this mean but type?

“The girl who sits next to me is an Alpha; I knew it before I saw her pin.” What does this mean but type?

A NOVEL METHOD OF EXTRACTING A PROMISE TO WEAR A FRATERNITY-BADGE]

“I knew a chapter that was made up of three distinct types, digs, butterflies, and Y. W. C. A.’s.... To be sure, it rather _slumped_ for a time.” Why?

When a shrewd member of the faculty can forecast that certain freshmen will make Gamma Gamma, and certain others Omicron Omega, it must be admitted that not only is there a general fraternity type, but there is a tendency to type for each combination of Greek letters that is worn on a pin.

No doubt in the leveling up to type, many individual faults, such as selfishness, self-distrust, laziness, frivolity, lack of initiative, lack of self-control, bad temper, bad manners, and so on, are corrected; but in so far as the system is artificial, it is bound to develop conventionality. It is artificial because it chooses and restricts friendships. Close intimacy with outsiders is almost always made impracticable by circumstances and the mutual attitude of the elect and the non-elect; and in some cases it is held to be disloyal to the chapter. It is artificial because it strives to eliminate from a girl’s experience all incongruous and hostile elements, and these are often conducive to growth. The fraternity girl’s position is comparable to that of the child who is fed on soft foods.

That is, the trouble is that she _is cultivated_ instead of being allowed to grow freely. She is rushed, pledged, initiated; she is studied, counseled, criticized, disciplined, drawn out, molded. Her power of initiative is developed only in that she “_is made_ to go out and do things.” Even as an upper classman, when it is her turn to uphold the fraternity ideals and to mold her younger sisters, she still lives in the rarefied atmosphere of an artificially selected community, where there is no chance for the free play of the individual. The fraternity girl, with all her initiative, her poise, her charm, her efficiency, is crippled by the fact that she is not allowed to come to grips with all sort of conditions and people, by which alone is gained the personal, as opposed to the group, attitude toward life.

Does the fraternity idea mean caste? Are fraternity girls snobbish? This question brought an emphatic denial from fraternity women on all sides. The existence of snobbery here and there, in chapters and in individuals, is admitted; but the attitude of the organization, I am told, is to root it out, and by all means to encourage democracy. The only difficulty here is that snobbery is the foundation-stone of the system, and when it goes, the system topples. This is the way of it. If you and I have a secret, and we talk together in the presence of a third person who does not know it, by no means in our human power can we avoid a snobbish attitude toward that third person. We ourselves may forget the secret; but the person outside, by the very fact that he is shut out from it, magnifies its importance, and no equality of dealing is possible between him and ourselves. Extend the picture to a houseful of girls, linked together by a common knowledge, a common family, and a common social life, and give these girls the right to say who shall be privileged to join them, what chance for equal dealing has the outsider, or even a less closely organized group of outsiders, against their united social attitude? The fraternity girl may not feel _snobbish_, but if the barbarian is _snubbed_, the result is much the same. What though the “frat” girl claims that the “barb” will not meet her half-way? As long as there is consciousness of effort to bridge the gap, the gap is plainly there.

MEETING DISTINGUISHED GUESTS AT A FRATERNITY HOUSE, AND--]

Where there is a gap, there is caste, and where caste is recognized, snobbery is inevitable. When the fraternity woman disclaims snobbery, she means that she is careful not to emphasize the distinctions between herself and others. She is like the teacher who, in order to preserve strict impartiality, takes off her fraternity-pin when she goes to class. No, the fraternity woman, aware as she is of the “greater blessings of her lot,” does not snub those less fortunate than herself; she either ignores them or is kind to them. Sometimes she manages both attitudes at the same time, as in the case of a party given to all the students, in which the programs of the fraternity members are filled weeks ahead. And if the outsiders who go feel like parasites, it is surely their own fault. Admit, on the one hand, a fund of common knowledge and common acquaintance, extensive social experience, and the assurance of social standing, and, on the other, instead of these things, the ever-present sense of having been passed over as negligible, or, what is yet worse, of having been tried and found wanting. Can the gap be bridged?

Nor do the attempts of the fraternities to bridge the gap bear out their claims of democracy. In a recent report on social customs made by a committee of the Pan-Hellenic, only three chapters mentioned any effort to be “nice” to the whole student body. One spoke of a spring picnic; two, of attempts at occasional “open houses,” in one case dubbed a failure by some members; and the third, “prospects of a party for all college women and a freshman scholarship”! I am afraid it is impossible to deny that the fraternities live in a world by themselves, shut off by an insuperable barrier from those who are not “their sort.” And if this is not caste, what is?

The system, however, does create a sort of noblesse oblige, which in some cases makes the fraternity girls leaders in the class and student organizations, Young Women’s Christian Association, and various other college activities, although in this they are sometimes thwarted by inter-fraternal rivalries and jealousies, and by the combined hostilities of the barbarians. Further, they are said to coöperate earnestly and efficiently with deans and presidents in coercing refractory members of their own body, and in helping put through reforms and other measures for the good of the whole student body. They are the most loyal part of the alumnæ, and through their permanent connection with their chapters, continue to come back and show interest in their alma mater long after other students have broken the tie.

“THE UNFORTUNATE ‘BARB’ WHO IS LEFT TO THE PROMISCUOUS FRIENDSHIPS OF THE CHEAP BOARDING-HOUSE”]

So far I have said little about the girl who is left out. To many of the fraternity women she seems the most deplorable feature of the system. Except in the college where the societies contain all but a very few of the students, her case does not seem to me serious. To be sure, she misses a great deal of fun and social training; but if she is worth saving, she saves herself in the end; and if she gives up in despair and goes home because she does not “make a frat,” she is not of the stuff that the college needs. Probably some sensitive girls are embittered for a long time by the slight, but the finer ones conquer, even though the sting lingers throughout their course. A large number in the great mass of the students are unaffected by the fraternity problems. They do not expect or wish to get in, and they have virtually very little to do with the fraternity girls except as they work in the same student organizations. They have their own sets, their own social life, averaging more good times, perhaps, than they are credited with by their pitying superior sisters. What the university fails to do to counteract the effects of poverty, ill breeding, bad preparation, and inexperience is another thing altogether. Individual tragedies settle themselves, and those who win come out stronger, finer women for their victory over adverse conditions than any fraternity girl for whom the way has been made smooth.

But the fraternity idea must be judged not so much by those whom it shuts out from special privilege as by the results that it produces in those whom it fosters.

The Pan Hellenic Society believes itself specially chosen and trained for service. And what has it done? Aside from a vague and general interest in alumnæ activities, this service is reduced to scholarships, some isolated attempts in education and philanthropy, a certain “dynamic force” upon the character of its members, scarcely apparent to outsiders, and continued perfection of organization, thus far for no more evident purpose than the reform of its own body.

In other words, the fraternity system seems grotesquely out of proportion in the general scheme of things. Why should this one feature of undergraduate life be magnified by means of publications, council meetings, and conventions, if it is to fulfil no other purpose than the perpetuation of itself? How does it stand in relation to the many needs of the world? Is it not rather like a crystallization of an immature stage of development? Why should a fraternity woman go about the world seeking only her own kind, like the missionary to China who wrote to her fraternity paper of the various social advantages that came to her through her encounters there with Greek sisters? It looks to me very much like an actual limitation of growth. Take the case of the country girl whom college has unfitted for her home environment. It was cited as one of the inestimable blessings of the system that her sole interest now lies in her fraternity literature and friends. To my mind this relationship is rather a handicap that retards the shifting of focus that must take place in her before she can make her life a success.

For these reasons I believe that the fraternities, notwithstanding individual benefits, are hastening on our “French Revolution”; they are creating a type that rules by habit rather than by individual power and wisdom; and by their inflexible system of caste they are emphasizing the gap, already more than sufficient for women as for men, between privilege and the working world.

A college president recently said to me in substance: “I always think of the fraternity men as in a circle, hand in hand, facing outward; but of the women as turned the other way, worshiping at their own little shrine, with their backs to the winds of the world.”

[3] And yet I read in a belated answer from a broadminded fraternity
woman: “The vows of these childish secret societies are regarded
as just as binding as marriage-vows.”

[4] In Wellesley the societies are local, and in Smith they are not
properly fraternities at all.

DAVY

BY LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY

Davy, her knight, her dear, was dead:
Low in dust was the silken head.
“Isn’t there heaven,”
(She was but seven)
“Isn’t there” (sobbing) “for dogs?” she said.

“Man is immortal, sage or fool:
Animals end, by different rule.”
So had they prated
Of things created,
An hour before, in her Sunday-school.

Trusty and glad and true, who could
Match her hero of hardihood,
Rancorless, selfless,
Prideless, pelfless?--
How I should like to be half so good!

Firebrand eye and icicle nose;
Ear inwrought like a guelder-rose;
All the sweet wavy
Beauty of Davy;--
Sad, not to answer whither it goes!

“Isn’t there heaven for dogs that’s dead?
God made Davy, out of His head:
If He unmake him,
Doesn’t He take him?
Why should He throw him away?” she said.

The birds were busy, the brook was gay,
But the little hand was in mine all day.
Nothing could bury
That infinite query:
“Davy,--_would_ God throw him away?”

HORACE HOWARD FURNESS

FROM A PENCIL PORTRAIT BY AMY OTIS]

OUR GREAT SHAKSPERE CRITIC

THE LATE HORACE HOWARD FURNESS

~November 2, 1833--August 13, 1912~

BY TALCOTT WILLIAMS

Only a great man can accomplish a great task. For fifteen of Shakspere’s most familiar plays, Horace Howard Furness condensed the criticism of three centuries for each play in a single volume, save “Hamlet,” which has two.[5] From 6000 to 8000 works have been published on Shakspere. All on each play is brought within the compass of its volume. Who holds this volume holds the fruits of all past criticism and comment on the play.

Mere industry can do much, but mere industry could never build the monument of these volumes. I confess I never look at the impressive row without amazement at the labor for which they stand. It would be much, if this were all. Long labor of this order grinds like a glacier over a writer’s style and individuality. Textual criticism saps men. There is a certain form of stupidity never found except in “notes.”

Small have continual plodders ever won
Save bare authority, from others’ books.

Nothing saves a man from this but personality. The first great tonic is humor. Dr. Furness, man and work together, brim with it. Who else would have made a merry mark of the one word in Shakspere--in “The Tempest,” “young _scamels_ from the rock”--for which no one has even suggested a convincing or even plausible meaning? The humor needed to salt these barrels and barrels of Shaksperian pemmican is much more than the capacity to see a joke. This is to humor what a pocket-dictionary is to an encyclopedia. What is needed for adequate comment on Shakspere, the most English of all figures in the world of letters, is that numberless capacity to see the broad laugh in all things which lies so near to tears that when the coin of fate is flipped no man knows which is to be uppermost. This gives sanity. It enables the editor of a variorum to know from time to time what a fool a German scholar can make of himself and his author. I suppose no man could see Horace Howard Furness, that solid figure, that sturdy step, that firm face of roomy planes and liberal modeling, those twinkling eyes, that air of benignant wisdom and general good-nature, without seeing that the worst joke of all, life itself, could not daunt this resolution or dull this humor.

There is a look we all know on the face of the judge--a detached habit of thought. It comes on the bench, and it comes, too, let me assure you, if a man has had before his bar for forty years all the culprits who for two centuries have been writing about Shakspere. His beam will stand sure and he will “poise the cause in justice’s equal scales.” There are scholars whose lives are given to the great in letters who become surfeited with honey and “in the taste confound the appetite.” Nothing saves from this but the incommunicable capacity for the perception of the best. This capacity grows by what it feeds upon. Through these volumes there has grown certainty of touch and serenity of judgment, but from the first issue there was apparent, as in the man, the norm which is not to be corrupted even by the Elizabethan extravagance of the greatest of Elizabethans.

Dr. Furness came to his life task through the Kemble tradition. The Kembles, who succeeded Garrick, first gave dignity to Shakspere. Three critics of the contemporary stage, dramatic critics all, Coleridge, Lamb, and Hazlitt, two of them working journalists, began the present attitude. It has since been impossible for any scholar to say, as Samuel Johnson did, that a passage in a third-rate play, Congreve’s “Mourning Bride,” was better than anything in Shakspere.

The stage was dear to him, and he believed that no play could be adequately understood unless it was heard. The foremost players of his day he knew, and each had counseled with him, and he had gladly learned from them. With Fanny Kemble and her light touch and perspicuous, penetrating interpretation as a model, he read the familiar plays himself to many audiences, interspersing comment. To all who read or act he was a living proof that lines are “read” by the mind and that he or she who fully understands will fully express, and he or she alone. Deaf as he was, stress, cadence, emphasis, intonation, and expression were as manifold, accurate, and illuminating as his comment. All was suffused with the cheer and glow of strength, and had behind that incomparable organ of interpretation, a mind that knew, loved, and voiced the inner meaning of the uttered word.

It is now sixty-five years since Dr. Furness, a boy of fourteen, received from Fanny Kemble a season ticket for her readings. In her readings she sat at a green baize-covered table still cherished in his library. She made him a Shaksperian for life. He was living in a city which, until Boston took its place a little over twenty years ago, as Chicago is doing to-day, gave the stage a more serious, steady, intelligent, and consistent support than any other.

To a local stage possessing this tradition the Philadelphia of threescore years ago added through his father, William Henry Furness, for fifty years head of the Unitarian Church founded by Joseph Priestley, a more intimate contact with the romantic movement in England than fell to other young Americans of the period. It was in Philadelphia that Wordsworth was first appreciated at his full value by an American. It was there that Coleridge was first printed. There, in a commonwealth for two centuries nearer Germany than any other American State, German translation began. William Henry Furness early addressed himself to this field. His daughter, Mrs. Annis Lee Wister, continued the task through thirty years, her last work appearing in a volume of her brother’s variorum series. Where other commentators in our tongue, in either home of our race, have looked to English comment, Dr. Furness from the first significant dedication of his “Hamlet” (1877), written in personal exultation over German triumph as proving Germany no longer the “Hamlet of Nations,” has seen Shakspere as a world poet, has come close to German authority and research, and equaled its thorough and exact character without falling into its pedantry or its far-fetched gloss.

From many causes he knew all it is to be a gentleman, and when every year he rose as dean of the Shakspere Society on St. George’s day to give the solitary toast, “William Shakspere, gentleman,” it was on the last word that his sturdy accent fell. Beyond all the other great voices of our tongue, Shakspere was “gentle.” The author of “Coriolanus” loathed the general mass. He scarce mentions it without touching on its evil smell. Its sweaty nightcap ever stank in his nostrils. Certain sympathies are needed for full critical appreciation of the poet who was the last word of the feudalism of the past to the democracy of the future, and these sympathies Dr. Furness had.

The Shakspere Society first began his study. For sixty-one years its fortnightly meetings have gathered a group of men foremost in Philadelphia. One has read Shakspere there with a cabinet-minister, a chancellor of the bar association, a judge of the first rank, a great physician as well known in the art of letters as in the letters of his art, and a novelist whose best seller has not had its total exceeded. It was in a like practical atmosphere that, a young man not yet thirty, Dr. Furness was stirred half a century ago to try to compare texts by the aid of a scrap-book. Out of this grew the Variorum, first with the first folio for a basis and later the Cambridge text. He had leisure, a perilous gift. He early collected, until 7000 volumes were at hand in a building for their use; but most collectors are swamped by their apparatus. “A Concordance of Shaksperian Poems,” 1874, by Mrs. Furness, bespoke a common bond in a perfect union. In 1883 she was taken. After a generation, those who then saw his grief from without will not adventure to speak of it. A sense of loss was never absent from him. It drove him to arduous labors, which the years made a habit of life. Save a single volume of his father’s intimate friendship with Emerson, he wrote nothing but the Variorum. His prefaces, his addresses, and his letters should, now that he is gone, make a volume. He preserved the epistolary gift, lost in our day. His simplest note had style, charm, and weight.

In his research he was to the end a firm believer in the study of the plays and the plays alone. The order in which the plays were written did not interest him. For “weak endings,” “incomplete lines,” and all the newer apparatus of Shakspere study, he had an unconcealed disregard. It was not for him. He would have questioned his personal identity as soon as question the personal authorship of Shakspere’s plays.

The happy fortune befell me once at his side and over his ear-trumpet to say of him that which greatly pleased. It was at the luncheon when the New Theatre gave him a gold medal and he monopolized the affectionate attention of every woman in the room. His appreciation gave whatever value there was to my words, in which I said that it was not as a scholar unrivaled and a critical authority unequaled that he would be most loved and remembered, but because his work had made accurate study possible to the wandering player, given the solitary teacher on the frontier the best of past criticism, and armed the smallest village club with a library of learning, making the best of Shakspere the general possession of all. It was for this he labored. It was this American ideal that inspired him. It was in the service of this ideal that he renounced all royalties.

It is only as a friend I write of Horace Howard Furness, as one of those that loved and knew. It is ever ill writing of one’s friends when they are gone, but his going changed the very horizon of life for us all, robbed of its landmark the landscape of the years, and left a gap where once we all looked up and learned and had new sense of the fashion in which long purpose, fulfilled and never forgotten, shapes character and carves cliffs from which men see afar.

For forty years he sat at a desk and worked to make books from books on a book. In all our American life there is no other, few in any land, who so encysted himself in a task wholly of letters. There goes with this for most, as all know, the bent figure, the absent-minded or the self-conscious gaze, aloofness from the actual. Not he. To the last there was the sturdy, erect figure, the ruddy, full face, shaped and blocked as of a man of many tasks, the resolute mustache, the solid chin, the stiff, short, aggressive hair, early whitened by tears and tasks--“your white-haired son,” as he wrote in an inimitable acknowledgment to his father in one of his volumes. Even a year from eighty his very step was decision. He bore down Chestnut Street in his weekly visit from his country home like “a royal, good, and gallant ship, freshly beheld in all her trim.”

There is in Philadelphia a little group which has dined together just short of four decades every three weeks for eight months of each year. He was of the first that met, and the last of the first to go. To one who began thirty years ago as the youngest of those who sat at this board, and now, alas! finds himself among the elder at a table peopled with the past, nothing so bulks in all the round of a manifold social contact as this dominant figure, alert, awake, clear-visioned, felt through all this gathered group of men. Each of them was himself felt in all the various walks of life, on the bench, in law, in medicine, in letters, in art, in journalism, and in affairs; yet he the center, stone-deaf. How did he do it? I do not know. I only saw. He alone had the secret. Gay, responsive, indomitable, flashing sheer personality, and with a big silver ear-trumpet moving here and there, into which some one at his side poured a reversion of the passing talk, who is there whom you know, or whom you have known, who could have done it? None other that I know. Yet he so did it that one felt that the best recipe and assurance of unflagging talk, of explosive, masculine laughter, of a perpetual source of the dearest and most precious thing on earth, the easy interchange, conflict, and contact of friends with friends--the best recipe for all this was to have there a great scholar, unable to hear a word until it was dropped into the silver trumpet, yet giving edge, guidance, direction, and inspiration to all the flow of mutual utterance that has run in this well-worn channel for twoscore years.

To do this was more like his very self than all his throned volumes; and I am not sure but that, in the great chancery of existence, it is better worth while to have made friends gay, high-spirited, and ready to give a frolic welcome to all the years as they came than to be known ever after, as he will be, as foremost in his great field. It was like him to concentrate all his social life on this one group. Elsewhere he was always sought and scarcely seen, though his house was graced by an open hospitality the loss of which in time he made up by night work. How wise to know your friends in your forties, and to gather them and to be with them to the very threshold of the eighties! How far wiser than the wandering way in which, like children, we fill our hands so full that we can neither use, nor give, nor leave, nor enjoy! It was like him resolutely to keep this dinner of high talk and plain fare, with men who dined much and well elsewhere, to a dollar apiece, as a constant protest against a lavish age which kills all by gilding it, as with the luckless boy in the Medicean festival.

Life was compounded by him of simples; but they were “collected from all simples that have virtue under the moon.” He lived in one city and loved it. Two homes housed all his years.

He sprang of a goodly ancestry and was justly and openly proud of it. He held high the long descent of men given to the works of the mind. His father was known before him, and his sons were known with him and will be known after him.

His heart visibly and frankly warmed, though without word or bruit, when in a narrow span of years he and his son Horace Howard Furness, Jr., published each his volume which garner the comment of all the years on a play of Shakspere. Another son, Dr. W. H. Furness, in the same span, wrote an authoritative volume on the Dyaks of Borneo, placing in the Museum of the University of Pennsylvania the best existing monographic collection on the region he studied. A daughter, Mrs. Horace Jayne (Caroline Furness Jayne), issued the one most important book ever published on the perplexing, fascinating, and almost unknown field of cat’s-cradles, a mine of patient research and accurate, skilful description. His sister, Mrs. Caspar Wister, published the long series of translations from German novels the success of which, among a score of failures in this field, was wholly due to the skill with which the “translator” adapted this fiction “made in Germany” to the English-speaking world. Five years ago this brother and sister were at work side by side, Mrs. Wister on the proof-sheets of her fortieth German translation, “The Lonely House,” by Adolph Streckfuss, and he on the proof-sheets of “Antony and Cleopatra,” the twelfth in his monumental march. Her first translation, “Seaside and Fireside Fairies,” from George Blum and Louis Wahl, had appeared forty-three years, and his “Romeo and Juliet” thirty-six years, before. His brother, Frank Furness, whose death preceded his by so short a span, was, when a mere lad, in Rush’s Lancers, and all his life looked the cavalryman, with his drooping, yellow mustache and his seamed face. He retained to the end the walk of a man who, for years together in his youth, has felt the saddle-leathers between his legs. Like Lever’s hero, he once escaped capture by taking a barn-yard fence no other man would have dared or persuaded his cavalry mount to venture. By carrying powder to a battery not only under fire, but through burning woods, he won a medal of honor. At Cold Harbor he risked life openly and flagrantly by walking out between two firing-lines a few rods apart to give a wounded Confederate a drink of water. Years later, when there came to this dauntless soul heartbreaking grief, he solaced himself by finding through a newspaper friend, who sowed the strange and moving tale broadcast in Southern papers, the man whose life he had saved, bringing him to Philadelphia and filling a month with mutual memories for both. To the world Frank Furness was known as an architect, a pupil of Richard Morris Hunt.

It could be only in such a family that, as a family lark at a family dinner, a novel was written, the first chapter by Horace Howard Furness, the others in turn by the rest, three sons, a daughter, a son-in-law, and a daughter-in-law, no author to kill a character without the consent of its creator, and all printed in seven copies as “Grace Auchester.” I foresee a pretty penny for this volume in catalogues of Shaksperiana a century hence.

It is the odd blunder of a dull world that social buoyancy and the notable mind seldom march together; but, as an acute thinker has said, a man with a strong pair of legs can walk east as easily as he walks west, and our great Shaksperian had all the mirth that rang under the rafters of the Mermaid. He made the Hasty Pudding Club at Harvard. He was the dancer of his year and led in the play of more than sixty years ago. I like it that after his death there were found, preserved through all the half century, the pink tights and the spangled skirt which the toil-worn commentator had worn in glad youth as _Mlle. Furnessina_. In the world of silence in which he lived so long he seemed to know laughter by instinct. His speech on the “Miseries of Old Age” at a Harvard dinner four years ago swept the tables. He presided over a dinner or a meeting marvelously. His instinct, his attention, his capacity to interpret a look as easily as a word, carried him through all. Nor was humor ever far from the ceremonial surface of things. For example, at the lunch given at the opening of the Bryn Mawr College library--it was on the hottest of June days, and he was sweltering under the crimson trappings and beef-eater hat of his Cambridge degree of Litt.Doc. (1899), when a young friend spoke a consoling word to him. He replied, “Ah, Mademoiselle, il faut souffrir pour être _swell_.”

The world narrowly missed in him a great Arabic scholar. His trip abroad after his graduation at Harvard carried him far afield. He was in Damascus when the Crimean War set the East ablaze. He saw Richard Burton, imperious-souled, a vision of masterful will, holding his consular court; and to the vision he recurred again and again. He had a week or two in the desert. He became enamoured of Arabic and its study, of which relics exist in a grammar and reader that he owned. But his brief days over Semitics had this strange by-product. In the polychrome Bible, projected by Professor Haupt of Johns Hopkins, and halted midway for lack of support, Dr. Furness, perhaps the only man alive so versed in Elizabethan English that it was as the tongue to which he was born, and knowing enough of Hebrew, furnished the translation of the revised text. In the Hebrew lyrics and psalms translated for this edition of the Old Testament he reached the summit of his style, an incomparable mingling of nice scholarship and exalted utterance. How fit it was that the Bible and Shakspere should attract the same critical capacity!

If I were to sum by a single inanimate object the temper and tradition of Dr. Furness, I would turn to the gloves, in his unrivaled collection, which one is glad to believe were Shakspere’s. They are manifestly the gloves of an Elizabethan gentleman not too large in build, gold-embroidered, and shapely. They were treasured as genuine by the descendants of Shakspere’s son-in-law, the physician who attended him in his last illness, and were handed down in that family. They passed to Garrick, who gave them to Philip Kemble, and so by descent again they passed from Fanny Kemble to their recent owner. There again is the double line of grace, the descent both of line and of genius, to make precious the gloves that rested on Shakspere’s hand, took its shape and knew its strength and beauty.

[5] The plays edited by Dr. Furness are “Romeo and Juliet,” 1871;
“Macbeth,” 1873; “Hamlet,” two volumes, 1877; “King Lear,”
1880; “Othello,” 1886; “The Merchant of Venice,” 1888; “As You
Like It,” 1890; “The Tempest,” 1892; “Midsummer-Night’s Dream,”
1895; “The Winter’s Tale,” 1898; “Much Ado about Nothing,” 1899;
“Twelfth Night,” 1901; “Love’s Labour’s Lost,” 1904; “Antony
and Cleopatra,” 1909, and “Cymbeline,” completed and to appear.
His son Horace Howard Furness, Jr., will complete his father’s
task, and has already published “Richard III,” 1911, and revised
“Macbeth.”

THE HUNGRY SHEEP

BY WILLIAM LYON PHELPS

Lampson Professor of English Literature at Yale University

“_The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed,
But swoln with wind and the rank mist they draw,
Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread._”

~Milton~, “_Lycidas_.”

One of to-day’s favorite questions, both in private speculation and in public debate, is this, “Why do not more men go regularly to church?” Like all questions of real interest, it is much easier to ask than to answer. The pews undoubtedly contain more women than men, though this fact by itself need occasion no alarm. It does not prove that the church has “lost its hold” or that the habit of going to church is relatively unimportant. Women have always taken more interest in religious organizations than men, both because they have more leisure for contemplation, and because public worship appeals more to a woman’s nature than it does to a man’s. If the mere fact that the minister sees in front of him more brilliant hats than bald heads be a sign that the church does not appeal to the solid intelligence of humanity, then the symphony concert and the art museum fail even more signally. The masculine proportion of listeners at a high-class musical entertainment or among the visitors at an art gallery is even less than it is at church. Indeed, it is rather interesting to observe that at almost any public spectacle the number of men is in inverse ratio to the intellectual value of the performance. At a vaudeville the men vastly outnumber the women, and amid the enormous throng at a prize-fight there are hardly any women at all. Thus the fact that the seats at a prize-fight are crowded with men, while the pews are filled with women, does not in itself indicate that the church is on the down-grade.

Still, it is unfortunate that more men do not attend church, and it is more unfortunate for the men than it is for the church. Men need the church more than the church needs men. The real difficulty is not a fundamental one; it does not lie in the nature of religion or in the nature of man. Next to questions of sex and means of subsistence, the average man is at heart more interested in religion than in any other one thing. The ordinary man is a natural theologian. He takes keen interest in constructing his God, his scheme of the universe, and the problem of life after death has always had, and probably always will have, an irresistible fascination.

The main trouble with the church to-day is not in the pews; it is in the pulpit. There is more Christian faith in the average congregation than there is in the average preacher. During the short period of Emerson’s pastorate, he was obliged to call on an old man who was dying. The young minister murmured apologetically a number of confused and clumsy commonplaces, and finally his aged client cried sharply, “Young man, if you don’t know your business, you had better go home.” Emerson, who came to give advice, took it, like the honest and sincere man that he was; and he had no peace until he left the church for good and all. He was totally unfitted to be a minister because he had no Christian faith, and as soon as he realized his unfitness, he sought another occupation, and became enormously useful to humanity in other ways.

A United States senator met three clergymen in three different parts of the country, and each complained that he could not get a large audience. The senator asked the first man if he believed that the Bible was the word of God; the cleric smiled pityingly, and said that of course he did not in the crude and ordinary sense, and then he launched a mass of vague metaphysical phrases. The senator asked the second man if he believed in the future life, and the reverend gentleman said that he did not believe in personal immortality, but that the essence of life was indestructible, or some such notion. The senator asked the third man, a pastor of an orthodox evangelical church, if he believed in the divinity of Jesus Christ; the shepherd of souls replied that all men were divine. The three clergymen had themselves supplied abundant reasons why their audiences were small. They had nothing to offer them but wind. The hungry sheep looked up, and were not fed.

A vital Christian faith is the prime essential for a man who wishes to succeed in the ministry. It is worth more to him than all the learning in the world. If an honest man cannot believe, we surely ought not to blame him or quarrel with him; but he has no business in the pulpit. Christian faith is just as necessary a prerequisite for a clergyman as a knowledge of mathematics is for a civil engineer. Without it, he is not merely ineffective; he is futile and absurd. I remember being present once in a vast audience where Mr. Moody was talking, and at the end of his remarks he said that he would be glad to answer any questions. Some one asked, “What, in your judgment, is the best work a modern minister can do?” Before Mr. Moody had time to reply, there was a voice from the throng, which cried out, “This is the work of God, that ye believe on him whom He hath sent.” The great evangelist hesitated a moment, and then said that he had nothing to add.