LIBRARY 
 
 OF THE 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA. 
 Class ^ 5" 2i 
 
C 
 
A Study of Prose Fiction 
 
 The Powers at Play 
 
 The Plated City 
 
 Salem Kittredge and Other Stories 
 
 The Broughton House 
 
THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 
 
The Amateur Spirit 
 
 By Bliss Perry 
 
 
 Boston and New York 
 Houghton, Mifflin and Company 
 
 (fte Ciiticrsi&e press, Cambribge 
 1904 
 
COPYRIGHT 1904 BY BLISS PERRY 
 
 Published October iqo4 
 
To 
 A. B. P. 
 
PREFACE 
 
 THE half dozen essays that are printed in this 
 volume have sufficient unity, I hope, to justify 
 their publication as a book. The emotions of the 
 author who discovers that he has produced a 
 treatise when he intended only a series of essays 
 may be likened to the surprise of the child who 
 observes that his blocks, piled almost at random, 
 make something that looks like a castle after all. 
 My castle is indeed but a modest one. Yet the 
 essays which make up this volume have all been 
 written, I find, with some reference to the cen 
 tral theme : namely, the significance of the ama 
 teur spirit in carrying forward the daily work of 
 our modern world. I have endeavored to illus 
 trate from many fields from sports and poli 
 tics, from science and letters the possibility of 
 combining the professional s skill with the zest 
 and enthusiasm of the amateur. 
 
 The first essay is devoted to that general 
 theme. The study of Indifferentism approaches 
 
viii PREFACE 
 
 the subject from another side, and one not less 
 fascinating to the observer of human life. The 
 two papers about the College Professor have 
 been chosen, partly because that profession is 
 but little understood by the general public, and 
 partly because it frequently affords a very per 
 fect illustration of the union of an ardent human 
 spirit with a consummate technical expertness. 
 The story of an episode in Nathaniel Hawthorne s 
 spiritual development contributes something, I 
 think, to the understanding of the fusion of 
 normal human interests and sympathies with the 
 purely artistic passion of the born writer. The 
 amateur and the professional in Hawthorne 
 using both words in their best sense may be 
 observed with singular clearness in that critical 
 summer of 1838. 
 
 An honored and friendly Doctor of Divinity 
 has accused me of endeavoring, in the essay upon 
 Fishing with a Worm, to write allegory. That 
 shall be as the reader chooses to interpret it ; but 
 I have certainly tried to picture from the material 
 offered by a favorite pastime, some of the warring 
 motives in the old struggle between the generous 
 and the sordid ways of looking at the world. 
 
PREFACE ix 
 
 I should add that the essay on The Life of a 
 College Professor originally appeared in Scrib- 
 ner s Magazine. The others have been printed 
 in The Atlantic Monthly. 
 
 B. P. 
 
 CAMBRIDGE, 1904. 
 

 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 The Amateur Spirit . . . 1 
 
 Indifferentism ...... 35 
 
 The Life of a College Professor ... 67 
 
 College Professors and the Public . . 93 
 
 Hawthorne at North Adams . . . . 117 
 
 Fishing with a Worm ..... 141 
 
THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 
 
THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 
 
 ONE interesting result of the British struggle 
 in South Africa was a revival among English 
 men of the spirit of self-examination. The unex 
 pected duration and the staggering cost of the 
 war brought sharply home to them a realization 
 of national shortcomings. When every allowance 
 was made for the natural difficulties against which 
 the British troops so gallantly contended, there 
 remained a good deal of incontrovertible and un 
 welcome evidence of defective preparation, of in 
 adequate training. The War Office maps were 
 incomplete ; the Boer positions were ill reconnoi 
 tred; British officers of long experience were 
 again and again outgeneraled by farmers. Of the 
 many frank and manly endeavors to analyze the 
 causes of such a surprising weakness, one of 
 the most suggestive was made by the Hon. George 
 C. Brodrick, Warden of Merton College. In an 
 article published in 1900 he inquired whether his 
 countrymen may well be called, not, as formerly, 
 
4 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 
 
 " a nation of shopkeepers," but, with more justice, 
 a nation of amateurs. " Conspicuous as are the 
 virtues of British soldiers and British officers," 
 he remarks, " these virtues are essentially the vir 
 tues of the amateur, and not of the professional, 
 arising from the native vigor of our national tem 
 perament, and not from intelligent education or 
 training." J 
 
 The distinction here made between the ama 
 teur and the professional is one that, for ordi 
 nary purposes, is obvious enough. The amateur, 
 we are accustomed to say, works for love, and 
 not for money. He cultivates an art or a sport, 
 a study or an employment, because of his taste 
 for it ; he is attached to it, not because it gives 
 him a living, but because it ministers to his life. 
 Mr. Joseph Jefferson, for instance, is classed as 
 a professional actor and an amateur painter. 
 Charles Dickens was an amateur actor and a 
 professional novelist. Your intermittent polit 
 ical reformer is an amateur. His opponent, the 
 "ward man," is a professional; politics being 
 both his life and his living, his art and his con 
 stant industry. 
 
 1 The Nineteenth Century, October, 1900. 
 
THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 6 
 
 In any particular art or sport, it is often diffi 
 cult to draw a hard-and-fast line between amateur 
 and professional activity. The amateur athlete 
 may be so wholly in earnest as to take risks and 
 to endure hardships which no amount of money 
 would tempt him to undergo. This earnestness 
 has seldom, if ever, been carried so far as it is in 
 our American athletic contests of the present day. 
 Here, for instance, is the testimony of one of 
 the members of the Oxford-Cambridge Golfing 
 Society s team, which won so many victories on 
 the American links in the summer of 1903 : 
 
 "Apart from the American phraseology and 
 such minor distinctions, golf as played across 
 the Atlantic is fundamentally different from the 
 English, and more especially the Scotch variety 
 of the game. At bottom the game in America is 
 a business. At bottom the game in England 
 is a pleasure, a relaxation, and a means of 
 taking pleasant exercise. No doubt from its en 
 thralling nature golf in England has devotees to 
 whom the game* is a pleasure that s all but pain, 
 but even so, the attitude of this minority is dif 
 ferent from the great bulk of American players 
 who have set golf upon such a pedestal that it 
 
6 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 
 
 has dominated them as a pain that is almost a 
 pleasure. . . . 
 
 " The whole attitude towards golf is one of 
 comparison, just as in other branches of life. 
 The American is intensely interested in the tall 
 est building, the richest man, the longest street, 
 the fastest train, and a host of other such combi 
 nations which sound like exercises out of an ele 
 mentary German grammar. It is imagined that 
 there is a list, at the head of which is the best 
 player, with the rest below him in descending 
 scale of efficiency. . . . 
 
 " The title of champion does not carry with it 
 honor and congratulation, but rather liability to 
 attack and disparagement if the holder does not 
 win every single match or competition in which 
 he plays. This criticism may be important from 
 the business point of view of the professional, as 
 an advertisement, but it cannot possibly affect an 
 amateur who has nothing whatever to gain or lose 
 pecuniarily by being champion. The principle is 
 to put a man at the head of a list and then tear 
 him down by all available means. . . . This con 
 tinual golf -play ing with an object does away with 
 the light-hearted and cheery matches and four- 
 
THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 7 
 
 somes which are the main part of golf in the 
 United Kingdom. The game under this treatment 
 easily loses its title to be called a game, and be 
 comes a serious proposition, blighted with respon 
 sibilities and overburdened with care. There is 
 no relaxation in golf of this kind, but only in 
 creased consumption of both physical and mental 
 energy." l 
 
 And here is a Harvard rowing-man writing 
 with admirable frankness in a recent number of 
 The Harvard Graduates Magazine, under the 
 title " Sport or Business " : "I have known but 
 one Varsity athlete (I refer particularly to foot 
 ball and rowing as the most strenuous branches 
 of our sport) who admitted for a moment that 
 he went out for the fun he got from the practice 
 and the contest. . . . 
 
 " As the thing now stands a man may have the 
 best of personal reasons for not playing, but if 
 he is a good athlete his duty to the college de 
 mands a sacrifice of these. The duty to get Yale 
 beaten is just now reckoned to be the athlete s sole 
 duty, while his duty to his present and future self 
 looms small in the background, or vaguely in the 
 
 1 J. A. T. Bramston in Golf. 
 
8 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 
 
 middle distance. It is hard lines for men who are 
 unable to adapt themselves to such a perspective, 
 and who are made to feel ashamed of this as of a 
 weakness. They bear indeed the athlete s bur 
 den/ And there are too many such men, men 
 who thoroughly dislike their work under the pre 
 sent extreme conditions, moral as well as physical, 
 and who do it only from a vague feeling that it is 
 * up to them to stake their persons in the gen 
 eral obligation to organize victory. 
 
 " The spirit that makes a man, when he has once 
 undertaken a thing, put it through to a finish and 
 win out no matter what it costs (and this was 
 once given as a definition of the Yale spirit), is 
 an excellent maxim for business or politics, and 
 one that is frequently heard in defense of the 
 present teeth-gritting state of affairs between 
 Harvard and Yale. But such a maxim cannot be 
 applied to athletics. It means the death of ath 
 letics. Its place is in the prize-ring or anywhere 
 you please save in a branch of activity which is 
 essentially a recreation. The true amateur ath 
 lete, the true sportsman, is one who takes up sport 
 for the fun of it and the love of it, and to whom 
 success or defeat is a secondary matter so long as 
 
THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 9 
 
 the play is good. . . . Rivalry is a vital element of 
 sport ; it is from doing the thing well, doing the 
 thing handsomely, doing the thing intelligently 
 that one derives the pleasure which is the essence 
 of sport. Even more vital than the rivalry itself 
 is the checking of its fierceness and bitterness by 
 the graciousness of gentlemanly feeling. It must 
 be remembered that pure rivalry is fighting, and 
 the more its part is magnified in sport the more 
 sport takes on the nature of a fight, the nature 
 of the sport which has come to exist between 
 Harvard and Yale. We have to admit that there 
 are some of us who prefer fighting-fun to sport, 
 and there is no doubt that the fighting is a healthy 
 discipline ; but the majority of us do not, and 
 there is no reason why our athletics should be 
 moulded to suit the taste of the former, that 
 we should be made to take our fun with all these 
 convulsions and hysterics. Yet just as long as we 
 meet the present-day Yale such will be the state 
 of things. . . . 
 
 " I am well aware of the construction which 
 a part of the public would put upon Harvard s 
 giving up contests with Yale. Hopeless of vic 
 tory, it would be repeated, and like a sulky 
 
10 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 
 
 child, she won t play ! To make my own mean 
 ing clear let me repeat that not the loss of vic 
 tories, but fear of the loss of the true amateur 
 spirit here would be what would urge Harvard to 
 such a course. I have rowed against Yale three 
 times, twice in minor crews which beat her, and 
 once in a university boat which she beat hand 
 somely. I should be willing to see her beat Har 
 vard incessantly if the business and hysterical 
 elements of the thing could be left out. And for 
 these elements it is by no means fair to blame 
 Yale exclusively, though her spirit is popularly 
 understood to include them. The contestants if 
 left to themselves would not develop this spirit 
 to such excess. It comes from outside pressure, 
 from the papers, the graduates, the non-athletic 
 undergraduates, the crowd of betting toughs who 
 turn up at every important game, and, in general, 
 the false friends of sport. " 1 
 
 The athletic contests of zealous undergraduates 
 are of course but one illustration of the earnest 
 ness which the amateur may carry into every 
 department of life. Amateur philanthropy, for 
 
 1 William James, Jr., in The Harvard Graduates 1 Magazine, 
 December, 1903. 
 
THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 11 
 
 example, is of great and increasing service in 
 the social organism of the modern community. 
 Many an American brings to his amusement, his 
 avocation, such as yachting, fancy farming, 
 tarpon fishing, the same thoroughness, energy, 
 and practical skill that win him success in his 
 vocation. 
 
 And yet, as a general rule, the amateur betrays 
 amateurish qualities. He is unskillful because un 
 trained ; desultory because incessant devotion to 
 his hobby is both unnecessary and wearisome; 
 ineffective because, after all, it is not a vital 
 matter whether he succeed or fail. The amateur 
 actor is usually interesting, at times delightful, 
 and even, as in the case of Dickens, powerful ; his 
 performance gives pleasure to his friends; but, 
 nevertheless, the professional, who must act well 
 or starve, acts very much better. In a country 
 where there is a great leisure class, as the Warden 
 of Merton points out, amateurism is sure to flour 
 ish. " The young Englishman of this great leisure 
 class," he says, " is no dandy and no coward, but 
 he is an amateur born and bred, with an amateur s 
 lack of training, an amateur s contempt of method, 
 and an amateur s ideal of life." The English boy 
 
12 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 
 
 attends school, he adds, with other boys who are 
 amateurs in their studies, and almost professionals 
 in their games ; he passes through the university 
 with the minimum of industry ; he finds profes 
 sional and public life in Great Britain crippled 
 by the amateur spirit ; in the army, the bar, the 
 church, in agriculture, manufacturing, and com 
 merce, there is a contempt for knowledge, an in 
 veterate faith in the superiority of the rule of 
 thumb, a tendency to hold one s self a little above 
 one s work. 
 
 Similar testimony has also been given by Man- 
 dell Creighton, the late Bishop of London, in a 
 posthumously published address entitled " A Plea 
 for Knowledge." " The great defect of England 
 at present," confesses the bishop, " is an inade 
 quate conception of the value of knowledge in 
 itself, and of its importance for the national life. 
 We have a tendency to repose on our laurels ; to 
 adopt the attitude that we are no longer profes 
 sionals, but high-minded and eclectic amateurs. 
 . . . We do not care to sacrifice our dignity by 
 taking undue care about trifles." 1 
 
 With the validity of such indictments against 
 
 1 Contemporary Review, April, 1901. 
 
THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 13 
 
 a whole nation we have no direct concern. But 
 they suggest the importance of the distinction be 
 tween the amateur and the professional spirit. 
 They show that a realization of this distinction 
 may affect many phases of activity, personal and 
 national. They indicate how far reaching may 
 be its significance for us Americans as we face 
 those new conditions under which the problems 
 of both personal and national life must be worked 
 out. 
 
 Amateurs, then, to borrow Mr. Brodrick s 
 definition, "are men who are not braced up to 
 a high standard of effort and proficiency by a 
 knowledge that failure may involve ruin, who sel 
 dom fully realize the difficulties of success against 
 trained competitors, and who therefore rebel 
 against the drudgery of professional drill and 
 methodical instruction." One may accept this 
 definition, in all its implications, without ceasing 
 to be aware of the charm of the amateur. For 
 the amateur surely has his charm, and he has his 
 virtues, virtues that have nowhere wrought 
 more happily for him than here upon American 
 soil. Versatility, enthusiasm, freshness of spirit, 
 initiative, a fine recklessness of tradition and 
 
14 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 
 
 precedent, a faculty for cutting across lots, 
 these are the qualities of the American pioneer. 
 Not in the Italians of the Renaissance nor in the 
 Elizabethan Englishmen will one find more plas 
 ticity of mind and hand than among the plain 
 Americans of 1840. Take those men of the Tran- 
 scendentalist epoch, whose individuality has been 
 fortunately transmitted to us through our litera 
 ture. They were in love with life, enraptured of 
 its opportunities and possibilities. No matter to 
 what task a man set his hand, he could gain a live 
 lihood without loss of self-respect or the respect of 
 the community. Let him try teaching school, Emer 
 son would advise ; let him farm it a while, drive 
 a tin peddler s cart for a season or two, keep 
 store, go to Congress, live " the experimental life." 
 Emerson himself could muse upon the oversold, 
 but he also raised the best Baldwin apples and 
 Bartlett pears in Concord, and got the highest 
 current prices for them in the Boston market. 
 His friend Thoreau supported himself by making 
 sand-paper or lead pencils, by surveying farms, 
 or by hoeing that immortal patch of beans ; his 
 true vocation being steadily that of the philoso 
 pher, the seeker. The type has been preserved, 
 
THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 15 
 
 by the translucent art of Hawthorne, in the 
 person of Holgrave, the daguerreotypist of The 
 House of the Seven Gables. Holgrave was 
 twenty-two, but he had already been a school 
 master, storekeeper, editor, peddler, dentist. He 
 had traveled in Europe, joined a company of 
 Fourierists, and lectured on mesmerism. Yet 
 " amid all these personal vicissitudes," Haw 
 thorne tells us, " he had never lost his identity. 
 He had never violated the innermost man, but 
 had carried his conscience along with him." 
 
 No doubt there is something humorous, to our 
 generation, in this glorification of the Yankee tin 
 peddler. Yet how much there is to admire in the 
 vivacity, the resourcefulness, the very mobility, 
 of that type of man, who was always in light 
 marching order, and who, by flank attack and 
 feigned retreat and in every disguise of uniform, 
 stormed his way to some sort of moral victory at 
 last! And the moral victory was often accom 
 panied by material victory as well. These men 
 got on, by hook or by crook; they asked no 
 favors ; they paid off their mortgages, and in 
 vented machines, and wrote books, and founded 
 new commonwealths. In war and peace they had 
 
16 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 
 
 a knack for getting things done, and learning the 
 rules afterward. 
 
 Nor has this restless, inventive, querying, ac 
 complishing type of American manhood lost its 
 prominence in our political and social structure. 
 The self-made man is still, perhaps, our most re 
 presentative man. Native shrewdness and energy 
 and practical capacity qualities such as the 
 amateur may possess in a high degree continue 
 to carry a man very far. They have frequently 
 been attended by such good fortune as to make 
 it easy for us to think that they are the only 
 qualities needed for success. Some of the most 
 substantial gains of American diplomacy, for in 
 stance, have been made by men without diplomatic 
 training. We have seen within a very few years 
 an almost unknown lawyer, from an insignificant 
 city, called to be the head of the Department of 
 State, where his achievements, indeed, promptly 
 justified his appointment. The case of Judge 
 Day is by no means unique. The conduct of the 
 War Department and the Navy has frequently 
 been intrusted to civilians whose frank ignorance 
 of their new duties has been equaled only by 
 their skill in performing them. The history of 
 
THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 17 
 
 American cabinets is, in spite of many exceptions, 
 on the whole, an apotheosis of the amateur. It is 
 the readiest justification of the tin peddler theory, 
 the theory, namely, that you should first get 
 your man, and then let him learn his new trade by 
 practicing it. " By dint of hammering one gets 
 to be a blacksmith," say the French ; and if a 
 blacksmith, why not a postmaster, or a postmaster- 
 general, or an ambassador ? 
 
 The difficulty with this theory lies in the temp 
 tation to exaggerate it. Because we have been 
 lucky thus far, we are tempted to proceed upon 
 the comfortable conviction that if we once find 
 our man, the question of his previous apprentice 
 ship to his calling, or even that of his training in 
 some related field of activity, may safely be ig 
 nored. The gambler is in our blood. We like to 
 watch the performance of an untried man in a 
 responsible position, much as we do the trotting 
 of a green horse. The admitted uncertainty of the 
 result enhances our pleasure in the experiment. 
 In literature, just now, we are witnessing the ex 
 ploitation of the " young writer." Lack of experi 
 ence, of craftsmanship, is actually counted among 
 a fledgeling author s assets. The curiosity of the 
 
18 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 
 
 public regarding this new, unknown power is 
 counted upon to offset, and more, the recognition 
 of the known power of the veteran writer. Power 
 is indeed recognized as the ultimate test of merit ; 
 but there is a widespread tendency to overlook 
 the fact that power is largely conditioned upon 
 skill, and that skill depends not merely upon nat 
 ural faculty, but upon knowledge and discipline. 
 The popularity of the " young writer " is, in short, 
 an illustration of the easy glorification of amateur 
 qualities to the neglect of professional qualities. 
 
 This tendency is the more curious because of 
 our pronounced national distaste for ineffective 
 ness. The undisguisedly amateurish traits of 
 unskillfulness and desultoriness have not been 
 popular here. If we have been rather complaisant 
 toward the jack-of -all-trades, we have never wholly 
 forgotten that he is "master of none." In the 
 older New England vernacular, the village ne er- 
 do-well was commonly spoken of as a " clever " 
 fellow ; the adjective was distinctly opprobrious. 
 And indeed, if the connoisseur is the one who 
 knows, and the dilettante the one who only thinks 
 he knows, the amateur is often the one who would 
 like to know, but is too lazy to learn. Accord- 
 
THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 19 
 
 ingly, lie keeps guessing, in an easy, careless, 
 " clever " fashion, which is agreeable enough when 
 no serious interests are at stake. He has transient 
 affections for this and that department of thought 
 or activity ; like Mr. Brooke in Middlemarch, he 
 has " gone into that a good deal at one time." Mr. 
 Brooke is a delightful person in fiction, but in 
 actual life a great many Mr. Brookes end their 
 career at the town farm. Even this would not 
 in itself be so lamentable a matter, if it were not 
 in the power of a community of Mr. Brookes to 
 create conditions capable of driving the rest of us 
 to the town farm. " Dilettanteism, hypothesis, 
 speculation, a kind of amateur search for truth, 
 this," says Carlyle, " is the sorest sin." 
 
 The amateur search for truth has always flour 
 ished, and is likely to flourish always, in the 
 United States. That the quest is inspiriting, 
 amusing, sometimes highly rewarded, one may 
 readily admit. But if it promotes individualism, 
 it also produces the crank. If it brevets us all 
 as philosophers, it likewise brands many of us as 
 fools. Who does not know the amateur economist, 
 with his " sacred ratios," or his amiable willing 
 ness to " do something for silver " ? The amateur 
 
20 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 
 
 sociologist, who grows strangely confused if you 
 ask him to define Sociology ? Popular preachers, 
 who can refute Darwin and elucidate Jefferson 
 "while you wait," if you do wait? Amateur 
 critics of art and literature, who have plenty of 
 zeal, but no knowledge of standards, no anchorage 
 in principles? The lady amateur, who writes 
 verses without knowing prosody, and paints pic 
 tures without learning to draw, and performs what 
 she calls " social service " without training her 
 own children either in manners or religion ? Nay, 
 are there not amateur teachers who walk grace 
 fully through the part, but add neither to the do 
 main of human knowledge nor to the practical 
 efficiency of any pupil ? 
 
 But the roll-call of these dependents and defec 
 tives is long enough. The failures of the amateur 
 search for truth are often brilliant failures. Its 
 occasional successes have often been brilliant, too. 
 Yet the real workaday progress, the solid irre 
 traceable advance in any art or profession, has 
 commonly been made by the professional. He 
 sums up in himself both connoisseurship and 
 craftsmanship. He not only knows, but does. 
 Pasteur was a professional, and Helmholtz, and 
 
THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 21 
 
 Huxley. John Marshall was a professional jurist. 
 Mr. John Sargent is a professional painter of por 
 traits, and Mr. Secretary Hay is a professional 
 diplomatist. 
 
 If the gifted amateur desires to learn his rela 
 tive rank when compared with a professional, the 
 way is easy. Let him challenge the professional ! 
 Play a match at golf against the dour Scotchman 
 who gives lessons for his daily bread. He will 
 beat you, because he cannot afford not to beat 
 you. Shoot against your guide in the North 
 Woods. You will possibly beat him at a target, 
 but he will hit the deer that you have just missed ; 
 you can cast a fly on the lawn much farther than 
 he, but he will take more fish out of the pool. It 
 is his business, your recreation. Some one dear 
 to you is critically ill. It seems cruel to surrender 
 the care of the sick person to a hireling, when you 
 are conscious of boundless love and devotion. 
 But your physician will prefer the trained nurse, 
 because the trained nurse will do what she is told, 
 will keep cool, keep quiet, count the drops accu 
 rately, read the thermometer right ; because, in 
 short, he can depend upon a professional, and can 
 not depend upon an amateur. 
 
22 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 
 
 What is true of the sport, of the art, is even 
 more invariably true in the field of scientific ef 
 fort. How secure is the course of the Fachmann^ 
 who by limiting his territory has become lord of 
 it, who has a fund of positive knowledge upon all 
 the knowable portions of it, and has charted, at 
 least, the deepening water where knowledge sheers 
 off into ignorance ! It is late in the day to con 
 fess the indebtedness of our generation to the 
 scientific method. How tonic and heartening, in 
 days of dull routine, has been the example of 
 those brave German masters to whom our Ameri 
 can scholarship owes so much ! What industry 
 has been theirs, what confidence in method, what 
 serene indifference to the rivalry of the gifted 
 amateur ! I recall the fine scorn with which Bern- 
 hard ten Brink, at Strassburg, used to wave aside 
 the suggestions of his pupils that this or that 
 new and widely advertised book might contain 
 some valuable contribution to his department. 
 " Nay," he would retort, " wissenschaftliche Be- 
 deutung hat s dock nicht." Many a pretentious 
 book, a popular book, even a very useful book, 
 was pilloried by that quiet sentence, " It has no 
 scientific significance." To get the import of that 
 
THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 23 
 
 sentence thoroughly into one s head is worth all 
 it costs to sit at the feet of German scholars. 
 There speaks the true, patient, scientific spirit, 
 whose service to the modern man was perhaps 
 the most highly appraised factor when we of the 
 western world tried to take an inventory of our 
 selves and our indebtedness, at the dawn of the 
 twentieth century. 
 
 For to be able to assess the scientific bearing 
 of the new book, the new fact, upon your own 
 profession proves you a master of your profes 
 sion. Modern competitive conditions are making 
 this kind of expert knowledge more and more 
 essential. The success of German manufactur 
 ing chemists, for example, is universally acknow 
 ledged to be due to the scientific attainments of 
 the thousands of young men who enter the manu 
 factories from the great technical schools. The 
 alarm of Englishmen over the recent strides of 
 Germany in commercial rivalry is due to a dawn 
 ing recognition of the efficacy of knowledge, and 
 of the training which knowledge recommends. It 
 is the well-grounded alarm of the gifted amateur 
 when compelled to compete with the professional. 
 The professional may not be a wholly agreeable 
 
24 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 
 
 antagonist ; he may not happen to be a " club- 
 able " person ; but that fact does not vitiate his 
 record. His record stands. 
 
 Is it possible to explain this patent or latent 
 antagonism of the amateur toward the profes 
 sional ? It is explicable, in part at least, through 
 a comparison not so much of their methods of 
 work where the praise must be awarded to the 
 professional as of their characteristic spirit. 
 And here there is much more to be said for the 
 amateur. The difference will naturally be more 
 striking if we compare the most admirable trait 
 of the amateur spirit with the least admirable 
 trait of the professional spirit. 
 
 The cultivated amateur, who touches life on 
 many sides, perceives that the professional is apt 
 to approach life from one side only. It is a com 
 monplace to say that without specialized training 
 and accomplishment the road to most kinds of 
 professional success is closed. Yet, through bend 
 ing one s energies unremittingly upon a particu 
 lar task, it often happens that creation narrows 
 "in man s view," instead of widening. Your 
 famous expert, as you suddenly discover, is but a 
 
THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 25 
 
 segment of a man, overdeveloped in one direc 
 tion, atrophied in all others. His expertness, his 
 professional functioning, so to speak, is of indis 
 putable value to society, but he himself remains 
 an unsocial member of the body politic. He has 
 become a machine, as Emerson declared so 
 long ago, " a thinker, not a man thinking." He 
 is uninterested, and consequently uninteresting. 
 Very possibly it may not be the chief end of man 
 to afford an interesting spectacle to the observer. 
 And yet so closely are we bound together that 
 a loss of sympathy, of imagination, of free and 
 varied activity, soon insulates the individual, and 
 lessens his usefulness as a member of society. 
 Surely we are playing an interesting comedy, 
 here between heaven and the mire, and we ought 
 to play it in an interested way. We can afford 
 to be human. Scientific Method is a handmaiden 
 whose services have proved indispensable. No one 
 can fill her place. We should raise her wages. 
 But, after all, Personality is the mistress of the 
 house. Method must be taught to know her sta 
 tion, and 
 
 " She is the second, not the first." 
 
 No doubt there is a temptation, in such a com- 
 
26 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 
 
 parison of qualities and gifts, to dally with mere 
 abstractions. None of us have known a wholly 
 methodized, mechanicalized man. But none the 
 less we may properly endeavor to measure a ten 
 dency, and to guard against its excess. There are 
 few observers of American life who believe that 
 specialization has as yet been carried too far. 
 Yet one may insist that the theory of specialized 
 functions, necessitated as it is by modern condi 
 tions, and increasingly demanded as it must be 
 while our civilization grows in complexity, needs 
 examination and correction in the interests of 
 true human progress. It is not that we actually 
 meet on the sidewalk some scientific Franken 
 stein, some marvelously developed special faculty 
 for research or invention or money-making, which 
 dominates and dwarfs all other faculties, 
 though we often see something that looks very 
 much like it. It is rather that thoughtful people 
 are compelled to ask themselves, How far can 
 this special development this purely profes 
 sional habit of mind proceed without injury 
 to the symmetry of character, without impairing 
 the varied and spontaneous and abundant play of 
 human powers which gives joy to life ? And the 
 
THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 27 
 
 prejudice which the amateur feels toward the 
 professional, the more or less veiled hostility be 
 tween the man who does something for love 
 which another man does for money, is one of 
 those instinctive reactions like the vague alarm 
 of some wild creature in the woods which give 
 a hint of danger. 
 
 Let us make the very fullest acknowledgment 
 of our debt to the professional spirit. Many of 
 our best inheritances, such as our body of law, 
 represent the steady achievements of professional 
 skill, professional self-sacrifice. The mechanical 
 conveniences and equipments in which the age 
 abounds, all this apparatus for communication 
 and transportation, have been wrought out for 
 us by the most patient, the most concentrated ac 
 tivity of professionals. The young man who is 
 entering medicine, the law, business, the army, 
 the church, finds himself ranked at once by his 
 power to assimilate the professional experience of 
 older men. Some day, let us trust, the young man 
 who desires to serve his country in her civil ser 
 vice, her consular and diplomatic service, will find 
 himself, not as now, blocked by an amateurish 
 system of rewards for partisan fealty, but upon 
 
28 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 
 
 the road to a genuine professional career. The 
 hope of society, no doubt, depends largely upon 
 those men who are seriously devoting their en 
 ergies to some form of expert activity. They 
 are the torch-bearers, the trained runners who 
 bear the light from stage to stage of the heaven- 
 beholden course. And at least in the immediate 
 future the necessity for unwearying professional 
 endeavor will be more pressing than ever before 
 in the history of the world. 
 
 " Cities will crowd to its edge 
 In a blacker incessanter line ; 
 . . . The din will be more on its banks, 
 Denser the trade on its stream." 
 
 Ours must be, not "a nation of amateurs," 
 but a nation of professionals, if it is to hold its 
 own in the coming struggles, struggles not 
 merely for commercial dominance, but for the 
 supremacy of political and moral ideals. Our 
 period of national isolation, with all it brought 
 of good or evil, has been outlived. The new 
 epoch will place a heavy handicap upon igno 
 rance of the actual world, upon indifference to 
 international usages and undertakings, upon con 
 tempt for the foreigner. "What is needed is, in- 
 
THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 29 
 
 deed, knowledge, and the skill that knowledge 
 makes possible. The spirit with which we con 
 front the national tasks of the future should have 
 the sobriety, the firmness, the steady effectiveness, 
 which we associate with the professional. 
 
 Yet is it not possible, while thus acknowledg 
 ing and cultivating the professional virtues, to 
 free ourselves from some of the grosser faults of 
 the mere professional ? The mere professional s 
 cupidity, for instance, his low aim, his time-serv 
 ing, his narrowness, his clannish loyalty to his 
 own department only ? How often he lacks im 
 agination ! How indifferent he may show himself 
 to the religious and moral passion, to the dreams, 
 hopes, futilities, regrets of the breathing, bleed 
 ing, struggling men and women by his side ! It 
 is not the prize-fighter only who brings profession 
 alism into disrepute. The jockey who "pulls" a 
 horse, the oarsman who " sells " a race, the bicy 
 clist who fouls a rival, are condemned even by a 
 mob of " sporting men." But the taint of profes 
 sionalism clings also to the business man who can 
 think only of his shop, the scholar who talks 
 merely of letters, the politician who asks of the 
 proposed measure, " What is there in this for 
 
30 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 
 
 me f " To counteract all such provinciality and 
 selfishness, such loss of the love of honor in the 
 love of gain, one may rightly plead for some 
 breath of the spirit of the amateur, the amator, 
 the " man who loves ; " the man who works for 
 the sheer love of working, plays the great com 
 plicated absorbing game of life for the sake of 
 the game, and not for his share of the gate 
 money ; the man who is ashamed to win if he 
 cannot win fairly, nay, who is chivalric enough 
 to grant breathing-space to a rival, whether he 
 win or lose ! 
 
 Is it an impossible ideal, this combination of 
 qualities, this union of the generous spirit of the 
 amateur with the method of the professional? 
 In the new world of disciplined national endeavor 
 upon which we are entering, why may not the old 
 American characteristics of versatility, sponta 
 neity, adventurousness, still persist? These are 
 the traits that fit one to adjust himself readily to 
 unforeseen conditions, to meet new emergencies. 
 They will be even more valuable in the future 
 than in the past, if they are employed to supple 
 ment, rather than to be substituted for, the solid 
 achievements of professional industry. If we are 
 
THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 31 
 
 really to lead the world s commerce, though 
 that is far from being the only kind of leadership 
 to which American history should teach us to as 
 pire, it will be the Yankee characteristics, plus 
 the scientific training of the modern man, that 
 will enable us to do it. The personal enthusiasm, 
 the individual initiative, the boundless zest, of 
 the American amateur must penetrate, illuminate, 
 idealize, the brute force, the irresistibly on-sweep 
 ing mass, of our vast industrial democracy. 
 
 The best evidence that this will happen is the 
 fact that it is already happening. There are 
 here and there amateurs without amateurishness, 
 professionals untainted by professionalism. Many 
 of us are fortunate enough to recognize in some 
 friend this combination of qualities, this union of 
 strict professional training with that free outlook 
 upon life, that human curiosity and eagerness, 
 which are the best endowment of the amateur. 
 Such men are indeed rare, but they are prized ac 
 cordingly. And one need hardly say where they 
 are most likely to be found. It is among the 
 ranks of those who have received a liberal edu 
 cation. Every higher institution of learning in 
 
32 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 
 
 this country now offers some sort of specialized 
 training. To win distinction in academic work is 
 to come under the dominion of exact knowledge, 
 of approved methods. It means that one is disci 
 plined in the mechanical processes and guided by 
 the spirit of modern science, no matter what his 
 particular studies may have been. The graduates 
 whose acquisitions can most readily be assessed 
 are probably the ones who have specialized most 
 closely, who have already as undergraduates begun 
 to fit themselves for some form of professional 
 career. They have already gained something of 
 the expert s solid basis of accurate information, 
 the expert s sureness of hand and eye, the ex 
 pert s instinct for the right method. 
 
 But this professional discipline needs temper 
 ing by another spirit. The highest service of the 
 educated man in our democratic society demands 
 of him breadth of interest as well as depth of 
 technical research. It requires unquenched ardor 
 for the best things, spontaneous delight in the 
 play of mind and character, a many-sided respon 
 siveness that shall keep a man from hardening 
 into a mere high-geared machine. It is these 
 qualities that perfect a liberal education and 
 
THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 33 
 
 complete a man s usefulness to his generation. 
 Taken by themselves, they fit him primarily for 
 living, rather than for getting a living. But they 
 are not to be divorced from other qualities ; and 
 even if they were, the educated American can 
 get a living more easily than he can learn how to 
 live. The moral lessons are harder than the in 
 tellectual, and faith and enthusiasm, sympathy 
 and imagination, are moral qualities. 
 
 Here, for example, is some young scholar who 
 has been taught the facts of history, trained to 
 sift historical evidence, to compare historical 
 periods, to trace historical causes; but has he 
 imagination enough to see into the mind and 
 heart of the historical man ? He has been taught 
 to analyze the various theories of society and 
 government ; he has learned to sneer at what he 
 calls " glittering generalities ; " yet has he sym 
 pathy enough, moral passion enough, to under 
 stand what those glittering generalities have done 
 for the men and the generations that have been 
 willing to die for them? Such secrets forever 
 elude the cold heart and the calculating brain. 
 But they are understood by the generous youth, 
 by the man who is brave enough to take chances, 
 
34 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 
 
 to risk all for the sake of gaining all. It is for 
 this reason that the amateur football game, for all 
 its brutalities, has taught many a young scholar 
 a finer lesson than the classroom has taught him, 
 namely, to risk his neck for his college ; yet no 
 finer one than the classroom might afford him if 
 his teacher were always an amator, a lover of 
 virility as well as of accuracy ; a follower not of 
 the letter only, but of the spirit which makes 
 alive. " Our business in this world," said Robert 
 Louis Stevenson, a craftsman who through all 
 his heart-breaking professional toil preserved the 
 invincible gayety of the lover, " is not to suc 
 ceed, but to continue to fail in good spirits." 
 In this characteristically Stevensonian paradox 
 there is a perfect and a very noble expression of 
 the amateur spirit. He does not mean, we may 
 be sure, that failure is preferable to success, but 
 that more significant than either success or fail 
 ure is the courage with which one rides into the 
 lists. It is his moral attitude toward his work 
 which lifts the workman above the fatalities of 
 time and chance, so that, whatever fortune befall 
 the labor of his hands, the travail of his soul 
 remains undefeated and secure. 
 
INDIFFERENTISM 
 
INDIFFERENTISM 
 
 READERS of books have sometimes debated the 
 question, " What was the greatest book produced 
 during the eighteenth century ? " Was it Goethe s 
 Faust, or Jonathan Edwards on the Freedom of 
 the Will ? Was it Gibbon s Decline and Fall, 
 or that romance of Fielding s which Gibbon de 
 clared would " outlive the palace of the Escurial, 
 and the imperial eagle of the house of Austria " ? 
 It is hard to answer such a question, and very 
 likely it is foolish to try. An easier task is to 
 name the wittiest book of that century. One may 
 do so without much fear of contradiction. The 
 wittiest eighteenth-century book, surely, al 
 though Wordsworth does call it, and in The Ex 
 cursion at that, a 
 
 " dull product of a scoffer s pen," 
 
 and Hawthorne once fell asleep over it, is Vol 
 taire s Candide, or Optimism. Written in 1759 
 to satirize the doctrine that ours is the best of 
 
38 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 
 
 all possible worlds, Candide presents, in the form 
 of a swiftly moving story, Voltaire s impression 
 of the world as it really is. He exiles his young 
 hero Candide "a person of the most unaffected 
 simplicity" from his native castle in West 
 phalia, separates him from his beloved mistress 
 Cunegunde, and sends him over Europe and Amer 
 ica to seek for her and incidentally to observe 
 our mortal situation. Candide is accompanied 
 by an old philosopher named Martin, who has 
 long served as a bookseller s hack and has lost all 
 illusions. As they pass from one European capi 
 tal to another, Candide still maintains in spite of 
 every disappointment and misfortune that " there 
 is nevertheless some good in the world." 
 
 " Maybe so," says Martin, " but it has escaped 
 my knowledge." 
 
 Reasoning thus, they arrive at last at Venice, 
 where they hear much talk about a certain noble 
 Venetian, Signor Pococurante, whose name signi 
 fies " The-Man-who-cares-little," and who is said 
 to be a perfectly happy man. 
 
 " I should be glad to meet so extraordinary a 
 being," says Martin, and accordingly our travel 
 ers pay a visit to the noble Pococurante. They 
 
INDIFFERENTISM 39 
 
 find him dwelling in a palace on the Brenta. Its 
 gardens are elegantly laid out and adorned with 
 statues. The master of the palace is a man of 
 sixty, rich, cultivated, bored. He shows the trav 
 elers his collection of paintings, among them 
 some by Raphael. " I have what is called a fine 
 collection," he admits, " but I take no manner of 
 delight in them." He orders a concert for his 
 guests, but confesses that he himself finds the 
 music tiresome. After dinner they repair to the 
 library, where Candide, observing a richly bound 
 Homer, commends the noble Venetian s taste. 
 
 " Homer is no favorite of mine," answers Po 
 cocurante coolly ; " I was made to believe once 
 that I took a pleasure in reading him. ... I 
 have asked some learned men whether they are 
 not in reality as much tired as myself with read 
 ing this poet. Those who spoke ingenuously 
 assured me that he had made them fall asleep, 
 and yet that they could not well avoid giving 
 him a place in their libraries." 
 
 The conversation shifts to Virgil, Horace, 
 Cicero ; to the Memoirs of the Academy of Sci 
 ences, to the drama, to English politics, and 
 finally to Milton ; but Signor Pococurante finds 
 
40 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 
 
 in all these subjects little or nothing to praise. 
 Candide the optimist is grieved. He has been 
 taught to respect Homer and is fond of Milton. 
 
 " Alas," he whispers to Martin, " I am afraid 
 this man holds our German poets in great con 
 tempt." 
 
 " There would be no such great harm in that," 
 replies Martin. 
 
 " Oh, what a surprising man ! " exclaims Can 
 dide to himself. " What a prodigious genius is 
 this Pococurante ! Nothing can please him." 
 
 After finishing their survey of the library, 
 they go down into the garden. Candide politely 
 says something in praise of its beauty. 
 
 " It is laid out in bad taste," replies Pococu 
 rante ; " it is childish and trifling ; but I shall 
 have another laid out to-morrow upon a nobler 
 plan." 
 
 At last the two travelers take leave of their 
 host. " Well," says Candide to Martin, " I hope 
 you will own that this man is the happiest of all 
 mortals, for he is above everything he possesses." 
 
 " But do you not see," answers Martin, " that 
 he likewise dislikes everything he possesses ? It 
 was an observation of Plato long since that those 
 
INDIFFERENTISM 41 
 
 are not the best stomachs that reject, without 
 distinction, all sorts of food." 
 
 " True," says Candide, " but still there must 
 certainly be a pleasure in criticising everything, 
 and in perceiving faults where others think they 
 see beauties." 
 
 " That is" retorts Martin, who generally has 
 the last word, " there is a pleasure in having no 
 pleasure" 
 
 Few pages of imaginative literature are more 
 admirably written than these whose bare out 
 lines I have been copying. No group of inquirers 
 concerning the intellectual habits and the moral 
 hopes of mankind is more skillfully composed 
 than that formed by the three men who saunter 
 through the library and garden of this palace 
 upon the Brenta: Candide the puzzled young 
 optimist, old Martin the pessimist, grimly de 
 lighted, and Pococurante the indifferentist, with 
 his perfect courtesy, his refreshing frankness, 
 his infinite capacity for being bored. In this 
 last personage, particularly, there is something 
 which touches the fancy, provokes curiosity, and 
 possibly, in spite of all disapprobation of the 
 
42 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 
 
 noble Venetian s faults, invites to a closer ac 
 quaintance. One may venture therefore to con 
 sider the type of mind which the Venetian senator 
 represents, and to discuss, in their bearing upon 
 the life of the modern man, some of the old and 
 new forms of indifferentism. 
 
 For Signor Pococurante is by no means a 
 mere clever invention of Voltaire s. We have 
 met the gentleman before. The type is older 
 than the eighteenth century ; older than the 
 Horatian doctrine of nil admirari ; older even 
 than the Hebrew king who, like the Venetian 
 senator, had his men-singers and women-singers, 
 his banquets and palaces and pleasure-gardens, 
 and grew tired of them all. The weariness of 
 the mind in full possession of its treasures, as 
 that of the body surfeited with its pleasures, is a 
 familiar fact in human history. Pococurantism 
 the caring little for things that are worth 
 caring much for lurks deep in human nature. 
 But there are certain conditions that bring the 
 seed of it to full flowering. Every cultivated 
 circle of men and women, every highly organized 
 society, has its Pococurantes ; nay, there is some 
 drop of their blood in all of us who have had 
 
INDIFFERENTISM 43 
 
 free access to the fine excitements of the senses, 
 to the wide interests of the mind. Once liberate 
 a man through education and opportunity, once 
 make him a free citizen of the great world of 
 thought, introduce him to affairs, to art and 
 literature, and you give the indifferentism latent 
 in him a chance to develop itself. Is there an 
 educated person who has not noticed among his 
 friends and, if he be gifted with any power of 
 self -analysis, in himself this tendency to regard 
 with dissatisfaction, with finical criticism, with 
 satiety, objects which are not only worthy but 
 which once filled him with admiring joy ? 
 
 Salient examples of this familiar phenomenon 
 are always to be found in communities where the 
 academic type of character is strongly marked. 
 In every university town you will hear much 
 talk of the local Signor Pococurante, some 
 scholar of fastidious temper, of taste scrupulously 
 refined, against whose severe standards of criti 
 cism, whether in architecture, poetry, or politics, 
 the heathen rage. How useful such personages 
 often are! Their smiling indifference to the 
 popular verdict strengthens the wavering inde 
 pendence of weaker men. The very irritation pro- 
 
44 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 
 
 duced by their criticism is often proof that the 
 faults they perceive are real faults, and should be 
 remedied. How characteristic of such men is the 
 following passage from the Memoirs of Mark 
 Pattison : 
 
 " It is impossible for me to see anything done 
 without an immediate suggestion of how it might 
 be better done. I cannot travel by railway with 
 out working out in my mind a better time-table 
 than that in use. On the other hand, this rest 
 lessness of the critical faculty has done me good 
 service when turned upon myself. I have never 
 enjoyed any self-satisfaction in anything I have 
 ever done, for I have inevitably made a mental 
 comparison with how it might have been better 
 done. The motto of one of my diaries, 4 Quic- 
 quid hie operis fiat pcenitet, may be said to be 
 the motto of my life." 
 
 Undoubtedly, this restlessness of the critical 
 faculty contributes to human progress. And how 
 upright may be the character of the super-subtle 
 critic, how singularly attractive his personal 
 charm ! 
 
 Yet after all, in spite of Candide s ingenuous 
 opinion, the fact that " nothing pleases " a man 
 
INDIFFERENTISM 45 
 
 does not prove him a " prodigious genius." That 
 he is " above everything he possesses " does not 
 demonstrate any native power, any insight of 
 imaginative sympathy. Nor do academic commu 
 nities present more pathetic figures than the 
 pococurantists who are without fame, influence, 
 or many friends ; whose refinement of feeling 
 has degenerated into querulousness, and whose 
 exalted standards of action are chiefly displayed 
 in their ability to cooperate, to any useful pur 
 pose, with our American world as it actually is. 
 
 No one has yet written, I believe, the His 
 tory of Academic Sterility. Whoever may do so 
 will consult Gray and Gibbon as to the moral 
 stagnation of the English universities in the 
 eighteenth century, and Mark Pattison as to 
 their intellectual apathy in the middle of the 
 nineteenth. " The men of middle age," says Pat 
 tison in speaking of Oxford, " seem, after they 
 reach thirty-five or forty, to be struck with an 
 intellectual palsy, and betake themselves, no 
 longer to port, but to the frippery work of at 
 tending boards and negotiating some phantom of 
 legislation, with all the importance of a cabinet 
 council belli simulacra denies. Then they 
 
46 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 
 
 give each other dinners, where they assemble 
 again with the comfortable assurance that they 
 have earned their evening relaxation by the 
 fatigues of the morning s committee." 
 
 But we need not look abroad for such exam 
 ples of pedantry, of the false air of accomplish 
 ment, of arrested development. Fortunate is the 
 American institution that has none of this sterile 
 stock, these men who have been surrounded by 
 books, museums, galleries, only to discover at 
 last that they have no pleasure in them. To de 
 scribe adequately such types of barrenness one 
 must employ those terrible metaphors used long 
 ago to portray secret causes of spiritual failure. 
 A wins at last his professorship ; his desire has 
 been granted, but leanness has been sent into his 
 soul. B possesses all the apparatus of scholarship, 
 but by middle life there is no more oil in his lamp. 
 The lamp goes out, while the man lives on. Yet 
 in the same county, perhaps, there will be men 
 of straitened means, with few modern facilities 
 for research, slender libraries, little converse with 
 fellow scholars, who are nevertheless steadily, 
 quietly, building up a national, an international 
 reputation ; while the pococurantist, with every- 
 
INDIFFERENTISM 47 
 
 thing he needs at his elbow, fairly choked with 
 the riches and pleasures of the scholarly life, not 
 only brings no fruit to perfection, but even fails 
 to produce any fruit at all. 
 
 One may be pardoned for thus alluding to the 
 academic type of indifferentism, since its features 
 are so familiar. But there are many varieties of 
 indifferentists, up and down the world, and all of 
 them are worth studying. What sort of man was 
 that Gallio whose unconcern for sectarian con 
 troversy has proverbialized him as the man who 
 " cared for none of these things " ? I imagine 
 that Gallio was a companionable soul, full of 
 savor, but who knows? And who can tell us 
 authoritatively about the real Horace, that ripe 
 specimen of the genial pococurantist whose bland 
 worldliness, dislike of being bored, and frank 
 indifference to the ambitions and passions of the 
 hour make him such a charming figure? Old 
 Omar Khayyam is a more subtle pococurantist, 
 of the pessimist species ; and Edward FitzGerald, 
 Omar s sponsor, was on many sides of his com 
 plex personality as perfect a Signer Pococurante 
 as was ever bred by university training and sub- 
 
48 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 
 
 sequent insulation from the world. Is there not 
 some humanist who will analyze the secret springs 
 of indifferentism in men like these ? Is it a de 
 fect of the will, or a surplusage of philosophy? 
 Is it a strange torpor of the mind, or is it rather 
 the result of a too keen intelligence ? Or is it 
 merely " temperament " ? Professor Flint, who 
 has recently dissected Agnosticism with the prac 
 ticed skill of a Scotch logician, might be asked 
 to make a diagnosis of Pococurantism as well. 
 His book would be interesting reading, but I 
 fancy that Gallio and FitzGerald would put it 
 aside with a quizzical smile. 
 
 It is not too fanciful to say that there are in- 
 differentists produced by ignorance, as well as by 
 a surfeit of knowledge. Whole classes and races 
 are apparently doomed to a happy-go-lucky, semi- 
 tropical indolence of body and spirit, amusing 
 enough to the traveler, but yet dull and blind. It 
 may stretch our Italian word too far, to make it 
 cover these coarser forms of indifference to ex 
 cellence, forms that spring from sheer uncon 
 sciousness rather than from satiety with the 
 objects of intellectual curiosity. Likewise it may 
 be taking too much liberty with the word to 
 
INDIFFERENTISM 49 
 
 apply it to that unconcern for the ordinary tastes 
 and pleasures of mankind which results from ab 
 sorption in some supreme issue. How many a 
 mediaeval saint demonstrated his sainthood by 
 caring for none of these things that move us to 
 such transports, such pursuits, such struggles ! 
 "Did you enjoy the lake?" runs the famous story 
 about St. Bernard, who had been journeying all 
 day beside the waters of Geneva. " Lake ? " re 
 plied the saint in mild surprise, " what lake ? " 
 There may be a strain of ethical nobility, no 
 doubt, in this forgetfulness of all sensuous 
 beauty. But the type of soul represented by the 
 dreaming saint has always been rare, and seems 
 to be growing rarer. Few high-minded men and 
 women are now content to press into the solitary 
 ways of lonely spiritual rapture ; the path of pro 
 gress leads them no longer to cells in the high 
 Alps. The men and women most keenly alive to 
 spiritual issues are insisting upon the social 
 duties, the validity of social instincts, the claims 
 of the innumerable close-woven bonds of human 
 relationship. The true saints, whether of the 
 mediaeval or modern type, are never, strictly 
 speaking, Pococurantes. They care infinitely, 
 
50 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 
 
 whether for one or many things, but it is true 
 that their sense of values has been so reversed, 
 as compared with that of ordinary men, that like 
 the risen Lazarus in Browning s poem, the things 
 which seem trivial to us are all important to 
 them, while their great concerns are our trivi 
 alities. Yet in this very detachment from the 
 average standard of judgment, in their sense of 
 superiority to their surroundings and possessions, 
 they illustrate, singularly enough, a suggestive 
 phase of indifferentism. 
 
 It is evident that I have just been choosing 
 extreme examples. But somewhere between the 
 peasant, who is indifferent to ideas because his 
 eyes are darkened, and the saint, whose inner 
 light makes the world of ideas a mere flickering 
 unreality, stand men like Horace and Horace 
 "Walpole, Montaigne and Goethe, Franklin and 
 Jefferson, the speculative, amused, undeluded 
 children of this world. Such men do not lack 
 interest in human affairs, but they weigh all 
 things coolly, and register the gravity or the 
 levity of our mortal predicament with the same 
 smile. Even if no pococurantists themselves, 
 they are the begetters of Pococurantism in 
 
INDIFFERENTISM 51 
 
 others. For behind such representative figures, 
 sharing their recurrent skepticism, but wanting 
 their robust curiosity, their unimpaired sanity, 
 are grouped the great majority of privileged, 
 educated men. Few of them escape some touch, 
 sooner or later, of the temper of indifferentism. 
 With one it is a mere sophomoric affectation, 
 a pretense of unconcern, while with another 
 it deepens into lifelong habit. But to all of us 
 at times the mood of "caring little" comes. 
 Subtle are the disguises, puzzling are the contra 
 dictory manifestations of the loss of interest in 
 the normally interesting. The child pokes into 
 the inside of its doll, and straightway possesses 
 one delightful mystery the less ; the worldling 
 finds his game not worth the candle ; the states 
 man sees his great plans crumbling like a house 
 of cards, and often realizes that at heart he cares 
 for them as little. And all this disillusionment 
 may come, as it did to our Venetian senator, 
 without making the man discourteous or unkind. 
 Indeed it sometimes seems to deepen the pococu- 
 rantist s humaner qualities, as if disillusionment 
 were the sign of initiation into a world-wide 
 fraternity, the seal of our mortal experience. 
 
52 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 
 
 Here is a well-known passage from the auto 
 biography of one of the most gentle, honest, and 
 unquestionably great men of our own day. It 
 is the passage where Charles Darwin confesses 
 his loss of interest in certain things which had 
 once moved him deeply. The words are fre 
 quently commented upon as illustrating the atro 
 phy of unused faculties. That is indeed their 
 obvious purport, but as you read them, note how 
 perfectly they echo, more than a century after 
 ward, the very tones of Signor Pococurante s 
 confession in his library : 
 
 " I have said that in one respect my mind has 
 changed during the last twenty or thirty years. 
 Up to the age of thirty, or beyond it, poetry of 
 many kinds, such as the works of Milton, Gray, 
 Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, gave 
 me great pleasure, and even as a schoolboy I took 
 intense delight in Shakespeare, especially in the 
 historical plays. I have also said that formerly 
 pictures gave me considerable, and music very 
 great delight. But now for many years I cannot 
 endure to read a line of poetry : I have tried lately 
 to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably 
 dull that it nauseated me. I have also almost 
 
INDIFFERENTISM 53 
 
 lost my taste for pictures or music. Music gen 
 erally sets me thinking too energetically on what 
 I have been at work on, instead of giving me 
 pleasure. I retain some taste for fine scenery, 
 but it does not cause me the exquisite delight 
 which it formerly did. . . . 
 
 " This curious and lamentable loss of the 
 higher aesthetic tastes is all the odder, as books 
 on history, biographies, and travels (independ 
 ently of any scientific facts which they may con 
 tain), and essays on all sorts of subjects interest 
 me as much as ever they did. My mind seems to 
 have become a kind of machine for grinding 
 general laws out of large collections of facts, but 
 why this should have caused the atrophy of that 
 part of the brain alone, on which the higher 
 tastes depend, I cannot conceive. A man with a 
 mind more highly organized or better constituted 
 than mine would not, I suppose, have thus suf 
 fered ; and if I had to live my life again, I would 
 have made a rule to read some poetry and listen 
 to some music at least once every week ; for per 
 haps the parts of my brain now atrophied would 
 thus have been kept active through use. The loss 
 of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may 
 
54 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 
 
 possibly be injurious to the intellect and more 
 probably to the moral character, by enfeebling 
 the emotional part of our nature." 
 
 The famous naturalist s experience has been 
 that of countless men whose devotion to their 
 own chosen field has left them more and more 
 oblivious of general human or aBsthetic interests. 
 There are plenty of Latinists who read Virgil 
 not for the poetry but for material for a theory 
 of the subjunctive, and they gradually forget 
 that there is any poetry there. It would be easy 
 to multiply examples of this narrowing influence 
 of over-specialization. And it is instructive to 
 note that in every field except the one selected 
 for his concentrated activity, the specialist often 
 offers a curious parallel to his arch-enemy the 
 amateur. Sooner or later, both tend to become 
 pococurantists as regards the majority of sub 
 jects of human intercourse. " I went into that a 
 good deal at one time," says Mr. Brooke in Mid- 
 dlemarch. It is the typical remark of the typical 
 amateur. "Poetry and pictures formerly gave 
 me great pleasure," says Darwin. " I was once 
 persuaded that I enjoyed Homer and Baphael," 
 says our Venetian senator. The three confessions 
 
INDIFFERENTISM 55 
 
 are identical ; the amateur and the specialist have 
 now arrived at the same point as the born poco- 
 curantist. 
 
 There are other examples of intellectual and 
 moral indifferentism no less striking, although 
 widely different in their source. A jaded Amer 
 ican millionaire, trying to get pleasure out of a 
 too long deferred holiday in Europe, is one of 
 the most depressing of pococurantist spectacles. 
 For twenty or thirty years he has been amassing 
 a fortune, with the pluck and energy which we 
 all admire. And here he is set down in Paris or 
 Dresden or Florence, ignorant of the language, 
 the history, the architecture, the ideas of the 
 country. He is a good fellow, but he is home 
 sick, listless, indifferent: he speeds his automo 
 bile along some famous Roman road without once 
 kindling at the thought of Caesar or Napoleon ; 
 the Mediterranean means to him Monte Carlo ; 
 and nothing in his trip gives him so much real 
 satisfaction as to buttonhole a fellow American 
 and talk to him about the superiority of New 
 York hotels. He is taking his holiday too late. 
 He has no longer any oil in his lamp. Curiosity, 
 
56 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 
 
 imagination, sympathy, zest, have been burned 
 out of him in that fierce competitive struggle 
 where his life forces have been spent. He is a 
 victim of a system, of the quantitative rather 
 than the qualitative test of excellence. None of 
 our contemporary hallucinations leads more cer 
 tainly to ultimate weariness and indifferentism 
 than this too exclusive glorification of " men who 
 do things." We worship size, efficiency, tangible 
 results. With the late W. E. Henley in his au 
 tomobile poem we cry : 
 
 "Speed 
 Speed, and a world of new hayings, 
 
 Learning and Drink 
 
 And Money and Song, 
 
 Ships, Folios, and Horses, 
 
 The craft of the Healer, 
 
 The worship of God 
 
 And things done to the instant 
 
 Delight of the Devil 
 
 And all, all that tends 
 
 To his swift-to-come, swift-to-go 
 
 Glory, are tested, 
 
 Gutted, exhausted, 
 
 Chucked down the draught ; 
 
 And the quest, the pursuit, 
 
 The attack, and the conquest 
 
INDIFFERENTISM 67 
 
 Of the Unknown goes on 
 Goes on in the Joy of the Lord" 
 
 It is a fascinating, record-breaking schedule 
 for the road-race for Success, but a man may 
 without cowardice confess that he is afraid of it. 
 One sees too many broken-down machines in the 
 roadside ditch. Study the faces of the Men Who 
 Do Things, of the Men of To-morrow, as you 
 find them presented in the illustrated periodi 
 cals. They are strong, straightforward faces, the 
 sign of a powerful, high-geared bodily mechan 
 ism. These men are the winners in the game 
 which our generation has set itself to play. But 
 many of the faces are singularly hard, insensi 
 tive, untouched by meditation. If we have pur 
 chased speed and power at the cost of nobler 
 qualities, if the men who do things are bred at 
 the expense of the men who think and feel, 
 surely the present American model needs modifi 
 cation. 
 
 For there has been a good deal of human his 
 tory made upon this planet before the invention 
 of the automobile, and one of the most obvious 
 lessons of that history is the moral indifference 
 which is apt to follow upon great material sue- 
 
58 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 
 
 cess. We perceive that something is wrong even 
 with the courteous superiority of Signor Pococu 
 rante. We feel that it is a flaw in an otherwise 
 kindly and attractive character. But what shall 
 we say of the moral insensibility, the sheer reck 
 lessness of human life, the selfish indifference to 
 the welfare of weaker races, in which the present 
 decade abounds ? It is a new form of Pococu- 
 rantism, and one far more dangerous than any 
 dilettante type, because it attacks stronger men. 
 
 " Speed, and a world of new havings," 
 
 no matter who or what may lie in the path ! 
 That is its watchword. It has taken new accents 
 in our own days, but it is after all the old hoarse 
 shout of Philistinism, trusting in its sword and 
 spear and shield. 
 
 Nor are its less militant aspects any less fun 
 damentally barbaric. " How pleasant," says one 
 of the citizens in the Easter Sunday scene in 
 Faust, " to sit here and empty your glass and 
 think of the people fighting far away ! " 
 
 " On Sundays, holidays, there s naught I take delight in 
 Like gossiping of war and war s array, 
 Where down in Turkey, far away, 
 The foreign people are a-fighting." 
 
INDIFFERENTISM 59 
 
 But beneath even this softer and more smug 
 Philistinism, wrapped comfortably in material 
 progress, full of good nature, of benevolent sen 
 timent, of jocosity, what indifference there may 
 be toward the good old cause of world-wide liberty 
 and fraternity, what essential hardness of heart I 
 
 It is a long journey from Venice in the eigh 
 teenth century to America in the twentieth. Yet 
 the decaying commercial republic of Italy, draw 
 ing to itself even in its decline the treasures of 
 the East and West, offering to the stranger, with 
 a sort of splendid affluence, both its best and its 
 worst, presents more than one likeness to the vast, 
 prosperous America of to-day. Among our coun 
 trymen who have enjoyed full opportunities for 
 culture, there are few who have not at times 
 shared the listlessness, the apathy of that Vene 
 tian nobleman who was cloyed with his own trea 
 sures. How can it be otherwise ? How can the 
 man or woman of normal power constantly re 
 spond to the multiform stimulus of these swift 
 days of ours ? Who can adequately react even to 
 the news contained in the morning paper ? Here 
 is the life of the whole world brought daily to the 
 
60 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 
 
 door. But who is ready to weigh it, sift it, assimi 
 late it ? No wonder that men and women of fine 
 fibre are conscious too often of that lassitude 
 which comes from wandering through the rooms 
 of a great museum, a weariness like that which 
 oppresses the conscientious sight-seer at a World s 
 Fair. 
 
 We cannot rest, meditate, dream, without miss 
 ing our train, breaking our engagement. We 
 hurry on, through this crowded, absorbing, splen 
 didly rich and varied life of contemporary 
 America, a race of a few athletes and millions of 
 nervous dyspeptics. We are a restless people, 
 hypnotized with transient enthusiasms. To-day we 
 plan a marble archway for a naval hero, build 
 it to-morrow in plaster, and the day after tear it 
 down. We idolize the phrases of the Declaration 
 of Independence for two or three generations, 
 and then suddenly make the discovery that they 
 are mere generalities, good enough for the library, 
 but inapplicable to practical affairs. All the 
 wealth of our physical resources, all the marvels of 
 our tangible success, are not enough, it appears, to 
 save us from the Old World vice of indifferent- 
 ism, from the swift relapse into disillusionment. 
 
INDIFFERENTISM 61 
 
 Let us come back to Voltaire s parable. He 
 was a master of dialectic weapons, and in this 
 novel about the quest of happiness he scores his 
 point with impeccable precision. Signer Pococu 
 rante is not happy. Candide is searching for a 
 perfectly happy person, and he does not find one, 
 even in that admirably furnished palace upon the 
 Brenta. A man s life, in other words, consists not 
 in the abundance of the things which he pos 
 sesses. Yet the road to happiness is not through 
 caring little, as the Stoics will still have it, 
 but through caring much and continuing to care 
 much. It is the ardent, luminous mind, not the 
 smothered, hypercritical mind, which has the 
 truer perception of values. The disillusionized 
 man is not necessarily the wise man. Hamlet was 
 wiser, more truly philosophical in the university 
 at Wittenberg, where he was doubtless taught 
 " What a piece of work is a man ! how noble in 
 reason ! how infinite in faculty ! " than he was 
 later, when, in the stress of unequal conflict with 
 the world, he added the sad personal footnote, 
 " And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of 
 dust?" 
 
 In actual human intercourse, furthermore, 
 
62 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 
 
 your disillusionized man or woman is, to put it 
 plainly, apt to prove himself a bore. It is amus 
 ing enough for a while to hear some melancholy 
 Jaques wittily rail and sneer, but it soon grows 
 tiresome. The most agreeable companion in the 
 game of life is what golfers call the "cheerful 
 duffer," who plays shockingly, it is true, but who 
 is always hoping and struggling to beat bogey on 
 the next hole. It is in the mood of the awkward 
 idealist, and not of the graceful pococurantist, 
 that most of the good work of the world is done. 
 There is plentiful absurdity, no doubt, in the 
 popular interpretation of what has been so widely 
 heralded as the doctrine of " strenuousness." As 
 a counter-gospel to that of mere fault-finding 
 inertia or obstructionism, strenuousness is well 
 enough. But superficially understood, it may 
 mean nothing more than the cult of activity for 
 its own sake ; " hustling," as we love to say, 
 for the mere end of being a " hustler." No na 
 tion ever needed such a doctrine less than we. 
 We have already too much headlong hurry that 
 does not count : like the nervous pulling on and 
 off of sweaters by the substitutes on the side 
 lines of a football-field, it shows feverish activity 
 
INDIFFERENTISM 63 
 
 and energy, but it does not advance the ball. 
 The real purport of the strenuous doctrine is 
 rather this : that life is infinitely significant ; 
 that it should not be frittered away, either in 
 finical criticism or in foolish, irrelevant activities. 
 It is meant to be used, intelligently, fully, gen 
 erously. Those are fine lines of Henry van 
 Dyke: 
 
 " Life is an arrow therefore you must know 
 What mark to aim at, how to use the bow 
 Then draw it to the head, and let it go ! " 
 
 It is the good fortune of some men and women 
 to feel instinctively this potential value of hu 
 man life. Others learn it tardily, after the oil 
 in the lamp is low. But nothing is more inspir 
 iting than to see human beings make the great 
 acceptance, and devote themselves to some gen 
 erous service. The bow is meant to shoot with, 
 and not to hang on the wall. It improves with 
 age, and so should men and women. " We grow 
 simpler," wrote Thackeray, " as we grow older." 
 
 For, after all, these contemporary forms of 
 indifferentism are not final. We shall doubtless 
 specialize more, rather than less, and yet the 
 narrowing tendencies of absorption in one s own 
 
64 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 
 
 specialty may be resisted. The lassitude that 
 marks the reaction from great and long-con 
 tinued effort is perhaps inevitable ; but in those 
 hours one may refresh himself from the deep 
 fountains that spring up within the soul. One s 
 individual success or happiness may tempt him 
 to regard the less fortunate with an indifferent 
 eye, but in a democracy like ours Dives and 
 Lazarus may always be trusted to shift places, 
 if you will but give them time. 
 
 To avoid that cold, paralyzing touch of indif- 
 ferentism, one can at least endeavor to live sim 
 ply. There is even now apparent, in the press, 
 in many strange pulpits, and in the private talk 
 of men in every section of the country, a whole 
 some tendency to praise this " simple life." It is 
 perhaps a by-product of prosperity, for the doc 
 trine it praises is more easily followed by the 
 rich than by the poor. A fine simplicity of mind 
 often accompanies great wealth, while poverty is 
 as often the cause of perpetual duplicity and 
 fear. But fortunately for our generation, both 
 rich and poor have been rediscovering Nature. 
 We have found sources of joy in familiar sur 
 roundings and in common things. It is one step 
 
INDIFFERENTISM 65 
 
 toward rediscovering ourselves. <f Simplifica 
 tion," as Mr. John Morley has so often pointed 
 out, was the motto of that Eevolution which fol 
 lowed so swiftly upon the mood of Voltairean 
 doubt ; and now that a whole cycle of experi 
 ence has been accomplished, simplification should 
 be the watchword once more. "Plain living 
 and high thinking " is a hackneyed phrase, and 
 represents for many of us but a forced virtue ; 
 yet plain living and high thinking are at least 
 not the soil in which Pococurantism flourishes. 
 A quiet mind that recalls the enduring lessons 
 of history, a meditative mind that perceives the 
 secret of vitality in true books and true men, a 
 sane mind that sees life wholesomely and hu 
 manly, this is what one must cultivate if he 
 would share the inexhaustible freshness, the un 
 ceasing energy, which make the daily gladness 
 of the world. 
 
 And the last words of Signor Pococurante 
 himself are not to be forgotten. They relate, it 
 may be remembered, to his garden. He is in 
 deed dissatisfied with it, as with everything else, 
 and yet he adds, in words that almost redeem his 
 character and testify to his essentially human 
 
66 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 
 
 quality : " I shall have another laid out to-mor 
 row upon a nobler plan." How persistent, how 
 indestructible is idealism, even in the breast of 
 a professed indifferentist ! This idealism is an 
 integral part of our inheritance. Though baffled 
 at every point, it underlies and corrects our tran 
 sient fits of despondent criticism. Indifferentism 
 should be studied, controlled, counteracted; but 
 in most of us, after all, it is a mood only. It is 
 a shadow on the landscape. Yet far below it in 
 our nature there is the undefeated desire, the 
 imperishable aspiration, that to-morrow may find 
 us dwelling in another garden, built upon a 
 nobler plan. That is our human heritage of toil 
 and hope, and it is a man s part to reenter it 
 daily with courage and good cheer. 
 
THE LIFE OF A COLLEGE 
 PKOFESSOR 
 
THE LIFE OF A COLLEGE PROFESSOR 
 
 IT is an impertinence to ask a man still in the 
 game whether the game be worth the candle. He 
 thought so once, no doubt, or he would not have 
 begun playing ; and the courteous presumption 
 is that he persists in his opinion. Whatever may 
 be his secret guesses as to the value of the stake, 
 your true sportsman will play the game out, and 
 as long as he is playing his best, he makes but an 
 indifferent philosopher. No man absorbed in a 
 profession can assess critically that profession s 
 claims and its rewards, but he can at least recall 
 some of his anticipations upon entering it, and 
 compare them with the realities of his actual ex 
 perience. 
 
 To a young man with some taste for the things 
 of the mind, the life of a college professor offers 
 manifold points of attraction. The candidates for 
 the profession have usually won some distinction 
 as undergraduates, so that from the first moment 
 of post-graduate study one has the feeling of asso- 
 
70 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 
 
 elation and rivalry with picked men. I The days 
 when the valedictorian was invariably called back 
 to his Alma Mater as a tutor, to be used in any 
 department happening to be short of tutors that 
 year, or when the Kev. Mr. Blinker of Mudville, 
 famous in college as a mighty handler of the lexi 
 con, but quite unappreciated in Mudville, was on 
 that account tolerably sure of getting a professor 
 ship, are indeed rapidly receding. Sometimes 
 men drift into college work from other callings, 
 or are drafted from among the teachers in pre 
 paratory schools, but the conventional road to 
 promotion is some form of specialized graduate 
 study. The experience of foreign life thus comes 
 to many an American in the years when he is 
 most impressionable to its stimulus and charm. 
 Berlin and Leipsic, it is true, send back young 
 doctors who are delightfully unconscious how 
 much they must unlearn, but most of them get 
 their bearings again long before they secure their 
 coveted chairs. yThe years of preliminary training 
 as tutor or assistant are likely to be happy years, 
 too, in spite of drudgery and jealousies and hope 
 deferred. There is the excitement of meeting 
 one s first classes; the first curious glimpse, it 
 
THE LIFE OF A COLLEGE PROFESSOR 71 
 
 may be, into faculty meetings ; the first letter 
 addressed to you as " Professor " you bless the 
 kindly error ; the notice of your first paper ; the 
 companionship of other young fellows like your 
 self, already infinitely removed from undergradu 
 ate sympathies, and not yet admitted to the inner 
 circle of professorial intimacies. Lucky years, 
 when spurs are to be had for the winning, and 
 when many a teacher, without ever suspecting it, 
 does the best work of his life ! 
 
 At last, on the red-lettered day of all, comes 
 the professorship, the solid-built chair that is 
 warranted to last, instead of the temporary affair 
 which you now turn over to the next man behind 
 you. You are secure. Barring incapacitating ill 
 ness, and flagrant violation of the Decalogue, it 
 is a life-appointment. The salary is small, but 
 what there is of it is tolerably certain to be paid ; 
 one can marry on it if he has the courage to live 
 plainly. Your lifelong associates will be gentle 
 men. Your chosen field of work, in science or 
 philosophy or literature, stretches before you in 
 tempting vistas. One-third of the year will be 
 vacation time and hence all your own, for la 
 bor, if your ambition holds, for rest, if you find 
 
72 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 
 
 it flagging. You have the opportunity to impress 
 the best there is in yourself upon a perpetually 
 renewed stream of youthful and more or less ar 
 dent minds, and in this thought what satisfaction 
 for the didactic instinct, for the ineradicable 
 schoolmaster that is lurking in us all ! Can any 
 profession offer a program half so certain, under 
 normal conditions, of a fair fulfillment ? Surely 
 the candle burns brightly at the beginning of the 
 game. 
 
 As the years go by, does the college professor 
 regret his choice? I know a few who would 
 gladly change their calling, but only a few, and 
 these are mainly men of energetic, practical cast, 
 who now recognize that by entering another pro 
 fession they might have quadrupled their in 
 come. Men of strong literary and scholarly bent 
 are less likely to question the wisdom of their 
 choice, and indeed, of those outside the college 
 circle, it seems to be the " literary fellows " who 
 speak with most envy of the professor s lot. 
 Aside from lazy midsummer guesses at what one 
 might have been and who does not hazard 
 these at times? I find college teachers pecu 
 liarly contented. 
 
THE LIFE OF A COLLEGE PROFESSOR 73 
 
 To turn to the material side of things, the 
 assurance of a fixed income is a source of per 
 manent satisfaction, however disproportionate the 
 income to the service that is rendered. To be 
 sure, the salary of a full professor, the country 
 over, is little if at all in excess of $2000. In 
 the larger universities it may rise to $3000 or 
 something more, but the men who receive above 
 $4000 are so few as to scarcely affect the gen 
 eral average. Aside from the bare possibility of 
 a call to a richer institution, the college profes 
 sor is not likely to be earning more at fifty than 
 at thirty. Unlike most other professions, there 
 is here no gradual increase of income to give 
 tangible evidence of a man s growth in power. 
 Unless one has taken the Northern Farmer s 
 thrifty advice and " gone where money is " when 
 he married, his outlook as he faces old age is 
 not reassuring. Pensions are extremely rare ; 
 college trustees are forced in most cases to be as 
 ungrateful as republics. The cost of living has 
 steadily risen in college towns, keeping pace 
 with the general increase of luxury throughout 
 the older communities. Here and there, particu 
 larly in the West, there are exceptions, but upon 
 
74 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 
 
 the whole the scale of necessary expenditure, for 
 a man fulfilling the various social duties re 
 quired by his position, is constantly growing 
 greater. The professor s incidental income from 
 books and lectures is ordinarily insignificant. 
 When he has paid his bills he finds no margin 
 left for champagne and terrapin. If he smokes 
 at all, he invents ingenious reasons for prefer 
 ring a pipe. He sees the light-hearted tutors sail 
 for Europe every summer, but as for himself, he 
 decides annually that it will be wiser to wait 
 just one year more. Once in a while he will 
 yield to the temptation to pick up a first edition 
 or a good print, but Aldines and Kembrandt 
 proofs are toys he may not dally with. In short, 
 his tastes are cultivated beyond his income, and 
 his sole comfort is in the Pharisaical reflection 
 that this is better, after all, than to have more 
 income than taste. If his meditations upon qua 
 ternions or Descartes or the lyric cry are liable 
 to be interrupted by an insulting cook, striking 
 for another dollar that he can ill spare, it is 
 doubtless a device of Providence to keep him 
 in healthy touch with actualities. It were a pity 
 that in the colleges, of all places, high thinking 
 
THE LIFE OF A COLLEGE PROFESSOR 75 
 
 and plain living should be quite divorced, and 
 that the men whose duty it is to train American 
 boys in citizenship as well as in letters should 
 themselves have no need to practice the stern 
 virtues of industry and thrift. 
 
 No man s satisfaction or dissatisfaction with 
 his salary, however, affords a complete indica 
 tion of his attitude toward his work. A more 
 subtle arithmetic makes up the sum of failure or 
 success. After ten, twenty, or thirty years of 
 experience, the college professor may be analyst 
 enough to pass verdict upon the result of his 
 own efforts, but an outsider s estimate may even 
 then be more accurate than his own. Besides, 
 many a man s point of view becomes insensibly 
 but increasingly modified after he has entered 
 upon his vocation, so that it is difficult for him 
 to decide whether his early ambitions have been 
 realized. 
 
 There are two professional types, assuredly, 
 that are admirably adjusted to their environment; 
 the born investigator, and the born teacher. Men 
 belonging to the first of these classes find in re 
 search itself a sufficient recompense ; their happi 
 ness is in widening the bounds of knowledge, and 
 
76 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 
 
 undermining stoutly intrenched stupidities, and 
 adding to the effectiveness of human energy. Al 
 most every college has one or more of these men. 
 The larger institutions have many of them, and 
 the college community is their rightful place. 
 They deserve their bed and board, and their 
 cakes and ale besides even if they are too ab 
 sent-minded to remember their lecture hours, or 
 too .feebly magnetic to hold the attention of un 
 dergraduates. An unerring process of differenti 
 ation is constantly at work, marking out these 
 born scholars and scientists from those of their 
 colleagues who possess scholarly and scientific 
 tastes, but who learn by the time they are forty 
 that they are never likely to produce anything. 
 These latter men often make noteworthy drill- 
 masters. Their respect for original scholarship 
 grows as they come to recognize that it is beyond 
 their own reach. Though they discover the fu 
 tility of " doing something for " science or litera 
 ture themselves, they touch elbows daily with 
 men who can, and they reflect something of the 
 glory of it, and impart to their pupils a regard 
 for sound learning. 
 ; Not every teacher, of course, is an investigator 
 
THE LIFE OF A COLLEGE PROFESSOR 77 
 
 manque. Your born teacher is as rare as a poet, 
 and as likely to die young. 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. J 
 
 Sometimes it happens that the great teacher is 
 also a great investigator, but that is a miracle. 
 For a man to be either one or the other not to 
 speak of being both requires singular vitality. 
 Outsiders usually underestimate the obstacles to 
 successful professorial work. With regard to 
 one s own scholarly ambitions, particularly, the 
 steady term-time strain, the thankless and idle 
 sessions of committees, the variety of demands 
 upon one s time and energy, combine to make 
 
78 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 
 
 one pay a heavy price for winning distinction. 
 You must do, upon the average, as much teach 
 ing as your colleagues, and the time for your 
 magnum opus must either be stolen from that 
 due your classes, or you must accomplish two 
 days work in one. It is true that the number of 
 hours of classroom instruction required of the 
 professor varies greatly in different institutions. 
 Sometimes a schedule of four hours per week is 
 considered sufficient, in the case of men who 
 have won the right to devote themselves to ad 
 vanced research. In the smaller colleges, and for 
 the younger men in the larger ones, the schedule 
 is often sixteen or twenty hours. Perhaps twelve 
 would be a fair average for colleges and univer 
 sities the country over. To teach college boys for 
 two hours a day does not seem like a very severe 
 task to one who has never tried it, but I have 
 observed that most professors who have taught 
 or lectured for two hours thoroughly well, putting 
 their best powers into the task, are ready to quit. 
 Few men can rivet the attention of fifty or a hun 
 dred students for one hour without feeling, five 
 minutes after the end of it, that vitality has gone 
 out of them. The emery wheel that wears out 
 
THE LIFE OF A COLLEGE PROFESSOR 79 
 
 fastest cuts the diamond best ; and when a man 
 boasts that he teaches without effort and weari 
 ness, he has sufficiently described his teaching. 
 Every college town has its own pitiful or tragic 
 stories of professors who have broken down ; they 
 are usually the men whom the college could least 
 afford to lose. It is no wonder that in the face 
 of all this many professors cease trying to ride 
 two horses at once ; they either do their duty by 
 their classes and let the dust gather on the leaves 
 of the magnum opus, or else they get over their 
 class work with as little expenditure of energy as 
 possible, and give to the magnum opus their real 
 strength. And the college would not be the mi 
 crocosm it is if there were not some professors 
 who abandon both ambitions after a little, be 
 coming quite incurable though often very charm 
 ing dead-beats ; and this, I confess, is the most 
 interesting type of all. 
 
 It is a pity that Mark Pattison, whose Memoirs 
 throw so terribly frank a light upon the intel 
 lectual side of university life, did not leave be 
 hind him that essay upon Academic Sterility 
 which I have already suggested that someone 
 ought to write. He may have thought that 
 
80 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 
 
 AmleVs Journal pictured the malady, for once 
 and all; and certainly Mrs. Humphry Ward, 
 whose Langham is an attempted personification 
 of the class, has succeeded only in clothing with 
 an English garb the self -distrust and impotence 
 of will of the lonely Genevese professor. There 
 can be no reasonable doubt that the academic 
 atmosphere is unfavorable to creative vigor. Few 
 vital books come out of the universities. One 
 cause, beyond question, is the prevalence of the 
 critical spirit. 
 
 " Our knowledge petrifies our rhymes." 
 
 A sophisticated sense that everything has been 
 written, and better than it is likely to be written 
 again, is not the stuff from which literature is 
 bred. It may be that a mere over-accumulation 
 of material prevents the scholar from ever turn 
 ing his treasures to account; the monumental 
 treatise becomes arrested, like Mr. Casaubon s, 
 in the pigeon-hole stage. Often, too, he outlives 
 his former intellectual interests, and his drawers 
 are crammed with various half -completed pieces 
 of work, melancholy reminders of enthusiasms 
 that have now grown cold and long years that 
 
THE LIFE OF A COLLEGE PROFESSOR 81 
 
 have been wasted. In morbid self -depreciation or 
 well-grounded despair of making any contribu 
 tion to the world s thought, and disgusted with 
 class-room routine, many a gifted man, unwilling 
 or unable to resign his chair, turns tramp. Care 
 less of public opinion, he adopts some pet avoca 
 tion for his vocation henceforth, makes an opiate 
 out of a hobby, and settles down for the rest of 
 his days into a fly-fisherman, or amateur photo 
 grapher, or cross-country saunterer, or novel 
 reader. But it is then that he is worth knowing ! 
 " May God forgive me," cried Sir Walter Scott 
 to his Diary, " for thinking that anything can be 
 made out of a schoolmaster ! " Ah, shade of Sir 
 Walter, out of a schoolmaster who has survived 
 his illusions and is cheerfully planting his cab 
 bages, there may be made the most delightful 
 companion in the world ! 
 
 It is because a college faculty exhibits this sur 
 prising range of types, illustrative, in little, of 
 almost every variety of success and failure known 
 to the greater world, that it furnishes so per 
 petually interesting a spectacle. No man who has 
 returned to his own Alma Mater to teach is likely 
 to forget the impressions received at those first 
 
82 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 
 
 faculty meetings, where he has met on terms of 
 absolute equality the gentlemen whose corporate 
 action decided so many vital issues as it then 
 seemed in his own undergraduate life. What 
 a revelation to find that " the faculty " are very 
 much like other men : with prejudices and favor 
 ite animosities ; capable of being much confused 
 by a motion to amend an amendment, and much 
 relieved by a proposition to refer to a committee ; 
 the younger ones rigid and the older ones lenient 
 in enforcing the letter of the law ; all of them glad 
 to adjourn, and retire to their own toil or their 
 own decorous beer and skittles ! But what mas 
 tery of parliamentary fence, on the part of old 
 gentlemen who have been making and withdraw 
 ing motions for half a century ! l What deep 
 wrath among the disciplinarians over that vote to 
 restore the erring half-back (needed in Novem 
 ber) to full standing in his class ! What subtle 
 argumentation, pro and con, over Smith s petition 
 to be excused from chapel on the ground of his 
 physician s written statement that Smith s eye- 
 
 1 I recall one such expert, who, at the first faculty meeting of 
 the college year, offered a prayer that he and his colleagues 
 might he endowed with " holy skill." 
 
THE LIFE OF A COLLEGE PROFIiSSOR 83 
 
 lids are liable to inflammation upon sudden ex 
 posure to the morning air ! What passionate 
 denunciation of the faculty s past injustice in 
 the famous Kobinson case, pronounced by some 
 sunny-tempered philosopher who has just per 
 suaded himself that whenever the student body 
 differs with the faculty on a moral question the 
 students are surely in the right! And is it not 
 singular that over that question of Jones s rank, 
 which any man in the room could settle satis 
 factorily enough in two minutes if left to him 
 self, two or three dozen educated and experi 
 enced gentlemen should sit in futile misery for 
 half an hour, only, at the end of it, to follow 
 sheeplike some obstinate motion that takes them 
 through precisely the wrong hole in the wall? 
 Until the psychology of mobs is better compre 
 hended, there will be no understanding the ways 
 of " faculty action." Even when we shall have 
 learned that the normal powers of the two or 
 three dozen men are under some strange para 
 lyzing inhibition, shall we be able to explain 
 why the inhibition should proceed from the most 
 thick-headed man in the room ? 
 
 To these gentlemen who grow old in the shel- 
 
84 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 
 
 tered academic life, a thousand whimsicalities 
 and petty formalities attach themselves, like bar 
 nacles to the bottom of a ship long at anchor. 
 No man can teach ten years and escape them. 
 Unbeknown to himself he is already on the 
 way to becoming a " character," and people are 
 smiling at him in their sleeves. If he finds him 
 self at a reception, he buttonholes a colleague 
 and talks shop. The habit of addressing boys, 
 without contradiction, leaves him often impotent 
 in the sharp give-and-take of talk with men, and 
 many a professor who is eloquent in his class 
 room is helpless on the street, or in the club, or 
 across the dinner-table. Sometimes he perceives 
 thist and makes pathetic efforts to grow worldly. 
 Faculty circles have been known to experience 
 strange obsessions of frivolity, and to plunge 
 desperately into dancing lessons or duplicate 
 whist. Both the remedy and the disease have 
 their comic aspects, and yet I know of no circles 
 where the twilight hour of familiar talk is more 
 delightful, where common instincts and training 
 and old associations touch the ordinary court 
 esies of life with a more peculiar charm, where 
 mutual pride is so little spoiled by familiarity, 
 
THE LIFE OF A COLLEGE PROFESSOR 85 
 
 and where lifelong friendships, undisturbed by the 
 accidents frequent in the greater world, grow so 
 intimate and touching as the evil days draw nigh. 
 * A professor s attitude toward the undergrad 
 uates is a good test of his personality, but a still 
 better one may be found in their attitude toward 
 him. They are shrewd judges of character, intol 
 erant of shams, and demoniacally ingenious in 
 finding the weak places in a man s armor. If he 
 is a shirk or an ignoramus, they know it as soon 
 as he perhaps sooner. Your college student is 
 a strange compound of reverence and irrever 
 ence, conservative and anarchist, man and boy. 
 If you decide to treat him as a youngster he 
 straightway astonishes you by his maturity; if 
 you thereupon make up your mind to consider 
 him henceforth as a man, he will be guilty of 
 prompt and enthusiastic lapses into juvenility. 
 An American college is half public school, half 
 university. Toward professors whom they like, 
 students are finely loyal, though the curious 
 alternations of popularity which fall to some 
 teachers at the hands of successive classes are 
 quite beyond the reach of analysis. If they do 
 not like a professor, and can get the whip hand 
 
86 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 
 
 over him, undergraduates know how to demon- 
 
 rate that twenty is the age of perfect cruelty. 
 
 In few college recitation rooms, nowadays, is 
 
 I 
 
 there anything said about the whip hand, but it 
 is always there, on one side or the other. Every 
 lecture hall witnesses a daily though possibly un 
 conscious struggle of talent, training, and char 
 acter against the crowd. The lecturer usually 
 wins, because he knows he must, but many a 
 one who has never experienced defeat invariably 
 rises, like Gough, with knees that tremble. La 
 boratory and seminary methods of instruction 
 alter these conditions, of course, and bring the 
 professor at once into informal and even inti 
 mate relation with his pupils^ Upon the whole, 
 the contact with college classes is agreeable to a 
 man of friendly temperament. He learns to make 
 allowance for undergraduate conventionalities, 
 and does not expect enthusiasm where enthusi 
 asm would be bad form. On their part, students 
 generously overlook the whims and crotchets of 
 a favorite professor ; they even pardon his amaze 
 ment at the ways of intercollegiate diplomacy, or 
 his radical skepticism as to the intellectual dis 
 cipline involved in football. 
 
THE LIFE OF A COLLEGE PROFESSOR 87 
 
 In one sense, indeed, he is supposed to know 
 very little about the men whom he teaches. The 
 in loco parentis theory has long been doomed 
 at least in the larger institutions and so far as 
 direct observation is concerned, the professor is 
 as ignorant of what is going on in a student s 
 room as if it were in the South seas. But for 
 all that he can make skillful guesses, from a hun 
 dred signs, and when the Seniors file upon the 
 Commencement platform for their degrees, that 
 silent circle of professors often know them better 
 than their mothers do. It is pleasant to meet 
 these fellows afterward, either on the old cam 
 pus, or at some remote railway junction, or at 
 midnight in a foreign city, and pick up for a 
 moment the dropped threads of acquaintance. 
 Sometimes one learns in these accidental ways 
 that his instruction counted for more than was 
 apparent at the time ; he makes the discovery 
 that someone has taken pains to remember words 
 that he himself has long forgotten. Herein lies 
 half the zest of teaching. One blazes away into 
 the underbrush, left barrel and right barrel, 
 vaguely enough as it seems, but some of the shots 
 are sure to tell. Young men are after all so 
 
88 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 
 
 susceptible to impression, so responsive to right 
 feeling, that though the fine reserve of youth may 
 not betray it at the moment, they nevertheless 
 bear away from their instructor the best he has 
 to give them. This may be poor enough, but it 
 is something. 
 
 When a professor grows tired of moralizing 
 about his colleagues or his pupils, he always has 
 the president to fall back upon. So have the 
 undergraduates, for that matter, and their pa 
 rents, and the alumni, and the trustees, and the 
 general public, and the newspaper reporters. 
 The college president who can conduct himself 
 to the satisfaction of this varied body of critics, 
 and enjoy at the same time the approval of his 
 own conscience, is a gifted man. A president 
 must have many qualifications for his office I 
 have heard a cautious observer say but his first 
 need is a thick skin. Undoubtedly, by some wise 
 provision of nature, the skin grows thicker with 
 exposure, but there is a curiously prevalent im 
 pression that a president s conscience is liable to 
 a corresponding induration. A cynical-minded 
 friend of mine, of large discourse in these mat 
 ters, avers that such are the temptations peculiar 
 
THE LIFE OF A COLLEGE PROFESSOR 89 
 
 to the office, that of all the college presidents he 
 has known, only two remained Christians. These 
 two if I may be permitted to say so without 
 discourtesy to the others are both dead. 
 
 Whatever be the foundation for such impious 
 generalizations, no one will deny that an Ameri 
 can college president has a task of extraordinary 
 difficulty. Yet his problems have been met, upon 
 the whole, with consummate skill. Every type of 
 president has done something to advance the 
 cause of higher education in America : the sleek 
 "promoter," the sectarian fanatic, the close- 
 mouthed business manager, the far-sighted educa 
 tor, the blameless clergyman. These types appear 
 and disappear and blend, but meantime the great 
 cause itself goes lumbering steadily forward. 
 
 Two generations ago, the place held by the 
 college professor in the community must have 
 vastly tickled his vanity. Those rules in vogue in 
 New England, requiring students to doff their 
 hats when four rods from a professor (two rods 
 only for a tutor, alas !) were emblematic of the 
 universal homage paid him in a college town. 
 I suppose there is no man so great nowadays, 
 even on great occasions, as those old fellows were 
 
90 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 
 
 continuously. Town and college had a solid 
 arity of interest that is now unknown, except 
 in a few instances of fortunate survival. The 
 commanding position of the professor in the com 
 munity was often a deserved recognition of his 
 services to the local public. Here and there may 
 still be found a man of the old type, an agitator 
 for all good causes, an orator in town meeting, 
 a politician within the bounds of dignity, but it 
 is a common complaint among the townspeople 
 in academic communities that your modern pro 
 fessor is a Gallio. He may turn out occasionally 
 to manifest his interest in some crisis of the 
 church or school or state, but in general he sticks 
 to his library. This criticism is often short 
 sighted, particularly in reference to politics. The 
 professor who patiently teaches his classes, week 
 in and week out, to think straight, to see that two 
 and two make four on either side of the Atlantic 
 and that " stealing will continue stealing," serves 
 his country better than a hundred " spell-bind 
 ers " in the last frantic days of a campaign. But 
 upon the whole there is ground for the current 
 complaint as to the college teacher s unconcern 
 for public questions. He remains in one sense a 
 
THE LIFE OF A COLLEGE PROFESSOR 91 
 
 leading figure in his community. There are cer 
 tain things he may not do without losing caste. 
 The butcher, with a vague feeling of his impor 
 tance, charges him a couple of extra cents per 
 pound, and the suave Armenian refugee, noting 
 the real Bokhara on his floor, pockets the pro 
 fessorial gift of two dollars and thinks in his 
 Oriental heart that it ought to have been five. 
 Yet in these respects he may be a marked man 
 unluckily ! without possessing any of the 
 old, real leadership of influence and character. 
 Plausible as may be his excuses of preoccupa 
 tion with wider intellectual interests, the tone of 
 American civic life has already suffered from his 
 indifference. There are indications, however, of 
 a reaction against this indolent exclusiveness. It 
 may be that the hour of selfish acquisition and 
 ungenerous rivalry between the colleges is pass 
 ing, and that side by side they are to strive once 
 more, and more effectively than ever, for the com 
 mon welfare. Some such aspiration is certain to 
 thrill sooner or later, the loneliest scholar in the 
 most secluded corner of the college world ; for 
 even the inveterate pedant may possess a " most 
 public soul." 
 
92 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 
 
 After all is said, the life of a college professor 
 presents, under curious disguises, the old, univer 
 sal issues. It is a noble profession for the noble- 
 hearted, and but a petty calling for a man of 
 petty mind. 
 
COLLEGE PROFESSORS AND THE 
 PUBLIC 
 
COLLEGE PROFESSORS AND THE 
 PUBLIC 
 
 IN a recent number of the Harvard Graduates 
 Magazine there is a sketch entitled " A Harvard 
 Ascetic." It describes that singular gentleman 
 and scholar, Evangelinus Apostolides Sophocles, 
 with whose academic career anecdote, and myth 
 have long been busy. For some thirty-six years 
 after his appointment as Greek tutor, in 1842, 
 Professor Sophocles " lived by himself," we are 
 told, " in the west entry of Holworthy, and there 
 cooked and spread his frugal meals, amid his 
 lexicons and papers and exercise books." Whether 
 he bred his famous chickens in his sleeping room 
 is still a matter for high debate among Cambridge 
 humorists of an antiquarian turn. At any rate 
 he seems to have lived his own life in serene in 
 difference to contemporary opinion. He preserved 
 throughout the most stirring period of the last 
 century the spiritual isolation of the exile. He 
 remained from first to last a Greek monk, set to 
 
96 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 
 
 the somewhat incongruous task of teaching Amer 
 ican boys. 
 
 I am so unfortunate as never to have known 
 Evangelinus Apostolides Sophocles. But I have 
 often been inclined to moralize upon his monastic 
 existence, in comparing it with the fuller if more 
 interrupted lives of some of his contemporaries 
 and pupils. For there have been many gramma 
 rians quite as anxious as Professor Sophocles to 
 " settle Hoti s business " and impart " the doc 
 trine of the enclitic de" who have cheerfully sur 
 rendered their scanty hours for research at the 
 call of public service ; arguing in town meetings 
 for better schoolhouses and better roads, visiting 
 and burying the town poor, securing better terms 
 from the all-invading trolley companies, addressing 
 legislative committees in behalf of local improve- 
 ments,. -"? sparing,-4*feoptv no time or labor where 
 the expenditure of time and labor might insure 
 better conditions of living for the communities 
 where the scholar s lot was cast. That this devo 
 tion to the claims of the town or city or general 
 public is likely to interfere with Hoti s business 
 is undeniable. The doctrine of the enclitic de is 
 less clearly defined to-day than it might have 
 
COLLEGE PROFESSORS AND THE PUBLIC 97 
 
 been if all college teachers had lived, like Pro 
 fessor Sophocles, in the west entry of a dormitory, 
 engrossed with lexicons and exercise books, and 
 with a few chickens, possibly, to add speculative 
 interest to the scene. There is, one must confess, 
 a more or less constant antinomy between the in 
 stincts of pure scholarship and the impulses of 
 citizenship. It is a warfare which accounts, at 
 least in part, for the peculiar status of the college 
 professor under the conditions of contemporary 
 American life ; and certain phases of the rather 
 "" Simplex situation growing out of these contradic 
 tory duties one may venture to discuss. 
 
 Few educated men will deny the imaginative 
 charm that invests the existence of the solitary 
 scholar. In his person we discover one man, in 
 this confusing world, who knows what he likes. 
 Chaucer s Clerk of Oxenford, who had 
 
 " levere have at his beddes heede 
 Twenty bookes, clad in blak or reede 
 Of Aristotle and bis philosophic 
 Than robes riche, or fithele, or gay sawtrie," 
 
 is something more than a type of mediaeval devo 
 tion to the Aristotelian logic. Some breath of 
 his ascetic spirit still abides in every scholar wor- 
 
98 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 
 
 thy of the name ; the twenty books continue to 
 yield to such a man a deeper delight than the 
 robes or the fiddle. There is no college faculty 
 without its Clerk of Oxenf ord, some unworldly 
 soul who grows old without tangible rewards, 
 possibly without very tangible achievements, but 
 who has nevertheless kept the pure flame of 
 learning alive in his heart. Innocent eccentri 
 cities attach themselves to him. Young doctors 
 from the great foreign and American universities 
 find him a trifle old-fashioned in his views and 
 unaware of the latest dissertations. Yet the 
 blameless Clerk loves his twenty books to the 
 end. 
 
 One such man I remember in particular. In 
 his younger days he had been a Latinist, until 
 the loss, by fire, of his manuscript Latin gram 
 mar disheartened him, and he accepted a casual 
 offer of a chair of elementary mathematics, which 
 he kept till his death. He fulfilled his duties as 
 instructor with perfect gravity and fidelity, but 
 cared wholly for other things : for his collections 
 of Phsedrus and black-letter Chaucers ; for Scott s 
 novels, which he used to read through once each 
 year; for the elder dramatists; for Montaigne 
 
COLLEGE PROFESSORS AND THE PUBLIC 99 
 
 and Lamb. Weather permitting, he drove from 
 twenty to forty miles a day in his rusty, mud- 
 covered buggy ; he knew every wild flower, every 
 lovely or bold view, within reach of Williams- 
 town. To be his companion upon one of these 
 drives was to touch the very essence of fine, 
 whimsical, irresponsible scholarship. But Pro 
 fessor Dodd made no speeches in town meeting, 
 was scantily interested in no-license agitation, 
 was rather likely to forget election day alto 
 gether, and on pleasant Sundays used to patron 
 ize obscure churches that lay at an extraordinary 
 driving distance from home. His sense of freedom 
 from these compulsions that are laid upon the 
 strenuous citizen of New England was very 
 charming. The land of his habitation was " far 
 from this our war." 
 
 The type of moral detachment which my old 
 f rien cf thus exemplified is not only charming ; it 
 is positively necessary, if the work demanded by 
 productive scholarship though he was quite 
 frankly an unproductive scholar ! is adequately 
 to be done. It is an encumbrance to the scholar, 
 as it is to the soldier, to entangle himself over 
 much with the affairs of this life. Certain mem- 
 
100 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 
 
 bers of every academic community seem drafted 
 by nature and by achievement to special service. 
 They are summoned out of the usual social order, 
 away from the conventional, wholesome round of 
 ordinary discipline, to lead some forlorn hope of 
 science or letters, to explore the farthest bound 
 aries of human knowledge, to chart unknown 
 waters that will by and by be crowded with the 
 funnels of the carrying trade of the world. There 
 is a profound sense in which every such man 
 must, like Newton, be 
 
 " forever 
 Voyaging through strange seas of thought alone." 
 
 He cannot keep in touch with the normal life of 
 other men. If he brings back something to us at 
 the end of his voyages, that is enough ; he must 
 not be held to rigid attendance upon ward meet 
 ings and Sunday school. The chances are that 
 not twenty men in the world will recognize, at 
 first, what these explorations mean to human 
 progress ; their significance is realized very grad 
 ually. Meantime the man s neighbors will know 
 merely that he is gone, that he is absent- 
 minded, forgetful of jury duty and registration 
 and a hundred admirable " causes." 
 
COLLEGE PROFESSORS AND THE PUBLIC 101 
 
 Since this type of intellectual pioneer is so 
 essential to the true progress of the race, there is 
 no likelihood that it will not persist. Indeed, 
 there are more opportunities open to it and 
 greater honors are paid to it to-day, in this coun 
 try, than we have ever offered before. The Clerk 
 of Oxenford, who was " not right fat," as it may 
 be remembered, in the fourteenth century, is bet 
 ter clothed and fed and housed in the twentieth. 
 Yet the college teachers who really make original 
 contributions to human knowledge are few in 
 proportion to the total numbers engaged in the 
 profession. The passion for scholarship, like that 
 for poetry, does not always imply a correspond 
 ing power of production; and because we are 
 glad to release some picked man from the com 
 mon social obligations and services, and bid him 
 Godspeed upon his adventure, it does not follow 
 that a similar freedom may be claimed for those 
 who stay at home. The solitary scholar will al 
 ways be the exception, not the rule. The college 
 professor, under normal conditions, can escape 
 neither his duties to the public nor the daily irre 
 sistible impact from the public. His endeavor to 
 escape them may be an evidence of instinctive 
 
102 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 
 
 capacity for creative work of the highest value ; 
 but it has not infrequently been the badge of a 
 mere Bohemianism, a mark of the reckless, self 
 ish existence of an alien, of a man with no 
 stake in the community. 
 
 "I do not often speak to public questions," 
 said Emerson, who, without formal academic re 
 lations, was nevertheless in so many ways our 
 finest type of academic behavior : " they are odi 
 ous and hurtful, and it seems like meddling or 
 leaving your work. I have my own spirits in 
 prison, spirits in deeper prisons, whom no man 
 visits if I do not. And then I see what havoc it 
 makes with any good mind, a dissipated philan 
 thropy. The one thing not to be forgiven to intel 
 lectual persons is, not to know their own task." 
 
 Yet these serene sentences were uttered at the 
 opening of his address on the Fugitive Slave 
 Law, and he goes on to say that he never felt 
 the crack of the slaveowner s whip until that 
 measure, backed as it was by Daniel Webster, 
 put a check on his free speech and action. Then, 
 with words fairly incandescent with noble scorn, 
 Emerson denounces a law which he believes to 
 be an outrage alike upon the rights of private 
 
COLLEGE PROFESSORS AND THE PUBLIC 103 
 
 citizenship and upon the public honor. That 
 speech upon the Fugitive Slave Law deserves to 
 be read with the more famous Phi Beta Kappa 
 oration of 1837 on the American Scholar. The 
 earlier address describes the scholar s duty to 
 ward his work; the speech of 1854 states and 
 exemplifies the scholar s duty as a citizen. 
 
 Scarcely half a century has elapsed since these 
 later words of Emerson were spoken. Yet what 
 far-reaching changes have been wrought in the 
 relations of the academic scholar to the public ! 
 Many of the most characteristic phases of our 
 modern industrial and social development are 
 less than half a century old. Within that period 
 the curriculum of the American college has been 
 transformed. The professor of to-day, instead of 
 occupying himself solely with the dead languages 
 and a little mathematics and philosophy, pursues 
 studies and gives instruction that bring him into 
 touch, at a thousand points of contact, with the 
 material interests, the practical concerns, of the 
 American public. Some Evangelinus Aposto- 
 lides Sophocles still trims his solitary lamp in 
 every college; and in every college there are 
 still, as always, men whose instincts of citizen- 
 
104 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 
 
 ship are wholly independent of the work of their 
 particular department. But a newer type of col 
 lege professor is also everywhere in evidence : the 
 expert who knows all about railroads and bridges 
 and subways; about gas commissions and elec 
 trical supplies; about currency and banking, 
 Philippine tariffs, Venezuelan boundary lines, 
 the industries of Porto Kico, the classification of 
 the civil service, the control of trusts. I take my 
 illustrations almost at random, and yet in con 
 nection with each topic upon that variegated list 
 it would be possible to point to college professors 
 who have lately been rendering a signal public 
 service. These men combine technical training 
 with practical capacity. They can no longer be 
 brushed aside contemptuously as "mere theor 
 ists." They are helping to carry forward the de 
 tailed work of governmental departments ; and 
 as you and I are paying for their traveling 
 expenses and their stenographers, they ought to 
 meet every American definition of " the practical 
 man " ! 
 
 And we must take into account other facts be 
 sides these new professorial activities springing 
 out of the new scientific and commercial energy 
 
COLLEGE PROFESSORS AND THE PUBLIC 105 
 
 of the nation. This energy has been felt by the 
 universities, and it has produced university men 
 who, judged by any previous academic stand 
 ards, belong to a new species. But the college 
 professor who represents the " humanities " rather 
 than the distinctly scientific side of modern edu 
 cation, is likewise brought closer to the public 
 than ever before. The newspapers report and 
 misreport him. Editors offer him space to re 
 ply. Publishers weary him with appeals to write 
 text-books. He goes to conventions. He has be 
 come sophisticated. The great festivals of his 
 university like the rural college Commence 
 ments of sixty years ago assume the character 
 of a popular show. The President of the United 
 States attends them. The professor s photograph, 
 in full academic costume, assaults your eye in the 
 market-place. The college press club and the 
 university s bureau of publicity give his lecture 
 dates in advance. The prospectus of your favor 
 ite magazine bids you inspect his literary qualifi 
 cations as well as his thoughtful countenance. 
 WTio s Who in America informs you of the name 
 of his second wife. 
 
 In all this familiarity of intercourse with the 
 
106 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 
 
 world, some of the fine old reserve of manner and 
 reticence of speech has been lost. The secular 
 ized professor like one of those gray Italian 
 convents now secularized into orphan schools 
 is sometimes rather a noisy, middle-class affair. 
 Yet if something of the traditional fastidiousness 
 and exclusiveness has disappeared, other quali 
 ties, more robust, and probably more useful, have 
 been gained. It has been an advantage to the 
 public to see the professor at closer range, and it 
 has been a still more obvious benefit to the pro 
 fessor himself that he has found manifold modes 
 of contact with his fellow citizens. For the les 
 sons which the professor learns from the public 
 are at least as important as those which he imparts. 
 If, as the cant phrase has it, he does something 
 occasionally to " purify politics," politics pretty 
 constantly clarifies him. 
 
 This growth in mutual knowledge between a 
 single class in the community and the community 
 as a whole has already proved its value, but the 
 limits of its usefulness have by no means been 
 reached. Popular suspicion of the political theo 
 rist a suspicion curiously active at the pres 
 ent moment is still apt to find in the " college 
 
COLLEGE PROFESSORS AND THE PUBLIC 107 
 
 professor " a convenient symbol of ineptitude. 
 The Philistinism which glorifies the so-called 
 " man of action " minimizes by contrast the man 
 of thought. Nor is it to be expected that the 
 general public can ever develop a full sympathy 
 with the academic scholar whose mind is bent 
 solely upon discovering the truth. It may respect 
 him if he keeps out of the way. But let him once 
 lift his voice against some popular movement, 
 and the hisses will be prompt enough. Most of 
 us can remember the time when college professors 
 of economics who advocated tariff for revenue 
 were stigmatized as " British emissaries " with 
 their pockets stuffed with " British gold." There 
 is less said just now about British emissaries, and 
 yet the college economist who does not, in football 
 parlance, " buy the winning colors after the game " 
 must still pay the penalty of his hardihood. Col 
 lege teachers have been openly denounced as 
 " traitors " for advocating self-government for 
 the Filipinos. In many a pulpit and newspaper 
 office, it was declared that the utterances of col 
 lege professors were largely responsible for the 
 assassination of President McKinley. Singularly 
 enough, the most bitter denunciations of the col- 
 
108 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 
 
 lege professor in politics come from college-trained 
 politicians and journalists ; there is no such mas 
 ter of the sneer as the partisan who in his youth 
 
 " did eagerly frequent 
 Doctor and saint." 
 
 In short, courage is still necessary if the college 
 teacher desires to speak frankly upon disputable 
 topics. In 1904 it is easy to be a champion of 
 the gold standard, because the gold standard has 
 fortunately prevailed ; in 1896 the comfort of 
 such a championship depended upon the longitude 
 of the college. We are gradually learning to 
 analyze the complex elements that enter into the 
 question of " academic freedom," and to discover 
 that human nature must not be left out of the 
 reckoning ; but meantime it must be confessed 
 that academic freedom, like the Supreme Court 
 in Mr. Dooley s epigram, "follows the election 
 returns." 
 
 Yet there is something to be said for that 
 instinct of self-preservation which forces the ma 
 jority, in a democracy like ours, to silence demon 
 strative opposition, and proceed with the public 
 affairs. One must admit that a good many college 
 
COLLEGE PROFESSORS AND THE PUBLIC 109 
 
 professors have taken the Irish members of Par 
 liament as their exemplars, and are boyishly 
 pleased if they can merely obstruct the business 
 of the House. Miss Fanny Burney once wrote 
 of Sir Philip Jennings Clerk, " He is a professed 
 minority man." This type of man is familiar in 
 academic circles. There is something very ad 
 mirable in his bravery, in his consistency, and in 
 the Cato-like the Oxford-like pride with 
 which he clings to lost causes. But, like all of 
 us, he needs to discriminate. John Milton, who 
 was " a professed minority man " of the most 
 militant order, declared that "when God com 
 mands to take the trumpet, and blow a dolorous 
 or a jarring blast, it lies not in man s will what 
 he shall say or what he shall conceal." Noble, 
 heartening words are these, and as much needed 
 now as ever. Yet there should be a reasonable 
 certainty that the note is really blown at God s 
 command ; and one may concede that the pro 
 fessed minority man of the academic species some 
 times mistakes for the Divine clarion what is 
 merely a tin trumpet hanging on the wall of his 
 private study, and that he blows it mainly for the 
 exercise of his lungs. 
 
110 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 
 
 It is easy to comprehend, and it should be easy 
 to pardon, these professorial extravagances. They 
 are the excitable utterances of men not habitually 
 sobered by practical contact with affairs. Yet an 
 excited participation in public debate is better, 
 after all, than indifference ; and as the solidarity 
 of interests between all classes in the republic 
 becomes more generally realized, there is likely 
 to be less and less criticism of academic critics. 
 While making fullest admission of the occasional 
 peevishness and exaggeration of these men, it 
 should never be forgotten that no class of Ameri 
 can citizens bring to the discussion of current 
 questions so wide a knowledge of the teachings 
 of history, a deeper attachment to American 
 ideals, and a more disinterested patriotism. 
 
 The field of political activity has been selected 
 to illustrate some of the relations of the professor 
 with the public, not only because the illustration 
 lies conveniently near at hand, but also because 
 it is typical of other activities as well. The bene 
 fits that have attended the more general partici 
 pation of college teachers in current politics are 
 undeniable. They justify the belief that many of 
 
COLLEGE PROFESSORS AND THE PUBLIC 111 
 
 the obstructions which still embarrass the com 
 merce of the professor with the public will disap 
 pear upon better mutual acquaintance. There are 
 many spheres of public activity in which college 
 teachers need encounter none of the suspicion 
 that is bred by partisan politics. In the fight for 
 better tenements, for public parks, bath-houses, 
 libraries, and training-schools ; in all the varied 
 work of philanthropic, ethical, and religious 
 organizations ; in the immense task of securing 
 and developing throughout this country a respect 
 for law, a man is not handicapped because he 
 earns his living in a college. He will discover, if 
 he makes the effort, that he can come to closer 
 quarters with his fellow Americans, not only 
 without abandoning any old ideals worth keeping, 
 but with the certainty of obtaining an invigorat 
 ing supply of new ideals. His working hours may 
 be devoted to investigation or to classroom in 
 struction ; he may hope to influence his generation 
 through his pupils or through his books ; but he 
 will have at least certain moments of leisure. 
 These may be spent, if he will, in widening his 
 knowledge of the American people of to-day. 
 I have already referred to one delightful Wil- 
 
112 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 
 
 liamstown personage, the late Professor Dodd, as 
 an instance of academic detachment. I shall 
 choose a phrase descriptive of a more normal 
 scheme of life from a remark made about another 
 resident of the Berkshire college town, named 
 " Kuss " Pratt. He was the one-armed and more 
 stupid brother of the half-witted and locally 
 famous "Bill" Pratt. As Russ was reputed 
 to be the laziest man in Williamstown, a vil 
 lage that had many claimants to that distinction, 
 I once asked his adopted daughter how her 
 father spent his time. Her answer was epigram 
 matic in its swiftness and scope: "He saws 
 wood, sets in the house, and goes down street ! " 
 Is not that an admirable formula? Labor, re 
 flection, social contact ! Could there be a wiser 
 counsel of perfection for the college professor? 
 Poor fellow, he must " saw wood " or freeze ; yet 
 he has some opportunity to reflect, in a world 
 which is just now little enough given to reflec 
 tion ; and surely he might " go down street " 
 more often and to better advantage than he does. 
 The street no less than the library has its whims, 
 partialities, extravagances, panics. But the man 
 of the library has much to learn from the man of 
 
COLLEGE PROFESSORS AND THE PUBLIC 113 
 
 the street, and a riper friendship between them 
 will betoken a better service toward their com 
 mon country. 
 
 A friend of James Russell Lowell has said 
 that in Lowell s later life he sometimes spoke 
 discontentedly of the years he had spent as a col 
 lege professor. He complained humorously that 
 he had been wont, in those earlier days, to lec 
 ture for an hour or two, go back to Elmwood, 
 fill his pipe, and thank God that he had done a 
 day s work. Now it is not easy to say what shall 
 constitute a day s work, either for one s self or 
 for another ; the question is not so simple as the 
 arithmetic of the labor unions would seem to 
 imply. Yet that is a scant day s work, whether 
 long or short, that does not bring the worker 
 into some relation to human progress ; that does 
 not make men and women freer, wiser, better. 
 Lowell s years of service in the Smith Professor 
 ship may have been as fruitful as any years of 
 his life, although it was the nobler side of him, 
 no doubt, that made him question it. 
 
 But who knows the pattern into which his days 
 and years are being woven ? I remember com 
 plaining, long ago, to a venerable professor, as 
 
114 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 
 
 we were walking together to morning chapel, 
 that a required chapel service involved a costly 
 expenditure of time; and that the German 
 scholars were steadily drawing ahead of their 
 American rivals because, for one reason, they 
 saved that half hour a day. His reply was very 
 fine : " If you are turning a grindstone, every 
 moment is precious ; but if you are doing a 
 man s work, the inspired moments are precious." 
 Every fully endowed man believes that saying in 
 his heart, whatever he may think about the spe 
 cific question of compulsory chapel for the col 
 lege-bred ; and as our modern world gradually 
 reveals to us both its complexity and its spiritual 
 unity, the " inspired moments " are increasingly 
 likely to be those, not of lonely intuition, but of 
 organized social service. No Americans, above 
 all, no body of educated Americans, should 
 imagine that they have a charter to live unto 
 themselves. The whole contemporary movement 
 is against it, the secularization of knowledge, 
 the democratization of society, the fundamental 
 oneness of interest among all peoples of this 
 swiftly narrowing earth. For the members of 
 any profession to insulate themselves from these 
 
COLLEGE PROFESSORS AND THE PUBLIC 115 
 
 currents of world-sympathy is to cut off that pro 
 fession s power. The astonishing development of 
 academic studies in our day, the evolution of 
 these new types of professorial activity, the im 
 mense endowments and other evidences of public 
 interest in the American college, are fortunate 
 auguries for the republic. But they are also wel 
 come because they invite the professor himself to 
 make generous contribution to what the Presi 
 dent of Harvard, in speaking at the bicentennial 
 of Yale, characterized as " the pervasive, aggres 
 sive, all-modifying spirit of Christian democracy." 
 
HAWTHOKNE AT NOKTH ADAMS 
 
HAWTHORNE AT NORTH ADAMS 
 
 THE westward-bound passenger on the Fitchburg 
 Railroad, emerging from the long roar of the 
 Hoosac Tunnel, sees the smoke-blurred electric 
 lamps quenched in sudden daylight, shuts his 
 watch, and finds himself in North Adams. The 
 commercial travelers leave the car, and a boy 
 comes in with the Troy papers. A grimy station 
 hides the close-built town, though upon the left 
 one can see row above row of boarding-houses 
 clinging to the face of a rocky foothill of Grey- 
 lock, and further to the south a bit of meadow 
 land not yet covered with railroad sidings. Then 
 the train moves on, and in a moment plunges 
 into another tunnel, and so out of the Tunnel 
 City. 
 
 Thirty years ago, the traveler s first glimpse 
 of North Adams was more picturesque. The big 
 six-horse coaches, starting from Rice s, away 
 over in the winding valley of the Deerfield, and 
 climbing Hoosac Mountain, used to swing at full 
 
120 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 
 
 gallop along the two or three miles of tableland 
 on the summit of the range, past the queer old 
 houses of Florida, the highest township in Mas 
 sachusetts, and pull up for a moment where the 
 road turned sharply down the western slope. On 
 the right were the last reluctant spurs of the 
 Green Mountains ; directly in front, over the 
 broad Williamstown valley, stretched the clear- 
 cut Taconics ; at the left rose the massive lines 
 of Greylock. At one s feet, far below, were two 
 or three church spires, and the smoke of facto 
 ries. Tiny houses were already perching here 
 and there on the steep sides of the mill streams ; 
 for North Adams has no site whatever, and from 
 the beginning has had to climb for its life. Com 
 pletely enfolded by hills as the village seemed, 
 one could yet catch a glimpse, as the driver gath 
 ered up his reins for the long descent, of a val 
 ley extending southward, between Ragged Moun 
 tain and the Hoosac range, toward the towns of 
 lower Berkshire. 
 
 It was up this valley, more than half a century 
 ago, that the Pittsfield stage brought Hawthorne 
 to North Adams. He was taking, in rather aim 
 less fashion, one of those summer outings, which 
 
HAWTHORNE AT NORTH ADAMS 121 
 
 gave him more pleasure, he said, than other 
 people had in the whole year beside. Nothing 
 drew him to northern Berkshire, apparently, 
 except the mere chance of travel ; but he found 
 the place congenial, and there are facts con 
 nected with his stay there that throw a clear 
 light upon Hawthorne, at a period critical both 
 for himself and his art. There are persons still 
 living who well remember his sojourn in North 
 Adams. His favorite companions were men 
 prominent in the little community, and of such 
 marked personal qualities that story and legend 
 are busy with them to this hour ; so that even if 
 the graphic delineations of the American Note- 
 Books were not at hand, one might still form a 
 fairly accurate picture of the North Adams of 
 1838. 
 
 Halfway down the straggling main street, upon 
 the site of the present Wilson House, was a noted 
 inn, called either after its proprietor, Smith s 
 Tavern, or according to its politics, the Whig 
 Tavern, or else, and more pretentiously, the North 
 Adams House. Those were the days of Martin 
 Van Buren, and the Democratic, or Waterman 
 Tavern, was across the way, on the corner now 
 
122 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 
 
 occupied by the Richmond House. But Haw 
 thorne, though on the very eve of becoming a 
 Democratic office-holder, weakly yielded to the 
 attractions of the Whig Tavern, being doubtless 
 lured by the reputation of Orrin Smith as a 
 hotel-keeper. Up to the many-pillared piazza of 
 Smith s Tavern drove the stages from Greenfield 
 and Pittsfield, from Troy and Albany. The broad 
 stoop was the favorite loafing-place of the village 
 characters. Here sat mild-mannered Captain 
 Carter, with butternut meats and maple sugar 
 for sale in little tin measures, which Hawthorne 
 has described with curious precision ; and which 
 descended, by the way, after the captain s death, 
 to a well-known vagrant in the adjoining village 
 of Williamstown. Hither hobbled " Uncle John " 
 Sheldon, the Eevolutionary pensioner. Here was 
 to be found the one-armed soap-maker, Daniel 
 Haynes, nicknamed " Black Hawk," who had 
 once been a lawyer, and had been ruined by 
 drink, though there was still " a trace of the gen 
 tleman and man of intellect " in him. And here, 
 accompanied by his Newfoundland dog, was the 
 brandy-possessed " Doctor Bob " Robinson, a sort 
 of fearless and savage Falstaff, the fame of whose 
 
HAWTHORNE AT NORTH ADAMS 123 
 
 single combats and evil ways and miraculous gifts 
 of healing lingers even yet in the Tunnel City. 
 
 Along the piazza, or within the hospitable bar 
 room, sat village worthies of a higher grade : 
 Otis Hodge the millwright, Orrin Witherell the 
 blacksmith, Squire Putnam and Squire Drury 
 and the rest, filling their broad-bottomed chairs 
 with the dignity acquired by years of habitude. 
 Jovial old fellows were these patrons of the Whig 
 Tavern, Khode Island Baptists, most of them, 
 hard-handed and level-headed, with hearty 
 laughs and strongly flavored stories, with coarse 
 appetites for meat and drink, and " a tendency 
 to obesity." Doubtless they scrutinized each new 
 arrival, drew shrewd inferences as to his occupa 
 tion and character, and decided whether he was 
 worthy of their intimacy. We do not know their 
 first impressions of the young man who stepped 
 out of the Pittsfield stage on the 26th of July, 
 but there is every evidence that he was strongly 
 attracted to these broad-backed tavern-haunters, 
 and was promptly initiated into their circle. 
 Curiously enough, their new friend was the most 
 delicately imaginative genius this country has 
 yet produced ; gifted with such elusive qualities, 
 
124 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 
 
 such swift, bright, fairy-like fancies, that his col 
 lege mates had nicknamed him " Oberon ; " so 
 shy and solitary that for years he had scarcely 
 gone upon the streets of his native town except at 
 night ; so modest that he concealed his identity 
 as a story-writer under a dozen different signa 
 tures ; with a personal reserve so absolute and 
 insistent that no liberty was ever taken with 
 him ; beautiful in face and form, fresh-hearted 
 and pure-souled. A strange associate, indeed, 
 for Orrin Witherell and Otis Hodge, Orrin Smith 
 and "Doctor Bob " Kobinson ! Kagged, one-armed 
 "Black Hawk," soap-boiler and phrenologist, 
 stopped in his " wild and ruined and desperate 
 talk " to look at the new guest. " My study is 
 man," he said. " I do not know your name, but 
 there is something of the hawk-eye about you, 
 too." And thus the two students of man entered 
 into fellowship. 
 
 Hawthorne tarried at the North Adams House 
 until the llth of September. He bathed in the 
 pools along Hudson s Brook, and climbed the hills 
 at sunset. He chatted on the tavern stoop with 
 " Uncle John " Sheldon and with Captain Carter, 
 of whose name he was not quite certain, and 
 
HAWTHORNE AT NORTH ADAMS 125 
 
 which he enters in the journal as " I believe, 
 Capt. Gavett." On rainy days he sat in the bar 
 room and consorted with Methodistical cattle 
 drovers, stage agents, agents for religious and 
 abolition newspapers, and an extraordinary va 
 riety of other people. He attended court, the 
 menagerie, and the funeral of a child. Some 
 times he took brief excursions in the neighbor 
 hood ; as, for instance, to the Williams Com 
 mencement. Here he might have seen Mark 
 Hopkins, presiding for the second time, flanked 
 by dignitaries of the church and state ; he might 
 have listened to twenty-three orations, upon 
 themes of which The Influence of Deductive and 
 Inductive Habits on the Character, by William 
 Bross, and The Effect of Music on the Feelings, 
 by Henry M. Field, are perhaps fair examples, 
 to say nothing of the polished periods of the Rev. 
 Orville Dewey s address before the alumni. But, 
 as a matter of fact, this conscienceless graduate 
 of Bowdoin apparently spent most of his time 
 behind the church, watching the peddlers and 
 the negroes. The only evidence that he entered 
 the big white meeting-house at all is his remark 
 that there were well-dressed ladies there, " the 
 
126 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 
 
 sunburnt necks in contiguity with the delicate 
 fabrics of the dresses showing the yeoman s 
 daughters." 
 
 Some of the people with whom the usually 
 taciturn Hawthorne conversed, in the course of 
 his walks and drives, made a deep impression 
 upon his imagination. Of an old man whose 
 children were connected with a circus establish 
 ment, he noted, as Wordsworth might have done, 
 " While this old man is wandering among the 
 hills, his children are the gaze of multitudes." 
 On the top of Hoosac Mountain he met, one day, 
 a German Jew, traveling with a diorama. After 
 Hawthorne had looked at it, a curious elderly 
 dog made his appearance, which the romance- 
 writer has described with such extreme fidelity 
 as to give Mr. Henry James the impression of a 
 " general vacancy in the field of Hawthorne s 
 vision," although it will appear that Hawthorne 
 knew what he was about. One moonlight night 
 he ascended the mountain side, startling the 
 lonely watcher by one of those huge lime-kilns 
 that then, and for many years, abounded near 
 North Adams ; and, going up to the top of the 
 kiln, the future author of Ethan Brand gazed 
 
HAWTHORNE AT NORTH ADAMS 127 
 
 down upon the red-hot marble, burning with its 
 " bluish, lambent flame." Experiences like this 
 were destined to reappear,more or less transformed, 
 in his creative work ; but often the incidents 
 recorded in the journal are of the very simplest 
 character, as, for instance, the fact that two little 
 girls, bearing tin pails, who met him on the Notch 
 road, " whispered one another and smiled." 
 
 North Adams is a strange place, after all, to 
 find Oberon in, Oberon, the king of the fairies. 
 We are not likely to understand the secret of 
 Hawthorne s stay there unless we remember that 
 the summer of 1838 was the most important 
 epoch of his life. 
 
 What is first to be observed in the North 
 Adams portion of the American Note-Books is 
 the professional point of view. The writer is an 
 artist in search of material. " Conceive some 
 thing tragical to be talked about," he adds, after 
 describing the old man whose children were in 
 the circus, "and much might be made of this 
 interview in a wild road among the hills." He 
 notes elsewhere : " A little boy named Joe, who 
 haunts about the bar-room and the stoop, four 
 years old, in a thin, short jacket, and full-breeched 
 
128 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 
 
 trousers, and bare feet. . . . Take this boy as 
 the germ of a tavern-haunter, a country roue, to 
 spend a wild and brutal youth, ten years of his 
 prime in the state prison, and his old age in the 
 poorhouse." Thus generously does the Hawthorne 
 who himself haunts the Whig Tavern suggest to 
 that other Hawthorne who invents stories that he 
 might " take this boy." The suggestion was 
 adopted, though Joe was not made to run through 
 the melancholy course so vividly outlined for 
 him ; and readers of the Note-Books, who have 
 wondered what ever became of the little fellow, 
 whose real name was not Joe, but Edward, 
 will doubtless be glad to learn that he grew up 
 to be an eminently respectable citizen, and moved 
 West ! But the paragraph about Joe is a typical 
 one. 
 
 Hawthorne was thirty-four years old that sum 
 mer, and for a dozen years had devoted himself, 
 in a solitary and more or less ineffective way, to 
 the art of fiction. A gentleman who well remem 
 bers his sojourn at the North Adams House says 
 that he used to walk along the street with his 
 eyes down, and that he presented the tavern- 
 keeper s niece with a book he had written. This 
 
HAWTHORNE AT NORTH ADAMS 129 
 
 book, published the year before, was Twice- Told 
 Tales. In Hawthorne s well-known criticism 
 upon these stories, written many years afterward, 
 he accounted for their negative character " the 
 pale tint of flowers that blossomed in too retired 
 a shade" by his way of life while composing 
 them. It had been a hermit life, a life of shadows, 
 yet now and then of almost pathetic grasping 
 after realities. The articles in Twice- Told Tales 
 which pleased the author best were those elabo 
 rate exercises in description, valuable indeed as 
 illustration of the accuracy of Hawthorne s self- 
 training in detailed observation, but more valua 
 ble as evidences of his struggle to turn from his 
 air-drawn fancies, and morbid though often ex 
 tremely powerful imaginings, to the common 
 sunshine, the trivial sweet realities of the actual 
 world. 
 
 Now, the author of the North Adams journal 
 is the Hawthorne of the Toll- Gatherer s Day 
 and Little Annie s Ramble, rather than the Haw 
 thorne of the Prophetic Pictures and Fancy s 
 Show Box. He turns eagerly to the life about 
 him ; he notes its details with fascinated interest. 
 Nothing comes amiss to him ; the long valley of 
 
130 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 
 
 the Notch, as it sweeps up to the Bellowspipe, 
 and a grunting drove of pigs passing the tavern 
 at dusk, are alike entered in his note-book. Fifty 
 years before the preface to Pierre et Jean was 
 written, here was a young man in an obscure 
 corner of Massachusetts practicing a " theory of 
 observation " which would have satisfied De Mau 
 passant himself. The extraordinary precision of 
 Hawthorne s descriptions thus early in his career 
 can be fully appreciated only by one who discovers 
 how a mere line from the Note-Books will to-day 
 serve, with the older citizens of North Adams, to 
 identify the village characters sketched therein ; 
 or by one who will stand, with Hawthorne s 
 words before him, by the side of Hudson s Brook, 
 or on the desolate summit of Bald Mountain, or 
 at that point on the Notch road where there is a 
 view of Williamstown, " with high, mountainous 
 swells heaving themselves up, like immense sub 
 siding waves, far and wide around it." 
 
 There was a reason for this passion for the 
 outer world. Solitude had done its utmost for 
 Hawthorne, at least for the time being, and he 
 had come to a parting of the ways. A single 
 sentence from a letter to an intimate friend in 
 
HAWTHORNE AT NORTH ADAMS 131 
 
 1838 is like a cry from the man s inmost soul, 
 " I want to have something to do with the material 
 world." Wedged in between Otis Hodge and 
 Orrin Witherell around the huge fire in the pub 
 lic room of the Whig Tavern, his elbows touching 
 those stout-built, cheery-souled embodiments of 
 pioneer virtues and vices, and casting himself 
 into the life of the village in all its varied activi 
 ties, Hawthorne found the " material world " with 
 which he longed to come in touch. When he left 
 North Adams, it was to enter almost at once upon 
 the life of a weigher and gauger in the Boston 
 Custom House, and to stand thenceforth in the 
 ranks with his fellow-men. 
 
 But Hawthorne s new contact with actualities 
 was something more than a mere quickening of 
 interests, a broadening of his range, a closer fo 
 cusing of his professional eye upon the object. 
 He was a writer ; he had the passion for observ 
 ing, recording,recombining ; he could not help it. 
 It may well be that when such a man throws him 
 self upon the actual, the result is simply a keener 
 physical vision, a more perfect analysis, a more 
 pitiless art. This fate was quite possible for 
 Hawthorne. The fear of it haunted him, and 
 
132 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 
 
 never more so than in this very year when he 
 made his escape from it. He wrote to Longfel 
 low, " There is no fate in this world so horrible 
 as to have no share in its joys and sorrows." To 
 the mere observer as well as to the mere dreamer 
 and Hawthorne had been both by turns 
 may come that paralysis which lays hold of the 
 very roots of life and art together ; which begins 
 in artistic detachment, and ends in the sterility 
 of isolation. From the horror of that death in 
 life, which has fallen in our day upon artists like 
 Flaubert and his more brilliant nephew, Haw 
 thorne was saved, as he believed, by the influence 
 of the woman who afterward became his wife. 
 In his own simple phrase, his heart was touched. 
 " I used to think I could imagine all passions, all 
 feelings and states of the heart and mind, but 
 how little did I know ! Indeed, we are but shad 
 ows ; we are not endowed with real life ; and all 
 that seems most real about us is but the thinnest 
 substance of a dream till the heart be touched. 
 That touch creates us ; then we begin to be ; 
 thereby we are beings of reality and inheritors of 
 eternity." 
 
 Hawthorne had already felt that creative touch 
 
HAWTHORNE AT NORTH ADAMS 133 
 
 in the summer of 1838. It accounts does it 
 not ? for the new sense of reality so apparent 
 in the journal. It was not simply his artistic 
 interest, but his sympathy, that started into a 
 quicker life. His extraordinarily sensitive mind 
 brooded upon the risk he had run of becoming a 
 cool observer, untaught that he had a heart ; it 
 became, in his own words, " a fearful thought " 
 to him, and, being an artist to the finger-tips, he 
 put his fearful thought into artistic form. In 
 Ethan JBrand,t}ie story of the man who committed 
 the Unpardonable Sin, Hawthorne embodied not 
 only his North Adams character studies, but the 
 very emotion that must have stirred his deepest 
 heart during those weeks of sojourn at the Whig 
 Tavern. He laid upon the shoulders of the lime- 
 burner on the slope of Hoosac the awful burden 
 whose weight he himself had almost felt. 
 
 Ethan Brand, a Chapter from an Abortive 
 Romance, was first published in the Dollar Maga 
 zine under the title of The Unpardonable Sin, in 
 1851. The date of its composition is uncertain. 
 Mr. Lathrop thinks that Hawthorne s removal to 
 Berkshire in 1850 may have revived his interest 
 in the old material provided by the Note-Books ; 
 
134 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 
 
 Mr. Conway is inclined to believe that the story 
 was written in 1848. Nor is it clear how literally 
 the subtitle is to be taken. There are allusions 
 in Ethan Brand to preceding episodes connected 
 with the theme, of such dramatic possibilities 
 that Hawthorne may well have sketched them in 
 his fancy, but whether he ever seriously tried his 
 hand upon anything more than the culminating 
 chapter is doubtful. Two things, however, are 
 certain : for the setting of the story, its author 
 drew exclusively upon notes taken in North 
 Adams; and the moral problem involved in it 
 was Hawthorne s own problem, as a man and an 
 artist, in the summer of 1838. Remembering 
 how long he brooded over the Septimius Felton 
 theme and the Scarlet Letter theme before writ 
 ing a word, it will not seem improbable that the 
 conception of Ethan Brand should date from 
 the time of his first visit to Berkshire, even if the 
 story remained unwritten for a dozen years; 
 though, as a matter of fact, it is not at all un 
 likely that its composition is to be placed much 
 earlier than the critics have surmised. 
 
 Ostensibly a fragment, and undoubtedly bear 
 ing internal evidence of some haste or dissatis- 
 
HAWTHORNE AT NORTH ADAMS 135 
 
 faction on the author s part, Ethan Brand remains 
 one of the most powerful things that Hawthorne 
 ever wrote. Rarely has he shown such dramatic 
 instinct as when he marshaled his old North 
 Adams acquaintances into the moonshine and 
 narrow streaks of firelight that illuminated the 
 open space before the lime-kiln on the sombre 
 mountain side. They are all there : the stage 
 agent, the crippled soap-boiler, the brandy-pos 
 sessed doctor, the old man whose daughter had 
 wandered away with the circus, the German Jew 
 with his diorama, and the curious old dog. It is 
 little Joe who guides them into the presence of 
 their former associate, Ethan Brand, who has 
 committed " the one only crime for which Heaven 
 can afford no mercy." Many notes from the 
 journal are adopted without change. Sometimes 
 there is a mere shifting of descriptive phrases 
 that seem to suit Hawthorne s fancy ; as when 
 the " wild and ruined and desperate talk " attri 
 buted in the Note-Books to the cripple is here 
 given to the doctor ; or the sentence " Earth was 
 so mingled with sky that it was a day-dream to 
 look at it," originally written of Williamstown, 
 is applied to the village of the tale. But there 
 
136 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 
 
 are more subtle adaptations of his material in 
 two allusions to events not narrated in the story 
 itself, however definitely Hawthorne may have 
 outlined them in his imagination. The old man s 
 missing daughter has become " the Esther of our 
 tale," " whom with such cold and remorseless pur 
 pose Ethan Brand had made the subject of a 
 psychological experiment." Eeference is also 
 made to " a professional visit of the village doctor 
 to Ethan Brand, during the latter s supposed 
 insanity." Hawthorne has perhaps wrought out 
 the psychological experiment motive often enough 
 elsewhere to indicate what would probably have 
 been his method here ; but the idea of bringing 
 " Doctor Bob," with his huge animalism and 
 mordant humor, " savage as a wild beast and 
 miserable as a lost soul," to minister to the spir 
 itual malady that preyed upon Ethan Brand, might 
 easily have resulted in a scene unmatched in the 
 whole range of Hawthorne s work. 
 
 If it is a pure bit of romanticism to transform 
 the Jew of Hoosac Mountain to " the Jew of 
 Nuremberg," the mask of the fiend himself, there 
 is, on the other hand, in the description of the 
 antics of the old dog an instance of the power of 
 
HAWTHORNE AT NORTH ADAMS 137 
 
 Hawthorne s realism. In the Note-Books, the 
 trivial incident of the dog s chasing his own tail 
 is minutely narrated, as a fact somehow worth 
 recording. In Ethan Brand, the fact is nothing 
 except as it illustrates a truth : the man who had 
 chased the world over for something that was in 
 his own breast, " moved by a perception of some 
 remote analogy between his own case and that of 
 the self -pursuing cur," broke into the awful laugh 
 that sent the jovial party hurrying homewards 
 through the darkening woods. 
 
 For Ethan Brand himself there is no model in 
 the journal. None was needed. Hawthorne s own 
 problem, in that critical year, was to keep " the 
 counterpoise between his mind and heart." The 
 doom he dreaded most of all was, to be " no longer 
 a brother man, opening the chambers or the dun 
 geons of our common nature by the key of holy 
 sympathy, which gave him a right to share in all 
 its secrets," but to be, like Ethan Brand, " a cold 
 observer, looking on mankind as the subject of 
 his experiment." The scene of the tale is the very 
 hillside where Hawthorne wandered, brooding 
 over the isolation that kills and the touch that 
 makes alive. Its personages are the people that 
 
138 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 
 
 jostled against him in the tavern. But Hawthorne 
 found Ethan Brand or a potential Ethan Brand 
 in his own heart. He believed in an Unpar 
 donable Sin ; and it is by this faith in the reality 
 of the moral life, after all is said, that he takes 
 his rank as an artist. He chose moral problems, 
 the truths of the human heart, and made them 
 plastic ; he created, not abstract types, but men 
 and women, charging them with spiritual force ; 
 and the result is that Ethan Brand, with his 
 homely garments and heavy shoes, bending over 
 the fiery lime-kiln on the slope of Hoosac, is a 
 figure with all the moral passion, the tragic dig 
 nity, of Empedocles of old casting himself despair 
 ingly into the crater of Mount Etna. 
 
 It is more than fifty years since Hawthorne 
 left the village at the foot of Greylock, never to 
 return. Most of the companions of his sojourn 
 there lie buried in the cone-shaped sand-hills of 
 the crowded cemetery just beyond the Little 
 Tunnel. The Whig Tavern changed hands shortly 
 after his departure ; and although Orrin Smith 
 later kept another hostelry by the side of the old 
 coaching road on the crest of Hoosac, that, too, 
 has long since disappeared, and the site is over- 
 
HAWTHORNE AT NORTH ADAMS 139 
 
 grown with alders. But within ten minutes walk 
 of the Tunnel City may still be seen a gray lime 
 kiln upon which Hawthorne s eyes have rested, 
 and the intense personal emotion of that long-past 
 year is still vibrant in Ethan Brand. The ro 
 mance-writers of our day have learned to stray 
 far afield in their search for material, and they 
 come back, too often, with such empty hands ! 
 The more s the pity, since a factory village, set in 
 a narrow space among New England hills, was 
 once field enough for a Hawthorne. 
 
FISHING WITH A WOKM 
 
FISHING WITH A WORM. 
 
 " The last fish I caught was with a worm." IZAAK 
 WALTON. 
 
 A DEFECTIVE logic is the born fisherman s por 
 tion. He is a pattern of inconsistency. He does 
 the things which he ought not to do, and he leaves 
 undone the things which other people think he 
 ought to do. He observes the wind when he 
 should be sowing, and he regards the clouds, with 
 tempation tugging familiarly at his heartstrings, 
 when he might be grasping the useful sickle. It 
 is a wonder that there is so much health in him. 
 A sorrowing political economist remarked to me 
 in early boyhood, as a jolly red-bearded neighbor, 
 followed by an abnormally fat dog, sauntered 
 past us for his nooning : " That man is the best 
 carpenter in town, but he will leave the most 
 important job whenever he wants to go fishing." 
 I stared at the sinful carpenter, who swung along 
 leisurely in the May sunshine, keeping just ahead 
 of his dog. To leave one s job in order to go 
 fishing ! How illogical ! 
 
144 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 
 
 Years bring the reconciling mind. The world 
 grows big enough to include within its scheme 
 both the instructive political economist and the 
 truant mechanic. But that trick of truly logical 
 behavior seems harder to the man than to the 
 child. For example, I climbed up to my den 
 under the eaves last night a sour, black sea- 
 fog lying all about, and the December sleet crack 
 ling against the window-panes in order to 
 varnish a certain fly-rod. Now rods ought to be 
 put in order in September, when the fishing closes, 
 or else in April, when it opens. To varnish a rod 
 in December proves that one possesses either a 
 dilatory or a childishly anticipatory mind. But 
 before uncorking the varnish bottle, it occurred 
 to me to examine a dog-eared, water-stained 
 fly-book, to guard against the ravages of pos 
 sible moths. This interlude proved fatal to the 
 varnishing. A half hour went happily by in 
 rearranging the flies. Then, with a fisherman s 
 lack of sequence, as I picked out here and there 
 a plain snell-hook from the gaudy feathered 
 ones, I said to myself with a generous glow at 
 the heart : " Fly-fishing has had enough sacred 
 poets celebrating it already. Is n t there a good 
 
FISHING WITH A WORM 145 
 
 deal to be said, after all, for fishing with a 
 worm ? " 
 
 Could there be a more illogical proceeding? 
 And here follows the treatise, a Defense of 
 Eesults, an Apology for Opportunism, con 
 ceived in agreeable procrastination, devoted to 
 the praise of the inconsequential angleworm, and 
 dedicated to a childish memory of a whistling 
 carpenter and his fat dog. 
 
 Let us face the worst at the very beginning. 
 It shall be a shameless example of fishing under 
 conditions that make the fly a mockery. Take 
 the Taylor Brook, "between the roads," on the 
 headwaters of the Lamoille. The place is a jun 
 gle. The swamp maples and cedars were felled a 
 generation ago, and the tops were trimmed into 
 the brook. The alders and moosewood are higher 
 than your head ; on every tiny knoll the fir bal 
 sams have gained a footing, and creep down, im 
 penetrable, to the edge of the water. In the open 
 spaces the Joe-Pye weed swarms. In two minutes 
 after leaving the upper road you have scared a 
 mink or a rabbit, and you have probably lost the 
 brook. Listen ! It is only a gurgle here, droning 
 along, smooth and dark, under the tangle of cedar- 
 
146 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 
 
 tops and the shadow of the balsams. Follow the 
 sound cautiously. There, beyond the Joe-Pye 
 weed, and between the stump and the cedar-top, 
 is a hand s breadth of black water. Fly-casting 
 is impossible in this maze of dead and living 
 branches. Shorten your line to two feet, or even 
 less, bait your hook with a worm, and drop it 
 gingerly into that gurgling crevice of water. Be 
 fore it has sunk six inches, if there is not one 
 of those black-backed, orange-bellied, Taylor 
 Brook trout fighting with it, something is wrong 
 with your worm or with you. For the trout are 
 always there, sheltered by the brushwood that 
 makes this half mile of fishing " not worth while." 
 Below the lower road the Taylor Brook becomes 
 uncertain water. For half a mile it yields only 
 fiugerlings, for no explainable reason ; then there 
 are two miles of clean fishing through the deep 
 woods, where the branches are so high that you 
 can cast a fly again if you like, and there are 
 long pools, where now and then a heavy fish will 
 rise; then comes a final half mile through the 
 alders, where you must wade, knee to waist deep, 
 before you come to the bridge and the river. 
 Glorious fishing is sometimes to be had here, 
 
FISHING WITH A WORM 147 
 
 especially if you work down the gorge at twi 
 light, casting a white miller until it is too dark 
 to see. But alas, there is a well-worn path along 
 the brook, and often enough there are the very 
 footprints of the " fellow ahead of you," signs as 
 disheartening to the fisherman as ever were the 
 footprints on the sand to Robinson Crusoe. 
 
 But " between the roads " it is " too much 
 trouble to fish ; " and there lies the salvation of 
 the humble fisherman who disdains not to use 
 the crawling worm, nor, for that matter, to crawl 
 himself, if need be, in order to sneak under the 
 boughs of some overhanging cedar that casts a 
 perpetual shadow upon the sleepy brook. Lying 
 here at full length, with no elbow-room to manage 
 the rod, you must occasionally even unjoint your 
 tip, and fish with that, using but a dozen inches 
 of line, and not letting so much as your eyebrows 
 show above the bank. Is it a becoming attitude 
 for a middle-aged citizen of the world ? That de 
 pends upon how the fish are biting. Holing a put 
 looks rather ridiculous also, to the mere observer, 
 but it requires, like brook-fishing with a tip only, 
 a very delicate wrist, perfect tactile sense, and a 
 fine disregard of appearances. 
 
148 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 
 
 There are some fishermen who always fish as 
 if they were being photographed. The Taylor 
 Brook " between the roads " is not for them. To 
 fish it at all is back-breaking, trouser-tearing 
 work ; to see it thoroughly fished is to learn new 
 lessons in the art of angling. To watch R., for 
 example, steadily filling his six-pound creel from 
 that unlikely stream, is like watching Sargent 
 paint a portrait. K. weighs two hundred and ten. 
 Twenty years ago he was a famous amateur 
 pitcher, and among his present avocations are 
 violin playing, which is good for the wrist, taxi 
 dermy, which is good for the eye, and shooting 
 woodcock, which before the days of the new Na 
 ture Study used to be thought good for the whole 
 man. R. began as a fly-fisherman, but by dint of 
 passing his summers near brooks where fly-fishing 
 is impossible, he has become a stout-hearted 
 apologist for the worm. His apparatus is most 
 singular. It consists of a very long, cheap rod, 
 stout enough to smash through bushes, and with 
 the stiffest tip obtainable. The lower end of the 
 butt, below the reel, fits into the socket of a huge 
 extra butt of bamboo, which R. carries uncon 
 cernedly. To reach a distant hole, or to fish the 
 
FISHING WITH A WORM 149 
 
 lower end of a ripple, R. simply locks his reel, 
 slips on the extra butt, and there is a fourteen- 
 foot rod ready for action. He fishes with a line 
 unbelievably short, and a Kendal hook far too 
 big ; and when a trout jumps for that hook, R. 
 wastes no time in manoauvring for position. The 
 unlucky fish is simply " derricked," to borrow 
 a word from Theodore, most saturnine and pro 
 fane of Moosehead guides. 
 
 " Shall I play him awhile ? " shouted an excited 
 sportsman to Theodore, after hooking his first 
 big trout. 
 
 " no! "growled Theodore in disgust. "Just 
 
 derrick him right into the canoe! " A heroic 
 method, surely ; though it once cost me the best 
 square-tail I ever hooked, for Theodore had for 
 gotten the landing-net, and the gut broke in his 
 fingers as he tried to swing the fish aboard. But 
 with these lively quarter-pounders of the Taylor 
 Brook, derricking is a safer procedure. Indeed, 
 I have sat dejectedly on the far end of a log, 
 after fishing the hole under it in vain, and seen 
 the mighty R. wade downstream close behind me, 
 adjust that comical extra butt, and jerk a couple 
 of half-pound trout from under the very log on 
 
150 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 
 
 which I was sitting. His device on this occasion, 
 as I well remember, was to pass his hook but 
 once through the middle of a big worm, let the 
 worm sink to the bottom, and crawl along it at 
 his leisure. The trout could not resist. 
 
 Once, and once only, have I come near equal 
 ing K. s record, and the way he beat me then is 
 the justification for a whole philosophy of worm- 
 fishing. We were on this very Taylor Brook, and 
 at five in the afternoon both baskets were two 
 thirds full. By count I had just one more fish 
 than he. It was raining hard. " You fish down 
 through the alders," said E. magnanimously. 
 " I 11 cut across and wait for you at the sawmill. 
 I don t want to get any wetter, on account of my 
 rheumatism." 
 
 This was rather barefaced kindness, for 
 whose rheumatism was ever the worse for an 
 other hour s fishing ? But I weakly accepted it. 
 I coveted three or four good trout to top off with, 
 that was all. So I tied on a couple of flies, 
 and began to fish the alders, wading waist deep 
 in the rapidly rising water, down the long green 
 tunnel under the curving boughs. The brook 
 fairly smoked with the rain, by this time, but 
 
FISHING WITH A WORM 151 
 
 when did one fail to get at least three or four 
 trout out of this best half mile of the lower brook ? 
 Yet I had no luck. I tried one fly after another, 
 and then, as a forlorn hope, though it some 
 times has a magic of its own, I combined a 
 brown hackle for the tail fly with a twisting worm 
 on the dropper. Not a rise ! I thought of R. 
 sitting patiently in the saw mill, and I fished 
 more conscientiously than ever. 
 
 " Venture as warily, use the same skill, 
 Do your best, whether winning or losing it, 
 If you choose to play ! is my principle." 
 
 Even those lines, which by some subtle telepathy 
 of the trout brook murmur themselves over and 
 over to me in the waning hours of an unlucky 
 day, brought now no consolation. There was sim 
 ply not one fish to be had, to any fly in the book, 
 out of that long, drenching, darkening tunnel. 
 At last I climbed out of the brook, by the bridge. 
 E. was sitting on the fence, his neck and ears 
 carefully turtled under his coat collar, the smoke 
 rising and the rain dripping from the inverted 
 bowl of his pipe. He did not seem to be worrying 
 about his rheumatism. 
 
 "What luck?" he asked. 
 
152 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 
 
 " None at all," I answered morosely. " Sorry 
 to keep you waiting." 
 
 " That s all right," remarked K. " What do 
 you think I Ve been doing ? I ve been fishing 
 out of the saw-mill window just to kill time. 
 There was a patch of floating sawdust there, 
 kind of unlikely place for trout, anyway, but I 
 thought I d put on a worm and let him crawl 
 around a little." He opened his creel as he spoke. 
 
 " But I did n t look for a pair of em," he added. 
 And there, on top of his smaller fish, were as 
 pretty a pair of three-quarter-pound brook trout 
 as were ever basketed. 
 
 "I m afraid you got pretty wet," said E. 
 kindly. 
 
 " I don t mind that," I replied. And I did n t. 
 "What I minded was the thought of an hour s vain 
 wading in that roaring stream, whipping it with fly 
 after fly, while K., the foreordained fisherman, 
 was sitting comfortably in a sawmill, and der- 
 ricking that pair of three-quarter-pounders in 
 through the window ! I had ventured more warily 
 than he, and used, if not the same skill, at least 
 the best skill at my command. My conscience 
 was clear, but so was his ; and he had had the 
 
FISHING WITH A WORM 153 
 
 drier skin and the greater magnanimity and the 
 biggest fish besides. There is much to be said, in 
 a world like ours, for taking the world as you find 
 it and for fishing with a worm. 
 
 One s memories of such fishing, however agree 
 able they may be, are not to be identified with a 
 defense of the practice. Yet, after all, the most 
 effective defense of worm-fishing is the concrete re 
 collection of some brook that could be fished best 
 or only in that way, or the image of a particular 
 trout that yielded to the temptation of an angle 
 worm after you had flicked fly after fly over him 
 in vain. Indeed, half the zest of brook fishing is 
 in your campaign for " individuals," as the 
 Salvation Army workers say, not merely for a 
 basketful of fish qua fish, but for a series of indi 
 vidual trout which your instinct tells you ought 
 to lurk under that log or be hovering in that rip 
 ple. How to get him, by some sportsmanlike pro 
 cess, is the question. If he will rise to some fly 
 in your book, few fishermen will deny that the 
 fly is the more pleasurable weapon. Dainty, lur 
 ing, beautiful toy, light as thistle-down, falling 
 where you will it to fall, holding when the leader 
 
154 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 
 
 tightens and sings like the string of a violin, the 
 artificial fly represents the poetry of angling. 
 Given the gleam of early morning on some wide 
 water, a heavy trout breaking the surface as he 
 curves and plunges, with the fly holding well, 
 with the right sort of rod in your fingers, and the 
 right man in the other end of the canoe, and you 
 perceive how easy is that Emersonian trick of 
 making the pomp of emperors ridiculous. 
 
 But angling s honest prose, as represented by 
 the lowly worm, has also its exalted moments. 
 " The last fish I caught was with a worm," says 
 the honest Walton, and so say I. It was the last 
 evening of last August. The dusk was settling 
 deep upon a tiny meadow, scarcely ten rods from 
 end to end. The rank bog grass, already drenched 
 with dew, bent over the narrow, deep little brook 
 so closely that it could not be fished except with 
 a double-shotted, baited hook, dropped delicately 
 between the heads of the long grasses. Under 
 neath this canopy the trout were feeding, taking 
 the hook with a straight downward tug, as they 
 made for the hidden bank. It was already twi 
 light when I began, and before I reached the 
 black belt of woods that separated the meadow 
 
FISHING WITH A WORM 155 
 
 from the lake, the swift darkness of the North 
 Country made it impossible to see the hook. A 
 short half hour s fishing only, and behold nearly 
 twenty good trout derrieked into a basket until 
 then sadly empty. Your rigorous fly-fisherman 
 would have passed that grass-hidden brook in 
 disdain, but it proved a treasure for the humble. 
 Here, indeed, there was no question of individu 
 ally-minded fish, but simply a neglected brook, 
 full of trout which could be reached with the 
 baited hook only. In more open brook-fishing it 
 is always a fascinating problem to decide how to 
 fish a favorite pool or ripple, for much depends 
 upon the hour of the day, the light, the height of 
 water, the precise period of the spring or summer. 
 But after one has decided upon the best theoreti 
 cal procedure, how often the stupid trout prefers 
 some other plan ! And when you have missed a fish 
 that you counted upon landing, what solid satis 
 faction is still possible for you, if you are philoso 
 pher enough to sit down then and there, eat your 
 lunch, smoke a meditative pipe, and devise a new 
 campaign against that particular fish! To get 
 another rise from him after lunch is a triumph of 
 diplomacy ; to land him is nothing short of states- 
 
156 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 
 
 manship. For sometimes he will jump furiously 
 at a fly, for very devilishness, without ever mean 
 ing to take it, and then, wearying suddenly of 
 his gymnastics, he will snatch sulkily at a grass 
 hopper, beetle, or worm. Trout feed upon an 
 extraordinary variety of crawling things, as all 
 fishermen know who practice the useful habit of 
 opening the first two or three fish they catch, to 
 see what food is that day the favorite. But here, 
 as elsewhere in this world, the best things lie 
 nearest, and there is no bait so killing, week in 
 and week out, as your plain garden or golf -green 
 angleworm. 
 
 Walton s list of possible worms is impressive, 
 and his directions for placing them upon the 
 hook have the placid completeness that belonged 
 to his character. Yet in such matters a little non 
 conformity may be encouraged. No two men or 
 boys dig bait in quite the same way, though all 
 share, no doubt, the singular elation which gilds 
 that grimy occupation with the spirit of romance. 
 The mind is really occupied, not with the wrig 
 gling red creatures in the lumps of earth, but 
 with the stout fish which each worm may capture, 
 just as a saint might rejoice in the squalor of this 
 
FISHING WITH A WORM 157 
 
 world as a preparation for the glories of the world 
 to come. Nor do any two experienced fishermen 
 hold quite the same theory as to the best mode of 
 baiting the hook. There are a hundred ways, 
 each of them good. As to the best hook for 
 worm-fishing, you will find dicta in every cata 
 logue of fishing tackle, but size and shape and 
 tempering are qualities that should vary with the 
 brook, the season, and the fisherman. Should 
 one use a three-foot leader, or none at all ? Whose 
 rods are best for bait-fishing, granted that all of 
 them should be stiff enough in the tip to lift a 
 good fish by dead strain from a tangle of brush 
 or logs ? Such questions, like those pertaining to 
 the boots or coat which one should wear, the style 
 of bait-box one should carry, or the brand of to 
 bacco best suited for smoking in the wind, are 
 topics for unending discussion among the serious 
 minded around the camp-fire. Much edification 
 is in them, and yet they are but prudential max 
 ims after all. They are mere moralities of the 
 Franklin or Chesterfield variety, counsels of 
 worldly wisdom, but they leave the soul untouched. 
 A man may have them at his finger s ends and 
 be no better fisherman at bottom; or he may, 
 
158 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 
 
 like R., ignore most of the admitted rules and 
 come home with a full basket. It is a sufficient 
 defense of fishing with a worm to pronounce the 
 truism that no man is a complete angler until he 
 has mastered all the modes of angling. Lovely 
 streams, lonely and enticing, but impossible to 
 fish with a fly, await the fisherman who is not 
 too proud to use, with a man s skill, the same 
 unpretentious tackle which he began with as a 
 boy. 
 
 But ah, to fish with a worm, and then not catch 
 your fish ! To fail with a fly is no disgrace : your 
 art may have been impeccable, your patience 
 faultless to the end. But the philosophy of worm- 
 fishing is that of Results, of having something 
 tangible in your basket when the day s work is 
 done. It is a plea for Compromise, for cutting 
 the coat according to the cloth, for taking the 
 world as it actually is. The fly-fisherman is a 
 natural Foe of Compromise. He throws to the 
 trout a certain kind of lure ; an they will take 
 it, so ; if not, adieu. He knows no middle path. 
 
 " This high man, aiming at a million, 
 Misses an unit." 
 
FISHING WITH A WORM 159 
 
 The raptures and the tragedies of consistency 
 are his. He is a scorner of the ground. All honor 
 to him ! When he comes back at nightfall and 
 says happily, " I have never cast a line more per 
 fectly than I have to-day," it is almost indecent 
 to peek into his creel. It is like rating Colonel 
 Newcome by his bank account. 
 
 But the worm-fisherman is no such proud and 
 isolated soul. He is a " low man " rather than a 
 high one ; he honestly cares what his friends will 
 think when they look into his basket to see what 
 he has to show for his day s sport. He watches 
 the Foe of Compromise men go stumbling forward 
 and superbly falling, while he, with less inflexible 
 courage, manages to keep his feet. He wants to 
 score, and not merely to give a pretty exhibition 
 of base-running. At the Harvard- Yale football 
 game of 1903 the Harvard team showed superior 
 strength in rushing the ball ; they carried it almost 
 to the Yale goal line repeatedly, but they could 
 not, for some reason, take it over. In the instant 
 of absolute need, the Yale line held, and when 
 the Yale team had to score in order to win, they 
 scored. As the crowd streamed out of the Sta 
 dium, a veteran Harvard alumnus said : " This 
 
160 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 
 
 news will cause great sorrow in one home I know 
 of, until they learn by to-morrow s papers that 
 the Harvard team acquitted itself creditably" 
 Exactly. Given one team bent upon acquitting 
 itself creditably, and another team determined to 
 win, which will be victorious ? The stay-at-homes 
 on the Yale campus that day were not curious to 
 know whether their team was acquitting itself 
 creditably, but whether it was winning the game. 
 Every other question than that was to those young 
 Philistines merely a fine-spun irrelevance. They 
 took the Cash and let the Credit go. 
 
 There is much to be said, no doubt, for the 
 Harvard veteran s point of view. The proper 
 kind of credit may be a better asset for eleven 
 boys than any championship ; and to fish a bit of 
 water consistently and skillfully, with your best 
 flies and in your best manner, is perhaps achieve 
 ment enough. So says the Foe of Compromise, 
 at least. But the Yale spirit will be prying into 
 the basket in search of fish ; it prefers concrete 
 results. If all men are by nature either Plato- 
 nists or Aristotelians, fly -fishermen or worm-fish 
 ermen, how difficult it is for us to do one another 
 justice ! Differing in mind, in aim and method, 
 
FISHING WITH A WORM 161 
 
 how shall we say infallibly that this man or that 
 is wrong ? To fail with Plato for companion may 
 be better than to succeed with Aristotle. But one 
 thing is perfectly clear : there is no warrant for 
 Compromise but in Success. Use a worm if you 
 will, but you must have fish to show for it, if you 
 would escape the finger of scorn. If you find 
 yourself camping by an unknown brook, and are 
 deputed to catch the necessary trout for break 
 fast, it is wiser to choose the surest bait. The 
 crackle of the fish in the frying-pan will atone 
 for any theoretical defect in your method. But 
 to choose the surest bait, and then to bring back 
 no fish, is unforgivable. Forsake Plato if you must, 
 but you may do so only at the price of justi 
 fying yourself in the terms of Aristotelian arith 
 metic. The college president who abandoned his 
 college in order to run a cotton mill was free to 
 make his own choice of a calling ; but he was 
 never pardoned for bankrupting the mill. If one 
 is bound to be a low man rather than an impracti 
 cal idealist, he should at least make sure of his 
 vulgar success. 
 
 Is all this but a disguised defense of pot-hunt 
 ing? No. There is no possible defense of pot- 
 
162 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 
 
 hunting, whether it be upon a trout brook or in 
 the stock market. Against fish or men, one should 
 play the game fairly. Yet for that matter some 
 of the most skillful fly-fishermen I have known 
 were pot-hunters at heart, and some of the most 
 prosaic - looking merchants were idealists com 
 pared to whom Shelley was but a dreaming boy. 
 All depends upon the spirit with which one makes 
 his venture. I recall a boy of five who gravely 
 watched his father tramp off after rabbits, gun 
 on shoulder and beagle in leash. Thereupon he 
 shouldered a wooden sword, and dragging his 
 reluctant black kitten by a string, sallied forth 
 upon the dusty Vermont road " to get a lion for 
 breakfast." That is the true sporting temper ! 
 Let there be but a fine idealism in the quest, and 
 the particular object is unessential. " A true fish 
 erman s happiness," says Mr. Cleveland, " is not 
 dependent upon his luck." It depends upon his 
 heart. 
 
 No doubt all amateur fishing is but " play," 
 as the psychologists soberly term it : not a neces 
 sary, but a freely assumed activity, born of sur 
 plusage of vitality. Nobody, not even a carpenter 
 wearied of his job, has to go fishing unless he 
 
FISHING WITH A WORM 163 
 
 wants to. He may indeed find himself breakfast- 
 less in camp, and obliged to betake himself to the 
 brook, but then he need not have gone into the 
 woods at all. Yet if he does decide to fish, let 
 him 
 
 " Venture as warily, use the same skill, 
 Do his best, ..." 
 
 whatever variety of tackle he may choose. He 
 can be a whole-souled sportsman with the poorest 
 equipment, or a mean " trout-hog " with the most 
 elaborate. 
 
 Only, in the name of gentle Izaak himself, let 
 him be a complete angler ; and let the man be a 
 passionate amateur of all the arts of life, despis 
 ing none of them, and using all of them for his 
 soul s good and for the joy of his fellows. If he 
 be, so to speak, but a worm-fisherman, a fol 
 lower of humble occupations, and pledged to un- 
 romantic duties, let him still thrill with the 
 pleasures of the true sportsman. To make the 
 most of dull hours, to make the best of dull peo 
 ple, to like a poor jest better than none, to wear 
 the threadbare coat like a gentleman, to be out 
 voted with a smile, to hitch your wagon to the old 
 horse if no star is handy, this is the wholesome 
 
164 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 
 
 philosophy taught by fishing with a worm. The 
 fun of it depends upon the heart. There may be 
 as much zest in saving as in spending, in working 
 for small wages as for great, in avoiding the snap 
 shots of publicity as in being invariably first 
 " among those present." But a man should be 
 honest. If he catches most of his fish with a worm, 
 secures the larger portion of his success by com 
 monplace industry, let him glory in it, for this, 
 too, is part of the great game. Yet he ought not 
 in that case to pose as a fly-fisherman only, to 
 carry himself as one aware of the immortalizing 
 camera, to pretend that life is easy, if one but 
 knows how to drop a fly into the right ripple. For 
 life is not easy, after all is said. It is a long 
 brook to fish, and it needs a stout heart and a 
 wise patience. All the flies there are in the book, 
 and all the bait that can be carried in the box, 
 are likely to be needed ere the day is over. But, 
 like the Psalmist s " river of God," this brook is 
 " full of water," and there is plenty of good fish 
 ing to be had in it if one is neither afraid nor 
 ashamed of fishing sometimes with a worm. 
 
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