The Observations of Professor Maturin

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The Observations of Professor Maturin By Clyde Furst
New York Columbia University Press 1916 All rights reserved
Copyright, 1916, by Columbia University Press Printed March, 1916 ∵ Reprinted, by permission, from The New York Evening Post D. B. Updike · The Merrymount Press · Boston
Dedicated to Professor Maturin’s Oldest and Best Friend R. E. M.
IT was never my good fortune actually to meet Professor Maturin, or even to see him, although in the latter case I should instantly have recognized him, so familiar have I been through my mind’s eye, at least, with his personal appearance—his slender figure somewhat stooping with the bodily inclination of the scholar, the clear-cut features that could only have fitted his clear-cut mind, and the thoughtful eyes that were their necessary concomitant. I had known, of course, of his predilection for the Athenaeum, and his habit of dining at that club of intellectual and gastronomic repute, and I was aware of his membership in the veracious Sindbad Society whose meetings he frequently attended; but here, too, and principally from the fact, no doubt, that I was a member of neither, I had never been able to bring about the much desired personal acquaintance with him.
Of acquaintance, however, and even of a fairly satisfactory sort, there has nevertheless been no lack, for I have read much that Professor Maturin has written, and I have remembered, although inadequately enough, many of the things that he has said with such understanding and insight of the real bearing of individual experience, along quite extraordinarily extended lines, upon the wide problems of human existence.
It is so much the more a pleasure, accordingly, to me, and as it will be to all those who have read Professor Maturin before only sporadically and at intervals, at length to have the opportunity to read him consecutively, and thus to get those side-lights and reflections of understanding that can only come with a reasonable contiguity of statement.