IX. BLISS PERRY
CARROLL LEWIS MAXCY '87
The subject of this brief sketch may indeed be termed a Williams man both by heredity and by environment. He passed his boyhood and early youth under the very shadow of our hills; and his father, Professor A.L. Perry, was for years the most widely known as well as the most generally loved of its faculty.
Bliss Perry was born in 1860; after graduation, in 1881, he became instructor in English and elocution at his alma mater and in 1886 was advanced to the full professorship. In 1893 he accepted a call to the same chair at Princeton. Six years later he was appointed to the editorship of the Atlantic Monthly, thus becoming one of a famous line of editors including Lowell, Howells, and Aldrich. He remained at the head of the Atlantic for just ten years, resigning in August 1909 to devote himself wholly to the duties of the chair of English literature at Harvard, which he had accepted two years before and which had already been filled by Longfellow and Lowell. The year 1909-1910 he spent abroad as Hyde lecturer at the Sorbonne.
Professor Perry's publications extend over the fields of fiction, criticism, and the occasional essay. His Study of Prose Fiction, a clear exposition of narrative writing, is one of the best-known college textbooks on the subject. His Walt Whitman is without doubt his most careful and elaborate critical work and is a recognized authority. The Amateur Spirit, a series of familiar essays, shows Professor Perry at his best and should be read especially by those who delight to study the personality of an author as revealed in his work.
But whatever fame Professor Perry may have attained in the fields of literature, to Williams men he is the teacher. In The Amateur Spirit he has written: "Your born teacher is as rare as a poet…. Once in a while a college gets hold of one. It does not always know that it has him, and proceeds to ruin him by over-driving, the moment he shows power; or to let another college lure him away for a few hundred dollars more a year. But while he lasts—and sometimes, fortunately, he lasts till the end of a long life—he transforms the lecture-hall as by enchantment. Lucky is the alumnus who can call the roll of his old instructors, and among the martinets and the pedants and the piously inane can here and there come suddenly upon a man; a man who taught him to think, or helped him to feel, and thrilled him with a new horizon."
Those of us who have been under Professor Perry's instruction in the class-room must smile to note how—all unconsciously—he has here portrayed what we know him to be. Scholarly in his tastes, clear in his thinking, simple and direct in the expression of his thought, and always human in his personality, he "taught us to think, he helped us to feel, and he thrilled us with a new horizon." To us he seemed the ideal teacher, and as teacher and as man withal he has won the loyalty of Harvard, Princeton, and Williams men alike.