Perhaps I had better mention the adjustments by which these results have been reached. When a man has been in college during only the closing years of the course, I assume that he would have lived at the same rate had he been here throughout it. I have added $150 for persons who board at home, and another hundred for those who lodge there. Though I asked to have the expenses of Class Day and the summer vacations omitted, in some instances I have reason to suspect that they are included; but of course I have been obliged to let the error remain, and I have never deducted the money which students often say they expect to recover at graduation by the sale of furniture and other goods. There is a noticeable tendency to larger outlay as the years advance. Some students attribute this to the greater cost of the studies of the later years, to the more expensive books and the laboratory charges; others, to societies and subscriptions; others, to enlarged acquaintance with opportunities for spending.
For the sake of lucidity, I keep the expense account and the income account distinct. For example, a man reports that he has spent $700 a year, winning each year a scholarship of $200, and earning by tutoring $100, and $50 by some other means. The balance against him is only $350 a year; but I have included him in the group of $700 spenders.
XII
A TEACHER OF THE OLDEN TIME
On the 14th of February, 1883, Evangelinus Apostolides Sophocles, Professor of Ancient, Byzantine, and Modern Greek in Harvard University, died at Cambridge, in the corner room of Holworthy Hall which he had occupied for nearly forty years. A past generation of American schoolboys knew him gratefully as the author of a compact and lucid Greek grammar. College students—probably as large a number as ever sat under an American professor—were introduced by him to the poets and historians of Greece. Scholars of a riper growth, both in Europe and America, have wondered at the precision and loving diligence with which, in his dictionary of the later and Bzyantine Greek, he assessed the corrupt literary coinage of his native land. His brief contributions to the Nation and other journals were always noticeable for exact knowledge and scrupulous literary honesty. As a great scholar, therefore, and one who through a long life labored to beget scholarship in others, Sophocles deserves well of America. At a time when Greek was usually studied as the schoolboy studies it, this strange Greek 284 came among us, connected himself with our oldest university, and showed us an example of encyclopædic learning, and such familiar and living acquaintance with Homer and Æschylus—yes, even with Polybius, Lucian, and Athenæus—as we have with Tennyson and Shakespeare and Burke and Macaulay. More than this, he showed us how such learning is gathered. To a dozen generations of impressible college students he presented a type of an austere life directed to serene ends, a life sufficient for itself and filled with a never-hastening diligence which issued in vast mental stores.
It is not, however, the purpose of this paper to trace the influence over American scholarship of this hardly domesticated wise man of the East. Nor will there be any attempt to narrate the outward events of his life. These were never fully known; and could they be discovered, there would be a kind of impiety in reporting them. Few traits were so characteristic of him as his wish to conceal his history. His motto might have been that of Epicurus and Descartes: “Well hid is well lived.” Yet in spite of his concealments, perhaps in part because of them, few persons connected with Harvard have ever left behind them an impression of such massive individuality. He was long a notable figure in university life, one of those picturesque characters who by their very being give impulse to aspiring mortals and check 285 the ever-encroaching commonplace. It would be ungrateful to allow one formerly so stimulating and talked about to fall into oblivion. Now that a decent interval after death has passed, a memorial to this unusual man may be reverently set up. His likeness may be drawn by a fond though faithful hand. Or at least such stories about him may be kindly put into the record of print as will reflect some of those rugged, paradoxical, witty, and benignant aspects of his nature which marked him off from the humdrum herd of men.
My own first approach to Sophocles was at the end of my Junior year in college. It was necessary for me to be absent from his afternoon recitation. In those distant days absences were regarded by Harvard law as luxuries, and a small fixed quantity of them, a sort of sailor’s grog, was credited with little charge each half-year to every student. I was already nearing the limit of the unenlargeable eight, and could not well venture to add another to my score. It seemed safer to try to win indulgence from my fierce-eyed instructor. Early one morning I went to Sophocles’s room. “Professor Sophocles,” I said, “I want to be excused from attending the Greek recitation this afternoon.” “I have no power to excuse,” uttered in the gruffest of tones, while he looked the other way. “But I cannot be here. I must be out of town at three o’clock.” “I have no 286 power. You had better see the president.” Finding the situation desperate, I took a desperate leap. “But the president probably would not allow my excuse. At the play of the Hasty Pudding Club to-night I am to appear as leading lady. I must go to Brookline this afternoon and have my sister dress me.” No muscle of the stern face moved; but he rose, walked to a table where his class lists lay, and, taking up a pencil, calmly said: “You had better say nothing to the president. You are here now. I will mark you so.” He sniffed, he bowed, and, without smile or word from either of us, I left the room. As I came to know Sophocles afterwards, I found that in this trivial early interview I had come upon some of the most distinctive traits of his character; here was an epitome of his brusquerie, his dignity, his whimsical logic, and his kind heart.
Outwardly he was always brusque and repellent. A certain savagery marked his very face. He once observed that, in introducing a character, Homer is apt to draw attention to the eye. Certainly in himself this was the feature which first attracted notice; for his eye had uncommon alertness and intelligence. Those who knew him well detected in it a hidden sweetness; but against the stranger it burned and glared, and guarded all avenues of approach. Startled it was, like the eye of a wild animal, and penetrating, “peering through the portals of the brain like the 287 brass cannon.” Over it crouched bushy brows, and all around the great head bristled white hair, on forehead, cheeks, and lips, so that little flesh remained visible, and the life was settled in two fiery spots. This concentration of expression in the few elementary features of shape, hair, and eyes made the head a magnificent subject for painting. Rembrandt should have painted it. But he would never allow a portrait of himself to be drawn. Into his personality strangers must not intrude. Venturing once to try for memoranda of his face, I took an artist to his room. The courtesy of Sophocles was too stately to allow him to turn my friend away, but he seated himself in a shaded window, and kept his head in constant motion. When my frustrated friend had departed, Sophocles told me, though without direct reproach, of two sketches which had before been surreptitiously made,—one by the pencil of a student in his class, another in oils by a lady who had followed him on the street. Toward photography his aversion was weaker; perhaps because in that art a human being less openly meddled with him.
From this sense of personal dignity, which made him at all times determined to keep out of the grasp of others, much of his brusqueness sprang. On the morning after he returned from his visit to Greece a fellow professor saw him on the opposite side of the street, and, hastening across, greeted him warmly: 288 “So you have been home, Mr. Sophocles; and how did you find your mother?” “She was up an apple-tree,” said Sophocles, confining himself to the facts of the case. A boy who snowballed him on the street he prosecuted relentlessly, and he could not be appeased until a considerable fine was imposed; but he paid the fine himself. Many a bold push was made to ascertain his age; yet, however suddenly the question came, or however craftily one crept from date to date, there was a uniform lack of success. “I see Allibone’s Dictionary says you were born in 1805,” a gentleman remarked. “Some statements have been nearer, and some have been farther from the truth.” One day, when a violent attack of illness fell on him, a physician was called for diagnosis. He felt the pulse, he examined the tongue, he heard the report of the symptoms, then suddenly asked, “How old are you, Mr. Sophocles?” With as ready presence of mind and as pretty ingenuity as if he were not lying at the point of death, Sophocles answered: “The Arabs, Dr. W., estimate age by several standards. The age of Hassan, the porter, is reckoned by his wrinkles; that of Abdallah, the physician, by the lives he has saved; that of Achmet, the sage, by his wisdom. I, all my life a scholar, am nearing my hundredth year.” To those who had once come close to Sophocles these little reserves, never asserted with impatience, were characteristic and endearing. I 289 happen to know his age; hot irons shall not draw it from me.