Dr. Hall was an ardent Freudian. “Nothing since Aristotle’s categories has gone deeper, or in my opinion is destined to have such far-reaching influence and results,” was the characteristic way he estimated the Freudian mechanisms. It mattered nothing to him that psychoanalysis and the study of the unconscious have made small appeal to the majority of trained psychologists of this or any other country. He attributed this to the prudish reluctance of his colleagues to face the momentous problems of sex life. They deny it; at least, his successor at Johns Hopkins, the professor at Columbia, the successor to William James at Harvard, and many others do. But the momentous problems of sex life did not balk Dr. Hall. He confessed to “a love for glimpsing at first hand the raw side of human life,” and he records the unique thrill he experienced at the numerous prize fights that he attended “unknown and away from home.” Moreover the seamy side of life seemed to him as valuable in some respects as the psychological laboratory. “In many American and especially in foreign cities, Paris, where vice was most sophisticated, London, where it was coarsest, Vienna, which I thought the worst of all, I found, generally through hotel clerks, a guide to take me through the underworld by night to catch its psychological flavour.” Some reader, low-minded and altogether contemptible, will be base enough to believe that there were other motives. It is a dangerous business anyway. Even Dr. Hall says he had a narrow escape once—his life, not his morals—in a den of Apaches in Paris. About the year Dr. Hall was called to Clark University, a clergyman in New York and a pious vice hunter visited such places and their motives for doing so were publicly questioned. The clergyman stood the shock, but his reforming friend went off his head. The reformatory urge, though not a fundamental one, often needs to be curbed, especially when it is entangled with a lust of curiosity.
Dr. Hall always had a weakness for new, bizarre, hybrid words, and he found difficulty in giving adequate vent to his emotions and cognitions in one language. Therefore one is not astonished to find the present volume constellated with French, German, and Latin words and phrases. He frequently speaks of his éclaircissements. He had various kinds: religious, social, political, economic, and even ethical. He has been very fond of giving aperçus, of being irreverent to the ipsissima verba; and he can never quite forget the hegira from Clark University after the visit of a certain Harper; he still hears the echo of the vox clamantis in deserto; and he will talk of the vita sexualis. It is to be presumed that any one lured by an autobiography of one of our leading educators will be able to translate these words. At any rate he is not likely to have any more trouble with them than he is with some of the sentences in English. For instance, the Professor, speaking of the necessity of educating the will and the heart as well as the intellect, says:
“Nothing else can save us and I shall live, and hope to die when my time comes, convinced that this goal is not only not unattainable, but that we are, on the whole, with however many and widespread regressions, making progress, surely if slowly and in the right directions.”
And again when saying a good word for the “seminary”:
“The rabulist, the sophist, the debater, the man of saturated orthodoxy, the literalist, and the dullard will all be held in check if the seminary is rightly pervaded with the phenomena of altitude.”
Yes, indeed, but what will save the bromide, the smart Aleck, the hard-shelled—that’s the question. Is there any phenomenon or altitude that will accomplish that?
I have always understood it was Worcester, not Webster, who said: “It is I who am surprised; you are astonished,” when he returned home and saw his mother-in-law being kissed by the butler. I must have been mistaken, for Dr. Hall says that he was surprised and delighted when he got an invitation, after some lean years as a tutor, to deliver a course of lectures in Baltimore. The sensation of the butler and of Dr. Hall must have been the same, only on the reverse side of the shield.
Dr. Hall wrote this book to find out more about himself than he knew before. I hope he was successful. I know more about him than I did before, though I have been fairly familiar with his life in the open the past quarter of a century. He says many interesting things about himself. With some of them I find it hard to agree: for instance that he was a mixture of masochistic and sadistic impulses. It may be so, but they were not fifty fifty. One predominated.
Somewhere in the Tale of a Tub Swift says that happiness is a perpetual possession of being well deceived. Were it true, the writer of this autobiography rarely experienced happiness save perhaps in Berlin, where he learned “how great an enlightener love is, and what a spring of mind Eros can be.”