It is only as a friend I write of Horace Howard Furness, as one of those that loved and knew. It is ever ill writing of one’s friends when they are gone, but his going changed the very horizon of life for us all, robbed of its landmark the landscape of the years, and left a gap where once we all looked up and learned and had new sense of the fashion in which long purpose, fulfilled and never forgotten, shapes character and carves cliffs from which men see afar.
For forty years he sat at a desk and worked to make books from books on a book. In all our American life there is no other, few in any land, who so encysted himself in a task wholly of letters. There goes with this for most, as all know, the bent figure, the absent-minded or the self-conscious gaze, aloofness from the actual. Not he. To the last there was the sturdy, erect figure, the ruddy, full face, shaped and blocked as of a man of many tasks, the resolute mustache, the solid chin, the stiff, short, aggressive hair, early whitened by tears and tasks—“your white-haired son,” as he wrote in an inimitable acknowledgment to his father in one of his volumes. Even a year from eighty his very step was decision. He bore down Chestnut Street in his weekly visit from his country home like “a royal, good, and gallant ship, freshly beheld in all her trim.”
There is in Philadelphia a little group which has dined together just short of four decades every three weeks for eight months of each year. He was of the first that met, and the last of the first to go. To one who began thirty years ago as the youngest of those who sat at this board, and now, alas! finds himself among the elder at a table peopled with the past, nothing so bulks in all the round of a manifold social contact as this dominant figure, alert, awake, clear-visioned, felt through all this gathered group of men. Each of them was himself felt in all the various walks of life, on the bench, in law, in medicine, in letters, in art, in journalism, and in affairs; yet he the center, stone-deaf. How did he do it? I do not know. I only saw. He alone had the secret. Gay, responsive, indomitable, flashing sheer personality, and with a big silver ear-trumpet moving here and there, into which some one at his side poured a reversion of the passing talk, who is there whom you know, or whom you have known, who could have done it? None other that I know. Yet he so did it that one felt that the best recipe and assurance of unflagging talk, of explosive, masculine laughter, of a perpetual source of the dearest and most precious thing on earth, the easy interchange, conflict, and contact of friends with friends—the best recipe for all this was to have there a great scholar, unable to hear a word until it was dropped into the silver trumpet, yet giving edge, guidance, direction, and inspiration to all the flow of mutual utterance that has run in this well-worn channel for twoscore years.
To do this was more like his very self than all his throned volumes; and I am not sure but that, in the great chancery of existence, it is better worth while to have made friends gay, high-spirited, and ready to give a frolic welcome to all the years as they came than to be known ever after, as he will be, as foremost in his great field. It was like him to concentrate all his social life on this one group. Elsewhere he was always sought and scarcely seen, though his house was graced by an open hospitality the loss of which in time he made up by night work. How wise to know your friends in your forties, and to gather them and to be with them to the very threshold of the eighties! How far wiser than the wandering way in which, like children, we fill our hands so full that we can neither use, nor give, nor leave, nor enjoy! It was like him resolutely to keep this dinner of high talk and plain fare, with men who dined much and well elsewhere, to a dollar apiece, as a constant protest against a lavish age which kills all by gilding it, as with the luckless boy in the Medicean festival.
Life was compounded by him of simples; but they were “collected from all simples that have virtue under the moon.” He lived in one city and loved it. Two homes housed all his years.
He sprang of a goodly ancestry and was justly and openly proud of it. He held high the long descent of men given to the works of the mind. His father was known before him, and his sons were known with him and will be known after him.
His heart visibly and frankly warmed, though without word or bruit, when in a narrow span of years he and his son Horace Howard Furness, Jr., published each his volume which garner the comment of all the years on a play of Shakspere. Another son, Dr. W. H. Furness, in the same span, wrote an authoritative volume on the Dyaks of Borneo, placing in the Museum of the University of Pennsylvania the best existing monographic collection on the region he studied. A daughter, Mrs. Horace Jayne (Caroline Furness Jayne), issued the one most important book ever published on the perplexing, fascinating, and almost unknown field of cat’s-cradles, a mine of patient research and accurate, skilful description. His sister, Mrs. Caspar Wister, published the long series of translations from German novels the success of which, among a score of failures in this field, was wholly due to the skill with which the “translator” adapted this fiction “made in Germany” to the English-speaking world. Five years ago this brother and sister were at work side by side, Mrs. Wister on the proof-sheets of her fortieth German translation, “The Lonely House,” by Adolph Streckfuss, and he on the proof-sheets of “Antony and Cleopatra,” the twelfth in his monumental march. Her first translation, “Seaside and Fireside Fairies,” from George Blum and Louis Wahl, had appeared forty-three years, and his “Romeo and Juliet” thirty-six years, before. His brother, Frank Furness, whose death preceded his by so short a span, was, when a mere lad, in Rush’s Lancers, and all his life looked the cavalryman, with his drooping, yellow mustache and his seamed face. He retained to the end the walk of a man who, for years together in his youth, has felt the saddle-leathers between his legs. Like Lever’s hero, he once escaped capture by taking a barn-yard fence no other man would have dared or persuaded his cavalry mount to venture. By carrying powder to a battery not only under fire, but through burning woods, he won a medal of honor. At Cold Harbor he risked life openly and flagrantly by walking out between two firing-lines a few rods apart to give a wounded Confederate a drink of water. Years later, when there came to this dauntless soul heartbreaking grief, he solaced himself by finding through a newspaper friend, who sowed the strange and moving tale broadcast in Southern papers, the man whose life he had saved, bringing him to Philadelphia and filling a month with mutual memories for both. To the world Frank Furness was known as an architect, a pupil of Richard Morris Hunt.
It could be only in such a family that, as a family lark at a family dinner, a novel was written, the first chapter by Horace Howard Furness, the others in turn by the rest, three sons, a daughter, a son-in-law, and a daughter-in-law, no author to kill a character without the consent of its creator, and all printed in seven copies as “Grace Auchester.” I foresee a pretty penny for this volume in catalogues of Shaksperiana a century hence.
It is the odd blunder of a dull world that social buoyancy and the notable mind seldom march together; but, as an acute thinker has said, a man with a strong pair of legs can walk east as easily as he walks west, and our great Shaksperian had all the mirth that rang under the rafters of the Mermaid. He made the Hasty Pudding Club at Harvard. He was the dancer of his year and led in the play of more than sixty years ago. I like it that after his death there were found, preserved through all the half century, the pink tights and the spangled skirt which the toil-worn commentator had worn in glad youth as Mlle. Furnessina. In the world of silence in which he lived so long he seemed to know laughter by instinct. His speech on the “Miseries of Old Age” at a Harvard dinner four years ago swept the tables. He presided over a dinner or a meeting marvelously. His instinct, his attention, his capacity to interpret a look as easily as a word, carried him through all. Nor was humor ever far from the ceremonial surface of things. For example, at the lunch given at the opening of the Bryn Mawr College library—it was on the hottest of June days, and he was sweltering under the crimson trappings and beef-eater hat of his Cambridge degree of Litt.Doc. (1899), when a young friend spoke a consoling word to him. He replied, “Ah, Mademoiselle, il faut souffrir pour être swell.”
The world narrowly missed in him a great Arabic scholar. His trip abroad after his graduation at Harvard carried him far afield. He was in Damascus when the Crimean War set the East ablaze. He saw Richard Burton, imperious-souled, a vision of masterful will, holding his consular court; and to the vision he recurred again and again. He had a week or two in the desert. He became enamoured of Arabic and its study, of which relics exist in a grammar and reader that he owned. But his brief days over Semitics had this strange by-product. In the polychrome Bible, projected by Professor Haupt of Johns Hopkins, and halted midway for lack of support, Dr. Furness, perhaps the only man alive so versed in Elizabethan English that it was as the tongue to which he was born, and knowing enough of Hebrew, furnished the translation of the revised text. In the Hebrew lyrics and psalms translated for this edition of the Old Testament he reached the summit of his style, an incomparable mingling of nice scholarship and exalted utterance. How fit it was that the Bible and Shakspere should attract the same critical capacity!