The tutorships which Mr Child had held were not entirely in accordance with his tastes, which had always led him in the direction of literary and linguistic study. The faculty of the college was small, however, and it was not always possible to assign an instructor to the department that would have been most to his mind. But the governors of the institution were glad to secure the services of so promising a scholar; and Mr Child, whose preference for an academic career was decided, had felt that it was wise to accept such positions as the college could offer, leaving exacter adjustments to time and circumstances. Meantime he had devoted his whole leisure to the pursuit of his favorite studies. His first fruits were a volume entitled Four Old Plays[2] published in 1848, when he was but twenty-three years old. This was a remarkably competent performance. The texts are edited with judgment and accuracy; the introduction shows literary discrimination as well as sound scholarship, and the glossary and brief notes are thoroughly good. There are no signs of immaturity in the book, and it is still valued by students of our early drama.
The leave of absence granted to Mr Child in 1849 came at a most favorable moment. His health had suffered from close application to work, and a change of climate had been advised by his physicians. His intellectual and scholarly development, too, had reached that stage in which foreign study and travel were certain to be most stimulating and fruitful. He was amazingly apt, and two years of opportunity meant much more to him than to most men. He returned to take up the duties of his new office a trained and mature scholar, at home in the best methods and traditions of German universities, yet with no sacrifice of his individuality and intellectual independence.
While in Germany Mr Child studied at Berlin and Göttingen, giving his time mostly to Germanic philology, then cultivated with extraordinary vigor and success. The hour was singularly propitious. In the three or four decades preceding Mr Child's residence in Europe, Germanic philology (in the wider sense) had passed from the stage of "romantic" dilettantism into the condition of a well-organized and strenuous scientific discipline, but the freshness and vivacity of the first half of the century had not vanished. Scholars, however severe, looked through the form and strove to comprehend the spirit. The ideals of erudition and of a large humanity were not even suspected of incompatibility. The imagination was still invoked as the guide and illuminator of learning. The bond between antiquity and mediævalism and between the Middle Ages and our own century was never lost from sight. It was certainly fortunate for American scholarship that at precisely this juncture a young man of Mr Child's ardent love of learning, strong individuality, and broad intellectual sympathies was brought into close contact with all that was most quickening in German university life. He attended lectures on classical antiquity and philosophy, as well as on Germanic philology; but it was not so much by direct instruction that he profited as by the inspiration which he derived from the spirit and the ideals of foreign scholars, young and old. His own greatest contribution to learning, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, may even, in a very real sense, be regarded as the fruit of these years in Germany. Throughout his life he kept a picture of William and James Grimm on the mantel over his study fireplace.
Mr Child wrote no "dissertation," and returned to Cambridge without having attempted to secure a doctor's degree. Never eager for such distinctions, he had been unwilling to subject himself to the restrictions on his plan of study which candidacy for the doctorate would have imposed. Three years after, however, in 1854, he was surprised and gratified to receive from the University of Göttingen the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, accompanied by a special tribute of respect from that institution. Subsequently he received the degree of LL. D. from Harvard (in 1884) and that of L. H. D. from Columbia (in 1887); but the Göttingen Ph. D., coming as it did at the outset of his career, was in a high degree auspicious.
The Boylston Professorship of Rhetoric and Oratory, to which, as has been already mentioned, Mr Child succeeded on his return to America toward the end of 1851, was no sinecure. In addition to academic instruction of the ordinary kind, the duties of the chair included the superintendence and criticism of a great quantity of written work, in the nature of essays and set compositions prepared by students of all degrees of ability. For twenty-five years Mr Child performed these duties with characteristic punctuality and devotion, though with increasing distaste for the drudgery which they involved. Meantime a great change had come over Harvard: it had developed from a provincial college into a national seminary of learning, and the introduction of the "elective system"—corresponding to the "Lernfreiheit" of Germany—had enabled it to become a university in the proper sense of the word. One result of the important reform just referred to was the establishment of a Professorship of English, entirely distinct from the old chair of Rhetoric. This took place on May 8, 1876, and on the 20th of the next month Mr Child was transferred to the new professorship. His duties as an instructor were now thoroughly congenial, and he continued to perform them with unabated vigor to the end. In the onerous details of administrative and advisory work, inseparable, according to our exacting American system, from the position of a university professor, he was equally faithful and untiring. For thirty years he acted as secretary of the Library Council, and in all that time he was absent from but three meetings. As chairman of the Department of English and of the Division of Modern Languages, and as a member of many important committees, he was ever prodigal of time and effort. How steadily he attended to the regular duties of the class-room, his pupils, for fifty years, are the best witnesses. They, too, will best understand the satisfaction he felt that, in the fiftieth year of his teaching, he was not absent from a single lecture. No man was ever less a formalist; yet the most formal of natures could not, in the strictest observance of punctilio, have surpassed the regularity with which he discharged, as it were spontaneously, the multifarious duties of his position.
Throughout his service as professor of rhetoric, Mr Child, hampered though he was by the requirements of his laborious office, had pursued with unquenchable ardor the study of the English language and literature, particularly in their older forms, and in these subjects he had become an authority of the first rank long before the establishment of the English chair enabled him to arrange his university teaching in accordance with his tastes. Soon after he returned from Germany he undertook the general editorial supervision of a series of the 'British Poets,' published at Boston in 1853 and several following years, and extending to some hundred and fifty volumes. Out of this grew, in one way or another, his three most important contributions to learning: his edition of Spenser, his Observations on the Language of Chaucer and Gower, and his English and Scottish Popular Ballads.
Mr Child's Spenser appeared in 1855.[3] Originally intended, as he says in the preface, as little more than a reprint of the edition published in 1839 under the superintendence of Mr George Hillard, the book grew upon his hands until it had become something quite different from its predecessor. Securing access to old copies of most of Spenser's poems, Mr Child subjected the text to a careful revision, which left little to be done in this regard. His Life of Spenser was far better than any previous biography, and his notes, though brief, were marked by a philological exactness to which former editions could not pretend. Altogether, though meant for the general reader and therefore sparingly annotated, Mr Child's volumes remain, after forty years, the best edition of Spenser in existence.
The plan of the 'British Poets' originally contemplated an edition of Chaucer, which Mr Child was to prepare. Becoming convinced, however, that the time was not ripe for such a work, he abandoned this project, and to the end of his life he never found time to resume it. Thomas Wright's print of the Canterbury Tales[4] from the Harleian MS. 7334 had, however, put into his hands a reasonably faithful reproduction of an old text, and he turned his attention to a minute study of Chaucer's language. The outcome was the publication, in the Memoirs of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences for 1863, of the great treatise to which Mr Child gave the modest title of Observations on the Language of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. It is difficult, at the present day, to imagine the state of Chaucer philology at the moment when this paper appeared. Scarcely anything, we may say, was known of Chaucer's grammar and metre in a sure and scientific way. Indeed, the difficulties to be solved had not even been clearly formulated. Further, the accessible mass of evidence on Anglo-Saxon and Middle English was, in comparison with the stores now at the easy command of every tyro, almost insignificant. Yet, in this brief treatise, Mr Child not only defined the problems, but provided for most of them a solution which the researches of younger scholars have only served to substantiate. He also gave a perfect model of the method proper to such inquiries—a method simple, laborious, and exact. The Observations were subsequently rearranged and condensed, with Professor Child's permission, by Mr A. J. Ellis for his work On Early English Pronunciation; but only those who have studied them in their original form can appreciate their merit fully. "It ought never to be forgotten," writes Professor Skeat, "that the only full and almost complete solution of the question of the right scansion of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales is due to what Mr Ellis rightly terms 'the wonderful industry, acuteness, and accuracy of Professor Child.'" Had he produced nothing else, this work, with its pendant, the Observations on Gower,[5] would have assured him a high place among those very few scholars who have permanently settled important problems of linguistic science.
Mr Child's crowning work, however, was the edition of the English and Scottish Popular Ballads, which the reader now has before him. The history of this is the history of more than half a lifetime.
The idea of the present work grew out of Mr Child's editorial labors on the series of the 'British Poets,' already referred to. For this he prepared a collection in eight small volumes (1857-58) called English and Scottish Ballads.[6] This was marked by the beginnings of that method of comparative study which is carried out to its ultimate issues in the volumes of the present collection. The book circulated widely, and was at once admitted to supersede all previous attempts in the same field. To Mr Child, however, it was but the starting-point for further researches. He soon formed the plan of a much more extensive collection on an altogether different model. This was to include every obtainable version of every extant English or Scottish ballad, with the fullest possible discussion of related songs or stories in the "popular" literature of all nations. To this enterprise he resolved, if need were, to devote the rest of his life. His first care was to secure trustworthy texts. In his earlier collection he had been forced to depend almost entirely on printed books. No progress, he was convinced, could be made till recourse could be had to manuscripts, and in particular to the Percy MS. Accordingly he directed his most earnest efforts to securing the publication of the entire contents of the famous folio. The Percy MS. was at Ecton Hall, in the possession of the Bishop's descendants, who would permit no one even to examine it. Two attempts were made by Dr Furnivall, at Mr Child's instance, to induce the owners to allow the manuscript to be printed,—one as early as 1860 or 1861, the other in 1864,—but without avail. A third attempt was more successful, and in 1867-68 the long-secluded folio was made the common property of scholars in an edition prepared by Professor Hales and Dr Furnivall.[7]