Among the things that his biographer left out was that old black meerschaum pipe of the late sixties and early seventies. It was an equilateral triangle about two and a half inches on edge, cut from a slab of meerschaum a little over an inch thick. It had a cherry stem about a foot long. When Fiske got settled down, he would slowly pull the bowl and the stem and the tobacco separately from some of the infinite recesses of his person, and get them together and in operation, and then heave one of his immense sighs of contentment, and be ready for conversation. Yet there’s a paradox in my recollections of this pipe. I’m sure all those I have stated are correct, and yet at that time “the recesses of his person” had hardly begun to approximate infinity, as they afterwards did: amid all the impressions is one that he was rather slight, but that must have had something to do with the thinnish beard of the portrait before me as I write, which it is a pity was not put into the biography.
He was the “broadest-minded” man I ever knew—most alive to the good points of things he did not endorse. During his whole life his attitude toward the religion which had persecuted him, was one of reverent but discriminating affection.
Yet it is hardly fair to discourage readers, as it must be admitted Fiske’s biographer does, by leaving the implication that this extraordinary creature was superhuman.
With all his colossal powers, he was not, perhaps fortunately for us, what is usually called a genius: his conclusions were reasoned and consistent, and his likes and dislikes reliable. But he had not that intuitive power which leads a man like a bee in a quick straight line to the essential thing, or to put vast accumulations of truth into epigrams. He was enormously instructive and always entertaining, but he was seldom suggestive. He dealt in food, rather than in condiments. He had to plod to his conclusions in his irresistible elephantine way. To get rid of Christian dogmatism, when the first page of the Westminster Catechism is enough for some men, he had to read a library; and when he was twenty-two, he wrote Spencer that he had “successively adopted and rejected the system of almost every philosopher from Descartes to Professor Ferrier.”
He had his faults like the rest of us, but not as many mean ones as most of us. He was hardly ever selfish or irritable or impatient: the elephant bides his time, though he never forgets. But Fiske was better than the elephant, in that he never harbored revenge. His few faults were “childlike and bland,” though, unlike those of the accepted exemplar of those virtues, never deceitful, and to a great extent they were forced upon him by circumstances, and of course were “faults of his qualities”—of a mind that could not hold itself down to the business of life. But take him by and large—and he was so very large—he was not only a very great man, but a very good man. Yet he was not, nor was ever anybody else, such a man as biographers necessarily depict if they write while there are still living those whom the whole truth could hurt.
But our present biographer has not even brought out, except as they show themselves by implication, some of Fiske’s remarkable virtues. During an acquaintance of very exceptional intimacy, I never heard him curse any human being or speak of one with merciless hate. Of one who, he thought, had injured him unjustifiably and cruelly, he generally made fun; of another, who presented fewer temptations to burlesque, he often spoke admiringly, and perhaps less often with a sarcasm doubly powerful because judicial.
He had absolutely no pride of intellect: partly, perhaps, because from childhood he naturally kept himself, by his chosen reading, in contact with the greatest intellects, and so was never struck with the greatness of his own. We had not been out of college long, and I had not made much progress out of the average new A. B.’s worship of intellect, when, as we were speaking of a common friend, I said something to the effect that I wished he had more brains (I now suspect that he had more than I had) when Fiske, who had more than both of us, made a few remarks, very kind though very instructive, on the superiority to mere intellectual power, of goodness, sympathy, and refinement. Once with a friend unknown to fame, who seemed a mere pigmy beside him, he had had a long talk with one of the world’s greatest men, and Fiske was heard to say that he was struck throughout by the fact that his obscure friend showed more intelligence than he did. The fact probably was that his friend’s intelligence really was quicker than the elephantine but irresistible movements of Fiske’s great mind. But Fiske did not think of his own power, but only of the agility of his friend. The friend subsequently said that he supposed he had understood all that was in the books of his two companions, but he certainly did not understand all that was in their talk—the talk in which Fiske had ascribed to himself the less intelligence. Another illustration: many years ago, when Taine was on the lips of all American readers, Fiske said: “He’s a sort of big John Fiske—a diffuser of other men’s ideas, without ever having originated an idea himself.” Probably this was before Fiske had developed his own idea, generally recognized as original, of the effect of long infancy in evolving the higher qualities of a species.
Yet Fiske’s distinction between finders and diffusers is not necessarily as modest as, at first sight, it appears, and certainly not as simple. Newton, Darwin, Spencer, and their kind undoubtedly form a very respectable group, but so do St. Paul and all the great apostles of all the faiths, not to speak of the historians. And on which side of the line, if you run it through all writers, will you put Homer, Dante, and Shakespear?