The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I

by William James Stillman

And Agassiz's disposition was as generous as large. He had absolutely no scientific jealousy or sectarian feeling. The rancor which was shown him by some of the Darwinians never disturbed his serenity an instant; for of the world's opinion of him and his ideas, even when the "world" was scientific, he never took account other than to regret that science was the loser, by running off on what he considered side issues. We had much conversation on the question of evolution and allied topics, in which my part was naturally that of listener and only occasional questioner, and I remember the warm appreciation he always expressed for Darwin and his researches, for his fineness of observation and scientific honesty. He regarded the widespread acceptance of the theory of natural selection as one of the epidemics which have swept the scientific world from time to time, and looked with absolute serenity to the return of science one day to the conception of creation by design.

I am neither qualified nor disposed to pass judgment on Agassiz as a scientist, or institute any kind of comparison of his relative authority, and probably the time is far away at which his comparative eminence can be estimated impartially. I have only to do with his personality as it appeared to me in our relations, and, as the latest survivor of those who enjoyed that greenwood intimacy, to put on record my impression of the great, lovable, magnanimous man. Of his unbounded generosity and indifference to personal advantage, his freedom from scientific jealousy, everybody who came in contact with him was witness. He refused all offers of emolument from any quarter, and spent all his surplus earnings for the aggrandizement of the great natural-history museum he founded at Cambridge. The propositions of the Emperor Napoleon III. he had declined with thanks as soon as made, and without a thought. He had come to America to study natural history, and did not propose to be diverted from this purpose. To a lecturing agent who offered him a very large sum for delivering a course of lectures in the principal cities of the Union, he replied that he had no time to make money; and he died of overwork, insatiate in the pursuit of the completion of his museum and the classification of his observations. I have heard him speak with pain of the animosity shown him by a Swiss associate in his glacial investigations, who had once been his warm advocate, but there was no bitterness in his manner. I am convinced that there was no bitterness in him, and that all personal feeling was overshadowed and minimized by his absolute devotion to scientific truth, with his loyalty to which nothing ever interfered.

His influence even on the business men of the city of Boston and the legislature of the State of Massachusetts was the most remarkable phenomenon of the kind ever witnessed in that frugal and matter-of-fact community, for he had only to announce that he wanted for his museum or department in the University a donation or an appropriation, to obtain either, so absolutely recognized was his unselfish devotion to science by all classes. There are few of us left who can remember the sudden shadow that fell on our community at his unexpected death, and the universal grief that told of the hold he had on the entire nation; and the mourning extended far beyond the circle of personal acquaintance with Agassiz. Even men who had no interest in physical science took it into consideration on account of him, carried away by his enthusiastic advocacy of its advancement. The religious world forgot the indignation at his repudiation of Adam in the refuge it found from absolute atheism in his affirmation of a Supreme Intelligence, as Creator of all things, though to theological contentions he never gave the slightest consideration.

It is needless to say that this was the effect, not of scientific education or of the capacity in the great majority of those who accepted his position to judge of a theory or a scientific line of demonstration, but of the dominance of personal character in the man, his inflexible honesty and disinterestedness. The last time I saw him was when he came to make me a brief visit in a glen of the White Mountains, where I was encamped near a subject which I was painting, and which was in part composed of huge boulders, dropped in the gorge by a primeval glacier, and brought, perhaps, from beyond Lake Superior. He had then had the first attack of the brain trouble, from which he was recovering, and was making a mountain trip where he could, if possible, study and rest at once. But his want of common prudence in regard to overwork prevented his recovery, and he died just as he was beginning to elaborate his conclusions on the doctrine of evolution, for which he had a colossal plan, cut short in its opening. He was always too hurried in his work, as if he knew that his life would not suffice for its completion, if indeed completion were possible in such work, and he persisted in accumulation of material without pause either to coordinate his ideas or to rest and reflect. I one day said to him that I was intending to write a little book, and he exclaimed: "Oh, I wish I had time to write a little book! All my books come large, and I have not the time to condense them."

CHAPTER XIV

LOWELL

The third magnate of our Club was Lowell, with whose personality the world at large is already well acquainted. In his own day and presence it was impossible to form a satisfactory personal judgment of him, and even now, through the perspective of the years since he died, it is out of the question for me to pronounce a dispassionate judgment. Of all that New England world, so hospitable, so brotherly to me that if I had been born in Cambridge it could hardly have been more kind, Lowell and Norton were those who most made my welcome free from any embarrassment to myself. Norton, almost exactly my contemporary, is still living, and which of us two shall say the last word for the other is in the lap of the gods, but in the Adirondack Club life he does not appear. No kinder or wiser friend have I ever had. Himself the son of one of the most distinguished of the great Unitarian leaders of liberal New England, his broad, common-sense views of sectarian questions first widened my religious horizon, emancipated me from the tithes of mint and cummin, and helped me to see the value of observances, and his hand was always held out to me in those straitened moments in which my impulsive and ill-regulated manner of life continually landed me. I shall not disturb the serenity of his old age by the indiscreet garrulity of mine. But the brotherhood between him and Lowell brought our lives together, and Lowell was the pole to which both our needles swung. Norton's delicate health made it impossible for him to take part in the excursions made by the Club, though he was enrolled as a member.

Of Lowell much has been said by many people, some of whom were less, and others, perhaps, better acquainted with him than I was, but of him I can speak at least without restraint, other than that which love and gratitude impose. And to-day, more than forty years since I found his friendship what it ever remained, the judgment I formed of him at first acquaintance comes up again in one point dominant. He seemed to me a man whom good fortune, and especially the favor of society, had prevented from filling the rôle that fate had intended for him. There was in not a few of his poems the promise of reaching a height which was attainable only to a man who climbs light. There was in him the possible making of a great reformer, an evangelist, which possibility never became actuality, owing to the weight which social success laid on him.

All through his early poems runs the thread of a fine morality, the perception of the highest obligations of religion and philanthropy, the subtle distinction of the purest Christianity, the defense of the weak and oppressed, the succor of the poor; in fine, the creed of a practical religion which required its adherent to go into the slums and out on the highways to carry out his convictions in acts. In the warfare he waged on slavery when the anti-slavery cause was very unpopular, and, in the case of Garrison and others, brought on its advocates continual danger and occasional violence, Lowell was unsparing in the denunciation of the national sin; but whether because the anti-abolition public which ruled Boston thought denunciation in form of verse had no practical value, or because the personal fascination the man always exercised on all around him was such as to disarm hostility, it happened that he was never made the object of aggression.

"Men called him but a shiftless youth,
In whom no good they saw;
And yet, unwittingly, in truth,
They made his careless word their law.