The Shining Faces

Henry Adams had damned the place with the faintest of praise. "Harvard College," he wrote, "was probably less hurtful than any other university ... It taught little, and that little ill, but it left the mind open, free from bias, ignorant of facts, but docile . . ." In effect, "the school created a type but not a will. Four years of Harvard College, if successful, resulted in an autobiographical blank, a mind on which only a watermark had been stamped."

Adams graduated from Harvard in 1858, and returned to the Yard as a professor in 1870. Though he did not know it, and would probably have been scandalized to hear it, he was teaching in what has since come to be regarded as the beginning of Harvard's golden age. Last week, present-day readers could catch a little of the shine of that era through a new book by onetime Harvard Lecturer Rollo Walter Brown (Harvard Yard in the Golden Age; A. A. Wyn, $2.50).

The Big Names. It was, for the most part, the age of Charles W. Eliot, for 40 years (1869-1909) Harvard's president and the grand seigneur of U.S. education. He was an erect and lofty gentleman, who "always had a fight on my hands," and who could be both imperious and impatient in waging it. "Do you suppose," an awed acquaintance once whispered to a colleague, "that anyone has ever called him Charley?"

But Harvard was great as much for its professors as for its president. There was George Santayana, the strange Spaniard who complained as much about Harvard and "the taste of academic straw" as Adams did.. There was Barrett Wendell, who looked as if he might have stepped out of the court of Queen Elizabeth; pudgy Josiah Royce ("the Rubens of Philosophy," William James called him); and Philosopher George Herbert Palmer, who once told a student: "It will hurt nothing at your age to have a nervous breakdown. As a matter of fact, I sometimes think it would be a good thing . . ." And there was Charles Eliot Norton, the unappeasable pursuer of beauty. After his death, students guessed that he, would enter Heaven shading his eyes against the glare and protesting: "Oh! Oh! Oh! So overdone! So garish! So Renaissance!"

The Undisciplinables. It was certainly the golden age of Harvard philosophers--and the greatest of them all was William James. He had wandered from art to medicine, to psychology ("The first lecture on psychology I ever heard being the first I ever gave"), and then finally to philosophy. He was forever reading the books of unknown authors, or listening to the lectures of his juniors, lest he overlook some undiscovered genius. He detested "educated cleverness in the service of popular idols and vulgar ends." As a teacher, he preferred thinkers of another sort: "Our undisciplinables are our proudest product."

To the caustic Santayana, Charles Townsend Copeland was a mere "elocutionist" who provided a "spiritual debauch [for] many well-disposed waifs at Harvard." Copey's well-disposed waifs felt otherwise. A shrunken little man, with an actor's sense of staging, he brought literature to life for thousands of students. When the announcement went up for one of his readings, students would line the streets outside his hall. Then Copey would enter, order the doors to be locked, spend minutes adjusting his lamp, listen disdainfully for the audience to swallow its coughs, and finally begin. Over the years, those readings became a Harvard institution--long after Copey began to feel old ("Do you suppose I am ever to be well again? You must remember that I am 63 . . ."), and long after he retired ("I am 82 years old--God damn it!").

A Mad Lear. Copey had one great rival in the English department--George Lyman Kittredge. He was a stormy lecturer, now prancing across his dais like a mad Lear, now hurling his pointer across the room as if it were a spear. When someone asked him how long it took him to prepare a lecture, he answered, "Just a lifetime--can't you see that?" If a student fearfully quoted the dictionary pronunciation of a word to him, Kitty would whip out an old envelope to jot it down. "That's wrong," he would murmur, "I'll see that that is changed." Once a woman asked him why he had never taken a Ph.D. "Who," replied Kitty in all seriousness, "would have examined me?"

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