Barrett Wendell: New England orderly idealist.

THE OBSCURITY OF INTELLECTUALS comes in two basic varieties: justifiable and unjustifiable. The former are trapped in the contexts of their own times, whose ideas cease to resonate far after their deaths. The grave is the end and they are remembered, if at all, in anecdotes and footnotes. Not answering the enduring questions, their obscurity is well-deserved. The latter are, however, forgotten sometimes deliberately as men who had written and said important things, but whose message ran against the grain of their times. As that message was often critical of fashionable intellectual or cultural trends, it was waived aside as crankiness or oddity. Obscurity functioned as a kind of revenge or punishment. But their message spoke beyond its immediate context, said interesting things about former and future times, and deserves rediscovery. This obscurity is unfortunate but reversible.

Barrett Wendell (1855-1921), for thirty-seven years a professor of English at Harvard College, ranks as an undeservedly obscure American "Man of Letters." He interpreted the nation's past through what he called its twofold character--one part Puritan and theocratic, the other part legal and based in English common law--and he brought that understanding into the contentious Progressive Era, harshly condemning those who defied America's traditions and origins. A thoroughgoing conservative and self-described Tory reactionary, he often felt a man apart, whose ideas had either "seen their day" or were, ironically, so orthodox as to be unorthodox in a radical age.

As a Harvard professor with the likes of colleagues Irving Babbitt and George Santayana, Wendell was wildly successful, having a "real and direct" impact in influencing a generation of important writers and poets from his classroom. (1) While never the mentor of creative talent like Robert Frost, John Dos Passos, or T.S. Eliot--all students during Wendell's Harvard era--Wendell helped to define an enduring literary tradition. His skepticism of juvenile literary eccentricity and his despairing opinion of an emerging democracy marked a path for others to follow and to expand upon in poetry and prose. A representative of an under-appreciated New England conservative tradition in American letters--what he dubbed "orderly idealism"--Wendell merits reconsideration.

Wendell was born in August 1855 to a wealthy mercantile family with roots deep in New England history. He was descended from Dutch traders who settled around Albany, New York, in the 1640s and eventually emigrated to Massachusetts and New Hampshire by the early 1700s. Beginning poor but armed with a good family name, his paternal grandfather was a self-made man, who made money privateering in the War of 1812 but lost it all through bad manufacturing investments in the 1820s. Wendell's father, therefore, had to begin in similar poverty, and worked his way up the economic and social ladder as an agent for major New England textile mills in the 1840s and 1850s. By the time he married and began having a family, he had acquired both a name and a large fortune. (2)

During the Civil War, the Wendells moved briefly to New York, a transition the young Wendell despised. He, like any good New Englander, found New York cold, forbidding, and lacking the humanity of Boston. "[T]here was something depressingly monotonous, though, in the unbroken vistas of the rectangular streets, and something inhuman in the fact that they were not named but numbered," he later recalled. "Compared to Boston, I can now see, it was surging with growth, which means incessant change; and change I have never found instinctively sympathetic." (3) The Wendell family also frequently traveled to Europe--between the ages of 13 and 19 (1868-1874), young Barrett visited England and the Continent three times. Here, he always felt at home. Like Henry James, Henry Adams, and other disillusioned writers of that era, Wendell was inspired by the ruins, cathedrals, and romantic past of Europe, a past America glaringly lacked. His longing for Europe, however, did not lead him to forsake the United States. Boston and Europe would be Wendell's cultural guideposts for the rest of his life.

He entered Harvard in 1872, dropped out when his health gave way (Wendell was continually in fragile mental and physical health), and eventually re-enrolled, graduating with the class of 1877. As a student, Wendell struck observers as a bookish fop, "somewhat radical, or rather iconoclastic, in temperament." He spoke with a British accent, dressed in fashionable British clothes, joined all the campus literary societies, and walked with a cane because of a bad back. Writing for the early Harvard Lampoon, he allied himself with the conservative and aristocratic elements at the College, taking joy in how many people he could annoy with his opinions. His writings, remarked one biographer, "reveal a somewhat world-weary young man, both consciously and unconsciously clever, evidently fond of saying smart, 'snobbish,' and--to the more conventionally minded--irritating things, indulging himself freely in the venerable criticism of youth, and obviously enjoying it all to the full." (4) Such a habit, of shocking tender-minded opponents with controversial opinions, would follow Wendell his whole life.

After graduation and under pressure from his father, Wendell tried his hand at law, studying for the bar in both New York and Boston, at the latter with the law firm of a cousin, Oliver Wendell Holmes. But the experience depressed him, his health began to fail again, and he turned to Dante for solace. "I manage to lose myself in the smoky depths of hell for half an hour or so every evening," he wrote to a friend. "Hell has certainly given me more pleasure during the past two years than Heaven and Earth combined." (5) His misery and self-loathing were finally broken by three events in 1880: the beginning of a happy marriage to Edith Greenough, failure to pass the bar exam and refusal to consider any further attempt at law, and acceptance of a position teaching composition and literature at Harvard. (6)

At Harvard, Wendell became a popular teacher. Armed with his peculiar habits of speech and dress, as well as his conservative political views, he never failed to thrill or infuriate his classes. "Ready of tongue, addicted to repartee, he expressed himself in a staccato and much-inflected speech that was eminently his own--not the utterance of Oxford, yet much more English in its effect than American," recalled a former student. "Add to this distinctive characteristic such an easily imitable habit as the twirling of his watch-chain while addressing an audience, and it is no wonder that Barrett Wendell offered an irresistible temptation to the mimic in successive college generations." (7) Friend Stuart Sherman attended one of his Boston lectures around 1905: "He entered the room with a cane, in a cutaway coat and spats, with the air of an Anglicized Boston man of letters who had crossed the Charles to speak to the boys about life." (8) Another Harvard student remembered:

  His eccentricities of voice and manner, his humorous epigrammatic
  exaggerations, his willingness to shock the straitlaced with what they
  could not but regard as levity and irreverence, the facility with
  which he was imitated, the frequency with which some trifling or ill-
  advised remark of his in the classroom was torn from its contexts,
  colored by reporters, and sent broadcast, produced in many places the
  impression that he was a light-minded aristocrat whose conduct was
  quite out of keeping with his official position ... His pupils knew
  that he kept nothing back, that he was never warily on his guard, that
  they had whatever was in Barrett Wendell's mind, and that the mind was
  fertile, original, and bold.

One former assistant viewed Wendell as a shaper of minds: "to all but an insignificant few he was a vitalizing influence, because he taught them how to use their brains ... that knowledge must be a part of life, that it must be used, wrought into the texture of being, and become the source of impulse." (9) As a result, Wendell's Harvard office at "Grays 18" welcomed a constant stream of students seeking advice and counsel. Old pupils continued to write to him on literature and events of the day long after their graduation.

Wendell's Harvard years were also marked by prolific writing. He tried his hand at novels in the 1880s, publishing The Duchess Emilia (1885) and Rankell's Remains (1887), but with little success--biographer Robert T. Self rightly called him a "frustrated artist." (10) Failing at this, he instead turned his attention toward American history and literary criticism. His English Composition (1891) reported his experiences as a Harvard composition teacher, remained in print until the 1940s, and was a standard textbook for generations of American college students. That same year he published Cotton Mather (1891), a sympathetic biography of the "Puritan priest" that shocked liberal-minded, Unitarian Victorians who had for years used Mather as a seventeenth-century conservative foil, complicit in the heinously intolerant Salem Witch Trials and representative of everything nineteenth-century Bostonians had rebelled against. In some ways, Cotton Mather was Wendell's Mont Michel et Chartres--his historical counter to the grubbiness of modernity,--replacing Henry Adams's high altar and Gothic stained-glass windows with the pulpit, white walls, and clear light of a Congregational Church.

A much-requested public speaker, he also began the habit of bundling his addresses and publishing them as books. Stelligeri (1893) touched on everything from the Witch Trials (where he, with obvious relish, declared that the condemned "deserved their hanging") to the poet John Greenleaf Whittier ("perhaps the least irritating of reformers"). (11) His crowning achievement came in 1900 with publication of A Literary History of America, a long and controversial consideration of American national character--covering everything from Puritanism to the Revolution to the various writers and movements of the nineteenth century as seen through its literature. Of the book, Wendell wrote the philosopher William James, "In sentiment it is Tory, pro-slavery, and imperialistic; all of which I fear I am myself. I love the memory of Cotton Mather, and should be happier in a world that hadn't been graced by [William Ellery] Channing or Emerson." (12)

Wendell's reputation as a writer now secure and armed with his promotion to full Harvard professor (despite the fact that he never earned a doctorate), he began to gain fame internationally. After publication of The Temper of the Seventeenth Century in English Literature (1904), which was a series of addresses he delivered at Cambridge University in 1902-1903, he lectured for a year at the Sorbonne on the topic "American Ideas and Institutions." Some of these essays were collected in a book called Liberty, Union, and Democracy (1906), as were his much-heralded observations of French society France of Today (1907). Another collection of addresses, The Privileged Classes (1908) brought down a considerable storm of protest on Wendell's head for his reactionary political views, as did his rather dim view of American schooling in The Mystery of Education (1909).

Wendell's writing and speaking schedule lightened after 1914 when his health began to fail. After retirement in 1917, his only major publication was The Tradition of European Literature from Homer to Dante (1920), which built heavily upon his Harvard lectures of the previous twenty years. Wendell died of pneumonia at the age of sixty-five in February 1921. In the years after his death, biographers have been few. His ex-student Mark A. DeWolfe Howe culled Wendell's letters and offered a very sympathetic biography in 1924. Other former students also published a volume of essays in his honor in 1926 and even H.L. Mencken pondered Wendell, whom he dubbed half in jest and half in admiration as the "last of the New Englanders," in the fifth of his Prejudices. (13) Former student Van Wyck Brooks mentioned Wendell in his scathing overview of post-Civil War New England intellectual life, New England: Indian Summer, 1865-1915, and portrayed him as an unhappy anti-modernist skeptical of American ideals and totally out-of-step with the more progressive times. (14) Ex-colleague George Santayana gave a brief, rather friendly portrait of Wendell in his three volume autobiography, praising him for improving American writing and working hard to prevent the "steam-roller of industrial democracy" from ruining the liberal arts tradition of old Harvard. "We were on the same side of the barricade," the Spanish-American philosopher remembered. (15) After that, Wendell had to wait until the 1970s when Robert T. Self wrote a short biography for the Twayne series of literary biographies and republished several of Wendell's essays. (16) Besides that, Wendell has gone largely unconsidered.

For Barrett Wendell, at the heart of American character and institutions was the story of "great national inexperience," a lack of crowded populations, material want, and autocratic governments that typified European life for centuries. Without this experience, America developed differently. But that difference was, literally, a conservative one; without the pressures of modernization upsetting Europe, America was able to conserve the spirit and ideas of its original settlers. "Remote from the great world, the American colonies preserved, in somewhat fading colours, traditions that England had outgrown." (17) These traditions were, as he calls them, Elizabethan: "spontaneity, enthusiasm, and versatility." (18) They could also be seen in English literature circa 1600, "those years were years of exploration, of experiment, of spontaneous, enthusiastic, versatile eagerness to discover the mysteries which lurked, wherever the bodies or the souls of men might stray, beyond the bounds of the horizon." (19) This essential spirit marked the American colonies in their initial years, but never radically changed--he refers to seventeenth-century America as "a period of almost stationary national temper." (20)

England exploded into civil war, the Commonwealth, the Restoration, and the Glorious Revolution. The English mind of 1700 was fundamentally different from that of 1600, while America, relatively remote from these disturbances, remained an Elizabethan colony on the Atlantic periphery. "[T]he native Yankees of 1700 were incalculably nearer their Elizabethan ancestors than were any of their contemporaries born in the mother country." (21) Thus America and England, beginning as one mind and character, slowly diverged over time. This fact helps explain Anglo-American political problems over the next two centuries, a growing divide which Wendell found deeply tragic.

Despite this, Wendell continually emphasizes that the American mind is fundamentally British and built on two firm foundations: Biblical right based on the King James Version and historic British rights based on English common law. America is most at peace when it is able to balance right with rights. He saw this balance in New England Puritanism. "[Puritan] emigration was impelled by the fervent spirit of their faith. It was no such abstract love of ideal liberty as the superstitious traditions of our later democracy have fondly ascribed to them, which led them painfully to seek refuge in what Cotton Mather fitly called the solitudes of an American desert. The true impulse which founded New England was a hope that, in the unhampered wilderness of a virgin continent, the Puritans might so adjust their lives that right and rights should agree as nowhere else on earth." (22) New England Puritans were no revolutionaries.

Unique to his time, Wendell portrayed Puritanism in a remarkably positive light. Like many intellectuals of his day, unhappy with the pace and the shape of modern industrial America, he searched for a "usable past," a tradition, history, or place in time where society was better ordered and men lived civilized rather than barren barbaric lives. Once found and described, this past acted as a shaming example on how far modern life had deviated from its meaningful origins, a model for possible redemption, and an intellectual escape from dreary, industrial, "progressive" modernity. Some found this past in European Catholicism, medieval society, and Gothic aesthetics. Wendell found this past in the austere Puritan New England of his ancestors. Thus for Wendell, a fiercely proud New Englander, American character and history contained New England writ large.

Beginning with a pessimistic Calvinist theology of human depravity and the "insidious weakness of humanity," Puritans eagerly attempted to decipher the mind of God and reveal who among them could expect the selective gift of grace and membership in God's elect. (23) Puritan life was thus one of "passionate aspirations, ecstatic enthusiasms, [and] profound discouragements." (24) What at first glance looked like a grim faith was in fact one of tremendous inner vigor. "A strangely tense life it shows us, dull and trivial externally, commonplace in phrase, but in its essence idealistic." (25) He added in The Temper of the Seventeenth Century in English Literature:

  There are few more wonderful experiences possible than that which will
  come to you if you have patience to pore over some musty, crabbed
  Puritan sermon until the words begin to swim, as their meaning begins
  to fade even beyond its harsh obscurities, and, of a sudden, you are
  aware that this is only another daring, futile, fleeting effort to
  express in the passing terms of earth an ecstatic sense of the eternal
  mysteries above--those mysteries amid whose glories the spirits of the
  saints may triumphantly and securely emerge from the errors and
  distortions of corrupt human will into everlasting communion with the
  vast justice and mercy of Omnipotence. (26)

This vigorous Puritan idealism and striving to know the mind of God led to a remarkably creative spiritual imagination combined with increasing material wealth. "What puzzles posterity about it is how so profoundly fatalistic a creed could possibly prove a motive power strong enough to result not only in individual lives but in a corporate life that was destined to grow into a national life, of passionate enthusiasm, and of abnormal moral as well as material activity." The key to this twofold growth resided in the Puritan search to identify the elect in their community, doing right, and the "ability to exert the will in true harmony with the will of God." (27) These were all drives to better both the understanding and the individual's place in this world and the next. Puritanism drove men to self-improvement.

Puritanism also had important social implications: "It always had a singular power of comforting people who had failed to prosper on earth and were disposed to envy those who had succeeded; for if amid the most humiliating misfortune, or the deepest personal obscurity, a man could honestly feel himself assured of salvation, he could look with grim humor at the passing pageant and triumph of those whose infernal sufferings should presently and permanently enhance his saintly joy." (28) Orthodox Puritanism acted as a theological safety valve for the unhappy and discontented. As a system of thought, it had lasting appeal to winners and losers--winners (the elect) deserved their spiritual and material prosperity because they were God's chosen, losers could rest assured that the elect were gravely mistaken and that they would get their just deserts in the great beyond.

In addition to being richly idealistic and imaginative, Puritanism was also "supremely orderly," placing a high emphasis on station, place, and the reality of human inequality. If salvation is better than damnation (obviously, yes) and those who are saved are "better" in the eyes of God, the elect most certainly should occupy a higher place here on earth. Thus Calvinist theories of predestination implied an earthly aristocracy reflecting the gift of God's grace.

  [T]he Calvinists believed, you might always be assured, that in every
  human region there are a few men who are essentially better than the
  mass of their fellows; and such superiority as this is not a matter of
  accident, of delusion, or of contradiction to the essential will of
  our common Father in Heaven. On the contrary, it is the most venerable
  earthly manifestation of His grace ... In both the human order and the
  divine, most of us are bound to have our betters. And among the
  deepest phases of Puritan conviction was the certain assurance that
  when by any process of seeking we can discover here on earth one who
  is truly and justly among these betters, it is our constant duty not
  to belittle him with all the spite of envy, hatred, and malice, but
  rather reverently to thank God that here is something nobler than such
  as we. (29)

Several things followed from this. First, a theology of natural inequality and aristocracy in place since America's origins showed that egalitarianism was alien to this country. (30) Second, this Puritan aristocracy was not necessarily hereditary: sons of saints could easily be sinners. Instead, it was the beginning of an American meritocracy. In other words, the elect could come from anywhere and not recognizing them was a terrible blunder. (31) Third, this helps explain the early New England promotion of public education. If a member of God's elect can come from any class, "To leave him in ignorance would be to limit the chance of his usefulness ... It had pleased the Lord to sow a little wheat among the tares. It was best for men that they should be able to reap and to harvest as much as might be of what the Lord had sown." (32) This combination of intense Puritan imaginative life and Calvinist theories of predestination at the origins of New England signaled for Wendell that America's national character was based in "orderly idealism."

As a richly idealistic, socially soothing, orderly theology that accounted for humans' success in this world and the next, Wendell saw in Puritanism a lasting creed that remained appealing to Progressive-era Americans. Whereas New England Puritans spoke of an elect who enjoyed spiritual and material riches as God's chosen, men in Wendell's time spoke of a new elect who enjoyed life's riches by prevailing in the competition of life. What is the Puritan theory of the elect, Wendell asked, but the seventeenth-century version of Social Darwinism? He began making this connection early in his work, first in Stelligeri: "What Calvinism regarded as evidence of the total depravity of man, indeed, is very like what modern science calls the struggle for existence. What it regarded as evidence for the doctrine of election is very like what people have in mind nowadays when they talk about the survival of the fittest." (33) As he meditated more on American character--sounding similar to his contemporary Max Weber connecting Protestantism and modern capitalism--Wendell drew the thread between Puritanism and evolutionary thought in more detail:

  Earthly life, the modern evolutionists hold, consists in a struggle
  for existence wherein only the fittest can survive; for every organism
  which persists, myriads must irretrievably perish ... [W]hat Augustine
  and Calvin saw, in the human affairs whence each alike inferred the
  systems of Heaven and Hell, was really what the modern evolutionists
  perceive in every aspect of Nature. Total depravity is only a
  theological name for that phase of life which in less imaginative
  times we name the struggle for existence; and likewise election is
  only a theological name for what our newer fashion calls the survival
  of the fittest. Old-world theology and modern science alike strive to
  explain facts which have been and shall be so long as humanity casts
  its shadow in the sunshine. (34)

The Puritans, long condemned for their harsh theology, were on to something. They saw the struggles of life as a theological tale; we see the struggle of life as a scientific one. Yet their perception of life was not markedly different from our own.

  Any creed, to live, must accord with the facts of human experience; or
  at least must not flatly contradict them. At first sight, the
  transcendental dogmas of the Puritans may seem as remote from the
  actualities of life as were the heavens or the hells where they were
  held to work themselves out ... There is a struggle everywhere for
  existence; and only the fittest few can ever survive. So in terms
  which are themselves beginning to stiffen into cant, we moderns have
  attempted to generalize into the simplicity of comprehensible truth
  the complexities which bewilder each fresh gazer on the phenomena of
  human existence. And thus generalizing, we find ourselves, when we
  stop to consider what we mean, almost at one with the Puritans after
  all. They phrased their theologies in the mystic terms of other worlds
  than ours; their depravity and their election were matters of God's
  justice and grace, not of what we call the laws of Nature. Yet the
  facts on which these dogmas were really based are just the facts which
  we call the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest.
  Throughout Nature, if one organism shall live myriads must perish. And
  one deep reason for the tenacity of Calvinism lies in the certainty
  that as you strip it of its technicalities and its mysticisms, it
  proves more and more to accord with the processes of earthly life as
  these reveal themselves to the cool scrutiny of science. (35)

Modern Americans think Puritanism a dead religious creed, but in truth the old New England religion not only remained a vital understanding of human nature but accorded well with advances in modern evolutionary science. Cotton Mather and William Graham Sumner saw the same thing but explained it in different ways. Rescued from Unitarians who saw Calvinism as grim pessimism and from agnostic Victorians who saw it as silly superstition and fear, Wendell's Puritanism became a usable American past, not something to be closeted and forgotten in shame.

His ideas on American character and history traveled to a wider audience through his books and generations of Harvard students. In fact, the similarities between Wendell and T.S. Eliot are at times striking. Wendell prophesied democracy was entering a period of decadence, qualitatively different from the quasi-aristocratic mixed democracy of former times. As early as 1892, Wendell warned of the "terribly disheartening" record of democracy and that it was the "sworn foe of excellence." "No man can excel without making other men seem less in comparison. And whatever tends toward inequality, without which no excellence can be, arouses the spirit of democracy to fierce rebellion." (36) Writing to a friend three years later, he lamented:

  Democracy, in old world or new, seems little better than a caricature
  of government. Power, wherever it reside, seems bound to develop the
  hateful traits of human nature--tyranny, dishonesty, petty baseness,
  corruption. In a government of the better classes, at least those
  traits are balanced by certain external graces and dignity, and often
  by some sense of personal consequence which is at least impressive if
  not admirable. In any democracy they are at their worst. In America
  generally the better classes have renounced public life altogether--
  with certain exceptions, of course. The country is doubtless the worse
  for it; individuals, I rather think, the better, for they are freed
  from almost inevitable temptation to serve from ideals, and from truth
  of word and deed. After all, I often think nowadays, the best comment
  on democracy ever written is Coriolanus. The pity of it all is that we
  can't escape the evil. (37)

That democracy was increasingly corrupt and that Shakespeare's play Coriolanus was the best portrayal of democracy's doom was a frequent Wendell refrain. In his small 1894 book on Shakespeare, he complimented the playwright for describing the "people" with "ultimate precision." In this play, "the mob, unreasoning, turbulent, capricious as ever, becomes a devouring monster. It no longer contents itself with transferring power; it seizes power for itself, and once possessed of power behaves with suicidal unreason." (38) Mobs hate excellence. "Nowhere can we feel more distinctly why to some modern philanthropic dreamers Shakspere, for all his art, presents himself as a colossal enemy, as a tradition which advancing Humanity ought ruthlessly to overthrow. For, very surely, no work in literature more truly and unflinchingly expounds the inherent danger and evil of democracy; nor does any show less recognition of the numerous benefits which our century believes to counterbalance them." (39) The turmoil of the 1912 American presidential election brought Coriolanus to mind yet again for Wendell:

  That this is a naughty world is beyond dispute. That some human beings
  are less naughty than others is a tenable proposition. That the least
  naughty are those who are least disposed to vaunt the virtues of
  humanity seems to me certain. Wherefore to find in the heart of
  democracy just the meannesses of which those who practice them believe
  their comparatively innocent betters to be guilty brings me ironic
  consolation. It was the vices of others which brought Marie
  Antoinette, whom they could not dream nobler than they, to her heroic
  test. In a vulgar way, it is such baseness in our people which makes
  them, translating themselves into terms above them, believe our
  strongest and best men corrupt. All of which is in Coriolanus. (40)

These concerns mirror Eliot rather strikingly, especially in the latter's choice to write his own poetic lament for liberal democracy in 1931 called Coriolan. Professor Herbert Howarth went so far as to write: "in [Wendell's] own country he thought he perceived a value in playing the autocrat. At the least it forced people, especially students, with whom he was mainly concerned, to remeasure their values. Did his example encourage Eliot on the way to the conservatism and royalism he was to acquire from the French?" (41) Wendell presented his condemnations as progressivism and direct democracy began to gather momentum; Eliot wrote his (in Coriolan and in his Idea of a Christian Society [1939], which is an extension of this critique) as liberal democracies in Europe began to totter in the 1920s and 1930s.

Wendell's commentary on literary tradition also closely resembles that of the later Eliot. For Wendell, originality and orthodoxy were not understood correctly. The one depended upon the other, and the best works of culture never divorce themselves entirely from those things they are reacting against. He wrote in Literary History of America:

  The development of human expression seems like the growth of a tree.
  The same vital force which sends the trunk heavenward, puts forth
  branches, and from these in turn sends forth twigs and leaves; but the
  further they stray from the root, the weaker they prove. The trunk
  lives, and the greater branches; year by year, the lesser twigs and
  leaves wither. Now, eccentricity of manner, however unavoidable, is
  apt to indicate that art has strayed dangerously far from its vital
  origin. Oddity is no part of solid artistic development; however
  beautiful or impressive, it is rather an excrescent outgrowth, bound
  to prove abortive, and at the same time to sap life from the parent
  stock which without it might grow more loftily and strongly. (42)

Eccentricity in the arts is most often a sign of weakness, said Wendell, echoing an earlier remark made by the British jurist James Fitzjames Stephen in Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (1873): "[T]he question is not of being orthodox, but of understanding orthodoxy," he wrote to a friend in 1906. "You touch on modern poets; you are quite right to do so. But every one of those poets had orthodoxy behind him, to break from. And the greatest of them--Shakespere--was remarkable in his own time for strict adherence to the best fashion of experience--in all respects--then prevalent. Technically he is almost unique for his lack of petty 'originality.' What makes him immortal is that he did best of all what all were doing." (43) Eliot's essay on "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1917) treads similar ground (as does that of Irving Babbitt in his chapter "On Being Original" from Literature and the American College [1909]). Eliot remarked that artists seeking to work within the traditions of the past must gain a "historical sense." Those relishing their oddity in defying traditions are profoundly off the mark and leave (or should leave) little lasting contribution. "One error, in fact, of eccentricity in poetry is to seek for new human emotions to express; and in this search for novelty in the wrong place it discovers the perverse." (44)

Wendell's contributions to an understanding of American character and origins are significant. He left a legacy in writings and admiring students that lasted long after his own death, marked out a unique path toward the "usable past" of New England Puritanism, and interpreted much of American history through the prism of "orderly idealism" and Cotton Mather's Calvinism. Fittingly, he called himself "the last of the Calvinists who wouldn't respect a maker that didn't damn us." (45) At the end of his life, looking back over many years of teaching and writing, he did not linger over politics, world travel, or friends in high places. For Barrett Wendell the reward came from another source. "I tried to make pupils read things, and not weight their unsteady heads with things that had been written about things--historic, linguistic, whatever else. My task as a Harvard teacher was to give glimpses of literature to men who would generally not be concerned with it in practical life. That I never forgot. Any scholar can help make scholars; but lots fail in the process to humanize. My real duty, as I saw it, was not scholarly but humane." (46)

1. Robert T. Self, Barrett Wendell (Boston, 1975), 9. 2. Mark A. DeWolfe Howe, Barrett Wendell and His Letters (Boston, 1924), 7-10. 3. Ibid, 13-14. 4. Ibid., 25; Self, Wendell, 32. 5. Howe, 30. 6. Ibid., 29, 35-38. 7. Ibid., 39-40. 8. Stuart P. Sherman, Critical Woodcuts (New York, 1927), 254. 9. Howe, 83-86. 10. Self, Wendell, 34. 11. Barrett Wendell, Stelligeri (New York, 1893), 83, 155. 12. Mark A. DeWolfe Howe, "A Packet of Wendell-James Letters," Scribner's Magazine, 84 (December 1928), 677-678. 13. Essays in Memory of Barrett Wendell, by his assistants (Cambridge, 1926); H. L. Mencken, Prejudices: Fifth Series (New York, 1926), 244-254. 14. Van Wyck Brooks, New England: Indian Summer, 1865-1915 ( Boston, 1940). 15. George Santayana, The Middle Span, Vol. II (New York, 1945), 172. 16. Barrett Wendell, Literature, Society, and Politics, ed. Robert T. Self. (St. Paul, 1977). 17. Wendell, Stelligeri, 118. 18. Wendell, Literary History, 19. 19. Barrett Wendell, The Temper of the Seventeenth Century in English Literature (New York, 1904), 43. 20. Ibid., 7-8. 21. Wendell, Literary History, 33. 22. Wendell, Temper, 235. 23. Ibid, 221. 24. Wendell, Literary History, 15-16. 25. Wendell, Stelligeri, 117. 26. Wendell, Temper, 228. 27. Wendell, Stelligeri, 50. 28. Wendell, Temper, 221. 29. Barrett Wendell, Liberty, Union, and Democracy (New York, 1906), 62-64. 30. Ibid., 64-65. 31. Ibid, 69-70. 32. Ibid, 71. 33. Wendell, Stelligeri, 119. 34. Wendell, Literary History, 16. 35. Wendell, Temper, 219-221. 36. Wendell, Stelligeri, 41. 37. Howe, Letters, 112-113. 38. Barrett Wendell, William Shakspere: A Study in Elizabethan Literature (New York, 1894), 329. 39. Ibid., 333. 40. Howe, Letters, 253. 41. Herbert Howarth, Notes on some Figures behind T.S. Eliot (Boston, 1964), 91. 42. Wendell, Literary History, 476. 43. Howe, Letters, 177-178. 44. T.S. Eliot, Selected Essays (New York, 1964), 4. 45. Howe, "A Packet of Letters," 682. 46. Howe, Letters, 326-327.

MICHAEL J. CONNOLLY teaches in the Department of Social Sciences at Purdue University North Central in Westville, Indiana.