The Dedication of Germanic Museum of Harvard University/Address by Edward Robinson

The Chairman: Ladies and Gentlemen, our enterprise has had from the beginning the kind assistance of a great many persons connected with the older established institutions of similar character in this neighborhood. It is my pleasant duty to express our gratitude especially to Mr. C. Howard Walker and to Professor Herbert Langford Warren for the assistance which they have rendered in installing the collection in its present quarters. It is natural that on this occasion we should turn for counsel to the oldest and most widely known institution of this character in our neighborhood, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and I have the pleasure of presenting to you its Director, Mr. Edward Robinson.

ADDRESS BY MR. EDWARD ROBINSON.

Mr. Chairman, Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen: It is a gracious and a graceful thought which has given the Museum of Fine Arts the opportunity of sharing with you in such an auspicious occasion as this, and I trust it comes as a symbol of that co-operation which should exist, and I hope always will exist, between the two institutions.

The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston is, in a sense, the foster-child of the University, for in the act of incorporation by which it was called into being in the year 1870, it was provided that three trustees should be appointed every year "by the President and Fellows of Harvard College, if said corporation makes such appointments," and I am pleased to say that "said corporation" has made such appointments without interruption since the foundation of the Museum. More than that, in the names of those who are known as its founders and who are included as the original body of trustees in the act of incorporation is that of the President of Harvard University—not ex officio, but as an indidivual, and it is as an individual that his counsel and his judgment have been of service to the Museum in the years of its growth up to the present time. Beginning as it did at the time when its only assets were its hopes, he has followed the history of the Museum, at first when it existed only on paper, then when it became the tenant of two rooms in the Boston Athenaeum, then when it had outgrown those rooms and moved to what was considered at that time a building which would last for generations in its service, and he has followed as others of its trustees have done, the history—I may almost say the marvelous history—of its development in that building so that the building has had to be increased twice, so that only a few years ago, less than a generation after it was started, he found it bursting its bonds in all directions. The collections are now multiplying in such a way and to such an extent that we are face to face with an entirely new problem, realizing that the land on which we stand, although we occupy but half of it at the present time, will be far too small for our purpose, knowing that at the present day we could fill that entire lot of land with things in our possession if we had the building available, so that a new life is starting out for the institution and we stand at the threshold between the parting of the old and the new generation in its development. I speak of it now because I look forward—and we all look forward—to that development as a new means of bringing about co-operation with Harvard University, as a new opportunity of serving Harvard University as Harvard University has helped us.

It may interest you to know—I think it is a significant fact—that in connection with the plans for the new building which are now in course of preparation each curator and each head of a department has been asked to work out for himself his ideal of the needs of his department, to put that into definite shape and to hand it over to the architects to be carried out in concrete form so far as may be practicable. Now, it has turned out that, although each one of those gentlemen has worked independently and often without the knowledge of his companion as to what his plans were to be, in every case—I think I am right in saying in every case—among the requirements which were stated as part of the necessities of the new building was a small class room in connection with the curator's office. In other words, the curators look forward there to doing the work of teaching as well as the work of displaying,—of making the Museum in the future more and more, as time goes on, an active force in education. In that way we hope that it will supplement the work that is done at Harvard, and we look with the greater rejoicing upon the work which Harvard is doing now to supplement our own, in that spirit of co-operation of which I have spoken, with the desire not to run parallel lines of rivalry or of emulation, but each doing its part as best it can, each suiting its work to the work of the other, so that the two institutions may henceforth go forward as two parts of one whole.

And so it is aside from the work that we know that the Germanic Museum will do for Harvard that we welcome the more its existence with the prospects—so brilliant at present—of its rapid growth and development in the future, because it will be just another instance of that co-operation. With its superb collection of casts and reproductions now in hand and still to come, it will save us the necessity of representing Germanic—or, let me say in this case, German—art as extensively as we should otherwise have felt it necessary to do. We can refer our students now to the Germanic Museum of Harvard College, and we shall have so much of our resources to put into other fields of work where Harvard is not strong and where she may naturally look to the Museum of Fine Arts for aid in supplementing her own work.

So that I look forward with joy and with hope to the constant growth of this spirit of co-operation between the two institutions; and as we go on, in Boston, preparing larger and larger collections of works of art of all ages open to the students here, so, in Cambridge, the community will be educated to a greater appreciation of the meaning of those works of art, of the part they should play in the life of the community, and of the educational value which they have to every young man who looks toward the higher ideals of life in this country.

It is, however not of the Museum of Fine Arts that I am called upon to speak this afternoon. It is not that which is in our thoughts, but the celebration of the opening of the Germanic Museum here and what it means to the University and to the community, and I should like to say a word about that.

When Dean Stanley was in this country, he delivered an address at the Century Club, almost twenty-five years ago to a day, in the course of which he told, in language which no one could reproduce, of the impression which the first view of Niagara had made upon him. He saw it first at midnight, from the upper suspension bridge, and he said that in the ever-varying movement, in the everlasting sound of the contortion, of the confusion, of the whirl and the chaos of the mighty cataract he saw the emblem of the all-devouring activity, the ceaseless and restless whirlpool of life in America; and then he added, “In the moonlit sky there arose from the falls a column of spray twice as high as the falls themselves, silent, majestic and immovable; and in that I saw the image of the future destiny of America, the pillar of light that should emerge from the destruction of the present.” Had he chosen to carry his figure further, he might have spoken of the emblem that Niagara would represent to him of the two sides of the American character as we find them in the nation as a whole and in so many individuals in that nation: on the one hand the strong, all-powerful, devouring materialism, rushing on and rushing—we all know—so much faster to-day than it did twenty-five years ago when Dean Stanley spoke, carrying everything before it, in its motion downwards; and, side by side with that, standing in front of it, the idealism, the ideal spirit of America rising as a constant reminder in front of the other of the high source from which it had its origin. There is no doubt, I think, to which of those two sides every university should address itself. If the young men of our country, having that ideal to start with, are not taught to believe here that that is the true side of life, that it is the ideal point of view that they must keep in mind as sons of the university, then where, in heaven's name, are they to learn it? It is the university which, more than all—which perhaps alone of all the forces that we have at present for the development of our character—can keep its hold upon the ideal side of the American young man, can keep him from the all-absorbing spirit of materialism and can lead him to believe and act upon the belief that there is a higher side to himself. Knowing that that higher side that speaks in him is a side that deserves cultivation, how is it to be done? How, indeed, if not through the study of the arts,—the most permanent possession that men leave behind them. Wealth goes, dominion goes, creeds go; but the arts that the people, who have had wealth and who have had dominion and who have believed in their religion, have created, those have outlasted all, from the remotest ages down to our time. It is because of the arts that we are interested in this or that nation, all whose material signs of existence have long since passed away. Therefore, is it not to the arts that we should refer the young student of the ideal side of life and remind him of the men who, in the midst of prosperity,—kings, nations, republics, whatever they may have been, or individuals,—have used their wealth and power for the creation of these works and have conferred a lasting benefit on mankind?

And so it is that the Germanic Museum has come to be, I believe, a splendid symbol—a splendid statue, let me say,—in the college life of the reality of that spirit. Here the student can go and be inspired by the works of past generations and can study the meaning of an art which was formed and developed and which flourished while the great empire of which it reminds him was still young in its growth and its material development. The student there can see that in the midst of their material needs men stood aside and created or bought or ordered beautiful works for everlasting pleasure. And so he sees in the works of this Germanic race, and more particularly in the works of the later development of it when it is specifically the German race, the ideals of a sturdy people carried out in a sturdy way,—less refined than some, less delicate than some, but lacking never in the power of virility,—the favorite materials for the expression of these ideals being the homely substances by which they were surrounded in their daily life—iron, stone, wood and leather. What nation has ever surpassed the Germans in the works which they have wrought in these materials? And so the student can come to them for constant inspiration, and by having them before him as a visual illustration of the principles which we are endeavoring to teach him we can, through this means, hold on to that ideal side and foster it and develop it.

To you, sir, (addressing Baron von dem Bussche) I should like to express the hope that His Majesty, your Emperor, may be made aware that the magnificent gift which he has conferred upon this University will benefit not only the University itself but the whole community in which that University stands; and I hope—and I am sure we all of us hope—that it may stand as a permanent memorial, not only of the great arts of the past, but of a man who, born to high position, has used his birth and its privileges, not as an excuse for an idle and self-indulgent life, but as an opportunity for work—steady, hard and strenuous work,—for the benefit of his fellow men. As such I am sure it cannot fail to be an inspiration to all the students of this university.