The Whitney Memorial Meeting/Address VI
ADDRESS.
By WILLIAM HAYES WARD, D.D., LL.D.,
Of New York City.
I DO not understand that I am desired to provide a biographical sketch of Professor Whitney. That has been the grateful task for those who were in more constant and intimate connection with him. Neither am I asked to supply a critical review of his scholarly acquisitions and philological productions. That is a service to us which would require the technical knowledge of one of his favored pupils. I was not an intimate friend of Professor Whitney, nor was he my teacher. I seldom met him except at the spring and fall meetings of the American Oriental Society, where he was the one to whom all looked up as leader and master. He had been a member of this Society nearly twenty years before I became a member; but the meetings of these last twenty-five years, with the occasional call on him since his resignation, to discuss the interests of the Society, gave me some knowledge of, and admiration for, the man, although my own ignorance of the special branch of philology which he made his own leaves me incompetent to say what many of you could well say. It is only my own long connection with the American Oriental Society, and the sense of the obligation I am under to his personal kindness, that make me unwilling to decline the request in behalf of all of us, to scatter now, in the mellowing year, the leaves and the ripened berries of laurel, brown myrtle, and ever green ivy, over the grave of him who was the master not of his pupils only, but of all American scholarship, and whom, departed, we yet look up to as its genius, shall I not say its guiding, its protecting spirit?
Our first tribute is due to Professor Whitney as the most active and faithful member and officer of the American Oriental Society. He became a member in 1850, while a graduate student in Yale College, with Professor Hadley, under Professor Salisbury, the same year that he went to Germany to pursue the study of Sanskrit with Weber and Roth. On his return in 1853 he accepted a professorship especially secured for him by the wise provision and generosity of Professor Salisbury, who particularly desired his assistance in developing the usefulness of the Oriental Society, of which he was Corresponding Secretary. And accordingly his name appears on the Publication Committee for 1853-54, and in 1855 he was made Librarian. He found the books lying in a corner in a room in the Boston Athenæum, where they seemed to have been dumped, brought them to New Haven, and did no small amount of tedious work in arranging and cataloguing them and providing for their increase. In 1857 he succeeded Professor Salisbury as Corresponding Secretary, and in 1884 he was made President,—an office which he held until his enfeebled health compelled him to resign in 1890. During the years from 1853 until 1886 he was never absent from a meeting when he was in the country, and for a series of years his contributions composed half, and far the most important half, of the Society's publications. Indeed, we could almost say, and were glad to say, that the Society was William D. Whitney. It came with him to the Annual Meeting in Boston, and went back with him on his return. He put most distinctly his impress on the Society. He taught it the methods of critical philological science; and as an object lesson in that kind of research he presented his own work, and that of his pupils, in the study of Sanskrit. The Philological Association was later founded, inheriting the field of the classical section of the Oriental Society, and Professor Whitney was elected its first president in 1869. And his influence, coupled with that of Professors Goodwin and Hadley in the classical field, and of Professor March in Anglo-Saxon and Modern Languages, was of the most far-reaching importance in directing the activity and moulding the character of the young Association.
I suppose that what we may, without thereby identifying ourselves with either opposing camp of Materialists or Spiritualists, call the physical substratum of genius, its large and finely textured or convoluted brain, is given by Nature, and no study will make a great scholar out of one on whose endowment niggardly Nature has frowned. But Nature was in a gracious mood when she moulded the brain of the infant Whitney. Mr. Galton tells us that classic Greece bred men of genius more lavishly than has any other country at any time in the world's history. Some favored families have extraordinary endowments. The Whitney family was a remarkable one, although I need speak here only of the two older brothers, Josiah Dwight, the famous geologist, and our own William Dwight, the philologist, of whom it is a curious fact that the geologist brother attended Sanskrit lectures in Berlin, while the younger philologist, on graduating from Williams College at the age of eighteen, with the valedictory rank, began collecting birds and plants, and soon after was taken by his eminent brother as his assistant on a United States Geological Survey of the Lake Superior region, having charge of the botany and barometrical observations. It was about this time that he found some Sanskrit books in his brother's library, and his attention was first directed to what was to prove the main pursuit of his life. The geologist came very near turning out a philologist, while it was a narrow chance which prevented the philologist from becoming an authority in geology or biology.
When Nature has given a man the mind-stuff, it makes all the difference in the world how he develops it. I doubt very much if tastes or aptitudes for specific lines of study are inherited. I think they rather come from training. They are the result of the influences by which we are environed, or of the drift of study into which we fall. It was no injury to the boy graduate of Williams College that he had acquired no special tastes. He had a powerful and alert mind, and everything was meat and drink to it. In everything he excelled. In these days of early specialization we may not err in directing the ordinarily bright mind, from which we expect useful second-class work, into fields where intensity is cultivated at the expense of extension; but this is no benefit to a mind of the first order,—a mind which can co-ordinate. Such a mind can afford to create for its acquirements the widest base, and to wait long before it takes extreme excursions in any single direction. Such a mind can profitably learn much of what the world knows on many diverse subjects before it selects one to be made a life's field of labor. Nowadays we are in danger of making narrow men when we make learned men. Of all men a specialist needs to be a broad man; but how can he be a broad man if he devotes himself to his specialty early in his course of study? The profound scholar is not the one who will laugh at the scheme outlined by John Milton in his Letter to Master Hartlib on Education. Its wonderful breadth is the record of nothing more than what Milton himself did as a youth, in school and college and at Horton; and for all that wonderful breadth of learning which covered all that all languages could then give him, he found use when, comparatively late in life, he entered on the immense political and literary tasks which no man in England but him was trained to accomplish. But, as he reminds Master Hartlib, that is a bow which not every man can draw. That universal breadth of training and that late coming into his kingdom is peculiarly important, not for the drudges, in the second and third rank, but for the master, in the first. The carpenter may begin early to hew to the line; but the architect or the engineer must spend many years over many things before he is master of his profession.
At last, after securing the first rank in college in the days when there were no electives, after a time given to business, and then to botany, zoölogy, and geology, the new study of Sanskrit attracted him, and he went to New Haven to be a pupil of Professor Salisbury, the only professor of Sanskrit and Arabic in the United States, and who still survives in a venerable and honored old age. But I am not following him to Germany and back. I only want here to recall that as a philologist he was not a mere Sanskritist, and nothing else. He not only found all his knowledge helpful to his study of philology, but the breadth of his training and the variety of his discipline gave him soundness of judgment in the processes of his own peculiar study. I do not simply mean that it was only because he exactly understood the mathematics that underlies astronomy that he was competent to undertake the editing of a Sanskrit astronomical treatise, but rather that the bent and discipline which a mind gets in one study fits it better to reach sure conclusions in another. The mind trained to the severe methods of observation of actual facts in biological science could not help, for example, seeing the absurdity of following the unscientific traditions of Hindu grammarians. He could do nothing else but build his Sanskrit grammar out of the observed facts in the language of the Vedas and the later writings, throwing all the traditions overboard, and that, too, notwithstanding he was a proficient student of the native grammarians. He did not put botany or geology into his grammar, but he was the first to prepare a grammar on methods as purely scientific, as absolutely based on observation of facts of language and observed phonetic laws, as those he had first learned to employ in the studies of natural science. I do not ask others to shoot with his bow, but for a man who is to break paths, to be the engineer of our highway, no breadth of culture or extent of attainment can be useless; nothing less than the greatest is safe. Accordingly, we are not surprised that even in his own field of philology he had wider interests than those of the whole Indo-European family even; that in the beginning of his service at Yale College, he offered instruction in Egyptian as well as Sanskrit.
May I not perhaps connect with this same breadth of training the remarkable exactness of his knowledge and the soundness of his judgment? He had a contempt for uncertainty where certainty was attainable, and perhaps a greater contempt for certainty where it was unattainable. He demanded the exact facts, as they were observed and measured and counted. For hasty conclusions and generalizations he had no patience. If he was ever lacking in suavity, it was toward the sounding pronouncements and brilliant charlatanisms of a really able scholar. His keen mind took in all the facts and sought out their philosophy, and was not to be misled by eloquent sophistry to accept conjecture for ascertained truth. He was our soundest teacher on the philosophy of language. At the same time, while thus careful, he was not slow, neither did he allow any finical nicety to prevent him from being a prolific author. We have observed the contrary dangers of a hasty man, fertile in suggestion, quick to enter new fields, publishing his undigested studies, often to the advantage of others and his own discredit; and the opposite error of a scholar so careful never to be wrong that he never tells the world anything. Mr. Whitney avoided both errors. Who was more careful than he? And how large and numerous are his published writings!
On one other point in Professor Whitney's character I wish briefly to speak; I mean his transparent simplicity. Naturalness may be treated as a negative quality, the absence of show and pretence; but it is a positive quality, nevertheless, just as the whiteness of light is something more than the absence of color. I suppose that simplicity, unconsciousness, is the mark of a great scholar anywhere, and that every great college can boast of men as simple as they have been great. But it seems to me that Yale College has been fortunate in having had, during the last forty years, three men singularly great in special scholarship, yet all very wide in their attainments, and all notably simple and unaffected. I mean President Woolsey, Professor Hadley, and Professor Whitney. It is a great thing for the traditions of a college, for the influence exerted on its successive classes of students, to have such men as their models, as the objects of their admiration. No one could meet Professor Whitney without observing the beauty of his simple Doric strength, which allowed no acanthus decorations to solicit the notice of observers.
Perhaps we may best appreciate what we owe to Professor Whitney, if we try to imagine our American scholarship deprived of all that came through him. I do not deny that it might have come through others, in time; but through him it did come, and through others it would have come later. His special impulse was needed. Only two students, Whitney and Hadley, had ever sought instruction in Sanskrit from the Professor of Arabic and Sanskrit during the dozen years he held the chair before the accession of Professor Whitney. Whitney was the first American Sanskrit scholar to exploit the whole broad field of Indo-European philology, or indeed any field of comparative philology; for up to that time—only forty odd years ago—there was no Semitic comparative philology. Let it then be remembered that it is no exaggeration, no figure of speech, which calls him, who has so lately left us, yet lacking three years of a man's allotted threescore and ten, the Father of American Philological Science. Every one of the Sanskritists of this country,—and a great school it has been, if a young one,—Avery, Bloomfield, Buck, Edgren, Hopkins, Jackson, Lanman, Oertel, Perry, and a dozen others that deserve mention, may fairly claim to have been his pupils, either because they received his instructions in his lecture-room, or else because of the potent personal influence which he exerted upon their studies and work, albeit they had not belonged to that more favored circle. And to these pupils should be added others, men like Harper, Perrin, Peters, Tarbell, Wright, who learned from him the methods which they have since employed in other fields of philology than Sanskrit. His impulse, given specially to Aryan studies, has reacted even on Semitic, through his pupils; and all our students of human language, of whatever family, have felt his power.
Scholarship moves like the tides of the sea. It is started by some great celestial attraction, some force moving in an ecliptic high above the level world of letters; and with gathering strength it comes to its flood. Such a force was Professor Agassiz, who was master to the whole school of young American biologists. We can never sufficiently recognize the debt we owe to that Swiss naturalist through whom we learned how to observe the facts of life and discover its laws. What Harvard did for the science of life in America through Agassiz, Yale did for Indo-European philology through Whitney. These men created epochs in our learned world,—such epochs as we have not since seen paralleled by any one man, and only by the establishment of Johns Hopkins University, with its grand provision for post-graduate instruction. These great epochs and epoch-making men and institutions we need to keep in mind in all their commanding grandeur if we will understand aright the history of learning.
Professor Whitney, who turned the tide of American philology so completely toward Indo-European studies, lived long enough to rejoice in the later renaissance of Semitic studies under the lead of his friend Hall, his pupil Harper, and Dr. Haupt, called to the head of the Semitic department at Johns Hopkins. Those of us who were interested in these studies he encouraged to earnest labor, and warned against hasty conclusions. To him all deferred as their wisest leader and friend. Who can follow him, with such creative abilities, such power of mind, such purity of soul, such simplicity of character, such scorn for the pretentious and the inexact, such breadth of learning, such balance of judgment, such modest strength?