Though Harvard still paid its famous professor a small salary, it now built him a house, comfortable, and large enough to allow him for the first time to house all of his books. Of all the places where he had lived, Agassiz loved this home best. Here he felt the security which a man needs as he grows older, here he had the companionship which was so necessary to him that he used his library less for work than the living room where the young people wandered in and out and his wife was close at hand. And here he stayed as long as he lived.
Elizabeth Agassiz saw that something had to be done about the money question. She was not one to let bills run, or to expect some vague fortune of the future to take care of them. She consulted her practical son, Alexander, who had slipped easily from undergraduate work to Lawrence Scientific School, and who wholly agreed with his stepmother about the importance of paying one’s way. They climbed together to the top floor of the new house, and with Ida at their heels much interested, they paced off the place into a schoolroom. We will charge good prices, they decided, and we will give the students their money’s worth. An excellent basis on which to start a private school.
When the details were settled, they told Louis who was so pleased that he at once placed himself at the head of it, a very characteristic gesture. At the same time, a profitable one for the school. For the privilege of having Louis Agassiz for a teacher, the price could not be too high nor the distance too great. It was a school which did not have to build up a reputation, or wait for pupils. They settled into the town or came each morning in special buses, from seventy to eighty of them, as many as the top floor could hold. And never did youngsters enjoy school more.
Though the school was for girls, the curriculum was not in the least flavored with the current Godey’s magazine ideas of education for the young female. Agassiz stated in his circular: “I shall myself superintend the methods of instruction and tuition, and while maintaining that regularity and precision in the studies so important to mental training, shall endeavor to prevent the necessary discipline from falling into a lifeless routine, alike deadening to the spirit of teacher and pupil.” Be it said that he fulfilled the spirit and the letter of that contract so generously that girls who had never heard of physical geography, natural history, and botany, came early and stayed late to his lectures while astonished and equally interested parents listened from doorways and spare corners. The usual tribute to Louis Agassiz, the teacher!
Now Alexander thoroughly disliked teaching, he was only twenty, and he was working hard at college. To his greater credit then, he also became part of the teaching force. He managed the financial end of the school and taught the girls subjects which his father found uninteresting. He was shy, and he knew many of the girls socially, but he faced them over his desk each day hoping that they had not discovered how young he was. For four years he taught them and somewhere in that time fell deeply in love with one of them. Anna Russell was her name, and her picture shows a young and lovely face whose dark proud eyes any anxious lecturer might watch for approval. A face of rare beauty and character for one so young. Alexander made up his mind to get a job.
By this time the school was well established, and paying not only its own way, but much of Agassiz’s. With its help, and an increased salary from Harvard, Louis’ hard days were over. He would, of course, always run close to the wind, but the danger of capsizing was past. No pupil of his ever forgot him, and he could always depend upon them, no matter how involved in years and husbands and children, to stand behind him in any new project even to the end of his life. For a mind that had been touched by Agassiz’s fire never forgot its heat and light.
Over the wide country now were people who knew Agassiz through his lectures, who felt that here was a man who had a great gift to offer America, and who felt it an honor to have some small share in helping him. He had only to issue a circular asking for collections of fresh water fishes when hundreds of letters poured in with offers which, moreover, they fulfilled with specimens now in his museum. Not from scientists either, but the contributions of farmers, fishermen, woodsmen. “Many a New England captain,” says his wife, “when he started on a cruise, had on board collecting cans, furnished by Agassiz to be filled in distant ports or nearer home, as the case might be, and returned to the Museum at Cambridge.” One would be hard put to it to think of any modern scientist who could count upon that sort of cooperation.
Now, decided Agassiz, overwhelmed with material about which something must be done, now was the time to publish what he had found out about the natural history of the United States. He thought that he could manage it in ten volumes, but no publisher could risk the output for them and their costly illustrations without a subscription list of at least five hundred. The subscription list was scarcely started before it reached twenty-five hundred. Again a response from the working world who now save their subscriptions for popular magazines. It may be said, of course, that they probably read the magazines more thoroughly, for Agassiz’s books, shorn of the magnetism of his speech, must have been pretty hard wading for many of the subscribers.
Nobody was more astonished than the author. He writes, “What do you say to that for a work which is to cost six hundred francs a copy, and of which nothing has as yet appeared? Nor is the list closed yet, for every day I receive new subscriptions—this very morning one from California! Where will not the love of science find its niche!” Or better, perhaps, the love of Agassiz.
Like many of Agassiz’s projects, the work was never completed. After four volumes, his museum snatched him away from writing. But among the published parts, was his Essay on Classification which, two years after its publication, was to enter the lists with Darwin’s new book, Origin of Species. The quarrel is so old now that it is hard to realize the excitement which it caused; though, after all, it is not so long ago that a southern schoolmaster discovered that the issues were not entirely settled. Agassiz remained convinced to the end of his life that the great groups of the animal kingdom were specially created. They might be modified within certain limits, but neither environment nor any other factor was powerful enough to change the typical structure of one group into another. At the same time he produced his discovery that embryos follow in their development the succession of fossils of the same type through the geological ages, an idea not without interest to any evolutionist. If one can discard the necessary factor of time in settling discussions, one might speculate on what rich results a quiet collaboration between these two honest scientists could have brought forth. But the men who start conflicts, seldom live to see them settled. If the human mind could keep its thoughts apart from its emotions, the time factor might be partly eliminated.
Louis had flung himself into this book with a kind of impassioned vigor. It shall be finished, he promised himself, for my fiftieth birthday. A fiftieth birthday is a special high-tide mark and there shall be something left of that tide line to show how high it rose. Day and night he worked, for Louis never left unfinished anything he wished to do. No novelist ever spent more staunchless hours over high romance than those which drove Louis Agassiz through his fever of creating in words which anyone could understand what he believed to be the great truths of the universe. Hands off, everybody, for a man can do no more! Family, friends, students, kept away from his study where the pen scratched endlessly, from the garden where he rushed to cool his fever heat in the first freshness of spring. He did not know that they existed. Now, said his genius, you will show them what you can do. But Louis, for once, was unaware of a need for an audience.
It is said, and why not believe so right an ending, that when the clock struck twelve of May 28, 1857, he wrote Finis to the manuscript and lifted his head from it to listen to a garden turned into song. Outside his windows they had gathered, students, friends, and always the family, and in proud serenade they rejoiced over a high-tide mark which few men would touch.
Louis listened, and agreed, and was himself again. He rejoiced with them, nor was he ever after very mu
ch interested to finish any more volumes of his work. Perhaps he knew that other and more careful workers could thresh out the details and whip them into shape. He was fifty years old, and he had much to do. There was no more time for fine records from his rough material. It would keep as sound as truth is sound for more patient hands to fuss over. Now while there still was time, he meant to build the museum which had not been out of his thoughts since the days when the Swiss lad grew desperate over country-wide distances between the museums that he must consult. Under one roof, he had promised himself, we shall have all the material which a scientist needs for comparison if he is to understand the truth. Material he had aplenty, and now he meant to get the roof.
But even the museum was out of his mind that spring night in the garden which paled to early dawn before the guests left it. Could a man want more, he must have thought, with his family beside him in the dark fragrant garden listening to the Bach choral and then the old Heidelberg songs to which he hummed a deep bass like a bumblebee. For Louis had sung zestfully in four-part songs with Cily and her brothers in their courting days. Perhaps he thought of her now, and touched Elizabeth’s warm live hand in the darkness. And knew briefly what a man owes to women if fifty is a high-tide mark: Rose, the mother, who struggled against fear and hardship for him; Cily whose three splendid children were singing in the garden; and Elizabeth who would see him to the end. The deep humming quieted, for Agassiz was an emotional man.
17. FOR NO MAN STANDS ALONE
The golden years were upon New England, too, and Louis Agassiz felt himself now as true a New Englander as if he had grown up there in Cambridge with Henry Longfellow and James Lowell, his good friends. It was important for the foreign-born American that these years were ripe and ready for him. The times, the people, what they thought, what they did, helped or hindered Louis Agassiz as much now as they had twenty-five years ago when he first ranged outside his home limits. Cambridge, a hundred years before or a hundred years later, would have presented problems which he might or might not have been able to handle. Yet it is probably no coincidence that he was the kind of man who throve on the earth at this time; nature may be as prolific with geniuses as with everything else, and many men may well be wasted in each period with only a lucky one who fits it able to dominate it. If Louis Agassiz was swept along on the shoulders of writers, artists, poets, scientists, instead of struggling against them in the opposite direction, he was bound to add that conserved energy to achievement.
The brewing war had stimulated New England as threat stimulates while its victim is not yet involved. Cambridge and Boston were full of abolitionists, men who loved to talk and write, such men as Whittier, Henry Ward Beecher, Lowell, Theodore Parker, who made the business of slavery their quarry. Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin with no notion of what would come from it. War was ahead, but a long period of peace was behind, and its rich harvest was as ready for the reaping of Louis Agassiz as of anyone else. And distracting enough in its plenty he found it! A man could hardly tell where to mow, or how to take the time to finish what he had begun.
Education, that issue which is always most important in times of peace, interested everybody, and everybody took a hand in it. Of Louis Agassiz, the born teacher, America could not get enough. Everybody was convinced that if you understood nature, you were in a fair way to understand life. Of all people, Louis Agassiz was best fitted to tell them about nature. They did not expect to understand or to remember all that he told them, but he did interpret life for them so that they understood it better. And he helped them to discover what a deep and abiding satisfaction it is to a man to gain full use of the senses which God gave him. No one listened to Louis Agassiz or walked with him without a quickening of his eyes and ears, without astonishment that there was so much to see, to hear, to smell, to know. Louis Agassiz had a theory that education did not take unless you got it firsthand, and so far we have not found much reason to disagree with him.
The back-to-nature tendencies which were stirring in the youth of Agassiz were now at their height. Nor has their effect ever disappeared. We like to feel superior about the romantic period, but we have its inheritance in our blood. With no anemic effect, either. There is no way of reckoning exactly the factors of inheritance, but it is fair to credit to the mid-century an abiding interest and knowledge not there before that time. We have now shifted back to eighteenth-century homage to cities, but only part-time homage. We must have a few weeks, or months, off for the country, a few books about birds and animals, a few poets like Robert Frost, and a few people who know a great deal about birds and flowers and will continue to increase that knowledge.
This compulsion of ours, which is at once a delight, is not an accidental trait. We come by it honestly. Nowadays a hard-headed business man like my father does not get up at four o’clock of a spring morning and row his children up the Charles River where they found things that they never forgot; a phoebe’s nest under the deep shadow of a bridge, redwings teetering on the rushes, water lilies floating pure in the dawn; and a hot, hot sun which rose higher and higher until it drove us back to breakfast and a long sleepy day. But he takes it for granted that his child shall now learn in school anything that he should know about the flora and fauna of the world, and that any ordinary school teacher shall be equipped to rouse his interest as she probably is. At any rate she can enforce the rule whereby her pupil must know fifty kinds of flowers, and fifty varieties of birds, enjoy it or not.
Our inheritance of science is rather exact since time has a way of sifting out the true from the false. But we are likely to minimize the importance of truth which has now become familiar. It is hard to remember that when it was new, its effect on a man was as startling as our own feelings at the sudden widening of our horizons when we contemplate the new dimensions of time and space. It unsettled his solid conviction just as thoroughly.
The stir which was going on in science through this period was as upsetting to the people living in it as Galileo’s discovery had been, and as Einstein’s may be. Scientists began to search for the stages through which animals and plants had passed as they developed; Agassiz gave them important evidence with his accurate records of fossils. They began to study comparative anatomy with relation to the effect of environment and function; Agassiz was not going to be caught with any theories which resembled Darwin’s, but he had a wide store of knowledge about this very effect which would all be turned into the grist from which truth would be ground. And that truth is our inheritance.
Since there is no way of measuring art and literature exactly, we may treat our inheritance here with as much contempt as we please. We may pronounce the poets of the fifties without originality, sweetly sentimental, echoes of Victorianism. But note what happened a year or two ago. A magazine which stands for contributions of highest literary quality only, printed a modern poem for its beauty and originality which began “Out of the bosom of the air, Out of the cloud folds of her garments shaken,” and went on, as it had begun, with a poem of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. One is not brought up in the neighborhood of Cambridge without knowing her poets, but to make sure of my instant recognition, I called up a novelist, a biographer, an instructor of American literature, not one of whom had heard the poem.
Curiously and comfortingly enough, it turned out to be no plagiarism. The author was an old poet who, as he neared the end of life, had taken to reciting poetry which was stored up somewhere in his dim memories. He never knew that it had been sent to a magazine as his own. The incident closed, but from it grew a heartening conviction that old age may have a way of keeping for us whatever of beauty we have saved out of life; and that if beauty exists, it seems to have an indestructible quality. If it is immutable, it might well come on down to us as an inheritance which we need not despise.
In this year 1857, the man who wrote this old modern poem was fifty years old, too, so that he knew what the half-century mark felt like, and proceeded to put it into poetry for Agassiz’s bi
rthday party at the Saturday Club. Another member of the club, a man of great gentleness and sweetness who would willingly tear his heart out to stop black slavery, John Greenleaf Whittier was also fifty years old. The stars were high in the year 1807! Lowell and Thoreau were a decade younger, and Emerson a few years older, but at that time of life, age is measured by the spirit, and a few years, more or less, are of small importance. The men sat around the table that night of Agassiz’s birthday party, and we would do well today to produce their equal. They had their inheritance from an eighteenth century which placed high value on good talk. Not all their brilliant ideas were saved for books, or perhaps they took the written form in even greater perfection after the dress rehearsal of speech.
Agassiz sat at one end of the table and Longfellow at the other. We have no roll call of the rest, but Oliver Wendell Holmes was not likely to miss this chance for his ripe wit, nor John Lothrop Motley, and perhaps, withdrawn, shy, and a little uncomfortable, Hawthorne squeezed in between Theodore Parker and Edward Everett Hale and wished that they would stop discussing war.
They ate well, and they talked well. They had deep affection for the big man with glowing eyes and ready laughter whose birthday they were celebrating. If Lowell, halfway down the table, spiced his remarks with the kind of pungent wit which made his salty relative, Amy Lowell, an incomparable dinner companion, all of the jubilee was not at the table ends. Brilliant, they called him then; an echo of other minds, now. Not seeming to realize that in a certain period all minds echo each other as if they were crowded into a great rotunda which caught up their voices and flung them back. The modern critic tells us that Lowell took color from his environment; but what man is free from that chameleon protection? And whoever treats Lowell as a critic is unaware of his real contribution. His senses were as sharp as his friend’s at the head of the table, and what he saw and heard and knew of beauty, he recorded with some of that imperishability which makes us quote lines now as unaware of the author as the magazine was of the author of the snow poem.
The Young Adult Award-Winners Megapack Page 26
