Edward Rowland Sill : his life and work

Preface

It is more than ten years since, in a burst of enthusiasm and admiration, I undertook to prepare a "Life" of Sill. Enthusiasm and admiration have continued unabated, but circumstances interposed to delay the work; not, I am now inclined to think, to its detriment. Had I gone forward unimpeded, working out the plan I then had in mind, the result would have been different, partaking of the nature of essay and criticism. But midway of my task I fell under the influence of that great master of the art of biography, Sir Leslie Stephen, whose dicta upon the subject changed the course I was taking. "Nobody," said he, "ever wrote a dull autobiography"; and he added, "The biographer can never quite equal the autobiographer, but with a sufficient supply of letters he may approach very closely to the same result." About the same time a saying of Sill's, which I had probably read half a dozen times without seeing its application to the matter in hand, came home to me and reinforced the remarks of Sir Leslie, — "Let a man write about himself. It's the only fellow he knows anything about." These have been my sailing viii PREFACE

orders. Though Sill's letters are not so abundant as a biographer working on this principle might wish, they are not wanting except for brief periods, and so far as available they have been most generously placed at my disposal by Sill's family and friends.

My obligations, therefore, are many and serious. My most grateful thanks are due to Mrs. Sill, not only for materials, but also for wise counsel and cooperation. To Sill's classmates at Yale, Mr. Henry Holt and Franklin

B. Dexter, as also to Miss Millicent W. Shinn, of California, I acknowledge a debt of gratitude. Among many others to whom I am beholden for letters, recollections, and aid are Miss Heloise E. Hersey, Mr. Howells, and Professor Royce, and, to add those who are no longer living, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Daniel

C. Oilman, and Ralph 0. Williams, Yale, '61.

W. B. P.

Contents

I. Ancestry and Youth .... 1

II. His Life at College .... 12

III. The Voyage 'round the Horn . . 36

II

Sill entered Yale in his seventeenth year, a moderately tall, slender youth decidedly handsome, with brown hair, gray eyes, and the stamp of personality which marked him off at once from the crowd. "We have n't got much of a class," wrote one of his classmates (Governor Baldwin) in his diary, "but Sill is somewhat of a genius, to be sure." Before the middle of the Freshmen year this was the accepted view of him. At the first trials of literary ability — the class song competition — Sill was seen to be easily first, and he soon took a special place among his classmates, which he kept. He was no athlete, and far from being the jovial good fellow, but he took his part in the sports and amusements of the college, played a creditable game of baseball, and held his own in the little world of the campus. The accounts given of him by his contemporaries indicate that he led a free, open life, never unduly hampered by college rules and regulations, reading a good deal in a desultory fashion, and, like Lowell at Harvard, getting rusticated for neglect of college exercises. It is entered upon the records that at the end of the Freshman year the Faculty voted that "E. R. Sill ('61) for neglecting his studies shall be removed from college." He was away over a year. Twentyfive years later, when writing to Thomas Bailey Aldrich, then editor of the "Atlantic," he remarked: "Let me confess, since I am addressing you personally, that while I preach college, and believe in it, I was myself a reckless student. In fact, I was on the retired list for a considerable part of the course because I wouldn't pursue the curriculum, and would pursue literature." An instance of his somewhat cavalier attitude toward class routine is recalled by a classmate. It was the custom of the professor of Greek to call upon members of the class to rise and read aloud passages of the text, giving beat, stress, and caesura. To this exercise, called "scanning," Sill had a strong distaste, and among the reasons for his rustication was his response, a response given with an air of extreme nonchalance, when called upon to scan, "Please, sir, I don't scan."

Some notes by another classmate give a very good background for the figure of Sill as an undergraduate. At the time Sill entered Yale — in the fall of 1857 — he says : —

"It was in many respects an unreal place. Despite President Woolsey's abiding interest and influence in some national questions, and he was about the only man in the faculty who manifested any, the institution stood apart from both the acting and the thinking world. The teaching it afforded was, with slight exceptions, mere rote teaching.

"Partly because of poverty, the college did not contain a professor of history, much less of American history — that subject was not even touched; a professor of any political or economic science; or a professor of any modern language. Our first lesson in respect for law was the formal presentation to each of us, of * The Laws of Yale College,' and the exaction of a written promise to obey them. They dated from an earlier generation, had not been brought up to date, any more than anything else in the institution had, and contained some laws that nobody thought of enforcing — among them, laws against smoking and going sailing. Our respect for them as a whole, and their effect on our young minds regarding laws in general, are obvious.

"As to literature, we had recitations only from an elaborately and dogmatically annotated edition of Demosthenes' 'On the Crown/ in the original; and from Whateley's Rhetoric — a fantastic book which lent itself wonderfully to undergraduate fun-making. The literatures of Greece and Rome were used solely as material for vocabulary and grammatical

* drills.' There was not a man in the faculty who had ever done anything in pure literature; or, so far as I can recall, anybody but Hadley and Dana and Whitney, the last two of whom we scarcely ever saw, who ever did any work in anything else that long survived them. We wrote 'compositions' three or four times, which were read to the class (or rather to each writer's one of its four divisions) and never criticized, and we had a few 'disputes' by groups selected in turn, before the 'division,' which were ' summed up ' and commented upon, with considerable literary instinct whenever Hadley presided. The topics set for these exercises were occasionally criticism of some author, but were equally apt to be some question outside of practical life, and often outside of practical consideration — for instance, one, I remember, was: 'Is Language of Divine or Human Origin?' That question is a fair illustration of what was, on the whole, the dominating spirit of the college — theological speculation. The Puritan influence still controlled. The officers, as has been intimated, were nearly all Puritan clergymen, holding, in the midst of the nineteenth century, the views they had inherited from the seventeenth, and avoiding and dreading the stir of thought which was beginning to tear down their whole system. The names of Carlyle, Darwin and Mill were never mentioned in the classroom, and the only notions given us of the doctrine of evolution, which had begun to take form, were in a lecture on Laplace's law of planetary evolution, and in a few then celebrated lectures by Dana, read to us, in his disability, by another. In them he tried to demonstrate that the evolution of the earth, and the life upon it, was in accord with the account given in Genesis.

"Most of the men who regulated the 'thought' of the institution were clergymen. Its trustees practically all were, the ' six senior senators' of the State being mere figureheads, and the representation of the alumni not yet having been instituted.

"On one side, the atmosphere of the place was all 'discipline.' We were taught to overcome obstacles by obstacles being deliberately massed before us, as if learning in its most attractive forms did not present more than enough. In addition to the bare chronology of classic history, we were asked to commit to memory a murderous pamphlet of chemical formulas. The test of merit, rewarded with the honors, was the capacity to recite well. A rote repetition of the contents of the textbook answered the purpose as well as intelligent appreciation. Originality in any form was not stimulated, though one 'composition' (never criticized) did count as much as several recitations. When President Woolsey offered to cushion the bare seats in the chapel at his own expense, the proposition was turned down as tending to make the students effeminate.

"To this hated chapel, we were driven twice a day and four times on Sunday, one of the daily herdings being before daylight in winter. Some compensation for these monastic rigors lies in the fact that during one of them, Sill got the idea for 'Morning,' and it symbolized his feeling regarding the lights our teachers read by.

"In short, everything was done to make learning and religion loathsome, and done with considerable success. Yet, as a body, the college officers were men of admirable sincerity and purity of life, But with, so far as I know, one exception, as to capacity to see beyond their narrow range of dogma, they may as well have been monks of the Thebaid, or priests of a lamasery in Thibet. That exceptional man — perhaps the most eminent scholar America has produced — we were hardly brought in contact with; and I did not suspect his largeness of view until we became intimate, years after my graduation. With pathetic self -repression, he stayed at Yale while out of sympathy with his colleagues and the whole intellectual spirit of the place. There may have been others who thought beyond their inherited dogmas, but if there were, they kept their thoughts to themselves, as he did. Yet all those men gave us a rare example of single-hearted, self-sacrificing, and unswerving devotion to duty, as they saw it. But they had not the gift to see much of it, and so their example lacked inspiration. It is astounding that so much knowledge (onesided though it was) and so much moral worth could have existed side by side with so much obtuseness. Yet the explanation is not far to seek: a generation earlier, a bright man could have been a Puritan; but in that generation, there had been so much stir of thought that none but a stupid man could grow up a Puritan. Some of the older men were bright, but their ideas were out of date. No younger man could be brought in unless he was a Puritan, and therefore no younger man abreast with the day was among the college officers. The scholarship was a narrow formalism. In the classroom, even Hadley, deep and broad as was his culture, confined himself to Homer's grammar, with little or no reference to his poetry; though, as already intimated, in his comments on some of our scant rhetorical efforts, he showed himself a delicate and suggestive critic.

"Offsetting the atmosphere of 'discipline' was one of mediaeval, almost primitive, superstition, mysticism, and dread. The students were affected by it so that their voluntary associations, instead of being natural gentlemen's clubs, were ' secret societies/ designated by the usual mystic Greek letters, meeting as far as they could in secret places, with secret rites and strange initiations and mummeries. The chief of them had and still has, as a badge, a gold skull with crossed bones, each member displaying in his room, over the entrance, the real objects themselves. Merely to allude to this society in the presence of one of its members was to insult him and lead him to withdraw from the company. To become one of its fifteen members in senior year was the controlling ambition of the other three years. The halls of these societies were used but one evening a week. At that time Skull and Bones was the only one having its own building. To guard its secrecy, it was made, as many halls have since been for other societies, without windows. Even a generation later, one of the societies has reared a superb (though rather poorly proportioned) white marble Greek temple, lit by the sun only through a skylight over its second story. The idea of a rational clubhouse to be enjoyed at all times, as the society buildings are at other institutions, was, and generally still is, too rational to fit the prevalent atmosphere. Health, of course, was not taken into consideration.

"Athletics in the present sense had not been evolved. Each class had three or four boatclubs, crews from which used to go rowing in gigs on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons, and occasionally at other times, and frequently took out guests — not seldom ladies, in the stern seats. The Wednesday and Saturday rows were curtailed by the necessity of getting back to 'prayers.' Sill joined one of these clubs in Freshman year, and pulled a fairly good oar. The club came to grief, owing to a certain uncongeniality between the faculty's system of things and the tastes and convictions of some of the club's members, including the captain, which led to the temporary separation of these members from the institution.

"This uncongeniality between students and faculty was general and chronic. As there was no congeniality, far less was there any intimacy. The faculty generally consisted (with the exception of the instructor of elocution, of whom we saw little) of men who had never been young. The idea of teacher and student spending an hour together, outside of the effort on one side to detect ignorance, and, on the other, to conceal it, was seldom thought of before dear Timothy Dwight got back from Europe, after Sill's graduation; the idea of playing a game together would have been ludicrous; the idea of having a smoke together would have been insulting to the older men; and the idea of taking a drink together, criminal. Once when I was 'called up' for some of my many peccadilloes, after I claimed that I was not given to strong drink, the argument against me was clinched with: 'But you admit that you play billiards and drink wine.' The relation between students and faculty, on the part of the boyish boys and most of the thinking boys, was at best one of sullen indifference, and at worst one of strategic hostility. A student absent from one of the sixteen religious exercises a week, or one of the sixteen literary ones, or unprepared for one of the latter, was permitted to hand in a written excuse. The attitude of strategic hostility made, to the student mind, everything fair in war, and these excuses were very often lies. 'Indisposition' was the euphemism at the base of most of them, and it generally meant indisposition to attend or to study. I doubt if Sill handed in any of these false excuses, and I am confident that Shearer [Sill's closest friend, of whom more later,] did not, but neither of them lacked respect for anybody else because he did.

"In telling all this, I feel a little as if I were sinning with the sons of Noah; but it must be told to explain Sill — to explain the gropings and vacillations and struggles that his early letters are full of.

"Into the atmosphere I have tried to describe, our poet was thrust when he was a boy of less than seventeen. The class, of course, contained a group of youths who, like their teachers, had never been superfluously young, took things as they were given them, and did their best with them — 'not theirs to ask the reason why.' Sill I did not see much of this conservative element in the class until he met some of them in Skull and Bones in senior year. There was, equally of course, another group full of young blood, much of it foolish blood, some of whom did 'ask the reason why,' and found precious little reason. Nearly all of them played much, only one or two of them studied much, two or three of them questioned much, several of them read much — some in books that the faculty would not have recommended, and all of them were in a state of more or less intellectual revolt. Some of them believed as long as they lived, and some of them believe to this day, that their revolt was well justified. To this group Sill naturally gravitated. He was perhaps the leader in the spirit of revolt. He was far-seeing. His alter ego, Shearer, was in the same group; but he was wide-seeing as well as far-seeing, and while he shared the spirit of revolt, he was, both by disposition and comprehension, made to temper it.

"Sill and Shearer were both poor, and

'pleasure' costs money. They were also proud and scrupulous: so, even if their disposition had been toward excess, it would not have been as easy to them as to some of their friends. Sill did most of the foolish things that were not dishonest which the other boys did, but his native delicacy made the restraint of his poverty superfluous in keeping him from any gross excess. While his principles were more those of Socrates than of St. Francis, his practice was nearer that of St. Francis than of Socrates. However pagan he may have been, it is inconceivable that he would have deliberately pursued his own pleasure to the detriment of another. He would take his share of the flowing bowl, unless his full share would have been too much, in which case there were always others ready to take the excess for him; but he was not intolerant of these friends, if otherwise they merited his regard — not half as intolerant as he was, at first, of intellectual inferiority. This absolutely prevented him, at first, from recognizing the merits of some of the most lovable fellows and finest characters in the class. But he outgrew it, and became a man of very wide sympathies and charitable judgments.

"Not having grown up in the world where one amuses one's self; going to Puritan Yale where that world was unknown and abhorred, instead of to Harvard where it was known and appreciated; realizing its Philistine side, and having no opportunity to enjoy its aesthetic side, Sill hated it and every symbol of it. 'Society' he would have nothing of. When his beauty and eloquence made all the girls, after they heard him deliver the class poem, wild to have him introduced, he stubbornly refused, even his dearest who wanted to introduce him to their dearest. Yet we know that, outside of 'social occasions,' no man was more attracted by women.

"Some of the lines from the class poem, not printed in the later selections, illustrate his attitude toward the world at this time : —

"'The world! The world!

Mockery, knavery, cheat!

Down at thy angry feet Let the lying thing be hurled.

"None of his portraits do him justice. They all strangely fail to give his face the character — or enough of the character — which would have led any observer to say: 'There is a poet.' He had the most wonderful gray eyes I ever saw; his wavy chestnut hair was just what it should have been; he wore no beard until he was thirty or forty, and was better without it. I believe he always wore a mustache, having, if I remember rightly, an enviable amount of it when we were freshmen. His figure was moderately tall, and slight — too slight, but very graceful. We used to make fun of his lank shanks. But one day when I, who was taller and much heavier, put on the boxing gloves with him, I realized to my cost that strength was not an affair of muscle alone. By sheer nerve, he could do things that men with much i more muscle could not. I suppose he had to pay for it in subsequent fatigue.

" Despite his slight figure, he had a beautiful rich bass voice; and he had, of course, as lyric poets must, a genius for music. He could play on any instrument he took a notion to, with very little practice. Yet I don't remember that he sang in the choir. Perhaps he would have been apt to refrain in those rebellious years, because of distaste for the service.

"Though he was so frail-looking, I don't remember that he ever lacked health, though I find some anxieties expressed in some of Shearer's letters after graduation; but they were mainly, perhaps entirely, lest nervous taxes and uncongenialities should be too much for him. There was no need of his dying young, as we too sadly know.

"Carlyle was probably the great teacher of most of us. It was too early for Mill and Spencer. Sill's chief influence was Tennyson. We all read Emerson and Macaulay. Browning we do not seem to have got to : we knew his wife better : she was nearer our then level. There is little indication of our then having much to do with Shakespeare. Sill does not even include him among the poets in the letter of a year before his death, quoted in the memoir prefacing the edition of 1902; but in his letter to me of December 24, 1868, from California, he says: 'There's one compensation in living in a heathen country — i.e., that one's only companions are Shakespeare and Shelley and Mill and Browning and Spencer and the others.' Like our college teachers, we as boys lived most in speculations and dreams.

"Nearly all the prizes offered by the faculty or the students for any feats but those of memory and linguistic or mathematical skill, were divided about equally between Sill and Shearer. Of course they were elected on the 'Lit. Board,' and their contributions were awaited more eagerly, probably, than other contributions ever were, by the whole college world : for the recognition of them was not confined to their own class. And of course they were elected (unanimously, I believe) Class Poet and Class Orator, though their 'scholarship' under the rote tests applied by the faculty, did not entitle them to an appearance on either of the stupid occasions (Junior Exhibition and Commencement) which the faculty provided to display the stupid results of their system.

"Sill's independence, and the environment in which he grew up, were both well illustrated in the great religious revival of '58. This, of course, set in as soon as spring began to stir people's emotions after the great commercial panic in the fall of '57. But instead of being restricted, as such phenomena have been since, mainly to those whose psychic stock-in-trade was merely emotional, it was taken up by people of culture (for those days), and by none more ardently than the faculty of Yale. The whole college was swept off its feet. In our class, Sill, Shearer, and one other were, I believe, the only men who did not join the church. I have an impression that they were about the only ones in the academic department. The reaction was frightful. There probably never was at Yale such an orgy of dissipation as during the following autumn — certainly there was nothing like it in my time. This, of course, doubled the skepticism of those who were out of sympathy with the prevailing ideas, and left them in a more chaotic state than ever. Spencer had not yet put within general reach his point of crystallization for faith and hope, and thinking young men were in the dark and anxious atmosphere that pervaded Sill's and Shearer's early letters, and Sill's early poems."

From the pen of still another classmate, Ralph O. Williams, I take a sketch of Sill at

Yale, interesting not only because it is done by a contemporary, but also because it reveals the unusual and deep regard which Sill inspired in those who knew him, whether early or late in his life: —

"There is lying near me a photographic portrait of Edward Rowland Sill taken in his senior year at Yale College when he was not quite twenty years old. It is on glass, — an old-fashioned 'ambrotype.' I have seen perhaps half a dozen later photographs of Sill, taken at various periods of his life, but all the others made him less than he was. The picture before me reveals his extraordinary eyes, — large, oval, deep eyes, whose light seemed to come from the recesses of a reflective mind, — a penetrating light which disclosed the thoughts of those whom it rested on. People who had never seen or heard of Sill, looking at this picture, have exclaimed, " What wonderful eyes ! " x In other respects, too, the picture is faithful. Sill was hardly more than a boy then, but much more than a boy in mind and character. His face — of regular, handsome features — seemed to be the face of one who had never had a mean impulse. It showed independence of judgment, but not aggressiveness. Notwithstanding its mobility of expression, it was a

1 Some of the paper photographs of Sill give his eyes a staring look, — a fault probably introduced in retouching the negatives.

calm face, quite unconscious of itself, thoughtful, spiritual, considerate of others. As to the rest of his personality at that time, he was fully grown in height, straight, slim, not muscular, and in seeming good health, — though his health, without being decidedly bad, was not good. His dress was careless, but never slovenly.

"Sill's course in college could hardly have been different; at least, that must seem so to those who consider his temperament. By disposition he was eager of instruction and learning; he liked to think things out; but he was revolted by lessons that were to be recited parrot-like for a daily mark. Naturally he took as little of the lessoning as possible. But I never heard Sill speak unkindly of the wise men of down east who were doing it. He thought they were not in the best way; perhaps some of them, or some of their successors, would find a better way later.

"In such opportunities as there were for exercising his literary power Sill shone from the beginning to the end of the college course. His poem * The Open Polar Sea ' was printed in the 'Yale Literary Magazine' for April, 1858, while he was in his freshman year. It was published as 'From the German of Malvaro,' because the young freshman feared that the senior editors of the magazine would have a poor opinion of a freshman's output. The poem now entitled 'Morning,' and beginning: —

"'I entered once, at break of day, A chapel lichen-stained and gray,' —

appeared in the 'Yale Lit.' for June, 1860. At that time Sill was near the close of his junior year and was one of the editors of the magazine. It happened that I saw a proof of the poem at the printer's just as the 'Lit.' was going to press. It differed verbally somewhat from the one printed many years later among his collected poems, and had as a concluding line, rhyming with the two immediately preceding lines, 'Was there not meaning in my dreams.' On my own responsibility (for there was not a moment's time for consulting the poet), I struck out that last line, because, as I told Sill afterwards, 'a fingerpost wasn't needed.' Instead of being vexed, he was grateful. The poem is a good example of how a trivial incident which to the barren imagination has no significance can be made to glow by a poet's touch. The 'chapel' was the old college chapel, but not the one that is used for religious services now. The time was earlier than the composition. It was of the days when we had to attend prayers at half past five on summer mornings and at half -past six winter mornings. There was no 'rich stained glass' in the chapel, nor an aisle in the architectural sense. There were * ghostly shadows/ and 'the congregation dozed,' no doubt, excepting those who with bowed heads were conning the lesson for the succeeding recitation. The shutter was shifted by a gust of wind, not by one * who rose with a wistful face.' A dismal scene, and lowering in its influences; but with what charming color the boy artist overlaid the unwholesome fact. "In writing for college prizes, — although he was always successful, — Sill put under constraint his best impulses; for he never had any desire to shine at the expense of others, and, besides, he looked on such contests as boyish. But he wanted to measure himself with others so as to get a scale of judgment, boy with boys, man with men later. Prizes for literary composition brought him no elation, only a useful stiffening of self-confidence. And that he needed. But although he had such feelings, I am sure, about college honors, Sill then and always hungered for real distinction. Commonplace successes that tickle the vanity and fill the wants of most men had for him no attractions."

Sill's life at Yale fell at a time when the intellectual ferment of the past forty years was being prepared. Though the academic community at Yale was for the most part immune, some of the yeast of question and revolt was stirring in his mind and in the minds of his friends. The first edition of Darwin's "Origin of Species" came out during his freshman year; Huxley had not come yet, but Carlyle and Tennyson were sowing inquiry broadcast, The unconventionality and austere discontent of Carlyle appealed strongly to Sill. With his eyes already opened to the inequalities of life, the Scot's grim challenge of accepted conditions awoke in him an eager emulation. All his writing in college echoes of Carlyle. "Poor petrifactions of men!" he writes in the first essay he contributed to the "Yale Literary Magazine." "... One shudders even to imagine you, at the last, when the great veil is being lifted, with your weazened, world-crusted soul, cringing into the dim outskirts of the presence of the Eternal."