CHARLES ELIOT NORTON '46

By Professor Charles H. Moore '90.

In the death of Professor Norton the University and the community at large have lost a personality whose widely extended influence for good, during more than one generation, cannot be adequately told. Professor Norton was not only a man of high scholarly attainments and ideals, but he was a citizen who had the welfare of the community at heart, and took an active part in its concerns as far as need required and opportunity offered. He was also a warm-hearted and hospitable friend to a wide circle of men of many callings, and was always ready to serve them as he could, however much it taxed his time and strength, though his hands were full with work of his own, and, during his active service as Professor in the University, with the routine of instruction. The number of persons whom he has helped by his wise counsel, his quick recognition of merit, his friendly criticism, and his generous encouragement is large, and includes many whose names are now well known for honorable achievements in literature and the fine arts. The more than liberal expenditure of time in helping others told upon the amount of his own literary production. Of his exhaustive studies, and widely-known translations, of Dante (which have international reputation as of foremost excellence) I need not speak; but serious students of the fine arts must regret that of books like "Church Building in the Middle Ages" we could not have had more. As a teacher of the History of the Fine Arts in Harvard University Professor Norton strove, by directing attention to the finest historic monuments, to awaken an appreciation of the nature and worth of beauty, and to show that the greatest artistic achievements of past times have borne witness to what moral integrity and exalted ideals have entered into the make-up of peoples endowed with natural artistic aptitudes.

Of the merits of contemporaneous art he was warmly appreciative, but he felt, as all men of large vision must feel, that much of it is too limited in purpose, and too experimental in method, to rank as yet with the highest achievements of past times. Thus in University teaching he felt that it was more important to acquaint young men with what the fine arts have been than to engage their attention extensively on the various phases of modern art which, though manifesting much that is hopeful, are more or less transient in character. CHARLES H. MOORE.

The following letters appeared in the Graduates' Magazine on the occasion of Professor Norton's eightieth birthday last December:

From William Dean Howells h.'67.

I knew that Mr. Norton was nearing his eightieth birthday, but I was instinctively putting it off some years longer, and it needed your reminder to make me realize that it fell next month. Whatever his age, there was something in the early maturity of his power which keeps him enduringly young; the keen insight, the critical acumen, the generous sympathy, remain undimmed, unblunted, unchilled.

For me he is of that golden prime which we Americans shall not see renewed in the course of many centuries. While he lives, Emerson and Hawthorne, Longfellow and Lowell, Whittier and Holmes, are not lost to the consciousness of any who knew them; the Cambridge, the Boston, the New England, the America which lived in them, has not yet passed away. He was not only the contemporary, the companion of those great men; he was their fellow citizen in those highest things in which we may be his if we will, for the hospitality of his welcome will not be wanting. Something Athenian, something Florentine, something essentially republican and democratic in the ideals common to them all has had its especial effect in him through that temperamental beneficence, that philanthropy in a peculiar sense, so characteristic of him. I suppose he never met any man without wishing to share with him the grace of his learning, the charm of his wisdom, the light of his knowledge of the world; but this is poorly suggestive of the pervasive influence of his constant precept and example, which only those whose lives it shaped could duly witness of.

The future is of better augury because of the past which unites with the present in him, and remains ours in what he has done and what he is.  WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS.

From George Herbert Palmer '64.

Mr. Norton taught at Harvard from 1875 to 1898. He began under conditions which for a man less powerful would have been strongly adverse. He was already past middle life, in slender health, without experience in teaching, or indeed in routine work of any kind. His life had been that of a gentleman of leisure, spent in reading, travel, correspondence, and only occasionally writing for publication. With little technical training he undertook to teach a subject novel to the University, in which as yet there was no department; a subject, too, regarded with suspicion by influential sections of the community. Under such untoward circumstances--yes, by very means of them--he soon won honor for himself and his subject, a unique position of dignity among his colleagues and deep gratitude from a group of pupils who at the time of his resignation must have numbered about ten thousand.

In the College Faculty Mr. Norton stood as our great humanist. Though easily confused with dilettanteism, and then justly laughed at, humanism when solidly grounded begets a kind of awe. This Mr. Norton experienced. He was a welcome member of a company of scholars who almost from chlidhood had been so charged with responsibility for single subjects that the relations of these to man's interests as a whole had been often overlooked. A representative of that wholeness Mr. Norton became. To the anxious debates of the Faculty, through which the modern Harvard has been gradually evolved, he brought the steadying influence of a mind free from provinciality, an acquaintance with the best the world elsewhere has known, a spirit averse to mechanical methods, a loyalty to high ideals, and a disposition ever to make the moral being of the students his prime care. While his colleagues often felt that what he urged required supplementation, or even occasional antagonism, his simplicity, sweetness, and generosity won their affection as truly as his learning did their respect. To him many a young instructor has turned in a literary or personal exigency and found in his disciplined judgment and sympathetic heart help of incalculable worth. How time has been found for this costliest sort of kindness is known to Mr. Norton alone.

Over the student body his influence has been of the same nature as that felt by the Faculty; for he is made all of a piece. His personal kindnesses have been innumerable and untraceable, and his following can probably be paralleled only by one other teacher of our time. The subject which he taught for many years was elected by everybody almost as a matter of course; and all regarded it, high students or low, as one of the signal events of the college years. Like Geology 4, Fine Arts 3 was a "soft course." Would there were more such! Under Professor Shaler the student gained a kindling vision of pretty much all of the natural world; under Professor Norton, of the human. In these two culture courses the speaker gave so much that there was little left for the hearers to do except to wonder, to enjoy, and to grow. Students accordingly flocked around in such numbers and eagerness as we read attended the lectures of Abelard. To be properly nourished, each age needs something that is not grown on its own soil. Besides the nutrition that is "timely," a little of that on which our forefathers fed keeps up the continuity of the stock. The methods of Mr. Norton were superbly out of date in our specialistic time. He saw in the Fine Arts the embodiment of man's deepest and most durable ideals; and with almost a religious fervor he brought these to bear on every aspect of the petty and careless life around him. He has been a preacher of reverence to a headlong age. And if sometimes a despairing note has been heard in his voice, it has been perhaps a necessary corrective of overconfident America.

Both for Faculty and students Mr. Norton himself has been more important than what he has said. Through him all have come in contact with the literary leaders of the last generation; with most that is notable in the circles of literature, politics, and the Fine Arts abroad; with whatever forces have worked for beauty and dignity in every age. He has been an epitome of the world's best thought, brought to our own doors and opened for our daily use. Let others describe him more fully in his personal charm and in his relations with the larger world. I, though with reluctance, confine myself to the admiring gratitude given him by the College which he served.  GEORGE HERBERT PALMER.

From Richard Watson Gilder h.'90.

I know something of the affectionate reverence of Harvard men for Professor Norton, and I know that, for many and many of them, he stands for all that they hoped to acquire at Harvard--in a word, for Culture. When admitted to the hospitality of his home I have realized something of the feeling of the Harvard undergraduate with regard to Professor Norton's home and its influence. I have felt that I breathed there the true atmosphere of that university of the poets;--for while there have been notable poets at other universities, the Cambridge of America, like the Cambridge of England, has always attracted the poets, and men of poetic minds. Professor Norton has stood for the beautiful in literature, for the beautiful in art, and for the beautiful in life. It is significant that with all his admiration for the classical, he is known as one of the closest friends and encouragers in America of the most modernly resonant poet of Great Britain. It is significant, too, that while a lover of the reserved and the reposeful, such as Harvard represents inwardly and outwardly, he is an appreciator of the new spirit of a rushing and aspiring community like Chicago.

Grateful am I for this opportunity to express, though inadequately, my felicitations to his friends and himself on the noble accomplishment and long continuance of that distinguished and attractive personality.--that exceptional personality, which has conquered the hearts and done a very beautiful work in moulding the taste and character of men.  RICHARD WATSON GILDER