VI
HORACE HOWARD FURNESS
AN ADDRESS DELIVERED IN THE NAME OF THE AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY,
PHILADELPHIA, JANUARY 17, 1913
HORACE HOWARD FURNESS
We meet on a solemn occasion.
One has recently disappeared from our midst whose work was a model; whose life, too, was a model; whose benign influence, exerted for many years from the seclusion of a quiet retreat, was felt far beyond the limits of his own country; whose views, always expressed in the gentlest terms, will outlive the thunder of many a noisy writer, as ever-renewing flowers survive earthquakes.
A member of the American Philosophical Society, founded in his own city by Franklin "to promote useful knowledge," Furness was true to the motto of the society and lived the life of a true philosopher. I call him Furness, without Doctor or any other title, not because he is no more, but to obey a request of his. "I do not like titles in the republic of letters," he wrote me in the early times of our acquaintance; "if you will drop all to me, I will do the same to you. One touch of Shakespeare makes the whole world kin."
All those whom the spirit of philosophy has penetrated and who stanchly adhere to its ideal count among the noblest types of humanity and, whatever their rank in life or the period when they lived, resemble each other. When Furness died numerous eulogies, biographies, and portraits of him, penned, many of them, by the hands of masters, were published. I wonder if any better resembled him than this one:
"Remember his constancy in the fulfilling of the dictates of reason, the evenness of his humor at all junctures, the serenity of his face, his extreme gentleness, his scorn for vainglory, his application to penetrate the meaning of things. He never dismissed any point without having first well examined and well understood it. He bore unjust reproaches without acrimony. He did nothing with undue haste.... A foe to slander, he was neither hypercritical, nor suspicious, nor sophistical. He was pleased with little, modest in his house, his clothing, his food. He loved work, ate soberly, and thus was able to busy himself, for the whole day, with the same problems. Let us remember how constant and equable was his friendship, with what open mind he accepted a frank contradiction of his own views, with what joy he received advice that proved better than his own, and the kind of piety, free from all superstition, that was his. Do as he did, and your last hour will be comforted, as his was, by the conscience of the good accomplished."
In those higher regions where true philosophers live, equality reigns; they resemble each other by their virtues; this portrait, which, to my mind, gives such a vivid idea of the life Furness led at Wallingford, near Philadelphia, was drawn eighteen centuries ago, by that noblest of antique minds, Emperor Marcus Aurelius, describing his predecessor, the first of the Antonines, he who, on the last night of his life, being asked for the password, had answered: "Æquanimitas."
After studies at Harvard and Philadelphia and a visit to Europe and the Levant, having taken such part in the Civil War as his infirmity allowed him, a happy husband, a happy father, Horace Howard Furness decided to devote his life to the "promotion of useful knowledge." He withdrew, in a way, from the world, settling in a quiet retreat, and started on his life's work with the equipment of a modern scientist and the silent enthusiasm, the indefatigable energy of mediæval thinkers, the compilers of Summæ of times gone, regretting nothing, happy with his lot, at one with that master mind of old English literature, the author of Piers Plowman. "For," said centuries ago the man "robed in russet,"
"If heaven be on this erthe · and ese to any soule,
It is in cloistre or in scole · be many skilles I finde;
For in cloistre cometh no man · to chide ne to fihte,
But all is buxomnesse there and bokes · to rede and to lerne."
Such a cloister, with ease to his soul, with buxomness, with books to read and learn, was for our departed friend his house in Wallingford, where he lived surrounded by that extraordinarily gifted family of his: a wife to whom we owe the Concordance to the poems of Shakespeare, a sister who translated for him the German critics, sons and a daughter and a sister's relative[250] who have all made their mark in their country's literature. There, for years, he toiled, never thinking of self nor of fame, busy with his task, and even in his seclusion, with his tenderness of heart and ample sympathies, listening to
The still sad music of humanity.
What that task was all the world now knows. A passionate admirer of Shakespeare, he wanted to make accessible to all every criticism, information, comment, explanation concerning the poet which had appeared anywhere at any time. Each volume was to be a complete encyclopædia of all that concerned each play. The first appeared in 1871, the sixteenth is the last he will have put his hand to.
In the introduction to each volume, his purposes and methods are explained, and never has any writer more completely and more unwittingly allowed us to look into his own character than Furness when writing what he must have considered his very impersonal statements. What strikes the reader, before all, is the philosophical spirit which pervades the whole work. A worthy member of the American Philosophical Society, he wanted to be "useful." Lives are and will be more and more encumbered; the acquisition of knowledge should, therefore, be made more and more easy of reach. "To abridge the labor and to save the time of others" was, said he in his first volume, what impelled him to write. No pains of his were spared to lessen those of others. And all specialists know the extraordinary reliability of his texts and statements. "Nowhere, perhaps," Sir Sidney Lee wrote in his Life of Shakespeare, "has more labor been devoted to the study of the works of the poet than that given by Mr. H.H. Furness, of Philadelphia, to the preparation of the new Variorum edition."
The labor was one of love, and a lover naturally forgets himself for the beloved one. Furness tried not to show the ardor of his sentiments; but it now and then appears, usually in small details when he would, more naturally, be off his guard. Shakespeare calls Cæsar's Ambassador Thidias, and not Thyreus, as the later-day editors do, under pretense that it was the real name. They are wrong: "Shakespeare in his nomenclature was, as in all things, exquisite.... For certain reasons (did he ever do anything without reason?) he chose the name of Thidias...."
In the privacy of intimate correspondence Furness would be more outspoken, being not restrained by the thought that he would be imposing his own views upon the mass of readers. On Cleopatra, about whom I had risked opinions somewhat different from his, he wrote me—it seems it was yesterday: "Of course, Shakespeare's Cleopatra is not history. But who cares for history? Of this be assured, that, if you had lived with her as I have for two years, you would adore her as deeply as I do."
The truth is that, as he said, he actually lived with the personages of the plays, and he rapturously listened to those far-off voices, which came clearer to his infirm ears than to those of any one of us, meant only for commonplace uses. He had a better right than any to form an opinion, but was ever afraid to seem to force it on others. Of his edition itself he had written: "I do not flatter myself that this is an enjoyable edition of Shakespeare. I regard it rather as a necessary evil."[251] On another occasion, having been criticised about a certain statement of his, he wrote: "I now wish to state that my critic was entirely right and I entirely wrong." His work was a work of love, but it was also a work of reason, as befits a philosopher. He leaned throughout toward conservative methods, which have doubtless the fault of attracting less tumultuous attention to the worker: a great fault in the eyes of the many, a great quality in Furness's own.