His shrewd good sense, seconded by a no less enjoyable good humor, never failed him. When he began, one important question had first to be decided: would he admit in his work only textual and philological criticisms or also æsthetic criticism, mere poetry, sheer literature? To many the temptation would have been great to exclude the latter, the fashion being among the most haughty, if not the most learned, of the learned to doubt the seriousness, laboriousness, usefulness of any who can enjoy, in a play of Shakespeare's, something else than doubtful readings and misprints. This school is less new than is generally believed, and in his Temple du Goût Voltaire had already represented the superb critics of the matter-of-fact school answering those who asked them whether they would not visit the temple:
"Nous, Messieurs, point du tout.
Ce n'est pas là, grâce à Dieu, notre étude;
Le goût n'est rien, nous avons l'habitude
De rédiger au long, de point en point,
Ce qu'on pensa, mais nous ne pensons point."
The fact is that, as Furness well perceived from the first, the two elements should no more be separated than soul from body. Without accuracy, literary criticism is mere trumpery; without a sense of the beautiful, mere accuracy is deathlike. Much so-called æsthetic criticism, wrote Furness, "is flat, stale, unprofitable.... But shall we ignore the possible existence of a keener insight than our own?... Are we not to listen eagerly and reverently when Coleridge or Goethe talks about Shakespeare?"
With such a rule in mind he made his selections, pruning what he deemed should be pruned: "rejectiones et exclusiones debitas," as Bacon would have said. But one more kind of thing he excluded, and this is an eminently characteristic trait of his. His gentleness (not a weak, but a manly one) rebelled at others' acerbity, and when he saw appear that unwelcome and somewhat abundant element in modern criticism, he simply left it out: no admittance for any such thing within the covers of a gentleman-scholar's gentlemanly and scholarly work. True it is that, while Shakespeare is the author most read—after the Bible, it is also the one about which the most furious and unchristian disputes have been waged—after the Bible. The Philadelphia scholar wanted all the critics admitted within his fold to keep the peace there, and he adopted the following rule: "First, all unfavorable criticism of fellow critics is excluded as much as possible.... To confound Goethe, Schlegel, or Tieck is one thing, to elucidate Shakespeare is another." He went even further, and since he could not quote whole books and had to select, "the endeavor," he said, "in all honesty has been to select from every author the passages wherein he appears to best advantage." What critic, then, can be imagined so blind to the service rendered, so much in love with his own harshness, that would not feel toward Furness as Queen Katharine toward Griffith:
After my death I wish no other herald,
No other speaker of my living actions,
To keep mine honor from corruption,
But such an honest chronicler as—Furness.
His friendly appreciation of French critics (who, with all they lacked in early days, were, after all, the first to form, outside of England, an opinion on Shakespeare, the oldest one being of about 1680) cannot but touch a French heart. "It has given me especial pleasure," he said in the Introduction to his first volume, "to lay before the English reader the extracts from the French; it is but little known, in this country at least, outside the ranks of Shakespeare students, how great is the influence which Shakespeare at this hour is exerting on French literature, and how many and how ardent are his admirers in this nation." He had even, at a later date, a good word for poor Ducis and his Hamlet, a Hamlet truly Ducis's own.
Nor shall I ever forget in what tones, amidst friendly applause, the great scholar spoke of France in his own city of Philadelphia, at the memorable gathering of April 20, 1906, when, in accordance with the will of the nation as expressed by Congress, a medal was offered to my country to commemorate her reception of Franklin at the hour when the fate of the States was still weighing in the balance.
In the early years of manhood one sees, far ahead on the road, those great thinkers, scientists, master men, tall, powerful, visible from a distance, ready to help the passer-by, like great oaks offering their shade. They seem so strong, so far above the common that the thought never occurs that we of the frailer sort may see the day when they will be no more. Who was ever present at the death of an oak? Whoever thought that he could see the day when he would accompany Robert Browning's remains to Westminster or mourn for the disappearance of Taine or Gaston Paris? The feeling I had for them I had for Furness, too. Was it possible to think that this solid oak would fall?
He himself, however, had misgivings, and it seemed, of late years, as if the dear ones who had gone before were beckoning to him. "Do you remember," he wrote me in 1909, "my sister, Mrs. Wister, to whom I had the pleasure of introducing you at the Franklin celebration? I am now living under the black and heavy shadow of her loss. She left me last November, solitary and alone, aching for the 'sound of a voice that is silent.'" And at a more recent date: "I have been so shattered by the blows of fate that I doubt you'll ever again receive a printed forget-me-not from me."
And now, in our turn, members of the American Philosophical Society, members of the Shakespeare Societies of the world, members innumerable of the republic of letters, we too ache for "the sound of a voice that is silent." On the signet with which he used to seal his letters, Furness had engraved a motto, which is the best summing up of Emperor Marcus Aurelius's firm and resigned philosophy: "This, too, will pass away."
For him, too, the august sad hour struck. But so far as anything in this fleeting world may be held to remain, so long as mankind shall be able to appreciate honest work honestly done, the name of Furness will not pass away, but live enshrined in every scholar's grateful memory.
FOOTNOTES
[250] Owen Wister.
[251] Introduction to Hamlet.
VII
FROM WAR TO PEACE
AN ADDRESS DELIVERED BEFORE THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR THE JUDICIAL SETTLEMENT OF INTERNATIONAL DISPUTES, DECEMBER 17, 1910
FROM WAR TO PEACE[252]
Does peace mean progress? Is the disappearance of war a sign of improvement or of decay? At a yet recent date learned men, their eyes to their microscopes, were teaching us that among the various kinds of living creatures they had studied, war was the rule; that where struggle ceased, life ceased; and that, since more beings came into the world than the world could feed, the destruction of the weakest was both a necessity and a condition of progress. Struggle, war, violence meant development; peace meant decay. And a bold generalization applied to reasoning man the fate and conditions of unreasoning vermin. Since it was fate, why resist the inevitable and what could be the good of peace debates?