and Friend*

GOTTFRIED EMANUEL HULT,

Professor of Greek, University of North Dakota

S out of some old-world thorofare of ceaseless and congested traffic one slips into the quiet of a chapel to sit for some moments in contemplation of an altarpiece, or listen to strains stealing upon the ear from distant chanted service, so out of the busy activities of our commencement week we have come here for some moments of quiet and revery. In this our pause and withdrawal, we too sit in contemplation of beauty, but a beauty finer than that of things wrought with the cunning of artistry; we hearken to music rarer than the heard melodies of sense. Out of a life, beautiful as it was lived and lovely in its passing and memory, steals upon us the subtle and potent influence of the hour, dedicated to commemorating our late colleague and friend, George St. John Perrott.

It would not be right to mar this After-silence by conventional eulogy. Only the simplest most heartfelt words befit his memory. So unnoisy was he in his coming and going among us, so self-effacing in his activity, that praise almost seems incongruous and out of keeping. And yet the University of North Dakota is finer and better because for twenty-five years this gentle ministering spirit Ishared in its activities and shed itself abroad in beneficent influence upon its institutional life. This city of the plains has some elements of character and manhood by which it is richer because this profound scholar and refined gentleman had part in its citizenship. Even the great prairie state thruout its commonwealth could not have been wholly untouched by the light and sweetness of this rare culture, of which Alma Mater might have used the words of Portia: "That light we see is burning in my hall.

How far that little candle throws his beams!

So shines a good deed in a naughty world."

That Professor Perrott always exercised a certain spell upon me in a way that few have done, and made a fine appeal by his personality to my imagination I always knew, without stopping to ask why. Since his passing I have enquired of myself the reason for this appeal, and found the explanation in a variety of causes. In the first place one could not see him without being aware of a

• An address given at the memorial service for Professor Perrott, at the University on Tuesday afternoon, June 13, 1916.

certain distinction of manner and bearing, as unmistakable as the distinction in his speech. This man had come out of an early environment which had spoken to his soul, and so molded him into an instinctive refinement and fastidiousness of appreciation. Not in vain had he sat as pupil beneath the very roof and within the very walls of the school at Stratford which three centuries earlier had educated William Shakespeare. The spell of that association he felt, altho keeping it to himself as something too fine to be vulgarized by speech. Then that later experience of Oxford that came to him-the beauty of the ivy-clad colleges with their old gardens, the memories of the great men associated with Oxford, whose lives were everlasting contributions to English history, his contact with England's élite of studenthood intellectually and socially, Oxford music, Oxford theatricals, Oxford athletics, Oxford's many-sided scholastic life in all its phases,-how it must have imprest this impressionable and hypersensitive youth! No wonder one caught gleams in his speech that seemed like the reflection of reminiscences of a bygone age of gold.

It is fortunate that such reminiscences did not go wholly unrecorded as would probably have been the case except for our insistence on his sharing in programs of various kinds, which compelled a little self-expression on his part. Reading the papers he wrote that have to do with the experiences both of his childhood in his native town of Stratford, and his student days at Oxford, one feels the pity of it that one who had so much to give did not give more. Nothing could be more delicate and sensitive than the phrasing in the biographical recordings that we managed to get out of him. Interesting data are presented in such a way as to keep himself as much as possible out of the narrative. Where he is absolutely obliged to make a personal reference he does it with fine restraint and tact, as for instance in his paper on Stratford, the last thing from his pen, I believe, in which he writes: "The school in which Shakespeare learnt his 'little Latin and less Greek'; the school which I attended 300 years later and where respect for my present position compels me to hope that I did better than that! With the assistance of the dear old doctor and his stick I flatter myself I really did learn something." In a paper on Dickens given at Convocation I came across this bit of self-revelation which is like sudden color in one's path by reason of a flower: "His pathos takes a stronger hold on me than his humor, because I presume I am naturally a dismal subject who would always rather cry than laugh. Not that I ever do cry about the happenings of real life but I admit

that there are many passages in fiction that I should not like to try to read aloud." With what artistic sensitiveness he read literature is suggested in the same connection by his criticism of Dickens for using "phrases that make one shrink as though in pain at their untruthfulness, and the sincerity of literature is compromised." In his paper on Oxford with its fund of rich anecdote and spontaneous droll humor, the deep feeling of the writer as he stands in retrospect comes to the surface at times inevitably. That he was finely attuned to values, both artistic and human, which came to him out of the Oxford years of his life, he makes evident when he writes: "Words fail me when I think of the 'stream-like windings of that glorious street' which runs from Carfax Church to Magdalen Bridge. "The High' (as we called it) contains University, Queen's and Magdalene colleges, besides that most graceful of all structures, the University Church, with its memories of Wycliffe, Cranmer, Ridley and Latimer, of Laud, Newman, and Pusey."

These brief excerpts from papers that I have recently been privileged to read help to bring Professor Perrott back to our thoughts as we knew and loved him. Many of you heard the very words I have quoted as they fell from his lips. We appreciated then and can appreciate even more fully now what it meant to our University in her early history to have so finely endowed and so richly cultured a nature in her midst. When he became connected with the University in 1891 there were only 150 students in one building. Yet this incipient nucleus of a future University was linked by the acquisition of Professor Perrott as one of its faculty with the best of old-world scholarship and culture. If we apply the Garfield-Mark-Hopkins test, here already then was a University. For in its mustard-seed beginnings it had real men on its teaching staff.

Being connected with the University almost from the beginning, Professor Perrott inevitably came into demand in latter years for what he called "old-timer speeches." Acting in that capacity he invariably acquitted himself most worthily. We came to expect from him his characteristic quiet humor, his unerringly characterizing phrase, his concrete experience drawn upon with such good taste and given forth with such command of apt allusion and fitting figure. In looking over his papers I found the record of such a speech which imprest me at the time of its delivery with the homely directness of its close. Probably his lips quivered as he spoke these words. As in much of what he said he is strong by his very modesty and understatement: "My friends, I think I have chattered to you long

enough of my reminiscences of early days. I have seen the University of North Dakota grow to its present size and importance. I have given it a large part of my life, and of course I love it. I hope also that I have been of some slight use to it and to its students."

Professor Perrott contributed much as a colleague to the life of each of us. Intimate contact with him always yielded flavor and quality. Shy tho he was,-as shy as a fern whose cherished anonymity too much sunlight would destroy, yet he was one whom instinctively one wished to know. Because of reserves of scholarship divined in him, and quiet wisdom giving token of itself in the subtle ways of demeanor and personality one spontaneously desired the approach leading to the relation of companion and friend. The spiritual resources we drew upon after his approach had been somewhat timidly acquiesced in by him were far in excess of what we had anticipated in the way of enjoyment and fruition.

He assiduously cultivated the obsolete virtues of reticence and reserve. Robustious forthputting was not to his taste. He told me once that self-advertising was to him indecent, and that he shrank from it as one might from physical self-exposure. He clung to the now unorthodox religion that God is not in the storm-wind, nor in the earth-quake, but in the still small voice. He knew there was a vast difference between beauty talked about and beauty appreciated; and that the kingdom of beauty no less than that of righteousness cometh not with outward observation. There is hope in Israel as long as such men are among us. If education should wholly lose that type of manhood from its service, wherewith shall it then be salted?

I have walked on the shore of the Pacific at night, and seen the silvery path of the moon across the waters,-the moon-glade, which seemed to me one of the most beautiful of marine night effects. One evening, however, when by chance no moon was abroad, I caught glimpse of a faint shy glimmer on the water that was more magic, more rare by far, than the obvious lunar splendor. It was star-glade I had glimpsed-a faint trickling down upon hushed waters from a half-hidden star. I had made a discovery. The splendor across the sea from the moon was only borrowed light, ostentatiously reflected. The star was intrinsic, sending its own light like perfume out of its own inmost glowing soul. In the world of human character I have seen the same contrasts as in nature. There, too, I am thankful for the subtler effects. Professor Perrott exemplified something of their quality. He was in that respect like rare poetry, of which it is said that it is not heard, but overheard.

Already six years ago he knew that he was stricken and his fate sealed. Yet all thru these years of handicapped toil, in that hardest, most strength-draining of professions, teaching, the arduousness of which weighs a man down even in his utmost prime of vigor and strength, he did not falter, nor ever give sign of failing courage. Not knowing at what moment the end might come he went each morning to his work, which he did well as a good man will, until called up higher. What reward beyond may come to one for life nobly lived and service well rendered, I have no way of knowing. But this I do know:

"Greatness and goodness are not means but ends.

Hath he not always treasures, always friends,

The great good man? Three treasures: love, and light,

And calm thoughts regular as infant's breaths?

And three firm friends more sure than day and night:

Himself, his Maker, and the angel, Death?"