Charles Eliot Norton is unknown today outside historians of literature or education, but between Fort Sumter and Teddy Roosevelt he dominated Anglo-American literature and Harvard lecture halls. Beginning with optimism, in the years following Appomattox his perspective darkened into fears that American democracy encouraged selfishness, corruption, and the hatred of excellence.
In the 1890s, Harvard professor Charles Eliot Norton attended a Harvard-Princeton football game and while on the sidelines marveled at the play of Arthur Poe. Poe, a diminutive two-way player for Princeton and Maryland native, flashed across the field. Norton turned to a student and asked, “He plays well, that Poe … Is he any relation to the great Poe?” The befuddled student glanced at the professor and replied, “Why, he is the great Poe.” A bookish and disciplined scholar whom as a child William Wordsworth bounced on his knee, who knew Longfellow and Emerson as close friends, and whom John Ruskin called “my tutor,” could not fathom the popularity of the game among undergraduates. In one lecture, he informed students that classical Greeks never played football, perhaps expecting the revelation to shock them. It did not, and Norton saw nothing funny in the misunderstanding. His youthful positivity had long receded before a lengthening gloom that Americans cared nothing for humane learning. Half-educated incurious technocrats, his countrymen increasingly only used knowledge to make money. Universities like Harvard failed in their mission to make American gentlemen.[1]
Norton is unknown today outside historians of literature or education, but between Fort Sumter and Teddy Roosevelt he dominated Anglo-American literature and Harvard lecture halls. Beginning with optimism, in the years following Appomattox his perspective darkened into fears that American democracy encouraged selfishness, corruption, and the hatred of excellence. “I can understand the feeling of a Roman as he saw the Empire breaking down, and civilization dying out,” he complained in 1896. Contemporaries chuckled at his older sensibilities – fading echoes of antebellum New England – but after he died friends regretted maltreatment of “the darling old saint.” He fell into obscurity because Americans suspect impractical men of the mind, the writer John Jay Chapman declared:
Our age has been an age of management, not of ideas or of men. Our problems have been problems of transportation and housing, not of thought. Our great men have been executive persons, whose merit was to serve the public convenience in practical ways. Our greatest pedagogues have generally been mere administrators. As for teaching in the mystical and personal sense – teaching in its religious and spiritual meaning – we have not had time for it.
As writer and teacher, Norton believed that education’s purpose was to create men and women of tradition, custom, place, learning, and light rather than practically trained but soulless technocratic progressives. He deserves rediscovery from those reconstructing the history of American thought away from the dominant historical narrative of triumphant liberalism.[2]
Norton’s Considerations
Charles Eliot Norton’s life can be broken into two neat halves: conservative optimism before 1870 and conservative pessimism thereafter. The future professor was born, to say the least, into favorable circumstances. As one of six children of the Unitarian minister and Harvard theologian Andrews Norton – dubbed the “Unitarian Pope” for his prodigious learning and feisty joists with interloping Transcendentalists – Charles Eliot Norton followed in his father’s footsteps and graduated from the University in 1846, thence to a career at a Boston counting house. After a trip to India, he returned home via a Europe still recovering from the 1848 revolutions and the experience struck him as frighteningly parallel to what many American reform movements wished to achieve: social regeneration along the revolutionary lines of equality, liberty, democracy, and socialism. Back in Boston, Norton composed a book of warnings entitled Considerations on Some Recent Social Theories. It was a pose he maintained the remainder of his life, a literary and professorial fire bell warning Americans the times were unwell.
Norton’s Considerations did not critique reformism from the direction of European reactionaries like Maistre or Metternich but from that of a young conservative Boston Brahmin Whig. As such, for all its fear and anxiety, an ebullient optimism infused the book. Social problems could be solved and both spiritual and material progress were within reach, but reformers needed to define their terms carefully, humbly understand the possible, and proceed with prudence. It was, therefore, no mistake that Norton began the first chapter with a quotation from Edmund Burke.
Too many reform movements in Europe and America were based on passion and “blind enthusiasm” rather than reason and experience, Norton began, and their notions of equality depended upon vague concepts like “the people.” Most often, radicals like the Hungarian Louis Kossuth meant the aggregate mass exclusive of elites, the bone and sinew of the working classes, and appealed to their vanity via propaganda and oratory. The divine right of the people replaced the divine right of kings. Norton held a low opinion of the spontaneous virtue and good will of the masses and by detaching the people from elite guidance, restraint and humility evaporated. “Is there any one who will assert that ‘the people’ in any country is so wise that it can know, or so calm that it can choose, what is best for itself,” he asked. “Does it not everywhere need counsel, restraint, and education? Is the wisdom which is to advance the world to be found in any multitude? Is evil no longer in possession of any heart?” Elites were necessary and inevitable, and Norton posited throughout Considerations an Iron Law (if not of Oligarchy) of Elites. “[The people] could not, if they would, rescue themselves from evil; and they have no help for others. But their progress must be stimulated and guided by the few who have been blessed with the opportunities, and the rare genius, fitting them to lead.” Norton, of course, considered himself and fellow Boston Brahmins among those “fit to lead” and irresponsible friends and associates who supported radical reform movements abdicated a sacred responsibility. They were the teachers and ministers, merchants and lawyers, institution builders and philanthropists who funded and built Boston, and to fail at leadership was dereliction of duty.[3]
Liberty as defined by the reformers was likewise “a mere jest and illusion,” Norton wrote. That which begins poorly ends poorly and defining Liberty as freedom from all restraint as opposed to Liberty to live a virtuous life led to moral ignorance rather than moral order. Many utopian reformers indulged in fantasies of a primitive liberty from social, familial, or traditional obstructions to the individual will, thereby creating a race of “noble savages.” This was willful barbarism rather than human civilization and there was nothing noble in savagery, he replied. Real liberty was “the possession of the power to do the will of God,” a liberty which required understanding God’s laws and knowledge of virtue and the virtuous ends of human action, which is to say human happiness. Therefore, ignorance was the real enemy of liberty. It was little wonder Norton went on to become a renowned teacher, educating students in the virtues necessary for noble citizenship.[4]
Reformers also believed liberty only thrived in democracies, a theory Norton considered absurd. “It is not impossible for more political Liberty to be enjoyed under a despotism than under a republic,” he asserted, no doubt recalling the European monarchies through which he recently traveled. “And it is to be clearly recognized that universal Liberty, under any form of government, is no more possible than universal happiness.” Nations were as diverse as the world’s peoples in material conditions and aptitude for self-rule, and with the liberty to live virtuously the primary goal, no form of government was necessarily better than another. “An absolute monarchy with piety is better for a people than a republic without it.” A republic worked for the United States because of its “general moral and intellectual education,” but that could change over time: “If we become as a nation corrupted and ignorant, no worse form of government can be imagined than ours must then become; for it would be the irresistible despotism of a majority of corrupt and ignorant men.” Norton, fearing the rise of majoritarianism and calls for universal suffrage in antebellum America, declared that no connection existed between the reign of numbers and virtue. “Of all tyranny, that of the majority has been the most fearful,” he warned. Unless the wisdom of the majority was astonishingly high, higher than could be reasonably expected on earth, “all good is left to chance, while much evil is certain.” The incessant democratic universalizers who preached false ideas of equality and liberty were not liberating humanity by imposing republicanism upon them, but often enslaving them.[5]
Yet, the young sunnier Norton believed reformers and socialists were not completely wrong. The world did suffer from outrageous injustices, some man-made and others the inevitable result of human differences. Like the French Revolution, nineteenth century reform movements in both Europe and the United States failed at solving problems and the fault lay with corrupt elites. First, in their reckless haste to eliminate problems, they lacked patience and an understanding that progress was the stuff of decades and centuries rather than days and weeks. Anxious to gain social plaudits in their own lifetimes and secularizing Christianity into a materialist reformism, they demanded heaven on earth and the applause that came with it. At heart, radical reformers were colossal egotists. Second, their reforms ran contrary to human nature and human life as actually lived and worked to eradicate passion and the craving for esteem (all the while hypocritically yearning for recognition of their work). Even a cursory familiarity with humanity demonstrated that life was resistant to theory and planning. Third, they skirted the thorny complexity of correcting social wrongs that conflicted with existing rights, like socialists attacking property rights guaranteed by law and custom. What seemed so easy in theory required genuine tyranny to work.
With too many elites embracing visionary social reforms, Norton feared an American version of the 1848 revolutions. No nation was immune from bad ideas and as a large diverse nation America was even more susceptible. It was not exceptional or free from the patterns of history and prosperity gave too many people the luxury to think extravagantly and insulate themselves from how the world works. Good times bred decadence and responsible elites had a duty to advocate social responsibility and prudence, not revolution. Norton’s Considerations was an elite call to arms and a Boston Brahmin manifesto.
Squire and Professor
Leaving the life of a West India merchant behind him, the independently wealthy Norton caught the “Cambridge flu,” albeit a more modest conservative version. As his brother-in-law Theodore Sedgewick described it:
Instead of our being, as our forefathers had insisted, naturally depraved and prone to evil, we were really, if allowed to be happy, virtuous. The feeling of the indefinite perfectibility of the individual through training and education was nowhere more likely to take hold of the imagination than in a seat of learning and the community connected with it … While [Norton] was too distinctly a scholar and critic to be carried away by it, his whole youth and early manhood derived a buoyancy and glow from it that never left him throughout his life. It was a buoyancy which enabled him to share the feelings of the young and innocent, and it made him prone always to reserve a corner of his mind for a belief in some not impossible Utopia. To him who had grown up in the New England Arcadia, Utopia could never seem wholly a dream.
Norton busied himself in Boston philanthropy and was legendarily charitable throughout his lifetime, devoting time and money to a host of worthy causes. He dabbled in designing new housing for recently arrived Irish immigrants and raised money for construction and taught night school twice a week for the city’s poor. Although firmly opposed to slavery (condemning it as evil and “sowing the seeds of weakness and decay”), he was no radical abolitionist. With so many southern friends and classmates from his Harvard days, he could not hate the South. Emerson’s son remembered, “He was never an agitator, and the War seemed a calamity not be thought of.” Yet when the war came, too sickly to serve in the field, he enthusiastically composed pro-Union pamphlets for the Northern cause.[6]
After the war, Norton’s mood darkened into pessimism. His wife of only ten years died giving birth to their sixth child during an extended family stay in Europe. Her death along with circulation among skeptical European intellectuals dampened his religious faith into a soggy agnosticism and religion became sociologically useful for the maintenance of social order rather than a supernatural reality. As Gilded Age America sank beneath a wave of political corruption and populist demagoguery, Norton questioned the future of American democracy and while never passionately embracing party politics, he expressed dissatisfaction by advocating Mugwump causes like civil service reform, free trade, and African-American education. The widower now devoted the remainder of his life to three projects: building a country estate to escape the city, educating Harvard undergraduates, and serving as muse to the great literary men of England and America.
Norton lived his entire life at “Shady Hill” in Cambridge, a sprawling suburban home and botanical showplace where he carefully archived plants and trees. When the city became too noisy, he retreated to the country and purchased a farm in Ashfield, Massachusetts as a quiet summer retreat. In the Berkshire foothills, Norton transformed into a Tory squire. He organized harvest festivals, sponsored an annual dinner where speakers like James Russell Lowell, William James, Josiah Royce, and Booker T. Washington enlightened local farmers (at the bargain cost of one dollar), and renovated the town’s academy and library. Chapman recalled Norton in his rural splendor:
He did all these things in the aristocratic manner. Indeed, he was a grand exemplar of a dignified and ancient race. If he stopped to talk to an old neighbor in the country, it was with the graciousness of a prince; if he gave a lecture before the audience of a rural lyceum, he distributed his thoughts with largesse. Behind his aristocracy of breeding, moreover, there was manhood, sincerity, good feeling – the instinct of human solidarity.
Local children loved him, as he held annual contests for growing the best vegetables, finding varieties of wild flowers, and identifying birds. One year he paid them fifty cents a bushel to collect acorns to help sustain Cambridge squirrels through the winter. “It was a moderate ideal,” Sedgewick wrote, “indeed, the old classical ideal of a pleasant home in a smiling country, with books, friends, children, dogs, horses, fields, and a garden and trees.”[7]
In 1875, Norton became professor of art at Harvard, accepting the invitation of his first cousin and university president Charles W. Eliot, and for twenty-five years towered over school life. For Chapman in the 1880s, Norton was “the most important man there.” He opened his home to students, inviting them for dinners and lending (or gifting) them hard-to-find books from his prodigious personal library. Undergraduates who were poor or too far from home to return for Christmas he hosted at Shady Hill and to be invited to Norton’s wood-paneled study for reading sessions was a spiritual event. “They followed the text while Norton read aloud,” the critic Van Wyck Brooks recalled, “like a learned, elegant, and venerable priest dispensing sacred mysteries to a circle of heretics, perhaps, who were unworthy of them. One felt there was something sacramental even in the sherry and the caraway cakes that a maidservant placed in our hands as we were about to depart.” A man of letters from a bygone era, he offered young Harvard men “that gentle courtesy of an older world, a courtesy that many have marked in Mr. Norton as possessing the most perfect democracy.”[8]
At Cambridge, he stoutly defended the role of universities in American life. New Englanders long ago dedicated themselves to public education and the creation of an educated citizenry, but democracies also needed universities. “They are the head-waters of the stream of education by which the general intellectual and moral life of the community is in large measure supplied and sustained,” he wrote in 1895. But the proliferation of professional and scientific schools since the Civil War diluted this civilizing function and graduated thousands of partially-educated technocrats adept at pie charts and formulas but ignorant of art and culture. American universities betrayed their mission:
[Universities] must guide and lead, not merely follow the general direction of the national progress. Their proper work is not only one of teaching, but of inspiration as well. It is for them to enforce the conviction upon their students, and through them upon the community, that mere material prosperity affords no solid basis for the permanent welfare of the nation. The very continuance of this prosperity depends on the intelligence and character of the people, and thus the institutions that are devoted to the cultivation of the intelligence and of the moral faculties are, even from a material and selfish point of view, the most important institutions of the country.
Places like Harvard had a civic responsibility to humane learning and to offer “studies that nourish the soul” and banish moral ignorance. “The ideal university is the training place of the wisest, strongest, and best men,” Norton insisted, returning to his theme of a virtuous elite. “Such a university Harvard aspires to become.”[9]
Hundreds of students crammed lecture halls to hear the hunched black-robed “Oracle of the Humanities” speak. Norton’s delivery was careful, measured, and a model of precision and mixed humor and wit with moral earnestness. Although his lectures surveyed the art of Western Civilization, he had faint interest in technique and instead preached ethical lessons, standards of beauty, and “intellectual and moral discrimination.” He impressed upon students they were inheritors of a great civilization with the duty to preserve it and they were “shamed and exhorted into consciousness of our national shortcomings and into wholesome resolves to make their country venerable,” one literary critic wrote. Chapman remembered:
Norton’s lifework consisted in making the unlettered, rough youth of America understand that there were such things as architecture, painting, and sculpture. Norton could do this on a grand scale, to two hundred men at once; he did it as a giant crane-shovel digs the Panama Canal. He did it with great strokes of natural power, often with tears in his eyes, sometimes with sarcasm, sometimes dogmatically, but always successfully. More men have told me what Norton did for them in opening their understanding to the influence of art than have ever spoken to me of all the rest of Harvard’s professors put together.
These talks lacked the expertise of academically-trained specialists but Norton never intended them as such. He was a thorough-going aesthete. One Boston joke ran that Norton, upon arriving in Heaven, looked around and exclaimed: “Oh, oh! So overdone! So Renaissance!” His son kidded his father’s courses should be renamed “Lectures on Modern Morals as Illustrated by the Art of the Ancients.” As the New York Tribune accurately noted, Norton’s lectures were “instruction in the art of living.”[10]
Growing Pessimism
While many experienced epiphanies in the Norton’s lecture hall, others failed to understand him. He could be deliberately provocative, teasing, and bitterly sarcastic. Once, in a lecture on the idea of gentlemen, he turned to students and dryly added, “None of you, probably, has ever seen a gentleman.” A student reported during another lecture:
The dear old man looks so mildly happy and benignant while he regrets everything in the age and the country – so contented, while he gently tells us it were better for us had we never been born in this degenerate and unlovely age … I wonder if these dear and reverend people realize what an impression they give the younger ones when they beg them to believe that there is nothing high and lovely in this country or this age.
He could be stubborn (“mulish,” said one commentator) and wielded a deadly serious moral sobriety with students and friends alike. When an associate defended James G. Blaine and insisted allegations of personal corruption had no connection to presidential caliber, Norton snapped “That gives me your gauge,” and their friendship ended. You had to work at camaraderie with Norton, Chapman reflected. He left behind many disappointed courtiers upset by his manner and “polite, sardonic, patronizing smile.” But the persistent and patient “found frankness behind his sophistication, religion behind his irreligion, and bonhomie behind his crudeness.”[11]
Norton’s moral seriousness brought him notoriety during the 1898 Spanish-American War, when he joined fellow anti-imperialists in opposing American empire, told students not to enlist, and even voted against Harvard granting President McKinley an honorary degree. Newspapers and politicians condemned his lack of patriotism and death threats arrived at Shady Hill. When a press photographer visited Cambridge, Norton laughingly showed him a postcard signed “Massachusetts Soldier” that simply read “Professor Charles E. Norton is an un-American ass.” The message delighted him, the photographer reported.[12]
In Considerations, a young Norton warned of disorderly social movements endangering American progress. “He felt a duty to warn as well as work,” Edward Waldo Emerson recollected. Now the aging professor warned of colonialism and appealed to Americans “to use whatever influence, whatever power [they] may possess, to restore the nation to its old, true course.” There were other warning signs. Formerly literate elites abandoned high culture for popular entertainment, which made intelligent conversation difficult. “Not even in Cambridge can I now get together half a dozen men or women around a table, who have a large common background for their thoughts, their wit, their humor,” he lamented. “Literature in the best sense used to supply a good deal of it, but does so no longer. My fair neighbor asks, ‘What are Pericles?” Decades of democratic education failed to reduce moral ignorance. In fact, Norton feared the lowering of standards and creation of citizens “whose moral sense is in their trousers and not their breast pocket” was an inevitable feature of democracy.[13]
He believed wealthy democracies encouraged selfishness and lack of civic concern and despised wisdom and excellence as antithetical to equality. Differences of opinion and independent thinking faced the withering punishment of public opinion and the whims of the crowd. In sharp contrast to his antebellum self, Norton wrote a European friend in 1896 that the “rise of democracy to power in America and in Europe is not, as has been hoped, to be a safeguard of peace and civilization. It is the rise of the uncivilized, whom no school education can suffice to provide with intelligence and reason.” Instead, America was entering “a long course of error and of wrong, and is likely to become more and more a power for disturbance and for barbarism. The worst sign is the lack of seriousness in the body of the people; its triviality, and its indifference to moral principle.”[14]
In acknowledging the limits of progress and the presence of evil in the world, Norton had become the counterweight to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s boundless optimism, an anti-Emerson if you will. He met the “Sage of Concord” on board a transatlantic steamer in the 1870s and reported home that Emerson was hopelessly naïve. “Never before in intercourse with him had I been so impressed with the limits of his mind,” he confessed. The old philosopher had become an ideologue:
His optimistic philosophy has hardened into a creed, with the usual effects of a creed in closing the avenues of truth. He can accept nothing as fact that tells against his dogma … To him this is the best of all possible worlds, and the best of all possible times. He refuses to believe in disorder or evil. Order is the absolute law; disorder is but a phenomenon; good is absolute, evil nothing but good in the making … He would find no difficulty in entering any kingdom of Heaven; his sympathies would be perfect with its denizens. If by mistake he were to visit Hell he would deny its existence, or find it what he believes it, still the abode of good and the realm of order.
Too many Americans had tragically listened and internalized Emerson’s message. Great wealth imbued Americans with an “extravagant self-confidence” that encouraged “self-will as the rule of conduct.” Norton never mistook Heaven for Hell. By the 1890s, he witnessed Hell all around him.[15]
For all his insights as a teacher, Norton’s agnosticism too often cramped his mind. He built his reputation encouraging undergraduates to recognize ethical standards and beauty and to preserve them as models for living virtuously. The earlier religious basis for his appeals, be it Unitarian or otherwise, faded into secular pleas for moral responsibility. Norton of the Considerations, which instructed men to do as God intended, retreated before the Harvard professor telling students “this is what gentlemen do.” He clearly recognized moral ignorance expanded extravagantly despite his injunctions and that lack of religious grounding left students without the social and intellectual resources to maintain self-discipline, but could not bring himself back to belief. Norton was left in the weakened state of escaping the old New England Puritan creed while bemoaning a world without firm ethical foundations and it soured him. To a crowd of Shady Hill guests in December 1900, he announced as part of his Christmas toast, “Today the United States is standing forth as one of the worst of all nations, for she is expressing ill will toward man; she is at war.” Two years later, he told Radcliffe graduates to work to correct the errors of “vulgar, semi-civilized America.” His agnosticism also led him to questionable ethical opinions, like in 1906 when he wrote an Ohio woman in support of euthanasia for terminally or mentally-ill patients.[16]
A mighty cognitive battle raged within Norton between religious doubt and the necessity of belief to maintain human happiness, individual character, and social order. He followed the common Brahmin path of sensing Unitarianism supplied weak armor against rising modernity but never joined a church. Richard Henry Dana, Sr. and Ralph Adams Cram entered the Episcopalian Church as Anglo-Catholics and Henry Adams flirted with Rome in his medieval paean Mont St. Michel et Chartres, although none could ultimately cross the Tiber. Norton toyed with Roman Catholicism too and while at first harshly critical, his attitude toward Rome noticeably softened over time. He defended the Church against the violently bigoted attacks of American Protective Association zealots at Ashfield in the 1880s, gloried at a Cambridge priest who kept the local Irish kids in line, and when French Canadian Grey Nuns built a hospital near Shady Hill, he joined the Board of Directors, fundraised to help its operations, and visited frequently to read the Bible to patients. “He recognized the Catholic Church as, on the whole, an important power for good in our country,” Emerson’s son wrote. One wonders, given a few more years, if Norton might have moved from appreciation to conversion.[17]
Muse of the Greats
The greatest shame of Norton’s life was that he wrote so little, devoting time instead to help others write. His assistance was an extension of his charitable nature and a task he considered “an unavoidable obligation.” Apart from Considerations (a work of commentary, not literature), he composed a travel account of Italy, a history of Italian church building, translations of Dante, and bevy of essays, but little else. Norton dedicated himself to others. James Russell Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Thomas Carlyle so respected his guidance that they appointed Norton their literary executor, and the Harvard professor eventually edited and published their multi-volume letter collections. “For Lowell, Norton did everything,” the literary scholar Martin Green wrote. “He suggested subjects, deprecated others, urged publication, arranged publication, read proofs, praised, blamed, altered, circulated copies, organized support, told him to work on this now and that later … He endlessly put off his own career to promote the career of others.” John Ruskin and Norton became close friends beginning in the 1850s, so close that Englishman called him “Papa” and the American got away with chastising Ruskin for his “unsteady habits.” Ruskin gushed over Norton:
In every branch of literature, he was my superior; knew old English writers better than I – much more old French writers. Norton saw all my weaknesses, measured all narrowness, and from the first took serenely, and as it seemed of necessity, a kind of paternal authority over me, and a right of guidance – though the younger of the two, and always admitting my full power in its own kind; not only admitting, but in the prettiest way praising and stimulating.
In turn, the Anglophilic Norton brought Ruskin’s works to America and helped popularize them, particularly in his Harvard classroom with students.[18]
Norton’s students were among the most important literary scholars and writers of the coming generation, imbibing their teacher’s ideas and carrying them into the twentieth century. Their admiration for him became of a kind of academic “apostolic succession.” His pupils Barrett Wendell, George Woodberry, George Santayana, Paul Elmer More, and Irving Babbitt begat the likes of T. S. Eliot. Babbitt particularly admired Norton as mentor and guide, faithfully attended Shady Hill study sessions, and absorbed his teacher’s skepticism of democracy. “In the decorous but earnest conversations at Norton’s Cambridge estate, perhaps Babbitt even found something of the camaraderie he had known around Wyoming campfires,” a Babbitt biographer observed. “Norton was an aristocrat to be sure, but his was a true aristocracy of virtue, open to anyone strong enough to practice its moral discipline.” Babbitt brought his writings to Norton for review and his professor’s persecution over Spanish-American War criticisms gave the rough-and-tumble Ohioan “a model of grace under pressure that would serve him well.” Indeed, Babbitt and More’s “New Humanism” owed everything to Norton’s influence. The literary scholar Leslie J. Workman went so far as to write: “One might call Norton the godfather of the New Humanism; and as the link between his father, whom Carlyle called ‘the Unitarian Pope,’ and the New Humanism, Norton embodies the transference of moral force in American from theology to literature.” Babbitt always kept a photo of Norton in his study and thanked him profusely for his guidance in his 1908 Literature and the American College.[19]
In his last years, the acerbity of his battles with cultural philistines faded away. “He was a beaming little old gentleman with a note as sweet as an eighteenth-century organ,” Chapman remembered, “such an organ as you find in the hallway of an English country house – mellow, gentle, and touching in the extreme.” Former colleagues and students visited Shady Hill realizing time was short. “He really became as beautiful as a picture and a presence.” Among his final contributions were several volumes of children’s readers called Heart of Oak, filled with poetry and stories to stimulate young minds toward the humanities. College was too late to start reading good literature, he advised parents. Children must be immersed early in imaginative tales:
The imagination is the supreme intellectual faculty, and yet it is of all the one which receives least attention in our common systems of education. The reason is not far to seek. The imagination is of all the faculties the most difficult to control, it is the most elusive of all, the most far-reaching in its relations, the rarest in its full power. But upon its healthy development depend not only the sound exercise of the faculties of observation and judgement, but also the command of the reason, the control of the will, and the quickening and growth of the moral sympathies. The means for its culture which good reading affords is the most generally available and one of the most efficient.
The series was a fitting and final expression of Norton anxieties for the future and his abiding Cambridge-inspired hope. He died at Shady Hill on October 21, 1908, “the last representative of a remarkable generation.”[20]
For decades, Norton played Virgil to the great Anglo-American men of letters of the late nineteenth century and educated a generation of Harvard men on the necessity of restraint and cultural responsibility. More explained his long dead teacher to readers:
More than any other man of his group, [Norton] represented the naked New England conscience and its tenacity of character. It may seem that his powers were manifested chiefly in negation. To the individual, and particularly to the young student who showed promise of achievement, he could be generous of help and encouragement. But in relation to the community at large he stood undeniably as critic and check; and this attitude was often deeply resented. What has this man done, people would ask in a tone of caviling rebellion, that he should set himself up as judge over others? Well, the question was not unnatural; yet is not character always in some way negative? Is it not of its very essence to act as a check upon the impulsive temperament, and even upon the ranging enthusiasms of the soul? And especially in the hour of expansive liberty that came to New England when it had broken from the bondage of religion, it was desirable that the principle of restraint, broadened indeed by contact with the world, but not weakened or clouded, should have had its voice and embodiment.
Thus, as the prophet of restraint in an unrestrained age, Norton bridged the earlier Federalist-infused conservatism of John Adams, Fishes Ames, and George Ticknor, and the pessimistic grandeur of Nathaniel Hawthorne, to the intellectual rigor of Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More’s critique of emerging American modernity.[21]
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Notes:
[1] The Commoner, 9 April 1909; and George Santayana, The Genteel Tradition at Bay (New York, 1931) 3-4.
[2] Letters of Charles Eliot Norton, eds. Sara Norton and M. A. DeWolfe Howe (Boston, 1913) 241; and John Jay Chapman, Memories and Milestones (New York, 1915) 130-131.
[3] Norton, Considerations, 15-16, 19-20.
[4] Ibid, 26, 154.
[5] Ibid, 31, 40-48.
[6] Letters of Charles Eliot Norton, V2, 432; Norton, Considerations, 149-150; and Edward Waldo Emerson and William Fenwick Harris, Charles Eliot Norton: Two Addresses (Boston, 1912) 15.
[7] Chapman, Memories, 134-35; Letters of Charles Eliot Norton, V2, 444; For story of the acorns, see the New York Tribune, 25 October 1908.
[8] Chapman, Memories, 129; Van Wyck Brooks, Scenes and Portraits: Memories of Childhood and Youth (New York, 1954) 116; Emerson and Harris, Norton, 44.
[9] Charles Eliot Norton, “Harvard,” in Four Universities: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia (New York 1895) 4, 12, 43.
[10] Martin Green, The Problem of Boston (New York, 1966) 135-36, 141; Austin Warren, New England Saints (Ann Arbor, 1956) 130; Chapman, Memories, 139-140; Van Wyck Brooks, New England Indian Summer, 1865-1915 (New York, 1940) 419-21; New York Tribune, 25 October 1908.
[11] Emerson and Harris, Norton, 438-39; Brooks, Indian Summer, 421fn; Chapman, Memories, 132-33
[12] San Francisco Call, 8 May 1898.
[13] Emerson and Harris, Norton, 34; The Conservative (Nebraska City, Nebraska), 24 August 1899; and Warren, Saints, 131; Letters of Charles Eliot Norton, V2, 166.
[14] Letters of Charles Eliot Norton, V2, 236-37.
[15] The Letters of Charles Eliot Norton, V1, eds. Sara Norton and M. A. DeWolfe Howe (Boston, 1913) 503-4
[16] Evening Bulletin (Maysville, KY), 29 December 1900; The Courier (Lincoln, NE), 31 August 1901; and Evening Times (Grand Forks, ND), 8 January 1906.
[17] Emerson and Harris, Norton, 37-38.
[18] Leslie J. Workman, Review of The Correspondence of John Ruskin and Charles Eliot Norton, in New England Quarterly (December 1989) 575; Green, Boston, 137; Brooks, Indian Summer, 250; and New York Tribune, 25 October 1908.
[19] Workman, Correspondence, 577; Stephen C. Brennan and Stephen R. Yarborough, Irving Babbitt (Boston, 1987) 19-20.
[20] Chapman, Memories, 142; The Heart of Oak Books, V6, ed. Charles Eliot Norton (Boston, 1906) ix; and Paul Elmer More, “Charles Eliot Norton,” in A New England Group and Others (Boston, 1921) 103.
[21] More, “Norton,” 111-12.
The featured image is a photograph of Charles Eliot Norton (1827-1908), reading a book, 1903, by photographer: J.E. Purdy & Co.,Boston. This file is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.