KITTREDGE

A student once confronted George Lyman Kitredge with the choice between teaching and research. "Thank you," Professor Kitredge said, "I'll take both." Indeed, his brilliant career was the successful fusion of the two.

It is all too easy to deify such a man, to build up myths that describe his "Olympian" stature. Rather than explaining his prominence, however, colorful fables tend to obscure the true nature of his greatness: devoted scholarship and inspired teaching.

Kitredge wrote more than 150 books and articles, running the gamut from Arm Pitting among the Greeks to Witchcraft in old and New England, from a school edition of Cicero's orations to An Advanced English Grammar, from studies of Middle English balladry to his famous notes on Shakespeare.

In these notes are many examples of his best criticism, always aiming for a logical and constructive interpretation rather than imagining a possible though unlikely one. For instance, Prospero's gift in The Tempest of "a third of mine own life,/Or that for which I live," he writes, "Life consists of past, present, and future. All that the future means to Prospero--all that henceforth he lives for--is his daughter. Therefore she is his future, a third of his own life."

Not only did he prepare such line by line notes for each play, but also a critical and historical introduction, a glossarial index, and references to textual variances in other editions. To those in scholarly circles, however, his work on Shakespeare comprises only a small part of his achievement, even though it was more glorified by the undergraduates at Harvard than were his other efforts. Far more significant to the development of the study of English language and literature are his discovery of the tremendous influence thirteenth century French poets had on Chaucer, his valuable inquiry into the ways in which the Anglo-Saxon language grew out of Germanic tongues, and his extensive research into medieaval mythology, especially the works of Sir Thomas Malory.

In his writing, Kittredge used all of the amazingly diversified material that he read, as two successive footnotes to chapter seven of Witchcraft in Old and New England show, "1. Thucydides, ii., 48. 2. Boston Transcript, January 17, 1918." In addition to using the products of his research for his own purposes, he invariably sent bibliographical references to his colleagues when he found something pertinent to their research.

Because he read so much, he acquired a reputation for having an immense fund of knowledge, a reputation which spread throughout Europe as well as America. For example, when he visited the Bodleian Library at Oxford, he asked the librarian for help in answering an enormously difficult question. "Sir," came the reply, "there is only one person in the world who might be able to answer that question, and that is Professor Kittredge of Harvard."

Aside from the immediate influence of his works on the field of letters, Kitteredge helped bring the public to think of scholarship as respectable endeavor, more than a pedant's ocupation. When it was remarked that Widener was "an elephant" among buildings in the yard, he countered, "What if it is? You could destroy all the other Harvard buildings to the northwest and, with Widener left standing, still have a University." For Kittredge, books were humanity recorded.

And underneath the man who produced volumes of scholarly works was a sensitive mind, philosophically aware of man's comparative insignificance in a huge universe: "Sometimes I fear that we are all donkeys together--we foolish mortals--braying dissonantly at each other and taking our hee-haws for the oracles of Apollo--shaking our ears in the moonlight, and interpreting their shifting shadows as glimpses of the infinite."

As a teacher, Kitteredge was "alert, brilliant, amusing, through, but always inexorable," according to a pupil. "He made us think," said another. "He taught us to respect the dignity of the scholar," said a third. Indeed, there are many such tributes to his teaching, not the least of which came from Monty Wolley, who studied with him in 1912: "I can think of no one who more inspired me as a teacher, stimulated my mind... or gave me more complete happiness."

In lecture, he was "a consummate artist, who knew all the tricks of rhetoric and histrionics." Most undergraduates feared his outbursts of temper, which were provoked by any rude or unprepared students. Despite the intellectual stimulation provided by his classes, most of the stories about them idealize his imperious and domineering manner.

One wintry morning "Kitty" was late. Over seven minutes late. Someone cantiously said, "All out," but nobody moved. Finally, one brave soul ventured towards the door, and soon the class began to file downstairs from Harvard 6, the site of English 2 for many years. Suddenly, one of the leaders shouted from downstairs, "Here he is!" There was a mad scramble to return to the room, but "Kitty" was on the platform before all were settled. "When I was an undergraduate in this College," he bellowed, "by thunder we never went back for a professor." He then proceeded to deliver an incomprehensibly brilliant lecture, in the course of which he scared away a 38-year old graduate student, who was a professor in another college.

Kittredge may have terrorized many of his students, but they probably failed to understand that his momentary outbursts of temper were merely outlets for the tension built up by the strain of his 16-hour working day. Nevertheless, these frightened undergraduates knew their Shakespeare. In a normal year, he required them to memorize 600 lines and to know the rest of the six selected plays well enough to be able to recognize 60 spot quotations on the final exam.

In graduate courses, Professor Kittredge was less overbearing. He held at least one seminar a year in his home, where he was completely at ease. His teaching technique in these seminars was such that it caused one graduate student to remark, "I'm studying Beowulf with Beowulf himself."

His nature was perhaps best manifest in oral examinations. As one student commented, "Many a candidate felt relief, after being subjected to a host of merciless, polished questions, at Kittredge's taking over the exam with his mild kindliness and amazing ability to elicit information from exhausted minds that objected to thinking further." Once a frightened candidate for Honors in English said in reply to one of his questions, "I'm afraid I can't answer; I have not read all of Wordsworth." Kitteredge reassuringly disclosed, "Neither have I. I couldn't be hired to." He always helped the candidate to relax, and, according to one professor, was extremely sympathetic in the voting.

Born in Boston in 1861, Kittredge attended Harvard, winning the Bowdoin prize twice, and receiving his A.B. in 1882. After teaching Latin at Exeter for six years, he was appointed instructor of English in 1888. Immediately popular with the Faculty and the student body, he soon became a full professor, and in 1917 was named Gurney Professor of English, a post he held until his retirement in 1936. Although he was given a plethora of honorary degrees (from Harvard, Oxford, Chicago, Johns Hopkins, McGill, Brown, Trinity, Union and Colby), he never received a Ph.D. "Who," he replied when someone asked why not, "could examine me?"

Kittredge was a hale, hearty man, who chain-smoked cigars to save on matches and always wore a pearl-gray suit. He carried a cane which he held high in the air to stop Harvard Square traffic, causing one truck driver to remark, "Who do you think you are--Santa Claus?" He also used his cane to knock the hats off students rude enough to wear them inside Widener. An associate of Leverett House, his portrait hangs in the Dining Hall there.

25th Year at Harvard

To celebrate his 25th year of teaching at Harvard, 45 of his friends, on the faculties of many universities, prepared erudite essays for a congratulatory volume. He was not only popular with scholars, however. Kittredge had so large a Boston following that when it was announced that he would give the Lowell Institute lectures for 1934, the demand for tickets was so great that he gave each lecture twice, in the afternoon and in the evening.

Several years later, some efficiency experts asked him how long it took for him to prepare an average lecture for English 2. "I refuse to answer. It's one of my trade secrets," he said, but when he was pressed for a reply, he relented. "Just a lifetime--can't you see that?"

'The Puzzle of Life'

The closing lines of Chaucer and His Poetry sound strangely like a confession; "...Geoffrey Chaucer, poet, idealist, burgher of London, Commissioner of Dykes and Ditches, who loved his fellow man both good and bad, and found no answer to the puzzle of life but in truth and courage and beauty and belief in God." Kittredge longed to have a chance to live in an age when this sort of life was possible, a desire hinted at in Witchcraft in Old and New England, "We are all specialists now-a-days, I suppose. The good old times of the polymath and the doctor universalis are gone forever." In trying to fullfill this archaistic longing, Kittredge achieved an unusual stature for the modern age