Lucien Price '07

He was in his eighty-second year when he died; yet we could have better spared a younger man. For, though he had physically slowed somewhat in recent years, his mind was as keen and probing as ever, and his old-fashioned dipped pen (he loathed the typewriter) just as active and skilled. In his last months, he was revising the manuscript of the last novel of All Souls, an eight-volume roman-fleuve to rank with Proust's and Rolland's.

Classicist, philosopher, novelist, essayist, memoirist, journalist, diarist (170-odd volumes of notebooks repose in Houghton Library)--and so much more. Above all he strove to be a 20th-century Periclean Hellene; and his whole life was indeed a paragon of the ancient Greek arete.

To the world at large he was most renowned for his Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead, an unsurpassed mnemonic feat of verbatim reporting, which has been reissued in paperback and even translated into Arabic. But, steadfastly refusing all honors and awards, he especially enjoyed writing under the shielding "Uncle Dudley" byline of the Boston Globe, whose pages he graced, lustrum after lustrum, for an entire half-century. His Sunday editorials, always timely, were usually timeless as well, and unexcelled in any other newspaper.

He might hold forth on the great men he personally knew well--Whitehead, Sibelius, Harvey Cushing, Santayana, Rolland, Koussevitzky, Sir Richard Livingstone, Gilbert Murray, Samuel Eliot Morison; or on the things absorbed into his marrow--the sweep of Homer, the wisdom of Sophocles, the vitality of Michelangelo, the depth of Beethoven, the ironies of Stendhal, the scope of Goethe, the imagination of Berlioz, the thrust of Ibsen, the grandeur of Wagner, the vigor of Whitman.

He used to say of his editorials that "perhaps 300 read them, maybe 30 fully understand them, and possibly three persons act on them." Surely his estimate was conservative. Though he characteristically put his candle under a bushel, how far that candle threw his beams!

Reared in Ohio, he came to Harvard, fell in love with Boston, and remained here the rest of his life, unflaggingly solicitous of the University. It is somehow fitting that he made his last unofficial visit to Cambridge to see the German film version of Goethe's Faust shown at the Loeb Theatre; for he had waged an ardent campaign to stimulate a fully staged production of this classic in Harvard's new playhouse. It is also fitting that his editorial appearing the day he was stricken dealt with Aeschylus' Oresteia; for it was occasioned by the forthcoming Adams House production, and concerned the work he loved most in the world.

He would not choose to be eulogized. But let us just recall a thought from Pericles' Funeral Oration, which he often quoted: "The whole earth is the sepulchre of famous men; and their story is not graven only on stone over the native earth, but lives on far away, without visible symbol, woven into the stuff of other men's lives."

Amphion's Lyre, the celebrated discourse Lucien Price gave to the Harvard Glee Club in 1945, concluded with the line. "Eternal life is not a duration; it is an intensity." Lucien Price earned eternal life.