Knox College - Gale Yearbook (Galesburg, IL)

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THE GALE NINETEEN-TEN PROFESSOR SIMONDS By Buss PERRY 3jUST before sitting down to comply with the request of the editor of the GALE, who has asked me to write something about Professor Simonds, T happened to take from its dusty shelf a bound volume of lecture notes on English vowel sounds, made long ago in a German class room. My intention was to p1'0VC to a Harvard graduate student of the present epoch that 'his elders had also, in their day. kept their noses tolerably near the grindstone. But out of the decorus note-book tumbled a folded sheet of foolscap, inscribed in Simonds' familiar hand to Seinem lieben freunde, R. Perry. It was a page of the original manu- script of Simonds' doctoral dissertation at Strassburg, on Sir Thomas Wyatt. 'But why dedicated to me? At this gracious distance from the event. there is no treachery in explaining. On t'he despondency resulting from long labor upon his dissertation, combined with worrying over the examination, Simonds had been rash enough, in one passage of his thesis, to write thus: lXfleanwhile, the results to be gained by continuing the examination of the two texts in this uncertain way are too slight and too indefinite to warrant spending much more time upon it. This statement was true enough, for all T know, but I was alarmed over the possi- ble effect upon the mind of Professor Ten Brink, who had to pass upon the merits of Simonds' investigations. I begged him not to admit, in this fashion, that his labor had been in vain. VVhereupon Simonds, too discouraged to care what he was writing, deleted the above-quoted sentence and composed this extraor- dinary substitute: Meanwhile, t'he results obtained are sufficient and satisfactory. and especially valuable in demonstrating the priority of the Harrington text. This is of course most important for us to know. Thus amended, the dissertation passed Ten Brink, and Simonds won his Ph. D. But he presented his cautious friend with that corrected Ms. page, to serve as a cynical reminder of the il1SiClG view of academic honors. This is a trivial anecdote, and the Strassburg student days are far behind us now. Kindly Professor Ten Brink, greatest of ghosts, is no doubt sipping his Rhine wine and smoking his one mild cigar beside some Elysian stream,-and chafing the Baconians, if there are any Raconians there. Simonds and his critiC are staid college professors in America, and the nightingalcs are singing in the Alsatian gardens for some one else to hear. But it was a fair seed-timenfor one's soul, while it lasted, and that folded page of the dissertation on Sir Thomas Wyatt brings it all back again. We did not know much about Siinonds at that time except that he was a graduate Of Brown, that he had an eye for picking a good restaurant in an unprom- ising StrCC'f. Illlfl that he had a knack of writing peculiarly graceful English. VVe 1'6- ioiced in his Ph. D.. and were glad to hear, after a year or two, that he had been Called to a college of such fine traditions and standards as Knox. But there are few of us who can remember the exact size of his family, or the titles of the books K N OX cou.sca :- I D E D l C A T I 0 N

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K N O X couazca 8 D E D I C A T I O N THE GALE NINETEEN-TEN he has written. We do not know the amount of his salary,-although it is a safe guess that no professors salary is large enough. Nor do we know the extent of his popularity with his classes, there being no weather-cocks delicate enough to register the changes in the wind of undergraduate opinion. VVhat we do cherish is the certainty that Professor Simonds is justifying the affectionate hopes of his old companions. His professional progress has been of a quiet and substantial kind. Like most of us who are teaching English Literature to-day, he has had to reckon with a somewhat shifting and sceptical attitude on the part of the public. The stress laid twenty years ago upon the philological side of English studies, and the emphasis upon the necessity of preparation in Germany, have suffered some alteration. Very likely, if Simonds and other good men of his day had studied in Paris rather than in Germany, American literary criticism would have been enriched. and our knowledge of linguistic sources not essentially impover- ished. I remember with pleasure that the great Alphonse Daudet once praised Professor Simonds' account of him in the Introduction to English Fiction 3 and there is many another exquisite French writer whose spirit would have been sym- pathetically interpreted by our friend. Yet it is useless to surmise what our little group of Strassburg students of English might have done in other circumstances and with a different training. We have all, in our various ways, muddled through somehow. We have had to do too much routine work, for the colleges employing us have been chronically poor. Most of us have had to do outside work-lecturing to the Gentiles and writing books for the publishers. But while these bread-winning necessities have doubt- less impaired scholarly thoroughness and the purely literary value of our college work, they have brought some compensating advantages. To Professor Simonds. especially, the wider public has been generous. His History of English Liter- attire, -to be followed this year by the long awaited volume on American Liter- ature-has been welcomed by thousands of teachers and students for its sym- pathy with varied types of literary performance and its unfailing grace of style. Two or three books of such a quality, in addition to the faithful performance of our college duties for a score of years, make a record which many a college teacher of English vainly envies. May Professor Simonds live to write the best of the good things there are in him, and may his pupils always be lucky enough to recognize, close by the highway of required tasks, the presence of a friendly and large-minded counsellor! E Q