Talcott Williams

“ Nothing saves a man from this but personality. The first great tonic is humor. Dr. Furness, man and work together, brim with it. Who else would have made a merry mark of the one word in Shakspere—in The Tempest, 'young scamels from the rock'—for which no one has ever suggested a convincing or even plausible meaning? The humor needed to salt these barrels and barrels of Shaksperian pemmican is much more than the capacity to see a joke. ”

“ How wise to know your friends in your forties, and to gather them and to be with them to the very threshold of the eighties! How far wiser than the wandering way in which, like children, we fill our hands so full that we can neither use, nor give, nor leave, nor enjoy! ”

“ What is needed for adequate comment on Shakspere, the most English of all figures in the world of letters, is that numberless capacity to see the broad laugh in all things which lies so near to tears that when the coin of fate is flipped no man knows which is to be uppermost. This gives sanity. It enables the editor of a Variorum to know from time to time what a fool a German scholar can make of himself and his author. ”

“ For forty years he sat at a desk and worked to make books from books on a book. In all our American life there is no other, few in any land, who so encysted himself in a task wholly of letters. There goes with this for most, as all know, the bent figure, the absent-minded or the self-conscious gaze, aloofness from the actual. ”

“ It is the odd blunder of a dull world that social buoyancy and the notable mind seldom march together; but, as an acute thinker has said, a man with a strong pair of legs can walk east as easily as he walks west, and our great Shaksperian had all the mirth that rang under the rafters of the Mermaid. He made the Hasty Pudding Club at Harvard. He was the dancer of his year and led in the play of more than sixty years ago. ”

“ Mere industry can do much, but mere industry could never build the monument of these volumes. I confess I never look at the impressive row without amazement at the labor for which they stand. It would be much, if this were all. Long labor of this order grinds like a glacier over a writer's style and individuality. Textual criticism saps men. ”

“ His beam will stand sure and he will 'poise the cause in justice' equal scales.' There are scholars whose lives are given to the great in letters who become surfeited with honey and 'in the taste confound the appetite.' Nothing saves from this but the incommunicable capacity for the perception of the best. ”

“ NLY a great man can accomplish a great task. For fifteen of Shakspere's most familiar plays, Horace Howard Furness condensed the criticism of three centuries for each play in a single volume, save Hamlet, which has two. [1] From 6000 to 8000 works have been published on Shakspere. All on each play is brought within the compass of its volume. Who holds this volume holds the fruits of all past criticism and comment on the play. ”

“ This capacity grows by what it feeds upon. Through these volumes there has grown certainty of touch and serenity of judgment, but from the first issue there was apparent, as in the man, the norm which is not to be corrupted even by the Elizabethan extravagance of the greatest of Elizabethans.
Dr. Furness came to his life task through the Kemble tradition. ”

“ It was in Philadelphia that Wordsworth was first appreciated at his full value by an American. It was there that Coleridge was first printed. There, in a commonwealth for two centuries nearer Germany than any other American state, German translation began. William Henry Furness early addressed himself to this field. His daughter, Mrs. Annis Lee Wister, continued the task through thirty years, her last work appearing in a volume of her brother's Variorum series. Where other commentators in our tongue, in either home of our race, have looked to English comment, Dr. ”