Barrett Wendell: New England orderly idealist

Modern Age, Fall, 2006 by Michael J. Connolly

THE OBSCURITY OF INTELLECTUALS comes in two basic varieties: justifiable and unjustifiable. The former are trapped in the contexts of their own times, whose ideas cease to resonate far after their deaths. The grave is the end and they are remembered, if at all, in anecdotes and footnotes. Not answering the enduring questions, their obscurity is well-deserved. The latter are, however, forgotten sometimes deliberately as men who had written and said important things, but whose message ran against the grain of their times. As that message was often critical of fashionable intellectual or cultural trends, it was waived aside as crankiness or oddity. Obscurity functioned as a kind of revenge or punishment. But their message spoke beyond its immediate context, said interesting things about former and future times, and deserves rediscovery. This obscurity is unfortunate but reversible.

Barrett Wendell (1855-1921), for thirty-seven years a professor of English at Harvard College, ranks as an undeservedly obscure American "Man of Letters." He interpreted the nation's past through what he called its twofold character--one part Puritan and theocratic, the other part legal and based in English common law--and he brought that understanding into the contentious Progressive Era, harshly condemning those who defied America's traditions and origins. A thoroughgoing conservative and self-described Tory reactionary, he often felt a man apart, whose ideas had either "seen their day" or were, ironically, so orthodox as to be unorthodox in a radical age.

As a Harvard professor with the likes of colleagues Irving Babbitt and George Santayana, Wendell was wildly successful, having a "real and direct" impact in influencing a generation of important writers and poets from his classroom. (1) While never the mentor of creative talent like Robert Frost, John Dos Passos, or T.S. Eliot--all students during Wendell's Harvard era--Wendell helped to define an enduring literary tradition. His skepticism of juvenile literary eccentricity and his despairing opinion of an emerging democracy marked a path for others to follow and to expand upon in poetry and prose. A representative of an under-appreciated New England conservative tradition in American letters--what he dubbed "orderly idealism"--Wendell merits reconsideration.

Wendell was born in August 1855 to a wealthy mercantile family with roots deep in New England history. He was descended from Dutch traders who settled around Albany, New York, in the 1640s and eventually emigrated to Massachusetts and New Hampshire by the early 1700s. Beginning poor but armed with a good family name, his paternal grandfather was a self-made man, who made money privateering in the War of 1812 but lost it all through bad manufacturing investments in the 1820s. Wendell's father, therefore, had to begin in similar poverty, and worked his way up the economic and social ladder as an agent for major New England textile mills in the 1840s and 1850s. By the time he married and began having a family, he had acquired both a name and a large fortune. (2)

During the Civil War, the Wendells moved briefly to New York, a transition the young Wendell despised. He, like any good New Englander, found New York cold, forbidding, and lacking the humanity of Boston. "[T]here was something depressingly monotonous, though, in the unbroken vistas of the rectangular streets, and something inhuman in the fact that they were not named but numbered," he later recalled. "Compared to Boston, I can now see, it was surging with growth, which means incessant change; and change I have never found instinctively sympathetic." (3) The Wendell family also frequently traveled to Europe--between the ages of 13 and 19 (1868-1874), young Barrett visited England and the Continent three times. Here, he always felt at home. Like Henry James, Henry Adams, and other disillusioned writers of that era, Wendell was inspired by the ruins, cathedrals, and romantic past of Europe, a past America glaringly lacked. His longing for Europe, however, did not lead him to forsake the United States. Boston and Europe would be Wendell's cultural guideposts for the rest of his life.

He entered Harvard in 1872, dropped out when his health gave way (Wendell was continually in fragile mental and physical health), and eventually re-enrolled, graduating with the class of 1877. As a student, Wendell struck observers as a bookish fop, "somewhat radical, or rather iconoclastic, in temperament." He spoke with a British accent, dressed in fashionable British clothes, joined all the campus literary societies, and walked with a cane because of a bad back. Writing for the early Harvard Lampoon, he allied himself with the conservative and aristocratic elements at the College, taking joy in how many people he could annoy with his opinions. His writings, remarked one biographer, "reveal a somewhat world-weary young man, both consciously and unconsciously clever, evidently fond of saying smart, 'snobbish,' and--to the more conventionally minded--irritating things, indulging himself freely in the venerable criticism of youth, and obviously enjoying it all to the full." (4) Such a habit, of shocking tender-minded opponents with controversial opinions, would follow Wendell his whole life.