Charles Edward Putney Part 7

To me Mr. Putney was a great teacher. I knew him as a friend, my friend and the life-time friend of my father. I knew him as an active member of the South Church, and a devoted leader of religious life and activity in the Academy. But it was as a teacher that he had a formative power on my life.

As I look back on those cla.s.ses in "Beginning Greek," and in Cicero, I recognize his painstaking thoroughness. The fundamentals were clear to him, and it was his work to make them clear, definite, and lasting in the minds of his pupils. If he made a mistake it was in his conscientious care that no dull or backward or thoughtless pupil should fail to have these fundamentals of the subject drilled into his mind.

How many hundreds of pupils owe their sense of accurate and clear thought to his persistent efforts day in and day out, I have no idea.

He was primarily a great teacher because he never relaxed his effort to make every pupil know the essentials of the subject he taught.

But he was more than a drillmaster, fundamental as that is. He was not without a sense of humor. I remember once he came to the door of a room in South Hall where, one Sat.u.r.day afternoon, some boys were not very quiet in their recreation. Some one answered his knock by asking, "Who's there?" When the answer came, "It's me, Mr. Putney," the boy said, "No, Mr. Putney would have said, 'It is I'"; and I can almost hear his quiet chuckle as he went away.

A great teacher depends for his success on his moral character. No one could ever question the sincerity and force of Mr. Putney's character.

With clear vision of the work he wanted to accomplish, with a devotion to his high purpose which never wavered, with a simplicity and straightforwardness which showed in every action, he impressed on the students his high ideals. At the same time he won their complete confidence and made them feel his sympathy.

Such a man leaves a widespread heritage in his pupils. He leaves also a heritage of fine tradition for the Academy he served.

ARTHUR FAIRBANKS, '82.

A college professor, at an alumni gathering, in conversation with one of his former students who had been obliged to work his way through college, said to him, "I always had a feeling that you took life too seriously,--that you had too little diversion."

The thought expressed in that remark suggests one of the dominant impressions of Mr. Putney that comes to me after these many years.

Teaching was to him a serious matter, and the student's part, in his judgment, both in preparation and in cla.s.sroom, demanded likewise faithful and not superficial performance.

The basis of this characteristic in his life-work was his Christian faith. It naturally made his objective the development of Christian character, over and above the impartation and reception of information.

I have always felt a deep sense of personal grat.i.tude for a service rendered during a special period of study at the Academy. Members of my cla.s.s who took the cla.s.sical course will recall that Greek was not included among my studies. Nearly four years after graduation from the Academy, having decided to enter college as a cla.s.sical student, I returned to St. Johnsbury for ten weeks of intensive study of Greek alone. Mr. Putney not only made my membership in the cla.s.s in "Middle"

Greek possible, and practically free from embarra.s.sment at being a late comer, but gave me many regular hours of private instruction in Homeric Greek, enabling me during the last weeks of the time to join the senior cla.s.s in the study of the latter form of the language.

This I believe to be ill.u.s.trative of his devotion and self-denying service to any who are ready to respond to the forth-putting of time, strength and knowledge on his part.

His home was open, if needed, to receive students or others who were sick and in need of attention impossible to be given in the Academy dormitory or other rooming building. Some cases of illness were of many weeks duration, but this mattered not. The tender ministrations of Mrs.

Putney were not lessened until all necessity was pa.s.sed.

Mr. Putney's influence was not due to his public utterances, for he did not seek platform prominence. But his constant adherence to high ideals of faithfulness, conscientiousness, and efficiency outside and in the cla.s.sroom, and his personal helpfulness to many an individual student are among the legacies which many of us have been privileged to share from his long and abundantly fruitful life.

GEORGE L. LEONARD, '83.

A HUMAN HUMANIST

"Are you willing to write an appreciation of what his influence in those early days meant to you?"

So the letter read, telling me of the Charles E. Putney memorial. And shall I be frank enough to add that for a moment the question rather floored me? For while youth is very susceptible to influences, of many sorts, youth is not much more conscious of them than the beanstalk of the pole. Yet almost immediately it came back to me that a few days before that letter arrived, a group of men were chatting in a Washington club--among other things, about the value and results of formal education. And, agreeing that few people ever pick up at school or college anything which in later life they can put their finger on, that for many people the so-called higher education is a pure waste of time, I added, "The only man who ever taught me anything was a Greek teacher I had at a preparatory school in Vermont."

That Greek teacher was Mr. Putney. Perhaps Greek is no longer taught at the Academy. I don't know. It is not the fashion nowadays. But I am somewhat concerned that it has ceased to be the fashion. And the foundation of the feeling I have about it was laid, in great part, at St. Johnsbury. On that, at any rate, I can put my finger. It may not have been Mr. Putney who first sowed in the mind of one of his pupils the consciousness that history is a very long drawn out affair; that it did not begin in A. D. 1776, or in A. D. 1492, or even in A. D. 1. For before that pupil trod the banks of the Pa.s.sumpsic he happened to have visited the sh.o.r.es of the aegean. To him, consequently, the Anabasis and Homer were more real than otherwise they might have seemed--though Mr.

Putney had the gift of making those old stories real.

But of one thing I am quite sure. Mr. Putney gave me my first sense of language as a living and growing organism, come from far beginnings; and he first made me see in the English language, in particular, a stream of many confluents. This is the chief reason why it seems to me a disaster that the cla.s.sics are pa.s.sing out of fashion. For with them all true understanding of our rich and n.o.ble tongue seems fated to pa.s.s out of fashion. To be too much bound to the past is of course an unhappy thing.

Each generation must live by and largely for itself. Yet does it not profit a man to be aware that knowledge is an ancient and gradual acc.u.mulation, to gain an outlook upon the cycles of history and upon the human experiments that have succeeded or failed, to be able to trace the sources of this or that element in science, in law, in art? And how shall he really know the language he speaks without some acquaintance with the languages which have chiefly enriched it--not only French and German, but Latin and Greek as well?

This Mr. Putney had the art of making his pupils feel. I remember how he used to pick words to pieces and squeeze out for us the inner essence of their meaning. One example in particular has always stuck in my memory: pernicious. And I can still hear Mr. Putney's voice translating it for us: "Most completely full of that which produces death." That word has had an interest for me ever since--akin to the respect which Henry James later instilled into me for the adjective poignant, which he declared should be used only once or twice in a lifetime. What is more, I have never lost the habit Mr. Putney enticed us to form, of picking words to pieces for ourselves. There is no better way of extracting shades of meaning. But that way is closed to those who have no Greek.

Mr. Putney was, in short, my first humanist--though that word didn't come to me till another day, when I began to read about the Renaissance.

But he was more than a humanist. He was humane. He was human. That underlay the fact that, with the affectionate disrespect of youth, he was known among ourselves as "Put." Disrespect, however, was never what we felt toward the princ.i.p.al of the Academy. Indeed, the first time I ever saw him, when I was a new boy of sixteen, he impressed me as being a rather awesome person. As long as I knew him his dignity and his firmness never failed to impress me. Yet about that dignity there was nothing aloof. That firmness was not hardness; it had no cutting edge. He meant what he said. That was all. No idle or disobedient boy flattered himself that "Put" was to be trifled with. Every boy felt, however, that "Put" was just. Firm as he was, he had too a great gentleness. And I think he had the kindest and most patient eyes I ever looked into. They were very shrewd. They could look through a boy as if he were made of gla.s.s. But they were also very wise, and they knew how to overlook a great deal of folly and thoughtlessness. Moreover there was in the bottom of them a twinkle--of a most individual kind. It was no broad Irish twinkle, nor yet an ironic Latin twinkle. You saw it sometimes when you had made a particularly egregious translation; but it didn't dishearten you.

I have never forgotten that quiet, that comprehending, that rare twinkle. After all, what happier light could a man cast on the cloudy ways of youth--or shed upon his own character?

H. G. DWIGHT, '94.

Coming East from Dubuque to Chicago, it is inspiring to an Eastern man to see how the life of this busy metropolis of the West is guided and influenced by the Eastern-trained man and woman. On the same street with the great University of Chicago is Chicago Theological Seminary. I had a delightful interview with the man who presides over this inst.i.tution, training the virile young men of the West for the work of the Christian ministry and also for work in the mission field. This man is Dr. Ozora S. Davis, a graduate of St. Johnsbury Academy and of Dartmouth College.

Dr. Davis attended St. Johnsbury Academy during the princ.i.p.alship of that gifted and consecrated Christian gentleman, Charles E. Putney, Ph. D. A powerful influence for righteousness exerted by the quiet but inspiring personality of this educational leader is now felt throughout the world. Truly the fourth verse of the nineteenth Psalm is applicable to this former princ.i.p.al of a New England academy: "Their line is gone out through all the earth and their words to the end of the world."

H. PHILIP PATEY, '86.

_Journal of Education._

It is fitting that Mr. Putney's work and influence as an officer in the church in whose service he was so constant and faithful should receive some mention. While serving as princ.i.p.al of St. Johnsbury Academy during some of its most prosperous years and largest enrollment, he found time to serve actively on the board of deacons of the South Church, to teach a large cla.s.s of students in the Sunday school, and to be unfailing in attendance upon the mid-week meeting. He was a pillar in the church he loved. And while in the Academy he maintained the religious traditions on which it was founded, he recognized that it was in the church that these traditions found their source and inspiration.

On his removal to Burlington he took up similar relations with the College Street Church, and continued them to the end of his career, loyal to its interests and liberal in its support. If fine distinctions are to be made between vocation and avocation it would be difficult to determine to which inst.i.tution the terms should be applied as his life is reviewed.

C. H. MERRILL, _Vermont Missionary._

It was not my privilege to sit at the feet of Mr. Putney as a student.

In about the year 1870, I attended prize-speaking at the high school of Norwich, Vermont, and was told that the young princ.i.p.al was a Mr.

Putney. Something about the man appealed to my boyish senses and I wished that I might know him, but lack of confidence prevented my making myself known. An acquaintance was formed three or four years later at St. Johnsbury. For a time, I was a.s.sociated with Mr. Putney in certain lay-religious work and came to know him well, if not intimately,--a friendship which ever after continued. After the death of Mrs. Hazen, I received a beautiful letter from Mr. Putney, written laboriously by a shaking hand, but it expressed so much in a few words, characteristic of his genuineness, it is a letter that will ever be preserved among my most cherished possessions.

What was the subtle something that so appealed to me that long-ago evening at Norwich? It seems to me it was the unspoken sympathy of the man which touched the lives of all who came in contact with him even as the fragrance of a flower permeates the atmosphere. Surely he lived a life that is well "worth the telling."

PERLEY F. HAZEN.

I want to join in the chorus of love and tender remembrance which you are hearing from all sides in regard to your father.