EDUCATORS JOIN IN PRAISE OF NORTON AS MAN AND TEACHER

The following article about Professor Norton was written for the Crimson by G. H. Browne '78, founder and for 45 years head master of the Browne and Nichols School, and an early disciple and a lifelong friend of Professor Norton.

Mr. Norton's interest in education in the college was hardly more keen than his interest in education in the schools. In both his chief concern was the cultivation of the imagination. I have in mind not only the inestimable value of his active cooperation and wise counsel to the school which, at his request, was established in Cambridge to provide opportunities for his own boys; but also a bit of personal experience in that connection which throws a significant light on his character.

Even in the eighties, unusual distractions were beginning to appear; and this solicitous parent was distressed by the lack of intellectual interests shown by the young friends his boys were bringing to the house. "The only thing they talk about is athletics!" He strove to counteract this influence in his own family by the reading of good literature every evening after dinner--not without success; and he later prepared several volumes of graded selections of the best literature, to provide other parents' children with material for the cultivation of a taste for good reading; for, "good reading," he said, "was the most generally available and one of the most efficient means of cultivating the imagination."

Was Rigid in Judgment of Books

In submitting to him every Saturday night, one winter, material for a supplementary volume in the series, I had an exceptional opportunity to observe the rare catholicity of his taste and the absolute independence of his judgment. He would not even consider anything that did not meet three tests: it must be simple, of superior literary technique, and of wholesome human sentiment. No author's name would recommend a selection deficient in any one requirement. For example, Stevenson's children's verses were mostly "adult opinions in grown-up language". "I wouldn't have in my book a poem with 'birdie' in it, even if Alfred Tennyson did write it." I fondly thought that Campbell's "Battle of the Baltic" would appeal to him, for it contained the phrase "Heart of Oak," which was the name of his "Books"; but no! "That was bad business for England to be in, and I won't have it."

Loftiness Keynote of Character

The conversation then turned on the editor of the next I happened to have brought. "That man never had a generous or unselfish motive in his life; and you will never live to see him have one." I never knew of Mr. Norton's acting from any other motive. He not only read out loud at home every evening; he offered every family in the land choice material for similar reading; every Sunday he read to the inmates of the Hospital for Incurables, not Tar from Shady Hill.... To describe Charles Eliot Norton in a single phrase, I should say, as he said of Emerson, that of all the men I have known, he made the strongest impression of consistent loftiness of character