Doris Fielding Reid: Edith Hamilton, An Intimate Portrait

Edith Hamilton, An Intimate Portrait, Doris Fielding Reid, W.W. Norton, New York 1967

Edith Hamilton never kept a diary of any kind and she had little or no interest in reminiscing. (11)

[Edith’s maternal grandmother’s] education was typical of Mid-Victorianism and so was her outlook on life. She had gone to Miss Lucy Green’s School in New York, where she had learned the most correct morals and manners, where she had come to adore Byron but had promised Miss Lucy never to read Don Juan…and her attitude towards social questions might be summed up by two statements I remember her making in later years. One was on the question of Negro slavery. ‘Doubtless it was hard on the slaves, but we had to have cotton.’ Another was on Lincoln. ‘My dear, what was the name of our President during the war, a most uncouth person I always heard, though well-meaning in his way?’ (22)

[Edith’s father’s] enthusiasm were for Macaulay, Froude, Addison, Scott, and Pope. He had little use for the New England writers, as he thought them unclear and muddled. He objected to the public schools—there were none other in Fort Wayne—because they taught too much arithmetic and American history, and he had no interest in either subject. He read them Macaulay’s Lays and Scott’s poems. Edith learned the whole of The Lady of the Lake by heart. She also learned pages of prose. Mr. Hamilton thought Addison and Sir Thomas Browne would develop her taste and style. She could quote passages from them all her life, but certainly they did not influence her style. Nothing could be less like Edith’s style in writing than that of Sir Thomas Browne. (23)

[Sunday] was entirely different from weekdays…They read what Edith referred to as “Sunday” books. (26)

Christmas was altogether different. The German maids would wake the children at five-thirty, and after a glass of milk in the kitchen they would steal out into the dark winter morning, accompanied by an elderly German manservant and a much-loved German nursemaid, and go over the German Lutheran Church. It was brilliantly lighted, with great Christmas trees on either side of the altar. The was a simple sermon in German addressed to the children and then the classes from the Lutheran Schools sang such Christmas hymns as “Uns ist ein Kind gerboren” and “Ihr Kinderlein kommet.” When the service was over, they would follow the congregation up the streets in the German section of Fort Wayne to the see the little lighted Christmas trees in every window. Edith often talked of these Christmases and how much she loved them. (27)

[At Miss Porter’s School] The courses were purely elective and if a girl was weak in any subjects, she could just decided not to take them. (31)

[Miss Porter] was quite disturbed…when Edith said she wanted to go to college, as she did not believe in college for girls. “My dear Edith, you can become learned,” Edith quoted her as saying, “but, my dear Edith, I don’t think much of learning.”

[Regarding the University of Leipzig] If a woman were admitted to lectures in the classical department, it would mean that a seminarian might have to sit next to her, even share a manuscript with her if there were not enough to go around. It was shocking even to think of it. All sorts of arrangements were suggested. I remember especially an ingenious one, that a little loge, a theater box, be built for her with curtains so that the seminarians could not even see her. Finally it came to a chair on the lecturer’s platform, where nobody could be contaminated by contact with her. (37)

I was a pupil in the Bryn Mawr School from 1903 to 1911, and in that period one of Baltimore’s leading gynecologists told Edith that he knew that women were so made that the study of Latin was bad for their health! Perhaps this belief was more excessive than that held by the average Baltimore parent, but it was a universal conviction that a real education would prevent a girl from getting a husband. (39)

Edith always opened the school day with a brief reading, usually from the Psalms or Gospels, ending with a prayer…The spirit of those prayers made a great impression on us all as we sat in that great study hall, surrounded by the Parthenon frieze. Miss Hamilton used to stand on the platform with the light coming in through the great windows. She knew the passages from the Bible that she read to us by heart, and so she would turn her head and look out of the window as she read to us in the mornings. One passage which was her favorite, it seems to me, sums up what was really the essence of the school… ‘Whatsoever things are good, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report, if there be any virtue, if there be any knowledge, think on these things.’(47-8)

[Edith] was starting to head up the group of people known as Maniacs, who consider Maine superior to all other localities! She would clap her hands and say, “Isn’t this a joy.” All her life she had a passionate love for the out of doors. The beauties of quiet, peaceful scenery did not appeal to her much. She loved the mountains and the ocean but, for her, the hand of man must not intrude. She once wrote in dismay of an inn in Zermatt, “the window boxes were so flourishing that one was perpetually looking at the Matterhorn through a wreath of pink geraniums.” (60)

It was a road, that is, if one’s idea of a road is elastic enough—no car could possibly go up or down it during the winter snows or rains. The grocer would leave our supplies on the main road and Edith would walk up with Dorian’s sled and fetch them down. She loved these walks, which she usually took alone, and she would come back looking radiant. “It is just rapturous out there, “ she would often exclaim. (61)

[Edith’s] battered and scribbled-up volume of the Greek tragedies was always by her bed. For decades her absorption and joy had been to read, in the original text, the Greek tragedians; she had no interest in translations. She made notes and marks on the margins of her volume for her own reference, which were usually incomprehensible to anyone else. Equally well-worn volumes of the great writes of that ancient period were also her daily companions. Plato, Homer, Thucydides, Herodotus, and the rest she had studied and absorbed and loved since her early youth. She had little or no interest in books about Greece.

In the spring of 1929 we decided to take a trip abroad. Edith had finished The Greek Way…She had traveled…in England, Europe, China, and Japan but, surprisingly, she had never been to Greece…As soon as we reached Athens we went up on the Acropolis. Edith sat for a long time on the steps of the Parthenon, but what was going through her mind and heart I did not know. (77-8)

I cannot overstate how little I wanted to go. I had lived in New York for some twenty-five years and it was home to me…In June of 1943 we packed up and moved to Washington, and there we lived for the next twenty years. / Shortly after we reached Washington we bought a small house at 2448 Massachusetts Avenue, the back of which faced Rock Creek Park. (88-9)

Edith spent almost four years on Witness to the Truth…Questions kept coming to her mind which inhibited her. Should she undertake a subject of such profound importance? Had she or had she not got across her points? (She never doubted the validity of her points.) (90)

…Robert Lowell occasionally came around. I remember when she was expecting Mr. Lowell she bought a book of his to bone up, as she was not familiar with his work. She told him, to his amusement, that there were some of his lines she could not understand and then said that the only line of modern poetry that stuck in her mind was: “We are the eyelids of defeated caves.” “Oh, I know the man who wrote that,” said Mr. Lowell. “Oh,” exclaimed Edith, clapping her hands, “then you can tell me what it means.” Mr. Lowell replied thoughtfully, “No, I can’t. But when I see him I will ask him.” (92)

In 1956 I had been at Loomis, Sayles for twenty-seven years and I decided I would ask for seven weeks’ vacation, which was ungrudgingly granted. Neither Edith nor I had been out of the country since our trip to Greece in 1929 and we decided to go abroad. Edith said she had never seen Etna and had always longed to. We planned to go by boat to Sicily; motor from Palermo to Taormina, where Edith could feast her eyes on Etna; fly to Rome for a few days; and end up in Madrid—Edith had never been to Spain. I think that many of us, particularly as we grow older, like best to revisit the places where we have been in the past. Edith did not. She wanted to go where she had never been before. (99)

I had assumed that Edith would want to go to Syracuse, where the Greek soldiers had died in the quarries, but she had no desire to do so. She said, “It won’t have any resemblance to what it looked like hundreds and hundreds of years ago. And you know I have never had any interest in historic spots. I mean the places where, say, some famous character was assassinated or where a vital treaty was signed. The truth is, I expect I have no historical imagination and the few places of this kind that I have seen had no intrinsic beauty.” (101)

One morning Edith read to us out of a newspaper, “Madrid is colder than it has been for a hundred years.” Edith said she did not want to be colder than she had been for a hundred years. So we decided to change our plans, skip Spain, spend further time in Italy, fly to Portugal, and go home from there. (101)

The Mayor then led her onto the stage and, after a citation, presented her with a scroll which made her a Citizen of Athens. She stepped briskly to a microphone which had been installed and made the following brief speech with, as usual, no notes. / “It is impossible for me to express my gratitude for the honors shown me. I am a Citizen of Athens, of the city I have for so long loved as much as I love my own country. This is the proudest moment of my life. And yet as I stand here speaking to you under the very shadow of the Acropolis a deeper feeling rises. I see Athens, the home of beauty and of thought. Even today among buildings, the Parthenon is supreme, Plato’s thought has never been transcended; of the four great tragedians, three are Greek…Greece rose to the very height

not because she was big, she was very small; not because she was rich, she was very poor; not even because she was wonderfully gifted. She rose because there was in the Greeks the greatest spirit that moves in humanity, the spirit that makes men free. It is impossible for us to believe that, of all the nations of the world, Greece was the only one that had the vision of what St. John in the Gospels calls ‘the true light’ which, he adds, ‘lightest every man who cometh into the world’; but we know that she was the only one who followed it. She kept on—on what one of her poets calls ‘the long and rough and steep road.’ Therefore her light was never extinguished. Therefore we are met tonight to see a play which has lived for twenty-five hundred years. In those years the Greeks have been outstripped by science and technology, but never in the love of the truth, never in the creation of beauty and of freedom. (114-5)

By then there were only a few weeks left of the summer and Edith announced that she was going to do nothing at all except sit on the rocks and watch the ocean, take walks with her dog, and play with the kittens. “As for writing,” she said, “I am never going to write another line.” One of us reminded her that that was exactly what she had said when she finished The Greek Way some thirty years ago. (119)

The Oresteia was given in London with great success, and the reviewers all said how much finer the translation of the Agamemnon was than that of the other two plays of the trilogy. Edith maintained, however, with deep conviction, that the Agamemnon was much the greatest of the three plays. “That is why,” she said, “I did not translate the other two and I am never going to.” (136)

It was her custom, when delivering a lecture, to write it out with great care, after which she knew it by heart and would throw away the manuscript. By some chance this Plato address and her talk at St. John’s church escaped the scrap basket and were published after her death in her collected essays, The Ever Present Past. (140)

Speaking of Plato’s Dialogues, she referred in a lecture to the hundreds of years of debate that has never been settled as to whether Socrates was a creation of Plato’s or a portrait from life, and she said, “However that may be, the picture we are left with is extraordinarily vivid and impressive, and to the reader today it is apt to seem unimportant how much of Socrates is Plato and how much of Plato is Socrates.” (150)

She writes, “Nothing is clearer than the fact that primitive man, whether in New Guinea today or eons ago in the prehistoric wilderness, is not and never has been a creature who peoples his world with bright fancies. Horrors lurk in the primeval forest, not nymphs and naiads. Terror lived there, with its close attendant, magic, and its most common defense, human sacrifice…Only a few traces of that time are to be found in the stories.” She points out that the first written record of Greece is the Iliad, “which is, or contains, the oldest Greek literature; and it is written in a rich and subtle and beautiful language which must have had behind it centuries when men were striving to express themselves with clarity and beauty, an indisputable proof of civilization…” (151)