Classicist Not Without Honor

Royal Case Nemiah Faces the Educational Moderns with Skepticism, Relates Discipline to Beauty and Philosophy

A CLASSICIST IS NOT without honor save in the seats of learning. He is suspect among his colleagues. Royal Case Nemiah, a devotee of the Greek and Latin Classics, is honored, however, even in the Administration Building. So are other members of the department, but not because they are classicists. It is a curious anomaly that such men should be respected in spite of the very foundation of their mental structure. We may take a halting step toward a solution of this paradox if we look a little further into one of their number.

Professor Nemiah is a teacher. Those who have been his pupils have some right in thinking that no one else fully knows him; that only those can fully appreciate him as a man who have studied under his guidance. The writer would like to have studied under him in college further than he did, yet he has felt the effect of his teaching enough to share this jealousy at least. To describe the man is another matter.

A scared rabbit of a freshman entered Dartmouth in 1920 with four years of bleak and rigorous Latin preparation. It had been as dismal as a tundra. He went to his class in Latin 5 full of foreboding. He had been given to understand that college Latin was the same, only worse. Professor Nemiah's humor warmed him from the first. None of it browbeat the students; it complimented them rather, by inviting them to share in Olympian humor pointed not at themselves, but at their unregenerate selves. Horace wrote poetry which the instructor and Eugene Field enjoyed, and the students also enjoyed it, especially if they had seen big trees bending under a load of snow. Or noticed, late in the fall, the white top of Moosilauke showing like a plume over the western shoulder of Cube, "Vides ut alta stet nive candidumSoracte—" Moosilauke-Cube, ad lib.

Presently Terence kicked up his heels, and with the help of some errors that the freshman made, even Livy was interesting. Whatever his thoughts, the professor seemed to laugh with the poor boy when his translation made Hannibal's elephants follow the ladies (feminas) across the creek, instead of the lady elephants. How one hates to appear unduly innocent!

One of his own contributions to the wisdom of the class he had probably got from Professor W. K. Stewart. In Punch had appeared one of those vulnerable excerpts from a provincial newspaper. It was a notice of the death of one John Longbottom, aet. four months and two days. The editor of Punch, long before the NewYorker was foaled, added the comment: ARS LONGA VITA BREVIS.

It was a great transition from the school days of "Latin Prose" and "ad ante con ininter" under a basilisk eye, to the morning in the following spring when the freshman and Professor Nemiah stood in the shallows off Johnny Johnson Island at four, bare as a birch trunk, and listened to a white-throat sing from the bank where the Pompy River comes in. The song suggested a passage from the New World Symphony. Perhaps Dvorak had collaborated with a white-throated sparrow. But when a veery tinkled in the thickets of the east bank, where it was still shady, both men grinned and talked no more of Dvorak.

This was not the sort of experience one would expect a roommate fully to understand, and the best of it had been the silences that were part of the talk. After that the freshman took a good deal more from the instructor on faith, and he wanted to earn some of his richness of philosophy for himself. He gathered, in the course of time, that he could get it if he wanted it enough to hunt eagerly, and to subject his thought to discipline. Without discipline it would become too subjective, volatile, and of no avail in hard places.

A year or two ago, in a gathering of his peers, Professor Nemiah spoke of the neglect of discipline in our educational policy. Of course such an idea is out of style, along with Greek and Latin. But knowing he preached an outworn doctrine, he made it worse by saying, "I know my thinking has not progressed beyond the Eighteenth Century." He said it in his best go-to-hell voice. The result was naturally to consolidate his position as an unreasonable classicist at bay before the forces of the new light. The joke may be on the members of the audience who took him literally, but it was also one on himself. (The joke on the audience improves if one realizes that his knowledge of current literature in three languages is intimate.) He is sportsman enough to enjoy a joke on himself. This is clear from any knowledge of the man, and it is confirmed by the complete absence of the bully element from his treatment of individuals. Yet it is doubtful whether he prefers a joke on himself to having his convictions treated with respect. Perhaps the truth is that he holds his convictions so precious that he cannot lightly expose them to unsympathetic view. If he can cover them with exaggeration, or put forward the joke defensive, maybe the unsympathetic will not penetrate to the sanctum. If this be his mental process, one sometimes wishes that it were otherwise. His convictions, or some basically like them, are held more widely than he sometimes appears to believe. They are so important that the alienation of allies becomes more unfortunate the more skepticism is turned upon them. If the writer did not cherish many of the same convictions he would not make the foregoing stricture. Moreover, the main purpose is to indicate that as there are in general two categories of people who see Professor Nemiah, his students and his fellow teachers, so there are in general two kinds of apprehension of his personality, that of his pupils and that of his colleagues. The students, in the long run, are nearer to the man. He has too many friends in the faculty to make this more than a generality, but as such it holds.

Royal Case Nemiah's father derived from Westphalia in North Germany, where the name was commonly spelled Niemeyer. His grandfather came to America in the early 1840's, and married a girl of lowland Scottish family named Nelson. His mother's family was descended from John Case who settled in Windsor, Connecticut, in 1639, and never moved more than ten miles from there. By far the more important part of his family background is that centering in this, the distaff side.

Born in 1891, in Hartford, Connecticut, he attended the Hartford High School and entered Yale College in 1908. After his sophomore year he supported himself almost entirely; and his four years can hardly be described as a primrose path of luxury.

Graduating in 1912 with a B.A., he entered the graduate school in the autumn, and continued his classical studies toward the doctorate for one year. Meanwhile he tutored enough to supplement a fellowship from Yale so that he was able to go to Germany from July 1913 to September 1914. He returned to New Haven and took his Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1916, teaching there from 1915 to 1918.

He came to Dartmouth as Assistant Professor of Greek and Latin in 1919, was made Professor of Greek and Latin in 1923, and served as Class Officer to the Class of 1936. From this connection he derived associations and friendships which he still prizes. In 1927 he succeeded to the work of the late Professor C. D. Adams in Greek, and his work has been almost entirely in Greek ever since. It was quite fitting that he should be made Lawrence Professor of Greek in 1938, for his tastes and philosophy are decidedly more Hellenic than Roman. A mark of the confidence in which he is held is his appointment as Chairman of the Division of the Humanities from 1938 to 1941, a confidence endorsed by the members of the division.

GROWTH OF THE MIND

This bare outline of events does not tell the story of the growth of his mind. There is in most people a series of stages in their attitude toward learning. At first they do their assigned lessons—well or ill, according mostly to their faithfulness. Royal Nemiah did well enough until late in his freshman year at Yale. Then, one might say, his mind was weaned. He found something which he wanted to pursue. In other words, Keats and Shakespeare called out the spontaneous element, without which no man can come of age intellectually. That summer, Keats, Shakespeare, Shelly—poetry in general accompanied him during the noon hour in the tobacco fields where he worked, and on Sundays and evenings of leisure. For two years at college he read in great quantities mostly poetry, and he read in season and out, so that up to the end of his junior year his mind was not completely absorbed by the courses of the curriculum.

Then in his senior year, being mentally a man, he dug into his courses, and with a remarkable senior record he made himself eligible to Phi Beta Kappa.

But there was another event in his growth quite as important as the discovery of poetry. This was the glorious year at the University of Gottingen, or, more exactly, when he was "operating out of" Gottingen. He had a good time. He had it with his mind, his sociability and his aesthetic sensibilities. He also had it with his body, for he walked all over the loveliest parts of Germany and Switzerland. All this was partly because, for the first time, he had the money for it. He could buy books—old classics and modern German and French authors. He could travel, from Salzburg and Vienna to Paris, and all around between. He could, for the first time, eat enough to feel good, with the relish of wine and beer and gay companionship.

In the first semester at Gottingen he worked hard at Greek and Latin. Naturally his German improved enough, though not without work too, so that by the second term he was the more ready to be one of the boys. Friedrich Leo, the Latinist, was one of the fine teachers who was especially kind to him, and another was Wilhelm Meyer aus Speyer, the mediaeval Latinist. (The name Meyer, like Smith or Brown, needed the name of the home town to distinguish it.)

Nemiah joined one of the societies—a Wissenschaftlicher Verein—called the Arkadia, which met twice a week, and walked out into the woods and hills on Sundays. Arrangements would be made beforehand with the proprietor of a country inn—a Waldschenke—so that plenty of sausage and beer would be on hand. Talk, beer, and song all the way home made the Connecticut Yankee dilate every pore with enjoyment.

In the summer term, April to August, 1914, he did little work. Life was too idyllie. lie. Once he went as one of four delegates to his society's convention in Marburg. He says he went as a freak, because he was a foreigner. With a big brass band at their head, all the delegates paraded down the main street with the burghers cheering and the Maedchen in the upper windows throwing flowers on them. After that there was beer—such beer—for three days. The men from Gottingen were not very detailed in reporting what business was transacted. Neither were the men from Heidelberg.

Not only singing his rolling bass with his fellow students, but the wider vistas of music invited him, and he followed where they led—to Vienna, Salzburg and, beyond them, into Beethoven and Bach. Painting he discovered, and he explored it in Dresden, Munich, Vienna, and Paris. It was an annus mirabilis indeed.

ONSET OF THE WAR

The onset of war only drove his roots deeper into the Germany that has, thank God, transcended wars. As the farmers and peasants were called up for service, notices appeared in Gottingen calling for volunteers to help with the harvest. Nemiah and a Princeton man, who later died in the American army, went by train and foot to a large baronial estate at Imbshausen, in the Province of Hannover. There was some astonishment at the castle when the Princetonian said, no, he was not an agricultural student but a chemist, and more when the lean fellow said that he was not an agriculturist either, but a classical philologist. For three weeks they worked in the fields from five in the morning until they knocked off at seven in the evening. Then they went to the tavern to talk and drink beer with the peasant laborers. They worked hard in those three weeks, but the love of Germany remained in Nemiah so indelibly thereafter as to torture him in the first World War and to make him loathe Hitler with perfection now.

That labor in the grain fields, coupled with a later experience, has also a special meaning for him. Some years later, during the confusion of a personal bereavement, he found serenity by hard work in a big garden. Serenity, closely linked with Demeter worship, he associates with working a vegetable garden—really working it. Walk a mile west of Hanover, past Archie Peisch's yard in Norwich, some June day before or after class, and you will see straight weedless rows in one direction, a brown bald head, and straight but weedy rows in the other. You may count upon it that some pretty sound thinking—or a neatly turned story—is being nourished there, as the soil wedges under his fingers.

Professor Nemiah teaches because he is a missionary. He is a deliberate apostle to young men of truth and beauty. Keats used both words and said they were the same. The Greeks had one word for it, to Raλov. This is his Holy Grail, and he would bestir the minds of younger knights errant in the quest. He encourages, and he spurs, laying down the essential rules of this chivalry to any who will hear.

DISCIPLINE THE PRICE OF BEAUTY

Beauty and ecstasy are to be found only by those who can endure the hard passage to their dwelling place. Therefore you must train your endurance, not by manufactured drudgery, but by resolutely ploughing through the inevitable drudgery along the way. You must train your strength and courage by frequent jousting with skillful foemen worthy to try you. In other words, your mind needs discipline; not mere squad drill, but training.

To study Latin, you must learn the rudiments as a task. Then, after the mechanics are mechanically learned, comes the work of intelligence: translation. But this is not simple. To express exactly in one language what you have found out to be the precise idea uttered in another is to free your mind of narrowness, widen its knowledge of men, exercise it in precision and honesty, and give it the habit of finding out. If translating is done under teaching that realizes these possibilities, then the mere exercise of translation is a noble exercise. Beyond this lie literature and the higher arts of language. But the hard work of grasping and expressing precise meanings is in itself a useful discipline.

One may digress to observe that one of the main reasons that the ancient languages are now out of vogue is the bad teaching that has shuffled along under the banner of "Humanities." Bad teaching has neglected translation in its real sense, as much of what went by the name of translation has no more connection with the communication of the student's mind with Horace's or Caesar's mind than pig squeals have with a symphony.

From translating you naturally go to the philosophy out of which the works come, the author's background, and the climate for his thought. This is a subtler discipline, and there are others more delicate still. Sometimes you discover that the words "discipline" and "disciple" are very closely related, and that their significance is not fully expressed by childish dragoonings and hard puzzling alone. Professor Nemiah finds no substitute discipline for what he calls "hard subjects." They are essential. He laments the flabbiness of our requirements ments for the B. A. degree because those essentials are too easily Avoided. But if one fairly pierces his occasional attitude of extreme and hopeless reaction, one finds that he has no mere sergeant's notion of discipline. He has that and more—for the sake of to Raλov.

Whether in the class room or, on a Sunday evening, in a fraternity living room, he would rather talk with young men than do anything else. He does it well, for he has read Horace and he knows how to invite attention: "Omne tulit punctum qui miscuit utiledulciLectorem delectando pariterque monendo."

More than that, he was himself invited to his great experience in Germany by the utile and the dulce. He would find his highest reward in being accepted by young men as a devotee of the Humanities, a welcome guide, especially, but not only, among the articulate spirits of Ancient Greece.

Among his peers he does not indulge in the neurasthenic pastime of being misunderstood. He is too busy and interested for that. He is a charming companion to all who want his company, a courteous and straightforward arguer for his principles in council. He is a gracious host. He has his prejudices of course, and his profound affections. He is not easy to catalogue, however. You can be put off the track, sometimes by his shy effort to protect himself from intrusion in public. In private you have no trouble.

The blend of Royal Nemiah's personality is rich, a paradox only if you insist that apparent extremes cannot be related in one character. If you can see that idealism can beget satire, awe before human ecstacy beget an insistence upon discipline, deep spiritual conviction beget radical criticism of the church, then you can begin to know the man. You will find what hundreds of alumni consider a precious influence in the life of Dartmouth College.

Royal Case Nemiah Twenty-two years a teacher of the classics at Dartmouth, Professor Nemiah is fondly remembered by many alumni for whom he made ancient literature rich and real, showing them the tie between discipline and beauty.

PROFESSOR OF BIOGRAPHY