LOUIS HENRY DOW
A Tribute to the Late Tuck Professor of French
DURING THE PAST FEW WEEKS I have been asked by many local acquaintances, and by old-time alumni and former faculty friends, for the details of Professor Dow's illness and death. Moreover, everybody has been interested in his life and his great personality; a few of these questions I try to answer now.
His scholastic career may be read in the obituaries in the public press. At Harvard where he took second-year and final honors in Classics, no mean ordeal, he graduated summa cum laude in 1890, at the age of nineteen. After five years of tutoring, travel and graduate study, he came to Dartmouth as instructor in Greek, later joining the French Department.
Louis Dow had passed his three score and ten by nearly two years. A little over a year ago he was a patient in St. Luke's Hospital in New York where he underwent a severe but successful operation, followed by radio-therapy treatment. He recovered sufficiently to lead a fairly normal life, and, on leaving Cornish, where he passed his summers with old Harvard classmates, he stopped for a few weeks as a guest at my house. It was here that he received the news of his wife's death; she had been for many years an incurable invalid. Her body was brought to Hanover for burial.
All this time, with stoic fortitude, he was suffering pains of varying intensity. On the morning of November 12th when they reached a climax he went to Dick's House for an operation, which was followed in his four months' stay by at least eight other operations. The end came on Tuesday, March 7 th, in the late evening, mercifully in a coma, and without pain.
When I came to Hanover in the autumn of 1900 to become a member of the Department of Romance Languages, I naturally was closely associated with Louis Dow. He, myself, and others, all about the same age, were in a group known by the students and some alumni as the Kid Faculty. Within that group were smaller groups, perhaps more intimately united by common interests. Ours consisted of W. K. Stewart, Dow and I, and, later, Ernest Greene. Until two weeks before writing this it has survived as a gathering of old cronies with many identical tastes and beliefs in the fundamental manifestations of life, even if occasionally apart in questions of politics and social outlook.
For years, almost every afternoon, in all seasons and weathers, we took our five to ten mile hike along the open road (motors were rarer then!) and through woods and over hills, always keeping up a line of lively talk. While on the subject of conversation, before it becomes too late, I should like to make a few references in print to what might now be called a discussion group, known as the Anarchists, named not by ourselves, the members, but by a verdict of some person or persons uncould known, who thought it was a subversive organization. The political and social views ranged from the conservative outlook of Dr. Gile to the radical opinions of George Ray Wicker. In between these extremes ranged Sydney Fay, "Cy" Young, John Poor, Bill Stewart, Ernest Greene, Sheldon, Dow and myself. Later President Hopkins and Dr. Carleton joined us. We had no secretary, and did not trouble ourselves about minutes or agenda. When it be arranged we met on alternative Saturday nights. First a paper was read by someone of us, then, after refreshments, usually a Welsh rabbit, there followed a discussion of the paper, continuing with many digressions into the early morning hours. The papers read dealt, with questions of literature, philosophy, politics, theoretical science, mysticism and religion in'general, the test for membership being a love for ideas for their own sake. In a modest way the group was somewhat similar to the famous Twelve Apostles of the University of Cambridge, England. I still have a list of the subjects of discussion ranging from Bergson's philosophy by Sheldon and Nietzsche's ideas- by Stewart to Einstein's Relativity by John Poor. One of the best papers we ever listened to was contributed by Louis Dow on Freud, then less known and talked about than in recent years. The paper indicated a most painstaking study of all Freud's works available at that time. Needless to say, in all these discussions, Louis Dow's wit and dramatic telling of an apposite anecdote alone would have repaid our presence. If the art of conversation consists in treating serious subjects in a light vein and light subjects in a serious vein, Louis Dow was an adept!
Perhaps a few words on Dow's wide reading might be interesting: His especial favorites were Moliere, Montaigne and Shakespeare, all of whom he read as a critical scholar as well as for his own pleasure. He cared less for lyric poetry, although he read and re-read Catullus and Horace. But the Romantics meant less to him. Curiously enough, however, Wordsworth was his measure of excellence in poetry. I think he owed this interest to a course on Wordsworth which he took as a Harvard undergraduate under the distinguished professor A. S. Hill. Other favorites were Pascal, La Fontaine, Voltaire, SainteBeuve and Anatole France. At the time of his last illness he was reading Jules Romains' Hommes de Bonne Volonte, volume after volume as it came out.
Besides French, his own specialty, he read Spanish and Italian, and, one winter, he and Professor Greene read all of DonQuixote, and, in addition, everything published on the Don Juan legend. Dow was a man of strong likes and dislikes, impatient of gradation or nuance. With the exception of Tolstoy he cared little for the Russian School. English literature he was familiar with as a matter of course. Dickens he read and knew thoroughly, but he disliked Pickwick. Tom Jones and , Moby Dick left him cold, but at last he came to enjoy Jane Austen completely.
Dow did not share my pleasure of color in landscape; what pleased him most was outlines of scenery, especially when there was an harmonious arrangement, lucidusordo, of nature. This was true of his taste in art. His preferences were architectural; his taste was for the classical and formalized. Music, while not neglected, was not important to him. He always said that the acme of fatigue and discomfort for him was when, on one occasion, he sat through a performance of Parsifal. His friendships and loyalties were the same; strong, indomitable; the de gustibus arguments availed nothing with him. His unostentatious charities were many, varied and generous; perhaps, most of all, for work among the Negroes, for whom he had the greatest sympathy.
Since Louis Dow's "promotion" to Emeritus—as it is ironically expressed in academic language—we in Hanover had seen all too little of him. He visited the Greenes and the Skinners on his way to and from Cornish; his winters he passed in Mexico, Nassau, Washington and New York. After his graduation from Harvard he Jived in Paris, and there he returned many times. He had stayed in Italy and in England; he travelled in Egypt and Palestine—and in Greece where he experienced his greatest happiness, the view of the Parthenon—he went to see it day after day.
Dow was remarkable for his handsome personal presence, his impressive carriage as he strode along the Hanover streets, upright, with free movement and swinging gait. This account giving the nihil nisibonum may seem to be inspired by the intimacy of an old friend, but those who knew him well will not show dissent. With his personal advantages, his good looks, his unusual intellect and general culture, he could have been much more widely known, but, as he often said, ambition is a human weakness even when leading to success, and it would not have brought him the satisfaction he received living his own life in his own way.
PROFESSOR LOUIS H. DOW
PROFESSOR OF FRENCH, EMERITUS
