WILLIAM K. STEWART
Death Takes Distinguished Member of College Faculty
A FTER A LONG AND COURAGEOUS FIGHT against illness, William Kilborne Stewart, Professor of Comparative Literature, Emeritus, died at Orlando, Florida, May 6, 1944.
Professor Stewart was born at Hamilton, Ontario, January 2, 1875, and spent his early years in California, Tennessee, and Kentucky. From the schools of Kentucky he went to the University of Toronto, where he received his A.B. with honors in 1897. He took his A.M. in Germanic Languages at Harvard in 1898. At various times he studied also at Leipzig, Berlin, and the Sorbonne. Except for one year as assistant in German at Harvard, his entire academic career was devoted to teaching at Dartmouth, first in the Department of German, then in the Department of Comparative Literature. He was retired in 1943. He was a member of Delta Upsilon, Phi Beta Kappa, the Modern Language Association, the Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Studies, and the American Association of University Professors. In 1903 he was married to a classmate at the University of Toronto, Ethel E. Scott, who survives him.
Professor Stewart's major interests as an undergraduate were in modern languages and philosophy, and they continued to be the dominant interests in his life. As time went on, however, he became increasingly concerned with philosophy. His principal contribution to the intellectual life of Dartmouth College was the introduction of courses in comparative literature. As ordinarily conceived, this subject deals with international relationships in literature, and Professor Stewart's first courses were in the Romantic Movement and Fiction in the Nineteenth Century; one of his earliest publications was on "Oehlenschlaeger's Relation to German Romanticism."
STARTED NEW DEPARTMENT
Professor Stewart's own preoccupation with ideas, however, inspired him in 1919 to institute a new series of courses which, for convenience, were placed in the Department of Comparative Literature. In substance they resembled those courses which have recently been introduced with considerable fanfare into the curriculums of various colleges and universities, for they were devoted to the contributions to modern thought of the great thinkers of England, France, Germany, Italy, and the United States. No textbooks were provided, but the students were required to read substantial passages of the works in all fields which have made the modern world what it is. Professor Stewart possessed the genius for lecturing with absolute clarity and conciseness, and his lectures were based on thorough and conscientious scholarship. In addition to the excitement of an introduction to the world of ideas, his students received an unforgettable impression of his own intellectual integrity and justice. Neither in the classroom nor out did he have anything of the spirit of the doctrinaire, and the inspiration of his receptive and understanding, but not undiscriminating, tolerance is one of the things for which those who studied under him will always be most grateful.
Professor Stewart's name appears on only two books, one a language text, the other an anthology; he did much professional journey work in the form of translation and reviews. He contributed to philosophical periodicals a series of important papers on the Paradox. His interest in new ideas was publicly demonstrated by one of the first articles on Spengler to appear in the United States, and in an article on "The Mentors of Mussolini" he was one of the first to draw attention to the significance of Pareto in modern continental thought. Much that he wrote he did not publish. But of the three functions of the college teacher—research, participation in administration, and teaching—he considered the last to be paramount, and devoted himself to it without stint, with what success hundreds of his former students can testify.
Life for him was never dull. He enjoyed its good things and savored with zest and humor all it had to offer. In college he played baseball, and throughout his life he retained his interest in sports. He was fond of dogs. Reading was a personal as well as a professional necessity to him, and his true appreciation of the great in literature did not blind him to the merit of minor works. One of his great interests was travel, and his fluency in all the modern languages made him at home in Europe, where he had been some fifteen times. The cities he liked best were London, Paris and Rome; and he loved the scenery of Switzerland, the Tyrol, Norway, Sweden, and parts of England. One of the great satisfactions of his life was the variety of landscape that the country about Hanover offered him on his daily walks. To the end he was able to enjoy the beauty of Florida.
Without possessing in the smallest degree the talent for self-advertisement, he had the genius for inspiring friendship. His intellectual honesty was so great and his sympathy so spontaneous that people trusted him on the briefest acquaintance. He loved good talk, and his most intimate friendships were with men who shared his capacity for that universal curiosity which characterizes the true humanist. To the conversation he brought wide information and that humorous whimsicality of mind which preserves proportion in discussion. The impress of his personality will remain with those who knew him. They will find it fitting that his last words, delivered with a smile, should have been a toast to one of his oldest friends; and they will know why he liked the following poem:
Fame is a food that dead men eat,— I have no stomach for such meat. In little light and narrow room They eat it in the silent tomb, With no kind voice of comrade near To bid the feaster be of cheer.
But Friendship is a nobler thing,— Of Friendship it is good to sing. For truly, when a man shall end, He lives in memory of his friend, Who doth his better part recall And of his fault make funeral.
WILLIAM KILBORNE STEWART from a photograph taken some years ago when he was an active and leading member of the Dartmouth faculty. Respected and liked by the hundreds of Dartmouth students who took his courses, he was often voted their favorite professor.
PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH
