Gentle Scholar

In his 43 years at Princeton, thousands of students had come to know George McLean Harper--and hundreds never forgot him. They had listened to his dry, earnest voice over a classroom lectern, or heard him read aloud a favorite poet in his sun-patched garden. They knew him as an erect and kindly man who loved all that was good in men & books. Sometimes, over milk and cakes in his garden, he would begin a quiet discussion of Milton or Sainte-Beuve, and would soon become so excited by a point that his chair would scarcely hold him. But his natural dignity never deserted him. When reading a poem aloud, he would sometimes come upon a passage so affecting that he could not read it. He would thrash his legs indignantly, glare at his students, loudly clear his throat, and then try the passage again. Some of his students would swear that he never got half way through Wordsworth's Michael without having to stop.

He seemed to some of them oldfashioned: he loved virtue, in an unembarrassed and trusting fashion. Some smart undergraduates might misunderstand his generosity and think him gullible, but most of his pupils learned to admire and respect him for his unique combination of learning and innocence.

Once, when a brilliant student who was forever cutting his classes finally showed up, Professor Harper turned to his other students and said: "Gentlemen, Mr. So-&-So is with us today, and we should all be very grateful." From anyone else the remark would have had a touch of sarcasm--but George Harper meant it.

Though few of his fellow townsmen in Princeton knew or cared, he was generally acknowledged to be the world's authority on Wordsworth. When, in the course of his researches into Wordsworth's life, he discovered that the poet had fathered an illegitimate child, he was as distressed as if the scandal had happened in his own family. It was a long time before he could bring himself to publish what he had found. But he did.

One of Woodrow Wilson's closest friends, Professor Harper sometimes disagreed and sometimes fought with him, but always made up ("Don't let this little spat spoil our friendship," Wilson would say). During all the bitter months when Wilson split faculty and alumni by insisting that the new graduate school be made part of the college itself, Harper stood by him. Appropriately, Harper was the first to occupy the Woodrow Wilson chair of literature.*

Once Professor Harper wrote of an author (Katherine Mansfield) whom he admired: "There are no perfect men or women, but now and then comes one who, feeling most joyously 'the loveliness of the world' and most poignantly 'the corruption of the world,' strives more successfully to make the loveliness known and to drive out the corruption." The words might have been applied to George McLean Harper himself, when he died last week at 83.

* Practically the only recognition Princeton has ever given its former president. Embittered by the quarrels of his regime, Princeton has not yet named so much as an alleyway for him. Recently the university began raising funds for a Woodrow Wilson Memorial Hall.

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