[Reprint] A President in Action George Norlin

By Dixon Wecter
[Wikipedia]

This article originally appeared in the June 1939 issue of The Atlantic magazine.

I

THAT a shy and slender professor of Greek, translator of Isocrates in the Loeb Classical Library, should become the head of a large state university—in a milieu where education often has to fight for its life in the hurly-burly of politics — is a paradox. George Norlin of Colorado is in fact the only first-class scholar among university presidents in the West. But more remarkable is the fact that, with his frank refusal to lobby or buttonhole legislators, he has always had what funds he needed, has completed a $4,000,000 building program through the years of depression, has made his university the ranking institution between the Middle West and the Pacific Coast, and with his great personal self-effacement has come to be regarded by fellow educators, lawyers, doctors, politicians, ranchmen, the rank and file of capital and labor, as the first citizen of Colorado. He is now ending the last month of a twenty-year presidency.

In an era of educational fads and eager overexpansion, of college heads who either were known as little brothers of the rich or else espoused that glib liberalism described by Shaw as belonging to those ‘whose minds are so open that there is nothing left but a draft,’ Norlin’s example has been rare and salutary. He has had the courage to make enemies, — the Ku Klux Klan of an earlier decade, and the sponsors of a ruinous old-age pension scheme lately written into the State Constitution, as well as the Nazis whom he infuriated while living in the same hotel with Adolf Hitler and lecturing on American democracy as Roosevelt Professor at the University of Berlin in 1933, — but one suspects that Norlin in his modest way is as proud of his enemies as of his friends.

Respected among his intimates as one of the best poker players they know, Norlin, as President of the University of Colorado in a sparsely settled state, has been compelled in material resources to bluff with a pair of treys to win the pot. But with his shrewd, cool, unhurried brain and unshakable integrity, he has had to bluff in no other ways.

The American success story has been told, perhaps too often, with stress upon dollars and dynamic energy. But Norlin’s life, although it falls into the American pattern, must be told in terms of intellect: how the son of an impoverished frontier family became a scholar, yet deliberately dedicated himself to the West where he belonged rather than to regions where his talents might have been more quickly prized; and how in his later years he grew into a type of unpolitical statesman rare indeed upon the American campus. His sympathy for the democratic tradition, which can hardly be plumbed apart from the story of his own life, is deeply personal as well as intellectual. Last year a Son of the American Revolution wrote to him about a senior named Byron (‘Whizzer’) White, an all-American quarterback and champion scorer of American football in 1937, a Phi Beta Kappa and Rhodes Scholar elect. The writer inquired if, as he had heard, such a remarkable young man came from a humble family of dirt farmers, ‘or whether there were any strain in the boy’s ancestry accounting for his distinction.’ Norlin replied that, ‘so far as he knew, the blood in Byron White’s veins was as blue as that in Abraham Lincoln’s.’

Norlin was born near Concordia, Kansas, in 1871, the son of a Swedish couple who had given up to family creditors a large, comfortable estate near Stockholm. With no skill to earn their bread, but driven by what Selma Lagerlöf called ‘the America fever,’ they settled on a frontier farm just after the Civil War. Indian fighting had not yet died out, and, in the absence of their father, three of the older brothers once saved themselves from redskins by crawling into a hollow log. Norlin’s earliest memory is of their log house, with a floor of loose cottonwood boards. Once at a harvest home, when all the dishes were set out on planks laid across boxes in lieu of tables, an upset brought them crashing to the floor; Norlin still thinks of his childish resentment at having to drink out of a tin can for many months afterwards. He remembers, too, the first grasshopper scourge, a dark cloud against the sun, and also the flood which broke in the dead of night and sent them running for their lives to higher ground. In all these adventures there was no feeling of defeat, but only a sense of hopeful and exciting struggle. Tramping two miles to his first country school, through the blizzards of winter or the fierce sun beating upon the sunflowers and corn rows, was fun rather than hardship.

His father, restless like so many pioneers, in 1879 moved the family to Green Bay, Wisconsin — to a rambling house on a ridge, with an apple orchard below and a farther prospect of silver birches, hemlock, and fir, and limestone cliffs fronting the water. There young Norlin grew up. Although the axe was laid long ago to its virgin timber, a sight of this country when he goes back at times to fish and loaf still quickens his pulse. An old friend who accompanied him on one of these Wisconsin expeditions some years ago told me — apropos of Norlin’s knack at unpredictable replies — that in this Republican backwater a woman at whose farm they had stopped asked Norlin about his politics, and, upon being told that he belonged to the Democratic Party, said with the best intentions, ‘But you don’t look like a Democrat.’ ‘No,’ he answered, ‘I’ve been sick.’ She gazed at him with a puzzled expression during the rest of their stay.

The family was broken up after the death of young Norlin’s mother. Thrown upon his own, he became a clerk in the shop yards of the Rock Island Railroad in Kansas. He found that he could do the work of a ten-hour day in three. One day after finishing his duties he was buried deep in Nicholas Nickleby when the master mechanic made his rounds and grumbled that even if the boy didn’t have enough to keep him busy it was disrespectful to waste the rest of his time over books. So Norlin quit the job. He began to think of college, and in the following September set out for Hastings College in Nebraska. Books were his absorbing passion, but, having no notion of any livelihood that could be made from them, he hit upon the idea of becoming an apothecary — since in those days almost every drug store had its book counter. Soon, however, he gave up chemistry, finding Greek and Latin much more to his taste.

Norlin had had a curiosity about the ancients ever since he had come upon the fascinating word ‘hieroglyphic’ on the last page of the blue-backed speller and found that the teacher — although able to spell it — could not tell him what it meant. In college he was soon immersed in Plato and Vergil; upon taking his bachelor’s degree in 1893 he stayed for three more years as a teacher. He spent two summers at the University of Chicago, where in 1896 he came under the dazzling spell of Paul Shorey, who invited him to apply for a fellowship and thus launched Norlin upon three years of graduate study which ended with a Ph. D. magna cum laude. Norlin was always a little awed by his master. ‘I remember well in the early days of our acquaintance going skating with him in Jackson Park,’ he wrote a few years ago. ‘ I was pleased and flattered that he should condescend to disport himself with me. I could not adjust myself to a world authority on Plato skimming over the ice like any boy.’

From Shorey, Norlin gained a sense of the unity of learning, of measuring the American Constitution by the yardstick of Aristotle or reading Aristophanes in the light of modern sociology. ‘He felt and made others feel that he was breaking the bread of life, and assumed that his students were hungry for that bread,’ as Norlin said in 1934 when he spoke, with beautiful simplicity, at Shorey’s funeral, by the scholar’s last request. Shorey also introduced his disciple to Matthew Arnold, whose war against the Philistines, to make reason and the will of God prevail, has been the good fight of Norlin’s life.

For a summer holiday Norlin came to Boulder, Colorado, and his first sight of the Rockies, with their snowy ranges and deep-gullied glaciers, was even more thrilling than he had imagined. Depressed by great cities, and loving the sun and the outdoors, as the ancient Greeks and his own pioneer stock had delighted in them, Norlin readily accepted a professorship in this little college town against the mountains, and there with few absences he has remained for forty years. Never a seeker after publicity or power, he has cheerfully declined opportunities in larger universities and more populous places.

He was appointed to the faculty by a gruff but kindly president of a bygone day, of whom Norlin once said that ‘when he wanted to pat you on the back he did it with his foot.’ Norlin’s old students remember him, tall, slim, erect, his face stamped with a boyish idealism which he has not lost now that his hair has grown a silver gray and his blue eyes a little dim. One of these students writes: ‘His clear, farseeing mind was a lens bringing to us the rays from other minds and ages. It was a purely intellectual process. He seldom commented or explained; the lens did not distort or pervert or even magnify; I believe all it did was to clarify, or perhaps correct astigmatism.’ His classes never seemed to hurry over their texts, yet there was a satisfying sense of accomplishment. Never subject to the tyranny of the clock, Norlin often kept his class in Plato far beyond the chapel hour; to his afternoon seminar, however, he usually brought his two Airedales, who would doze patiently for an hour and a half, and then, as if they had had enough, would lay their paws upon his lap and demand recess. Dogs, by the way, have always been his companions — the present favorite being a brindled bull terrier whom he calls Sappho ‘because she has no morals’; at a faculty meeting he once held her by the collar to keep her quiet beneath his chair, only to discover when he arose to adjourn the meeting that she had silently eaten the sleeve of his coat halfway to the elbow.

II

In the autumn of 1901, Norlin went abroad to study the manuscripts of Theocritus. While reading at the Bibliotheque Nationale, and living in a modest pension with a stone floor where, in accord with French custom, the heat was never turned on until a certain date regardless of the weather, he caught pneumonia. He had never been ill before, and, with a certain shame over the mishap that had befallen him, he called no doctor or nurse, but took to his bed and fought it out alone. From that time his health has never been quite robust. After a semester at the Sorbonne he went to Greece, where on bicycle or horseback he explored many remote villages of the Ægean and the back country. Arriving at a tiny hamlet where there was no inn, he would go into the bacali or wineshop, where he would order cheese and resinated wine

— knowing that, as soon as the news of a stranger was bruited about, the head man of the village would appear to ply him with the questions which have been asked of wayfarers since the time of Homer. Norlin would shortly be invited to the house of his questioner, where he would make himself as comfortable as possible, though the fare was wretched and he was compelled to get ready for bed in front of the fire under the scrutiny of the whole family.

Norlin went on to Asia Minor and rambled over the site of Troy — where, according to a legend one sometimes hears in the college town of Boulder, he saw fleetingly a beautiful unknown face, whether a gypsy avatar of Helen or the Platonic eidos of the beautiful-and-good, which remained for him the inspiration and symbol of ‘the regions which are holy land.’ He traveled on to Sicily, and passed the spring in the land of Theocritus, at Taormina, that, garden terrace between the white cone of Etna and the sea.

Returning to Boulder and to teaching,

— ‘this fellowship of folly and of hope,’as he once light-heartedly called his profession, — Norlin was again absorbed in the life of a Western university. He found time for research and writing for the classical journals, feeling none of the drain upon his classroom keenness about which teachers of low vitality often complain. Norlin believes with Hippocrates that the true researcher will always have a passion to teach. An expert tennis and billiard player, a good mountain climber, and a fair amateur boxer who has often put on the gloves with his students, Norlin has always had much sympathy for college athletics. When his influence as chairman of the athletic board was first felt, the words of his philosopher Arnold about ‘our young barbarians at play’ were no empty phrase — the ‘ringer’ and tramp athlete, lately driven from the Eastern colleges, had found their last frontier in the West. The house cleaning which Norlin began at home and soon extended through the Rocky Mountain Conference has had a lasting effect. His services here and as Dean of the Graduate School—jobs which came his way ‘because a professor of Greek had so little to do,’ as a colleague once sourly remarked — revealed unsuspected talents.

When Livingston Farrand went from his new presidency at the University of Colorado to head the American Red Cross and later to France as an expert on public health, Norlin was made acting President — a move to which Norlin modestly referred as ‘an emergency measure’ or ‘a moral equivalent for war.’ When in 1919 Farrand resigned, later to become President of Cornell, the faculty unanimously petitioned that Norlin be kept as their permanent head; and so it happened. Norlin accepted reluctantly, feeling a certain distaste for administration which he has never overcome. He once told some students who were in a disgruntled frame of mind that ‘ there are moods when I look back wistfully at the good old mediaeval times when students set up and ran their own university, employed and fired the faculty, played fast and loose with the town authorities, and, when things got too hot for them, packed up their university and carried it off like itinerant peddlers and set it down again where they pleased.'

Norlin became President with the understanding that he would not have to engage in lobbying, horse trading with legislators, and confabulating in hotel lounges near the Capitol — as many state university presidents have done to gain the appropriations necessary to keep body and soul together. His strategy has been to make students, alumni, and friends of the university aware of its needs, so that the voice of appeal never comes from the administration but from what he calls ‘the people’s lobby,’ which can fight the battles of the University with more effective grace. To make the University independent of biennial appropriations, the whim and sport of every passing Legislature, has been his major aim. In 1920, after a quiet but persuasive campaign waged by public-spirited citizens, the levying of an added mill of property tax for higher education was voted by the largest majority ever won by any referendum in Colorado. The wisdom of this move was shown four years later, when a governor elected by the Ku Klux Klan told Norlin that the University might have whatever appropriation it wished provided all Catholics and Jews were dismissed from its staff—an offer whose prompt rejection caused the withdrawal of all aid from the Legislature, although returns from the millage tax were enough to keep the University barely alive until the storm was over. With the same courage, and at the cost of much popular goodwill, Norlin has lately attacked the new Colorado old-age amendment, by which 85 per cent, of all excise and inheritance tax returns is used to pay $45 a month to pensioners sixty years of age and over, to the imminent bankruptcy of the state.

To his faculty Norlin is intensely loyal, whether or not he agrees with their politics, economic views, or religion — issues which have never been raised in the making of staff appointments. Moreover, during the depression the University was forced to cut heavily the salaries of the president, deans, and full professors, but not a single instructor was dismissed in the name of economy. The youthful Dean of the Law School, who gave up a lucrative practice for this post, recalls his long discussion with Norlin over the pros and cons, and the altogether kindly way in which the President persuaded him by remarking, ‘Even better men than you have taken the vow of academic poverty.’

In dealing with regents, legislative committees, or his own faculty, Norlin’s characteristic attitude is to remain silently attentive until others have spoken, while the air often becomes charged with prejudice and heat — and then, with quiet mastery and the rare Socratic gift of dispassionate analysis, he sums up the issue in a few clear sentences and usually points the way toward solution. His integrity bars any compromise of principle, but his tact often allows him to compromise differences of opinion, generally by means of a good story or salty remark.

Several years ago an excitable young professor in faculty meeting made a vigorous attack upon the University Librarian, who had grown gray in devoted service but undoubtedly had shortcomings on the score of efficiency. At this painful juncture Norlin recalled, in his unhurried way, a story told by his friend George Taylor of Chapel Hill — of a North Carolinian who ordered his Negro servant to bring home a turkey for Thanksgiving, but warned him explicitly against the wild birds then on the market. When the fowl was served up and the meal begun, the gentleman rang irritably and said to his darky, ‘I told you not to get a wild turkey — and now in the first mouthful I find buckshot.’ ‘Law, massa,’ the servant replied, ‘hit wuz a tame turkey. You see, dat shot was intended for me.' ‘And so,’ concluded Norlin, ‘any shot against the Librarian is intended for me, since I deserve the ultimate blame if he is not able to work miracles on the budget we give him.’ Time and again one has seen Norlin’s kindness and shrewd sense come to the aid of the discomfited.

For all his deceptive mildness, Norlin has a surprising gift for handling men, and when need arises is capable of audacious decisions. Some years ago, when alumni with delusions of grandeur sought to involve the University in building ‘a million-dollar stadium,’ Norlin, who had the imagination to see that a natural amphitheatre in a hollow of the hills near the campus could be utilized for some $200,000, quietly made negotiations with an architect, and then went before the Regents with the contract he had signed without authority, saying in effect, ‘You may fire when ready.’ Both he and the contract were upheld.

Freshmen have been known to send their luggage in his care; on at least one occasion the parents of a freshman from the Western Slope telegraphed him: ‘Our son John arrives by four-o’clock train to-morrow. Will you meet him and look after his trunks?’ No student who calls at the President’s office is ever turned away, or even asked his business by the tactful secretary — although deans and professors have to wait their turn. A young German immigrant working in New York City was so impressed by Norlin’s appearance and manner, when he saw the President receive a Litt. D. from Columbia, that he decided then and there to come to Boulder for his degree, and did so. Students have given him desk sets and other presents upon his return to the campus after long absence, have cut short their holidays to sing Christmas carols under his window, and once threw open the west doors of the assembly hall in the direction of his house, where he lay ill, so that he might hear the sound of their cheering at a rally. Yet Norlin’s subtlety of mind and increasingly frail health have conspired against his becoming a hearty campus idol or hero; some undergraduates of recent days think him a little cold and austere, even an academic myth. It is said that freshmen are afraid of him, sophomores don’t try to understand him, juniors deeply respect him, and seniors come to love him. No one ever calls him by his first name — not even his wife, who refers to him with a touch of old-fashioned formality as ‘my husband’ or ‘Mr. Norlin.’ She is a gracious and tranquil woman, who is never upset by his outrageous lateness to meals, nor by the number of guests he brings home at the last moment for Commencement Day luncheons, nor by the trail of tobacco he spills from an open pouch wherever he goes.

Norlin is not absent-minded in the inept professorial way which has been the subject for so many bad jokes. He merely ignores eating and other routine matters in favor of more vital things, such as a good talk with friends, work, and hobbies. Once long ago when he was Director of the Summer School, on the opening day of term his empty office was besieged with students who needed his signature; a worried secretary found him in overalls in his garden, digging among his prize dahlias. In New York several years ago Norlin and his good friend Robert Frost stopped on their way from an academic exercise and grew so absorbed in talking about poetry, and the bad effect which our business civilization has had upon it, that they missed their respective trains to Chicago and Boston by hours. When Norlin writes that ’we Americans are frantic worshipers of the great god Now,’ one feels that he is not pleading guilty to a personal impeachment.

From pedantry, that occupational disease of schoolmen, he has happily escaped. He is humorously aware of the small place which even a university president occupies in the main stream of American life. He tells of the desperate effort which he once made to identify himself before the manager of a Los Angeles hotel, prior to cashing a small New York draft. Searching through his pockets in vain for letters or telegrams, he grew more and more embarrassed, until his fingers fell upon his watch chain and golden key attached to it, and he exclaimed, ‘Here’s my Phi Beta Kappa key; you can see my name inscribed upon it and the place and time of my election.’ The manager looked at it gingerly and suspiciously, and finally, as if eager to get back on familiar and mortal ground, he asked, ’You haven’t got an Elk’s card about your clothes, have you?’

Those who think of Norlin only as a gray dignified educator — a trustee of the Carnegie Foundation, an elector of the Hall of Fame, and holder of a half-dozen honorary degrees — have never seen him unshaved and in hip boots, wading a mountain stream with his pockets full of flies and bits of tackle, patiently stalking a four-pound trout. Nor have they seen him at his cabin on the St. Vrain among his outdoor companions — a Denver lawyer, an anatomist, a physicist, and a few others with a whiskey and soda at his elbow, and a handful of cards. In such company he is fun-loving and boyish. He delights in such practical jokes as sending a deputy sheriff, who had called on routine business, up to the cabin of two cronies. In a brave attempt to impress visitors from the East they had in a bad season taken some four-inch trout that were plainly under the age of consent. The result was so wholesome that, while one culprit parleyed nervously with the officer at the door, the other hid the fish under his pillow and for good measure the poker chips under the bed.

III

In Norlin’s humanism there is a strong liberal strain, a keen sympathy with the modern world, which one might not expect so readily in a classicist and a disciple of Shorey. His is a passionate faith in democracy, which owes as much to Jefferson and Lincoln as to his reading of Aristotle on ‘that corporate partnership of all the people working together in quest of the good life,’ and not a little to his admiration for Sweden, his fatherland once removed. It is grounded upon his belief in the worth and dignity of individual man, and by this star he has made all his political and economic reckonings. He has hewed to the line of his own integrity, letting the chips fall to the right or the left as they may.

Some of his lifelong Catholic friends have broken with him over the late war in Spain; and following the enlistment of two Colorado sophomores in the Lincoln Brigade, and the death of one in action, a post of the American Legion has lately demanded an investigation of the University and of several Leftist professors whose right to their jobs and opinions Norlin has stoutly protected. Of course Norlin had no hand in the enlistment of these boys, although undoubtedly he sympathizes with the generous enthusiasms of youth, whatever the cause — remembering that in 1897, during his own student days, he tried to join the Greek army in the war against Turkey.

Norlin’s stay at the University of Berlin in 1932-1933 as Theodore Roosevelt Professor of American Life and Institutions was not without episodes of humor, such as his receiving a letter from a German admirer addressed to ‘Herr Professor Theodore Roosevelt.’ Violating the divinity which hedges a professor in Germany, Norlin shocked his students by asking them to tea at his hotel and chatting familiarly with them. In regard to his own lectures, in German, on the subject of American liberalism — a topic to which coming events lent more than a shadow of irony — Norlin wrote in the autumn to a friend: ‘I have a feeling that the German people are so desperately anxious to explain themselves, to justify themselves, and to be understood, that it is too much to expect them to take any interest in learning about another country.’ On February 5, 1933, from his rooms in the Kaiserhof, Norlin wrote to the same friend: ‘There has been much excitement over Hitler. He lives in this hotel, and the Chancellor’s offices are just over the way. The square has been packed with his followers, and the singing and cheering have been much like the demonstrations at home over a great football match. . . . Germany cries out just now to be ruled, and it will be ruled, I think, either constitutionally or unconstitutionally. If incidentally liberalism of any sort has a hard time, it appears to be a minor matter.’

Hitler never attracted Norlin in any way; he characteristically described the Führer as ‘not a man you would go fishing with.’ One of Norlin’s associates at the Amerika-Institut, a professor who had sneered at Hitler in the fall of 1932, by the end of the winter was parading in a brown shirt and advising Norlin to modify the tone of his lectures, and to ‘drop certain dangerous words like “liberty,” “individualism,” “democracy.”’ Norlin — who has never lacked a stubborn independence, as well as a touch of grim mischief in situations like this — opened his next lecture by naming these words and remarking coolly that he would continue to use them in their former meaning and not in the perverted sense now current in the Reich. He braced himself momentarily for an explosion which did not come, and was puzzled at the docility of German students.

On May 6 he witnessed the dismissal of Rector Kohlrausch, who had refused to yield to the Jew-baiting of the Nazi Student Association; to him Norlin took occasion to pay his sincere respects in the presence of the new Rector. A day or two later a Nazi officer came to Norlin with a message written out as a cablegram, to be sent to America with Norlin’s signature, denying that Jews were being persecuted save for their Communistic opinions; Norlin refused to sign, and the officer stalked out. Still later, on entering the gates of the University of Berlin, Norlin was stopped by the police, who demanded his pass or Schein, which he had long ceased to carry. He gave his name and rank, but was told that without his Schein admission was impassible. ‘ I’m going in,’ said Norlin, suiting action to words, ‘and what are you going to do about it?’ The officers were too astonished to lift a hand. On May 10 the Norlins watched the Burning of the Books; in the drizzle of spring rain they were glad to accept the invitation of an ample Hausfrau to stand under her umbrella tent. After some conversation Norlin asked guilelessly, ‘But why aren’t they burning the Bible? Surely the Jews had something to do with that book.’ ‘Nein, nein,' she replied earnestly, with a touch of pity for his ignorance. ‘Die Bibel ist von Martin Luther geschrieben! ‘

Norlin came home in the summer of 1933, at a time when comparatively few of his compatriots had caught the full import of the Nazi Revolution, convinced that no man who loved justice and truth could remain silent. With characteristic fairness he appreciated the post-war conditions out of which Hitlerism grew, — the starving time, the cruelty of Versailles, the failure of Western Europe and America to show any friendship for the struggling democracy of the Second Reich, — but with equal clarity he saw that the new leaders of the Fatherland have multiplied its ultimate misery by their injustice, arrogance, and falsification of truth. Norlin is too ripe a scholar to regard Fascism as a wicked new departure in history, knowing well that it is atavism rather than novelty — that ‘between the Greeks and the barbarians there has ever been and ever will be war.’ And as a humanist he subscribes to Burke’s saying that it is impossible to draw up an indictment against a whole people, whether German, Italian, or Russian. In fact, his frontal attack has assumed less the aspect of hate against the totalitarians, and more against the apathy of democracies, of what he has lately called ‘ futilitarianism’—which lacks even the Fascist appeal to the heroic in man, yet connives at the conquest of Ethiopia, the ravaging of China, and the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia. He has spoken often and bitterly of ‘the crucifixion at Munich.’ It is fitting that the last Commencement speaker whom he will introduce to his students in June is former President Beneš.

Norlin’s utterances on democracy and Fascism, which began with articles in the New York Times and the Weil Lectures at the University of North Carolina in 1934, have had an increasingly wide appeal. His address called ‘Hitlerism’ was reprinted by many American organizations and by ‘The Friends of Europe’ in England. His speech ‘Our National Defenses’ was distributed at home and abroad by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. ‘American Democracy: A Recapitulation’ was printed in the Congressional Record and evoked a host of letters to the author, including one from President Roosevelt. Other addresses, both for their trenchant liberalism and for their lucid writing, have lately been included in half a dozen volumes of selected essays for college students.

‘I am not for unleashing our dogs of war,’ Norlin lately wrote. ‘But, in the interest of a tolerable state of peace, I am pleading that the human quality of militancy — the soldier in man, as Plato would say — which now under barbaric régimes is blindly enlisted on the side of the brutish forces of the world, be quickened out of its deathly stupor in civilized countries and marshaled vigilantly in defense of the humanity which lifts us above the brute creation.’ In his latest formal address to the University, Norlin took as his text Thomas Mann’s challenge, ‘Artists we will be, anti-barbarians!’ and spoke stirringly of ‘the belief that man is not a means to an end, not a tool to be exploited either by his neighbor or by his nation, whether for wealth or for war, but an end in himself—the belief in the worth and preciousness of human life. To be a barbarian is to worship brute power; it is to be like any savage, who so far from standing up and doing battle with the gods who threaten him with drought and flood, famine and pestilence, violence and death, prostrates himself before them, seeking by charms and incantations to win their favor and so to league himself with the chaotic and destructive forces of the world. The artist, on the other hand, when true to himself, strives manfully to push back the messiness of chaos, to reclaim from the vast wilderness of space a habitation fit for man, to dissipate the fogs and mists in which we lose our bearings, by letting in light; in a word, to create a cosmos of order and beauty and sanity to serve both as a tolerable refuge for man and as an outpost in his warfare against all violence, whether of inanimate nature or of the brutishness in man himself.’

George Norlin’s life bears a resemblance to that of Isocrates, whose writings he has translated. A philosopher of statesmanship, with no zest for the turmoil of politics, he has helped mould public opinion from the scholar’s study and the academic rostrum. To generations of students he has taught Isocrates’s lesson that they ‘do not desert their true selves and become arrogant, but hold their ground as intelligent men.’ Like the ancient Greek, he has ever been a loyal son of his own land and people, yet his sympathies have embraced all Hellas in the hope of a brotherhood of culture rather than the snobbery of race or the hubris of imperialism. Although the late tidings of battles ‘fatal to liberty’— in the phrase referring to Isocrates in Milton’s famous sonnet — have struck him a poignant blow, he has never lost faith in the final victory of democratic humanism. With proud humility he is able to say in the Attic orator’s words, ‘Throughout my whole life I have constantly employed such powers as I possess in warring on the barbarians.’