Perry of Exeter

by LUCIEN PRICE

1

HE CAME from Williamstown to Exeter in August, 1914. A world war had just started and in those days world wars, being new, were even less well understood than they are now. In the hold of the Phillips Exeter Academy was a leak which had let in a debt of $250,000. Perry started the pumps and the old boat was freed by 1919, — old boat, for she had been launched in 1781, the year Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown.

In the beginning was a small boy in a small town. His father was a distinguished professor, Arthur Latham Perry, in an excellent college, and he was reared in that seemly village among the Berkshire Hills, where everybody knew everybody else, not omitting Bill Pratt the sawbuck philosopher, whose oratory was none the less astounding for the fact that Bill was slightly daft. The students still lugged in their own firewood and water, lamps were kerosene, vehicles horse-drawn, and life in that country town was no gilt-edged edition.

There is a well-authenticated legend in the Perry family that little Lewis’s hair used to be cut by his elder brother Bliss in the time-honored manner, shears in one hand while with the other holding a bowl over his yellow locks. Whether Bliss did or did not whack him for failing to hold his head still is a subject of domestic dialectic. Out of a wide experience in comparative literatures, first as an instructor at Williams, next as professor at Princeton, then as editor of the Atlantic Monthly, and finally at Harvard, Professor Bliss Perry says this tale is commonly recited by little boys in all lands and ages alleging the brutality of their big brothers.

That tone of simplicity in their early lives neither of them ever discarded or outgrew. It is a main sinew of their strength. One saw it and recognized its origin when in 1931 the Harkness millions came to the Phillips Exeter Academy. Only so much of that money was spent for bricks and mortar as was needful to build walls and roofs around an idea. That idea, as worded by Dr. Perry, is: “A school is its teaching.”

The new buildings, thirty-two of them, admirably designed dormitories and recitation halls in red brick Georgian, have a reticent beauty as they glow amid the enfolding greenery of their academic groves; but nothing is too fine. Exeter has still the simplicity of a country town, quite an old one to be sure, for it was started in 1638 by a college mate of Oliver Cromwell at Cambridge; a town architecturally choice too, along whose elm-canopied streets are whitewalled houses which General Washington saw there in 1789. Plenty of preparatory schools were competitors for that endowment of more than $5,000,000. “Exeter got the money,” said Dr. Perry, “because Mr. Harkness knew we wouldn’t splurge with it.”

Exeter got the money, but how? No one ever asked for it. Other funds had come in the usual ways, from graduates, from wealthy donors, not too plentifully, but enough to keep the school moving forward. Then in the 1920’s, when showers of Olympian gold began raining into the laps of America’s academic Danae (do not press that allusion too far) and the Cochran millions came to Exeter’s sister school, the Phillips Andover Academy, people began saying to Dr. Perry: —

“Why don’t you ask your friend Ed Harkness?”

“Ask Ed Harkness for money? Never in the world!”

For the friendship was genuine. The pathos of a rich man is that he must so often ask himself whether he can be sure whether a friend is a real friend. Mr. Harkness was sure. As young men he and Lewis Perry had met at a wedding in St. Paul and come back by train together. Both were interested in the theatre and both in English literature, which Perry, having been graduated from Williams in 1898, was now teaching at Williams College. Even then, more than three decades ago, the repute of his winning personality had traveled far beyond Williamstown, and twenty years before I ever saw him in the flesh I kept hearing about him from young Princeton and Williams men who evidently swore by him.

Harkness and Perry used to go to plays together in New York. “I knew he wasn’t in the pauper class,” said Dr. Perry years later, “but his income bracket didn’t interest me. Finally someone said, ‘I see you here at the Club quite frequently dining with Ed Harkness. You know, I suppose, that he is one of the richest men in America.’ Well, no; I didn’t. And the next time I went to New York I didn’t call him up. He must have heard or surmised what had happened, for I had a letter from him, and this, among other things, is what it said: —

“ 'Dear Lewis: Don’t be a damned fool’ ”

The offer of the millions came from Mr. Harkness. Its form was a question: “What does American secondary school education most need?” The answer eventually was: “Smaller classes, more teachers, and closer individual instruction.” But the answer was by no means so simple as this sounds, and it took more than two years to formulate. Even so, Exeter nearly lost the prize. The first plan submitted to Mr. Harkness was not satisfactory. They tried again and tried harder. In September, 1931, there was a succession of anxious days. Dr. Perry forbade himself either to expect or to hope. Finally the answer came. It was yes.

2

THIS, the spectacular part, is told first, because a good story should begin, like the Iliad, in medias res. But this, the spectacular part, is not the story at all, and never would have happened but for the unspectacular part, which is what took place day by day from 1914 to, let us say, 1928. When we begin to study the creative process in the individual, we find that it is the prosaic part which is the most startling.

What then is this process? William James can give us the start of a definition: —

Let no youth have any anxiety about the upshot of his education, whatever the line of it may be. If he keep faithfully busy each hour of the working day, he may safely leave the final result to itself. He can with perfect certainty count on waking up some fine morning to find himself one of the competent ones of his generation, in whatever pursuit he may have singled out. Silently between all the details of his business, the power of judg ing in all that class of matter will have built itself up within him as a possession that will never pass away.

The Principal’s power of judging grew slowly, like an oak. And not without stormy weather. During world wars Dr. Perry’s idea of what a schoolmaster should do is stay home and teach school. He has done this through two world wars, and it is one of the best things he does. In 1917 the boys of the Phillips Andover Academy went into uniform in their classrooms. Ex-President Theodore Roosevelt wrote Dr. Perry a letter pointing out that the Exeter boys were a little slow about getting into the war. Perry was a young fellow and new to his Principalship. The letter was a smoke-out. But Perry did not smoke out worth a cent.

Now it so happened that Mr. Alfred Stearns, then Principal of Andover, — the admirable, the idolized Al, was, as he still is, one of Dr. Perry’s best friends. Dr. Stearns stood up for Dr. Perry. His method of doing so was his own, and highly effective. When it was complained in his hearing, as in 19171918 it not infrequently was, that the Principal of Exeter was wanting in military ardor, he would drawl, “Oh, Perry is a kind of Wilson man.” As Woodrow Wilson was then President of the United States, and an old friend of the Perrys, this did not put the Principal of Exeter in a very treasonable light.

But there is a sequel in August, 1941. Speaking at Deerfield Academy on the occasion of its annual Deerfield Dinner, that community feast lineally descended from Charles Eliot Norton’s famous Ashfield Dinners of half a century ago, Dr. Perry said bluntly, “I think we should fight.” Like large bodies, his thinking may move deliberately; but it does not stand still. During the second world war Exeter went on teaching school, the boys were kept at their lessons as normally as possible till their induction into the armed forces at the age of eighteen, and an extra session was run through the summer months to fulfill their required studies so that they might be ready for college when or if they came home from the war. Dozens of them wrote him from the various fronts: “I hope you won’t change Exeter.” That school and their homes were for them two solid rocks in a world deluged with war.

Early in Act I, enter also two other loyal friends of Dr. Perry, each of whom was to become chairman of the academy’s trustees: the late Jeremiah Smith, Jr., and Mr. Thomas W. Lamont, — more affectionately known to the Principal as Tom and Jerry. All three were young men and believed that something notable might be made of the school. They personally steadied its Principal while his powers of judging matured.

How was that power getting on? More and more the school was being run by its faculty. The government was democratic, in form rather like a constitutional monarchy headed by a Prime Minister, but actually conducted on the principle of a New England town meeting. No one is the hero. Faculty committees do most of the work; the list of committees is staggering, but the work gets done. It gets done at the cost of a lot of talk, which is the price of democracy. On occasion the Principal will be voted down on an issue he wants to carry. After one of these defeats his remark was: “I had that comfortable assurance of being right which ought to have warned me that I was wrong.” His faith is in the ultimate rightness of the democratic decision, that the collective judgment evolves from the group a wisdom which is better than any individual dictum. This creates an atmosphere in which wisdom can grow.

“ In groups where debate is earnest, and especially on high questions, the company become aware that the thought rises to an equal level in all bosoms, that all have a spiritual property in what was said, as well as the sayer. They all become wiser than they were.”

Did Dr. Perry find this faith in Emerson’s essay on The Oversoul? More probably the schoolmaster and the philosopher both derived it from the same source. Perry’s profound respect for the individual personality has permeated the school, until boys feel it as well as teachers. He has made men better teachers than they are. His perceptions are acute to identify and to elicit the specific talent. He picks a man to do a certain work, then lets him do it. If criticism is offered, it is with a pat on the back.

Some of the talents thus elicited have been at once whimsically unsuspected and brilliantly successful. Schoolmasters are metamorphosed, this one into a business executive, that one into an amateur architect, another into manager of movie shows — the list grows almost bizarre, and all the while the pot boils best unwatched, the beans are not pulled up by their roots to see if they are growing. If a man is good enough to teach at Exeter, he is good enough to be let alone. The result is a floruit of versatility, the full spread of potential talents on their way to being utilized, and a community of scholars doing their best work and enjoying it.

In the thirty-two years of his Principalship, this democratic process of management by the Faculty has advanced so far as to have a comical back-kick: Dr. Perry is sometimes criticized on his own campus for not doing enough of the work himself. Samuel Butler somewhere describes Zeus as sitting on a cloud above Mount Olympus and observing to his daughter Pallas Athene as they survey the doings of mortals, “My dear, I can see there is no pleasing these people. . . .” But that is not quite fair, for I know of few places where more people are pleased more of the time or with better reason than at the Phillips Exeter Academy. The tone is immensely wholesome; no flummery, no fuss, no feathers; but plenty of hard work being done, and done superlatively well. Intellectual austerity. Very New Englandish, but thawing genially on the side of aesthetic cultivation and the fine arts.

Toward the end of these fourteen formative years (1914-1928), the Cochran money came to Andover. Frank Cushwa, the late and deeply lamented, but then what for so long he was, one of the abounding springs of constructive ideas among the Exeter Faculty, albeit an emotional fellow and at times a prey to temperament, said to Dr. Perry: “We’re beaten. Exeter can never catch up.”

“Don’t be too sure,” said Dr. Perry, in that calm, deliberate tone of his, bland and sanguine, which ‘Young Men in a Hurry’ find so exasperating, “Don’t be too sure. Wait and see.”

Then came the 150th anniversary of Andover (1928) and Perry was invited to speak. What could he say? That is a dangerous question to ask when Dr. Perry is going to make a speech. What he said was utterly disarming because so generous and so gracious, and it was heart-warming because it came from the heart. It came as a sudden turn of thought near the end of his formal address. What he said was that Exeter was little sister Cinderella, and that she was pleased to be asked to Andover’s grand party. (Well, what can you do with a man like that?) Besides, all unbeknownst to anybody, there was a catch in that speech. It was the Cinderella story itself. For little sister’s own coach-and-four was waiting just around the corner of the next three years. Perhaps that is what comes of staying by one’s hearth and tending the fire. William James thinks so.

3

RENAISSANCE, Reformation, or Revolution, which one of the three R’s was it that struck Exeter half way between the two wars? It is part of a larger intellectual upheaval which has struck our colleges since 1900. In the nineteenth century, led by Eliot of Harvard, we had copied the German university. Then our American universities began turning into colossal rolling mills and assembly lines, and something had to be done. In this twentieth century, under the Presidency of Lowell, we switched toward the English university system. If, during the next hundred years, we can evolve a type of university that is suitable to the American social system (provided we survive at all) we shall have done fairly well.

Meanwhile the inhuman academic assembly line needed to be broken up into smaller and human units. Woodrow Wilson tried it at Princeton only to be blocked by Dean West; Alexander Meiklejohn as President of Amherst took up the idea but was stopped; Mr. Lowell, aided by Edward Harkness, carried it through in the Harvard house plan, and others followed. Tutorial system, guided discussion as a method of teaching, the vitalization of thought by give-and-take between boy and man,— this is the method. Its progenitor is Socrates in the agora of Athens.

Could this method be carried on down into the secondary schools? That question was soon in the wind. It was scoffed at. Grim old schoolmasters snorted at the suggestion like regular army officers. “Schoolboys are to study their lessons and recite them back. No nonsense!” Then one of the oldest and best schools in America decided to experiment: Exeter invested most of the Harkness money in teaching. Thirty schoolmasters, the best obtainable, were added, raising the number of the Faculty to eighty-two. The new men were as remarkable in their teaching ability as the ones already there. How were they found? “Well,” said Dr. Perry, you don’t take the first one on the counter.” Time and again, he has identified a talent from ten to fifteen years ahead of anybody else.

The number of boys in each class could now be lowered to twelve or ten. Next came an innovation, which sounds trifling but proved momentous. The magisterial dais was abolished, bringing the master down to the floor level with his boys, all of them seated around a table, making the discussion method of teaching the natural one. And of a sudden, Exeter became a big, little school; seven hundred boys, but all under intimate personal instruction.

At the World’s Fair in Chicago — the one in 1893 — was a mechanical contraption called a moving sidewalk. Actually it was three. You stepped aboard at a slow-going gait, but by stepping across from section to section you reached the inside plane which went racing along at quite a clip. Exeter’s classes are arranged as moving sidewalks of aptitude: one for slower students, another for lads of average ability, a third for the brighter, perhaps brilliant, boys. If able, a boy may step from one to the next, and of course there is nothing to prevent the pedestrian from walking ahead on a moving sidewalk even when it is going full speed.

“More schoolmasters giving closer attention to fewer pupils, with guided discussion as the method of teaching,” — a dozen years of this, and today the Phillips Exeter Academy is a vat of mature thought and adolescent eagerness in noble ferment. Is the school conservative, or is it progressive? No sooner does one describe it by the one word than he feels compelled to describe it by the other. It is both. The tough, wholesome, chewy, old classical curriculum still flourishes there; Latin is required and Greek is taught.

Side by side with this is hospitality to new subjects and new methods. Doors are open for boys to learn through their hands the techniques of drawing, painting, modeling, and musical instruments. The whole school sings. Athletics of course are going full blast in every season with everybody in them. The boys stage and perform plays from the professional repertory; their debating society is serious business conducted in a miniature house of legislature; and through the school moves a procession of eminence from the outside world, — lecturers, preachers, artists, musicians, authors, and on occasion soldiers and statesmen. Exeter practices Whitehead’s precept: “Moral education is impossible apart from the habitual vision of greatness.”

It is now possible to put the secondary evidence in its proper place. When Dr. Perry took the school in 1914, it had 572 students, 32 teachers, and 29 buildings: it now has 725 students, 82 teachers, and 62 buildings. Its endowment has been increased ninefold. Yet these external achievements were meaningless without the inner ones. The heathen thought they should be heard for their much speaking. Shall an institution of learning be heard for its much brick and bullion? Verily, we shall not be heard for our gilt-edged equipment, but by every word that proceedeth from man to boy and back again out of active intellects and aspiring hearts.

Your adolescent boy, except in streaks or by spurts, is not a precociously religious creature. At Exeter religion is more seen than heard. It is deemed more useful to start him as a responsible member of society, fortify him with good habits, and reenforce his common sense with self-respect. On Sundays the boys must go to church; and at the Academy church, if that is where they elect to go, the preaching is that of guests who are almost a directory of clerical eminence; the whole school is required to turn up daily at morning chapel for brief devotions and a talk, by the Principal or a member of the Faculty, earnestly prepared and effectively delivered — as it had better be, for the acoustics of that assembly hall are a notorious pain in the neck. For the rest, religion is something to be done rather than to be talked about.

As for discipline, the saying at Exeter is that there are no rules till you break them, and that the system is one of liberty tempered by expulsion; but the supervision is much closer than appears. Good manners are of course taken for granted and everybody is expected to speak to everybody else whether introduced or not. Fraternities have been abolished. A rich-boys’ school Exeter never tried to be, never was, is not, and is on its way to be still less in such a category. One fourth of its students are wholly or in part on scholarship funds, and a procedure for broadening and deepening the selection of promising boys for such aid is being vigorously devised.

The creative process in an individual has a way of spreading. Dr. Perry’s power of judging has become a savings bank account to be drawn upon at will by the heads of other secondary schools and presidents of colleges. (You all did see — or perhaps you didn t that on the Lupercal he was offered the kingly crown of a college presidency, which he did then refuse.) When they find themselves in a quandary, Head Masters are privileged to reach for their telephones and say, “Toll operator, Exeter, New Hampshire, Dr. Lewis Perry, person to person call ...” and more than one of the best of them has told me privately, “Not the least of his value to us is that no matter how trivial our troubles may seem even to ourselves when we look back at them, Lewis never appears to think them so, and that makes us feel free to consult him the next time.” These were the words, to be explicit, of Mr. Frank Boyden, the self-reliant, the uniquely resourceful Head Master of Deerfield Academy, and Mr. Boyden proudly makes no bones about saying that at an extreme ebb-tide of Deerfield’s financial fortunes, Lewis Perry was the intermediary who saved Deerfield Academy.

4

ACADEMIC administrators are among the architects of America’s structural fabric. At their best they are the statesmen who govern statesmen. As our twentieth century gathered momentum a major sociological fact in American life was the trend from religion as a preponderating influence to education, from church to college, from parson to professor. “The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.” Religion had not saved us; perhaps education might. Money poured into the educational foundations, and the heads of them became administrators of more-than-million-dollar corporations. Your university president, your Head Master must, almost overnight, be no longer an innocuous superannuated clergyman but a man of affairs, and, if possible, also a man of thought. These two articles do not often come in the same package, but when they do they are in a key position of our social system.

By what process does a good school become a great school; a venerable New England academy, a typefounding national institution? It will have been the work of many men, and among these the man who has done most may be able to explain least. He will have mustered the totality of his forces over a long period of years, until what makes him the power he is is not this specific quality or that, but all of them. His power of judgment acts in the dark, subconsciously, as it were an instinct. His decisions come to him at odd moments, in queer places, and always several layers beneath conscious ratiocination.

These academic administrators, too, unlike some of their nineteenth-century industrial precursors, are expected to be gentlemen as well as scholars, dealing with highly civilized scholars and gentlemen. The position is charged with high explosive and the academic administrator protects himself, and others, in ways that vary according to personality. No more than does a doctor the patient in his consulting room does he deal with the whole man, for, like the doctor, did he feel every case as emotionally as the complainant, he would soon be dead. Instead he disengages just so much of himself as is necessary to meet the need, and no more. Some do this by austerity, some by the hard-boiled pose, some by a face of dead-pan, some by an air of patient boredom. Dr. Perry does it by a gentle friendliness, by unruffled good nature.

These educational administrators, central though they are to the development of our society, are also a half-way house on the road to something else. They conduct the orchestra; they do not play the instruments. And these educational institutions themselves, vital to our development — indeed to our very survival — though they are, are again a half-way house on the road to something else. They perform the piece: they do not compose the music. And, in the sense of genuine origination, it is not even certain that they train those who do. They do train the men and women who carry forward the major social services, the professions, some of the arts, and scientific techniques. They do transmit to the young the content of a civilization. But how directly have they to do with genuine power of origination?

It is notorious that evolution goes by jumps. The power of origination may appear most potently in persons quite outside the formal systems of schooling. Neither Abraham Lincoln nor Walt Whitman ever went through the academic mills at all. Education transmits thought, not the origination of thought. Therein the patient must minister to himself. When it comes to power of origination, the genes and hormones seem to have a way of managing that to suit themselves.

In the one art-form where our age has excelled all other ages, the art which during the past two, if not three, centuries has put forth the most amazing succession of men of genius, — the art of music, — virtually all of the most eminent among them, from before Bach until after Brahms, have been extracurricular men, owing their instruction not to an institution, but to the best individual tuition they could find, plus study of the best that had been done before them, plus lifelong cultivation of their own powers. Not duly accredited graduates of an institution, they were chosen, as it were, by an apostolic laying on of hands. For such power passes only from great soul to great soul.

An educational system may be its loving nurse, and once in a great while, perhaps, by the grace of Pallas Athene, its midwife; but scarcely its progenitor. In any land or in any epoch your true originator may be hard to identify. He may slip into the world, labor a lifetime, and slip out again, his identity never discovered until long after he is gone; and yet a main function of any society is to develop power of origination. The transmission of a culture, the training of those who are to carry along its social services, these are imperative, but not by themselves sufficient. Like women, they keep the world going: but the spiritual power of origination is what keeps the world going ahead — if go ahead it does.

This caveat is entered lest we expect of these often superb institutions that which nature never equipped them to do. Much of Exeter’s virtue, much of Dr. Perry’s hidden power, is in just this, that they do not o’erstep the modesty of nature.

5

SIXTY-NINE years old, Dr. Perry has decided to call it a day. This June he retires from his Principalship. His years accompany him like a troop of friends. Burly of figure, fair, florid, and with a face which is strong without pugnacity, this urbane gentleman moves and speaks with deliberation, never seeming hurried, flurried, or worried. He likes people and loves to have them around him.

His expansivencss in this kind has been known to backfire. It was at a term’s end in the 1920’s, none of the boys had been ill (epidemics are a Head Master’s nightmare), and Dr. Perry was driving to Boston feeling fine. At Newburyport he took in three forlorn waitcrs-on-the-curbstone for a belated motorbus, two men and a woman. One asked, to make conversation, “What business are you in?” and he, to further conversation, invited them to guess.

The first man said, “Traveling salesman.”

The second was invited to try. “That fellow at the filling station called you ‘doctor,’ ” said he, “but there’s no green cross on your car. You must be a veterinarian.”

He told the men that they were poor guessers, but perhaps the lady could improve on their score. She eyed him shrewdly and said: “Your car is big and good; you’re alone, and you seem to know a good many people along the road. I think you’re a bootlegger.”

Dr. Perry decided that the guessing garrfe had gone far enough. Yet the range and variety of the people he knows, not casually, but knows well, is fabulous, and they are spread far beyond the complacent paddocks of academia, clubdom, or social status. For both by nature and by cultivation he is many-sided. He loves music and knows a good deal about it; he is an indefatigable reader, more of modern books than of ancient ones; his liking for athletics is not acquired but came spontaneously when as a little boy in Williamstown he watched the big boys play their college games, and the day came when he was something in that line himself, especially at tennis, in which he had a national rating, and he kept up his athletics well into his middle years.

His domestic life is in this same key of informality and putting people at their ease. The Principal’s House is big, comfortable, smoothly run, full of good books and possessions unobtrusively choice. At seasons it presents the aspect of a decorous but highly animated hotel lobby. The world swashes into it and swashes out. Everybody has a good time, including the Perrys. The boys have a good time, their parents have a good time, the alumni have a good time, and their neighbors the Exeter townspeople have a good time.

All this of course takes doing, and it cannot be done by the captain of the ship single-handed; much of it must be done by his first mate. She was a Williamstown girl, Margaret Hubbell, who grew up in that old family homestead painted Indian-red, “Brookside,” under its centenarian Berkshire maple a mile and a half up the Green River road and across the little bridge. She did her share valiantly through the first half of Dr. Perry’s Exeter voyage, then died, leaving a young son and a little daughter. In an alcove of the academy library she has a kind of shrine, but she has a better one in the hearts of everybody who knew her.

For a long time her place remained empty. But there were two Hubbell girls, and in 1935 her sister Juliette joined the ship as Mrs. Perry, and without her the last decade of the Principal’s work would scarcely have been possible. Along with all the other gifts she brought to that position is one of the rarest, the great gift of kindly wit and infectious high spirits.

At Exeter the wicked world, for a moment, can seem very far away. That storied town beside the winding tidewater estuary of the Piscataqua lifts its walls of age-mellowed red brick and white clapboards under canopies of elm and maple.

Spring comes there, a bride in verdure clad; summer is matronly abundance in a smiling countryside; autumn kindles its flame-hues for October’s foliage festival in the golden sunshine of Indian Summer; and New England winter hews town, school, fields and woods in the statuesque white marble of snow sculpture. The procession of seasons is gracious and majestic. Once an hour the academy bell rocks in its iron cradle, and seven hundred boys troop this way and that, changing classes, a freshet of youth. At Exeter, for a moment, the world does not seem wicked at all. But never suppose that the Exeter Faculty do not know or are not exerting themselves to apply one of the most efficacious counter-agents to wickedness known to man. And at the heart of all this is a modest gentleman at whose heart in turn are two qualities which have been central to American life at its best during the whole of our three centuries on this continent. One is simplicity and the other is high purpose.