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Updated: June 19, 2025
There had been "Wang" and "The Wizard of Oz"; "Robin Hood"; the tall comedian of "Casey at the Bat"; the short comedian who had danced to fame on his crooked legs; Mrs. Fiske, most incomparable Becky; Mansfield, Sothern some of them, alas, already gods of yesterday!
Then Professor Fiske published in the New York World his able series of lectures on the "Positive Philosophy," which some think he weakened by turning into the "Cosmic Philosophy." Croly and Mr. Bell and most of us went into literature in some way, to an extent that made quite a library, now mostly lost or forgotten.
Now, let no carpist imagine I have dealt in hyperbole, or hand-illumined the facts: I have merely stated some simple truths about the early career of John Fiske. One might imagine that with all his wonderful achievements this youth would be top-heavy and a most insufferable prig. The fact was, he was a fine, rollicking, healthy young man much given to pranks, and withal generous and lovable.
Cambridge is still the home of much that is good and fine in our literature: one realizes this if one names Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Mr. John Fiske, Mr. William James, Mr. Horace E. Scudder, not to name any others, but the first had not yet come back to live in his birthplace at the time I have been writing of, and the rest had not yet their actual prominence.
He can sympathize with Paul in his anxiety in behalf of those for whom he had labored in the gospel. Sometimes the pupils of the Seminary so dreaded the scenes of home, in vacation, that they preferred to remain in the school. In April, 1849, Miss Fiske visited the village of Degala.
And, you know, Maria and Susie have awful times at home, though they do go to places. Mrs. Fiske is so particular. She always says 'Don't, and they haven't got any yard to their house, or anything. I wouldn't change." "Nor I," said Katy, cheering up at these words of wisdom. "Oh, isn't it lovely to think there won't be any school to-morrow?
That tried friend of the mission, E.W. Stevens, Esq., English consul at Tabreez, feared lest the missionaries should fall by the hand of violence. Miss Fiske writes, "Our native friends will doubtless suffer much, and we rejoice to share with them. We hope that fears on our account will not be realized. Still there is danger; and we try to be ready for life or death, as our Father sees best.
Fiske had been our neighbor in our first Cambridge home, and when we went to live in Berkeley Street, he followed with his family and placed himself across the way in a house which I already knew as the home of Richard Henry Dana, the author of 'Two Years Before the Mast. Like nearly all the other Cambridge men of my acquaintance Dana was very much my senior, and like the rest he welcomed my literary promise as cordially as if it were performance, with no suggestion of the condescension which was said to be his attitude towards many of his fellow-men.
Though I suspect "painful" in the Puritan vocabulary meant "painstaking," did it not? Cotton Mather called John Fiske, of Chelmsford, a "plaine but able painful and useful preacher," while President Dunster, of Harvard College, was described by a contemporary divine as "pious painful and fit to teach." Of two of the New England saints it was written:
I've read some William James and some John Fiske, and I realize this that I did more or less think God was a very large, stately old man. An "anthropomorphic deity." Fiske says that is the God of the lower peoples; that was my God. Also I realize this that, somehow, some God, the God if I can get to Him, might help might be my only chance. What do you think? Is this any better? Is it any step?
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