The Story of Wellesley | Page 7

conversion was of another sort: it offended
against good taste, and incurred for him the suspicion of hypocrisy.
For, with that ardor and impetuosity which seem always to have made
half measures impossible to him, Mr. Durant declared that so far as he
was concerned, the Law and the Gospel were irreconcilable, and gave
up his legal practice. A case which he had already undertaken for
Edward Everett, and from which Mr. Everett was unwilling to release
him, is said to be the last one he conducted; and he pleaded in public
for the last time in a hearing at the State House in Boston, some years
later, when he won for the college the right to confer degrees, a
privilege which had not been specifically included in the original

charter.
His zeal in conducting religious meetings also offended conventional
people. It was unusual, and therefore unsuitable, for a layman to preach
sermons in public. St. Francis and his preaching friars had established
no precedent in Boston of the 'sixties and 'seventies, and indeed Mr.
Durant's evangelical protestantism might not have relished the parallel.
Boston seems, for the most part, to have averted its eyes from the
spectacle of the brilliant, possibly unscrupulous, some said tricky,
lawyer bringing souls to Christ. But he did bring them. We are told that
"The halls and churches where he spoke were crowded. The training
and experience which had made him so successful a pleader before
judge and jury, now, when he was fired with zeal for Christ's cause,
made him almost irresistible as a preacher. Very many were led by him
to confess the Christian faith. Henry Wilson, then senator, afterwards
vice president, was among them. The influence of the meetings was
wonderful and far-reaching." We are assured that he "would go
nowhere unless the Evangelical Christians of the place united in an
invitation and the ministers were ready to cooperate." But the whole
affair was of course intensely distasteful to unemotional people; the
very fact that a man could be converted argued his instability; and it is
unquestionably true that Boston's attitude toward Mr. Durant was
reflected for many years in her attitude toward the college which he
founded.
But over against this picture we can set another, more intimate, more
pleasing, although possibly not more discriminating. When the early
graduates of Wellesley and the early teachers write of Mr. Durant, they
dip their pens in honey and sunshine. The result is radiant, fiery even,
but unconvincingly archangelic. We see him, "a slight, well-knit figure
of medium height in a suit of gray, with a gray felt hat, the brim
slightly turned down; beneath one could see the beautiful gray hair
slightly curling at the ends; the fine, clear-cut features, the piercing
dark eyes, the mouth that could smile or be stern as occasion might
demand. He seemed to have the working power of half a dozen
ordinary persons and everything received his attention. He took the
greatest pride and delight in making things as beautiful as possible." Or

he is described as "A slight man--with eyes keen as a lawyer's should
be, but gentle and wise as a good man's are, and with a halo of wavy
silver hair. His step was alert, his whole form illuminate with life." He
is sketched for us addressing the college, in chapel, one September
morning of 1876, on the supremacy of Greek literature, "urging in
conclusion all who would venture upon Hadley's Grammar as the first
thorny stretch toward that celestial mountain peak, to rise." It is
Professor Katharine Lee Bates, writing in 1892, who gives us the
picture: "My next neighbor, a valorous little mortal, now a member of
the Smith faculty, was the first upon her feet, pulling me after her by a
tug at my sleeve, coupled with a moral tug more efficacious still.
Perhaps a dozen of us freshmen, all told, filed into Professor Horton's
recitation room that morning." And again, "His prompt and vigorous
method of introducing a fresh subject to college notice was the making
it a required study for the senior class of the year. '79 grappled with
biology, '80 had a senior diet of geology and astronomy." To these
young women, as to his juries in earlier days, he could use words "that
burned and cut like the lash of a scourge," and it is evident that they
feared "the somber lightnings of his eyes."
But he won their affection by his sympathy and humor perhaps, quite
as much as by his personal beauty, and his ideals of scholarship, and
despite his imperious desire to bring their souls to Christ. They
remember lovingly his little jokes. They tell of how he came into
College Hall one evening, and said that a mother and daughter had just
arrived, and