Arthur Sherburne Hardy

If Arthur Sherburne Hardy is also to be remembered among the distinguished fiction-writers of his day—and that is undoubtedly the association which his name will bring to most of his fellow-countrymen—it will have to be said that this was only an incident in a singularly varied career. For pure versatility, Hardy’s life achievement can scarcely be described except as bewildering. Writers of romantic fiction have sometimes cut a figure in diplomacy; Brand Whitlock and Thomas Nelson Page are modern instances. Mathematicians have on rare occasions written imaginative stories; Lewis Carroll with his “Alice in Wonderland” comes to mind. Hardy was not even the only West Pointer to write successful novels; Colonel Richard Henry Savage, whose “My Official Wife” is the most absorbing of all tales of pre-war Nihilistic Russia, was graduated from the Academy in Hardy’s day.

But Hardy achieved exceptional distinction in all these various fields at once. In an official capacity, Hardy was successively identified with the United States regular army, with two college faculties, with the ministry to Persia, Greece, Rumania, Servia, Switzerland and Spain. This was unusual enough. But when the roster of his published writings comprises, along with a score of other books, such pleasingly contrasting titles as “The Elements of Quaternions,” “The Wind of Destiny,” “New Methods in Topographical Surveying,” and “But Yet a Woman,” the ordinary man’s imagination is fairly baffled.

Hardy was doubtless only one of many men of achievement on the record who could be cited for versatility. But the truly remarkable fact about Hardy was not so much the range of his accomplishments as the very high quality of his work in every one of them. Some of his stories were described by Stedman (perhaps a bit enthusiastically) as the “finest imaginative literature produced up to that time on this side of the Atlantic.” The Director of the Yerkes Observatory characterized Hardy’s teaching of mathematics as “unsurpassed by any professor that I ever listened to.” He mastered so thoroughly the difficult art of diplomacy that Roosevelt wished him to come to Washington and take a hand in conducting that government’s foreign policy. When, along with all this, it is recalled by his intimates that Hardy possessed a fund of contagious wit and humor, that he was famous for drawing out the best talk of others while himself a listener, that he was skilled as rider, yachtsman, golf and tennis player and was a noted rifle shot, we have an interesting picture.

The reading public’s insatiable appetite for any fresh investigation into Lincoln’s early life arises partly from the unflagging interest in Lincoln’s personality; partly, no doubt, from the plain citizen’s delight in being reminded of humble origins for great figures in history. Probably the particular curiosity about Lincoln’s youth has also the motive which for three centuries has sharpened expert inquiry into the baffling question, how the son of an unlucky Stratford yeoman could have come to be the Shakespeare of “Twelfth Night” and “Othello.” It is a puzzle in human intellect. Imagining total lack of information on the period between the corner-grocery lounging days of 1836 and the convention of 1860, the Gettysburg speech of 1863 or the second inaugural of 1865, why might we not have had a Baconian theory of Lincoln?

Alexander Dana Noyes
1931 Century Association Yearbook