Ellwood Hendrick

In one of the groups of a sociable Club-house evening the rugged figure and massive features of Ellwood Hendrick were always to be found. He was as good a listener as talker, but it was his own sententious comment, thrown out in his resonant voice with a gleam of humor from the sleepy eyes, that drew wandering fellow-Centurions to the circle. Nothing in life was without its interest to Hendrick, and certainly no one found more constant enjoyment in the human scene. He was a distinguished chemist, famous for capacity of making plain to pupil or reader the secrets of that science; but his mastery of the art of science was less noteworthy than his mastery of the art of friendship. Not many intimacies would at first glance seem more singular than Hendrick’s relations with Lafcadio Hearn. Hendrick himself described how he met at a New York dinner company this “frightened little man in old-fashioned spring-bottom trousers, carrying a fawn-colored sombrero.” Perhaps the personal oddities attracted him; at all events, that was the origin of a remarkably intimate long-distance correspondence. Lafcadio’s letters to Hendrick from Japan have been preserved. Some of their candid expressions of opinion could hardly have been written to any one else; his offhand judgment, for example, that Jay Gould had “exposed with splendid frankness the real laws of business,” for which “I hold that a statue should be erected to him,” or Lafcadio’s confession that, if chance were to bring him back again to America, “I hope I can keep out of New York,” whose “great nightmare always dwells with me.”

Hendrick did not object to the New York nightmare and he had his own ideas of the late Jay Gould, but one may believe that his own letters to Japan had a flavor equally original. His published “Percolator Papers” occasionally suggest it, as in their grave examination of the question whether “total abstinence by a whole people” might not, in the light of experimental history, inevitably produce a “serious mental intoxication.” What he actually wrote to Lafcadio Hearn we do not know; but when that dreamy idealist, in his reply to Hendrick’s observations from New York, described on one occasion their “lightning-flash glimpses of life,” on another “your wonderful letter, full of penetrating things,” on still another “the bracing tenderness that reminds me of a college friendship,” Centurions will surely get a new view of their Saturday night associate.

Alexander Dana Noyes
1931 Century Association Yearbook