Duane R. Stuart

For thirty-seven years Duane Reed Stuart taught the Classics at Princeton, happily and with a single-hearted devotion. A graduate of Michigan, he had been captain of his university’s track team and was long the holder of an intercollegiate record. To the end, he retained the youthful and easy grace of carriage of the athlete. Stuart divided men as eligible or ineligible for a “Louis Quatorze Club”—a figment he liked to indulge in. Gentlemen were eligibles; bounders were not. He was natively an aristocrat and made his wit a formidable defense of his faith. He required style in living as he admired it in his loved Latin authors, and as he successfully sought it in his own writing. These very personal standards were the charm of the man. Policies interested him less than their champions. The best opinions would have been distasteful to him if held by the wrong person. A friend and Centurion writes: “An element of playful irony in the man made him one of the most delightful of companions. It was a grace note enlivening the solid theme of his scholarship and character.”

The soundness and excellence of his scholarship brought him many invitations to serve as visiting professor in other colleges and universities. His published works include editions of several Latin classics and “Epochs of Greek and Roman Biography,” which one of Europe’s leading classical scholars praised for its “sovereign mastery of a highly complicated and often recondite literature.” It was as a man that his associates first thought of him. The faculty minute includes these sentences: “He possessed an engaging mastery of a richly stored and disciplined mind and enjoyed sharing with others the seemingly inexhaustible resources of his good nature and his good fellowship. He brought the warmth and savor of life into every class or group that he entered and was equally at home with, and beloved by young and old of every station. . . . Those who knew him well know how deep was his feeling for the beauty and pathos of man’s lot and understand why it was that he turned with ever-deepening love and interest to the poetry of Virgil. For him the phrase, et mentem mortalia tangent, had a deep and particular meaning and it is not inappropriate to apply to our colleague the words used by Horace to describe his friend, the poet of the Aeneid, candidiorem animam terra non tulit,—a whiter soul earth never bore.”

Geoffrey Parsons
1941 Century Memorials