Publication: A Princeton Companion
Harper, George McLean 1884 (1863-1947), a leading Wordsworth scholar and first Woodrow Wilson Professor of Literature, grew up in Shippensburg, Pennsylvania. His fellow-townsman, Robert Bridges 1879, encouraged him to come to Princeton, and later introduced him to Woodrow Wilson 1879, who became a lifelong friend.
In college Harper was one of the most studious members of his class and, his classmates thought, one of the happiest and most exuberant. He won prizes for oratory in Whig Hall, and was co-managing editor of the Nassau Literary Magazine. In the fall of his senior year, he was instrumental in bringing Matthew Arnold to Princeton on his first lecture tour of the United States. ``I got in correspondence with his lecture bureau,'' Harper later recalled, ``secured the Second Presbyterian Church as an auditorium, advertised the event, and persuaded some of my classmates to serve with me as ushers.'' Arnold was to be the guest of Dr. McCosh. But his acceptance of a railroad official's last-minute offer to have an express train make a special stop for him at Princeton Junction resulted in Arnold's arriving at Prospect from the Junction in a farmer's haywagon just as McCosh's coachman returned from the Princeton station with an empty coach. ``Despite this inauspicious arrival,'' Harper reported, ``the lecture was a great success.''
After graduation Harper spent several years abroad in study and travel and in 1887 got a job through Robert Bridges, as assistant editor of Scribner's Magazine. Two years later he was called back to Princeton as instructor in French. He became Woodhull Professor of Romance Languages at age thirty in 1894, and in 1900, when Bliss Perry left to become editor of the Atlantic Monthly, was appointed to succeed him as Holmes Professor of Belles Lettres in the Department of English. Writing to his classmates about this time, Harper said he had helped, he believed, ``to make French respected and hard to pass.'' His hope for Princeton was that it might be ``the hardest University in the land to enter and remain in, and the pleasantest for real scholars.'' He also wished that ``we had more poor men here, men prepared in the free public schools.''
HARPER AND WILSON
Harper was one of Woodrow Wilson's closest friends, and also one of the first to greet the Wilson family when Wilson joined the faculty in 1890. Harper was then a bachelor and the Wilsons frequently entertained him at Sunday dinner, afterward listening to his talk about poetry. Wilson, who once said he believed the best political thought was to be found in poetry, was particularly fond of Harper's hero, William Wordsworth.
In 1895 Harper married Belle Westcott, sister of the classicist, John Howell Westcott. The Harpers continued to enjoy a close relationship with the Wilson family after Wilson became president of the University. Once, however, in a faculty meeting, their friendship was badly strained. At the end of a long speech by Wilson, Harper rose and said, ``We have had enough of this quibbling. Let us get on with the business.'' Wilson flared up and gave Harper a verbal scorching, which hurt his feelings. As he turned into his house, walking home after the meeting, Harper felt a hand on his shoulder and heard Wilson say, ``Don't let this little spat spoil our friendship.'' The two friends made up and never referred to the quarrel again. ``How many a friend Wilson would have kept whom he lost in the two great controversies of his career,'' Harper observed in recounting this incident, ``if he had made such a brotherly gesture and spoken such reconciling words.''
In the presidential campaign of 1912 the Harper family was invited to join the Wilsons in receiving the election returns. They attended the inauguration and were afterward weekend guests at the White House. On Sunday afternoon, Harper later recounted, they all sat on a rug before an open wood fire, repeating some of their favorite passages of poetry.
Harper edited a volume of President Wilson's addresses in 1918. When the Woodrow Wilson Professorship of Literature was founded in 1926 by Edward W. Bok ``to commemorate Wilson's mastery of spoken and written English,'' Harper was unanimously chosen to be its first occupant.
BIOGRAPHY OF WORDSWORTH
Harper's two-volume biography, William Wordsworth, His Life, Works, and Influence (1916), established him as a leading Wordsworth scholar. Previous biographies, in Harper's view, had scanted Wordsworth's romantic and insubordinate youth, when he was ``burning with zeal for his fellow men and with the fire of a generous philosophy,'' and had given disproportionate prominence to his old age, ``when his personal and literary adventures were at an end, and he had given up his gallant struggle on behalf of equality and simplicity.''
Along with Professor Emile Legouis of the Sorbonne, Harper had discovered the facts concerning Wordsworth's natural French daughter, Caroline, by Annette Vallon, and in his biography had quoted extensively from a neglected collection of letters in the British Museum from Dorothy Wordsworth, the poet's sister, which contained frequent references to Caroline and to her approaching marriage.
In 1917, while serving as an orderly in the American Hospital at Neuilly, France, Harper continued his researches in the archives of Orleans and of the Prefecture of the Seine in Paris, where he found a record of the child's baptism and a certificate of her marriage, which noted that she was the ``daughter of William Wordsworth, landowner, residing at Grasmere, Kendal, in the county of Westmorland, England.''
Having discovered the official records of Caroline's birth and marriage as well as other items about her mother's family, Harper decided ``to give them as simply and correctly as possible'' in a little book, Wordsworth's French Daughter, published by Princeton University Press in 1921. ``I have made no attempt to deny that the origin of all this trouble was a wrong,'' Harper wrote, ``but the unusual difficulties that stood in the way of a legal marriage between William Wordsworth [a Protestant and zealous Revolutionary] and Anne-Marie or `Annette' Vallon [a Catholic and Royalist] should be and will be remembered.''
Harper's discovery created a great stir in England and in America and inevitably found its way into the seniors' Faculty Song:
``Harper went to France to get
The red-hot dope on dear Annette,
And there performed a deed of note,
Revealing Wordsworth's one wild oat.''
One of his students, Thomas S. Matthews '22, said of Harper in the classroom:
``He was a quiet teacher, on the dry side, yet quite incapable of irony or sarcasm; an open and guileless expectancy was his natural frame of mind. Before you had been long in his class you became aware that he was not only giving you the benefit of the doubt but confidently trusting that you might, at any moment, tell him something not only original but true. And that he would be grateful for it, but not at all surprised.''
Harper was a Socialist and once ran, unsuccessfully, for mayor of the Borough of Princeton on the Socialist ticket, the only man ever to do so. A friend of Norman Thomas '05, in 1940 he joined Thomas in expressing regret in letters to the Alumni Weekly that there were then no Negro students at Princeton.
He died of a heart attack on July 14, 1947, while sitting on the porch of his house on Mercer Street. He had just returned from taking his wife out to lunch to celebrate Bastille Day.
Professor Harper is memoralized by a graduate fellowship in English.
From Alexander Leitch, A Princeton Companion, copyright Princeton University Press (1978).