Charles
Eliot Norton was an American scholar and man of letters. He was
born at Cambridge, Massachusetts. His father, Andrews Norton (1786-1853)
was a Unitarian theologian, and Dexter professor of sacred literature
at Harvard; his mother was Catherine Eliot, and Charles William
Eliot, president of Harvard, was his cousin. His brothers were Gen.
Charles Benjamin Norton and Frank Henry Norton.
Norton
graduated from Harvard in 1846, and started in business with an
East Indian trading firm in Boston, travelling to India in 1849.
After a tour in Europe, he returned to America in 1851, and thenceforward
devoted himself to literature and art. He translated Dante's Vita
Nuova (1860 and 1867) and the Divina Commedia (1891-1892, 2 vols.).
He
worked tirelessly as secretary to the Loyal Publication Society
during the Civil War, communicating with newspaper editors across
the country, including the journalist Jonathan Baxter Harrison
who became a lifelong close friend (Turner 1999). From 1864 to
1868, he edited the North American Review, in association with
James Russell Lowell. In 1861 he and Lowell helped Longfellow
in his translation of Dante and in the starting of the informal
Dante Club. In 1862 Norton married Miss Susan Sedgwick.
In
1875 he was appointed professor of the history of art at Harvard,
a chair which was created for him and which he held until retirement
in 1898. The Archaeological Institute of America chose him as
its first president (1879-1890). From 1856 to 1874 Norton spent
much time in travel and residence on the continent of Europe and
in England, and it was during this period that his friendships
began with Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, Edward Fitzgerald and
Leslie Stephen, an intimacy which did much to bring American and
English men of letters into close personal relation.
Norton
had a peculiar genius for friendship, and it is on his personal
influence rather than on his literary productions that his claim
to fame rests. In 1881 he inaugurated the Dante Society, whose
first presidents were Longfellow, Lowell and Norton himself. From
1882 onward he confined himself to the study of Dante, his professorial
duties, and the editing and publication of the literary memorials
of many of his friends. One of his many students at Harvard was
James Loeb.
In
1883 came the Letters of Carlyle and Emerson; in 1886, 1887 and
1888, Carlyle's Letters and Reminiscences; in 1894, the Orations
and Addresses of George William Curtis and the Letters of Lowell.
Norton was also made Ruskin's literary executor, and he wrote
various introductions for the American "Brantwood" edition
of Ruskin's works.
His
other publications include Notes of Travel and Study in Italy
(1859), and an Historical Study of Church-building in the Middle
Ages: Venice, Siena, Florence (1880). He organized exhibitions
of the drawings of Turner (1874) and of Ruskin (1879), for which
he compiled the catalogues. He died at "Shady-hill,"
the house where he had been born. He bequeathed the more valuable
portion of his library to Harvard. He had the degrees of Litt.D.
(Cambridge) and D.C.L. (Oxford), as well as the L.H.D. of Columbia
and the LL.D. of Harvard and of Yale.
Quotations
"One
may sigh for all that one loses in giving up the old religion....
but the new irreligion is the manlier, honester and simpler thing,
and affords a better throry of life and a more solid basis for
morality."
"The
loss of religious faith among the most civilized portion of the
race is a step from childishness toward maturity."
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