Читать книгу Dr. Hyde and Mr. Stevenson - Harold Winfield Kent - Страница 11

INTRODUCTION

WHENCE CAME HYDE? This is a most usual query, but what is more usually asked is "Why a book on Hyde?" Charles McEwen Hyde was Mrs. Charles Reed Bishop's choice, after her husband, as one of the five trustees named in her will. This Hawaiian princess of beautiful character, who died in 1884, provided for an educational foundation, the B. P. Bishop Estate, to establish and operate the Kamehameha Schools of Honolulu, Hawaii.

It was my privilege to serve as president of the Princess' institution for more than 16 years following World War II. I came to recognize Hyde as the one responsible for the creation of the program of studies and activities and policies which were to stand as the principal landmarks and guidelines of this school throughout the years.

I prize membership in the Social Science Association of Honolulu and have, each time my turn has come up, presented an essay. I had written an essay on Charles Reed Bishop, husband of the Princess, and a distinguished figure in Honolulu and San Francisco, 1846 to 1915. My next effort at an essay seemed self-pointed at Charles McEwen Hyde. His name had come to me frequently as the real force behind the founding of the Hawaiian Historical Society and the moving spirit in the development of the Library of Hawaii. Any doubt about an essay on Hyde was dispelled with the discovery that he was the founder of the Social Science Association in 1882 and was its secretary for 17 years to 1899.

As I started upon my research on the Hyde essay I chanced across Miss Ethel M. Damon's Siloama—Church of the Healing Spring, the story of the Protestant Church in Kalawao, the leper village on Molokai island. Miss Damon had stumbled on an accumulation of forgotten church record books buried outside, at the rear of the church, in an old storage bin. She had the badly frayed and worn documents carefully exhumed and then forthwith translated into English from the Hawaiian. The mute story of the Hawaiian Church (Congregational) from the 1830's began to emerge and she was enabled to write Siloama from which the externally imposed confrontation between Hyde and Robert Louis Stevenson was revealed to me almost as a piece of startling news. I had never heard of Stevenson's "Open Letter" in which Hyde was pilloried following publication of his personal reply to the Rev. H. B. Gage who had inquired as to his opinion of Father Damien.

My original purpose in this essay was to describe this man Hyde for the membership of the Social Science Association and now, with the Stevenson matter, a new element became an essential aspect of the paper. It is certain that Father Damien does not need the swarm of apologists, the writers, who credit him as the first Christian leader of the leper settlement, and who aver with uniform clamor that he brought the first order, both in government and morality, out of a human chaos.

Further he did not need the broken reed of a Stevenson to mount his case. The kindly Father could and did speak for himself through his works. His voice should be the one to speak through these very works and not be dependent upon the unfounded and misguided utterances of a patterned emotional sympathy.

In the telling of the general Hyde story I confess a strong dependence upon the well preserved file of letters that flowed copiously from his pen in Honolulu to the secretaries of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions in Boston. Every letter of his 22 Honolulu years is now housed in the Houghton Library, Harvard University and this book could scarcely have been attempted were it not for privileged access to them. It would not have been possible to fill out the story in "good measure, pressed down, and shaken together, and running over" and give it a faithful Hyde "ring" otherwise.

The Rev. Dr. Hyde possessed the key elements of scholarship to high degree. He had patience and zest for research, a rare ability to analyze linguistic secrets, an orderly mind, a museumist urge. He was a classifier, an arranger, an organizer. He could have been ranked among the great researchists of Christian history, and he could have achieved this status more easily than most of the greats; he could have walked among the ruins, the idols, and the old tomes with no rip or tear in his own ecclesiastical clothing.

He was sure in his theology and so he was a free man, free to act out his life. It might have been better had he kept out of the teeming marketplace with its thrusting purpose and straying demand and instead remained within the scholarly walls of antiquity and philosophy and theology, there to stand forth in his niche in the stature of an intellectual. But he chose the marketplace and there, because of the hustling calls into every cell of human complaint and need, his intellectuality, while never feeble, was diluted to a pragmatic cause.

Hyde tended to make a career out of each of the major enterprises with which he became associated in Hawaii. Reading of this biography would be tedious if progress in the several areas were recorded chronologically. Consequently this story is based upon taking each "career" to its conclusion before picking up another.

I disassociate myself from Hyde comments on the Hawaiian monarchs of the day and likewise from the remarks about the personal characteristics of the Hawaiians. But passages on these subjects are worthy of inclusion since they constitute a largely unrepresented viewpoint in Hawaii.

Can the biography of Hyde be written to achieve for him the honorable position in Hawaiian history to which he is entitled? It is so believed and in that spirit this book is undertaken—not as an apologia. The Damien-Stevenson episode may seem such, but it is not so. Hyde has a place in that episode—in being honest in the light of his own convictions although unintentionally being cast into the role of a character assailant by the careless publication of a personal letter.

This ms. should be construed as an attempt on Dr. Hyde's life. An attempt it is, not in the vernacular sense—that has already been accomplished by the man with the scalpel, abetted sequent for three quarters of a century by the Stevenson writer followers—but in a special sense to turn around the unworthy image of him as bigot, traducer, slanderer; petty, despicable, obscure. The weight of the endless nouns and adjectives ill-humoredly applied piled up a staggering burden for Hyde but fortunately his life and especially the Stevenson episode do not today compel a blind stagger to the truth. And it is this truth which destroys the well of oblivion of the Rev. Dr. Charles McEwen Hyde.