Gilbert Arthur Highet (; June 22, 1906 – January 20, 1978) was a Scottish American classicist, academic writer, intellectual critic, and literary historian.
Biography
Born in
Glasgow
Glasgow ( ; sco, Glesca or ; gd, Glaschu ) is the most populous city in Scotland and the fourth-most populous city in the United Kingdom, as well as being the 27th largest city by population in Europe. In 2020, it had an estimated popul ...
, Scotland, Gilbert Highet is best known as a mid-20th-century teacher of the
humanities
Humanities are academic disciplines that study aspects of human society and culture. In the Renaissance, the term contrasted with divinity and referred to what is now called classics, the main area of secular study in universities at the t ...
in the United States. He attended Hillhead High School, Glasgow,
Glasgow University
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and, on both a Snell and a Jenkyns Exhibition,
Balliol College, Oxford. His Oxford career was distinguished by a First in Classical Moderations, 1930, an Ireland and Craven Scholarship, 1930, the Chancellor's Prize for Latin Verse, 1931, and a First in Literae Humaniores ('Greats', philosophy and ancient history) in 1932. He was appointed a fellow of
St John's College, Oxford in 1932 and remained at the college until 1938 when he moved to Columbia University.
He had met his wife, the well-known novelist
Helen MacInnes
Helen Clark MacInnes (October 7, 1907 – September 30, 1985) was a Scottish-American writer of espionage novels.
Life
She and her husband emigrated to the United States in 1937, when he took an academic position at Columbia University in New Y ...
, while they were fellow-students at Glasgow, and they married in 1932. In 1938 he was appointed to the
chair of Latin & Greek at
Columbia University
Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...
. He stayed at Columbia until 1971 (except for British Army service
during
World War II
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...
). He became an American citizen in 1951, following his appointment as Anthon Professor of Latin Language and Literature in 1950. See his obituary in
The Times
''The Times'' is a British daily national newspaper based in London. It began in 1785 under the title ''The Daily Universal Register'', adopting its current name on 1 January 1788. ''The Times'' and its sister paper ''The Sunday Times'' (fou ...
, January 26, 1978.
Highet devoted most of his energy to teaching, but he also aspired to raise the level of mass culture and achieved a broader influence by publishing essays and books, hosting his own radio program, acting as a judge for the
Book-of-the-Month Club
Book of the Month (founded 1926) is a United States subscription-based e-commerce service that offers a selection of five to seven new hardcover books each month to its members. Books are selected and endorsed by a panel of judges, and members c ...
, and serving on the editorial board of ''
Horizon
The horizon is the apparent line that separates the surface of a celestial body from its sky when viewed from the perspective of an observer on or near the surface of the relevant body. This line divides all viewing directions based on whether i ...
'' magazine.
Highet died in New York City.
Thought
Like others teaching at Columbia at this time—
Lionel Trilling,
Mark Van Doren
Mark Van Doren (June 13, 1894 – December 10, 1972) was an American poet, writer and critic. He was a scholar and a professor of English at Columbia University for nearly 40 years, where he inspired a generation of influential writers and thin ...
,
Eric Bentley
Eric Russell Bentley (September 14, 1916 – August 5, 2020) was a British-born American theater critic, playwright, singer, editor, and translator. In 1998, he was inducted into the American Theatre Hall of Fame. He was also a member of the New ...
,
Ernest Nagel
Ernest Nagel (November 16, 1901 – September 20, 1985) was an American philosopher of science. Suppes, Patrick (1999)Biographical memoir of Ernest Nagel In '' American National Biograph''y (Vol. 16, pp. 216-218). New York: Oxford University Pr ...
—Gilbert Highet conceived of his work as the fostering of a tradition. "These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but 'minds' alive on the shelves," Highet wrote. He believed that "The chief aim of education is to show you, after you make a livelihood, how to enjoy living; and you can live longest and best and most rewardingly by attaining and preserving the happiness of learning."
As a scholar in an era in which democracy,
communism
Communism (from Latin la, communis, lit=common, universal, label=none) is a far-left sociopolitical, philosophical, and economic ideology and current within the socialist movement whose goal is the establishment of a communist society, a s ...
, and
fascism
Fascism is a far-right, authoritarian, ultra-nationalist political ideology and movement,: "extreme militaristic nationalism, contempt for electoral democracy and political and cultural liberalism, a belief in natural social hierarchy an ...
vied for supremacy, he believed it was the duty of the intellectual to support freedom and defend
pluralism. "The aim of those who try to control thought is always the same," he wrote. "They find one single explanation of the world, one system of thought and action that will (they believe) cover everything; and then they try to impose that on all thinking people."
Above all, he was devoted to learning from the past. "History is a strange experience," he wrote in the introduction to an essay on
Byzantium. "The world is quite small now; but history is large and deep. Sometimes you can go much farther by sitting in your own home and reading a book of history, than by getting onto a ship or an airplane and traveling a thousand miles. When you go to
Mexico City
Mexico City ( es, link=no, Ciudad de México, ; abbr.: CDMX; Nahuatl: ''Altepetl Mexico'') is the capital and largest city of Mexico, and the most populous city in North America. One of the world's alpha cities, it is located in the Valley o ...
through space, you find it a sort of cross between modern
Madrid
Madrid ( , ) is the capital and most populous city of Spain. The city has almost 3.4 million inhabitants and a metropolitan area population of approximately 6.7 million. It is the second-largest city in the European Union (EU), and ...
and modern
Chicago
(''City in a Garden''); I Will
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, with additions of its own; but if you go to Mexico City through history, back only 500 years, you will find it as distant as though it were on another planet: inhabited by cultivated barbarians, sensitive and cruel, highly organized and still in the Copper Age, a collection of startling, of unbelievable contrasts." Despite this, as Highet showed above all in his masterpiece ''The Classical Tradition'', it was possible to discover in the past a great humanizing river of learning which connected the present to the Biblical and especially the Greek and Roman civilizations, and through his evocative and graceful prose to make one feel at home in that flow of past lives, and to long for it. Highet tended to be critical of contemporary literature, attributing to it decadent qualities.
He himself was a highly praised teacher. Robert J. Ball, in an appreciation under the heading Living Legacies published in 2001 in the ''Columbia University Alumni Magazine,'' wrote: "When Gilbert Highet entered the classroom, one felt as though the curtain were going up on a Broadway play, with a living legend in the lead. He reminded students (not surprisingly) of a British Army officer—of the kind portrayed by Jack Hawkins in motion pictures—tall, erect, handsome, clean-shaven, and impeccably dressed. He consistently gave his audience a commanding performance, whether he spoke or sang or stood or walked, with a presence comparable to that of Laurence Olivier or John Houseman. ... With his powerful and speculative mind, he gave his students an extraordinary intellectual experience, capped by a showmanship perhaps unparalleled in the American college classroom."
Works
Highet wrote voluminously. He is remembered today for:
*''An Outline of Homer'' (1935)
*
Werner Jaeger
Werner Wilhelm Jaeger (30 July 1888 – 19 October 1961) was a German-American classicist.
Life
Werner Wilhelm Jaeger was born in Lobberich, Rhenish Prussia in the German Empire. He attended school in Lobberich and at the Gymnasium Thomaeum i ...
, ''Paideia : die Formung des griechischen Menschen'', translated by Gilbert Highet as ''Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture'' (three volumes, 1939–1944)
*''The Classical Tradition: Greek and Roman Influences on Western Literature'' (1949)
*''The Art of Teaching'' (1950)
*''Another solution'' (1951) one of Highet's few fictional pieces, published in
Harper's Magazine.
*''People, Places and Books'' (1953)
*''A Clerk of Oxenford: Essays on Literature and Life'' (1954)
*''Man's Unconquerable Mind'' (1954)
*''The Migration of Ideas'' (1954)
*''
Juvenal
Decimus Junius Juvenalis (), known in English as Juvenal ( ), was a Roman poet active in the late first and early second century CE. He is the author of the collection of satirical poems known as the '' Satires''. The details of Juvenal's life ...
the Satirist: A Study'' (1954)
*''Poets in a Landscape'' (1957)
*''Talents and Geniuses'' (1957)
*''The Powers of Poetry'' (1960)
*''The Anatomy of Satire'' (1962)
*''Explorations'' (1971)
*''The Immortal Profession: The Joys of Teaching and Learning'' (1976)
*''The Speeches in
Vergil's Aeneid
The ''Aeneid'' ( ; la, Aenē̆is or ) is a Latin Epic poetry, epic poem, written by Virgil between 29 and 19 BC, that tells the legendary story of Aeneas, a Troy, Trojan who fled the Trojan_War#Sack_of_Troy, fall of Troy and travelled to ...
'' (1972)
*''The Classical Papers of Gilbert Highet, edited by Robert J. Ball'' (1983)
*''The Unpublished Lectures of Gilbert Highet, edited by Robert J. Ball'' (1998)
Highet contributed a satirical essay, 'Motherhood', to ''Red Rags : Essays of Hate from Oxford'', ed. R.C. Carr, London : Chapman & Hall, 1933, 77-85.
References
External links
*
*
Works by Gilbert Highet at
Hathi Trust
HathiTrust Digital Library is a large-scale collaborative repository of digital content from research libraries including content digitized via Google Books and the Internet Archive digitization initiatives, as well as content digitized locally ...
Works by Gilbert Highet at
JSTOR
JSTOR (; short for ''Journal Storage'') is a digital library founded in 1995 in New York City. Originally containing digitized back issues of academic journals, it now encompasses books and other primary sources as well as current issues of j ...
Gilbert Highet and Classics at Columbia A Lost Artby Nicholas Stix, ''The American Enterprise'', March/April 2001
Gilbert Highet's radio essays heard over WQXR New York.Finding aid to Gilbert Highet papers at Columbia University. Rare Book & Manuscript Library.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Highet, Gilbert
1906 births
1978 deaths
Scottish classical scholars
Scottish literary critics
American literary critics
Fellows of St John's College, Oxford
Columbia University faculty
British emigrants to the United States
Writers from Glasgow
British Army General List officers
British Army personnel of World War II
Scottish literary historians
Alumni of Balliol College, Oxford
Alumni of the University of Glasgow
20th-century British historians
20th-century American non-fiction writers
People educated at Hillhead High School