He had his faults like the rest of us, but not as many mean ones as most of us. He was hardly ever selfish or irritable or impatient: the elephant bides his time, though he never forgets. But Fiske was better than the elephant, in that he never harbored revenge. His few faults were "childlike and bland," though, unlike those of the accepted exemplar of those virtues, never deceitful, and to a great extent they were forced upon him by circumstances, and of course were "faults of his qualities"--of a mind that could not hold itself down to the business of life. But take him by and large--and he was so very large--he was not only a very great man, but a very good man. Yet he was not, nor was ever anybody else, such a man as biographers necessarily depict if they write while there are still living those whom the whole truth could hurt.
But our present biographer has not even brought out, except as they show themselves by implication, some of Fiske's remarkable virtues. During an acquaintance of very exceptional intimacy, I never heard him curse any human being or speak of one with merciless hate. Of one who, he thought, had injured him unjustifiably and cruelly, he generally made fun; of another, who presented fewer temptations to burlesque, he often spoke admiringly, and perhaps less often with a sarcasm doubly powerful because judicial.
He had absolutely no pride of intellect: partly, perhaps, because from childhood he naturally kept himself, by his chosen reading, in contact with the greatest intellects, and so was never struck with the greatness of his own. We had not been out of college long, and I had not made much progress out of the average new A. B.'s worship of intellect, when, as we were speaking of a common friend, I said something to the effect that I wished he had more brains (I now suspect that he had more than I had) when Fiske, who had more than both of us, made a few remarks, very kind though very instructive, on the superiority to mere intellectual power, of goodness, sympathy, and refinement. Once with a friend unknown to fame, who seemed a mere pigmy beside him, he had had a long talk with one of the world's greatest men, and Fiske was heard to say that he was struck throughout by the fact that his obscure friend showed more intelligence than _he_ did. The fact probably was that his friend's intelligence really was quicker than the elephantine but irresistible movements of Fiske's great mind. But Fiske did not think of his own power, but only of the agility of his friend. The friend subsequently said that he supposed he had understood all that was in the books of his two companions, but he certainly did not understand all that was in their talk--the talk in which Fiske had ascribed to himself the less intelligence. Another illustration: many years ago, when Taine was on the lips of all American readers, Fiske said: "He's a sort of big John Fiske--a diffuser of other men's ideas, without ever having originated an idea himself." Probably this was before Fiske had developed his own idea, generally recognized as original, of the effect of long infancy in evolving the higher qualities of a species.