obituary: john huston finley 1863-1940

American Geographical Society

Obituary: John Huston Finley 1863-1940Author(s): Isaiah BowmanSource: Geographical Review, Vol. 30, No. 3 (Jul., 1940), pp. 354-357Published by: American Geographical SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/210234 .

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THE GEOGRAPHICAL REVIEW

VOL. XXX JULY, I940 No. 3

JOHN HUSTON FINLEY

1863-1940

I N his Watson Foundation lectures at Edinburgh in I929 Dr. Finley spoke of " the poet's dream of a celestial country to the West which even today we picture to ourselves when we say that one has

'gone West,' the Tir nan Og, the land of the ever young of which Fionnlaoch sang,

'Where no sail bends the mast Nor prow divides the wave,'

and where are "great fields of thyme and heather and the sound of wind in the forest," as John Buchan phrased it in his mystical story of Colin.

It is impossible to think of John Finley except as an adventuring traveler on a hilltop in some Western land of youth. Every friend will tell, through the years ahead, of the undiminished zest in him, the restless, driving spirit that did not flag with age and that made him so frequently the "pulverulent vagrant," as he once signed a message written after his return

"From the road beyond Hymettus, From the slopes of Lycabettus Whence one sees the white Pentelic Shining in Time's noblest relic."'

The memories of his walking journeys in Palestine and Greece were especially dear to him, in part doubtless because of his wide knowledge of the Bible and of classical literature-memories of sunlit days and moonlit nights in which he did twenty, thirtv, or forty miles, of the people whom he met on the way, of what men said who had their feet on the ground.

The classic books of exploration were familiar to him, but he liked best to get his geographical information from his own view of the earth and from explorers themselves. The photograph he seemed to prize most highly shows Nansen seated in Dr. Finley's study at Knox Col-

Copyright, 1940, by ihe American Geographical Society of New York



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356 THE GEOGRAPHICAL REVIEW

lege many years ago, when both were young men. To his New York Times office came most of the explorers of the past twenty years. His interest in their exploits was never transient and always generous. That interest reached its highest point in a creation of his own, a globe showing the flights of those pioneering aviators who first spun the planetary network of the air. It is now without doubt, the most valuable globe in the world, a kind of supplement to the Hakluyt series, possible only when at length men's ideas took wing.

Each track on his globe was drawn by the aviator who flew the course, and his signature is added. The transatlantic crossings of Lindbergh and Earhart; Kingsford-Smith's great Pacific flight; the round-the-world flights of Eckener (airship) and Post and Gatty; Wilkins' airplane flight across the Arctic Sea from Alaska to Spits- bergen; Byrd and Ellsworth almost all the "firsts" are on it. For good measure the land and sea courses of Nansen, Bartlett, and Stefansson in the Arctic and of Amundsen in the Antarctic are added. Dr. Finley carried the globe down to the wharf on several occasions in order to meet the home-coming explorer and get his signature and his route while the news was still fluid. He borrowed it from the Society and returned it again and again. It is an extraordinary human document, not only because of the original signatures and tracks that it bears but also because it represents Dr. Finley's distinctive contribu- tion to geography, the planetary point of view.

The word "planetary" was a favorite. It was not, however, the scientific or physical triumphs that he had in mind. He dreamed of a peaceful world to be. His most subtle and poetical lines on the theme, in terms of individual responsibility, are found in what may be his best poem, "And to Such as Play Only the Bass Viol."

His geography was that of a poet, accurate but unsystematic, not a body of assembled knowledge but a way of thinking that enriched all that he did and made it unique in a world become worshipful of efficiency. America, he wrote, was baptized under the Ptolemaic system but settled under the Copernican system. It was not only the geography of the world that was becoming known in the period of the Discovery and thereafter: the heavens also had their explorers in that period, and so had the philosophies and faiths of men. Columbuses, Livingstones, and Pearys were in every field of thought and venture. America was not the solitary witness of a new age; the first settlers were not just men of any period climbing out of their frail boats and landing on strange shores. In their diversities these westward-faring men meant something truly significant under the sun, a whole new society taking the flavor of the best ingredients at least such was the poet's dream.

When he introduced geographical speakers at the monthly meetings of the Society, it was not only fact that he presented, about speaker



JOHN HUSTON FINLEY 357

and theme, but also illumination. His jocund style, his gift of grace, his personal charm were the marks of a generous man who had a warmhearted interest in both speaker and audience. It was difficult to decide whether the members of the Society had come to hear Dr. Finley's three-minute introduction or the speaker's hour-long lecture. We owe him deep gratitude for the faithful discharge of his duties and no less for his sophisticated yet gracious interpretation of lecturer and theme, made not seldom at heavy expense of his own convenience and strength.

Dr. Finley had his fun as he went along, not waiting for leisure in what proves for valuable men to be an ever receding future. The flick of humor was in most of his personal letters, handwritten and signed with his name or John Quill (a sketch of a feather), including those that were addressed to his friends by original nicknames, one of them at least written only three days before his death. His pride in the work of his friends was inexhaustible. He had the greatness that urged him to praise generosity and strength in other men.

Although the subject is nongeographical, I cannot close this sketch without a reference to his most deeply moving editorial, "The Menin Gate. " Whatever the theme of the designated memorial to the gallant Englishmen who died by shocking thousands at this point on the Western Front, it could hardly be more moving than the cadenced lines of Dr. Finley's immortal text, a kind of world inscription published simply on an editorial page. Beside it we place a phrase from the address he gave before the Johns Hopkins Alumni Association at Baltimore on February 22, 1938, on the liberation of thought, celebrating "the printed word that helped mankind to a permanent planetary possession of what the mind of the individual man has conceived," including free government through the free word, and, for an ideal to be realized on some distant day, a distinctive American excellence. ISAIAH BOWMAN



obituary: john huston finley 1863-1940

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