Anyone who discusses Perry Miller and his work, it seems, turns sooner or later to his metaphor of the New England "errand run into the wilderness"; it fits the man almost as well as his material. Miller himself used the phrase to describe the Messianic impulse which characterized colonial America. His friends and colleagues, contributors to this memorial issue of The Harvard Review, employ it to catch something of the impression he made.

His own errand into the scholarship of American history was perhaps as finally ambiguous as the earlier Puritan one, but it shared the same energy, and it expressed itself in a series of irreplacable books. Miller's abrupt inspiration on the banks of the Congo in 1926, what he called a "sudden epiphany," moved him--drove him, really--toward a surpassingly profound re-definition of the elusive American mind. In the process, in his New England "laboratory," he began to work out his own technique for the study of the history of ideas. As the legend grows, what he achieved may be obscured by the style with which he achieved it. But this Harvard Review is both passionate and intelligent, and for that reason alone a fitting tribute.

The Review opens with a short biography of Miller by his student Albert J. Gelpi, providing a suitable background for the analysis which follows in other articles. In an essay on "Perry Miller and the Historians," for example, Edmund S. Morgan of Yale examines Miller's place in his chosen profession of American history. It is an excellent article, informative, reverent, and sometimes angry. Miller, Morgan insists quite correctly, never received the honors he deserved from the academic world. He acted the manners of a "stevedore" more than a professor too often for his colleagues's comfort, and he never relaxed his lusty assault on the venerable citadels of scholarly mythology. His achievement can be appreciated, according to Morgan, by other students of the colonial period, but it cannot be measured; his influence was somehow "incommensurate with his genius." His forays into the new field of intellectual history, his insistence that "the mind of man is the basic factor" in human history either alienated or bewildered much of the contemporary academic world, and Miller worked alone. "Men like Charles Beard and Frederick Jackson Turner," Morgan argues,

whose intellectual achievements were inferior to Miller's, had at least as great an influence on the study of history as Miller has or is likely to have. He was, in fact, not a leader of thought, because at the level he worked, thought will not bear leading. He raised a standard to which no one could rally.

So the achievement, like Melville's, rests on the books which remain.

Alan E. Heimert's "Appreciation" of Miller is the longest and easily the most important article in the Review. It divides into three parts: an outline of the contents of Miller's work, a sketch of Miller's approach to intellectual history, and a personal reminisence. He tells the history of The New England Mind, Jonathan Edwards, the anthologies, and The Life of the Mind in America, Miller's projected study of national character in the years between 1775 and 1865. Miller would use the "artist" as an "entrance to the understanding of American society," Heimert explains.

The fullness of the American mind's development could not be understood however, by reworking the ideas of a few canonical figures of American literature and thought. No matter what his occasional contradictions, Miller never conceived The Life of the Mind in America as simply a history of its intellectuals.

Suggestive as they are, the interest of the first two parts is eclipsed by the intimate note of the last. For those of us who knew Miller only by reputation or from the back of Sever II, Heimert's references to his astounding industry or to "the sensitive discernment with which he savored every note-card in his numerous 'shoe-boxes'" fills in a part of the man we never knew. The fascination of the Miller "enigma" appeals to our human interest and excuses our lazy reluctance to follow his difficult thought. Yet for the student, Heimert's interpretation of "the lessons of the master" will clarify and correct the subtler areas of Miller's explorations.

Donald Fleming also takes up the theme of Miller's errand in "Perry Miller and Esoteric History." His first sentence strikes close to the heart of "the method": "The unmistakable impulse at work in all of Perry Miller's writing is his determination to get beneath the surface of his materials and reveal an esoteric pattern." One may quarrel with Fleming's word "esoteric," but there is no denying the accuracy of his insight; it was no private reality that Miller pursued, however, simply a difficult one. His remarkable announcement that all of Jonathan Edwards must be read as a "cipher" demonstrates exactly how Miller postulated complexity in human affairs and then penetrated the public mind of a time to find it. As Fleming says, the Christian system of typology--the instinct to discover the truth at work in symbols and words--parallels Miller's own approach.

The rest of the magazine is given up to a "complete" bibliography of Miller's writings and to two previously unpublished articles by him. The bibliography is not complete and even inaccurate in several places, but it is a useful beginning. The two articles, one on John Greenleaf Whittier and one on Protestant Churches in Colonial America, though not vintage Miller, serve as fine introductions. The essay on colonial churches (originally appearing in Church History, in 1935) was in its time a seminal work; its premises were more exhaustively treated in The New England Mind and other, better-known articles. The Whittier essay, first given as a lecture at Swarthmore College, conveys some of the charm of Miller's lecture style even while it re-locates Whittier in the nineteenth century literary scene.

It is the style to which all the commentators return, however obliquely. Miller's style has something of the Henry James in it, a manly, vigorous Henry James. James's description of the novelist's intentions, in fact, almost summarizes Miller's:

Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in its tissue. It is the very atmosphere of the mind; and when that mind is imaginative--much more when it happens to be that of a man of genius--it takes to itself the faintest hints of life, it converts the very pulses of the air into revelations.

It is the style of a great actor, a dramatist of the life of the mind, and it belonged to Miller and few others. He was the Ahab of academics.