Background
James Morgan Hart was born on November 2, 1839, in Princeton, New Jersey, United States, the son of John Seely and Amelia Caroline (Morford) Hart. He spent his boyhood in Philadelphia.
educator philologist translator
James Morgan Hart was born on November 2, 1839, in Princeton, New Jersey, United States, the son of John Seely and Amelia Caroline (Morford) Hart. He spent his boyhood in Philadelphia.
After graduating from the College of New Jersey in 1860, Hart studied at Geneva, Göttingen, and Berlin, becoming proficient in French, German, and Italian. He concentrated upon civil and canon law at the University of Gottingen and in 1864 won the degree. Linguistic science fascinated him and in order to penetrate his chosen field more deeply he spent two years in Leipzig, Marburg, and Berlin, entering intensively into the study of English and German philology under noted philologists, among them Braune and Grein.
After practising law ln New York City for several years, James Hart served, 1868-1872, as an assistant professor of modern languages in Cornell University. He also wrote for American newspapers, as in the spring of 1873, when he was special correspondent of the New York World at the Vienna Exposition. In 1874 he was back in New York engaged in literary work, translating Auguste Laugel’s Angletcrre, Politique et Sociale (1874), editing German classics for college use, and writing his German Universities: A Narrative of Personal Experience (1874), which he dedicated to his college-mate and lifelong friend, George Haven Putnam. For more than a generation it was the standard work on the subject in America, a signpost directing young Americans toward the paths of graduate study. Its appearance was timely, its influence inestimable.
From 1876 till 1890 Hart occupied the chair of modern languages and English literature at the University of Cincinnati, where he found his first group of disciples, who carried his enthusiasm for advanced studies and scholarly research to other American colleges. He published a large number of reviews, A Syllabus of Anglo-Saxon Literature (1881), and made extensive collections for an Anglo-Saxon lexicon which unfortunately he never completed.
In 1890 Hartwas called back to Cornell University as professor of rhetoric and English philology. His reputation attracted numerous graduate students in English and Germanic philology who later filled important college and secondary-school positions. In harmony with this work he found a wider field for his activities. He was appalled by the poor English spoken and written by college students. He started a campaign for the improvement of the teaching of English in the schools of New York and threw his energy into this movement, attending teachers’ meetings, organizing teachers’ training courses, keeping the fires hot in educational magazines, writing textbooks on composition and rhetoric. He carried his crusade into the meetings of the Modern Language Association, appealing to all language departments to insist on the use of good English, and aiming to place English at the center of college education.
Among Hart's scholarly writings book reviews preponderate. Most of them appeared in the Nation, not pleasing, faint notices, but virile, trenchant, and hard-hitting, never personal attacks, but straightforward, clear, precise investigations of the subject in hand. At the age of sixty-eight (1907) he retired. He continued to live in Ithaca until 1914, when a southern climate was recommended to him by his physician. He died in Washington, D. C.
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(Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We h...)
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(Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We h...)
Hart was president of the Modern Language Association in 1895.
Severely critical as a teacher, Hart cultivated independence in his students.
Hart was twice married: first to Miss Wadsworth, a resident of New York, who died shortly after their marriage; second, in 1883 to Clara Doherty of Cincinnati, who survived him.
