TRIBUTE TO PROF. HOMER H. DUBS
BY PROF. DAVID HAWKES
ON 20
AUGUST 1969
Homer, as I can't help calling him, although he was my professor --- not at all out of disrespect, but because everyone in Oxford seemed to call
him that --- slipped quietly away from us last Saturday after a longish period
during which age and arthritis had made him rather less than the man he had
been. Now that it is over, we can try to recall him as he really was, to
remember the whole book instead of dwelling on the last chapter.
Like many of the great sinologues of the past, including his famous predecessor,
James Legge, who became Oxford's first professor of Chinese nearly a century
ago, Homer began his career in the China mission. Nowadays younger men in the
profession often affect to look down on the old scholar-missionaries; but their
scholarship was grounded on experience, which the younger scholars often lack,
and Homer was always able to relate what he studied as an academic with what he
had lived through as a younger man and to remind us by anecdote or example that
the ancient texts he taught formed part of a continuum with the living present.
In fact, so dedicated was he to his subject, that I sometimes think that
Confucius and Hsün-tzu and Han Yü and Wu-ti and the other worthies and heroes
of Chinese antiquity were even more real to him than his contemporaries.
Before he became a professor of Chinese, Homer had been a professor of
philosophy, and though I do not know very much about philosophy, which nowadays
seems to concern itself more with the meaning of words than with the meaning of
life, Homer comes very close to my
idea of a truly philosophical man; so that I think for him philosophy must have
been not a subtle dialectical skill, but an inward force, ordering his attitude
to men and events. I once heard Homer described by Professor Linebarger, who
knew him in the days when he taught philosophy at an American college, as a
Spinozan saint who had missed some of the bigger academic plums because he
wouldn't press his pants. I don't recall that his pants were conspicuously
unpressed when he first came to us twenty-two years ago as professor of Chinese
at Oxford, but I do recall being impressed by that imperturbable good humour and
cheerful benevolence which never deserted him and which absolutely nothing
seemed able to shake.
Chinese was just beginning to be a department when Homer arrived in Oxford. For
the first time there were several students and more than one teacher. It was an
exciting time for all of us, and Homer was the captain of our little crew. He
had to do everything, from
teaching and examining us and building up and running a library down to hiring
and paying the charlady and the windowcleaners. When I look back on those days,
I am amazed that he managed to do so much and yet to do so much of his own work
on top of it. For he was already engaged, when he came to us, on a massive
translation project and his incomparable knowledge of Han history was
internationally respected. Professor Bielenstein at Columbia, Professor Hulsewé
in Leiden and Timoteus Pokora in Prague are among those who have acknowledged
their indebtedness to him. And his erudition extended into unexpected fields.
For example he was once consulted by the great Chinese epigraphist, the late
Tung Tso-pin, on the subject of solar eclipses in North China in the second
millenium B. C. I think it was his extraordinary power of concentration and his
extraordinary industry which enabled him to keep up his studies while he was so
busy as an administrator, even when he was surrounded by vexations and cares;
even when he was in the midst of tragedy.
This brings me to the quality which I think above all the others gained him the
respect and admiration of his college, colleagues, students and friends: the
cheerful stoicism with which he confronted trouble and pain and all the hard
things of life. In this respect we can turn back to the last chapter with
gratitude and admiration, thankful for this example of the human spirit's power
to triumph. In their very great loss I hope it will bring some crumb of comfort
to Margaret and his family to know of the affection and admiration those of us
who knew him felt for our 'prof'.