When Allisonians learned of Professor Tweedie's retirement in 1937 and of his subsequent death in 1951, they sent letters to the Mount Allison Record, reminiscing on the impact of his lengthy career. The sentiments expressed in these letters suggest that Professor Tweedie's greatest accomplishment was the impression that he left on his students. Excerpts from these letters, originally published in the Mount Allison Record, are transcribed here as a testament to Tweedie's influence on the development of Mount Allison and on the community of leaders who emerged from the university in the early twentieth century.
"I entered his freshman English class in 1889 and during two years as his student admired his coldly intellectual analyses of various themes and pieces of literature. The search for clarification of every allusion in a couple of Macaulay's essays aroused my special interest and gradually led me to become enthusiastically acquainted with many books. The allusion to 'Palace of Truth' stumped even him, but after a trip to England the following year he told me of information he had acquired in this connection... his remarkably retentive memory constantly illumined current conversation ... his personal bearing at all times, and his thoughtfulness in the case of friends, were indeed splendid. He was an exceptionally good letter writer, and often have I thought that probably among most people of my acquaintance he had the least cause to regret anything he had ever written or spoken."
“To Professor Tweedie—the voice that ‘charm’d magic casements, opening’ on the glorious expanse of English literature, and made the world a rich place for so many of us.”
“I am sure there are none of Professor Tweedie’s old students and associates who will not even yet fully appreciate their association with Professor Tweedie at Mount Allison what it is today, and for this and our pleasant associations we owe him a sincere debt of gratitude.”
“My appreciation of all that is finest and best in English literature I owe to him.”
“There is nothing I need for my own satisfaction more than expressing the tremendous gratitude I feel for the privilege of studying English under Professor Tweedie’s guidance.”
“It is a long time now since Vera Frye, Fred Meek and I puzzled out the origins of the English language in the Anglo-Saxon class. And it is a long time since that proud occasion when, after a little speech, ‘P.T.’ as we all affectionately called him, himself presented us with our Honour English diplomas. Since then Mt.A. has changed in many ways, and on the one or two occasions when I revisited Sackville I felt almost a stranger, until I met Professor Tweedie again, and then I remembered that I ‘belonged’ to Mount Allison too.”
"[D]eath has placed no period to the lines of influence which he wrote. It is, rather, a comma, indicating a continued flow of words. Just as the comma, set with purpose sure within its sentence frame, sustains an instant's interlude only to exalt with gentle accent words yet to be spoken, so death has stilled his words for but the passing of a silent breath to emphasize their meaning--and to render more magnificent, in rhythmic continuity of thought, the purer language of life eternal. He is not dead. His influence beckons us from just beyond the crossed frontier where he has traveled before us to claim his reward of a life of service to posterity, and the olden heritage of the faith which was his. Thousands of men and women who, like myself, sat at his feet in former years at the university will unite in raising to his memory a monument in loving appreciation of his useful life and faithful service to succeeding generations for more than half a century. It shall not be any mute memorial carved from chill granite by cutters of stone, but a more glorified structure reared to his spiritual achievement in the lives of those who sat under his tutelage and whose subsequent career have been built around the knowledge he so patiently imparted."
“I have often felt, as I have met and mingled with graduates from larger Universities, who hadn’t the privilege of personal acquaintance with their professors, how great a debt we owe to Mount Allison for giving us that opportunity. Many of the facts we learned we have long since forgotten; but time serves only to brighten our happy memories of good fellowship between professors and students at Mount Allison.”
“To me—and I know I am only one of many—Mt.A. will always be in part Professor Tweedie, and he will always be part of Mt.A. … When we found ourselves in a world darkened by unrest, where the sunshine of service was obscured by selfish objectives, it meant a great deal to us to be able to think of a kindly figure, whose example of loyalty and integrity shone through the gloom like a guiding light. I believe it is not too much to say that Professor Tweedie’s personal interest in his students, and his devotion to his work have made it possible for many Allisonians to retain their ideals. Could any life accomplish more?”
“I have admired his loyalty to his Alma Mater. With the ability that he had, he might well have chosen to spend his life in the work of some larger college where he might have made a greater reputation for himself, but he loyally decided to stay with Mount Allison and devoted himself to her interest, and to the interests of her students. I account it no mean privilege to have been a member of his classes in the regular Arts course. He was always approachable, and his opinions and judgment were readily placed at my disposal.”
"When I saw him last summer he was as bright as I had expected, but a bit frailer. What a full and profitable life! It is interesting to consider how his works go on through the years in the minds and lives of his students: they carry, worked into the texture of their thoughts, appreciations, sensibilities and tastes, the excellence of literature which they found under his guidance and which to some degree they will transmit to others and the stream go down indefinitely. There was a great wisdom surrounding all his technical accomplishments, and a vast personal richness in the framework of material simplicity. The contemplation of such a life brings a sense of grandeur to this existence, not only in its birth and course, but in its closing, as well."
"As a lecturer in English language and literature, Prof. Tweedie had few peers. He was a most scholarly man, excellently trained, of course, in his own subject, and widely read in the literatures of Europe and of this continent. He brought to his teaching an unusually acute mind, a clear and balanced judgment, and a dry humour which had the true academic flavor. In my postgraduate days at Oxford, I realized that he had prepared his students most thoroughly: the contents of his courses were rich and pertinent, and the organization of his materials always logical and helpful. No one can state with any approach to completeness the contribution which he made to the University. His name will always be among the Founders."
“It would be easy to write words of praise about the late Professor Tweedie—honest words of high praise. But I can think of few things harder than to write a memorial appreciation of him which would satisfy old Mount Allison men and women. His service was so unique; his influence had become so proverbial; his character was so steadfast. Each of the thousands of his old students will cherish particularly this or that aspect of his memory; and it would require a great symposium to bring out all the various elements of gratitude and affection in which that memory is now enshrined.
In sheer length of connection with our alma mater he was the greatest Allisonian of them all. From his first entrance into the Academy to his death a few days ago was a period of almost 75 years, and the connection was practically continuous,--first as a student, for fifty years as a teacher, finally as member of the governing board. Even the few years when he was not physically in Sackville did not really break the connection. The years of graduate study in Europe in the 1880’s were his preparation for the professorship which he took up immediately afterwards; and the rare leave of absence in subsequent years was devoted to increasing his familiarity with the ripest scholarship in the subjects of his teaching at Mount Allison.
He was pre-eminently a teacher; -- a teacher and a scholar. And he was a great teacher. To that the thousands of his old students would bear earnest testimony. His fine scholarship was, for him, obviously never a weapon in a contest, or something to be paraded for the sake of making an impression, but was always the servant and minister of his overriding concern – his teaching. Nevertheless an incident toward the close of his active career may have given him justified gratification—when he introduced himself at the offices of a famous London periodical, and the editors immediately rounded up a group of their most eminent contributors for a dinner in honour of the ‘W.M.T.’ whose distinguished critical literary notes they had been publishing at intervals for so many years.
Scholarship alone never made any man a great teacher. Genuine personal worth is necessary, too. And in the happiest combination there is also the charm of that unique human essence which we call individual ‘personality.’ His old students would agree that in Professor Tweedie the combination was a happy one indeed. And yet it might be difficult to specify precisely all of its elements. He did not wear his heart on his sleeve, and he never declaimed about his own enthusiasms. It was apt to be gradually that the attentive student became aware that the chosen balance of his words did not mean any absence of such enthusiasms. But as a genuine educator he would pay even awkward youth the courtesy of letting it find in literature the voices to which it could spontaneously respond, and would, if he might, foster without biasing the budding interest. And he would do this without any weak relaxation of his scrupulous critical standards.
He was not demonstrative, and an affable irony was apt to give his conversation its most distinctive flavour. An outsider might have thought that he had little interest in the individual student as a person. Yet all those who, over many years, had anything to do with Mount Allison records learned that his memory could faithfully revive the particular traits of the separate students of twenty, thirty, forty years back. By some alchemy independent of spoken language his students, too, became, happily, aware of his warm personal interest in them. As time went on, no old student revisiting Sackville would miss, if he could possibly help it, a call on Professor Tweedie. Still, many a middle-aged man, opening his call with the words ‘You wouldn’t remember me, Professor, but…’ has been amazed at the completeness of that memory;--sometimes a little remark, accompanied by a twinkle in the eye, showing that that memory included, albeit indulgently, some callow prank of long ago which had not been the proudest incident of the caller’s student life. Perhaps the word ‘alchemy’ a few lines back was ill-chosen. Perhaps it was, always, as much that well-known twinkle in the eye, as anything else, which conveyed a great deal that the deliberately spoken words never betrayed—a great deal of that which made William Morley Tweedie not only a greatly honoured but a widely beloved man.
Of the influence of such teachers is built up all the ‘tradition’ of a college that is worth its cherishing. Professor Tweedie’s life was so prolonged—to the happiness of his friends and the benefits of our university—that the last dozen or more classes never had the privilege of knowing him as a teacher. All those who did will trust that Mount Allison may never decline from what, in his day, he did so much to make it, and that his great part in that making may never be forgotten.”