Against the Grain: John Jay Chapman

by JACQUES BARZUN

1

TEN years ago there appeared in this country a good fat volume entitled John Jay Chapman and His Letters. The author, the veteran biographer M. A. DeWolfe Howe, had woven together a sketch of his subject’s life and a collection of truly astonishing letters. The reviewers were properly astonished, and several conveyed their aroused interest. But Chapman’s works are hard to find, other names continually crop up, and the interest spread little farther than the column or two that expressed it.

Chapman’s Letters were in themselves an astringent dose. One of the most sympathetic critics was moved to wonder whether their author was not mad or half mad, since it was impossible to take him and his ideas as belonging to any known sort of life or tradition on earth. Yet the biography should have been reassuring. Chapman did appear on earth — this one — in New York City, in the year following the outbreak of the Civil War. Descended from Huguenot, Dutch, and English ancestors, including the famous John Jay after whom he was named, Chapman belonged to the upper classes. He went to Harvard, married, took a militant part in reform politics, traveled, thought, and wrote a score of books. Then he died, in 1933, aged seventy-one. Except among a limited circle of friends in New England and New York, he did not, as we say, make a name for himself. What we mean is, he did not make a label stick to his name.

This is all the more reason for making one up now and gluing it on as firmly as possible — JOHN JAY CHAPMAN: CRITIC FIRST CLASS; then perhaps in smaller type, as a footnote: Philosophical writer, sociologist, humorist. I borrow the phrase “philosophical writer” from Samuel Butler, who used it about himself, for Chapman and he, besides being contemporaries, have certain affinities. Both were amateurs rather than professionals; both used violent exaggeration to blast through the hard cake of customary thought; and both believed acidulated humor a good medium for serious criticism. When Chapman wants to entice us to read an original book, he does not combat scholarly abstractions with other abstract modifiers; he speaks like a man, not a book, and we hear a voice: —

“May the Muses forgive me if 1 seem ungrateful to that race of scholars who have given us access to the literature of Greece and Rome. When I am cross with them, the child scratches his nurse. For where should 1 have been without the protection and the solicitude of these great drudges who ha ve been at work over my education for centuries? Nevertheless, there is something in a child, when he scratches his nurse, that is justified. She annoys him by her fussiness: she straightens his bib, corrects his manners, rules him in the bathtub, and bothers him with external attention. Is it not in spite of the attentions of the nurse that the inner, baffled, struggling spirit of the child comes into its own?

“Literature is for our immediate happiness and for the awakening of more literature; and the life of it lies in the very seed and kernel of the grain. Footnotes and critical information attack the creative instinct. The spirit is daunted, the tongue tied by them. Many a lad has known less about Shakespeare after a college course on Shakespeare than he did when the only phrase he knew was ‘Aroint thee, witch’ — and he didn’t know where that came from. Now he can write the etymology of the words on an examination paper; but the witch herself has vanished. Information is the enemy to poetry. If the old Greeks had known as much about Achilles as we do, the Iliad would never have been written. . . .

“The Nineteenth Century has left a hedge of critical literature about every great writer of antiquity. By the time a student has bored his way through the treatises, he is old, and he is dull. He cannot taste the honey, for he has exhausted himself in cutting down the tree. Let us climb and sip. Three generations of modern scholars have befogged and begoggled their wits over Aeschylus and Horace. Let us never read the learning of these investigators. Lei us be ignorant, nimble, and enthusiastic.

Let us never drink of that cup of delusion, critical knowledge. A scholar reads the books of other scholars, lest he shall say something that shows ignorance. Conscience and professional ambition keep him at it. He dare not miss a trick; just as the social climber dare not miss a party. Jaded and surfeited, both scholar and climber accept the servitude. They must know all these dull people, because these dull people are in the game that they are playing. Thus, one result of scholars and scholarship is to interpose a phalanx of inferior minds between the young intelligence and the great wits of the past. Must the novice read those forty pages of Willamowitz-Mollendorff which cover each dialogue of Plato like the grease on a Strasbourg pâté? . . . Accurate scholarship, when it prevails, is the epilogue to literature.”

It is easy to see from such fragments why Chapman would not be taken up by the professionals — whether academic pundits or established critics. And in their understandable resentment against a man who breaks up their game by hinting pretty strongly that literature is an elemental fact rather than a genteel livelihood, they probably do not bother to discover what he is really concerned about. So many of the attacks on scholarship and on professionalism are only a device to hide imperfect knowledge, or to catch the ear of the groundlings, that it is simpler to dismiss the plaintiff.

2

WHAT then was Chapman’s intent throughout the variety of subjects and causes that he espoused? If he was a Critic, why is he not as much a parasite on genius as those he attacked? What did he criticize that puts him in a special category? Quite simply, it was the mind of America. And to put it so, even before amplifying the idea, explains both why he achieved no outward success and why, despite appearances, he belongs to an important native tradition. He must be numbered with James Fenimore Cooper, Jefferson, Poe, Whitman, Emerson, and the prolific tribe of Adamses.

All of these, to be sure, made headway and are easily remembered, at least as names; they had the advantage of a second profession besides that of Critic. Chapman, whose means enabled him to follow his unprofitable bent, made cultural criticism his sole vocation and suffered the penalty. For it is obvious that the Republic has no use for critics of his sort. Partisan objectors, yes; since they satisfy party feelings. But a Socrates, no. Not only does such a man annoy, without furnishing a reasonable ulterior motive, but he is usually hard to interpret — as our modern reviewers still find John Jay Chapman. He seems “mad or half mad.”

In 1912, for example, Chapman put one of his visions into action. He went to Coatesville, Pennsylvania, where a particularly cruel lynching had occurred, and he made a speech in a store hired by him to hold what he termed in his local announcements a prayer meeting. Two persons came and listened to his reading from Scripture and his brief address. Chapman’s purpose, besides the desire to commemorate and atone, was purely critical in the special sense I am trying to develop — that is to say, diagnostic. The lynching was a symptom, and the fearful responses to his self-imposed duty were a disease — in his own words, he saw “a seldom revealed picture of the American heart and of the American nature.” He did not go to Coatesville as a liberal or a belated abolitionist, but as a witness, and he reported on his experience, not as an agitator, but as a philosophical observer. Chapman was conscious, through most of his life, of the necessary futility of this role: “I am saying things which will some day be thought of, rather than trying to get the attention of any one.”

Fortunately, this particular incident is not representative of the problems Chapman found most congenial to his talents. Ideas were his natural element, ideas as embodied in literature, education, and the arts — realms in which his state of isolation did no harm to him nor to his work. I speak of harm because Chapman did not invariably accept his lack of influence. Both at the beginning and towards the end of his life, his passionate and impulsive nature demanded action.

During the later period, after the First World War, which had brought him cruel private griefs, he seemed to align himself with groups thriving on prejudice, and he gave vent to utterances that have in turn prejudiced against him readers otherwise favorably disposed. Like all aberrations, these acts must be noted and then forgotten, at least until one knows his man more fully; otherwise they overbalance the judgment in just the degree to which they were an overbalance of character in the subject.

Chapman was a man of passion, and he necessarily erred more than once in his violent expression of it. Some of his mistakes, both of word and deed, are so striking that they have aroused more curiosity than his wisdom, but this only proves the impressionable foolishness of the beholder. It is surely the sign of a weak critical sense not to be able to get over an odd fact or an unexpected turn of character, and in any respectable culture, biography should be the servant, not the arbiter, of artistic judgment.

The boundary between character and performance is of course not always easy to draw. With regard to Chapman’s violence in writing, for example, two views are possible: one, that many of his letters are crude and unforgivable insults; the other, that they are in fact compliments, an onslaught being the most fraternal form of attack. Shaw, who himself has practiced epistolary extermination, has some sound words to say about the greater loyalty of the bludgeon over the insidious hypodermic. The reader, who is not the object of either treatment, can perhaps test his own feelings from passages in two letters Chapman wrote to Dr. Drury, of St. Paul’s School, the Second fragment showing on Chapman’s part a saving consciousness of his own methods: —

“Do you really think that if I had any ideas on the parent and child question I’d waste them on you? But just now I am taking a loaf and trying to forget the whole subject. Is the education of the young the whole of life? I hate the young—I’m worn out with them. They absorb you and suck you dry and are vampires and sollish brutes at best, Give me some good old rumsoaked club men — who can’t be improved and make no moral claims. . . .”

“Your school English is monstrous. I say ‘your’ just to be disagreeable — as one says ‘your’ railways, ‘your’ climate, etc. to foreigners — for I know you can’t do anything about it.”

To anyone who questions Chapman’s linkage with tradition, the desire to “do something” about things should provide an answer. The trait is certainly Western European, and its moralized political aim gives it further the American stamp. Chapman’s early need for action at the very beginning of his career, around 1885, coincided with the first stirrings of post Civil War reform. Chapman joined the City Reform Club, founded by Theodore Roosevelt, and gave up a dozen years to maneuvering, addressing crowds, pamphleteering, and quarreling with T.R. The happy result for us is the pair of descriptive and philosophical volumes, Practical Agitation and Causes and Consequences.

Had the tradition of cultural criticism boon continuous from Toequevillc to Whitman, instead of spasmodic, these two small books of Chapman’s might have taught and inspired a whole generation. But they were too sinewy, too concentrated, and too simple all at once. The critic has to have an audience that knows what to make of his utterances - or else he must exhort them to do this or that in detail, which is not his business and spoils his art. The muekrakors later on were highly articulate in this way, but they never achieved a style nor condensed their indignation into a thought. Compare with theirs a gambit in Chapman’s best manner: “It is the ambition of the agitator to use the machinery of government to make men more unselfish. Insofar as he succeeds in this, he is creating a living church, the only sort of slate church that would be entirely at one with our system, because it would be merely a representation in the formal government of a spirit abroad among the people.”

As for the negative side: “Misgovernment in the United States is an incident in the history of commerce. It is part of the triumph of industrial progress.” And later, amid the cool perfection of his reciting how industrial progress, individual lives, and party politics intertwine into a fabric of corruption, comes the characteristic irony: “During the year, a very nice point of law arises as to the rights of the railroad to certain valuable land claimed by the town. The city attorney is an able man, and reasonable. In spite of his ability, he manages to state the city’s case on an untenable ground. A decision follows in favor of the railroad.”

The critic is of course a man who can keep his eyes open even when his heart is beating high. W ith all his impulsiveness, Chapman the reformer could see himself exactly as he looked to what we would now call ” his society”: “After canvassing the whole community, the stranger finds five persons who are willing to work to defeat the district attorney: a young doctor of good education and small practice, a young lawyer who thinks he can make use of the movement by betraying it, a retired antislavery preacher, a maiden lady, and a piano tuner.”

3

BUT it is not entirely a joke. An early insight which he had happily no chance to recur to enabled him to say: “We have escaped an age of tyrants, because the eyes of the bosses and their masters wore fixed on money. They were not ambitious.” This conclusion moreover leads him into his main theme the mind: “Mere financial dishonesty is of very little importance in the history of civilization. Who cares whet her Caesar slole or Caesar Borgia cheated? Their intellects staved clear. The real evil that follows in the wake of a commercial dishonesty so general as ours is ihe intellectual dishonesty it generates. . . . This state of mind does not merely prevent a man having positive opinions. The American is incapable of taking a real interest in anything. The lack of passion in the American - noticeable in his books and in himself—comes from the same habitual mental distraction; for passion is concentration. . . . When a man takes a livinginterest in anything, we call him a ‘crank.’ There is an element of self-sacrifice in any honest intellectual work which we detect at once and score with contumely.”

What Chapman was pointing to was not an innate lack hut a defect of culture. The clear-eyed men of passion kept being born in this couniry as elsewhere, but they found no oullets; they spoke as if to a soundproofed generation. Emerson, on whom Chapman wrote one of his finest essays, had long since made the same complaint: “To be great is to be misunderstood. . . . The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion, it loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.” Whitman, for all his pump-priming of the democratic cultural springs, warned of a “certain highly deceptive popular intellectuality “which is “an almost complete failure in its social aspects and aesthetic results.” In Henry Adams the same insight turned civic passion into a toxic vinegar - to such a degree that we find Chapman relishing The Education but also excoriating it as “an odious book . . . by an egoist who conceives himself to be an intellectual.”

With a common impulse that marks them as American, all four - Emerson, Whitman, Adams, and Chapman — look upon education as the source of present evil and potential good in the national life They pray for teachers, scholars, and true universities. But they have in mind much more than the improvement of the institutions and the professionals. Chapman’s lifelong concern was not so much to reform education as to make it work - for the first time on this continent; thereby giving it a national use and a national value.

The first step was to break just this popular association of intellect with institutions, this bad habit of looking upon learning as properly quarantined in the classroom. To this end Chapman worked in a manner that knew no limits of occasion or seemliness. From the epistolary rockets which he discharged at the headmasters of his boys’ schools to his vivid expositions of the intangible in Learning and Other Essays, he kept his eye not on formal arrangements but on live situations. A striking example of his farsightedness occurs in the severe but just portrait of President Eliot of Harvard, with its account of the “social idea” in education: —

“This idea was vigorously carried out by the authorities . . . when they made the discovery that something was wrong at Harvard, that nobody loved anybody there, and that the thing to do was to give weekly teas at Brook’s Hall, to ask everyone, to get ladies from Boston, bishops from anywhere, social people at any cost, social talent to bridge the gulf between instructors and instructed. Nobly they labored. It was shoulder-to-shoulder, never say die, love one love all, more tea, more ladies.”

But President Eliot, then universally revered, “was the spiritual father of the glacial era theretofore in progress. . . . I have sometimes stopped to shake hands with him because I thought it was right — and also, I confess, because I thought it would cause him pain. Such is the silliness of the undergraduate mind. The trustees, the ladies, bishops and steerers of Harvard, having received new warmth themselves . . . got at President Eliot and thawed him out. . . . [He] responded to the treatment; he glowed, he beamed. He really did have a warm place in him and they moved this round in front where people could feel it; and by Jove, the new Eegend was launched.”

Under the mask of frivolous anecdote lies Chapman’s optimistic thesis that intellect can be a social force. To train intellect for social uses, the teaching institution must nurture it in a social setting. Chapman accordingly became one of the first critics of false specialization through the elective system, and one of the first advocates of general education. For as things stood he saw no meaningful relation between the university and the literacy of the country it was supposedly serving. On the one hand were the few boys who are born with an insatiable desire for true culture, and on the other, the rest who “come up to college with broken sets of rudimentary reminiscence, and without knowing what they want or how to get it.” Neither group received anything but mechanical attention in the free-for-all of higher learning. It was sheer travesty to “set a man to making original researches in anthropology and Hindu metaphysics when he has had no experience of life and only a classroom knowledge of books.”

4

WE should linger on that last phrase, “only a classroom knowledge of books.” It implies that there is some other kind of knowledge of books, though the public, and especially the century in which we live, summarily denies it. Books are felt to he one thing, of casual importance, and not a nourishment that can be taken in one of two ways. The distinction hardly ever arises, and that is why it is wise to seek it in the remainder of Chapman’s writings—the volume on Emerson and others, the Glance Toward Shakespeare, the Greek Genius, the essays on Dante, Plato, Whitman, Lucian, William James, and the several translations of Greek drama.

Long before we have finished, we know that John Jay Chapman was one for whom books or certain books were a necessity, not for relaxation (neurotic idea!), not tor the cultivation of the genteel virtues, even less for the absorption of “valuable” knowledge, but for the extension of the sense of life, and especially the sense of the scale of life. In the superb piece on Balzac, Chapman shows how this happens, how in the writings of the masters art and life are continuous, and consequently how a piece of art becomes, for the fit reader, a piece of life added to his personal stock. “The internal world of his fiet ion is the real world for Balzac, and he contrives to make it the real world for his readers. He does this by methods which are so subtle that we can rarely perceive them . . . one sees it rather than reads of it; one experiences it rather than sees it. . . . Even when he bores us he interests us. There is a residuum in his thought. We go back to it after the book is closed; we find it in our mind and ponder it.”

This being so, Chapman felt that art of this sort was a secret, a mystery. “We cannot hope to know what it is.” He finds an image for it in a comparison with the death chair, which kills men by means of a low alternating current. Great artists fashion “life chairs which vitalise men through an exceedingly high and perfectly steady current.” De Quineey had already spoken with similar feeling of the “ literature of power,” of which it is no exaggeration to say that we can live by it.

When so classed, a work transcends ordinary criticism. Formal flaws can be seen and may be docketed without affecting the essence of the creation. This invulnerability is in itself the sign of true power. What then becomes the role of the critic? He can, of course, number the specks, but his principal task is, on the one hand, to clear a path for the normal mind to those “life chairs,” and on the other to moderate the recurrent enthusiasm for facsimiles. Chapman did this notably about Stevenson, at the height of the latter’s popularity. Without contempt or lack of sympathy for Stevenson’s real gifts, the critic weighs the product of their application and concludes: ” The truth is that as a literary force, there was no such man as Stevenson; and after we have racked our brains to find out the mechanism which has been vanquishing the chess players of Europe, there emerges out of the Box of Maelzel a pale boy.”

I have quoted enough to show that Chapman himself had a share of that power which can do without copying models and hoarding echoes. His prose is light and strong, and finds images without poeticizing, just as it leaps connectives surefootedly. Occasionally choppy in his essays for fear of academicism (“gamboge and style, with its however’s and moreover’s and semicolons”), Chapman in his letters never deviates from perfect informality — the rarest of all literary gifts. This, if we can trust our stated preferences, ought to make him reasonably popular today. But we must remember his stand on intellect. “ We are ungrateful,” he says, speaking of William Lloyd Garrison, to the intellects of the past. . . . Yet everything we know and live by is due to the mind of someone.” We who might be his readers may assent to this proposition, but we do not believe it literally and viscerally. We think that what we know and live by was put on the market, some time back, by General Electric — and that they are probably working on an inexpensive “life chair” even now.

Besides, Chapman cannot be popular so long as he remains what he is, a master of concise commentary. Though he knew much — because he knew much — his mind was not a tureen of facts periodically ladled into a book. His aim was to convey general truths; not to inform, but to reform by awakening and compelling reflection, like Balzac’s residue. Unhappily, we are not used to this discipline. We have commentators, but it is notorious that they are not allowed to comment. They give us the low down, and we have a tendency to stay right there with them.

Yet all these reasons why Chapman is not readymade to our tastes are as many reasons why we should take up and read him—against the grain perhaps, at the outset, but not for long. He is not beyond us, nor are we beyond him. The resistance we oppose to the re-examination of our past and its buried treasures may be simply a symptom of the fatigue induced by too much relaxation in front of a box with a dial on it. In imitation of the box, our best authors have got into the habit of telling us that their ideas are easy, that the last thing they expect from us is an effort. No wonder we yawn before we are hurt. By contrast, it might be fun to stiffen the dose once in a while and try the effect of a tonic. Who knows? — there might even be a virtue in it from the point of view of national morale and the social capacity to conduct our affairs with intelligence.