John Jay Chapman and His Letters
by
[Houghton Mifflin, $4.00]
OF the thousand friends ‘Jack’ Chapman left behind him, few there are who have not marveled why a man so full of genius, so disinterested, so passionately sincere, should have left scarce a rack behind, A shelfful of slim books, mostly of criticism (ever the first to die), the memory of a presence noble as an Old Testament Prophet’s, and the unforgotten experience of having met a man in deadly earnest — that is about all. Yet who that has known him but did not say, ‘There was a man.’ For most of us he was a sort of Yankee Socrates— without his wisdom but with his divine power of waking the sleeping conscience. Chapman had not quite but almost as much tact as Socrates, as large a measure of impudence, as pregnant a gift for the exasperation of others. Within him dwelt a dæmon pricking him to everlasting battle against complacency and the spirit of ‘let things be.’ Sometimes one thought that dæmon the Imp of the Perverse, and perhaps it was.
Chapman had great gifts, but patience, the soul of achievement, was denied him. His interests took their color from the moment ; classics, politics, peace, war, the Catholic Church, education, each by turn had its right of way. It was not in him to live laborious years with single-minded devotion. Not that he was fickle. His prejudice and his conviction were alike bedrock; but there were too many things to be done, and life between times was very, very pleasant.
He was unlucky in his times. He should have been born with Garrison and John Brown. He needed an Age of Heroes when each man’s work stands out distinct and separate. Heroism was abroad while he lived, but it was mass heroism. With the World War began that fatal period when the voice of a man counts for less and less in the roar of the multitude. Chapman was passionately an individualist, with one man’s duty to be done and one man’s soul to be saved in seeking to save others. But during his manhood the individual was ceaselessly slipping back into the crowd. He is gone now. Perhaps Chapman was the last of him.
Chapman’s genius was for letters — letters and talk. Letters are for the few. Talk is for the fewer, and the superlative best of him will disappear when his last friend is gone. Till that time he will be unforgettably remembered. He talked not merely for victory, but for destruction. When he was in action his voice took on a peculiar timbre and there was a deadly violence about him, unrelieved by expletive, which grew in intensity till (if he were among friends) some preposterous climax of his philippic made him suddenly explode in laughter. It was purging to be with him, and few there are who, after a ’scene,’left him without self-searching.
It is rather of Chapman than of his Life and Letters that I speak, for in the November Atlantic Mr. Edmund Wilson has written of the book with eloquence and understanding. But Mr. Wilson’s discordance with the order of things makes him attribute to Chapman more of the revolutionary spirit than he possessed. In the deepest sense, in the sense of the New Testament, Chapman was indeed a revolutionary, but his abuse of money (which he himself very honestly enjoyed) and of the established order was chiefly owing to the imperviousness of his generation to the ferment of his mind and spirit. Yet no tribute of Chapman would be complete without a word of thanks to his biographer. There is no Boswellizing here, no mannered portraiture, but perfect modesty, candor, and good taste. The picture is a living thing. The book is all Chapman, but without Mr. Howe that leonine prophetic figure would soon be lost forever.
ELLERY SEDGWICK