"Copey"

by ROLLO WALTER BROWN

1

IT is not possible to write about Charles Townsend Copeland without speaking in the first person. For “Copey” had the mysterious vitality to be found in every great teacher: you could not have acquaintance with him without thinking of him in relation to yourself.

My personal acquaintance with him was long deferred. When I first arrived in Harvard Square, fresh from what Barrett Wendell called “the wilds of Ohio,” it was early July, and Harvard Summer School students were everywhere. As I moved about with much free time ahead of me into September, I noticed one morning in shop windows and on bulletin boards that “Mr. Copeland” was to read on a certain evening in Sever Hall. The wording of the announcement led me to feel that here was to be something unlike the lectures I had heard in the little college from which I had just come.

Although my roommate and I went early, we found the lecture hall overflowing into the main corridor of the building. Near us, three official-looking youngish men conferred seriously, and they decided to “go over and tell him” that he just had to read where there was more room — in the New Lecture Hall. When they started we trailed along close behind, in the hope of gaining advance information and securing seats.

From one of the upper windows of an ancientlooking dormitory a serious little man with cropped dark mustache and magnificent forehead looked out into the quiet of the Yard. One of the three hurried up. The man at the window vanished, and then the man who had gone up came to the window. “He does not wish to read in the New Lecture Hall.”

“But tell him that the people simply cannot get in.”

Then the man himself reappeared. “I wish to read in Sever.”

“But already the hall is overflowing into the corridor.”

“That is the way I want it.”

We followed back to Sever Hall. By this time the audience — chiefly schoolma’ams in bright summer dresses — reached all the way through the corridor, down the entrance steps, and out into the Yard. While the men conferred anew — we learned that one of them was President Eliot’s secretary — the stern little man we had seen at the window came trudging along the path with books under his arm.

It would be difficult to imagine a less academiclooking person than he was as he came up. He was small and shrunken, and he wore a checked suit, a collar of material that had a figure in it, and a black derby hat that seemed larger than his head, though it was not. He was then still under fortyfive — I came later to know — but a shuffling walk and some vast disapproval in his face made him seem older. No one ever saw a professor who looked like this. He might have been an actor — as he was. For he seemed well enough aware that he was the cause of all the flurry, and that he was being looked at somewhat awesomely.

The men spoke to him with respect — one of them addressed him as “Mr. Copeland” — but with great earnestness. “ You can see for yourself how it is.”

“Let them crowd in.”

“They are already standing everywhere, and sitting in the windows.”

“Let them sit in the windows! ”

Some of the crowd began to move nearer.

The three men sought to make themselves impressive. These Summer School students had paid their fees and were entitled to hear him — and could, if only he would be obliging enough to change his plans.

“Very well,” at last he said dourly, “I suppose if I must, I must — damn it!”

He moved off toward the New Lecture Hall. Quickly the crowd had the news, and followed. As he marched along with great deliberateness he was like a dark comet with a long spreading tail of a thousand bright dresses in the twilight.

When the last stragglers were in and the last woman had dropped her handbag and Copey had said warningly, “Now if you ladies will get a firm grip on everything,” he was ready to read. But the mosquitoes bothered him, and he tried also to make war on them. While he sat with his eyes intent upon the page, he slowly lifted an open palm until it was poised just above his head, and read in resonant, deliberate voice,

Smack! And on into the next stanza.

He noticed the titters and suppressed laughter, and in the course of the next poem, he lifted his hand again, and the titters spread all over the hall. But this time he did not bring his hand down. And after he had finished the poem and was leafing ahead in the volume for the next one, his face revealed the faintest trace of a smile.

Clearly enough, I was in the presence of some sort of extraordinary person. I went to hear him whenever he read. But for months I regarded him only from afar.

Then one day when the frosts of autumn were upon the Yard and gusts of wind were denuding the old buildings of their brilliant, ivy, a friendly professor suggested that Copey might be able to help me with some seventeenth-century letters in which I had become interested. The next afternoon at four o’clock I climbed the stairs in Hollis Hall to Copey’s rooms. I knocked. I heard no one. I knocked again. Then I heard what seemed to be shuffling slippered feet, and the turning of the lock in the door. Then the door swung open, and there stood Copey like a thunder cloud.

“Damn it, young man, don’t you know that I never see anybody until after ten in the evening? Why do you disturb me at this time of day?”

I drew desperately upon my resources: I explained that I had really been sent by one of his colleagues, who had said nothing about hours.

“Well, then, since you are here, come on in. But you must be brief. I have only five minutes. Sit down there and tell me what your errand is.”

I stumbled through a hasty explanation of my interest in the letters.

“Oh! Oh!” And I could see the cloud stealing from his face. “So that is it.” And the deliberate voice became almost intimate. “But I am not at all sure that I can be of the least help.”

Then for an hour I listened to the most illuminating and brilliant talk my provincial young ears had ever heard. He completely forgot that I had come at the wrong time.

When I was ready to go and was making a floundering effort to express my appreciation, I said, “But you gave me no chance to tell you my name. It is Brown.”

“Mine’s Copeland!” he replied in his resonant platform voice, and then smiled as if we both must know that that was pretty good.

“And now since we have been properly introduced, why don’t you come and see me some evening after ten o’clock? Just look for a light in that window over there in the corner. And if you see it, come on up.”

2

IT WAS the beginning of a friendship destined to be without end. And as I saw more and more of Copey I came to understand how almost anything said about him by anyone who had ever seen him might express one facet of truth. For his stringent exterior and his quick sallies of wit and sarcasm were capable of such proportioning that he could be casually interpreted almost as one chose. He repelled many, and with such energy that they became eloquent. To these he was cranky; he was artificial, even in voice; he was a charlatan in the world of scholars. George Santayana, in speaking of his own official career at Harvard, referred to Copey as an “elocutionist” who “by declaiming” provided a “spiritual debauch” for “the many well-disposed waifs at Harvard living under difficult conditions.”

Those who became Copey’s followers were the ones who by friendly intuition or fortunate chance were led to see that Santayana and Copey constituted a head-on collision in philosophies. Santayana, by his own confession on various occasions, preferred to remain in the quiet backwaters and watch the main stream of very imperfect human beings go by. The “well-disposed waifs” at Harvard did not interest him deeply. And they did interest Copey — the ones who would not be scared off. These found themselves getting excited over discoveries that Copey helped them to make. They found themselves feeling adequate to discover thereafter whatever they needed or much wished. And they were filled with a robust gratitude. Copey’s eccentricities became for them matters of affectionate regard; the undergraduate indignities suffered at his hands had to be talked about, and matched, and laughed at again and again as so many embellishments of the less obvious and greater Copey — until he became one of the company of picturesque legendary figures in three centuries of Harvard history.

Of course his followers had to linger long over his wit. Henry Ware Eliot wrote in Harvard Celebrities,

Copey criticized the lines by reminding Eliot that it was not Pope but Dryden. Eliot thought that was only a technicality. “Dryden” would not fit into the line.

And every Copey disciple knew that Eliot was right. The fundamental truth was there: Copey was full of wit — of his own special brand. Or if it could not always be called wit, it could be called whatever one liked. It was the expression of Copey.

There were countless examples — without drawing upon anything apocryphal. There was, for instance, that story — in many versions, but grounded solidly in fact — about Copey’s reply to the maid. When he went to see his sister, Mrs. Dunbar, on Highland Street in Cambridge, and the Irish maid unexpectedly ran into him, threw up her hands in consternation, and exclaimed, “Jesus!” Copey very calmly replied, “No, no! Just Mrs. Dunbar’s brother.” When a student who felt sure that he would never become a writer asked Copey somewhat worshipfully how many of his former students had dedicated books to him, Copey proudly gave him the number — a large one. Then he added: “But Bill, I can tell you something else. I have had six kids named for me. So if you cannot qualify in one respect, perhaps you can in another.” He was afraid that much of the current graduate study in English was only a process in de-education. So when he was told that a man who was seeking an assistantship in English already had his Ph.D., Copey turned and asked in stentorian voice: “And does he have the Ph.D. death rattle?”

Sometimes students found it difficult to appreciate his not ions of what was amusing. When an undergraduate who was one of my friends arrived five minutes late at his first conference with Copey, Copey asked severely, “What are you doing here at this hour, my young man? I have no conference with anyone at 3.05.” The “young man” apologized very humbly, and Copey used up the remainder of the time in telling him what students might expect in his courses if they undervalued promptitude. The next time the student arrived early, and Copey asked, as though puzzled: “What can I do for you, young man?”

“I came for my conference.”

“But I have no conference with anyone at 2.55.”

“It is for 3.00, but I didn’t want to be late this time.”

“Well, just go out and walk under the elms until 3.00.”

A senior who all in all had an excellent college record, but had been careless in his course under Copey and was in danger of failing, and therefore losing his diploma, went to Copey somewhat too belatedly, somewhat too desperately. He came away with a brief report: “Copey called me a toad.”

Sometimes he attached to his own experience a uniqueness that his most devoted friends did not find in it. Many years after my own university days were over I stopped at Hollis Hall to see Copey for a few minutes when he was having a year of leave. He lay upon a couch with a heavy towel that had been dipped in ice water on his forehead, and with his hands folded so neatly that he looked like a corpse.

“Do you suppose I am ever to be well again?” he asked.

“Of course you are—just as soon as you get away from here and quit thinking about students and lectures and themes and conferences.”

“But you must remember that I am sixty-three years old.”

“Now let me see,” I replied in an effort to be comforting; “that is just twenty-six years younger than President Eliot, isn’t it?”

The corpse sprang up, full of furious life. “My God! Don’t you dare mention that man to me! The Lord just made him to show to people!”

Five minutes later I met Dean L. B. R. Briggs in the Yard, and he asked, “Have you seen Copey recently? ”

“Just now.” And I told him what Copey had said about being sixty-three years old,

“Why,” the Dean replied with a tolerant beaming smile, “there have been several other people as old as that.”

Nor did Copey hesitate to let it be known that he welcomed appreciation, and praise, and the widest possible publicity for anything he had done, or was doing, or was contemplating. He once told me that he had heard I meant to write a sketch of him, and asked me why I hadn’t done it. I explained that I had had such a pleasant project in mind, but had deferred to a common friend who wished to write the sketch if ever he could get to it — though he did not. “But,” Copey asked reprovingly, “would it be calamitous if both of you should write about me?”

Always there were stories about how this or that person had outshone Copey in brightness — about the class in English at Radcliffe that put twenty-three glasses of water (one for each girl) on his desk at the next meeting after he had requested one of the girls — “ as though she were just a Harvard student ” — to go and find the glass of water which he always required; about the girl dressed for tea when she came late to his afternoon course whom he asked, “One lump or two, Miss Smith?” and who retorted, “I’ll have two, thank you, and no lemon”; about the tailor required by Copey to make him a new checked coat to take the place of one that had suffered a speck of damage in the course of pressing, who had the new coat delivered by a Negro boy wearing Copey’s old coat of identical pattern; about the sharp-eyed little woman who had been scolded out of the audience by Copey because she could not stop coughing, who slipped in early to his next reading and sprinkled cayenne pepper all over the top of his desk and evened the score. Some of the many stories of this kind had a basis of fact. Some were only what somebody had thought of the next day or the next week and wished he had said or done on the spur of the moment. But whether they were the ones based on fact or the ones only savored with the reminiscent wish that it had been like that, they were truthful comments on the man for whom they were intended.

All such things were part of the miscellany that in one way or another revealed something of Copey. But they were no more the complete expression of him than the stories of Whistler’s wisecracks were the complete expression of Whistler the artist. Essentially Copey was in earnest. He enjoyed participating in the mighty enterprise of awakening young men. When once a student had discovered that, and had begun to know his own part in the experience, he looked upon Copey as an eccentric but devoted revealer of gifts from heaven.

There were conditions to be met. Everyone within the circle of his life had to come to full alertness. He required undivided attention, and would resort to any expedient, even a theatrical one, in order to get it. When he went, for instance, to one of his Summer School courses — open to men and women — and found a great body of pleasant but casuallooking students waiting for him, he wondered — very eloquently — if some of them had not got into the wrong room. After other preliminaries designed to create expectancy, he remarked, “My Uncle Toby once said” — and then he cast a commanding eye over the room and asked, “But who is ‘my Uncle Toby’?”

He waited a few seconds, displayed impatience, and then became impetuous. “Am I to understand that no one here knows ‘my Uncle Toby’?”

A young man lifted his hand timidly and ventured: “Twelfth Night?”

“No! No! My God, no! Not Twelfth Night! Where did you go to college — tell me?”

The man told him.

“And do you mean to say that you never heard about ‘my Uncle Toby’? Who were your teachers of English?”

After a fearful silence, a young woman in the rear of the room lifted her hand, and Copey noticed.

“And will you tell us where ‘my Uncle Toby’ is?”

“In Sterne’s Tristram Shandy.”

“Why, of course! Of course! Of course! Here is a young lady who can tell us who ‘my Uncle Toby’ is. And where did you go to college?”

“Radcliffe.”

“Radcliffe! The young lady who tells us where to find ‘my Uncle Toby’ is from Radcliffe! And did you have any courses with me while you were there ? ”

She mentioned two.

“Now you see! It is one of my own Radcliffe students who is able to tell us about ‘my Uncle Toby.’”

And with an atmosphere of humility and awesomeness filling the room, he was ready to proceed into the hour and on into all the hours of the summer session.

3

HE HAD become master of two seemingly simple yet difficult means of teaching, and his chief hold upon students was through these: he read literature to them — in large groups; and he talked to them — one at a time, or in small groups. The era had not yet come when professors asked, “But if I use my time in talking to students, when am I to get my work done?”

Copey’s own commentary in his classroom lectures seemed never to be claiming his entire concern, though he was witty and discerning. But when he pushed aside the few sheets of lecture notes and took up the literature itself to read, he came to full life. His reading was so vivid, so complete an expression of the author read, that nobody could forget it. Men listened to him and wondered how they had in their own reading been so incompletely present. And that was precisely how Copey had planned to have it work out.

He liked the literature that read well aloud — and eventually compiled an enormous anthology called The Copeland Reader. In consequence, men went about in the Yard — and after — with their heads ringing with Dr. Johnson, and Blake, and Wordsworth, and Scott, and Lamb, and George Borrow, and Tennyson, and Dickens, and Hardy, and Stevenson, and Conrad, and Francis Thompson, and Kipling, and Walter de la Mare, and Masefield, and Abraham Lincoln, and Thoreau, and Whitman, and Mark Twain, and many and many another.

Such lecturing and such reading constituted only the workaday giving of courses. But when Copey announced a special evening reading, an hour that had for its sole purpose the giving of delight through profound or subtle revelation, that was an event in academic annals.

Of course there were certain to be amusing preliminaries and accompaniments. These were expected. Many a student would have felt cheated if Copey had sat down becomingly and read. At the appointed hour somebody had to lock the door against late-comers; somebody had to open a window — or close it — or open one and close another — or open or close two or three; somebody had to see that a glass of water was on the desk just the right distance away — and in the right direction; everybody had to choke off all coughing; and Copey himself had to readjust the reading light time after time.

To the uninitiated these matters were artificial and sometimes annoying. But where was there another man who could fill a lecture hall to overflowing with university students of every degree of sophistication, just to hear him read? They knew that they were not being deceived. Copey read so imaginatively, he was so vivid himself, that students had the enjoyable feeling of seeing luminously what they had before been wholly unaware of, or had felt but vaguely. It was something to see: a hall packed with students listening intently to a man read for an hour from the Old Testament, and finding themselves moved to the verge of tears as he closed: —

“And the king was much moved, and went up to the chamber over the gate, and wept: and as he went, thus he said, O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!”

One could not forget his reading. Yet it was in his other means of bringing students to aliveness, his talking to them in his conference room or study, that many found the chief good of his teaching. In his course in writing, after a student had done all else that was required, he sat in Copey’s presence and read his theme, broke out in a cold sweat to see how less than perfect it was, now that he read it in the presence of the Mighty Conscience, and heard the criticism that Copey dictated and that he himself wrote on the outside of the theme. “And put down an A with a long minus.” Or it might be “a B with a big plus,” or “two B’s.”

But in his talk as well as in his reading it was when he was half or wholly away from the workaday that he became most completely unforgettable. When the light was in the window after ten o’clock, men made their way up the wooden stairs that had thus resounded to the tramp of feet since before the building had been used as barracks in the Revolutionary War, past rooms that had been occupied by a long succession of men more or less known in America, and finally to a room in which Ralph Waldo Emerson had broken the ice in the washbasin on winter mornings one year while he was in college.

Sometimes Copey welcomed them personally. Sometimes he was already sitting erect in the goodsized chair close at one side of the fireplace — where he always seemed to be on a dais — and an earlier student opened the door, or hurried back into the next room to bring out one more chair.

“Sit right there!” Copey would command from his place of eminence, and the late arrival obeyed.

One evening a hesitant freshman ventured in when the only chair left was a small painted one opposite Copey almost in the fireplace. “Right there!” Copey directed. “Sit right there!”

His brilliance that evening was extraordinary even for him, and everyone sat intent and inquiring. Suddenly Copey broke off in the middle of a sentence with a “My God, young man!”

The fire had steadily grown hotter, the paint on the chair was smoking and blistering, and the freshman’s face looked as if he himself were in danger of bursting into flame. “You do know how to hold the fort, don’t you?”

Very privately some of Copey’s followers believed that he kept the little painted chair there close against the fireplace as an initial test of loyalty. Men who could stand such a scorching would be sure to come again.

No one — not even Copey himself—knew the direction the talk might take. It might begin in some such conventional way as, “And where are you from?”

“From Ohio — southeastern Ohio.”

“But you do not have the Midwestern guttural r-r-r-r-r! ”

“Half of my family came over the mountains from Virginia.”

“Ah! that explains it.” And since regions all over the United States were represented in the bright room, the interesting question of migrations and regional speech might claim the greater part of the evening.

But students were always hoping that the talk could be turned to Copey’s own experience — to literary gossip, to the great actors and actresses that Copey had come to know when he was writing for the Boston Post before he came to Harvard. He had written a life of Edwin Booth in the Beacon Biographies, and always somebody was ready to ask him about Edwin Booth and John Wilkes Booth — if there were a half-chance. And Ellen Terry, and Duse, and Bernhardt, and Mrs. Fiske — would Maude Adams and Julia Marlowe ever equal them? Or somebody started him off on the Harvard men of only yesterday who were already distinguished — a heavy percentage of them, it seemed, Copey’s own students. Teddy Roosevelt had to be considered also, and what he was doing with the big stick. And did everybody know that the tall young Roosevelt in the Yard at the time was Teddy’s cousin? And who were some of the recent poets who deserved to survive? Sometimes Copey had to take down two or three volumes and read a little to make clear just why he believed as he did.

In such talk, in the presence of a dozen men who had come because their own enthusiasm had brought them, Copey’s mind and tongue were freed. But almost more interesting still, the students began to find their own minds and tongues freed, so that they expressed themselves with a clearness and a certainty that until a moment ago they did not know they could command.

Before midnight some of those nearest the door slipped very unobtrusively away. After a time, when several had gone in this manner in order not to break the current of the conversation, all the others were standing and having — or hearing—a final word, and saying good-bye. One or two carried the chairs back and put them where they belonged; and then there was a bulge of cheerful voices on the stairs as the last of the group descended.

4

THUS the procession of Copey’s awakened ones grew and reached farther and farther until it had spread all over the United States and more or less over the world. In such a center as New York City they became so numerous that they felt called upon to have Copey come to them. At first he refused. To a man who had never been “farther west than Philadelphia, or farther south than Philadelphia,” even New York seemed remote. But one day in the Yard at the northwest corner of University Hall, the same man who had once prevailed upon Copey to give up Sever and go to the New Lecture Hall to read, prevailed upon him to go to his former students in New York.

It became an annual pilgrimage — a kind of royal progress, since each year the committee in charge tried to outdo the committee of the preceding year in devising sumptuous ways of expressing appreciation. Copey rode in state; he saw what he wished to see; he refused to see whatever he thought he would not care for; he was let alone when he wished to have quiet; and then at a grand dinner in the Harvard Club, he read to the men who had named themselves The Charles Townsend Copeland Association. Before many spring seasons had passed, men were traveling from other regions to the New York meeting — down from Boston and up from Philadelphia and Washington.

Especially after he had retired from the faculty at Harvard — where late he was elevated to the Boylston Professorship of Rhetoric and Oratory to succeed Dean L. B. R. Briggs, in a succession that began with John Quincy Adams — did his former students crowd in upon him on special occasions, and remember him on his birthday as if he were a President of the United States. He was happy to hear from so many, to know with great certitude that he had been influential in so many lives — and no small number of them very distinguished lives.

But he hated to have to remember that he was growing old. Being a retired teacher was not quite the same as being a teacher. He missed the cheerful voices on the resounding stairs of Hollis Hall. He missed Hollis itself — after he had moved into a complicated apartment house equipped with all such contrivances as door telephones, elevators, and garbage incinerators.

He had preoccupations that were revealed in unpredicted ways. He had never met Edwin Arlington Robinson, though both were from Maine. Once when “E.A.” was coming to our house on his way through Boston and Cambridge I arranged to take him to Copey’s apartment. It would be interesting just to sit back and hear these two discuss poetry and poets.

As we crossed the Cambridge Common, Robinson said, as if he might be the least bit nervous, “I wish I were a good talker — like Frost — for I know Copey is. But I am not, and never was. So I’ve just tried to put the best of myself into my poems and let it go at that.”

Copey, though, made everything easy. He greeted us at the door with, “Now no introduction is necessary. Come right in, and sit right down, for we must have all the time for talk.”

But the talk took a strange direction. Copey told us that he had been sitting there reading something that his mother had written when she was well toward four score years old. She was in a calm frame of mind, she said, yet she saw there in the room with her at the moment her own mother, who had been dead many years.

“Now what do you make of that?” Copey asked Robinson. And they were away on a lively discussion of immortality that occupied the entire evening. Not one word was said about any literary matter until just as we were leaving. “Here, come back for a moment,” Copey commanded, “and write your name opposite this poem of yours that I like particularly.”

The years advanced, and Copey did not like the fact. He was resistant. One morning when he was taking his accustomed walk in the Cambridge Common, I said when I met him: “Why, Copey, I haven’t seen you looking so well in ten years.”

“Yes, I know,” he replied; “but you see, I am eighty-two years old — God damn it!”

Yet he lived right on, and had a pretty good time, thank you. Always there were his students — those countless expressions of something that at least in small part was himself. I met them wherever I went — and covered the backs of envelopes with messages to carry to Copey. On a train between San Francisco and Seattle the man across the table in the dining car was reading a book — an interesting book. “A teacher I had in college started me off at this,” he explained, “and I have never stopped.” It came out that the teacher was Copey. In southern France one afternoon while I basked in the sun on the mountainside above Montpellier with a man whom I had not met until that morning — a man of importance today in the world of letters — he told me that when he was not finding it easy to earn food and shoe soles in college, he had a great friend in a professor who could say to one, “Well, God bless you, my boy,” and slip two or three five-dollar bills into one’s palm with his firm handshake and never cause the slightest twinge of embarrassment. And a man back from the Aleutians said, “Funny thing, though I imagine there must be others who have had the same experience; but I always got a bit of a lift just from being with Copey.”

If one could see the map of the world as it is, there would be unbreakable and shining threads running back from spots of Copey’s influence everywhere to Cambridge, Massachusetts. Nobody knows this better than Copey himself. That is how he lives. He does not need to peruse what someone has written in a book about the abiding satisfactions of life.