John Jay Chapman

“ Criticism to-day is but the articulate utterance of those conventions, those assumptions, and prejudices which must accompany and support any drama in the mind of the audience, and which in simpler ages hardly needed statement, because they were established. They stood in the public consciousness much as the walls of the theatre stood in the market-place, while the plays proceeded within them.
There has always been criticism. Aristotle did not begin it, but he is the starting-point of that great river of Thought-about-Art which has accompanied the developments of the arts since Greek times. ”

“ Of a truth, when we consider the rapidity of visible change and the amplitude of time—for there is plenty of time—we need not despair of progress.
The true starting-point for the world’s progress will never be reached by any nation as a whole. It exists and has been reached in the past as it will in the future by individuals scattered here and there in every nation. It is reached by those minds which insist on seeing conditions as they are, and which cannot confine their thoughts to their own kitchen, or to their own creed, or to their own nation. ”

“ Howe’s devotion is the same, his labors are the same; but his genius is not the same. It was not given to any man to understand the slavery question in the way that Howe understood the cause of the blind or the idiotic. Indeed, slavery was not a question, but a condition, an atmosphere, a thing so close and clinging, so inherent and ingrown that, like the shirt of Nessus, it brought the flesh with it when it was removed. Poor or great, sinner or saint, every man stood on an equality before the moral problems of slavery, and underwent either conversion or corruption when the wave smote him. ”

“ It is no accident that certain particular boys are sent to a certain particular school. They go there as the needle swings to the pole. They flow there as the ants flow to their native hill. The matter is settled by personal affinity.
This is a fact about all leadership; only it receives very visible proof in the case of school-masters. Every man’s followers are given to him by destiny; and a leader of men may see himself in this looking-glass if he have a mind to do so. It will give him a truer picture of his own soul than he will find elsewhere in the world. ”

“ If you imitate Zola and attack some nuisance in this town to-morrow, you will bring on every symptom and have every experience of the Dreyfus affair. The cost is the same, for cold looks are worse than imprisonment. The emancipation of the reformer is the same, for if a man can resist the influences of his townsfolk, if he can cut free from the tyranny of neighborhood gossip, the world has no terrors for him; there is no second inquisition. The public influence is the same, for every citizen of that town can thereafter look a town officer in the face with more self-respect. ”

“ The whole of Europe and Asia and South America and every Malay and every Chinaman, Hindoo, Tartar, and Tagal—of such is our civilization.
Let us for the moment put aside every dictate of religion and political philosophy. Let us discard all prejudice and all love. Let us regard nothing except facts. Does not the coldest conclusion of science announce the fact that the world is peopled, and that every individual of that population has an influence as certain and far more discoverable than the influence of the weight of his body upon the solar system? ”

“ In Aristophanes you have the convincing hurly-burly, the sweating, mean, talented, scrambling, laughing life of the Mediterranean—that same life of which you find records in the recent Cretan discoveries, dating from 2500 B. C., or which you may observe in the market-places of Naples to-day. Plato’s dialogues do not give this life. They give a picture of something that never existed, something that sounds like an enchanted picture, a picture of life as it ought to be for the leisure classes, but as it never has been and never can be while the world lasts, even for them. ”

“ The Constitution of the United States begins to rock and tremble. What shall we do with him? The deepest minds of the past must be ransacked to the bottom to find an answer. Every one of seventy million Americans must pass through a throe of thought that leaves him a modified man. The same thing is true when the American lands in China. These creatures have thus begun to think of each other. It is unimaginable that they should not hereafter incessantly and never-endingly continue to think of each other. And out of their thoughts grows the destiny of mankind. ”

“ Compared to Aristophanes, Shakespeare is not funny; he lacks size. He is a great and thoughtful person, of superabundant genius and charm, who makes Dutch interiors, drenched in light. But Aristophanes splits the heavens with a jest, and the rays of truth stream down from inaccessible solitudes of speculation. He has no epigram, no cleverness, no derivative humor. He is bald foolery. And yet he conveys mysticism: he conveys divinity. He alone stands still while the whole empyrean of Greek life circles about him. ”

“ The university, in like manner, stands to house the alphabets of civilization—the historic instruments and agencies of intellect. They are all akin to each other as the very name and function of the place imply. The presidents and professors who sit beside the fountains of knowledge bear different labels and teach subjects that are called by various names. But the thing which carries the label is no more than the shell. The life you cannot label; and it is to foster this life that universities exist. Enthusiasm comes out of the world and goes into the university. ”

“ Now when you approach metaphysics, the Greek and the Hebrew have been there before you: you are very near to matters which perhaps you never intended to approach. You are back at the beginning of all things. In fact, human thought does not advance, it only recurs. Every tone and semi-tone in the scale is a keynote; and every point in the Universe is the centre of the Universe; and every man is the centre and focus of the cosmos, and through him passes the whole of all force, as it exists and has existed from eternity ”

“ It is enough for us to see truth; for if we see it, everything we do will express it.
207 CLIMATE. The influence of the planets, of deities good and bad, of spells and incantations—of fatal or beneficial forces suddenly unlocked and, as it were, let loose upon innocent men—as though one had walked into a trap—all these myths and symbols were invented in past ages, by discerning, deep-seeing men to express the impotence which they saw about them, to express the fact that all men are walking in their dreams and their dreams control them. What we see is illusion: what we say is illusion. ”

“ In the first place, the limitations, the horrible limitations of artistic possibility, will begin to present themselves; few things can be done: they have all been tried: they have all been worked to death: they have all been developed by immortal genius and thereafter avoided by lesser minds,—left to await more immortal genius. The field of endeavor narrows itself in proportion to the greatness of the intellect that is at work. In ages of great art everyone knows what the problem is and how much is at stake. ”

“ Any religious institution is a tiny sample of the great question; and whatever we say of it is a little voice in the great chorus of humanity. We cannot isolate our subject: it is a part of the great subject, religion. We have no achromatic lens through which to view life. All that we see is colored by our own past, and surely, for any man to believe that in describing his youth or his school-days he can clear his mind of error, would be the greatest error and delusion of all. ”

“ We can to-day hardly remember or imagine what emotion the teacher of Laura Bridgman called forth all over the world. Looked at in retrospect, this brilliant achievement is enmeshed in a whole life-work of activity for the dependent classes, much of which is almost as remarkable as the Bridgman episode. Prison reform, school reform, care of the insane, care of paupers, reformatories for the young, trade schools for the blind, every possible effort of a man to help his less fortunate brother—these are the subjects to which Dr. Howe devoted his life. ”

“ Was it with such arguments as these that Socrates put Aristophanes and Agathon to sleep on the famous morning which Plato chronicles? We cannot tell. Plato has cast the magic of a falling star over the matter and thus leaves it: his humor, his knack, his destiny compelled him to treat subjects in this way. Something passes, and after a light has fallen far off into the sea, we ask “What was it?” Enough for Plato’s purpose that he has placed Comedy where, perhaps, no philosopher before or after him ever had the vision to place it—in the heaven of man’s highest endeavor. ”

“ If we can exhibit this spirit in one branch of learning, why not in all? The Promethean fire is one single element. A spark of this fire is all that is needed to kindle this flame. The glance of a child of genius at an Etruscan vase leaves the child a new being. That is why museums exist: not only for the million who get something from them, but for the one young person of intelligence to whom they mean everything. ”

“ There are, then, in the modern world these two influences which are hostile to education,—the influence of business and the influence of uninspired science. In Europe these influences are qualified by the vigor of the old learning. In America they dominate remorselessly, and make the path of education doubly hard. Consider how they meet us in ordinary social life. We have all heard men bemoan the time they have spent over Latin and Greek on the ground that these studies did not fit them for business,—as if a thing must be worthless if it can be neither eaten nor drunk. ”

“ He comes to you in a trusting spirit, with reverence in his heart, and you answer his hope in this wise: ‘Business and social success are the best things that life affords. Come to us, my dear fellow, and we will help you toward them.’ Your son asks you for bread and you give him a stone, for fish and you give him a serpent. It would have been better for that boy if he had never come to your college, for in that case he might have retained a belief that somewhere in the world there existed ideas, art, enthusiasm, unselfishness, inspiring activity. ”

“ I have no doubt that if you had, say, thirty new plays to produce, each of them as good as Hamlet, and if your audience were to consist of the most intelligent people in the world, and if your actors were all and each as good as David Garrick, I have no doubt, I say, that the most thrilling way you could produce those plays would be on a stage without scenery and with just such suggestion of costume as should lift the characters into the world of idea. ”

“ The force of human feeling behind these sayings can be measured only by their accomplishments. They have been re-arranging and overturning human society ever since. By this most unlikely means of quiet demonstration in word and deed, did he unlock this gigantic power. The bare fragments of his talk open the sluices of our minds; they overwhelm and re-create. That was his method. The truth which he conveyed with such metaphysical accuracy lives now in the living. Very likely we cannot express it in dogmas, for such intellect as it takes to utter a dogma is not in us. ”

“ I do not recommend subserviency to Europe, but subserviency to intellect. Recourse to Europe we must have: our scholars must absorb Europe without themselves becoming absorbed. It is a curious thing that the American who comes in contact with the old world exhibits two opposite faults: he is often too much impressed and loses stamina, or he is too little impressed and remains a barbarian. Contact with the past and hard work are the cure for both tendencies. Europe is merely an incidental factor in the problem of our education, and this is very well shown in our conduct of our law schools. ”

“ We may, then, measure the life in people’s fancy by the weight of suggestion which is requisite to awaken them—a feather of imagery or a cannon ball of actuality—and in this we shall not be dealing with several kinds of dramatic principle, but only with several conditions of education in the audience.
The recent realism seen on our own stage shows a deadness of wit in our life—the sad unresponsive seriousness of persons who do not habitually live in the world of imagination. ”

“ But if you want moral influence you may bless God you have not got them. They are the payment with which the world subsidizes men to keep quiet, and there is no subtilty or cunning by which you can get them without paying in silence. This is the great law of humanity, that has existed since history began, and will last while man lasts—evil, selfishness, and silence are one thing.
The world is learning, largely through American experience that freedom in the form of government is no guarantee against abuse, tyranny, cruelty, and greed. ”

“ Wherever humor arises in a Christian civilization—as in the popular Gothic humor—it is a local race-element, an unsubdued bit of something foreign to Judah. Where the Bible triumphs utterly, as in Dante and Calvin, there is no humor.
And yet the comic survives in us. It eludes the criticism of Christianity as the sunlight eludes the net. Yes, not only our own laughter survives, but the old classic comedy still seems comic—and more truly comic than the old lyric poetry seems poetic or the drama dramatic. Ancient poesy must always be humored and nursed a little ”

“ In the next place, it is evident that, in so far as science is not hallowed by the spirit of religion, it is a mere extension of business. It is the essence of world-business, race-business, cosmic-business. It saves time, saves lives, and dominates the air and the sea; but all these things may be accomplished, for ought we know, in the course of the extinction of the better nature of mankind. Science is not directly interested in the expression of spiritual truth; her notation cannot include anything so fluctuating, so indeterminate, as the language of feeling. Science neither sings nor jokes ”