When the young gentlemen of Harvard University returned to Cambridge last week, weary of vacation and longing to resume their studies, one of the first things many of them did was to visit the Coop (campus cooperative store) or Dunster House or Amee’s bookshop, and buy a volume* that had been published during the holidays. It was rather an expensive book. Much that it contained was already on the shelves of boys who read anything at all outside of the cinema magazines. Nevertheless it was a peculiarly desirable book. It was part of a legend.
The University of Nebraska was threatening to take Dean Pound from the Harvard Law School. President Lowell had made a stirring announcement about Harvard’s eating arrangements. Leland Stanford’s debating team was coming to Cambridge for a debate on Science. But none of these events could overshadow the fact that, after all these years, “Copey” had at last published his anthology.
The home of the legend that, is “Copey”—and no disrespect is meant by Harvard men when they thus nickname their Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratorv; but rather affection, for he would sooner be “Copey” than president— is up a high but never arduous flight of steps, on the top floor of antique Hollis Hall. Thither, every Monday night of college for some 33 years, have swarmed scores of undergraduates from the passing classes. The room they enter is not large. There must first be a good deal of scuffling and grunting before all can be com-fortably disposed on furniture, windowsills and floor. Then cigarets are borrowed, matches found, pipes gurgled clean, and someone arranges the windows and door to prevent a draft but assure ventilation. Usually there is a search for a pair of eyeglasses, but as “Copey” keeps an innumerable quantity of these, variously ground for varying type-sizes and occasions, the search is brief and successful. A hush falls. Some one takes his last cough. “Copey” waits for another last cough and, if none comes, begins to read.
Freshmen inevitably hear of “Copey” within their first week .at Harvard, if not long before, but they may pass him many times in the street before knowing him by sight. There is nothing to notice about a little fellow of 66, as small, indeed, as the smallest freshman, in traditional oldtime professorial garb—old brown overcoat, brown suit, felt hat far down over generous ears. But on a Monday evening, as soon as the reading begins, a newcomer understands what it is that has made “Copey” the William Lyon Phelps (Yale), the Henry van Dyke (Princeton), the John Erskine (Columbia), the Bur-ges Johnson (late of Vassar), of Harvard. The amazingly flexible voice, its sympathies and humor, its clarity, expression and power of creating reality out of written words, bespeaks “Copey” as not only a most popular and learned professor but a great master as well of that most difficult of arts, reading aloud.
The reading, as non-Harvard men can discover in “Copey’s” an-thology, may start off with something from the Bible—nothing dull like all those “begatters” (ST. MATTHEW,) but something with action like the Israelites’ conquest of Canaan (JUDGES IV :V), something affecting like David’s lament for Absalom (SAMUEL XVIII; XIX), or something portentous out of REVELATION. Or it may begin with so different a thing as Lewis Carroll’s “You are old, Father William,” the young man said, “And your hair has become very white; “And yet you incessantly stand on your head— “Do you think, at your age, it is right ?” …
Or it may have occurred to “Copey” to acquaint his listeners with the writing of some Harvard man—the late Poet Allan Seeger,who was doubtless one of the hundreds of men-with whom “Copey” kept up a lively correspondence as his contribution to the War; or Funnyman Robert Benchley, of Life; or Heywood Broun, idly-ambling colyumist of the New York World.
Of classical selections in “Copey’s” anthology there is, of course, a great plenitude. The grief of Achilles over the body of Patroclus; the death of Socrates; “Hark! Hark! the Lark” and “Full Fathom Five”; “Lycidas”; “To Althea from Prison”; Gulliver and the Lilliputians; Tristram and the Ass; the Pibroch of Donuil Dhu; “The Rime of the Ancient Mari-er” and “Kubla Khan”; Lamb’s “Gentle Giantess”; Edward John Trelawny on how they burned Shelley’s body; a great deal of Keats; more Tennyson; still more Thackeray and Browning and more Dickens than anyone.
The test being read-aloud-able-ness, this last is only natural, but it is also quite necessary. Now that Dean Briggs is gone, “Copey” is the last of a vanished style in Harvard professors, in professors anywhere, for that matter. He himself is Dickensian, with his piercing glance to identify a caller or passerby, his two bachelor rooms in the garret of old Hollis, his quick replies which from a less amiable nature might be crabbed but from him seem wry and sprightly, and his remark in the introduction to his anthology: “As for Christmas Eve, it won’t seem like itself if Mrs. Lowell stops allowing me to bring my book. . . .”
Every year for 21 years the Harvard Club of New York has had a “Copey” evening, a dinner to which a fortunate company, the Copeland Associates (by invitation only), sit down, followed by a reading. Here Theodore Roosevelt used to come. Here now come J. P. Morgan and his partner, Thomas W. Lamont. Here Publisher George Palmer Putnam and perhaps Nov-elists Owen Wister and Arthur Train, Poets Conrad Aiken, Hermann Hagedorn, Witter Bynner—these and many a plain John Smith and Tom Jones whose only claims to fame, perhaps, were their selection of one of “Copey’s” courses and their attendance upon his Monday nights at Harvard, gather around, shake hands and exchange greetings with the small man who seems to look fondly down on them all from below.
—THE COPELAND READER—Chosen and edited by Charles Townsend Copeland, Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory in Harvard University—Scribner’s ($10).
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