Last of the Characters

When I entered Harvard, Charles Townsend Copeland already had retired as Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory, but he and his derby were still familiar to the Yard, he still continued to live on the top floor of Hollis, he gave his annual autumn reading at the Union and an invitation to his room was still a summons. Once I too received the summons and climbed the stairs to that gas-lit, impressively cluttered room merely to sit there, an awe-struck, tongue-tied freshman listening to the silver authoritarian voice. As I left I asked him to autograph my copy of his Copeland Reader, and he wrote in an angular crabbed hand: “Only my best friends buy my books.” Then as I stood in the doorway he added, “Now don’t ever let me see this in any second-hand book store!”

Bernard De Voto—who grew wiser as he grew older—used to say then that he taught only for the five per cent. This five per cent became Ph.D.’s who in turn taught for a five per cent elect who became Ph.D.’s, who in turn, etc. Copeland taught for the 95 per cent who would lead commonplace lives for the most part, but who would keep the memory of a tart avuncular teacher who had once shown them qualities of literature that they might otherwise have never seen. For Copey was a teacher first and last, a being now almost wholly superseded by academic excavators. That was his prime quality. Nothing he ever wrote would have entitled him to the biography to which he is so richly entitled and which now, on the centenary of his birth, J. Donald Adams has given us in Copey of Harvard (Houghton, $5.00).

FR

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Francis Russell

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When I entered Harvard, Charles Townsend Copeland already had retired as Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory, but he and his derby were still familiar to the Yard, he still continued to live on the top floor of Hollis, he gave his annual autumn reading at the Union and an invitation to his room was still a summons. Once I too received the summons and climbed the stairs to that gas-lit, impressively cluttered room merely to sit there, an awe-struck, tongue-tied freshman listening to the silver authoritarian voice. As I left I asked him to autograph my copy of his Copeland Reader, and he wrote in an angular crabbed hand: “Only my best friends buy my books.” Then as I stood in the doorway he added, “Now don’t ever let me see this in any second-hand book store!”

Bernard De Voto—who grew wiser as he grew older—used to say then that he taught only for the five per cent. This five per cent became Ph.D.’s who in turn taught for a five per cent elect who became Ph.D.’s, who in turn, etc. Copeland taught for the 95 per cent who would lead commonplace lives for the most part, but who would keep the memory of a tart avuncular teacher who had once shown them qualities of literature that they might otherwise have never seen. For Copey was a teacher first and last, a being now almost wholly superseded by academic excavators. That was his prime quality. Nothing he ever wrote would have entitled him to the biography to which he is so richly entitled and which now, on the centenary of his birth, J. Donald Adams has given us in Copey of Harvard (Houghton, $5.00).