Learning and Other Essays

by John Jay Chapman

Dr. Coit was a tall man in a long black coat; and, as he moved and walked about the paths and corridors, he remained always within an invisible tower of isolation, so that you could not be sure that his feet rested on quite the same ground as your own. Half the time he was in an abstraction, but this did not prevent him from seeing and observing everything and everybody, especially the individualities of boys, about whom he acquired a preternatural astuteness. He lived within that solitude which a great purpose and constant prayer sometimes cast about a man. There was a chasm between him and the rest of mankind which could not be bridged by trivial intercourse. Neither he nor the rest of mankind were at fault for the difference in tension between them. He was so charged with moral passion that many people could not receive the delivery of it.

I was never able to establish a relation with him, either as a boy of thirteen or subsequently. His low, vibrant voice, and his hand laid gently upon one’s shoulder caused such a strong physical, moral, and galvanic appeal to my sensibilities that I invariably burst into tears. I think I never got through an interview with him without weeping. The appeal which his nature made was the appeal of enormous human feeling, penned up in a narrow language, restricted by a narrow experience. This temperamental isolation was, of course, intensified by his becoming a school-master. How strongly the influence of such a man must have affected the little family circle of the early school may be imagined. He lived habitually in a state of such vivid religious feeling that his face was ablaze with zeal; and he settled down to teach school in a farmhouse, knowing all the while, seeing with his mind’s eye all the while, the future of the enterprise. We can imagine the fervor of the tiny community, and the awe in which it must have stood toward the great man.

And yet all of his austerity, all of his closely confined, ebullient vitality was no more than a love of men. Down to his last days Dr. Coit never took his solitary drives about the countryside without stopping to bestow upon his poorer neighbors small offerings of food from his own table. It was done furtively and almost as an indulgence of those warm personal feelings toward all humanity, of which his mission denied him the expression. Behind his towering zeal there was a suffering, benevolent, and humble person.

Dr. Coit had, as it were, no secular side to his human intercourse, and the social side of St. Paul’s School was, in consequence, always a little stiff and ecclesiastical. On the other hand, his romantic and spontaneous feelings were permitted the outlet of secular literature, both ancient and modern; and he inspired his school with a love of letters. You were somehow made welcome to the joys of reading. The old-fashioned family education and atmosphere of a gentleman’s home qualified the boarding-school book-shelf. An interest in cultivation often goes with high-pitched, ecclesiastical natures; witness the outburst of literature in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and all that profound thought which makes that epoch in some ways outshine the Renaissance. Not only did Dr. Coit enjoy romantic literature, but he was himself like some character in mediæval romance—like Arthur, or Merlin; and the power of his personality was so great that whenever I am at St. Paul’s, I still feel as if the old Doctor were, somehow, not far away. I should hardly be surprised to see him step out from behind a clump of bushes on the margin of the stream, or to come across his rapt figure, on the athletic field, standing as I have seen him stand to watch the games, shading his eyes with his hand.

Dr. Coit was one of those saints who come into the world determined to found something: they are predestinate founders. They make and occupy the thing they found, repelling all the world beside, fleeing from all the world except this; and they generally become tyrants within the boundaries of their own creation. The tyrant founder-saint is a well-known figure in the Middle Ages; St. Bernard is a typical example; and Dr. Coit would have been more readily understood in any previous age of the world than he was in his own. He was in himself a piece of the Middle Ages, and to have known him is to have come in contact with all the piety, the romanticism, the mystery, the beauty, the depth and power of human emotion which flamed over Europe in Mediæval times, and which have been temporarily forgotten. To-day these provinces of human existence are abandoned to the art critic, to the moralist, and to the sentimental writer—to the very classes of persons who are the least likely to understand them. If we except the German philosophic historian, I suppose that no person in the world is so cut off by nature from an understanding of St. Francis or of Thomas Aquinas as is the modern æsthetic person, who cultivates a sympathetic interest in religion. The only hope of understanding the Middle Ages is through a living personal belief in Christianity.

It is only for convenience that I refer to the Middle Ages in order to explain Dr. Coit. His right to exist as a modern is incontestible: he was as modern as anyone else. He merely belonged to a type which, for the time being, has become rare. To us to-day, the tyrant founder-saint of the Middle Ages appears like a person not wholly a Christian. Judged by the standards of the New Testament, these men seem to be only half converted, or three-quarters converted, to Christianity, the rest of them remaining Tartar. The non-converted fraction of them makes them autocrats who trust no one but themselves, men of unfaith who rely on bolts and bars, on ordinances and arrangements.

At the worst, these enthusiasts are schemers, unscrupulous, crafty, and cruel. At the best they are merely opinionated, arbitrary, and lonely men. Their weakness is seen only in the fact that they have a slightly blind side, a side on which walk the favorites and hypocrites who have been formed in the shadow of their tyranny. The same parasites which grow upon autocracy in the great world seem often to appear in the miniature kingdom of a school.

That Christianity should have given rise to this peculiar kind of tyrant has often thrown me into wonderment. It seems as if any formulation of spiritual truth, uttered by a higher intelligence, were apt to act as an astringent upon the lower intelligence. The bread of life poisons many men. The formula means more than the neophyte is able to understand; and this overplus of meaning stimulates him to fierceness. The phenomenon may be observed on a small scale by anyone who will contrast the teachings of Froebel with the methods often found in kindergartens. Each mind in the world is capable of a different degree of abstraction; and when a mind is stretched to its widest and you give it still something more, you arouse passion. At any rate, the fact remains that Christ’s gentlest words have, as he predicted, become fire and sword in the world, and that through this fire and sword truth spreads. Men like Dr. Coit, for all their fury and for all their narrowness, leave peace in their wake, and bequeath to their followers not only gentleness, but breadth of view. Their unselfishness—their powerlessness to be other than they are—touches the heart of the world. Christ has been in their dungeons all the while.

I do not know whether it was the result of Dr. Coit’s own prophetic nature or the result of a more reasoned theory about the education of boys; but the fact remains that at St. Paul’s School you were encouraged to dream. You were permitted to wander alone in the woods. You were left much to yourself; and the fact that you were a thoughtful child, slow in development and perhaps backward in your studies was allowed for. They understood the need of letting God attend the child, and of not being too much worried about the outcome. There is a divergence of feeling among modern school-masters as to how much boys should be left to themselves. The freedom accorded to us at St. Paul’s resulted, no doubt, from the original domestic, non-institutional atmosphere of the place. A boy who is living at home in the country always has a good deal of time to himself. The school was at first a mere country home in which a clergyman conducted the education of boys—appending it to his own family life; and the traditions of boyhood-in-the-country survived as the school grew to more serious proportions. The place itself, moreover, was an example of independence and natural growth rather than of watched assistance. It was not the child of riches, receiving all that money and thought could give even from its birth onward; but was rather the child of hunger and thirst, thriving upon neglect, and gaining in character and in vigor throughout a youth of hardy loneliness.