William Lloyd Garrison

by John Jay Chapman

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About the author

John Jay Chapman (1862-1933) was an American author.

Reviews

[Fred R · Rating 4 out of 5]

1. A paradoxical book. The opinions and judgments expressed are, for the modern reader, entirely conventional. And yet they are so expressed with such force and originality, with such muscular poetry, that they could only have come from individual inspiration, and no parroting of popular cant. The reader gives such a strange document a blurred, uncertain glance. Chapman would, I think wrongly, teach us a more favorable response, and flatter our prejudices:

"The element of material interest in these matters gives them their awful weight to contemporaries. When we are dealing with a past age this element evaporates, and we see clearly that most of the importances of the world have no claim to our reverence. Now when a man has felt in this way about his own age, we call him a great man; because we agree with him. For this is the test, and the only conceivable test of greatness, - that a man shall look upon his own age, and see it in the same light as that in which posterity sees it."

Garrison was a limited man. Chapman is a limited man. He will have nothing of Emerson's capriciousness. He will blinker himself:

"He could not step aside for a moment and play the part of philosophic spectator. As well expect a point which is moving in a curve in obedience to an algebraical formula to change its course for reasons politeness."

Emerson has, even in the minor quotations Chapman tosses ahead to tread upon, the better of this argument. Are you a man, or a point on a curve?