On rare occasions, the crust of mediocrity covering our literary tradition cracks and allows a glimpse of its unappreciated foundations. This is surely the case with the brilliant polemicist, critic, and playwright John Jay Chapman (1862–1933), whose reputation, despite praise from Henry James, Edmund Wilson, and others, lies half-hidden, emerging from obscurity roughly once each generation. Chapman was the author of works on Dante, Shakespeare, Plato, and Emerson; wrote sharp portraits of his contemporaries; and was a translator of Greek of some distinction. However, he is not to the taste of the trendy theorists and “world lit” advocates who currently inhabit college literature departments.

The publication of this new collection from the University of Illinois Press is a welcome event; indeed, it is the only work of Chapman’s writings currently available. It is another sign of the distance between what passes for a literary establishment and its traditions that Chapman—a Harvard-educated scion of the East Coast aristocracy who lived in the WASP enclaves along the Hudson—had to wait for a midwestern press to publish a new edition of his work.

As Jacques Barzun notes in the foreword, Chapman wrote about matters of importance to a democracy: public and personal corruption, the preservation of learning in an atmosphere of consumerism, and the abiding principles of individual conduct. Penance and redemption hold a central, dominating place in his work, and he was not a man to take injustice lightly. In a famous story, Chapman, grieving after beating a man whom he had wrongly thought had insulted his future wife, thrust his own hand into a fire until it was burned beyond repair. He was to turn that passion and concern for justice to the subjects of his writing, from great authors to the city machine bosses.

Interest in Chapman has come in three broad stages. The first was spurred by the publication of M. A. DeWolfe Howe’s John Jay Chapman and His Letters (1937), still the definitive biography, and Edmund Wilson’s Triple Thinkers (1938), which praised Chapman as one of the great American critics and possibly its greatest letter writer. In the 1950s and 1960s, Richard Hovey and Melvin Bernstein each published a full-length study. In 1957, Jacques Barzun, in the first posthumous collection, placed Chapman in the company of Jefferson, Cooper, Henry Adams, and Mencken as a profound critic of the national character. Barzun wrote that Chapman expressed a deep understanding of the American practice of democracy in a sinewy, concentrated style that enraptured, delighted, and infuriated at the same time.

The relationship between Chapman’s writings and his family history received more attention at midcentury. Chapman’s grandmother was an ardent abolitionist and colleague of William Lloyd Garrison. Her grandson inherited her crusading spirit, but substituted the influence of money in politics for slavery. As a young man, Chapman was deeply involved in the New York City reform movement against Tammany Hall. This involvement led to an alliance (and, ultimately, a falling out) with Theodore Roosevelt, whom, Chapman felt, had deserted the reformers to please the machine in his run for mayor of New York. The critical results of those years were two profound critiques of American political life, Causes and Consequences (1898) and Practical Agitation (1900), and a short-lived political broadside “The Political Nursery.” Using his keen powers of observation and his experiences, Chapman outlined the moral costs of easy corruption, a lesson that bears repetition in this age of soft money and “lapses in judgment.”

The most recent reprise has focused on education. In 1992, the classics journal Arion, in a tribute to its late editor, and Chapman admirer, William Arrowsmith, devoted an issue to Chapman’s essays on and translations of the classics. Chapman was a vocal opponent of the “professionalization” of scholarship and the sycophancy he saw in the adoption by American institutions of the German-inspired doctoral degree and increasing obsession with pedantic minutiae at the expense of actual literature. In his Lucian, Plato and Greek Morals (1931), Chapman complained that “the Nineteenth Century has left a hedge of [critical literature] around every writer of antiquity… . A scholar reads the books of other scholars, lest he shall say something that shows ignorance. He dare not miss a trick; just as the social climber dare not miss a party… . Must the novice read those forty pages of Williamovitz-Mollendorf which cover each dialogue of Plato like the grease on a Strasbourg pâté? Accurate scholarship, when it prevails, is the epilogue to literature.” (One wonders what he would have thought of the more recent wholesale adoption of French literary theory.)

In a typical passage, Chapman praises Emerson as a welcome voice in a nation constricted by the issue of slavery, but faults the New Englander’s lack of passion and a curious detachment from emotion. An alien visitor, he wrote, would learn more from an opera than from Emerson: “He would learn from the Italian opera that there were two sexes; and this, after all, is probably the fact with which the education of such a stranger ought to begin.”

Almost the only complaint against The Unbought Spirit is that it is too short. Chapman’s essays on Emerson and Browning are included but not those on Shakespeare and Balzac. There are two chapters excerpted from his political books, as well as his essay “The Doctrine of Non-Resistance,” which is an extended exegesis on the political consequences of the Biblical injunction “Resist not evil; but overcome evil with good.” His magnificent address “Coatesville,” which was given on the anniversary of the torture and death of a black man at the hands of a mob in the Pennsylvania town where it has occurred, is here. (In a curious coincidence, Albert Jay Nock, another almost forgotten American critic with whom Chapman shared the Jay ancestry--although they do not seem to have met—also wrote an essay about the events in Coatesville.) Of Chapman’s classical writings, only “Greek as Pleasure” makes the cut, but Stone does provide a few of the better literary portraits (including that of Chapman’s friend William James, who is described as enjoying the “immunity of remaining triumphant even though he had been vanquished”), and excerpts from his letters. His translations, plays for children, and the story of Benedict Arnold that Chapman cast as a Greek tragedy must await another volume. Not all of the selections are flattering—Chapman’s complaints in a letter to his wife about the “vulgar people” accompanying him on a train reflect a residual snobbishness—but all demonstrate a fertile mind seeking the root of literature, politics, and education.

Arrowsmith once said of Chapman that he had a “vocation for heroism.” Not the heroism of contemporary Hollywood or New York—loudly proclaiming opposition to land mines from the safe perch of a public television benefit—but the heroism that risks reputation, ideals (even, in Chapman’s case, physical safety and sanity) for truth.