Arts and Letters

Chauncey Brewster Tinker was born in Auburn, Maine, on October 22, 1876, and died in Wethersfield, Connecticut, on March 17, 1963, at the age of 86. All his life he retained the characteristics of a Maine man: the deliberate pause before replying to a question, the refusal to be impressed by any honor which the world may confer, and the practice of invoking moral considerations prior to social or practical ones. He was the son of the Reverend Anson Phelps Tinker, a Yale graduate of the class of 1863, and Martha Jane White Tinker. In his youth his father took the family to Colorado where Chauncey Tinker attended the East Denver High School. He graduated from Yale University with honors in English in the class of 1899 and received from the same university the degrees of Master of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy in the following three years. Later he was to receive honorary degrees from Yale, Princeton, The College of Wooster, Hobart College, and the University of Rochester. Except for the year 1903, when he served as Associate Professor of English at Bryn Mawr and the year 1937, when he assumed the Charles Eliot Norton Professorship at Harvard, his entire academic life was spent at Yale. In New Haven he was appointed a full professor in 1913 and the Sterling Professor of English Literature in 1923. He retired in 1945 after almost a half century of active teaching.

Mr. Tinker was one of the foremost bibliophiles in the country. He assembled a notable private collection which he bequeathed to the Yale University Library. He owned many works by William Blake of the greatest rarity; all Anthony Trollope, and pristine copies of the masterpieces of the century with which he is mainly identified: Dr. Johnson's Dictionary, Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson, Gulliver's Travels, Tristram Shandy, and many more.

Throughout his long life as a teacher Mr. Tinker conducted classes covering a wide range of English literature from Beowulf to Keats, Byron, and Shelley, but from early in his career his interest centered on the eighteenth century and particularly on Dr. Johnson and his circle. Above all he was bent on rehabilitating James Boswell from the sneering depreciations of Macaulay's famous essay. He was convinced that he was not only a highly idiosyncratic individual but a distinguished writer. He published first a Young Boswell, for general readers, and, in 1924, a Letters of James Boswell, in two volumes. He long suspected that there were many Boswell papers in existence that had not come to the attention of scholars. In 1925 he inserted a few lines in The London Times requesting information and assistance. He received two replies—one almost totally illegible, the other a postal card, unsigned, bearing the words "Try Malahide." Malahide Castle is in the vicinity of Dublin. By adroit maneuvering he obtained an invitation to tea with Lord and Lady Talbot de Malahide. Lord Talbot was a descendant of James Boswell. From there one clue led to another and the flow of Boswell papers has since grown from a trickle to a large stream. They have emerged from ebony caskets and croquet boxes, from attics and stables. The results of these exhumations have delighted and astonished and occasionally shocked a large public. Mr. Tinker's days continued to be filled with his devotion to teaching and with his wide bibliographical interests. We may assume that he did not long suffer under the disappointment of not having been assigned the editorship of this enormous treasure. It was enough that, like Moses, he had struck the rock and that the copious spring had been released.

President Lowell of Harvard once said, "There are not enough great teachers in this country to fill the faculty of one small college." Mr. Tinker was an admirable writer and a distinguished bibliophile; he was a great teacher. When we remember that at one time or another almost 10,000 men were enrolled in his courses we must take into account, also, that in his most famous course, "The Age of Johnson," the number of listeners was generally doubled by undergraduates who attended—as the academic phrase goes—as "visitors." There are certain forms of genius of which no concrete record may be transmitted to aftertime, not even with the aid of the highest refinements of camera and sound-recorder. Among them is that of the born teacher. Its essence lies not primarily in the imparting of knowledge and wisdom but in a relationship. At one and the same time it gives and it receives. Mr. Tinker could be richly and vividly informative; he could be extremely funny; but the lasting impression of his lectures was of an extraordinary gravity. He made vibrate the chords of awe and wonder. He not only aroused admiration for the writers of the eighteenth century but for life itself and for great literature which he never failed to relate to life. His lectures were composed with the greatest care and were annually redigested and reshaped. Their very length was so artfully adjusted that they concluded with an effect that would have appeared theatrical in a lesser man. In the few seconds that followed his last words the bells of Battell Chapel—or in his last years, of "Harkness"—would sound the hour. "That will be all for today, gentlemen," he would say. For a moment the intellectual integrity of Edmund Burke or the wisdom of Samuel Johnson would hover above the classroom like a spell, like a summons.

One of the saddest phrases in English literature is that with which John Milton condemned the clergy of his time: "The sheep look up and are not fed." It applies to the majority of lecture halls. The most nourishing food for young men and women—at that time when they are still uncertain of values, still hesitant before the choices that lie open before them—is to hear great things greatly praised. Mr. Tinker's power was moral; it derived from his deeply religious life. Without ever being "preachy" or even didactic in the smaller sense of the word, he pictured the stern disciplines of the intellect and of art and of life as attractive and rewarding.

Many are the students who remember him with a deep indebtedness. They include such distinguished scholars as Dr. Frederick Pottle and Wilmarth Sheldon Lewis, editors, respectively, of the Boswell Journals and of Horace Walpole's letters; and a host of writers—many of them members of our Institute and Academy: Sinclair Lewis, Stephen Vincent Benet, Archibald MacLeish, Philip Barry, John Hersey, the writer of these lines; and many others.

Mr. Tinker was elected a member of the Academy in 1937, joining two colleagues of his own faculty, Professors Wilbur Cross and William Lyon Phelps, and he served as our Chancellor from 1949 to 1951.