gives it a shuddering noise, and this, magnified beyond measure, is the
nearest thing to a description I can give of the beginning of her song,
which poured out of her lips in a thick flame of sound. It pressed down
on me with the volume of a thousand storms, when suddenly I realized
that she was singing in a man’s voice! Without thought, the conviction
flashed on me that this was undoubtedly the devil, and that all her
beauty was false. With a shriek of awful fear I called on God to protect
me! Immediately the song caught in the throat of the thing, man or beast,
whatever it was, and the body commenced to distort into sheer ugliness
without form. I don’t know how it finally disappeared, for I went into a
raving delirium and swooned.
“The next two months I spent in a sanitarium on the verge of insanity.
All I can remember of this is an occasional flash of miraculous fear,
when I seemed to be vainly fleeing the avenging hand of God. As soon
afterward as I was able, I joined the priesthood, and I don’t mind saying
that it was through an actual, original fear of God and nothing else.”
“What about your philosophy?” I asked.
“I still have that,” he answered. “And it required very little
reconciliation to keep it. The realization of the part of celibacy
in it came to me about a year after I was ordained, as a feeling, or
conviction. Of course the refutation of my argument is that the Church
makes marriage a sacrament. I suppose most men have this explained to
them before they become priests, but I never found it necessary.”
“Is the girl a nun now?” I pursued.
“No,” he said, a faint smile lurking about the corners of his mouth. “She
never took the final vows, but left the convent and married. She has five
very beautiful children, one of whom, the eldest, I’m marrying next week.
In fact, he’s named for me.”
This time the silence was longer and seemed almost a conclusion, until I
broke it with one last question.
“Do you think that was actually the devil who appeared to you, or an
illusion brought on by the state of your mind?”
He answered me very quietly. “The hand of God is seen in strange places.”
ROBERT CRUISE MCMANUS.
_Ballade_
(Translated from a fifteenth century lyric of Charles d’Orleans)
Once in the weary wood of dull Distress
Where Fate condemned my leaden feet to stray
It chanced that Venus, now my comfortress,
Besought to know where I did take my way.
Then I replied, “My fortune’s gone astray,
And I long exiled ’mid this wood’s repose,
It happens I am one of whom men say,
‘A man astray, uncertain where he goes.’”
Then she, all smiles and godlike graciousness,
“Tell me, my friend, the reason, oh I pray.
Why is it you are lost in black Distress?
I may have power to set you on your way.
Long have I sought love’s pleasures to display
Unto your heart—I knew not of your woes.
Nor can I bear to see you thus to-day,
A man astray, uncertain where he goes.”
And I, “Alas! Most sovereign Princess!
You know my state: shall I repeat it? Nay!
’Twas Death—who doth all men alike oppress—
’Twas Death that stole my darling love away.
She who so guided me upon my way—
My only love, more lovely than the rose—
That while she lived no one of me might say,
‘A man astray, uncertain where he goes.’”
For I am blind—I catch no spark of day—
Nor but with tapping staff can find my way.
So tapping here and there the wanderer goes.
It is indeed a pity they must say,
“A man astray, uncertain where he goes.”
LAIRD GOLDSBOROUGH.
_Notabilia_
The most important action of the University in its relation to the
student body is the Sunday chapel regulation, that eleven o’clock
non-sectarian Christian service and sermon is compulsory for all Yale
College undergraduates and members of the common Freshman year. In this
change of hour lies a change of issue. Before, the ten-minute ten o’clock
service was a bit of tolerated hypocrisy to keep undergraduates in New
Haven over the weekend. This compulsory attendance at Divine Worship is
an intolerable religious offence.
Religion is a matter of individual opinion; compulsion is opposed to
individuality. Compulsory religion then by our own inherited conception
of that word is an impossibility. There can be no religion for an
intelligent person in Woolsey Hall. To those who are not Christians it is
intellectual persecution.
We are amused at the news that there was some discussion as to whether
there should be plants or members of the faculty on the platform during
the service. Plants seem to us the better choice; being more inanimate,
they are less hypocritical.
Really it is astonishing how Yale can be as much of an institution of
learning as it is, and still practice such stupidity in administration.
* * * * *
We should like to bring to our readers’ attention the following terse
facts about Commons. Commons has a compulsory patronage amounting to
approximately 900 men. It can count on a few hundred more men who are
working their way through. After its seating capacity has thus been
filled once, it need not (and does not) accommodate any more for that
meal; it can therefore calculate with perfect accuracy, so that no food
need be wasted. It requires cash _in advance_, or bills sent home; it has
therefore no credit to carry on its books. At the present writing, it
will allow no one to sign out: meals taken elsewhere are wasted money
for its customers. Its overhead is reduced to a minimum—far more so than
that of any other eating house in college. And, added to this, it has the
faculty to protect it.
Yet, what is happening? The charges for food are $9.00 per week, without
rebate for cash. The service is slow whenever the hall is crowded. The
food, while sometimes good, is by no means always so, and if maintained
at the present standard would be intolerable as a year’s diet.
Considering the fact that, for nine hundred of its customers, it requires
no table runners, thereby saving approximately $800 per week ($25,000 per
year); there it is only $1.00 per week cheaper than some eating houses,
and 50 cents cheaper than most; that its food is not as good as any of
the others—considering these things, we suggest that an investigation be
made. We are anxious to be fair in the matter and not judge too harshly a
project which is as yet young. But the college seems to be of the opinion
that considerable improvement must be shown by the Yale Dining Hall if it
is to continue its somewhat shaky career.
* * * * *
Taking the same paternal stand as they have taken in the case of Commons,
the faculty has decreed that the Liberal Club must ask “permission”
before inviting speakers to address their meetings. Just what the Liberal
Club will do about this, no one as yet knows. Certainly it conflicts with
the very principles and ideals of that club, and represents a trend, on
the part of the Yale faculty, to which the club is especially opposed.
_Book Reviews_
_Tutor’s Lane._ By WILMARTH LEWIS. (Knopf.)
Imagine Yale College without appendages, and New Haven without slums
or business section, and life just as it is now and you will have the
setting for Mr. Lewis’ ’17 first novel, “Tutor’s Lane”.
You are given as hero a young English instructor, a graduate from about
the same class as Mr. Lewis, probably with a Chi Delta Theta charm, and
a heroine not greatly sophisticated, of good family, mildly fond of
“doing good” to “the people.” These two fondly follow a Quixotic scheme
of uplift (which he doesn’t even like, and about which she’s a fool), and
come out of it ashamed but at one in their shame. The inevitable marriage
ensues. The plot is the weakness of the book. It is a thin-spun web, and
disappointing.
But the non-plot characters, and the phrasing of the Syllabus, and the
satire scattered through the pages are features over which no one can
pass without delight. Mrs. Norris talks, the reader is amused; Mr. Lewis
talks, the reader is wholly captivated. It is not the genial gay humor
of Punch; it is something with a sharper touch than that, more witty,
more satirical. It is only when Mr. Lewis becomes sympathetic with his
character or with his reader that he fails. He is superb when he is
laughing at both simultaneously.
If he ever gets hold of a plot, the result will be a fine novel. He has
the power of restraint and objectivity which most moderns lack. He is
refreshing in the midst of so much that is conspicuously heavy and bent
with the weight of the world. His product is not marred by continual
reference to the travail and labor its creation caused. He seems to have
enjoyed writing the book, and not to have written it in order to save
the world, or the destinies of nations. To amuse himself and his friends
seems to be his only purpose in writing, which is probably why “Tutor’s
Lane” will also amuse so many other people.
M. E. F.
_Young Peoples Pride._ By STEPHEN VINCENT BENÉT. (Henry Holt & Co.)
There are probably very few men now at Yale who are destined to look
back, after an equally short span of years, upon a more enviable literary
record than that already possessed by Stephen Vincent Benét. And yet,
we had to read a good deal of “Young Peoples Pride” before we began to
enjoy it. Perhaps the reason was that we had expected another “serious
novel” or “character study” somewhat along the lines of Mr. Benét’s “The
Beginning of Wisdom”. The rather affectedly “super smart” illustrations
with which the present book is garnished annoyed us, and the occurrence
of passages like the following caused us to fear that Mr. Benét,
with an eye to the box office, had joined the Fitzgeraldine ranks of
tale-tellers-out-of-school.
“‘The trouble with Art is that it doesn’t pay a decent living
wage unless you’re willing to commercialize—’
‘The trouble with Art is that it never did, except for a few
chance lucky people—’
‘The trouble with Art is Women.’
‘The trouble with Women is Art.’
‘The trouble with Art—with women I mean—change signals! What do
I mean?’”
But there is not much of that sort of “cleverism”. In fact, in so far as
“We Wild Young People” enter, Mr. Benét holds the mirror very sanely and
skillfully up to nature.
However, “Young Peoples Pride” scarcely requires all this analyzing. It
is not an “important novel” anyway—simply a rattling good yarn, and must
be judged as such. For sheer sustained excitement we have seldom read
anything better than the long scene in the apartment of Mrs. Severance
and the gentleman whom Mr. Benét so quaintly calls “Mr. Severance”. It
is a scene that we shall hope to see on Broadway later, when its author
becomes a playwright—if he ever does. Read the book for that, by all
means—and you’ll like a good deal of the rest.
L. S. G.
_Books and Characters._ By LYTTON STRACHEY. (Harcourt, Brace & Company,
New York.)
A reference, in the present volume, to Thomas Beddoes as “the last
Elizabethan” suggests, at once, Mr. Lytton Strachey’s preëminent right
to the title of “the last Victorian”—using the word in its best sense,
to denote an individual very far removed indeed from any desire to go
“tobaggoning down Parnassus”. Mr. Strachey’s bland progress through the
realm of letters is, in fact, the very antithesis of that adopted by the
tobaggoning school of modern critics. To analyze the characteristics of
his style is to call up a host of adjectives long all but forgotten amid
the present scramble for pseudo-culture. He is scholarly without being
pedantic, erudite without being obscure. And the queer, musing, almost
anecdotal manner in which he rambles from Johnson’s wit to Madame du
Deffand’s, from Shakespeare’s tragedies to Voltaire’s, is always giving
way to lightning flashes of true critical insight expressed with the
netteté of a Racine.
As might be gathered from the foregoing remarks, “Books and Characters”
is a volume of collected critical essays, which first appeared
individually between the years 1905 and 1919 in various publications,
such as the _Edinburgh Review_. Incidentally, it is a book which should
have an especial and peculiar appeal to the college man. For the books
and characters touched upon are, one or two excepted, the very ones
with which the reading essential to a college course has made him most
familiar. He will thus have freshly in mind the background of literary
acquaintanceships, which the guileless Mr. Strachey apparently supposes
is possessed by everyone, and upon which he proceeds to etch his
portraits with the aid of a wit so delightful and so acutely sharpened as
to be quite irresistible. For it was true wit, in the Victorian sense,
mingled with a quaint, sly humor, which made Strachey’s “Queen Victoria”
the consummate master-portrait that it is, and which reappears in “Books
and Characters”. Perhaps a quotation from the chapter entitled, “The
Lives of the Poets”, may show what we mean:
“Johnson’s aesthetic judgments are almost invariably subtle, or
solid, or bold; they have always some good quality to recommend
them—except one. They are never right. That is an unfortunate
deficiency; but no one can doubt that Johnson has made up for
it, and that his wit has saved all. He has managed to be wrong
so cleverly, that nobody minds. When Gray, for instance, points
the moral to his poem on Walpole’s cat with a reminder to the
fair that all that glisters is not gold, Johnson remarks that
this is ‘of no relation to the purpose; if what glistered had
been gold, the cat would not have gone into the water; and, if
she had, would no less have been drowned.’ Could anything be
more ingenious, or more neatly put, or more obviously true? But
then, to use Johnson’s own phrase, could anything be of less
‘relation to the purpose’?”
Well, we only restrain ourselves with difficulty from seeming to commit
sacrilege upon Johnson by proclaiming the rightness of Mr. Strachey’s
aesthetic judgments, as well as their wit.
The essays dealing with French life and letters, just prior to the
revolution, are equally a mine of interest. They are all brilliant
pieces of writing; from the flickering sidelights thrown upon the
undignified and incredible squabbles of Voltaire and Frederick the
Great, to the half-pitiful, half-comic details concerning the salon of
Madame du Deffande—Madame du Deffande, who was for twenty years, at
once, blind, hopelessly in love with Walpole, and the cultural autocrat
of Paris. Skeptics, all of them—and skeptics essentially Gallic, before
whose unabashed indifference to God, and cynical contempt for man the
Anglo-Saxon mind is apt to recoil, gymnastically unable to assume the
necessary shift in point of view. For instance, there is Madame La
Maréchale de Luxembourg:
“‘Quel ton! Quel effroyable ton!’ she is said to have exclaimed
after a shuddering glance at the Bible. ‘Ah, Madame, quel
dommage que la Sainte Esprit eut aussi peu de gout!’”
At least they seem to have been sincere, these most un-Victorian French.
And they round out Mr. Strachey’s book into something which really must
not be missed.
L. S. G.
_This Freedom._ By A. S. M. HUTCHINSON. (Little, Brown & Co.)
A. S. M. Hutchinson’s latest novel, “This Freedom,” is the life story of
an English girl. Brought up in an old-fashioned home where the duty of
the women is but to serve the men, she breaks from conventional ties and
becomes a thoroughly modern creature in thought and action.
Her ideal is man’s position of social independence. This she attains to
the fullest measure in the business world. But trouble comes after she
has experienced love, marriage and the duties of a mother of a family.
After a series of crushing disasters, she discovers that modern teaching
does not tend to make for that home life to which she, in her youth, had
been accustomed, and from whose charm she had never really freed herself.
The book has the same weak point as its predecessor, “If Winter Comes”.
Mr. Hutchinson does not seem to have the courage to write a tragedy.
After he has masterfully created a heap of wreckage, he vainly attempts
restoration in a few concluding paragraphs. It is as impossible for the
reader to conceive of recovery in the case of Rosalie and Harry as it was
to imagine a future happiness for Nona and Marco.
It is to be hoped that we shall soon have a real tragedy from the pen of
this popular author, for then we shall put down the book perhaps sadder
but at least more impressed.
M. T.
_Babbitt._ By SINCLAIR LEWIS. (Harcourt, Brace & Co.)
If “Babbitt” is a better book than “Main Street”, as its publishers would
have us believe, then Mr. Lewis’ improvement is to be found in an even
greater application to the details; the minute cataloguing of commonplace
incident. It is infinitely painstaking. But for those of us who believe
that “Main Street” in itself showed an unnecessary virtuosity in that
talent, this is hardly to be rated as an advance.
“Babbitt” is not so much to be considered as better or worse than “Main
Street”, as a companion volume in Mr. Lewis’ series of compendiums of
all that is tawdry, and hypocritical, and typical, in the contemporary
life of the American middle class.
Babbitt is the “average” American business man; a real estate dealer
(“realtor”, as he pridefully insists on being called); a Rotarian,
Booster, member of the Athletic Club, and solid citizen. He has a
squabbling family; a wife whom he tolerates, and three children whom he
loves impatiently—because he cannot understand them. Little attention
is given to a plot; the development is rather in exhaustive study and
analysis. From the time when Babbitt gets up to shave, until the time
when he makes sure (for the second time) that all the doors in the house
are locked, no detail of his life, personal, family, business, or social,
is omitted. And each detail is analyzed. Sometimes it is satirized; and
often the attempted satirization becomes an over-done burlesque.
Like Carol Kennicott, Babbitt is filled with dissatisfaction; and
a realization (more vague than hers, because he cannot understand
it) of the meaningless hypocrisy of his life. But his revolt is not
intellectual, and therefore the pain of frustration in the inevitable
defeat at the end is not so keen.
I do not hold with those critics who condemn Mr. Lewis for presenting
only one side of his picture. I agree that he does present only
one side—but are there not a great many times as many authors who
write only of the so-called “pleasant” side? And are not Mr. Lewis’
characterizations far closer to the actual verities?
I think that they are; and that historians of the future will do well to
turn to such books as “Babbitt” for their data on the “typical” American
citizen of the third decade of the twentieth century.
C. G. P.
_Editor’s Table_
As the French say: All generalities are false, even this one.
* * * * *
“The Editor’s Table has no raison d’être,” I said.
“Nor any pièce de résistance,” said my friend.
“Nor is it ever a chef d’oeuvre,” I added.
* * * * *
But I know now that the French are right.
CORY.
_Yale Lit. Advertiser._
* * * * *
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91 Church Street, Near Chapel
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HARRY RAPOPORT
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Established 1884
Every Wednesday at Park Avenue Hotel, Park Ave. and 33rd St., New York
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[Illustration: ESTABLISHED 1896
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NEW HAVEN, CONN.]
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The Collected Works of Herman Melville
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The Oldest Established Laundry to Yale
We darn your socks, sew your buttons on, and make all repairs without
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The Lit.
is a Yale magazine—leader in literature among undergraduates. A local
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not take many pictures outside of New Haven because we, too, are a local
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