Vol. LXXXVIII No. 1

The
Yale Literary Magazine

Conducted by the
Students of Yale University.

“Dum mens grata manet, nomen laudesque Yalenses

Cantabunt Soboles, unanimique Patres.”

October, 1922.

New Haven: Published by the Editors.
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Every generation is a foible. It is born of whim, and educated on fantasy. In adulthood it is naturally a freak. This younger generation in this year of our Lord 1922 is no exception. We were born of respectability, educated on pedantry. In adulthood we are revolutionaries. Could anything be more natural, more un-Victorian?

We were born secretly. God knows how such things happened in that age. Perhaps the Stork brought us, nicely done up in—well—baby-clothes. We were brought up on platitudes. Most of them were dressed up as Christian. We hid our meanings in pretty words, and our sense in a blush. The word sex was unheard of. We didn’t talk much about anything dirty. We never swore. We said our prayers. With goodness we were replete; it made our lives hideous. Ultimately it was our virtue that drove us to sin. We were too good for this world. Forced to live in it by the tyranny of our parents—we adjusted ourselves, and became bad.

As soon as lies become platitudes they are doomed. The next passer-by will see through their disguise and expose them. You can fool yourself with your own lie; but if your neighbors catch the habit from you, and begin fooling themselves with the same lie, in no time that lie becomes a platitude. The Victorians fooled themselves into thinking that anything you could forget didn’t[2] exist any more. So were we born into a Virgin world. Our beloved ancestry had forgotten there was any sin; for us then there would not be any. We were their realized dream.

But unfortunately these little cherubim, these little seraphim grew up into adolescence, learnt things about sex by groping in dark corners, learnt shocking social problems by looking up words in Dictionaries; learnt in so doing to disbelieve every word the Victorians uttered. They had put their faith in that sort of royalty once too often. Genuinely they became skeptics. Because they had been taught by liars they could not afford to believe anything—without testing its verity. They are generous in their estimate of the society into which they are born. Instead of saying, “We are born into a world of liars,” they restrain themselves, consider the question rationally and say, “No, only into a world of fools.” And out of these Fools’ Paradise the younger generation has toddled. To them it was a hell.

Their first independent action was to set up Truth as their God. They had had enough of lies. Truth was their panacea. Ignorance was the abiding sin of mortality. Their battle was for the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, not for the beautiful garden of Eden—where nakedness did not prevail upon innocence and blushing was unknown.

Part of this knowledge surely was scientific. The health of the body was all important: Biology, Hygiene, sex education. For these they cried out. They talked eagerly of germ-plasm and genetics; defiantly of birth-control, the double-standard.

An equality between man and woman had suddenly been decreed politically; philanthropists were already talking about it morally; the younger generation carrying the movement one step further is experimenting with it intellectually. What they think, they say. Does it matter who is there? Bah! Victorian prudery. There are no secrets now between the sexes.

But part of this knowledge of good and evil was common sense—when once the Puritan and Victorian nonsense had been destroyed. It is only to a sex-maniac that the shortening of skirts can possibly do any harm. What, cries the younger generation, is the difference between showing one’s legs, and one’s arms; bobbing one’s hair is the same, or smoking, or drinking, or[3] swearing. If they aren’t good for the physique—well and good, they are bad; but if they are only bad because our Puritan or Victorian ancestry say so—or because Moses fell down the mountain with some tombstones under his arm—what the hell?—they aren’t bad at all.

So the gentlemen and ladies of the past lift their monocles and their lorgnettes to watch these semi-nude girls, these godless men. “Dear, dear,” they say. “Gracious me. That’s not a nice young man.”

What really has happened, say the younger generation, is that America for some time has been living up to ideals which they have never expressed, and have expressed, in lieu of these, ideals which they have never lived down to. Silly little superficial rules, and some hideous inhibitions grew up out of these expressed ideals. Otherwise they have been like corpses rotting before the very eyes of those who created them. They were never alive at all, say the younger generation. So it considers itself a generation of building, not of destroying. With frankness a dominant characteristic it must express the futility of the old expressed, as well as the strength of the old unexpressed ideals. But it lays the emphasis on the old unexpressed. For instance, it is not proud that it has torn down the absurd anthropomorphic God of the literature of the Past, but it is proud, that, having gotten rid of that miasma, it has proceeded to the conclusion that God is but the vision of the potentiality of mankind realized. That with Thomas Hardy it can go forward

It is not proud of having torn the veil off the carefully draped Victorian womanhood, but having done so it is proud of the constructive results, that no longer having ignorance, it can see the beauty and purity in the nakedness of the sex. It has torn down the ugly lies that covered the world with a respectable and morne garland of fig-leaves, but out of the ruins of this demolition it is creating a naked sanity, of which it is reasonably proud.

[4]

Thirty years ago “Jude the Obscure” was called “Jude the Obscene”. To-day Jude is considered a masterpiece, dealing in an intensely honest way with God and the divine right of the marriage service. Marriage has become a less eternal and a more kindly institution. Divorcees are considered less heinous people than before. For better or for worse is no longer a very powerful condemnation. In the Victorian era the sexual became an obsession because it was over-emphasized by being left unmentioned. In reaction, for a moment, under the Freudian influence it became an obsession from the exactly opposite reason. With the younger generation it is taking its place like hunger and thirst in the category of normal desires. The relations between girl and boy are more open, more real than in the past. There is no longer the hideous restraint before marriage, causing unhappy lives. It is an easier matter to know whom one is to marry among the younger generation. More and more they are being honest with one another. More and more they are coming to consider themselves rational, kind-hearted people.

I am not justified in defending or attacking the younger generation. I am doing my duty only in attempting to express the ideals we live by, the ideals they teach me. Too long has the ridiculous idea been current that they have no ideals. I have set myself to define them. Because they are different from the past, they are not non-existent. We are not, as a generation, more dishonest, more dishonorable than our predecessors. Yet we have no ideals? That is out of the mouths of fools only.

No, the Victorians thought that not knowing, or pretending not to know, about things unpleasant was the way to destroy them—by a slow process of forgetting. The younger generation thinks that knowing, and everyone knowing thoroughly about things unpleasant, will eventually arouse the race to do something about them; to clean energetically the Augean stables. You can see there is a fundamental difference in each generation’s idea of Humanity. The Victorians thought that knowledge of sin tainted the virtuous flower of innocence by rousing thoughts and passions for evil, which could only be killed by long disusage. Mankind fundamentally, said the Victorians to themselves, has a bad streak. We must carefully avoid mentioning things that would start that[5] streak going. If man is not naturally bad, he naturally has some bad in him. We must starve the devil out of him. The younger generation denies this. Man is naturally good; anyway, fundamentally so. Evil is an outgrowth of our own civilization, and social scheme. Most, if not all, criminals are insane. Society is to blame for insanity. We must study the causes of the insanities; must publish them broadcast. People must know. If they know, they will improve. We must educate ourselves up to knowing what is good, what is bad. We must know the worst to do the best.

Consciously, the Victorians were living by the theories of church dogma, believing in original sin; unconsciously, the younger generation is living by the theories of the romantic spirit, believing in natural good. They are idealists beyond the common run of mankind; and they are ruthless in the following of their ideals.

MAXWELL E. FOSTER.

“The sane man is nowhere at all when he enters into rivalry with the madman.”

Look at your nose. It is smooth and round, and red and shiny. Possibly ’tis flat, obtuse, snub, Roman, or Jew. Or in case you happen to think of some other qualification, it is that. So with your eyes—if only you will apply suitable adjectives. And also with your chin, mouth, hair, ears, jowls, or whatever. The reason I suggest this, is in order to add the insinuation that, if you regard any of these members in a mirror for some length of time, their aspect changes. For instance—you, my kind sir of the snub nose, affirm that your nose did not appear beautiful at first? But you will as well admit that its grossness lessened in accordance with the time spent in contemplating it. You got to know it just a little better than you knew it before. Or you who wear the slight scraggly beard—no, not you, madam—, will you kindly step forward to the glass and observe how your impression of that fringe changeth from the disgust of a reformed highwayman to the pride of a father? If we but had the time, we should spend a delightful afternoon, dear reader, watching such profitable changes in expression. Human nature is fascinating, is it not? But verily all of this—for I shall leave aside even the proposition of how such an outward change affects the spiritual grace—is merely to remark that by taking thought on any part of your person, no matter how small, you become acquainted correspondingly with such a part.

This is indeed great. For the action pleases the gazer supremely with his personality. Yet I hasten to assure you, my dear reader, that such a phenomenon is quite natural—because after all, we are all of us pretty much fools, and generally when a fool becomes better acquainted with himself, he becomes more endeared to himself. As to the question of the right or wrong of this human attribute, I make no advances, for it is aside from my position as recorder. But from what I have heard wise men say, I should judge it to be a lamentable weakness, especially lamentable since the whole evil appears to issue from a person’s having thought[13] too much. As a child I was taught to respect thought. And actually I once believed this to be a worthy hypothesis. But now, as I linger on the verge of a dreary grave, my old head is fearsomely shaken with doubt. Ah yes, to think that—but I had better not think!

When we think, we do not observe the golden mean. We rush in where angels fear to tread. We are not humble, as Christians. We are exalted, as fools—and as such we love ourselves. So when we are in the act of thinking, we will not leave off with any sane or wholesome solution. We believe such a conclusion not good enough for us. We call it barren. We must needs explore further. After finding a cliff at the edge of a rational plane of thought, we urge on and grope into the outer darkness. For the little time that faith supports we continue safely—and blindly—enough, and then—fall down on the rocks, where we proceed lame and disorderly—or like Peter, sink absolutely into an offended sea—and are not saved.

You must allow that when you work yourself into such a state, the effect on your feelings is far from pleasant, far from elegant even. I should imagine that one in the grip of mental excesses is not unlike the habitual user of drugs—the morphinomaniac, opium-eater, or alcoholic. The mood is surely delirious, grotesquely fanciful, spirit-ridden. Possibly you believe it is pitiful to see a strong and normal man slowly gathered in by some subtle influence to become a slave grovelling bestially before a false and gilded—but an all-compelling—idol. Aye! this is pitiful. But the pity of it is not the greatest part. Here are you, possessed of abilities, ambitions, loving friends, philanthropy of the highest kind, delighted with this world, and enchanted with the prospect of the next. You hope everything and you fear nothing. By some insidious trick of fate—a fate that preys upon an insignificant weakness of yours—you feel yourself subdued slightly by the nod of some dim gigantic animal. But you are not afraid. For your interests are so worthily turned elsewhere that you know the Thing to have little power compared to your own—and you do not care. Oh, therein lives the fearful irony! You may indulge in your morphine, your opium, or your thinking largely to aid your powers and your works. The undermining influence[14] is not felt—until too late. Yes, too late.... The degraded wretch moaning and whimpering, and shivering all over spasmodically as he tries to get up on his feet, and his rotted nerves will not respond—can you imagine the inner state of such a fellow? Do you not conceive that one day he may have been as fine—or a far finer—person than you? Imagine, then, the turbulence in his heart! He dreams back to old days, perceiving the former integrity of his character, the power of his mind and body—and compares all with the present. Maybe he fashions images of what to-day he might have been—beautiful glowing things, full of the light of heaven and of loveliness! He starts from his vile gutter, repelled by horror, and is about to rise magnificently—when a fit of the passion seizes him, and you watch him grovel in the nauseous mire. Happy beast he is—now. But the torture of his mind will return.

The agony which thinking induces by such means as I have outlined above leads me to consider for a trice its alternative, because it is joyous and fruitful. Can you imagine a green and yellow countryside, with a little white farmhouse amidst a cluster of dark oaks? Willows are near a cove in the stream below, which ripples its way coolly through the hot day. Do you hear the dry voice of a locust, or a cricket? Perhaps the bird in that isolated pine tree will be singing soon. Breathe deeply, for the sun is low over the hill and a colder, fairer wind blows from the dark woodland. You sense its fragrance, feel a thrill, and are deeply delighted with the whole atmosphere. But stay, I hear a slow cowbell and the barking of a collie.... The colors of the sunset are delicate and marvelously blended.—And winding down the path comes a small boy, with pails to fill at the brook for his mother. So it goes on. However clumsy the little picture, I have tried to indicate slightly the pleasure met with when you feel. These emotions of yours are sacred because they are unfathomable. And they are more beautiful than anything else you will ever know. As for the fruitfulness of imagination, I must let you judge more for yourself: I will only say that, when people are wearied out, the beauty of nature has ever been found more of a balm to their spirits than the futility of overheated thought. Thought and emotion are living in eternal conflict within you.[15] As one fills your life you have less room for the other. Any choosing....

The psychologist, that enigmatic rabbit born recently amid a litter of new ideas, maintains thought to be the only respect in which we differ from animals. Now in the light of this last word I had better not have used the term “rabbit”; but, however.... I should like to suggest (though I am not sure whether you will call me a squirrel or a guinea-pig) that we differ still more from animals in our power of imagination. You certainly have seen cartoons entitled “Wonder what a lobster thinks about,” but it is always you who do the wondering and not the lobster (no inference that you are one, sir). And you never see “Think what a jellyfish wonders about”! Furthermore, if the psychologist is entirely right, you who have followed so assiduously this essay—which is largely devoid of thought—are at least for the time being largely an animal. Are you?

L. HYDE.

There was a mystery about Captain Knox’s wife. Of course, everyone in Gull Harbor knew there had been a Mrs. Knox, but according to the best accounts no one had ever seen her. There were a few facts, however, upon which one could rely. Some thirty or forty years before, the captain, returning after a long voyage to the East, had announced himself a widower of recent bereavement. The existence of the captain’s spouse in Gull Harbor had begun, therefore, simultaneously with the knowledge of her decease.

A short time after the captain’s return, a neat gravestone was erected on the Knox farm, in the old burial lot, in which had already been laid to rest the bodies of the captain’s parents, two brothers, and an uncle. Upon the stone, by the captain’s order, was carved in plain lettering, “In memory of Selima, my beloved wife.”

The captain himself would often refer to her. “She was a pretty cretur, she was.” Beyond this, however, discussion of her was not tolerated in his presence.

By the time I came to know Gull Harbor, the captain’s seafaring career was over. The people of the village had long since recovered from the first excitement caused by the mystery of the captain and his wife, and conversation had drifted back into familiar channels of interest as to why Mel Hibbard’s sister had given up her flock of Plymouth Rocks, or speculations as to the color Mrs. Lovell, wife of the minister of the Adventist Church, would choose for her new front room carpet.

I had always felt a prejudice for the Maine coast and from the moment the Portland boat rounded the big rocky cove, I knew I should like Gull Harbor. There was a restful peace about the place peculiar to the seaboard of New England. The smell of low tide and drying codfish hung about the wharf. Almost immediately one felt at home.

[17]

I had not been two weeks in the town before I knew all that Gull Harbor had to tell about their distinguished captain. Didn’t I know Captain ’Thiel Knox, the man who commanded the first seven-masted schooner to sail the sea? Why, he had been to “Chiny” half a dozen times, and the Lord knows how many he has crossed the ocean. As a further mark of distinction he was the proud possessor of two long-haired cats which he had brought with him from Persia.

One day I happened to ask my landlady, Mrs. Simmons, an old resident and a noted gossip, if the captain was a widower, and then I learned of the mystery. “For it’s my opinion,” she added, after telling me the story, “that she was a Chiny woman, or mebbe a princess from Persy, though nobody’ll ever know. The captain he would never say a word; quiet’s a mouse on the subject. You oughter see him, Mr. Fitch. He’s real nice, and a great hand for company; all kinds, it don’t matter to him,” she finished in a tone which meant to include even the summer people.

A “fortnit” later (one can see how easily I slipped into the vernacular of the place), I was out sailing in a borrowed dory. It was a clear August morning; the sky, a healthy blue and cloudless; the tall spruce trees, interspersed here and there by a monumental pine, guarded the water’s edge.

By the time I had rounded the long point that lay between the harbor and the back bay beyond, a stiff breeze had sprung up. The churning blue stretched oceanward for miles, blotched by myriads of foamy white caps. The little dory rocked and twisted in the choppy waves. The sail, which was home-made, proved an easy victim of the wind, and I soon found to my dismay that I was drifting helplessly down the bay toward a stretch of shore that I had not yet visited. The boat moved rapidly. The trees along the shore were soon followed by a broad green field, which stretched up from a tiny harbor almost surrounded by a protecting arm of the sea toward which I was being driven. Gradually the water became shallower, and the wind reluctantly let me slip from its grasp. I was able to look about me. It was a very beautiful harbor.

Suddenly I was conscious of an old man in a dory, rowing towards me. He might have been Father Neptune risen from[18] the depths of the ocean for all I knew. Without a word he pulled my dilapidated boat ashore. Safely landed, I thanked him. He was an old man with a long white beard. He had on a tarpaulin and looked like a sailor.

“Ay-es,” he said pleasantly, when he had moored the two boats to the wharf (he gave me no opportunity to assist him). “I thought you was a landlubber, the moment I set eyes on you. Ye can’t tack without a center-board,” he added with a smile, the first he had given me. I blushed feebly at my hopeless mistake.

“I thought,” I began weakly, but he didn’t wait for me to finish.

“Won’t you come into the house for a bit?” he asked kindly. “You’re wet through, ain’t ye?” And he led the way to the little low shingled structure, fronted by a long porch upon which sat a large Persian cat, the handsomest I had ever seen.

“Thar, thar, Daisy bird, you’ve had enough pettin’ for one day,” as he brushed her gently aside, adding, as he noticed my admiration, “Got another, better lookin’ of the two, in the kitching. Won’t ye come in?”

“You’re not Captain Knox, are you?” I asked.

“Right you be! Salathiel Knox, captain, retired you call it, don’t ye?” and he smiled again.

While my clothes were drying, we sat around the fire and talked, the captain still in his tarpaulin, while I languished in a richly figured rug which he had produced from a locked cupboard in the kitchen. “Bought it in Singapore twenty-four years ago,” he added by way of dismissal of my compunction at wearing so valuable a possession. The captain smoked mildly while I told him who I was, making few comments, but when I tried to lead the conversation around to his own life he proved a poor subject for questioning. As Mrs. Simmons said to me afterwards, “The captain can talk when he’s a mind to, but land sakes, when he ain’t, it’s no use.”

The captain did remark, as I was leaving, that although he lived alone he wasn’t a bachelor; his wife, he said, was dead. “She was a pretty creatur, she was,” he added, half regretfully, as he laid down his pipe.

[19]

On my way home, my path led not far from the burial lot. I found the stone without difficulty and read the inscription.

The following summer, soon after we arrived, I paid my second visit to the Knox farm. I found the captain sitting on his porch, smoking. He didn’t remember me at first; but suddenly he burst out with, “Wall, I swan! You’re the young man that was tryin’ to tack in a dory without a center-board. I remember you, o’ course. Pretty good stuff, eh,” he added, “to tackle such a wind when you knew next to nothin’ o’ the sea. You’d make a good one, I’ll warrant.”

After that I often went to see him. He became quite loquacious at times and recounted some of his adventures. Always I expected he would run up against the mystery, but he never did. Few women were to be found in his stories.

One day I was surprised to see the captain at my door, seated in a new motor car. He had come to take me for a drive. I looked the machine over carefully.

“How does she go?” I asked.

“She sets all right,” he replied, cheerfully, “but she’s a bit wide in the stern.”

As we drove off together, he seemed in the best of spirits, although he admitted he was a “little nervous navigatin’ the new craft.”

On the way back, the captain became confidential. His story this time was concerned chiefly with a long sickness he had had in the Far East, and his romantic experience with a Malay girl. “She was a ripper, she was,” he added by way of comment.

“What was her name?” I inquired, with suppressed excitement, but he was intent upon turning a corner and did not answer. The next moment we were at the door of my house. He waved me good-bye as he disappeared around a bend in the road.

“Another opportunity lost,” I thought, as I walked up the path.

“It’s the Malay girl, Selima, I’ll be bound. That’s the mystery, Mr. Fitch. Didn’t he tell you she was a great beauty, all done up in rings and jewels?”

“Yes,” I answered absently.

[20]

This conversation took place about a week after my drive with the captain, while Mrs. Simmons was removing the breakfast dishes. I was reading the paper in the next room and did not like to be interrupted.

“I never heard him tell that story,” she continued, raising her voice above the clatter of the dishes. “He has taken you into his confidence, Mr. Fitch.”

“Then I fear I have more woefully betrayed it,” I replied without looking up.

Later I took a walk to the post office. The thought of the mystery, although I would have hesitated to acknowledge it even to myself, was making me positively uncomfortable.

“Was she really the Malay girl, after all?” I pictured the captain, young and handsome, walking up to the altar of a Buddhist temple with a Malay princess, dazzling with rings and jewels, leaning on his arm, her pale skin—no, the Malays were brown. I cursed my superior knowledge. Perhaps their princesses were not so dark. But my vision had faded; I was gazing at the floor of the Gull Harbor post office.

I took the road back which led by the captain’s. There was no sign of anyone as I passed. I wandered up by the burial lot. I wondered if Malay princesses were ever named Selima. On the way home I passed the captain. He waved to me pleasantly, as he rattled by.

“I will go to see him to-night,” I said to myself. It was after nine when I reached his house. The captain was still up. He was sitting in front of the kitchen fire, a long-haired cat on either side. He seemed glad to see me. We sat and smoked. The logs crackled cheerfully. They reminded me somehow of my host. An hour flew by; conversation was gradually relaxing into silent contemplation. Suddenly I burst forth:

“Captain,” I said, desperately, “you remember the Malay woman you told me of the other day. Was her name Selima?”

For a moment I was afraid I had offended him. All of a sudden he began to laugh. Little by little his merriment increased, until his whole powerful frame was shaking. He trembled so that his glasses bobbed up and down on his nose like a cork. His chair creaked. Even his beard looked merry.

[21]

“Selima! Selima!” and he went off into another gale. Then, seeing my doubtful expression, he tried to pull himself together. “Selima! Selima! She was a pretty creetur’, she was,” and he laughed again. I was forced to join with him; his humor was catching.

“I know what’s a-worrying you,” he said. “It’s the mystery. There never was a boarder within twelve miles of this town whom they haven’t filled up with the story of my mysterious weddin’. They’re half curious themselves, though the Lord knows they’d oughter have more sense. Selima!” He laughed, the tears filling his eyes as he began again. “Selima! There never was any sech person! To think I have fooled this town for fifty years! It’s too much. I laugh about it nights.” Again catching my strained face, “Still curious?” he inquired with a twinkle.

“I’ll tell ye, but you mustn’t spoil my joke. D’ye understand? I guess I can trust ye,” he added confidentially, and settling himself in his chair he began.

“It’s not a long story,” he said, glancing at his watch. “About forty years ago, or mebbe more, when I was perhaps half as old as I am now, I lived here alone, when I warn’t on the water, which warn’t very much. It was close on to September, only a day or two or mebbe three before I was to sail from ‘Porchmouth’. She was a five-master, a beauty ef there ever was a handsome vessel.” The captain paused as if to recall her more vividly. “Gullnair was her name, brand new that year. Wall, it was a day or two before I was to sail, as I was tellin’ ye. I was out here in the pasture right over yonder by the old spring”—he pointed with a sailor’s thumb—“I had been gatherin’ berries and after a bit I lay down under a tree. I had been lobsterin’ all mornin’ and was tired. When I woke up I heard two women talkin’. They’re both dead now, but in their day they wuz the gol-durndest busybodies that ever I heard tell on. They was berryin’ and talkin’—about me, would you believe it? Speculatin’ as to why a nice lookin’ man (I hadn’t sech a bad complexion in those days,” added the captain reflectively as he rubbed his hand over his rough face)—“they was a wonderin’ why I didn’t get married. Was it because I had a hidden life? Did the girls object to my swearin’? Was I—the Lord preserve us, what didn’t[22] they say? They came to the conclusion that I didn’t marry because no one would have me. I could have strangled them both at that. I was hot headed in those days.” All the fun had faded from the captain’s face.

“After they went away,” he continued, “I began to think it over. At first I cal’lated I had better get married right away. There were a dozen of ’em hereabouts that very minute who would have taken me with a whoop. I had always tried to steer clear of the women heretofore. Second thoughts, thinks I, why not let the matter go driftin’ for awhile, anyway? So I did. But all the time that I was at sea it bothered me. On the home’ard voyage we struck a bad storm and the Gullnair went to the bottom after a brave fight, sir, after a brave fight! Most of the crew was drownded. I was saved by a miracle. Never mind about that now! Wall, sir, after I was picked up—she was a freighter bound for New York, as luck would have it—there come to me a big idea.

“When I got home I let them know I was a widower, married while I was away. Of course they understood she had been drownded on the ship. I wore a black band on my arm for a time. Seein’ as there as warn’t no suspicions in the wind, ‘I’ll make a full job of it,’ I says to myself. ‘I’ll set up a stone in the burial lot to her memory’. And that’s what I did. Wall, they come to write the inscription; I told them the words, but when they asked me for the name, I said kind o’ flustered like, ‘Selima’. It was the first one that popped into my head. That’s all.” The captain smiled, turning his gaze into the fire.

“Then you weren’t ever in love?” I said, with the faintest inflection in my voice.

The captain blew out a great puff of smoke, looked at me over the top of his glasses, and smiled.

MYLES WHITING.

Beauty

Fear of God

“I’ve never told anyone how I happened to become a priest because, for the first few years after ordination I didn’t like to recall the circumstances surrounding it, and afterwards, when they had lost most of their sting, the whole thing was so deeply buried in the past that I never resurrected it. But now, since I’m reaching that point where the events of my life appear to me more as interesting stories than anything else, I may as well tell it to you from that point of view.

“To begin with, I had, at twenty, a pretty definite philosophy. I thought of life and all its functions, as created by the divine hand of God, to be essentially perfect. Man was created, according to the teaching of the Church, in God’s image and likeness. The very highest good, to me, was to live in an accord as close as possible to the universal laws of nature. Man’s natural state is[24] good, and when he violates this state he undergoes a physical reaction, called shame, over which he has no control whatsoever. I had this underlying belief, which was clarified more or less by reading Walt Whitman and Carlyle, though I added some ideas of my own which I found in neither of these. But I can’t swear that they aren’t there. I drew no such sharp lines as are generally drawn between physical and spiritual love, but visualized, or rather, believed in, an ideal love in which both are combined, and which, by this combination raise each other to far higher levels, both collectively and individually. I rejected a purely abstract affection of the spirit as weakness, since it does accept and is out of tune with nature. That was Carlyle. And there was the only point of the whole matter that I have since come to question, though I have not actually put it aside. I wonder if I could still hold to it had I married. But if I reject this, the whole thing breaks down, so I must cling to it, though it does waver. I had always been a Catholic, and as far as I could see there was no conflict between my doctrine and that of the Church. In addition, though I realized that this was a personal viewpoint and couldn’t be brought to bear too closely on the other, beauty was to me rarely seductive. My moments of desire were, for the most part, connected with the most intense ugliness.

“At this time I was in love with a girl who was exactly the ideal of it all. She too was a Catholic and had been educated in a convent for the greater part of her life. She had not the clarity of feature that generally characterizes beauty, but possessed something infinitely more subtle than this. If you’ve ever seen one of those glorious green Irish hills that look as if they’ve been drawn up fresh from the depths of the earth by the hand of God, you’ll understand what I mean. She had the same original force of beauty in the rough mold of her face, which was at the same time miraculously soft, and free from cold line. Her whole head was clothed in a sort of cloudiness, like Venus, the mother of Aeneas, appearing to her son. Her body, and mind, and voice were so harmonious an expression of good that goodness was with her almost a physical quality. She had almost never come in contact with wrong, but I know she would have been the same under any circumstances. It’s easy to understand how I could hold to my[25] beliefs here; I loved her as much for her body as for her spirit. She had the same sweet curves and moved with the same music as a green, young tree bent in the wind.”

He was silent for a moment, and gazed into the thick purple sky, underneath which the sea beat tirelessly at the rocks which fringed the bottom of the cliff.

“Unfortunately, she didn’t love me, but had the same sort of affection a girl has for a very good friend of the opposite sex. However, as we were both quite young (she eighteen) I had plenty of hope that as soon as I was in a position to ask her to marry me, she would accept.

“Then, in the summer after her graduation from the convent, I learned that she was determined to return there in the fall as a nun! For two or three days after this discovery I was in a state of almost continual mental anguish, that she, a creature so beautifully alive, should keep the precious gift of herself from the world, and especially from me,—though curiously enough I looked at it from the general rather than the individual point of view. I was completely stunned.

“I had never definitely settled in my mind the question of priests and nuns remaining unmarried. This was through nothing more nor less than overlooking it, which I cannot understand, since it should have been so vital to me. But now I came out dead against it. To me it seemed that, since those who served God and were supposed to be leading the highest life possible to man were not permitted to marry, the Church put a mark of disapproval on the married state and the begetting of children. It was not the actual celibacy of the priests and nuns that concerned me most, but the disapprobation of what I considered the most spiritual act of life. I suppose I should have gone to a priest to learn the defense for it, but I became so prejudiced myself that I imagined that his point of view or any explanation he might make could be nothing else but prejudiced.”

He paused again, this time to light his pipe, which he pulled on for many long seconds before resuming the story, while I held my tongue and gazed into the vast plain of darkness.

[26]

“After a while the pain ceased, and I lapsed into a state almost of indifference, though the day she was to leave for the convent was pretty nearly always on my mind. Strangely enough I can’t for the life of me think what it was now, though I shall never forget what happened on the day itself.

“I went to her home, which was quite a large estate, to bid her good-bye. I still had the indifferent feeling, though my mind had that queer, detached sensation one gets in a fever, and felt, somehow, as if it were outside of the rest of me. Her brothers and sisters and I sat about talking constrainedly until the time came for her departure. She was to go off in the carriage to the station with no one accompanying her save the coachman. It rolled up to the door and they all crowded out to see her off. They were a rather grim lot, standing there, though no one was weeping. As for her, her face had the strangest mixture of joy and sorrow, which was exactly mirrored in her mother’s. The rest were all frankly and achingly unhappy. I was relapsing more and more and more into a dazed condition.

“When she said good-bye to me, I took her hand, quite unconsciously, and kissed it. It was trembling, which pierced my heart and made me gasp violently. I have no recollection at all of her actual departure, but when she was gone I must have been overcome by it, for I heard some one say, ‘He’s going to faint,’ and then one of her brothers took me inside and gave me a drink. I had several more, which increased my state of mental detachment, but did not affect my mental processes in the least. After a while I went outside the house and wandered about the lawn, until finally I sat down on a bench bordering a wide patch of grass on which there were no trees or shrubbery of any kind. I don’t think I noticed it, but night had practically fallen, and darkness was gradually enveloping the place. The thought of her trembling hand kept coming back to me, making the blood in my head throb violently, when suddenly, with a wrench that shook my whole body, my head cleared absolutely. I realized then, for the first time, that she was irretrievably gone, and the realization flung me into a rage. I cursed God in unutterable vileness for taking her from me, for making of life such a deceiving, rotten thing, and for setting me down in the midst of it! I am neither a savage,[27] nor a superstitious idiot, but as I stand here, I wonder I wasn’t struck down by His almighty hand for the filth and blasphemy I put upon my tongue that night!

“Then, out on the very center of the lawn before me, appeared a column of cottony-white smoke which, by indescribable foldings, formed itself into a woman of the most unearthly and terrible beauty. She was naked, and each particle of her white skin seemed to be shouting the fact of her nakedness aloud. The steely outline of her bare flesh cut the stuff of night away, and flashed out its blinding brilliance.

“She commenced to sing. There is a certain way of striking a harp which 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.”

[28]

“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)

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[31] 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.

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.

[33]

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.

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.

[34]

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[35] the chapter entitled, “The Lives of the Poets”, may show what we mean:

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:

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.

[36]

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[37] 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.

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.

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