Vol. LXXXVIII No. 8

The
Yale Literary Magazine

Conducted by the
Students of Yale University.

“Dum mens grata manet, nomen laudesque Yalenses

Cantabunt Soboles, unanimique Patres.”

May, 1923.

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It has been usual, in the past, for Editors of The Yale Literary Magazine to express themselves as strongly opposed to something, when engaged in writing a leader. Two recent leaders have varied this procedure to the extent of declaring the opposition of their authors to opposition, but the principle of being opposed to something remains. At the present moment, it occurs to us that it might be interesting to suppose correct a few of the pessimistic opinions held by that rather noisy group whom we shall call The Troubled Spirits. On the basis of these suppositions, we shall then try to show that, bad as things are, there still remain a few bright spots lurking in unsuspected corners of the very evils whose existence we are admitting, for the sake of argument.

A convenient starting point may perhaps be found in the Compulsory Sunday Chapel question. It can be urged that the two services now provided prevent anyone from claiming that he is[246] forced to listen to propaganda in the form of a sermon, on Sunday. But The Troubled Spirits, whose positions we are now admitting, regard the matter differently. If we are correctly informed, they consider it a fact, however unpleasant, that the average Yale student feels a very real, if unofficial, compulsion to attend whichever Sunday service is held at a later hour than the other. The Troubled Spirits defy the University to hold the short service at eleven o’clock, and the long one at ten—believing that their position would be more than vindicated by the lack of attendance at the earlier service. In short, so far as The Troubled Spirits are concerned, Sunday service is at eleven o’clock, and contains a sermon varying in length from twenty minutes to half an hour.

But after allowing all that, and allowing, too, that the visiting clergymen are attempting to foist opinions of their own upon the undergraduate body, there is still something to be said. In the first place, we imagine that The Troubled Spirits, on leaving college, will perform their undoubted duty of attacking Christianity with every resource in their power. Hence, were we in their place, we should ask nothing better than to have all the foremost of our enemies brought before us, at great expense, and exposed in such a manner that we could most easily detect the flaws in their armor, which we were later to pierce.

Secondly, there will be certain of The Troubled Spirits whose ardor will evaporate on leaving college, and who will allow the public opinion of their friends and relatives to force them to church again every Sunday. To these we should like to say that observations upon the sermons of more than one pitifully underpaid clergyman have convinced us, from The Troubled Spirits’ point of view, that in this respect “the worst is yet to come”. However stupid and unthinking The Troubled Spirits may find the highly cultured, and in many cases highly paid, gentlemen who speak at Yale, they will find the less highly paid, and not infrequently less cultured, type of man to whom they are destined, infinitely more stupid, and perhaps positively unpalatable. The flowers of rhetoric, when blended skillfully into a delicately fragrant and perfumed discourse, are, indeed, far more expensive than a bouquet of orchids—few of us will ever be able to afford them again. And so, after a lapse of years, I can imagine an old[247] and embittered Troubled Spirit attempting a Drydonian paraphrase to this effect:—

That, of course, would happen to very few Troubled Spirits, but it is not impossible.

Having attempted to prove, let us hope with some slight measure of success, that even the most troubled of The Troubled Spirits may find some crumb of consolation in present-day Sunday Chapel conditions, let us pass on to another example. Perhaps, by way of trivial digression, it might be interesting to speak of the feeling among The Troubled Spirits that Osborn Hall should be summarily destroyed as a relic of a past and barbarous age. Here, though we might admit the contentions of The Troubled Spirits as before, we think it more serviceable merely to recommend that The Troubled Spirits go and look at Osborn Hall. If our own spirits were troubled, we can imagine nothing more soothing than to look at Osborn Hall for the first time. Around the front of the main entrance runs a band of stonework carved with animals and foliage exactly resembling the woodcuts in The Troubled Spirits’ favorite magazines. One of the beavers, in particular, is gnawing away at a capitalistic grapevine with a communistic fury only to be called prophetic. Again, we have never seen anything more “advanced” than the exquisite mosaiced representation of a steamboat complete with paddle-wheels, which adorns the under surface of one of the arches. It is exactly the same thing as the “Painting Of A Train of Gear Wheels” sold recently in Paris as the latest example of Da Da. It seems, then, that this matter might very well rest by allowing The Troubled Spirits to admire Osborn Hall as a sample of the latest phase in unrepressed art, while the rest of us respect it as an example of what our grandfathers were fond of, and of what our grandsons will treat with veneration. But to return to things less trivial—

As this is written, the Senior class have voted that the most important thing needed by Yale is football victories, and we are, for once, in accord with The Troubled Spirits in thinking that our gridiron defeats are dreadful things. They may not go so far as[248] to admit, with The Troubled Spirits, that football at Yale has become not the most manly but the most sentimental of sports, yet they do attach great weight to the matter. The Troubled Spirits, I understand, go much further, and assert that year after year the University is expected to have confidence, trust, or perhaps blind faith in the team. They would have us believe that Yale has been taught to accept defeat with a pious resignation that savors of slave morality. And then they point to other fields of endeavor. Is the student given a long cheer by his parents before going into an examination, and assured that it won’t matter anyhow if he fails? Does the greatest of generals receive the same amount of encouragement from his people no matter if his success be large or small? The Troubled Spirits have put these questions to many of us, and, without waiting for reply, answered them almost vulgarly in the negative. They remark that it is fundamentally self-evident that one must spur one’s charger, not feed him lumps of sugar, before going into battle. And therefore they would attempt to excite the student body to such a pitch that to be a member of a team defeated by Harvard would not be an wholly enviable post.

But, even supposing there was a word of truth in these extreme views, it seems to us that, while The Senior Class, The Troubled Spirits, and ourselves are agreed in desiring a football victory as soon as possible, we may as well take pleasure in a certain aspect of these defeats which is very desirable in a quiet way. It has always been held that football victories help to stimulate enrollment, and it is universally admitted that the enrollment of the University is far too large as it is. Likewise, victorious Harvard is swamped with “race problems” and what not, which do not trouble us. We are permitted to jog along without attacks from “degraded races, who are trying to cast off the yoke of oppression with the key of learning”, and want a look through our keyhole. That, at least, is a consoling thought. May it bring a little peace to The Troubled Spirits.

LAIRD SHIELDS GOLDSBOROUGH.

When Miss Amy Lowell, in an essay upon the poetry of Edwin Arlington Robinson, expressed a doubt whether Mr. Robinson’s recent popularity had not gone to his head and would for the future endanger his work, no one then reading could fully comprehend the ineptitude of her fear. Perhaps the reader severely questioned her, but he could not be convinced until Roman Bartholow appeared to prove that any such statements as Miss Lowell’s were erroneous. Miss Lowell has based her fear, curiously enough, upon the melodramatic poem Avon’s Harvest, in which, though the poet was but playing with dime novel effects, his verse was more masterfully composed than in any of his earlier poems. Avon’s Harvest in its technique alone revealed a tightening of the poet’s art. His cadences were more definite, his vocabulary less elaborate, his construction certain and replete with the artlessness of art. There was to be seen no machinery in this poem, for it had vanished in the poet’s change to an objective method. The faults of Merlin and of Lancelot were due only to construction and that construction itself to an intensely subjective method. In these poems Mr. Robinson did not let the story tell itself as he was wont to do in the now famous short poems, but he must, for Merlin and Lancelot are essentially lyric dramas, sing for himself the love motifs, the tragedies as he himself experienced them. For this reason he must weave the story according to the whispering of his own moods. And in so doing he must lay himself open to attack on the grounds of incoherence of form. Miss Lowell was indeed one of the first of his critics to notice this, yet it is surprising that she should have refused to see in Avon’s Harvest the correction of the faults she censured in the lyrics; to wit, the change of treatment, the growth of sureness that the poet’s objective manner was displaying. That essential objectivity which distinguishes Flammonde, Richard Cory, and Zola, which previously was employed only to etch a character in a paucity of strokes,—that objectivity,[256] with the publication of Avon’s Harvest, Mr. Robinson announced to be the latest of his secrets for the writing of narrative poetry.

Though he followed this poem with others in the objective manner, the most remarkable of which is the little known Avenel Gray, no complete study has appeared until his last narrative poem, Roman Bartholow, a work that is dramatic, expressive, and yet holds about it more folds of dignity and power than even the elegiac The Man Against the Sky. Roman Bartholow, because of its complete and extensive objectivity, impresses one most signally with its inevitability, a characteristic which Mathew Arnold termed the basis for all great poetry. From the opening lines where Bartholow gazes down upon “a yellow dusk of trees” to the close of the last canto there is never a moment when the story does not move silently ahead, dynamically, inevitably, since the author has been able to withhold comment, and since he has purposely avoided an obvious climax. Mr. Robinson can no longer see climax in life, for to him destinies are decided well in advance of any catastrophe, so that the climax that does appear in the poem is one miraculously cast in overtones. No word comes from the poet that it is at hand. No word comes from the characters. The word is found in the reader’s mind, forcing him to believe its presence. He knows that Gabrielle, though she would “shrivel to deny it”, is come to the end of all her hopes. He knows she can only accept her fate. There is nothing more to say. The poet has only set down the theme, for the story has of its own force driven itself to its conclusion with the majestic restraint of an Aeschylean tragedy.

Mr. Robinson has discovered that to take Nature as she is is not necessarily to say to the player that he may sit on the piano.

Yet this taking of Nature as she is, despite the fact that Mr. Robinson calls the theme a “good deal of a mix up”, in no wise complicates the bare plot. Roman Bartholow, an ailing descendant of an old Maine family, is brought to know again the joy of life by acquaintance with a man that comes to visit him and forgets to go away. This Penn-Raven, though he works a cure for Bartholow, succeeds in doing the opposite for Roman’s wife. He falls in love with her and, before the opening of the poem, has for some time possessed her adequately. Gabrielle is a peculiar[257] character, but let it suffice here to say that the liaison with Penn-Raven is no answer to her problem. In Bartholow she married the wrong man, and the Raven she comes to find intolerable. She is one who has always suffered disappointments. It is no wonder, therefore, that, realizing she cannot fully enter into Bartholow’s renascence as he would have her do, in an effort to save for him his new-found light she drowns herself. Thenceforward the solution is cruelly plain. Bartholow, unaware of Gabrielle’s act and provoked by Penn-Raven, pays him to leave the house. Word is then brought that Gabrielle is drowned. That is in midsummer. It is fall when Bartholow himself leaves the house forever to go whither he will, cherishing the light of his regeneration the while he thinks of Gabrielle who couldn’t follow his rebirth, not being reborn in his manner, and who threw herself away.

These men and this one woman are the persons around whom the whole power of Mr. Robinson’s poetry abides. Yet there is one of whom I have not spoken, a fisherman who, though playing a minor part, frets his useful time upon the stage. He makes his appearance in the two opening cantos and again in the last two. Once in the final scene between Penn-Raven and Gabrielle he is referred to as one who knows more of their relation than even Bartholow. Thus his function is immediately evident. He is the chorus that gives its warning and advice. More than that, he is the mouthpiece to Mr. Robinson’s own thoughts.

That spring when, out of a winter steeped in night, Bartholow was

there came to him from across the river this prophet-fisherman, this hobo scholiast with his face “to frighten Hogarth” who was at once

He came to Bartholow dressed in “a checkered inflammation of myriad hues” and bearing as a peace-offering for his appearance a catch of trout for breakfast. Presumably he came to bring the fish and drink a glass, but incidentally he was curious to investigate this new birth of Roman’s and to discover if it blinded his eyes[258] so that he saw nothing further than acquaintance between Penn-Raven and his wife. Wherefore he sat with Roman and heard recounted the glory of being alive once more. But Umfraville was wise. He was in the eyes of the world “irremediably defeated” and for that reason had hid himself back in the woods where he

Hence from this distance he was able to understand the flood of human nature and capable of pronouncing judgment upon it. He was gifted, as he said, with an “ingenuous right of utterance” which gave him full license to speak his mind. He knew that Gabrielle’s unfaithfulness must come to Roman’s ears. He knew the tragedy that it would be to this proud, sensitive friend of his, and, knowing it, offered his aid if ever Roman’s light should be obscured.

It is in brilliant contrast to this “unhappy turtle” that Penn-Raven appears, Penn-Raven, the bounder, archguest, corruptor and healer in one breath. He it is, with his solid face, thick lips and violet eyes, upon whom “one may not wholly look and live”, for in Penn-Raven there is more of the devil than is safe to investigate. The devil only knows why he came to Bartholow, why he possessed those violet eyes withal, and, after he had met Gabrielle, why the devil he ever went away. He was large and muscular and imbued with a healthy-mindedness which could purge the soul of Roman. Not only was he able to change this man’s outlook upon life, bringing him light where only darkness had lain, but he could worm his way to the heart of Gabrielle and make her his for as long as he chose. He loved her with all the force of his animal self, yet he could hint to her that she was insufficient to Bartholow’s present needs. Callous Penn-Raven! He never understood Gabrielle, though he later called her “flower and weed together”. In her he saw mostly the weed, the woman who had forsaken her husband and who might be expecting him to take her away. So he thought and so he said to her, not noticing the agony he caused. He did not know the woman he[259] later called the flower who, though she had surrendered herself to his affections, yet saved for Roman a far transcending love. Thus to hint that she go with him was perhaps insulting her. At any rate it was a brutal intimation, a selfish one—and Penn-Raven was always brutal and always selfish. He could cry aloud of his tragedies and disillusions, the while the woman by his side was preparing herself to die. He could confront the husband with a nasty truth, looking upon him with those violet eyes, half triumphant and half sad. “Setting it rather sharply,” he could say, “you married the wrong woman.”

Poor Bartholow and proud! Stung with the malevolent implications with which Penn-Raven sought to gain Gabrielle, Bartholow once leaped upon him, feeling his “thick neck luxuriously yielding to his fingers”, and in his absurd pride thought to throttle him. At that time he was experiencing more pain than ever he had through the long winter before. He as a proud idealist was waking up to the fact that to be bathed in a new light is not to be external to sorrow.

Imagine his position. During the months previous to the spring when he “ached with renovation”, Bartholow had suffered from the malady of the sick-soul. His hopes were dulled, his ideals gone crashing. In his wife, for whom he cherished a desire to bring her closer to his thoughts, he found a woman cold and bitter from the disappointments she had suffered. Plainly she knew she had married the wrong man, plainly he did not know it. For to him life meant no more than disillusion, until one day, perhaps in April, life brought Penn-Raven with his zest for living, with his red-corpuscular religion of healthy-mindedness. To Bartholow, ready to catch at anything, this formidable spirit was the light. He grasped and claimed it. The light was his remaking. He was of the elect of earth, the twice-born. With joy gleaming in his eyes, he was up at dawn that spring morning,

Penn-Raven was the Friend! Blessed Penn-Raven! He had given him gold with which to build the city of his desires. There was Gabrielle. How glad she would be to help him build that[260] city, that house of gold in particular where he and she should live! She should be partner to his every mood. Gabrielle too should receive rebirth and with him build that house. Poor Bartholow!

Bartholow is a man upon whom the Light has fallen. What he will do with it is the subject of the poem. Where Lancelot was the study of a man in pursuit of the Light, Roman Bartholow is the study of a man after the Light had come. If both men were heroes in the sense that Galahad was a hero, no suffering would be entailed. But these are mortal men and mortal men are plagued with ignorance and frailty. Each has to learn that when the Light gleams before him he must follow it alone. Alone he must live in the Light. Alone he must fight for it. Few men know this and of all men Bartholow was the most unaware.

Bartholow then, because he did not know that his new position demanded the leaving of the old, still clung, but with added eagerness, to the hope of entering into spiritual communion with his wife. He was ever besieging her with his hopes and reproving her for delinquency, but by degrees he came to perceive that she would never erect that house with him. Gabrielle had two reasons, neither of which he knew. She was no longer his wife and she alone realized that the Light for him might mean the night for her. Roman was too wrapt up in himself to discover the first, the second he could learn, as Gabrielle had learned, only through suffering. So on he hoped and thought about it. Then Gabrielle, revealing that weakness, that was so peculiarly hers, of telling preferably the wrong and obvious reason for her delinquency to the right and subtle one, made it out to him that she could not share his light because Penn-Raven was hers too intimately. Anon came the Raven himself and forced the truth upon the husband, making a darkness to cover him that was far more agonizing than any he had known. When Bartholow saw this and would abandon the Light to seek again a less tormented existence, Penn-Raven said to him, “There is no going back”. He said, with an insight and eloquence unusual to him,

Like Job, when Jehovah spoke to him out of the heavens, Bartholow listened to the sentence placed upon him by one who had brought him light only to obscure it darkly. He listened and behold he was like a man that understands. He was quickly to know what Gabrielle in her suicide had done for him, and it was well he understood, before he learned of her, that he was free to live a life of knowledge and of sympathy with man, that he was alone, and that not even Gabrielle could build a golden house with him. Sadly he replied,

Poor Bartholow! It was a hard road along which he forced himself to go, proud, defiant, hopeful, until the night when he found the Raven, like a reproving older child, pinning him to his chair lest he again try to annihilate him. After that he knew what was before him, for he was no longer hopeful, defiant, or proud. He had learned as Lancelot and like him

[262]

Penn-Raven had brought the Light and showed Bartholow how it must be followed. But it was Gabrielle who was “too beautiful to be alive” that revealed to him its incessant worth. It was Roman’s wife who failed and died, Gabrielle whom Penn-Raven loved, for whom Roman hungered, Gabrielle, whose

Gabrielle in whom there was much of spring, much of chilly fall, much of Botticelli—a shadowed mingling of violets and wintergreen. Bartholow saw this and that morning, when she stood in the doorway, half awake, watching his springtime antics of adoration of his new self in his looking-glass, he found her irresistible and

“He told unheard”. There, there was the cloud that must bring him darkness. Gabrielle did not heed him.

For the sake of an explanation, let us first attribute her listlessness to a dislike of physical affections from her husband. Let us say, along with Penn-Raven, that she retreated from Roman because she was an adultress, that she told him she would never build that house because that house would be founded on a lie. Infidelity must out. How great then would be the tumbling down of Roman’s house! A woman guilty as she could never hope to build a spiritual house.

Such an explanation of Gabrielle’s lack of enthusiasm is at first glance somewhat superficial. The Gabrielle of the poem who has moved us so profoundly is not the woman Penn-Raven describes in this manner. Gabrielle was not motivated by selfishness and cowardice. She did not die because she feared her husband.[263] Yet, however one interpret Gabrielle, this judgment of her, which Penn-Raven voiced, remains partially correct. Gabrielle was essentially “flower and weed together”. In the eyes of the men the weed was uppermost and, provokingly at that, discouragingly beautiful. Wintergreen and violets! This weed to Bartholow was just a bit shallow and colder than any fish in any ocean. She mocked his renascent gestures, his Greek, and even mistook Apollo for Narcissus when she found him looking in his mirror. She even had a cursed habit of innuendo, so it seemed, for after a pretty speech of his about a soul groping in its loneliness, out she came with a furtive remark that the fish upon her plate was “beautiful, even in death”.

Shallow Gabrielle! Selfish, faithless, beautiful Gabrielle! Thus men saw her until it was too late to see her again. Like Flammonde, what was she and what was she not?

Gabrielle’s superficiality, at first so evident, appears to be explained by her later actions. In cantos IV and V Gabrielle is very far from any taint of superficiality. It is only at the outset that she gives the impression. This is done by Mr. Robinson in order that the reader may understand the attitudes of Bartholow and Penn-Raven toward her. What Gabrielle really is the reader will shortly discover. But the touch of the weed, nevertheless, remains. It was part of Gabrielle and she employed it as a protection against her lovers. Fearing lest Penn-Raven find her suffering, she preferred to be tortured by him rather than reveal herself. Against Bartholow she adopted it because, knowing herself to be totally outside his mystical experience, she hoped to ease his desires of building impossible houses.

Gabrielle, indeed, is worthy of infinite pity. Beset at once by the Raven’s exhortations that she go away with him, and by her husband with his mysticism, her situation was precarious. No light had come to her, but since it had fallen blessedly upon her husband, to aid him in his holding it was her duty. That she might desert him to sink again into the night she refused to consider. That she might do nothing but remain with him she pondered carefully. If so she stayed she could not save him. She was not worthy, as he himself had bitterly reproached her, of his mysteries. Yet how he prayed she might be! Without her all[264] would be as it had been, though Gabrielle knew differently. She knew he must follow the Light alone. Such was the law. It was decreed that she look with “tired and indolent indifference” upon the spring that was for Roman the beginning of a new life. “I am not worthy of your mysteries”, she had said with an insight at once supreme. Afterwards she told him,

A different light was come to Gabrielle. As she spoke these words, a “pale fire” descended upon her, shriveling the weed, giving luxuriance to the flower. A miracle alone could have revealed to her the truth, and if it was not a miracle, it was the light from her own tragedy. She had failed, in marrying Bartholow, to find the being she sought. Likewise Penn-Raven had disappointed her. But she loved her husband for the light that had come to him. The Light was greater than herself. Wherefore of Bartholow she thought,

No one had known the flower that grew within the weed. No one had cared to search beyond a certain libidinous examination. She, however, was aware. The command was come that she save Bartholow. She accepted. With her determination made she resisted two trying interviews with Penn-Raven and her husband, who successively tried to wound her sensitivity more deeply. The Raven groaned about his tragedies and disillusions, while Gabrielle was going out to die. There was nothing more in life for her than an austere duty, implacable and dark.

But a cruel farewell to her husband and the faces were for her no more. This woman, greater in every way than Vivian or[265] Guinevere, Gabrielle, the one complete and incisive expression of a poet’s ideal, the crowning achievement to a brilliant tier of characters, Gabrielle who stepped above the broken ruins of her life to save a weak man, this Gabrielle crept stilly from the house and, before descending, paused a moment in the night.

Yes, she was surely dead before she died. Tragedies had been her secret playthings and there was nothing left, nothing but to follow her peculiar light. Like Juliet her dismal scene she must act alone. She must go—forever. But the going was not difficult, for she was dead before she died.

Truly if one lingers over this pitiable death of Gabrielle’s, protesting against a destiny that will enact such evil, there is bound to rise in one’s mind the many instances in Mr. Robinson’s poetry where the same story is told. It is in The Children of the Night that this judgment of the world found its earliest expression, thenceforward developing until it has now reached its culmination. Here, in Roman Bartholow, in the magic loveliness of Gabrielle it has come to a noble conclusion.

Previous to this poem Mr. Robinson’s philosophy has expressed itself negatively. It is his belief that evil is the result of moral choice. He does not call disease, accident, or war by the name of evil, because it is possible to look forward to a day when such excrescences will be removed. Evil, to Mr. Robinson, is that which is ineradicable and the ineradicable is the situation resulting from moral choice. Man has little free will. He is continuously obliged to make a choice against his wish, a choice that will bring disappointment. We have seen how Orestes was locked in evil perplexity when the alternative was presented: either to obey heaven, slay his mother, and be damned by earth, or to obey earth, forgive his mother, and be damned by heaven. Whichever[266] road he followed evil overtook him. Whichever road we choose, says Mr. Robinson, evil must overtake us—with this one exception, however, that whereas Aeschylus believed the gods brought man to his doom, Mr. Robinson maintains that it is man’s own frailty. Take Lancelot for an example. Lancelot has come to a point where he must make a moral choice. Either he can accept the Light and forsake Guinevere, or he can retain the Queen and lose the Light. The alternative is implacable. The one or the other, it says. There is no middle way nor any synthesis. To accept the new situation and leave the old, that is the way of truth. Only by that way can man hope to achieve happiness. If he attempt to mediate, then he will lash himself and cry in Lancelot’s words,

Thus, previous to Roman Bartholow, Mr. Robinson, believing that man can rarely leave his old surroundings for the new, has developed his philosophy from the negative side. He has not treated of the attainment of the Light, but has showed the struggle of the man who is making the choice. He has been interested in the man’s failure and in consequence he has written of Merlin, Lancelot, and of Seneca Sprague.

With Roman Bartholow, however, he has represented in Gabrielle a complete and final expression of the positive side of his philosophy. Many years ago in an exquisite lyric, Bon Voyage, he wrote fleetingly of a man who saw his light and claimed it. But the poem was only a scherzo, a dash down the hill. Mocking the “little archive men” who tried to extract therefrom a “system” of thought, it raced away. Yet it contained a seed that to-day has burst into a flower that Gabrielle is, or was. It told of a man who had left the old. He had been as courageous as Galahad. To-day Gabrielle is such.

Roman, of course, in finding the Light, was obliged to abandon his earlier hopes of building that house with Gabrielle. Roman like Lancelot was unable to meet that requirement. He failed, and would have perished had it not been for Gabrielle. She was to reveal to him her incessant worth. The Light for Gabrielle demanded a mad sacrifice. There was no happiness entailed.[267] There was alone the recompense of that cold, resistless river. Leaving an inexorable world as she followed the light, she was, to complete the list of the poet’s figures, the one

Thus, after the tale is told, comes the realization of the ultimate isolation of man. Gabrielle had gone away alone. Penn-Raven too had disappeared. Each was bound from the other by ineradicable law. There never could have been a golden house with two to build it. It is not thus we are made. Bartholow was to come to understand that he could not build but by himself, that his renascence was a gift to him alone. It was Umfraville, who saw what he could see and was accordingly alone, who summed it up when he said,

So Bartholow left him there on the steps of the old house that he had sold after the others had disappeared. Umfraville was free and Bartholow, with his memories before him, was alone and free. A cold fire was his light to prove, but he knew it never would go out. There would always be with him the memories of Gabrielle, the cool fragrance of her body, the silent beauty of her deed. The key he held in his hand was the key to the ivied house. The key he held was his no longer. For the last time it had locked for him a door that once had opened to so much pain. But a tide was come and there were no more sand castles. All was as it had been and was to be.

LEWIS P. CURTIS.

I.

It was one of those blistering July afternoons that sometimes descend upon people who have traveled a long way in the palatial discomfort of a Pullman, only to find themselves completing the last leg of their journey amid the democratic rattle-ty-bang of an antique, plush-lined day-coach. Several cars in advance, the energetic branch line locomotive was belching clouds of smoke and whistling shrilly at each spralling crossroad; while within the day-coach itself, a faded sign proclaimed that persons of color would only be tolerated on the last three seats of each car, and thus localized the scene to one of those down at the heel Southern railroads that have not yet recovered from the Civil War.

The greater part of the passengers were negroes, prosperously dressed, and covertly taking pains to be as obnoxious as possible to the little group of whites entrenched in a compact and strategic position among the last three seats of the car. Of the latter, one was a grey-haired gentlewoman of the old South, her expression combining with the pride of blood a certain indefinable mellow sweetness. A blue-eyed child of six sat by her side, and perhaps he too was conscious of his descent, but he kept his nose glued close to the window for all that. Behind these two, in a little compartment formed by turning two seats together, sat three ruddy farm girls in uncomfortable attitudes of acute self-consciousness. They had been giggling and overflowing with spirits during most of the trip, but the appearance of a young man in the seat opposite, at the last junction, had reduced their exuberance and heightened their curiosity. For, on one side of the neatly strapped suitcase which he had erected beside him as a sort of barrier from the negroes, appeared the legend, “P. R. Melton, N. Y. C.”

[269]

II.

Thought Philip Melton, “Niggers ... niggers and heat ... the Devil putting collars of mustard plaster on damned souls....

“Common, common, common sort of girls ... perfectly decent, but not my class ... too muscular, or maybe it’s fat....

“Nice little chap ... eyes, hair, skin ... football some day ... wonder if his grandmother’s a Carroll ... aristocrat....

“Hot ... gosh....

“Marion ... letters ... letters in my pocket ... mush, but not common ... my class ... glad I’m a gentleman ... ‘known by what he does not do’ ... clickety clack, clickety clack, clickety clack....

“Marion ... never wrote a girl stuff like that before ... laps it up all right ... must practice on some one ... my class, not common at all....

“‘The man who seduces a pure country girl because he fears the diseases of the city deserves to be flayed alive’ ... funny ... seduce is such a nasty word....

“Clickety clack, clickety clack, clack, click.... Fool train had to get here some time....”

[270]

III.

As he clattered down the precipitous steps of the day-coach, the last of which was a clear jump of at least two feet, Philip saw the tall, still vigorous figure of his uncle detach itself from the crowd and come forward with its perpetually surprising grace.

“Glad to see you, boy.” The words had something soothingly restful about them that betrayed the unhurried country gentleman.

“A very long, hot ride, I’m afraid, and the train late as usual. Your mother well? And Don’ld?” The last name was slurred with the paternal carelessness of the man who has lived to ask his youngest brother’s son whether that brother is well.

“I brought Marion over in the car.” The clear eyes twinkled mischievously. “She was sitting on the porch as I drove by, and it seemed to me you rather liked her last summer. Mind she doesn’t wind you around her little finger before your two weeks are over. These ministers’ daughters—” The phrase melted away, and his uncle turned to direct the chauffeur. But Philip smiled inwardly. He knew his favorite uncle had once been “a bad man among the ladies”, as they put it in the South.

[271]

IV.

That night Philip lay half smothered in his enormous feather bed, and thought again, this time in retrospect. He was a boy whom a nagging illness had kept secluded during most of his early life, and the previous Freshman year at college had filled him with restless new ideas. Adolescence, too long delayed, was upon him with a vengeance, at last.

“Good move, coming here ... she’s certainly one of the most naturally beautiful girls I ever saw ... skin a little off, perhaps.... Lord, how can people stand to eat sausages the way they do here ... we’ll have them to-morrow ... in July!

“Somehow I feel too overconfident.... God help us if she ever really falls in love with me ... still, I don’t quite see why that’s my lookout ... Don Juan....”

“See here, Philip Melton, you’re an ass!” (That was the voice of common sense, speaking in crisp periods.) “You’ve never kissed a girl in your life, and you’ve thought too much about it lately. You’ve always been too bashful to even flirt with sub-debs. And now that curiosity, not romance, has gotten hold of you, and you’ve achieved the enormous conquest of receiving a few sloppy letters from a country clergyman’s daughter, you think—! Don Juan, blaah!” (And common sense disgustedly retired.)

But Philip’s thoughts soon began to drift in the old channel. And egotism, which lies crushed into its corner during waking hours, came out and sported in the land of demi-dreams.

“She blushed once, really.... I saw her do it ... and she let me take her hand practically as long as I wanted to, to look at her ring.

“Oh Phil, you’re not so bad ... you’ll learn ... learn ... lllle....”

Sleep.

[272]

V.

The river was not very broad. It curved and twisted between ranks of weeping willows, and, just as Philip grew tired of rowing, a perfect grotto of a cove beckoned them to come in and rest. Marion had taken off her ugly rubber bathing cap while Philip rowed, and as they slid among the green and golden shadows of the willows, he was almost startled at the beauty of her hair. It seemed to flow about her shoulders in a leaping cascade of light and shadow, and Philip’s throat tightened as he watched it. Then he remembered that he was in search of love, not beauty, and that with a girl one must “shoot a line”. The boat touched the bank with a soft plash, and Philip summoned courage to mention one of his poems, which he said had come to him while he was rowing her up the river.

It began:

and, aside from the questionable novelty of addressing a short poem to one’s love in Elizabethan blank verse, it was neither better nor worse than the efforts of many young poets, not as yet nipped in the bud.

[273]

VI.

A week later, Philip could lie out on the terrace of his uncle’s garden, sunning himself, and muse somewhat as follows:

“I’m getting the hang ... not a doubt in the world ... last night, now ... her hair is awfully nice when you feel it on your cheek....

“I think I’d better not try poetry ... again ... maybe ... it sounds too well ... too as if I weren’t really feeling deeply....

“Still I’ve got her going mighty well ... last night she said, ‘Maybe, just one before you go’.... I’ve thought of an awfully romantic way to do it....

“Poor Marion.... I wonder if I could really break her heart.... I mean I hope she’ll soon get over it when I’m gone....

“Anyhow I’ll never be afraid of Peggy Armitage again.... I’ve got the hang ... damn it ... got the hang....”

[274]

VII.

The Gods seemed to have conspired with Philip to make his last night in the South all that he could have wished. He and Marion had been rowing again in the moonlight, and now that it had really grown very late, they were sitting in a secluded arbor at the far end of the garden, which looked out over the river. The moon, which had been waxing ever since Philip’s arrival, was now full. And great trailing strands of the weeping willows shut them up alone, in a little secret lattice of moon shadows.

Her head was resting lightly against his shoulder, and they were speaking only now and then in whispers. She was very lovely, a pale lady of the moon, and he felt himself yearn strangely toward her. The note in his voice was not forced now. She seemed to feel it, and as his eager lips bent down to hers she met them firmly with her own, warm and yielding. For a long, long minute the kiss lasted. Philip’s sensations seemed to ebb and fuse together. Then suddenly the moment passed. Habit reasserted itself, and Philip thought, “Lord! The trapper trapped! Another minute and I’d have proposed!”

[275]

VIII.

It was afternoon on the broad, cool veranda. Philip had departed northward by the morning train, and a twinkling-eyed old gentleman was sipping great cooling sips of julep through a straw. He had once been a bad man among the ladies, and perhaps a casual observer might have thought he was so still. At least, the laughing girl at his side seemed not to lack for entertainment.

“Ah but, my dear Maid Marion, you forget that after all Philip is my nephew.”

“And that should make him quite invincible to my poor charms?”

“Invincible! And you say he kissed you! Really, my dear, these minsters’ daughters—”

“And you a vestryman! But seriously, Mr. Melton, Philip got to making love awfully well toward the last—except the poetry—that was always terrible! You are to be congratulated, sir! With my aid you have started your nephew on the road to ruin!”

“Dear child! And have you never heard me say he is my favorite nephew?”

LAIRD GOLDSBOROUGH.

One of the most charming of all the intellectual traditions of Yale is the group of Francis Bergen Memorial lectures delivered each year gratis to the University. Mr. Frank Bergen has lately added another memorial to his son. It takes the form of a gold medal to be awarded each year at the Lit. dinner by the outgoing board to the author of the most creditable contribution to the Lit. during their term of office. The editors themselves are ineligible.

Francis Bergen was in the Class of 1914, and a member of the Lit. board of that year. He was a college poet of distinction and promise. Had it not been for his tragic death on his way to Plattsburg, and with a few more years of lyric inspiration, it is likely that his poetry would have served itself as his own commanding memorial.

As it is, he is a traditional character of the Renaissance. You will meet no graduates of his generation who do not remember in greater or less degree Bergen’s extraordinary Turkish water pipe, and his long conversations with imaginary personages in his own room, unconscious of the attentive and astonished ears of his classmates about him. And the miracle is that in the Yale of then, still smacking of the Y-sweatered bulldog ideal, he should have been universally loved and admired, in spite of eccentricity. Such tales are indeed the romance of the beginning of wisdom at Yale.

This medal, this awarded piece of gold, this honor in the eyes of the literati of each winner’s generation at Yale, has about it a glamor of remembrance, a glory peculiar to itself. It is in memory of a poet whom the Gods loved too well, and did not allow to sing his fill. By its own name it is an inspiration more precious than gold.

M. E. F.

The Captain’s Doll. By D. H. Lawrence. (Thomas Seltzer.)

There is, in all living literature, a kind of between-the-lines expression of the atmosphere belonging to the described period and the described place. With the advent of literary interest in thought as well as action, the point of view peculiar to the time, the race, and the situation has been present also. To create these mysterious things by connotation from the written word, so that the reader becomes, temporarily, contemporary and incident with the characters of the story, is at least one of the essentials of a permanent novel. And while I am not at all prepared to predict permanency for The Captain’s Doll, I feel that Mr. Lawrence has been particularly happy in this strange business of evoking environmental atmosphere.

For instance, there is a moment in the first “novelette”—the volume contains three—when the German Countess-heroine and the Scotch Captain-hero are climbing a Tyrol Alp in a motorbus. The Alps and a motorbus! Everywhere, against the naked looming rocks and great glaciers, the blue sky and the blown clouds, are bulky trucks, picknickers, and “the wrong kind of rich Jews”. There are wild mosses and berry bushes among the rocks, but “the many hundreds of tourists who passed up and down did not leave much to pick”. Yet the exhilaration and the spell that belong to climbing even a civilized mountain are there; the civilized climbers get out of their lorry and feel it. The German Countess feels it in a glad, pagan abandonment: she likes the wind in her face, and she likes to see “away beyond, the lake lying far off and small, the wall of those other rocks like a curtain of stone, dim and diminished to the horizon. And the sky with curdling clouds and blue sunshine intermittent”. She “breathes deep breaths”, and says, “Wonderful, wonderful to be high up!” The English-Scot feels it, but in a different way. “His eyes were dilated with excitement that was ordeal or mystic battle rather than the Bergheil ecstacy.” He looks soulfully out, out of the world,[278] hating the mountains for their excitement, and their “uplift” that takes him beyond himself, and he feels bigger than the mountains. All that, as Mr. Lawrence tells it, comes pretty close to “getting” these races in a phase of our era, a phase which is important because man in relation to nature is man at his best. And anyone who has climbed mountains of late years will appreciate the realism of the picture, and of the story’s atmosphere.

But I said I could not predict the future for The Captain’s Doll. To me, Mr. Lawrence seems supremely able in handling the psychology of the moment, but less effective with the dynamic psychology necessary for his drama. I am not sure his characters would act as they do; I think no others would. Through a series of individual snapshots which are real to the life, Captain Hepburn and Countess Hannele move in a manner I cannot take for granted. More decidedly I should apply this criticism to the principals in the second story, The Fox. Over time, these people are all a little queer: it is the fault in most of this “new” kind of writing.

D. G. C.

Members of the Family. By Owen Wister. (The MacMillan Company.)

When the cauldron of contemporary American literature has boiled down and the dross been skimmed off by the years, there will be a special and enduring mold set aside for the works of Owen Wister. In his writings and in the pictures of Frederick Remington a richly romantic period of our national life will be long preserved. The Virginia, Lin McLean, and Scipio Le Moyne, even as the nightingale, were not born for death. As Scipio himself remarked, “I ain’t going to die for years and years.”

The eight short stories included in Members of the Family are typical of Mr. Wister’s most delightful and vivid manner. Those who enjoyed The Virginian or Red Men and White will wax happy over such tales as The Gift Horse and Where It Was. Owen Wister’s characters are unusual to us, but like that most[279] fanciful of characters, Long John Silver, they live. For humor, strength of plot, characterization, and general worth this collection takes rank with the very highest.

F. D. A.

A Book of British and American Verse. Edited by Henry Van Dyke. (Doubleday, Page & Co.)

As a general rule anthologies are of a distinct sameness. The most noticeable thing, therefore, in regard to this collection of verse by Henry Van Dyke is his novel method of arrangement. Instead of fitting the poems in chronologically he segregates them according to their poetical form. The volume is divided into six sections, devoted respectively to: ballads; idylls or stories in verse; lyrics; odes; sonnets and epigrams; and elegies and epitaphs.

As to the selection, it is as judicious as one would expect coming from Mr. Van Dyke. An attractive feature is the inclusion of a considerable number of modern poems. In quantity the collection lies between the Oxford Book of English Verse and Burton Stevenson’s Home Book of Verse, being nearer to the former. It is especially adapted for use in class-room work and is a valuable addition to a small library, from a utilitarian as well as an aesthetic viewpoint.

F. D. A.

The Goose Step. By Upton Sinclair. (Paine Book Co.)

Thorough discussion of this latest book by Upton Sinclair is a task that would require many pages. A brief dissertation upon his remarks about Yale, however, will suffice to shed considerable light upon the book as a whole.

Commenting upon the University in general, Mr. Sinclair remarks: “But the secret societies come in, and now Yale is just what Princeton is, a place where the sons of millionaires draw apart and lead exclusive lives.” Disregarding for the moment the innuendo cast upon the societies here, it seemed best to interview the millionaire we know in order to ascertain whether he was[280] really being secretly exclusive. The cause of research suffered when he proved to be out for the evening wearing the dress suit of his neighbor, who was working his way through college and could not use it himself.

Concerning societies Mr. Sinclair further opines that they encourage intoxication and venereal disease, but dictate the choice of clothing, slang, and tobacco, while preventing originality of cogitation. It is a sad thought, and the woeful plight of the American college lad is typified by the brazen indifference with which he bears his shame.

Mr. Sinclair certainly exaggerates—we are now speaking constrainedly, ourself—but his sincerity no one can doubt, as no one can sweepingly deny all his charges. He may irritate or he may distress or he may merely edify, but he always gets a reaction.

F. D. A.

Han and Cherrywold came across the campus together.

“What do you think of our first issue?” asked Han.

“Well,” replied Cherrywold, “a little thin, to be sure, but very fine goods—and mostly home-made, at that.”

“Yes,” mused Han, “and this one shall be better. I look forward to a short and pleasant evening.”

So saying, they approached the luxurious and delicately heated office confidently and in the best of spirits. But oh, what enemies lurk in the dark places ever eager to strike a treacherous blow at the Muse! In the window of her palace hung a filthy, yellow sheet advertising that altogether despicable sport of debating. With a mighty oath both jammed their keys into the lock, tore to the window, and stamped upon this latest outrage. That done, with spirits not altogether as calm as before, they sat down to wait for the others, who were, of course, late. In a short while they were joined by ante-moral, pro-subjective Rabnon. The conversation turned, purely by chance, upon bastard sons. The question before the house was: Whose was the greater—Aaron Burr’s or Elihu Yale’s? So rife became the argument that Cherrywold was dispatched to follow up certain clues and obtain further information upon the question. In a short while he returned greatly excited and out of breath. A number of prominent men had been interviewed—one of whom, though it may be hard to believe, was a professor. It was, however, decided to withhold the verdict on this remarkable case until the following month. As we go to press, new evidence is pouring into the office, owing to our expert secret service department, and we fully expect to startle the world by an announcement of momentous import at a near date.

In spite of this coup, our spirits were sorely tried by the sudden entrance of Mr. and Mrs. Stevens—one hour late! Due to the latter’s persuasive smile, we controlled our language. Beside, one must be cautious in the presence of three aliases. Cherrywold re-read Han’s poem for the tenth time.

“On reading this more and more,” he remarked, “I like it less and less.”

“Then read it less and less,” suggested Mr. Stevens. His wife tittered approvingly.

After that there was comparative silence, broken only by the muttered threats of Cherrywold each time he pulled out his watch. Another half-hour smoked by. Suddenly out of the darkness there appeared in the doorway a halo. With badly shaken nerves, all stared wildly at the light. Suddenly the hushed expectancy was broken.

[282]

“Well, if it isn’t little sunshine,” cried Rabnon. “And two hours late at that!”

“Then he’s the cause of all this daylight saving muddle,” asserted Mrs. Stevens. “Land sakes! Who’d think it to look at him?”

“My gosh!” yelled Cherrywold. “Aren’t we ever going to get down to work? If the rest of you don’t stop your giggling there won’t be any May issue. Now, Han, what do you want after this title; I suppose dashes?”

“No, thank you,” replied Han sweetly. “I’ll take dots.”

Eventually something was done, but no one knew exactly what nor cared much, for by that time it was far into the night and we were all three-quarters asleep. Some unknown person by the name of Briggs likes to tell people how to ruin a perfectly good day. He better look to his laurels, for he’ll have to go some to beat a new series, entitled “How to ruin a perfectly good evening,” by

CHERRYWOLD.

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