Vol. LXXXVIII No. 3

The
Yale Literary Magazine

Conducted by the
Students of Yale University.

“Dum mens grata manet, nomen laudesque Yalenses

Cantabunt Soboles, unanimique Patres.”

December, 1922.

New Haven: Published by the Editors.
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Here at Yale we are inclined to take things rather too much for granted. We talk glibly of our traditions as something everlasting, and forget that most of them originated in the vague limbo of eighteen-ninety. We unconsciously consider the College of to-day to be the same as our fathers knew, and so it is astonishing to find in the musty pages of an old Lit. an account of “the more splendid entrances of Durfee, a building which is certainly ornamental and whose rooms are spacious and elegant”.

For, in general, we have accepted our surroundings as a permanent matter of fact, and have not stopped to analyze just why they are as they are. Most of us hardly know the reason for our being here at all. In our four years we are continually passing through a series of changes—παντα ρει—everything is in a state of flux. Our ideas and ideals, our opinions and our minds are ever changing, developing, broadening. The Senior is the Freshman only in that he is the unifying body in which during the four-year span these many shifting thoughts have been welded together, and the instant has in truth been made eternity. For the Freshman is too engrossed with the business of becoming acclimatized, heeling[76] some publication or other activity, and making friends to have much time for anything else. Towards the close of the spring term he looks forward to Sophomore year with a certain relish. Then is when he will do all that reading and extra study, that plain living and high thinking, which he has planned. But, curiously enough, Sophomore year brings with it new and unforeseen petty distractions which devour the time at an incredible rate, and leave no more room for contemplation than the year previous.

And so with the last half of the cycle: the two final years swing by confusedly and bring us to the precipice of graduation, a charm or two on our watch chain, a smattering of knowledge which we may or may not find comforting, nothing more.

Our development has been somewhat of a hand to mouth affair. We have learned certain unrelated facts about this and that, and have sketchily attempted to piece them together. But ordinarily they have not fitted, because we have not devoted enough sheer intellectual effort to the analysis of our own ideas. We have not the slightest conception of what we believe. We may have learned to think with reasonable clarity, and our ideals may be rather high, but we have built up no scheme of life, nothing by which to live. Any philosophy or creed which we may possess is, at best, vague, inchoate, and fragmentary.

This, as I have said, is because we have never searched our souls with the cold, relentless light of reason in an attempt to understand every fiber of our make-up, we have taken things for granted, we have known only our exteriors, we have not known ourselves.

And living thus almost entirely on the surface, we have inevitably grown to think of a philosophy of life as hardly an essential. “What need have I for all this truck about religion?”, we ask frankly, for we have not yet been brought face to face with the Truth that in order to realize our highest possibilities we must be utterly dominated by an ideal. We wish to move the world, but we have not yet been impressed with the necessity of having a place to stand. We have not been convinced that we must believe in something.

The whole question has seemed to be something ethereal, something far removed from our own natural lives. Consequently we[77] have been inclined to think of religion as little else but repression and that its followers knew nothing either of happiness or of life. They seemed to belong to a world apart—to a world that was drab and unreal.

So Christianity has become the most forbidding word in the language. Judging it by its present fruits—by a decadent church and by sweaty Y.M.C.A. gymnasiums—we have pronounced it to be woefully lacking. We have not seen that these are in reality not fruits at all, but abortions, that although the church in its present form has outlived its usefulness, the spirit which exists in each one of us is as dominating now as it ever was, if only we will open our hearts to it. We have never stopped to think these questions through to their conclusion. We take untruths and half-truths for granted, and allow misconceptions to pass current without ever a sincere effort to get at the eternal strength of things.

And so we hear men talk of humility, and we laugh at them. We wish to assert ourselves, to express our own individuality, and being humble seems to convey the very opposite. We look upon it as something synonymous with servility, as a state of grovelling self-abasement in which a man must sacrifice both his personality and his self-respect.

We hear men talk of brotherly love and it seems to us a farce. How could anybody pretend to care for everyone equally, to put his closest friend and the man in the street in the same class? What could be more unnatural, more hypocritical?

And again we hear men talk of self-surrender and we hate them for it. Why should I surrender myself? I am I. I possess my ideas and ideals, and these are enough. Why should I not strive to realize them without any external aid, any “something not myself”?

Thus we argue and thus we feel because we are repelled by words whose meaning we do not really understand. Our minds have never pried deeply enough to find the Truth that humility is nothing mean, nothing subservient, but rather the natural consciousness of reverence before everything beautiful and sacred in the universe. We have thought the ideal of brotherly love to be futile because we have looked upon it only superficially.[78] We have not realized that instead of a mere question of surface like or dislike, it involves a tremendous tolerance and sympathy with all of mankind, and that although difficult, if not impossible, to attain in its fulness, it certainly is the antithesis of hypocritical. We have loathed the very sound of self-surrender because we have taken the word in its cold and literal sense, and have not understood that instead of sacrificing any trace of individuality in giving ourselves up to the spiritual and the ideal, we find instead a new fulness and depth to life. For self-surrender is actually a self-realization more compelling than our brightest dreams.

F. O. MATTHIESSEN.

Abbé Pierre. By Jay William Hudson. (D. Appleton & Co.)

“Abbé Pierre”, by Jay William Hudson, is altogether a delightful and charming book. It may not be called very subtle, nor humorous, nor dramatic, nor sordid—qualities which most modern novels seem to imbibe; but that it is delightful and charming no one may deny.

In one respect the book is a picture of a Gascon village—its customs and its traditions, its thoughts and its dreams. These walks with Abbé Pierre along the dusty roads of Gascony, these glimpses of its hills and valleys, these insights into its daily life are most interesting and picturesque. Furthermore, such a background is ideal for the unfolding of the romance of Germaine Sance and the young American, David Ware.

In another respect the book is a picture of life viewed broadly and sympathetically. Abbé Pierre left his little Gascon village when he was quite young; he has given the best of his years and strength to the world; and now he returns to spend his last days in this place that he loves above all else. Here he sits in his garden house and writes down some thoughts and ideas about life born of many years of living. And these thoughts of his give the book, along with its beauty of description, its beauty of spirit.

I wish that all of us who aimlessly rush about this world with no time to read anything but an “exciting” novel would pause and read this book. I suppose my wish is ludicrous, for does not Abbé Pierre himself say that “Americans always seem to think that unless one is bustling about all the time one is doing nothing”? And then he immediately adds: “Some of the best deeds that I have ever done have been the thoughts I have lived through in this same old garden by the white road, where wooden shoes go up and down”. He who can appreciate such a philosophy will read “Abbé Pierre” with much interest and delight.

W. E. H., JR.

[102]

Confessions of an Old Priest. By Rev. S. D. McConnell. (The MacMillan Co.)

We are all, being students, in a period when our opinions are forming rapidly according to our characters and interests. For those who feel that a religious philosophy is an essential basis from which other values must be derived, or for those whose religion is an untouched field of inherited beliefs and inhibitions, the time and the subject-matter of “Confessions of an Old Priest” are ripe. The Rev. Mr. McConnell remains in the end as devout a Christian as he was fifty years ago, when he entered the Church convinced that “it owed its origin to Jesus Christ, and that He was the unique Son of God”. But he is no longer a worshipper of Jesus; he has taken the very cornerstone out of Christian doctrine and cast it away—and the edifice still shelters him as efficaciously as before.

The volume is devoted to his explanation of this paradox: how he finds himself a faithful Christian still, while the result of his historical research has disproved for him the divinity of Jesus. For Jesus, he declares, was not the original Christ; Christus, a Greek word, was applied to the heroes of a number of Mystery religions during the century before the obscure Hebrew province of Gallilee had any intimations that the “Messiah” was born.

And the most startling attack upon traditional dogma is his analysis of “the trouble with Christianity”. “It is,” he says, “not an unworthy Christianity, but an unworthy Christ.” When the reader has swallowed hard for a moment over that declaration, he reads on to discover what this astounding pastor means, and finds a wealth of plausible argument to support his extravagance of phrase. Jesus himself preached a “workless” doctrine, a “toil not, nor spin” existence, a “turn the other cheek” attitude, and it is his biographers, together with such followers as Paul, who have incorporated Him into the practical philosophy and morality of the Church, to make Him the greatest exemplar in history of life as it should be lived. Jesus, and “Christlike” people are delightful, adorable characters, according to this book, but they are a care to the community, and should their ethics be generally adopted, civilization would go immediately more or less to smash.

The Rev. Mr. McConnell’s conclusions are so wholesale and so radical that I am not sure we can all accept them without comment[103] or refutation. I cannot agree with his method of discriminating between true history and apostolic imagination in the “synoptic” gospels. But I do think every Christian should read this work as a test for his present beliefs and an introduction to new areas of religious thought. And it is quite possible that here is the way to a new religion and a satisfactory one in this time of restlessness and agnosticism.

D. G. C.

What I Saw in America. By G. K. Chesterton. (Hodder & Stoughton, Ltd.)

After reading Mr. G. K. Chesterton’s account of his recent travels in this country, we recalled to mind a certain cartoon which appeared some time ago in a London periodical, which depicted the author as an immense Zeppelin floating over the city. From his mouth came great clouds of vapor and below were written the words: “G. K. C. spreading paradoxygen over London”. A similar caricature might be made in the present instance, for the gentleman in question has, in this book, tinged his treatment of America and American life with a shade of paradox.

It would seem to us as if this most interesting and penetrating series of essays should prove to be of greater interest to American than to English readers. Mr. Chesterton came, saw, and pondered, and the results of his meditations are a series of enlightening essays dealing with everything in America and American life from a discussion of what America is, and what manner of men Americans are, to Prohibition and the Irish question.

The author never comments on any subject as you would expect him to. His impressions of the material and the abstract, of which we have formed no very definite opinion because of what might be called that contempt bred of familiarity, come to us as truths which are as worthy of our consideration as they merit the laughter of the foreigner.

When he tells you that he is not sure that the outcome of the Civil War may not have been for the best and that he believes that Walt Whitman was the greatest American poet, you may be inclined to disagree, but you will be forced to admit that, as he himself would say, his reasons are reasonable. Nor does this[104] Englishman spare his own country in many of his comparisons. The book is not one to be read through in a sitting; it is something to be picked up and read one part at a time. There is none of the parts but will bear a second and even a third reading, for many of its truths are buried deep. It is a text-book in the art of the appreciation of foreign lands, and its teachings, if followed, would bring more lasting harmony among all peoples than the League of Nations it condemns.

M. T.

Aaron’s Rod. By D. H. Lawrence. (Martin Secker.)

Mr. Lawrence is undoubtedly the most consistent of the so-called moderns on either side of the Atlantic. His novels, thus far, have set an average standard far above that of his closest rival, Mr. James Joyce. Mr. Lawrence’s books are always readable; Mr. Joyce’s, seldom, but they both have gifts of sincerity and mental acuteness which lift them from the ruck of the ordinary incomprehensible. Their pungent observations on types, existing conditions, and each other, are amusing to say the least.

We have heard Mr. Lawrence’s name bandied promiscuously about as a realist. Nothing could be less real than “Aaron’s Rod”. The action and dialogue never took place on this earth, nor does it seem probable that they ever will. There is an odd, pervasive sense of violence saturating this novel. The Great War has evidently left its stamp on the intellects of these younger British geniuses, for their work has a tense, strained quality which is disquieting in the extreme. The characters of “Aaron’s Rod” move ceaselessly back and forth like a scurrying body of ants; they jabber in a rather inhuman way about love, socialism, Italian scenery, and Christmas trees.

There is no action, no story to speak of: A coal miner runs off to London, thence to Italy, from one of the larger Midland towns, for no reason whatsoever except that his wife is fond of him. Persons appear on Mr. Lawrence’s stage, speak their lines, and hurry off again, no one seems to know whither. Nevertheless, these characters are interesting by virtue of Mr. Lawrence’s positive genius for purely physical portraiture. Josephine, Aaron Sisson’s first incidental “amoureuse”, is particularly well done,[105] from a pictorial standpoint. Scarcely a page is given to her, yet she leaves an impression on our minds far more lasting than that of Aaron himself. Pains have been taken with Lady Franks in the same way; it seems as if Mr. Lawrence loses interest in his major characters. He must be on to pastures new.

“Aaron’s Rod” can scarcely be called a “good” novel. It contains many advanced ideas in the field of sociology which we found rather difficult to agree with. However, the world may in time grow up to Mr. Lawrence and until then we should seize the opportunity of reading his descriptions of luxurious interiors, and the Alps. They are remarkably able bits of writing.

Mr. Lawrence is an important novelist now, but it is in his power to do much better things than he has done so far. If he would lessen his tone of violent indignation, if he would tincture his spiritual realism a little less with impure physical realism, he might be considered one of the great novelists of our time. As it is, his achievement in “Aaron’s Rod” is remarkable in that he has stripped off everything unnecessary, merely giving us the essentials on just about every topic known as a “world problem”. However, we should prefer the doses one at a time; all at once they seem a rather large gulp.

G. L. G.

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