Vol. LXXXIX 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, 1923.

New Haven: Published by the Editors.

Printed at the Van Dyck Press. 121-123 Olive St., New Haven.

Price: Thirty-five Cents.

Entered as second-class matter at the New Haven Post Office.

WEBER’S STUDIO

Photographers to Yale
Since 1910

DON’T ABUSE YOUR EYES

Men who are working on themes and
theses will find the new Yale Theme
Tablet very beneficial.

It is Scientifically Prepared to Prevent Glare and Relieve Eye Strain

for sale at

THE CO-OP.

ESTABLISHED 1818

Gentlemen’s Furnishing Goods,

MADISON AVENUE COR. FORTY-FOURTH STREET
NEW YORK

Telephone Murray Hill 8800

Clothing Ready made or to Measure for Autumn

Evening Clothes, Cutaways, Sack Suits
Sporting Clothes and Medium-weight Overcoats
English and Domestic Hats & Furnishings
Boots and Shoes for Dress, Street and Outdoor Sport
Trunks, Bags & Leather Goods

Send for “Comparisons”

The next visit of our Representative to
the HOTEL TAFT
will be on November 6 and 7

BOSTON
Tremont cor. Boylston

NEWPORT
220 Bellevue Avenue

Tailored Models
Ready-to-Wear
Suits

Tailored Models
Ready-to-Wear
Top-Coats

Introductory Offer

To introduce our individual line of imported English
Woolens and Scotch Tweeds we are making a special
offering. We also have a few special tailored models
for immediate use.

WILKES LTD.

English Tailors

York Street—Opposite Harkness

4-Piece Suits
$47.50

Top-Coats
$42.50

THE YALE LITERARY MAGAZINE

Contents

OCTOBER, 1923

The Yale Literary Magazine

Vol. LXXXIX OCTOBER, 1923 No. 1

EDITORS

WALTER EDWARDS HOUGHTON, JR.
LAIRD SHIELDS GOLDSBOROUGH
DAVID GILLIS CARTER
MORRIS TYLER
NORMAN REGINALD JAFFRAY

BUSINESS MANAGERS

GEORGE W. P. HEFFELFINGER
WALTER CRAFTS

Leader

It would be difficult for even the most blindly ardent supporter of Yale to deny that the traditional four-year course for the degree of Bachelor of Arts no longer remains intact. There are probably fewer who realize that an ever increasing number are receiving that degree after completing a course that has had little or no relation to the field of learning to which, by its very title, it is closely related.

Disintegration of the long established College curriculum has been going on ever since the war. It began with the introduction of the old “Select Course” of the Scientific School into the Academic curriculum under the imposing title of Bachelor of Philosophy. This innovation was followed shortly by the institution of the Common Freshman Year. Furthermore, if a student now intends to become a lawyer, he may devote an entire year (and that his Senior year) to the study of law—and yet graduate as a Bachelor of Arts. Likewise, if an undergraduate desires to devote his life to the practice of medicine, he may start as early as Sophomore year, spending most of his time in the laboratories on Prospect Hill scrutinizing the hidden mechanism of feline organs—and still graduate as a Bachelor of Arts. In other words, assuming that the Freshman year is not very different from what it was in ante-bellum days, which is not the case, one-third of every class in Yale College is now graduated as B.A. men without more than a three years’ “exposure” to the subjects which, in the eyes of the world, are customarily associated with that educational label.

The reason for this state of affairs may be fairly stated in a single word—vocationalism. This utilitarian mania for taking the short-cut to one’s life-work has been in recent years the ideal of a large portion of American college men, and has left its mark on almost every educational institution in this country, by forcing them to change their curricula to meet the demand. Harvard long ago yielded to the pressure of vocational demands in the matter of time, permitting graduation in three years. It was not long after that Columbia took still more drastic action by allowing admission to her graduate schools at the end of Junior Year. In so doing these institutions were unconsciously practicing the methods of the Correspondence Schools and the twenty-lessons-in-your-home concerns whose business it is to supply the needs of those who seek the short road to the payroll. The liberal colleges endeavoring to provide such short-cuts by making inroads on their liberal curricula are untrue to their genius and merely challenge impossible competition.

It may be argued that this desire for specialization at the earliest possible moment was the natural result of the ever increasing complexity of modern life and the bewildering ramifications of present-day knowledge which forced the bulk of undergraduates to accept isolation in a single subject. This may be quite true, yet there remains the question of whether or not it is the place of the college, and in particular Yale College, to offer that opportunity even in part.

The recognized place for specialization is the graduate school. The graduate student works presumably in a special atmosphere created by the common labors of a common group for a common end; the end being a particular degree desired because it has come to signify that the bearer of such a symbol has mastered the details of a recognized branch of learning. A graduate school is the most suitable medium for accomplishing the task in hand. It is the only reason we have post-graduate schools at all.

The existing situation in the college is exactly the reverse. Those who are working for the B.A. degree and nothing else are carrying on side by side with what are in reality pre-medical students and first-year lawyers. Out of this have sprung two separate points of view on the same campus. On the one hand there is a group which pursues its studies with the realization that upon the complete mastery of every detail depends in a large measure the success or failure of its life-work. On the other, there remain those who are still searching in their work for that particular field which to them will seem to be the one to which they wish to devote their future time and energy. The result is a repetition of the old story of the house divided against itself. It is just this condition, we believe, that has led to such restless, groping questionings as, “What is Yale for?” The definition of a university as being one body of which there are many members admirably illustrates the point. For the college to-day is in the anomalous position of attempting to perform the duties of two members where it formerly functioned as one. Such a state of affairs is not conducive to the health of any organization whatever.

The solution in the minds of many seems to lie in the abolishment of the old college course, following the law of the survival of the fittest. This issue of our present afflictions we believe would be a regretable blunder. There should always be a place for the study of the so-called liberal arts; for the contemplation of “all the best that has been thought and said and done in the world”. Without such a background many a man cannot do his best work. What place is better fitted to continue this undertaking than Yale, established in this spirit, as attested by the words of the founder, “I give these books for the founding of a college”? Professor Mather in a recent address summed up the ideal of the college in these glowing terms:

“The college does its work alongside a dozen other equally worthy educational institutions, mostly vocational. It does not compete with them; it directly supplements them and incidentally aids them. It has its own aims, which are not immediately practical, vocational, or material.

“I should like to see inscribed over our college portals the following inscription:

“‘Generous Youth! Enter at your peril. We may so quicken your imagination as to bring you loss as the world counts it. There may be a great inventor in you now, there may only be a poet in you when you leave us; the captain of industry in you may give place to some obscure pursuit of philosophy; you are literary, we shall leave you forever incapable of best sellers; you are philanthropic, we may develop the detached critic in you; you are politically shrewd and practical, we may bring out the Utopian visionary in you. For our values are not those of the world of work, with which we can only incidentally help you to make terms—our values are those of the world of thought. We shall make you contemporary of all ages, and since you must after all live in this age, such an extension of your interest and imagination may make you an exile in your own day and place. We offer you no material reward of any sort for your effort here, we may even diminish the rewards you would enjoy if you kept away from us. We offer you nothing but what we ourselves most treasure—the companionship of the great dreamers and thinkers. Enter if you dare. Should you enter, this college will be indeed to you Alma Mater. All that we have shall be yours.’”

In short, the duty of the college is to give its members their intellectual bearings. What the prospective lawyer really needs to broaden his horizon and prevent him from succumbing to the bondage of his shop, is letters, science, mathematics; what the future doctor needs is letters, art, history, and the unbiological sciences. This ought to be the function of the college. To continue along any other line is to destroy forever the Yale that has held such an enviable place in American life for over two centuries—to extinguish the light that has been a source of guidance and inspiration to its large and distinguished band of alumni.

MORRIS TYLER.

Corydon

The pleasant hills in solemn silence sleeping

Under a sunset of perpetual fire,

Past summer’s weeping,

Shall know no more the vibrant melody

Of thy sad songs, O lovely shepherd boy!

The winds are free

And chill November

Sweeps thy reed music and thy lyric joy

Away with all the things I would remember.

The wood-smoke on the silent autumn air,

The disconsolate petals on the grass

Symbol despair,

And all the fragrance of divine Apollo

Is fled from this incalculable loss

Where none may follow.

Is there no rest

In the stark shadow of a naked cross

In silhouette against the scarlet west?

Shall I forsake philosopher and sage

Rebellious drawn

From solemn cloister and scholastic page

And get me gone.

O shepherd of the slender fingers?

Guide me above the mountain passes

Through the lush grasses

Where thy music lingers,

Out of nocturnal anguish into dawn.

For I shall sing to thee of Mytelene

And ancient things

And paint with poppied words a twilight scene

Where Lesbos flings

Her stretch of Sapphic isle

Over the sea. Ah, liquid interlude!

We would intrude

But for a little while

Upon the rapture of ambrosial springs.

This then is all of the enchanted vision

Far from the dusty passion of the streets?

The world’s derision,

The inarticulate call

Of ageless things in the awakened woods,

Unhappy autumn moods

And the wan summons of a grieving fate,

Hastening through the twilight pall

And beauties vanished, inarticulate?

Let no dim spectres haunt my darkened brain

Like aspens whispering at eventide

Of ancient pain

So oft repeated.

I shall flee far from the abysmal night,

Not in impetuous flight,

But, lingering by Lethe’s tideless void

Shall slumber undefeated

In sunset woods, forever unannoyed.

LUCIUS BEEBE.

“The Swift and Sharp-tongued Flame of Death”

The swift and sharp-tongued flame of death

Has touched our hearts. We love no more;

No more for us to drink the breath

Of life in one long kiss and store

Its fragrance ’till we kiss again.

All that is gone, and gone our dreams.

Remember if you will. The stain

Of rich red wine for me, it seems,

Is better far than memories.

And lest the ghostly perfume smell

Too sweet, and life be drowned in seas

Like this—I drink and say farewell.

EUGENE A. DAVIDSON.

Three Poems

Benediction

“I know not how he chose you from the crowd, came to your door, and grasp your hand to ask his way.”—Rabindranath Tagore.

You may not question why he chose you

From so many more—

Why his tiny hands have fumbled

At your door.

To a land of fifty cross-roads

He has come to-day,

Placed his eager hands in yours,

And asked his way.

He will follow where you lead him—

Bright and stormy skies;

And at evening still beside you

Close his eyes.

Keep his trust, O You the Chosen—

Far shall be his way.

Clasp him to your heart and bless him

With all you may.

Recall.

“Come back, my darling; the world is asleep; and no one would know, if you came for a moment while stars are gazing at stars.”—Rabindranath Tagore.

Dark was the hour you slipped away,

Veiled in the shadowed light.

Touched with a sleep the others lay

Then as they do to-night.

Come, my darling, oh, come to mother,

Come for an hour and go;

For the stars which gaze upon one another—

Only the stars shall know.

Fair was the spring you left behind,

Born of a teeming womb;

And now once more has a gentle wind

Breathed, and the gardens bloom.

Come, my darling, oh, come for an hour—

Quick e’er the night is done;

And if you should ask for a single flower,

How could they miss just one?

Those who played in the sun with you—

Sure, they are playing still;

For Life is a spendthrift hand to woo,

Led by a reckless will.

Come, my darling, for treasured and deep

Take of my love but this;

And if once more to my arms you creep,

Who would begrudge one kiss?

Just To-day

“But just for to-day, tell me, Mother, where the desert ... in the fairy tale is.”—Rabindranath Tagore.

I.

The shepherds slip into the fields

Where Father’s gone himself.

The books I should be studying

Are still upon the shelf.

O Mother, let me close my sleepy eyes,

And tell me where the fairy desert lies.

II.

What makes you silent? Must you work

Like Father every hour?

Your hands are busy as two bees

Which suck a honey flower.

But, Mother, while the sunlight fills the skies,

Tell me where the Tagra Desert lies.

III.

At curfew Father will return,

And I shall lose you then.

I promise some day I shall learn

As much as other men.

So, Mother, just before the daylight flies

Tell me where the Tagra Desert lies.

WALTER EDWARDS HOUGHTON, JR.

To One Bereaved

You welcomed me with such a joyous mask

Across the silence of your hurt wide eyes,

That I too forced banalities and lies

And dared no comfort, though I came to ask

The many little questions, long rehearsed,

Which meant relief, and friendship. What we said

So lightly, never touched upon the dead,

Yet we both knew that when we laughed we cursed

The bitter God who could make laughter too,

Beside this sorrow. Strange, we did not stare

Mute sympathy: I only smiling sought

To show I knew how bitterly was bought

Your cheerful beauty. But I turned my chair,

Once, when you laughed——, and looked away from you.

D. G. CARTER.

Lady of the Sea

Night, and vessels softly lifting

From the surges of the sea,

Arms to breezes ever shifting

As they whisper low to me.

Silhouetted masts are weaving

Circles wavering to lean

Nearer waves in slumber heaving

Far below a cold moon’s sheen....

Clothed in glory, still and splendid,

Starlight shimmers in her hair,

And my lady’s form is blended

With the shadows, waiting there.

As in silence we are taken

In the evening’s soft embrace,

Would I never could awaken

From the wonder in her face.

R. P. CRENSHAW, JR.

Coelum non animum mutant
Qui trans mare currunt.
—Horace.

Sail forth across the jade-green sea and view the glades our fathers trod,

Their rolling lawns of deathless sod, their hoary castles dear to me.

Catch the pale vision of the past, the sound of stealthy slippered feet;

Rest on the moss-grown garden seat and find a lover’s shadow cast.

Creep into Catherine cubicle and sense her icy presence there;

Her figure bent and drawn with care as Alchemist o’er crucible.

Look down the waving lane of trees that lines the speckled road’s approach

Where glides the flashing golden coach with gay plumes trembling in the breeze.

Gaze up at Longeais from the moat and feel the ages slip away

Until its grey walls seem at bay before the host in armored coat.

Go to each ancient place above and bless it with your noiseless tread;

Your presence there should stir the dead with tremulous warm thoughts of love.

Leave here for me your image fair, graven in crystal carved by time,

Untarnished as a star sublime, unchanging as the love I bear.

God speed you under other skies, drink deep of Europe’s scented charm,

But keep the gesture of your arm, the wistful wonder in your eyes.

MORRIS TYLER.

Quatrains

I. Morality

Behold these proper lovers, when they meet:

Each longs for love’s caresses, but that heat

Must be suppressed; it is the moral code.

God made their passion.... Made he this deceit?

2. The Dying Thespian

The theatre was my life, the very breath

Of my existence, so what followeth

Shall be in keeping. Tell the player-world

I take my final rôle—the lead, in “Death”.

3. A Maiden Lady

In younger days, her virtue was a veil

She planned to drop, when true love should assail.

No lovers came. Perforce, her life was chaste.

In age, she boasts her virtue’s iron mail!

4. Futility

So many, ere they leave this little sphere

Say thus and so observe my death; make cheer

Or weep, in just this way.

Well, as for me,

Mourn me or not: I shall not pause to hear!

C. G. POORE.

Lines

The cold pale patina of sky,

The brown upon the woodland leaf

With all frail lovely things that die

Blend in the autumn’s grief.

For in each withered autumn flower

Is wonder where the dead may go,

And we slight children of an hour

May live and never know.

JOHN R. CHAMBERLAIN.

The Great Pan Jandrum

A beautiful tolerance of the various actions of all other people is perhaps the most comprehensive statement of the virtue we admired in him so zealously. An ingenuously boastful boy of twelve would find in him a ready admirer of his most cherished deeds, and he appeared to really appreciate the condescension of the youth of eighteen who saw fit to confide in him, and to take their opinionated selves with decent ceremony where others among their elders would have been merely annoyed or else distressingly amused. People you had always regarded as obviously undesirable, you found him praising—not in the manner of one who champions the weaker side on principle, but because he actually found strange things to like about them. But he was not one of the quiet, gentle, charitable type whose humanity seems the result almost of a want of character, and as such a questionable asset: he relished things with the eager tastes of a performer rather than an onlooker, being blessed also with a watchful and sometimes bursting sense of humor which was as his religion, making him deal with events in the guise of a priestly buffoon and people with a surgery as incisive as it was good-natured.

He was a connoisseur of people—a connoisseur of the happier type who does not simply make a few things his own and damn the unfortunate rest, but who finds that all food for the soul is good food, after all. Thus he used to pick up all sorts of people and become tremendously fond of them overnight. Any genuine person—whether a self-centered young man or a despicable old one, or his gardener’s wife—was of the greatest importance in his eyes. A trace of sentiment or pomposity in one of the subjects of his observations was to him an intellectual emetic as regards that person, but practically all other forms of human failing delighted him quite as much, if not more than the most inspiring strength. You felt that he, for one, had attained to a perfect freedom from himself, so that he could sit back, unlike the rest of us, and be entertained by the diverse abnormalities of his companions: that he found his own passions wholly in the understanding perusal of those of other people.

An Irish servant once said of him: “Sure, now, he does like to see the young people have a good time!” and it expressed brilliantly his attitude. For to his mind, apparently all people were young people whom he was watching at their diversions. In fact, if it had not been for his hilarious sharing of our pleasures, he would have been to us rather like a god: for he seemed older than we, as though he had known of old the great lives upon Olympus and were down here to gratify some fatherly instinct of sympathy for us. And when he sometimes left us, one sensed the withdrawal of considerably more than a presence. We were accustomed to him as one of the most active figures on the scene, but still, when he went away, it was as if a harmonious background had also been removed. In appearance he was fat. His head was large and his face grave, in repose, like that of a serious child.

There were stories, I was once shocked on finding out, about the Great Pan Jandrum’s youth—stories of a vagueness that implied things about him quite incongruous to the people who knew him now. Did he then have a common youth, with all its attendant distortions?—it seemed impossible. Evidently it had not been a romantic theatrical youth either, in spite of its present shaded character. One lady simply said he had been “nasty” and let it go at that. He seems to have been a commonplace person then—aggressively commonplace, with all the nauseating poses of his age strong in him, like diseases. Alcohol had played a part, it seems; and he was not one of those who were made genial or attractive by its use. One could have the heresy to make a decent guess, after all this, as to one origin of his widespread tolerance.

But the placidity of his middle years had been of an amplitude to swallow and almost entirely submerge these indefinite and hushed enormities. So if any dignity in him had given it a chance, the community, which was not large, would have looked upon him as a benevolent influence. At a feast, without his contagious humor, he would still have been a sort of golden aura to the occasion; to meet him was to come away eased of the life-long burden of yourself, having heard him laugh; and he had a gift for rendering people unable to look seriously in the face of a calamity. You were always trying, in spite of yourself, to worship him, he was so grand, and so you would have, except that he was too dynamic for a pedestal.

It almost made him, as a person, not ring true. His rôle was too exact. Occasionally one would find one’s-self looking intently at his serious, childish face—and wondering if there were not something behind it besides a fund of geniality. He was too much of a cheerful background; too understanding of the weaknesses of his neighbors; and in his humor far too thorough not to be sometimes suspected to unreality. But it was a passing doubt at best, and quite conceivably the product of our imaginations as we looked backward from a later date. At any rate, he was enjoyed and respected as a very rare personage indeed: a friend of everyone alike, though no one in particular. You might have described him to a perfect stranger as “a very amusing person”, but if he was mentioned you really did not feel that way yourself. You did not think of him as a person at all, in fact, but as the thing he was, or stood for, as though he were the representative of something.

But it seems that fate had written that the Pan Jandrum—the wise and genial Pan Jandrum—the Great Pan Jandrum himself, was riding, all this time, for a fall.

Fortunately, I was away when it happened, as I should not like to have seen it. For it is certain I should have shared the curiously intense feeling of revulsion—or rather simply depression that settled upon the community afterward. Several things contributed to the effect of the event, chief of which was, of course, its publicity. Had he not chosen the particular evening he did to cast aside every vestige of self-control, no one might have known. But Mrs. Joe-Billy happened, on that winter night, to be giving a dinner at her big house up on the hill to which the Great Pan Jandrum had been invited, and from which he stayed, for a time, conspicuously and unaccountably absent.

Whether he was accidentally started by some inadvertent friend, or whether he deliberately wished to enjoy himself, I do not know. Perhaps he was just tired of his heroic rôle: that is, of our ridiculous yet touching attitude toward him.

Those who saw him during the earlier part of the evening, at the club, never could be made to see the tragic side of the whole affair. Upon them he apparently made an ineffaceable impression and from what we others heard, it must have been a performance in the genuine grand manner. It was, in a way, the glorious apex of his unreal career among us. People who did not see him there were always very pitiless about the way he acted, pity not being reserved, I suppose, for the unpardonable failure of something as great as the Pan Jandrum. But I have seen no one who did see him there who could tell of any part of it without putting it on a lofty epic scale—even the saturnine barber whose pride in his control of the imagination was like a perpetual flower in his buttonhole. The quantity he had to drink was grown, by the time it reached my ears, to an heroic figure. The picture was of him seated in his shirt sleeves alone at a small table, immersed in bottles. The smoke-filled grill room was thronged with young men and dignitaries tip-toe on tables and chairs and chairs on tables in order to hear him and see his stupendous gestures. Nobody could ever remember anything, he said, but it was so impressive as to need but a day for it to acquire a legendary character. I know for a fact that one of the twelve old women of the village who lived a whole block away sent to find the cause of the noise, and that old Mr. Galhoolie roared with the best until it was too much for him and he was sick—in the English sense—all down his patriarchal white beard. I have found myself wishing I had been there, as I wish I had been at Camelot or at one of the receptions given the Greek of many devices on his wanderings.