The Yale Literary Magazine (Vol. LXXXIX, No. 1, 1923)

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Title: The Yale Literary Magazine (Vol. LXXXIX, No. 1, 1923)
Author: Various
Language: English
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| Vol. LXXXIX No. 1 |
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| The |
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| Yale Literary Magazine |
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| Conducted by the |
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| Students of Yale University. |
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| [Illustration] |
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| “Dum mens grata manet, nomen laudesque YALENSES |
| Cantabunt SOBOLES, unanimique PATRES.” |
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| October, 1923. |
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| New Haven: Published by the Editors. |
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| Printed at the Van Dyck Press. 121-123 Olive St., New Haven. |
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| Price: Thirty-five Cents. |
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| _Entered as second-class matter at the New Haven Post Office._ |
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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._

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.

But I do not wish I had been up on the hill that night, though that
was the dramatic part of the show. It came after he was known to have
escaped from the club alone, after a lengthy disappearance. Up there,
they had naturally supposed that he failed to fill his place on account
of some trivial domestic tragedy, or the advent of friends; or that
something had at last got into his solid old liver which during so many
years of good living had been besieged in vain. But when they heard
he was coming up there in all his magnificence they were horrified. A
morbid curiosity chained them there, but they awaited him in silent,
breathless apprehension, imagining him drawing slowly toward them like
an evil fate over the snowy intervening mile of road. Their reticence
was curious, and explained only by the unbelievableness of the Great
Pan Jandrum’s being uncontrolled--hilarious, crude, outlandish--they
didn’t know what. And they appreciated the occasion at once. It was no
ordinary man about to be foolish, disheartening as that would be under
the circumstances, but they realized that it would touch each one of us
inasmuch as we had put a certain rare type of faith in what he was.

If only it had been hilarity, or crudity, or wildness that greeted
them! Their wait had been long enough and tense, with them talking
in low voices--asking each other hesitating little questions about
what they thought might happen. Suddenly some one started back with a
gasp, and they all turned to find his serious child’s face outside the
window, intently peering at them.

There is no need to describe his actions subsequent to his entering
the house. He was not outlandish. He was merely quiet in voice and
manner with an appalling drunkard’s dignity, and he was fully dressed.
The cheer had all gone out of him. He talked for an hour without
pause, first to one, then to another, entirely about himself and with
horrible seriousness. Sententiousness and pomposity from the Great Pan
Jandrum! His tone was threatening; almost challenging all the while,
and there was that in his face which prevented any thought of stopping
him. Intimate, personal, half-finished thoughts issued from him like
loathsome abortions. He took the beautiful Mrs. Galhoolie’s hand in
his and told her he reverenced and respected her so much that he could
not ever love her as the others did. Everyone was left knowing in
excessively sentimental terms just what he thought of them. Everything
he uttered was an indecent exposure; every sentence tore away another
portion of the disguise--as it looked--that he had been so long
building. He was operating on himself in their presence, exposing the
nauseating entrails of his mind--so comfortable from the outside--and
forcing upon them the knowledge that he was as sordid and commonplace
as they in their very worst moments. When they brought him home and
left him they could hear him sobbing--great, deep-voiced, mountainous
sobs that shook his bed.

But for me, the story of the evening gave the key to the man and made
him interesting. You may admire a point of view and you may even bask
in it, but you cannot make it your friend. It sounded precisely as
though a pent-up flood of gnawing sentiment and egoism had been let
loose in him. He must have had incurably Byronic tendencies which had
at some time or other offended his critical sense, and you saw him now
as a man despairingly and acutely aware of his vulgar heritage of ego
who had with his almost passionate interest in the fortunes of other
people built up the most powerful defense against himself that he could
think of. And there always was, too, I reflected, something of the
fanatic about his rôle of humorist.

I should have been disturbed on our first meeting soon after the
performance, had it not come as a surprise. I was in Paris, and as I
was leaving my hotel one night for some kind of a festivity he popped
out of the darkness and shook me by the hand. We parted hastily, I
having time for little greeting. “Have a good time, now!” he said as
I left, and that old characteristic phrase of his rang in my ears as
I walked off down the street. He had said it with his usual cheerful,
interested smile and I looked in vain for a found-out expression I had
expected to notice in his face. I wondered if he realized what his
one false step had meant to our imaginations. For, as I afterwards
observed, it was not a question of his brazening it out: he evidently
had consigned it to the limbo of to-be-expected mistakes with a shrug
of the shoulders and took it for granted that we had done the same.
But, however this may be, I saw that he had already begun to build
another structure of worship in my esteem at any rate. Already my
newly discovered man was disappearing, engulfed as in a very splendid
costume which he had removed for a minute. And when next I saw him at
home I had again the ancient feeling of being bathed in a warm electric
light--that unaccountably had sparks, as well.

W. T. BISSELL.

_Maurice Hewlett_

In 1893 Mr. Edmund Gosse, with a fine perception of literary
tendencies, wrote: “It is my conviction that the limits of realism
have been reached; that no great writer who has not already adopted
the experimental system will do so; and that we ought now to be on the
lookout to welcome (and, of course, to persecute) a school of novelists
with a totally new aim, part of whose formula must unquestionably be
a concession to the human instinct for mystery and beauty.” The next
year, with “Ebb Tide”, “The Prisoner of Zenda”, and “Under the Red
Robe”, the signs were unmistakable, and what the critics have pleased
to call the Romantic Revival had begun. It was on the crest of this
wave of romanticism that Maurice Hewlett first appeared, and when that
wave had spent itself fifteen years later his best work was done. He
was at once a child of this movement, exhibiting in varied form its
most familiar phases, and a strange free spirit, deriving from no
literary movement, a romanticist by nature, not the exigencies of his
art. And so, if we feel the influence of the period in “The Forest
Lovers”, “The New Canterbury Tales”, “The Fool Errant”, and the rest,
it is in “The Queen’s Quair” and in “Richard Yea-and-Nay” that we
come upon the very essence of Hewlett’s art, an art which was quite
distinctively his own. These two novels he wrote to please himself.
They have been called his finest work.

As Lionel Johnson said of Scott, so he might have said of Maurice
Hewlett: “In him the antiquarian spirit awoke a passion, instead of a
science.” Hewlett was mystically touched by the beauty of the Middle
Ages and by the beauty of the Renaissance. He was a mediaevalist, a
quattrocentist par excellence, but above all this, or perhaps, better,
as a physical embodiment of all this, he loved Italy with a passionate,
sensitive love. It was this love for Italy which so subtly affected
his character and gave to his novels their color and their warmth,
although strange enough very little of his life was spent in Italy and
little of his best work deals with its history or its people. It was
of England that he wrote in “The Queen’s Quair”, of England and the
Crusades in “Richard Yea-and-Nay”. So, if we grant to his affection for
Italy and her art the warmth and color of his novels, we must look for
their life, their vitality, to this same England and his understanding
love of her past, his oneness in spirit with even the simplest of those
characters which moved across the broad canvas of her history.

It is not for me to say that either the color and warmth of Italy’s
art or the life and vitality of England’s past were exclusively the
foundation stones of Hewlett’s art. His novels are, all of them,
rich with intermingled threads like tapestry--not the heavy brocaded
tapestry of the poet Spenser, but a tapestry brilliant, yet often
misty and confused, that was quite his own. His backgrounds he built
of hundreds of figures, quickly and sharply etched in a manner
remarkably reminiscent of Sir Thomas Malory and Froissart. Against
this background which he had created with so lavish a care he laid his
greater figures--and I think of Richard and John Lackland and the old
King, Henry the Second, from “Richard Yea-and-Nay”--figures which he
had limned with broad, bold strokes and touched with a quiet wit. The
effect is not only that of tapestry but of old stained glass. We marvel
how the simple, splendid figures stand out and are yet a part of a
delicately wrought background.

But in the movement of these greater figures before so complex a
background lay the weakness of Hewlett’s art. He knew the pageantry and
color of the lives he wrote about, but it was not given him to read
deeply beneath the gaily painted surface they presented. The movement
of his characters through the unfolding scenes of his romances is not
puppetry. Hewlett’s touch was too fresh, too original for that. It is
only that we see in part, whereas if he had had the power the whole
would be revealed to us. In his greatest novel, and in that novel
almost alone, the veil is lifted for a few moments. In those moments I
think he knew Richard.

Perhaps, though, more than all else, the factor that can undermine the
permanence of Hewlett’s work is his style. His writing is twisted,
tortured, and--in the reading--perplexing. His prose is almost never
rhythmical; it is often awkward and harsh. The books he wrote to please
himself, his best work, he filled with archaic turns of speech until
their very pages seem to bear the marks of age. They are, as some one
has said, “the inventions of a connoisseur in the queer and remote, a
sort of transformation of Henry James’s involutions into terms of olden
days”.

To cavil at this is difficult, as it is difficult to cavil at the
design and composition of the romances themselves, they are so
characteristic of their author. He turned his hand to modern England
in the novels of the English countryside, “Rest Harrow”, “Halfway
House”, and the others. He came back to the manner of his earlier
period in “Brazenhead the Great” and worked for a time in the field of
Norse legend. But he will be remembered longest by those two strange,
tangled, brilliant romances, “Richard Yea-and-Nay” and “The Queen’s
Quair”, the best expression his art ever found. Maurice Hewlett was a
colorist, a romancer, a passionate lover of ancient ways. We should
give thanks for the mystery of the Bowing Rood in the church of the
nuns at Fontevrault; for the beauty of Richard, his face covered with
his shield, standing at dawn upon the hills before Jerusalem.

RICHARD L. PURDY.

_The Egolatress_

Infinitely more lovely in the winter darkness than in the revealing
light of day, Summit Avenue stretched beneath the moon. The clashing
architectures of the huge houses were mercifully blurred into harmony
by the night, and the long piles of snow drew the picture into a loose,
graceful unity. Beneath the glowing strands of the boulevard lights
flowed a double current of automobiles, in smooth streams that wound
out to the suburbs and downtown to the bays of commerce and amusement.

Before the doors of the Territorial Club the streams turned in a
sweeping curve, and occasionally cars left the current to turn in,
pause a moment before the pseudo-Gothic entrance, and then join the
parked flank in the driveway.

A long blue roadster, once sleek and new, now battered, and dusty still
from months of confinement, slid to a stop, like a stick caught on the
bank of a stream. The young driver busied himself with the intricate
process of locking his car. It was dear to him. His companion climbed
out, shivering.

“Great Scott! You have cold nights up there,” he said. “At home there’s
no snow on the ground at all.”

The owner of the car laughed. “You’ll get used to it, in two weeks.
Throw that rug over the radiator, will you?” He finished locking
the car, got out, and, as an extra precaution, lifted the hood and
disconnected the spark-plugs.

“Can’t be too careful of the old boiler,” he said apologetically. “If
it was stolen I wouldn’t get another one out of dad for a century.”

In the lobby he nodded to the young negro who came to take their coats,
with the familiarity of a member, and turned to his companion, who was
glancing curiously at the chattering groups of men and girls in evening
dress who were in the lobby.

“From the crowd, Tommy, I gather we’ve looked in on some one’s party.
Wait, and I’ll see who’s giving it.”

In a tall, loosely hung way, Tommy was rather handsome; distinguished,
certainly. He had deep grey eyes, and a way of taking all things with
a slow, questioning smile, that either charmed or exasperated. He was
very dark; a Southerner; twenty-two perhaps.

The other, short, and sandy-haired, and blue-eyed, carrying himself
with that preoccupied air of conscious importance which is so often
the aspect of short people, was in excellent contrast. By their
oppositeness they set one another off; rather to Tommy’s advantage.

“Grant’s party, for Millicent,” his host said, returning. “Mrs. Grant’s
an old social-enemy and friend of mother’s; we’re invited to stay.”

He led the way down a short hall to the right, past parted velvet
curtains, toward the source of the music. Before the formidable Mrs.
Grant, a matron of the over-stuffed type, he performed the amenities.

“Mrs. Grant, this is Tommy Squire, my roommate at school. Tommy’s from
Richmond.”

Mrs. Grant was very happy to meet a friend of Carl Twist’s. Tommy
accepted the three longest fingers of the drooping hand which she
extended to him with the manner of an operatic duchess, and managed
to convey his gratitude for the honor. As a further concession Mrs.
Grant propounded the unique theory that winters in the North were
apt to be _much_ colder than those in Virginia--“Don’t _you_ find it
so, Mr. Squire?” When the two had unanimously ratified her sagacious
observation, the audience was over.

The club’s lounge and dining-room had been thrown into one; the
tables, later to be drawn out for supper, were massed in a corner, and
elaborate decorations festooned the walls. Under the rose and grey of
the low-beamed ceiling the whirl and color and indiscriminate noise of
unleashed exuberance of the first of the holiday dances throbbed and
spun to the music. There were men and girls from the universities, from
prep. schools and finishing schools, and a seasoning of those who had
graduated or dropped out. Most of them had returned within the week,
and each time that the music stopped there were numerous impromptu,
frenzied reunions, as friends parted for an age of three and a half
months simulated paroxysms of joy at seeing one another, with shrieks
and calls and kisses and much waggling hand-shaking--as the sex or the
innate histrionics of the participants impelled them.

In the interval of music Tommy was introduced to the privates of the
stag-line, remembering mismated fragments of names, and receiving the
bone-crushing grip which is every youth’s obsession, until his own
shoulders sagged, and his throat became dry with repeating “How do you
do.”

“I’d better introduce you to some girls, now,” Carl decided mercifully.

A couple brushed past, engrossed in the intricacies of a new dance. The
girl caught Tommy’s interest.

“Who’s that?” he asked.

Carl laughed softly. “So soon?” he said. “That’s Millicent Grant, for
whom the party’s being given. She goes to Dobbs; as a relaxation, I
guess. Her real business is the Male; making men fall for her, dangle a
while, and then dropping them. Thinks she’s wasted on the small field
this town offers. Look out for her. She’s shallow as the deuce, but
hard to get away from.”

“No danger,” said Tommy. “I didn’t appear so interested as to get all
this biography, I hope!”

“You’ll hear it soon enough. She enjoys being the talk of the town;
local Barbara Neave, as it were. Come and meet her.”

Followed by Tommy, Carl threaded his way through the dancers, stepped
with nonchalant expertness on the toes of a stag about to precede him,
and cut in.

“Hello, Millicent! Come and be introduced to Tommy Squire, coming Big
Man at school, who does me the honor of being my roommate for the
exclusive right of wearing my ties.”

Tommy smiled formally at his friend’s brilliance, made an inward
notation that he liked her eyes when she smiled, and acknowledged the
presentation.

When Carl had removed himself, they danced.

Then followed the conventional small-talk of two members of the
warring sexes when both are engaged in “making an impression”. They
both followed youth’s greatest diversion, staying in school the while
dodging its exactions and embracing its pleasures, and acquiring not
education, but the equally essential atmosphere. It developed that
he was a junior, she in the final year of finishing school; that he
played football, but had failed to win a letter (though he confessed
with pardonable pride having played eight minutes in a Big Game when
the first-string tackle had been carried off the field); that she
_adored_ football; that she likewise _adored_ a number of things; dogs
(but not the messy kind); fraternity pins, and Eastern men (this was
a pardonable error; she made flattering concessions to the Southern
variety, when Tommy found the opportunity to tell her where he came
from); that she _adored_--a great many more things.

In short, they simply chattered, as a man and a girl have always
done, on first meeting. Later stages of acquaintanceship bring long
silences, either from undisguised boredom or an adolescent spiritual
understanding. Now, silence was a gaping hole in the garment of
etiquette, to be patched with endless talk.

They were soon cut in on.

Carl returned from the arduous task of dancing with his own sister
(a task only to her brother; she, too, held court), and found Tommy
marooned in the stag line. He introduced him to other girls, in whom
Tommy found varying charm. Carl’s sister, a mature child of seventeen,
wanted to know, “_Honestly_ now,” whether Carl drank at school.

Tommy lied like a good roommate. He reflected philosophically on the
oddness of sisters who went out constantly with men who drank, and yet
expected total abstinence from their brothers. It was a reversal of
the older custom of brothers who demanded impeccable behavior of their
sisters; and yet--

Millicent passed. He cut-in. When they had danced half a dozen steps he
lost her to another stag.

She was annoyed, and the pressure of her hand as they parted was a
little more than casual artifice. Millicent had early finished her
appraisal of the men at the party. She knew that she was destined to
meet most of them night after night for the next two weeks, and she
planned eventualities. She planned to have half a dozen affairs; the
holiday-loves, more evanescent even than summer-loves, that dwindled,
after the two weeks, from special-delivery letters into abrupt
silence. There would be one or two proposals, perhaps, in the last
days--there had been three, at the end of the summer at Minnetonka.
She catalogued the men, slowly: Eddie Pearson, nice enough--too nice,
insipid; Orme Waldon, whom no amount of snubbing would rebuff; Stewart
Holmes, whose egotism was such that he believed all girls secretly
longed for his attentions; and so on. These were the last three of the
summer’s garnerings. She wanted some one _new_. Tommy Squire. He seemed
worth thinking about. Rather wise--he’d need angling to draw in. Idly
she planned manoeuvres.

Tommy cut-in again. She used the old effective artifice of asking him
to keep her tiny handkerchief and vanity-case in his pocket. When she
caught his eye, he was to understand that they were needed. Tommy
smiled to himself. He understood.

But Millicent did not need to use her vanity-case very often. Tommy
kept on cutting-in. However, his manner was not gratifying. He was
pleasant, impersonal, quizzical. He told her that she was rather the
most attractive girl there--and added, thoughtfully, that there were
lots more beautiful girls, in Richmond.

“You’re absolutely _rude_, Mr. Squire!” Millicent wanted to be placated.

He drew her out, and with skillful questions, sped with occasional
compliments, he exposed her vanity. When she realized that, she
retaliated--they understood one another, distantly still, and far
beneath the surface of conversation.

As he continued to cut in--alternating, rather from politeness, with
Carl’s sister Joan--the stags, in a tacit agreement, let him have her
more and more to himself. Joan did not like that. It was ahead of her
plans.

At supper Millicent saw to it that they were paired together. Looking
distastefully at the noisy tables, where already the customary
table-jokes were under way--spoons being laid in rows so that a tap
on one sent another into a glass of water, and misappropriation of
the salt and pepper (Bardy Cless and Evelyn Preston leading on the
humorists), she feared that she might lose him there to Joan Twist.

“Let’s go outside and have our supper in a car,” she suggested.
“There’s no room here.”

Tommy, politely overlooking the numerous empty places, was entirely
willing. He got cake and sandwiches, and two plates with cups of coffee
and chicken patties, and together they sped across the street to a
parked limousine that stood almost in the shadow of the cathedral.

He told her, in the course of the next few minutes, that she was
_quite_ as lovely as any girl in Richmond. The darkness, and
Millicent’s bare shoulder close against him, were effective.

And he was pleasantly surprised when he found that she had no desire to
be kissed.

“Why, I’ve only known you for two hours,” she said, dropping lightly
out of the car. “And besides, mother will be mad _again_ when she finds
that I’m not having supper at my own party. Last year Dick Cole and I
drove down to the chicken shack, and mother almost passed away when we
came back, eating drumsticks!”

They both forgot the débris of their supper, but later, after the party
was over, a very angry matron discovered it when she sat in a plate of
chicken, on entering her car to go home.

Long past midnight Millicent sat before her dressing table, thinking.
She took off the silver band around her hair, and with a brush began
to restore the fluffiness which the mode demands. A wisp which grew an
infinitesimal fraction of an inch longer, in front, than the rest she
critically snipped off with finger-nail scissors. She let her hands
rest on the table, and regarded her reflection. She was supremely
satisfied with what she saw; she always was. Her self-admiration
transcended egotism. It was impersonal. She was complacently certain
that she was the most beautiful girl in the city. The assurance of a
very few girls--and a very great number of men--was superfluous. Wilde
has said that love of oneself is a life-long romance: Millicent’s
was a passion! In the perfection of her features, a subtle coldness
of manner, a faint expression as of calculating, which her character
had betrayed into her eyes, was the nearest thing to a fault which
she could see. Such an expression must inevitably creep into the
expression of a girl who is the object of so much masculine attention
that she may--and perforce must--choose, and weigh, and reject, so
slighting the least attractive candidates. It was these who were most
aware of the expression--they remembered it vividly, in soothing their
disappointments.

Millicent picked up a lip-stick, and toyed with it. She glanced up
at the top of her mirror. There she kept a curious record. Drawn on
the level of the glass with the lip-stick, were three small hearts.
A photograph almost hid them. They were initialed--E.P., O.W., S.H.
She picked up her handkerchief, and rubbed out the last one. She was
tired of Stewart--he would be dropped; in the cool, summary manner
which was the essence of Millicent. Eddie, and Orme Waldon would
remain. Eddie was always beneficial--he played up so well when she
wanted compliments. Orme had a car which she could command, with him or
without him; and that was very useful.

When she had erased the last heart she drew a new one, larger and
apart; the photograph would completely hide it. She initialed it T.S.,
and then she sat regarding it--he had been so pointedly disinterested!
Ah, but he would learn servility; others had, before him.

* * * * *

After a few days, the members of the general “crowd” had come to see
that through accident or design Tommy and Millicent were usually
together, when both were at any given place at the same time. There
were comments; some caustic, some foolish, some wise: Carl, for
instance, was irritatingly derisive. “I told you she’d take you in!”
he told Tommy; and when Tommy serenely denied any unusual interest, he
agreed, with the reservation--“That’s all right, for _now_, you sweet
idiot, but you don’t appreciate what Millicent can do, in ten days.
Just wait!”

On Sunday afternoons a heterogeneous crowd was wont to drift over
to the Grants’, to piece together the gossip of the week. At
supper-time they regularly went through the ritual of expressing
formal astonishment at the lateness of the hour, and then reluctantly
accepting the expected invitation to stay and partake of a
buffet-supper.

When Carl and Tommy arrived they found the usual assembly. For half the
afternoon Millicent ignored Tommy, simulating a deep interest in Eddie
Pearson’s stuttered and imperfect rendition of all the jokes in the
past week’s Orpheum bill. Eddie was one of those people who insist upon
showing you how excellently they can imitate the comedian....

Tommy, on the couch, was amiably quarreling with Barbara Peart over
the literary merits of modern literature. Barbara held serious and
decided views; Tommy didn’t care a damn either way; the subject bored
him so that it was an effort to be polite. Millicent finally extricated
herself from Eddie’s imperfectly remembered humor with scant courtesy,
and sat down beside Tommy. There was satisfaction in taking him away
from Barbara, anyway. Thereafter she directed the conversation--to
herself, inevitably.

Tommy and Carl stayed on after the rest of the crowd had left.
Millicent arranged that. Carl at first refused to accept her hints
that he too might leave; but after they had sat in silence for ten
minutes, Millicent sulking, Tommy looking into the fire and thinking
about the hunting near Richmond, and Carl professing fascination in
the automobile pages of the Sunday paper, he relented, and rose to
go. Tommy, with elaborately concealed relief, rose to accompany him.
Then Millicent took command of the situation, and said, with superb
carelessness:

“Well, drive back here and take Tommy home about eleven, because I
really must go to bed early to-night if I’m to go on that snow-shoe
trip to-morrow.”

So Tommy stayed. The conversation was not animated. Millicent made poor
progress. Presently, when the conversation reached Millicent in its
usual course, she asked him whether he liked bobbed-hair. He did, on
certain girls. She obviously expected to be told that she was one; if
not the chief one. He told her so.

The next step would be for him to stretch his arm along the back of the
couch, above her shoulders, and comment upon its fluffiness. Tommy took
his cue admirably. He stirred her hair with his fingers, and he did not
withdraw his arm. Millicent had drawn imperceptibly closer. The fire
in the grate had burned down to a drowsy glow, leaving the room in the
semi-darkness of late winter twilight. Now her head swayed toward him.
The moment was propitious. Tommy knew it. He had been cast as leading
man in just such a scene before. He knew that the next move was his....

And rather unexpectedly he made it. Very deliberately he got up, walked
over to the table, took up a cigarette and lit it. Neither of them
spoke. The silence was unnatural. A tension filled the air. There was
nothing to say.

The sound of a horn on the driveway saved the situation.

“That must be Carl,” Tommy said quickly. “Sounds as if he might be in a
hurry. Don’t get up; I’ll just grab my things in the hall. Good-night,
Millicent--awfully good time.”

He went out, a little breathlessly, before she could speak or get up.

Millicent was furious; furious at Tommy, who had snubbed her with
such ironic insolence; furious at herself, who had engineered her
own humiliation. The climax of her planning had come to ignominious
failure. Consuming anger filled her. For a moment she wondered whether
his manner would betray anything of the breach to the rest of the
crowd, on the snowshoe trip, the next day. Paul Lyle, in making up the
party, had paired them as a matter of course. Millicent knew what the
crowd was saying: and she would not be made ridiculous in their eyes,
now. Before Tommy went back to school he must propose, and the crowd
must know that he had.

She repeated that, mentally. The words were like italics on a page.

* * * * *

There was no perceptible difference in their attitude the next morning.
The snowshoe trip to Paul Lyle’s cabin on the St. Croix River had been
abandoned, because a vagary of the thermometer had brought balmy winds
and a thaw, overnight.

Tommy was relieved. The trip had been planned in his honor, and he had
had to feign a deep interest in Northern sports; actually he had had a
distinct premonition that he was due to make a general ass of himself
on snowshoes.

It was decided that they should drive up to the cabin for dinner,
instead. They found the cabin mired in slush, and with a leaking roof,
but a crackling fire in the stone hearth, and the uncertain melodies
from a small phonograph which some one unearthed, put them all in high
spirits. When they had tired of dancing over the uneven floors they
constituted themselves into an exploring party, and wandered down to
the river and out on the soft ice.

Presently, Providence took a hand.

Millicent, who had run ahead of the rest, shrieked suddenly, balanced
wildly for an instant, and fell into an air-hole in the ice.

It took but a very few moments to lift her out, and take her up to the
cabin, but in that period she had been seriously chilled from exposure
in the icy water. The men had done all that they could. Mary Skinner,
small and frail, took command. Millicent was put to bed, before the
hearth, bordering on the line of unconsciousness. A doctor was on the
way. They could only wait.

Tommy was dazed. Millicent had suddenly became a great deal to him. The
play of excited emotion, suddenly released, will do that. He sat on the
steps, unmindful of his own damp clothes. Millicent’s light sweater was
in his hands. Why, he wondered inconsistently, out of all this crowd of
girls did it have to be Millicent who should be endangered?

“Tommy’s taking it pretty hard, I guess,” some one said. “He thinks an
awful lot of Millicent.”

And for the first time, he did.

* * * * *

When the doctor had come, and given Millicent a hypodermic, they
wrapped her carefully in rugs, and drove slowly back to town.

She would have to stay in bed for a week or so, that was all, the
doctor said.

Tommy’s first floral offering came the next morning, and in the course
of the following days he sent almost everything in the florist’s
stock, from corsage bouquets to funeral lilies. He came himself, and
stayed interminably, until Mr. Grant, ordinarily a mild-mannered and
ponderously humored man, observed with unwonted choler that “If that
young man comes any earlier, I shall have to give him my place at the
breakfast table!” His wife, who looked upon Tommy with that eye of
wisdom which mothers with marriageable daughters possess, was more
kindly disposed. Tommy, in the parlance of her sphere, was an excellent
“catch”. He might see Millicent as often as he liked.

Millicent prolonged her stay in bed. She was aware that she made rather
a charming invalid, and throned in her bed she received a gratifying
court.

The wise commenters became positive.

“Millicent’s really in love, this time,” they said, “and their
engagement will be announced before Tommy goes back to school.”

Tommy, the drawling and indifferent, had given way to Tommy, the
intense and devoted. Millicent was aware of her victory.

The hearts with E.P. and O.W. had gone. Tommy’s, hidden by the
photograph, reigned alone. Perhaps, she thought idly, after they were
married she would have it cut into the glass. It was a pretty fancy.
She toyed with the idea, toyed with it as she did with everything in
her life; a languid, fickle amusement.

The day before Tommy and Carl were to go back to school Millicent got
up. She was paler, and more ethereally beautiful, she decided, with
characteristic candor. The sweet peas which he had sent that morning
looked rather well on her.

She wondered, as she pinned them on, whether he would propose to-day or
wait until the last.

He was nervous; a little haggard, too, she noticed, when he came, and
she knew that he would propose to-day. Her triumph was at hand, but
suddenly she knew that she wanted more time to think. She must make him
wait until to-morrow.

They were on the couch again. He kissed her, and in the moment that
their lips touched it came to her that Tommy was realty infatuated--but
in another moment the old doubt had returned, and when he said:

“Millicent, dear, I’ve only known you--” she stopped him, with a
breathless flutter, and said, “To-morrow, Tommy, to-morrow afternoon; I
_can’t_ tell you to-day!”... And she ran out of the room.

Millicent did not appear at supper. She was locked in her room, her
head buried in her arms on the dressing-table, thinking; half crying.
It was the only crisis which had ever come into her life. Always before
she had left this to the man; her own way had continued serenely
untroubled. Once, in a fit of fancy, she reached up as if to erase the
heart, but she did not complete the gesture.

The next morning dragged slowly by.

After lunch Millicent went to her desk, and in a fit of caprice wrote
a letter. She read it, and started to tear it up. Then she changed her
mind, and left it, sealed, on her desk. It was a quarter past two.
Tommy ought to arrive very soon.

She walked over to the pier-glass in the hall. Dispassionately she
admired her beauty. She thought that she had never seen anyone so
lovely. Others might be merely beautiful, hers was distinctive. Beauty
was a power in itself; and when coupled with intellect--the power it
might wield was infinite. Great beauties had made history--many of them
had had humbler beginnings, by far, than she. She felt in that moment
that she too might have been destined to rule.... French novels had
taught her these things--and had failed to instil a sense of personal
absurdity.

Egotism was her greatest fault; she looked upon it as her highest
virtue.

Her thought came back to Tommy. No man had ever been so much in love
with her as he was. And he represented so many desirable things. He was
appealingly good looking. He was wealthy in his own right, Carl had
told her. Life with him would be tranquil and luxurious.... It might
grow dull.

* * * * *

She heard him on the walk. She stood there, frozen, as he came up the
steps. He rang the bell, and in that instant decision came. The maid
was coming through to open the door. Millicent snatched the sealed
letter from her desk, and handed it to her.

“Give this to Mr. Squire,” she said, and while the maid gazed stupidly
at her, she laughed, half hysterically, and ran up the stairs.

In her room she heard Tommy come in, heard the murmur of the maid’s
voice, and then, after a pause longer than she had ever endured, she
heard the door close upon him. She waited until she could not hear his
footsteps longer--then she walked over to the mirror, and rubbed out
the heart.

C. G. POORE.

_Book Reviews_

_Jean Huguenot._ By STEPHEN VINCENT BENÉT. (Henry Holt.)

Flowers in writing are like flowers on a grave: they commemorate death.
And Benét’s first novel was a little too prone to floral decoration. In
his third book, _Jean Huguenot_, his work as a stylist is noticeably
improved. He still remains all poet in his prose, and, as ever, reads
the better for it. Yet he has reached a saner manner of writing that
does not overwhelm and cloy as did parts of _The Beginning of Wisdom_.

Despite mechanical improvement _Jean Huguenot_ marks a lull in the
author’s literary progress. You are moved along for two hundred or so
pages by glowing language and well-drawn situations. And just when
the book has become really enjoyable--well, all pleasure in it begins
to subside. You are dropped, like a deflated balloon, into a flat and
tasteless completion. Why, oh, why, you say, couldn’t he have given us
something else--anything else? The spectacle of Jean Huguenot Ashley
turned _cocotte_ is neither appealing nor revolting; it is just plain
drab. Perhaps Benét is true to nature in his picture, but--read it and
see if it doesn’t affect you in the same fashion. The story is worth
while for three-quarters of its course--and then, being so near the
end, one might as well finish it, anyway.

J. R. C.

_The Florentine Dagger._ By BEN HECHT. (Boni & Liveright.)

Ben Hecht is mountebank of words par excellence: their swirling shapes,
their sounds, their shifting colors, as he juggles them so adroitly
before our bewildered eyes. The subject-matter of his books serves only
as a pattern, an excuse for weaving a tapestry of fascinating and often
amazing phrases. Whether it is a psychological study in the manner of
Dreiser, like Gargoyles, or an all-night detective story, like the
present book, is an altogether incidental matter. It is the words that
count. That may perhaps explain why Mr. Hecht should suddenly decide to
perform before such a bourgeois audience, descending, so to speak, from
the Palace to the four-a-day. He evidently realized that the world was
quite bored by anything he had to say, but perfectly entranced by the
way in which he said it.

_The Florentine Dagger_ was written with Prof. Hart’s Psychology of
Insanity on one hand and the Memoirs of the de Medici Family on the
other. Taken as a dramatic presentation of certain psychological
phenomena it is brilliant enough to make itself endeared by every
psychology professor in the country. Everyone in the book, from the
last member of the fastidious de Medicis to the old actress, is
troubled by complexes and obsessions of all sorts, so that a miserable
and uncertain rôle is assigned to each. All the time-dishonored devices
of the mystery story are faithfully observed, although its technique on
the whole is genuinely successful.

Mr. Hecht has in this book, as in all his others, displayed his
incredible faculty for choosing a new literary technique as casually as
most writers choose their stationery.

W. T.

_The Blind Bow Boy._ By CARL VAN VECHTEN. (Alfred Knopf.)

Carl Van Vechten is an elegant dilettante. His books are the essence of
trivial and charming existence. He is fond of cats, George Moore, Rolls
Royce motor cars, and cravats by Charvet. He is apathetic to Corot and
Monet, to Ibsenism, midwestern mediocrity, and synthetic gin.

_The Blind Bow Boy_ is of inferior quality to _Peter Whiffle_, just as
_Peter Whiffle_ is undoubtedly inferior to _Memoirs of My Dead Life_,
but it is good reading and by far the most intelligent intellectual
mixed grill of which the reviewer has partaken this season.

The fact that Van Vechten is in the good graces of the greatest of all
American whim-whammers, Henry Mencken, is in itself a warrant for the
six editions into which the book has already run. It may also prevent
it from running into another six.

_The Blind Bow Boy_ is the story of a summer opera season in New York,
an international alliance in the person of Zimbule O’Grady, and the
delightful exploits of the Duke of Middlebottom, who lived by the
Julian Calendar and in this case “contrived to evade all unsatisfactory
engagements, especially if they were complicated in any way by
daylight-saving time, an American refinement of which he was utterly
ignorant”. There are also some trivial protagonists who strut through
the book in a manner slightly suggestive of exaggerated and overdressed
Weiner sausages.

The author has an unfortunate habit of becoming enamoured of one
character for a chapter or two, and then without warning shifting his
affections to another, a failing which gives the reader a somewhat
biographically errant point of view.

It is also unfortunate that Van Vechten cannot follow a more clearly
defined theme, for he has no sense of plot, shading, or climax. His
stories are a series of photographically vivid scenes, innocent of
all structural liaison, and hanging together only by virtue of the
bookbinding which keeps them from fluttering away to the various
literary hemispheres.

It is, however, very satisfactory reading, for in his multiplex
catalogues of names and places the author gives the reader a vivid
sense of personal familiarity which is quite flattering. No doubt
this effect is obtained by mentioning so many aspects of contemporary
civilization that everyone must needs have come in contact with at
least some few of them.

L. M. B.

_A Son at the Front._ By EDITH WHARTON. (Charles Scribner’s Sons.)

As the most and vagueness surrounding the late war are slowly cleared
away by passing time and subsiding emotions, and the conflict settles
into a semblance of perspective, the more recent books that deal
with it show an increasing grasp of its essentials, and a higher
understanding of its trials and lessons. Where once were only trees,
we can see a forest now, whose outlines are becoming more distinct as
the shock of the cataclysm becomes a memory. It is past, now, and
irrevocable, open to description or interpretation.

Speaking sincerely from the depth of her own experience, Edith Wharton
here gives us a faithful picture; not of the mechanics of the war, but
of general and specific reactions to it. Paris is the setting almost
throughout the narrative, that of an American painter whose son, born
in France, is drawn by the logic of his instincts and sympathies into
the struggle. The scenes and events of the war, its growing tragedy and
sternness, and their gradual effect on John Campton, are recorded with
an insight and understanding that fascinate, while their subject-matter
grips. The author shows a keen grasp of small details, as well as
of large issues and their significance. Her style is delightful--a
silver rapier that here waves benignly, and there strikes humorously
or satirically, with great precision. Several delicate threads of
narrative underlie and emphasize the main theme--Campton’s art, Paris
visibly changing, and the younger Campton’s love affair. The story
never falters as it traces out that “huge mysterious design which
was slowly curving a new heaven over a new earth”. The author, in
that design, points us to a philosophy of the war, a personal moral,
comprehending its soul.

Our growing literary heritage from the World War contains few
contributions more authentic or more inspiring than “A Son at the
Front”.

R. P. C., JR.

_The Dove’s Nest._ By KATHERINE MANSFIELD. (Boni & Liveright.)

Here are stories that are literature: they move us by the presence
of the genuine elements of literature, and not by the elements of
painting, music, or any other art. Their language is neither colorful
nor melodious, but it is significantly expressive, related inextricably
to the subject matter. They help make the short story as distinct a
literary form as a landscape by Cezanne or a sonata by Beethoven.
Katherine Mansfield, scarcely a year after her death, has come to be
regarded as one of the most finished artists that ever worked with the
short story as their medium.

The present collection includes several unfinished fragments which are
invaluable to anyone interested in her art or in the short story as a
whole. They are cross-sections of her method which enable us to see
the processes that produce the half-dozen little masterpieces at the
beginning of the book.

“The Doll’s House” is at once the best and the most typical of all
the stories she has written. It shows us in an unforgetable manner
her complete mastery of the difficult trick of epitomizing the whole
of life in a minute and almost ridiculously petty episode. All the
aspirations of the many, all the heartless prejudice of the few, are
concentrated in a toy lamp in one of the little rooms of a doll’s
house. It might easily be sentimental, and very likely ridiculous, if
it were not for the implacable aloofness of her art. Again, in “A Cup
of Tea” we have a bitter, though inoffensive, exhibition of the quality
of mercy by somewhat the same whimsical concentration on little things.
A lady of high degree is accosted on Bond Street by another lady of
lesser degree who requests the price of a cup of tea. The first lady,
thinking it would be a charming adventure, takes the pathetic creature
into her own home for her cup of tea. She is impressed by her own
magnanimity, even considers doing something more worthwhile for the
stranger, when the great lady’s husband appears. Because the latter
ventured the remark that the visitor is really quite pretty, because
the great lady suddenly detects the shadow of age on her face as she
passes the mirror, the visitor is forthwith despatched with a few
shillings, and the great lady asks her husband that evening, “Do you
think I’m pretty?”

All the stories of Katherine Mansfield are more or less like that,
displaying the difficult accomplishment of a worker in miniature, and,
like the art of the miniature, possessing a rare and almost forgotten
spirit.

W. T.

_The Lyric._ By JOHN DRINKWATER. (Martin Secker.)

None of the “sound and fury” of modern literary theories (signifying
nothing?), and little that is arresting is to be found in this essay on
the lyric; its argument has a stately conservatism with enough that is
fresh and new to make the whole of interest.

Drinkwater pins much faith on Coleridge’s definition of poetry:
“poetry--the best words in the best order”. After declaring this to
be the one and only true definition, later in the text he admits that
there can be no proper definition of poetry, since so much depends
on the individuality of the poet. So perhaps we can forgive him the
contradiction on the score that he relieves us of the necessity of
having our ideals of poetry destroyed forever.

The author advances an interesting theory of poetic “energies”, the
forces that cause the creation of verse. He classifies these into
several types that cast a new light on the whys and wherefores of
poetry. The lyric itself is well defined. Perhaps the most interesting
passage is his clever answer to the accusations against form made by
the sponsors of free-verse. Their own lack of form, however, he treats
not with diatribe, but interested tolerance.

A. M.

_Within These Walls._ By RUPERT HUGHES. (Harper & Bros.)

It is the natural tendency of every generation to consider much
less vivid and wicked those that have come before. We still hear of
the “old-fashioned” mothers in sentimental appreciation or pity--as
contrasted with the obstreperous rising generation.

In this light, it is interesting to read Mr. Hughes’ novel, which has
as an obtrusive background the very vital and naughty New York of
1825-1875. With a slight hesitation for touches that obviously cater to
our surprise, we would class the bulk of this background as authentic.
It is the main theme of the book. A restless melodramatic movement of
indifferently drawn characters across this setting gives the author
his excuse for it. The action is too stereotyped in its thrill to be
in itself worth while, and it is given the reader as substitute for an
ability to define the characters into lasting silhouettes. Mr. Hughes’s
_forte_ is a running-fire, rat-tat-tat description of stirring events
(as the great fire of 1837) which never fails to work one up, and is
thus highly effective.

However, the author does hew to the line of his purpose, and gives us
an interesting (however faithful) picture of the growing New York,
and its groping fight for an adequate water supply. Daniel Webster
enters in two places--once as toper, once as orator--with doubtful
appropriateness.

One does not for the most part feel in sympathy with the book.

R. P. C., JR.

_The Powder of Sympathy._ By CHRISTOPHER MORLEY.

_The Powder of Sympathy_ is a collection of whimsical, verbal morsels,
colyumistic in length, but not for the most part in character.
Discourse upon the shortcomings of the Long Island Railroad, or upon
the vicissitudes of mongrel dogs in pedigreed kennels no doubt is
admirable colyum copy; but Mr. Morley has included in his latest book
an equal quantity of semi-serious discussion about books and about
authors. We can think of no one who can impart to the reader his
own genuine enthusiasm for good books so well as Sir Kenelm Digby’s
publicity agent. (Incidentally, we consider Mr. Morley’s observations
on Sir Digby’s character, habits, and work as the most titillating
particle of sympathetic powder to be found in the whole book.)

It is a book for every mood. If you feel the need of a laugh, pick up
this salmon-colored work and choose at random from the forty odd titles
that speak for themselves. If you are beginning to wonder whether you
will ever again find prose that will thrill you with its bold and
powerful use of the strong red roots of our English vocabulary, read
“Santayana in the Subway”. If you still have a morbid interest in the
higher side of the culinary art known as distillation, you will find
enlightening Sir Kenelm’s directions for making “ale drink quick and
stronger”. In any case once you open this book you will forget where
the blues begin.

M. T.

_Editor’s Table_

One by one the Editors appeared, grim with the prospect of renewed
and unremittent editing. It was hours before Cherrywold, the verbal
Valentine, could sufficiently cast off the burden of his perpetually
broken heart to enter the conversation, but the others gradually warmed
to the task of post-vacation badinage.

“How were the girls at Grosse Pointe Village?” inquired Han
solicitously of the pagan Rabnon.

“How was _the_ girl, you mean!” chirped Aerial. “Why, along in August
he telegraphed me, ‘A girl has been seen in Grosse Pointe Village. What
shall I do?’”

“What did he dew?” inquired the scandal-seeking Mrs. Stephens.

“Don’t know,” said Aerial. “I telegraphed back, ‘Compromise’, and let
it go at that!”

“How shiffless!” cried Mrs. Stephens. And at the same moment the deep
base roar of Mr. Stephens was heard calling for water, for she had
fainted from the shock of Aerial’s remark, being a perfect lady.

“Why pick on me?” countered Rabnon, when the excitement had subsided.
“The girls of Grosse Pointe Village are all right. One of them
entertained me this summer with an account of how an empty taxi-cab
once rolled up to Dobbs Ferry, and Cherrywold got out. You can’t beat
that for a masterly bit of description!”

Thus roused from thoughts of “all for love and love for all”, the
slandered Cherrywold girded himself against the powers of cynicism.

“You are a pack of blasphemous cowards all!” he cried. “It has been
alleged that Mr. and Mrs. Stephens are the only people in the world who
still believe in fairies, and that Jonah was swallowed by the whale,
but I believe--”

“‘What troubles you, my little one? The dawn is far away,’” soothed
Han. But, refusing to be calmed by a snatch of one of his own
lullabies, Cherrywold was only prevented from assaulting his Oriental
acquaintance by main force.

“You! You c-can’t SPELL!” he thundered. And the office crashed in ruins.

* * * * *

“That’s what they all say--when they can’t think of anything else. And
so say I--when I can’t think of anything else,” remarked

HAN.

* * * * *

Transcriber’s note

Retained archaic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings as printed.

*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Yale Literary Magazine (Vol. LXXXIX, No. 1, 1923)" ***

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