Vol. LXXXVIII          No. 3

                                   The
                         Yale Literary Magazine

                            Conducted by the
                      Students of Yale University.

                             [Illustration]

               “Dum mens grata manet, nomen laudesque YALENSES
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                             December, 1922.

                  New Haven: Published by the Editors.
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THE YALE LITERARY MAGAZINE




Contents

DECEMBER, 1922


    Leader                      F. O. MATTHIESSEN    75

    Poems                    RUSSELL W. DAVENPORT    79

    Five Sonnets                MAXWELL E. FOSTER    94

    Dagonet                HERBERT W. HARTMAN, JR.   97

    The Dark Priest                K. A. CAMPBELL    98

    Poem                              R. C. BATES    99

    Sonnet                        WINFIELD SHIRAS   100

    _Book Reviews_                                  101

    _Editor’s Babel_                                106




                       The Yale Literary Magazine

            VOL. LXXXVIII       DECEMBER, 1922        NO. 3

_EDITORS_

    MAXWELL EVARTS FOSTER
    RUSSELL WHEELER DAVENPORT
    ROBERT CHAPMAN BATES
    WINFIELD SHIRAS
    FRANCIS OTTO MATTHIESSEN

_BUSINESS MANAGERS_

    CHARLES EVANDER SCHLEY
    HORACE JEREMIAH VOORHIS




_Leader_


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

                                                       F. O. MATTHIESSEN.




_Poems_


                         I.

    Sometimes you are younger than the dawn;
    But sometimes you are older than the stars.
    Your eyes are made that way: new light is drawn
    From the piled gold where ancient suns have gone,
    When your gaze reaches mine. Immersed in wars,
    I seek rebellion, fearing to rebel;
    And sigh, not yet desirous of relief;
    And grieve, not yet relinquishing my grief;
    And love the more—I who have loved so well.

                        II.

    I love you. But it is a sorry task
    To probe the depths of why or how I love.
    We lovers are more fools the more we ask
    What lurks behind our kisses, what the mask
    Of rotting flesh conceals. Surely I love.
    Surely? Great heaven, who would tell the moon
    That she’s the light when she herself is cold?
    Without your love mine would be growing old;
    Without your eyes, mine would be ashes soon.

                        III.

    Ashes? Yet there is something infinite
    About an ash—hoary and cold and wise.
    Across the spent fires of the night they flit,
    And often when the day grows pale, they sit,
    Like monarchs, on a vanished enterprise.
    Ah, even thus my young love would endure!
    Without her light the moon would still express
    Her strength, in shadows not yet bodiless—
    Hoary and cold and wise: thus am I sure.

                        IV.

    I have addressed you with love’s first address:
    I’ve sealed the envelope with all my soul.
    Each day you add one burden to distress:
    Your silence! Ah, what icy ghosts caress
    Expectant hearts when women are the goal—
    What undreamt women do we hope to see
    When gazing like tired children heavenward!
    We say: God help us if our souls are barred
    From the white arches of infinity.

                         V.

    Strange that your silence is so deafening
    And your unwritten page so full of thought!
    Each time they do not come your letters bring
    A chaos of conjecture, gathering
    Its forces like mad winds, ’till I am caught—
    And swept—and swept into an agony.
    Ah, ruinous silence that awakes such stress!
    The noisy thunders of my heart suppress
    The frail, pale music of my memory.

                        VI.

    How long! How long, great God, must I regret
    Fleshly communions with the scattered ghosts
    Whom in the by-ways of the past I met,
    And whom I am desirous to forget,
    Lest at their feasts they shout aloud old toasts
    And grin with laughter that is desolate?
    For then the crimson tinge would cross your cheek—
    A tragic color—and your heart would seek
    Mutely for spring, though shorn of leaves by Fate.

                        VII.

    Winter! It is not winter when the snows
    Whiten the houses and the bare brown trees.
    It is not winter when the north wind blows,
    Nor yet when mountain lakes are glazed, and floes
    On the horizons of the Arctic freeze.
    There is no winter if the heart is warm!—
    And I would ask you to remember it.
    My dear, when you are silent, I must sit
    Frozen among the figures of the storm.

                       VIII.

    What do I mean by such queer similes?
    O heart beloved, I mean to show you how
    The red autumnal stretches of the trees
    In crystal twilight, ere the black ponds freeze,
    Would but reflect your stillness, were I now
    To tell you things a man’s life most conceals:
    And next to say that what the autumn is
    To you, winter would be to me. And this
    Seems all that any simile reveals.

                        IX.

    When marble wears the touch of Grecian hands,
    Or Leonardo’s paints on canvas live,
    I think the gods are building on the sands
    Castles of stone, but no one understands
    How much they can inspire one heart to give:
    Though I who dream about your untouched hair
    Can follow Leonardo’s rapid brush,
    And with it paint those yearning strokes, and crush
    Beneath a large ideal, life’s strong despair.

                         X.

    Dante was more than half of Beatrice!
    Thus for a woman’s warm identity
    We men go asking where our heaven is,
    And having found it, for that woman’s kiss
    We build the altars and the destiny.
    O Beatrice! How much we would forget,
    If Dante had forgotten what to write!
    The Silence and the Distance and the Night—
    These he erased—and we remember yet!

                        XI.

    But more than half of Dante was her frame—
    So fragile and so exquisite that rime
    Could but produce the soundings of her name,
    And leave all cold the radiance, the flame
    Which from her gaze swept Dante out of time.
    Oh, say not that a woman ever dies
    When Dante loves her! Yet when Dante loves,
    His soul becomes the body that he loves:
    A woman will not have it otherwise.

                        XII.

    If Beauty can be kind I know it not,
    Because you have not touched me with your lips,
    Nor yielded with your eyes. It is my lot
    To sit, an outcast on some barren spot,
    And watch the summer clouds, like treasure-ships,
    Sailing beyond me toward the evening.
    The beauty there is infinite, is blue!—
    But pitiless as effigies of you,
    And bitter with remembrance of the spring.

                       XIII.

    I am a madman in the wilderness:
    The gods of anger have bestirred my pen.
    Where is your magic now? Or your caress?
    The pressure of your arms, your tenderness?
    I’ll tear myself away from these, since men
    Are not as angels are—eternally.
    Damnation!—ah, but hush—see, my wild hands!
    If pity be the food my heart demands,
    Then for the love of heaven pity me.

                        XIV.

    Or do not pity me. Love is too great
    For kindly words and sighs and handkerchiefs.
    Your eyes will be my stars, your arms my fate,
    And I shall wait for these, although I wait
    Until the ship goes shattering on reefs
    Which lurk beyond horizons sailed in vain.
    Then let the ocean froth, let tempests rave;
    Let the straight masts bow stiffly to their grave;
    Let the old love go—go—nor come again!

                        XV.

    My lady condescends! A little note
    Written, upon my soul, in hat and glove,
    Leaves everything unsaid: and what she wrote
    Would strangle the young cupid by the throat,
    If he were not immortal. I may love,
    And she—is glad to have it so. Ah me!
    How fine a woman draws the thread of hair
    Which holds her lover dangling in the air,
    Suspended above all eternity.

                                                    RUSSELL W. DAVENPORT.




_Five Sonnets_


                         1.

    My friends will have it that I might have been
    A lover, and not thus have loved in vain,
    Had I had strength enough to kill the rain
    That showered on the April of our scene.
    And art to be impassioned and serene,
    And worn the guise of Abel, being Cain,
    Worshipping in a mild bucolic vein
    The blinding fire of the cold eyes of my queen.

    And calmly in their quiet judicial way,
    They tell me that the pictures I have drawn
    Of you are fantasies of my poor brain,
    And when, if ever, we shall meet again
    You will not be a person of the dawn,
    Or Love, herself, uprising from the spray.

                         2.

    But I can laugh with them at their good jokes,
    Knowing they are not serious, and reply
    That heaven is something less than a wild sky,
    And love only a pretty, human hoax.
    Do I not see what all their laughter cloaks,
    And know that really they would gladly die,
    Rather than idly pass your beauty by,
    Which all the dreaming of their hearts invokes.

    They are ingenious fellows and will play,
    But in the elements they are the same
    As I, building the altars of their souls
    To something that is nameless in a name,
    And, like a bell upon the night-tide, tolls
    Setting them midst their capers all to pray.

                         3.

    This something seems at times of less import
    Than what is built thereto. The altars rise
    Immeasurable records of surmise;
    The achievement is indeed of the great sort,
    The length of their magnificence not short,
    But in our wonder at their grace and size
    Can we forget they were fashioned for your eyes,
    Or make of those oblivion in our sport!

    Oh no, the idolater finds the idol still,
    Though there be pyramids to dazzle him,
    And paintings of high art along the wall,
    Still there is left the goddess young and slim,
    Her lips still breathe, her breasts still rise and fall,—
    He kills himself, if her he tries to kill.

                         4.

    But these my friends like other men do eat,
    And sleep, and spend most merrily their while
    Upon this lily-earth; their hours beguile
    Each other, each with a memory to repeat.
    And if by chance they do a noble feat
    It is for them the subject of a smile,
    For they know well at some uncertain mile
    Staunch military Death will blow retreat.

    Till in a moment they are one with me,
    And Love has conquered in an unseen way
    The turrets and the bulwarks of their dreams.
    No longer is to-morrow yesterday,
    Nor life the pagan paradox it seems,
    And they are begging immortality.

                         5.

    Immortal girl, what I have said in mirth
    About these people,—it is true of me,
    Only they live still rich in poverty,
    While I am one beyond the reach of earth.
    These, of their parent clay, still weigh the worth,
    And hesitate to plunge into the sea.
    But I, the sooner lost, have found in thee
    A new and an eternal kind of birth.

    Because your eyes are flaming, and must burn,
    Your body fire that kills, your beauty death,
    I love, worshipping that which I desire.
    Icarus knew no more: I breathe thy breath,
    And touch thy hair;—if I to dust return
    At least I shall be cinders, you still fire.

                                                       MAXWELL E. FOSTER.




_Dagonet_


    You come to me for guidance? That’s a queer
      Anomaly, to ask an aged man
      What course in Life he recommends, what plan
    Of conduct,—ask the King, or Bedivere....
    The King is dead? Oh, I recall,—last year
      It was; and Bedivere, last of the clan
      To follow, like a tired veteran
    Obeyed the hand that beckoned from the mere.
    Yes, I remember now: in Camelot
      When Life was wrapped about us like a flame
        How we enjoyed the zeal of Arthur’s rule.
    But that was long ago. And there is not
      A thing to say, because it was with shame
        I saw the King seek counsel of his fool.

                                                  HERBERT W. HARTMAN, JR.




_The Dark Priest_


    The dark priest tutors me to-day,
          The dark priest.
    I turn to the left in the cloister way
    To the inner court with the hollyhock row,
    And he looks down upon me and watches me go,
          The dark priest.

    I climb the stair to his study door,
          The dark priest,
    And I knock (I have done it o’er and o’er)
    Then he opens it slowly and ushers me in
    And I sit on the hassock and lessons begin,
          With the dark priest.

    His fingers are long and his eyes are grey,
          The dark priest.
    The other boys fear him, so they say,
    But he throws back his cowl and he lets me see
    The smile on his lips, and he’s kind to me,
          My dark priest.

    He takes his viola and tunes it to play,
          The dark priest,
    For my Latin’s well read and he promised to-day,
    And his instrument gleams in the dust-laden beams
    While I sit there athrill to his music of dreams,
          The dark priest.

    He plays an old Normandy love song I know,
          The dark priest,
    And the strings quaver back the caress of the bow.
    The chamber grows dark while his notes ring out clear,
    But he cannot conceal the slow fall of a tear,
          My dark priest.

                                                          K. A. CAMPBELL.




_Poem_


    A little laughter, and a few short days
      And Life is done:
    The race throughout this long bewildering maze
      Is quickly run.

    A little friendship, and a word or so
      With worth half guessed—
    And then a-weary to long sleep we go,
      And that is best.

    Life is a little while to dream our dreams
      Before we rest—
    And Life to us is always what it seems:
      That is Life’s jest.

    A little hope, a friendship which might live,
      The laughing sun,
    A tear, a star, is all Life has to give
      Ere Life be done.

                                                             R. C. BATES.




_Sonnet_


    Autumnal dusk was sweeping with a star,
    Over the wood where lovers’ lips were meeting;
    Trembled the first cold night-flame, passed the far
    Low-whistling sadness of a duck’s wings beating.
    Heart strained to heart. The purple deepened through
    A twilight shriven in its pain of dying;
    Swiftly the wing-beats slanted earthward to
    The darkening marshes, with a throat-soft crying.

    Night crept through dusk, as now the old surprise
    Crept through our kisses to the inner love,
    An age-old wistfulness. Our pensive eyes
    Yearned to the darkness and the veil thereof;
    Yea, and our ears found sorrow in the cries
    Of moor-fowls,—and the darkness wheeled above.

                                                         WINFIELD SHIRAS.




_Book Reviews_


_Abbé Pierre._ By JAY WILLIAM HUDSON. (D. Appleton & Co.)

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

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

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

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

                                                            W. E. H., JR.


_Confessions of an Old Priest._ By REV. S. D. MCCONNELL. (The MacMillan
Co.)

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

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

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

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

                                                                 D. G. C.


_What I Saw in America._ By G. K. CHESTERTON. (Hodder & Stoughton, Ltd.)

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

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

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

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

                                                                    M. T.


_Aaron’s Rod._ By D. H. LAWRENCE. (Martin Secker.)

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

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

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

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

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

                                                                 G. L. G.




_Editor’s Babel_


    Chaos!
    In intonations worthy priests of Baal
    Ahasuerus and Bukis
    Mr. Benson and the Egoist
    The Welcome Intruder and
    Richard Cory
    Shout the praises of Poesy.

    Chaos!!
    “Be it all poesy—that flaming goddess
    With bewildering hair.”
    Intones Richard Cory.

    _Sic transit prosae contributorum_

    Chaos!!!
    We _will_ be Punditical....
    We _are_ Punditical.
    And so is the LIT.

    Chaos!!!!
    “WHEE!” from Cory, Bukis, Ahasuerus, Benson, and the EGOIST.




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Correspondence of James Fenimore-Cooper.

Edited by his grandson, James Fenimore Cooper.

This unique and fascinating collection of letters, written 1800-1851 by
and to the first great American novelist and now authoritatively edited
by the novelist’s grandson, is printed from originals in the possession
of the Cooper family. As is well known, Cooper, during his last illness,
forbade the publication of any biographical material about himself by
his then living descendants; and the biographical treatments, including
even the late Professor Lounsbury’s valuable work in the American Men
of Letters series, have necessarily been written without access to any
considerable body of first-hand evidence.

The publication of his intimate correspondence in the present collection
reveals an altogether more remarkable character than has generally been
conceived by even the most ardent twentieth-century admirer of Cooper.

The letters tell of his life at Cooperstown, in Westchester County, in
New York City, and in various countries abroad. The leading men of the
time were among his correspondents—Washington Irving, S. F. B. Morse,
General Lafayette, Longfellow, Bryant—and oftentimes their letters to
Cooper are included to make the story complete.

The two volumes constitute, not only an unique addition to American
biography, but also a profound and diverting commentary on the social and
family life of the novelist’s generation; on the status of art, letters,
and the always fascinating business of writing, publishing, and selling
books; on travel and international relations; and on domestic politics
through the momentous decades when abolitionism was brewing in the North
and secessionism in the South. In fine, there is an overflowing measure
of all that one could look for, from the faint breath of old church
and family scandals up to the rousing melodrama of Cooper’s long and
triumphant legal campaign against newspapers. And there is a great deal
more for which one would never think to look, grateful as one is to find
it.

_Regular Edition. Two volumes. Large 8vo. Over 700 pages. With
Frontispiece. $7.50 the set._

_Limited Edition. 250 numbered sets on rag paper, with extra
illustrations from the collections of the Cooper family. In a suitable
binding. $30.00 the set._

YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS