Chapter I: Front Matter

Vol. LXXXVIII No. 1

The
Yale Literary Magazine

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October, 1922.

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THE YALE LITERARY MAGAZINE

Contents

OCTOBER, 1922

Leader MAXWELL E. FOSTER 1

Truth MAXWELL E. FOSTER 6

Poem RUSSELL W. DAVENPORT 8

About It and About K. A. CAMPBELL, JR. 11

The Meditations of a Non-Thinker L. HYDE 12

Selima MYLES WHITING 16

Portfolio:

Beauty HERBERT W. HARTMAN, JR. 23

Fear of God ROBERT CRUISE MCMANUS 23

Ballade LAIRD GOLDSBOROUGH 27

Notabilia 30

Book Reviews 32

Editor’s Table 38

The Yale Literary Magazine

VOL. LXXXVIII OCTOBER, 1922 NO. 1

_EDITORS_

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

_BUSINESS MANAGERS_

CHARLES EVANDER SCHLEY
HORACE JEREMIAH VOORHIS

_Leader_

Every generation is a foible. It is born of whim, and educated on fantasy. In adulthood it is naturally a freak. This younger generation in this year of our Lord 1922 is no exception. We were born of respectability, educated on pedantry. In adulthood we are revolutionaries. Could anything be more natural, more un-Victorian?

We were born secretly. God knows how such things happened in that age. Perhaps the Stork brought us, nicely done up in—well—baby-clothes. We were brought up on platitudes. Most of them were dressed up as Christian. We hid our meanings in pretty words, and our sense in a blush. The word sex was unheard of. We didn’t talk much about anything dirty. We never swore. We said our prayers. With goodness we were replete; it made our lives hideous. Ultimately it was our virtue that drove us to sin. We were too good for this world. Forced to live in it by the tyranny of our parents—we adjusted ourselves, and became bad.

As soon as lies become platitudes they are doomed. The next passer-by will see through their disguise and expose them. You can fool yourself with your own lie; but if your neighbors catch the habit from you, and begin fooling themselves with the same lie, in no time that lie becomes a platitude. The Victorians fooled themselves into thinking that anything you could forget didn’t exist any more. So were we born into a Virgin world. Our beloved ancestry had forgotten there was any sin; for us then there would not be any. We were their realized dream.

But unfortunately these little cherubim, these little seraphim grew up into adolescence, learnt things about sex by groping in dark corners, learnt shocking social problems by looking up words in Dictionaries; learnt in so doing to disbelieve every word the Victorians uttered. They had put their faith in that sort of royalty once too often. Genuinely they became skeptics. Because they had been taught by liars they could not afford to believe anything—without testing its verity. They are generous in their estimate of the society into which they are born. Instead of saying, “We are born into a world of liars,” they restrain themselves, consider the question rationally and say, “No, only into a world of fools.” And out of these Fools’ Paradise the younger generation has toddled. To them it was a hell.

Their first independent action was to set up Truth as their God. They had had enough of lies. Truth was their panacea. Ignorance was the abiding sin of mortality. Their battle was for the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, not for the beautiful garden of Eden—where nakedness did not prevail upon innocence and blushing was unknown.

Part of this knowledge surely was scientific. The health of the body was all important: Biology, Hygiene, sex education. For these they cried out. They talked eagerly of germ-plasm and genetics; defiantly of birth-control, the double-standard.

An equality between man and woman had suddenly been decreed politically; philanthropists were already talking about it morally; the younger generation carrying the movement one step further is experimenting with it intellectually. What they think, they say. Does it matter who is there? Bah! Victorian prudery. There are no secrets now between the sexes.

But part of this knowledge of good and evil was common sense—when once the Puritan and Victorian nonsense had been destroyed. It is only to a sex-maniac that the shortening of skirts can possibly do any harm. What, cries the younger generation, is the difference between showing one’s legs, and one’s arms; bobbing one’s hair is the same, or smoking, or drinking, or swearing. If they aren’t good for the physique—well and good, they are bad; but if they are only bad because our Puritan or Victorian ancestry say so—or because Moses fell down the mountain with some tombstones under his arm—what the hell?—they aren’t bad at all.

So the gentlemen and ladies of the past lift their monocles and their lorgnettes to watch these semi-nude girls, these godless men. “Dear, dear,” they say. “Gracious me. That’s not a nice young man.”

What really has happened, say the younger generation, is that America for some time has been living up to ideals which they have never expressed, and have expressed, in lieu of these, ideals which they have never lived down to. Silly little superficial rules, and some hideous inhibitions grew up out of these expressed ideals. Otherwise they have been like corpses rotting before the very eyes of those who created them. They were never alive at all, say the younger generation. So it considers itself a generation of building, not of destroying. With frankness a dominant characteristic it must express the futility of the old expressed, as well as the strength of the old unexpressed ideals. But it lays the emphasis on the old unexpressed. For instance, it is not proud that it has torn down the absurd anthropomorphic God of the literature of the Past, but it is proud, that, having gotten rid of that miasma, it has proceeded to the conclusion that God is but the vision of the potentiality of mankind realized. That with Thomas Hardy it can go forward

“with dependence placed
On the human heart’s resource alone,
In brotherhood bonded close, and graced
With loving kindness fully blown,
And visioned help unsought, unknown.”

It is not proud of having torn the veil off the carefully draped Victorian womanhood, but having done so it is proud of the constructive results, that no longer having ignorance, it can see the beauty and purity in the nakedness of the sex. It has torn down the ugly lies that covered the world with a respectable and morne garland of fig-leaves, but out of the ruins of this demolition it is creating a naked sanity, of which it is reasonably proud.

Thirty years ago “Jude the Obscure” was called “Jude the Obscene”. To-day Jude is considered a masterpiece, dealing in an intensely honest way with God and the divine right of the marriage service. Marriage has become a less eternal and a more kindly institution. Divorcees are considered less heinous people than before. For better or for worse is no longer a very powerful condemnation. In the Victorian era the sexual became an obsession because it was over-emphasized by being left unmentioned. In reaction, for a moment, under the Freudian influence it became an obsession from the exactly opposite reason. With the younger generation it is taking its place like hunger and thirst in the category of normal desires. The relations between girl and boy are more open, more real than in the past. There is no longer the hideous restraint before marriage, causing unhappy lives. It is an easier matter to know whom one is to marry among the younger generation. More and more they are being honest with one another. More and more they are coming to consider themselves rational, kind-hearted people.

I am not justified in defending or attacking the younger generation. I am doing my duty only in attempting to express the ideals we live by, the ideals they teach me. Too long has the ridiculous idea been current that they have no ideals. I have set myself to define them. Because they are different from the past, they are not non-existent. We are not, as a generation, more dishonest, more dishonorable than our predecessors. Yet we have no ideals? That is out of the mouths of fools only.

No, the Victorians thought that not knowing, or pretending not to know, about things unpleasant was the way to destroy them—by a slow process of forgetting. The younger generation thinks that knowing, and everyone knowing thoroughly about things unpleasant, will eventually arouse the race to do something about them; to clean energetically the Augean stables. You can see there is a fundamental difference in each generation’s idea of Humanity. The Victorians thought that knowledge of sin tainted the virtuous flower of innocence by rousing thoughts and passions for evil, which could only be killed by long disusage. Mankind fundamentally, said the Victorians to themselves, has a bad streak. We must carefully avoid mentioning things that would start that streak going. If man is not naturally bad, he naturally has some bad in him. We must starve the devil out of him. The younger generation denies this. Man is naturally good; anyway, fundamentally so. Evil is an outgrowth of our own civilization, and social scheme. Most, if not all, criminals are insane. Society is to blame for insanity. We must study the causes of the insanities; must publish them broadcast. People must know. If they know, they will improve. We must educate ourselves up to knowing what is good, what is bad. We must know the worst to do the best.

Consciously, the Victorians were living by the theories of church dogma, believing in original sin; unconsciously, the younger generation is living by the theories of the romantic spirit, believing in natural good. They are idealists beyond the common run of mankind; and they are ruthless in the following of their ideals.

MAXWELL E. FOSTER.

_Truth_

The Truth that lingers in the heart’s secret places,
The Truth that gleams of a sudden on Grail-faces,
The Truth that has run so many torch-lit races,
Shone suddenly on me,
And henceforth was to be
Bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh, soul of my soul, unto that
last far dawn which is eternity.

Our souls were worn like a gaunt dungeon-keep
Washed by the sea; we sowed not, nor did reap;
Our Gods were on a journey or asleep;—
When like a surging fire
A spirit from earth’s ages did suspire,
And each soul’s tower put forth leaves and blossomed,
Like a young tree, and in our souls again there was desire.

The Spring lay luxuriantly the earth over,
White roses broke like foam, and the hot clover
Seemed heavy with spent passion like a lover
Languorous, till the night
And the swift breezes white
Came like a cooling bell and rain, and our eyes grew brighter
With the new gleam of that celestial light.

Suddenly there was Romance laughing again,
And poetry in the strange ancient ways of men,
We were as ones on peaks in Darien,
And Love with a new glory
Opened in song and story,
Like a flower in a wan waste by the sea,
And we with our wide eyes looked forward from our star-touched
promontory.

The hands that moulded dust out of the dust,
Scorching the sky with the iron that turns to rust,
Fashioning brazen Gods to feed their lust,
These with their feet of clay,
In the slow alchemy of a timeless day,
Caught like the hunter of the east new beauty
And were like figures of the dawn and spray.

Time has not memory enough for these.
De Gustibus through shadowy autumn trees,
Drinking life fully to its twisted lees,
Nor Time, nor drear regret
Holds enough memory ever to forget,
These that are metaphors of immortality,
Enduring beyond the finality of any long and last sunset.

The Truth that lingers in the heart’s secret places,
For this is there an hour glass that effaces,
Or waves to wash away to sunless spaces
Truth that is more than Time,
More than the mere infernal and sublime,
Truth that is strong as Death, and light as Life,
And passionate as the last great poet’s last rhyme?

MAXWELL E. FOSTER.

_Poem_

“_The sane man is nowhere at all when he enters into rivalry with the madman._”

Goddess, the rocks are crumbling into sand;
The moonlight trembles hesitant, as though
Winter with all his winds and hoary snow
Were gathering. Goddess, thy hand,
Which has created shore and rock and ocean
Within my heart, seems cold;
I fear lest thou art growing old
With me—the shattered wreck of my devotion.

Goddess, there is no love in heaven or earth
Without thee, and the stars grow dim with age
When thine eyes are averted, and the rage
Of winter winds turns luxury to dearth.
What will it profit if we love no more
(For I know thou hast loved in thine own way)?
What will it profit, if for yesterday
We substitute to-morrow, with its store
Of sorrow?

What is a dream for goddess?—not to be
Immortal once is to be dead forever!
And shall our eyes go blind and our lips never
Meet? What is eternity,
If not that moment of a wild embrace,
When two souls recognize
Their first bewildered contact, and two eyes
Drink the white radiance of a lover’s face?

Oh, ere the evening lights go gathering like fire
Across the western portals—ere the sun
Proclaims that life and life’s short tasks are done—
Be thou the mistress of my pure desire,
Be thou the goddess of my heart!
A man cannot forget a woman’s eyes,
If he has kissed them (as I have thine own
In dreams). Love is an art
Which men do not forget, when they have known
The way a woman takes toward paradise.

What weary fools we are! Dust is the same,
Whether alive, or whether dead and rotten;
And love is love, remembered or forgotten;
And life is life, although it be a name.
Let sorrow come, with many tears; or shame
Alight upon my brow; or age deny
What fiery youth would fain assert or die;
Let even death wash all my dreams away
Like sand—still I am I,
To-morrow and to-day, and yesterday.

Therefore I am immortal; and thy face
Which I have called mine own, must live, must be
Immortal with the very heart of me.
On whatsoever shore, or in what place,
Whether among the gods, or on the earth,
Wherever man finds truth, or woman grace,
Or Sorrow tears, or Laughter tears of mirth;
Wherever love is, goddess, I shall be;
Wherever I am, thou—the heart of me!

Ah, we are weary fools—
We men who talk of love and sorrow,
And build philosophy upon old schools,
And yearn for paradise to-morrow.
We are insane! Creation dimly flows
About us, yet like children do we play
With our uncomprehended toys;
And no one knows
Wherefore in love these weary fools rejoice,
And grasp at stars in their uncertain way.

Yet I would rather be a fool, and love,
Than drink of wisdom, and forget the stars;
I’d rather tear life from Time’s calendars
Than lose thy face, which I am dreaming of.
Thus have I given all to be thy slave,
And now I ask that thou remember this:
’Tis better to be mortal in a kiss,
Than to be called immortal in a grave.

RUSSELL W. DAVENPORT.

_About It and About_

What made you speak so, Youth, just now before
These elders, men much nearer to the thing
You touch on?
Ah, but no. They claim it so
Yet I deny, for Graybeards grudge to have
Youth whisper, “Death” ... because they feel it close?
And Youth’s poor boldness makes it still more close?
Youth always speaks on death by proper right;
He has but left it when he enters life
While Graybeard’s years have dulled the sense that knew
Prenatal death, and now its imminence
Stifles his speech.... While Youth, Youth only dares!
So I ... hearing such bootless thoughts on death,
Oblivion, rest, eternal pain, reward....
Somehow they think death lasts, and seek to lie
Disposed at ease through aeons, or perhaps
Send on their proper sandal-size ahead
To heaven’s commissary. Thus Graybeards.
And yet, Youth also misconstrues its sort,
Makes it a vale deep-shadowed, where within
Ghosts glide ’neath cloistering cypress trees and sup
Of honey cakes in tombs wisteria-hung:
Cloaked lovers stroll through hazel groves and come
To Lethe’s bank ... or in another mood,
Visioning death as ugly, conjures up
A creatured sprite bent on a tarnished scythe.

But death, and such my death will be, is naught
To stop a soul’s drive nor to even check
Its impetus. Death is transition, well,
Transition’s but a word ... or say it thus,
It simply lies, a gap between two rails
The drive wheel rushes over unaware.

K. A. CAMPBELL, JR.

_The Meditations of a Non-Thinker_

Look at your nose. It is smooth and round, and red and shiny. Possibly ’tis flat, obtuse, snub, Roman, or Jew. Or in case you happen to think of some other qualification, it is that. So with your eyes—if only you will apply suitable adjectives. And also with your chin, mouth, hair, ears, jowls, or whatever. The reason I suggest this, is in order to add the insinuation that, if you regard any of these members in a mirror for some length of time, their aspect changes. For instance—you, my kind sir of the snub nose, affirm that your nose did not appear beautiful at first? But you will as well admit that its grossness lessened in accordance with the time spent in contemplating it. You got to know it just a little better than you knew it before. Or you who wear the slight scraggly beard—no, not you, madam—, will you kindly step forward to the glass and observe how your impression of that fringe changeth from the disgust of a reformed highwayman to the pride of a father? If we but had the time, we should spend a delightful afternoon, dear reader, watching such profitable changes in expression. Human nature is fascinating, is it not? But verily all of this—for I shall leave aside even the proposition of how such an outward change affects the spiritual grace—is merely to remark that by taking thought on any part of your person, no matter how small, you become acquainted correspondingly with such a part.

This is indeed great. For the action pleases the gazer supremely with his personality. Yet I hasten to assure you, my dear reader, that such a phenomenon is quite natural—because after all, we are all of us pretty much fools, and generally when a fool becomes better acquainted with himself, he becomes more endeared to himself. As to the question of the right or wrong of this human attribute, I make no advances, for it is aside from my position as recorder. But from what I have heard wise men say, I should judge it to be a lamentable weakness, especially lamentable since the whole evil appears to issue from a person’s having thought too much. As a child I was taught to respect thought. And actually I once believed this to be a worthy hypothesis. But now, as I linger on the verge of a dreary grave, my old head is fearsomely shaken with doubt. Ah yes, to think that—but I had better not think!

When we think, we do not observe the golden mean. We rush in where angels fear to tread. We are not humble, as Christians. We are exalted, as fools—and as such we love ourselves. So when we are in the act of thinking, we will not leave off with any sane or wholesome solution. We believe such a conclusion not good enough for us. We call it barren. We must needs explore further. After finding a cliff at the edge of a rational plane of thought, we urge on and grope into the outer darkness. For the little time that faith supports we continue safely—and blindly—enough, and then—fall down on the rocks, where we proceed lame and disorderly—or like Peter, sink absolutely into an offended sea—and are not saved.

You must allow that when you work yourself into such a state, the effect on your feelings is far from pleasant, far from elegant even. I should imagine that one in the grip of mental excesses is not unlike the habitual user of drugs—the morphinomaniac, opium-eater, or alcoholic. The mood is surely delirious, grotesquely fanciful, spirit-ridden. Possibly you believe it is pitiful to see a strong and normal man slowly gathered in by some subtle influence to become a slave grovelling bestially before a false and gilded—but an all-compelling—idol. Aye! this is pitiful. But the pity of it is not the greatest part. Here are you, possessed of abilities, ambitions, loving friends, philanthropy of the highest kind, delighted with this world, and enchanted with the prospect of the next. You hope everything and you fear nothing. By some insidious trick of fate—a fate that preys upon an insignificant weakness of yours—you feel yourself subdued slightly by the nod of some dim gigantic animal. But you are not afraid. For your interests are so worthily turned elsewhere that you know the Thing to have little power compared to your own—and you do not care. Oh, therein lives the fearful irony! You may indulge in your morphine, your opium, or your thinking largely to aid your powers and your works. The undermining influence is not felt—until too late. Yes, too late.... The degraded wretch moaning and whimpering, and shivering all over spasmodically as he tries to get up on his feet, and his rotted nerves will not respond—can you imagine the inner state of such a fellow? Do you not conceive that one day he may have been as fine—or a far finer—person than you? Imagine, then, the turbulence in his heart! He dreams back to old days, perceiving the former integrity of his character, the power of his mind and body—and compares all with the present. Maybe he fashions images of what to-day he might have been—beautiful glowing things, full of the light of heaven and of loveliness! He starts from his vile gutter, repelled by horror, and is about to rise magnificently—when a fit of the passion seizes him, and you watch him grovel in the nauseous mire. Happy beast he is—now. But the torture of his mind will return.

* * * * *

The agony which thinking induces by such means as I have outlined above leads me to consider for a trice its alternative, because it is joyous and fruitful. Can you imagine a green and yellow countryside, with a little white farmhouse amidst a cluster of dark oaks? Willows are near a cove in the stream below, which ripples its way coolly through the hot day. Do you hear the dry voice of a locust, or a cricket? Perhaps the bird in that isolated pine tree will be singing soon. Breathe deeply, for the sun is low over the hill and a colder, fairer wind blows from the dark woodland. You sense its fragrance, feel a thrill, and are deeply delighted with the whole atmosphere. But stay, I hear a slow cowbell and the barking of a collie.... The colors of the sunset are delicate and marvelously blended.—And winding down the path comes a small boy, with pails to fill at the brook for his mother. So it goes on. However clumsy the little picture, I have tried to indicate slightly the pleasure met with when you _feel_. These emotions of yours are sacred because they are unfathomable. And they are more beautiful than anything else you will ever know. As for the fruitfulness of imagination, I must let you judge more for yourself: I will only say that, when people are wearied out, the beauty of nature has ever been found more of a balm to their spirits than the futility of overheated thought. Thought and emotion are living in eternal conflict within you. As one fills your life you have less room for the other. Any choosing....

The psychologist, that enigmatic rabbit born recently amid a litter of new ideas, maintains thought to be the only respect in which we differ from animals. Now in the light of this last word I had better not have used the term “rabbit”; but, however.... I should like to suggest (though I am not sure whether you will call me a squirrel or a guinea-pig) that we differ still more from animals in our power of imagination. You certainly have seen cartoons entitled “Wonder what a lobster _thinks_ about,” but it is always you who do the wondering and not the lobster (no inference that you are one, sir). And you never see “_Think_ what a jellyfish _wonders_ about”! Furthermore, if the psychologist is entirely right, you who have followed so assiduously this essay—which is largely devoid of thought—are at least for the time being largely an animal. Are you?