Read Ebook: The Yale Literary Magazine (Vol. LXXXIX No. 1 1923) by Various

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 209 lines and 25018 words, and 5 pages

MORRIS TYLER.

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?

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 r?le--the lead, in "Death".

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!

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.

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.

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 r?le 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 r?le: 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 r?le 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.

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 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.

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.

"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."

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!"

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet