Public-domain ebook
by Various
Language: en419 downloads on Project Gutenberg
Subjects
In: Poetry·Essays, Letters & Speeches·Journals
Public-domain ebook sourced from Project Gutenberg #68518.
The opening · free to read
Probably one in every ten men brought up in a cultured environment has written, at some youthful period or other, sentimental verse. Such product is in any prep.-school paper; a few brilliant or hard working youngsters win prizes each year for the best “poems” of their classes. But too many of these prodigies, because they are one in ten, are convinced that they are endowed with the powers of a poet. They cannot realize that riming is to be outgrown at adolescence, just as other games are. Since some grown men continue to write poetry, and no one continues to rollerskate, they put off rollerskating as a childish thing, but they keep puttering away over platitudes “To ——” and to Spring. They have not yet come fully into their manhood.
Personally, I should prefer them to become professional rollerskaters, for then they could do no harm. Instead, they join the group of “younger _litterati_” of college, and play the artist as an extra-curriculum means to distinction, bringing down an undeserved indictment upon whatever men there happen to be with music in their hearts, and with something to say. The university which most desires to honor its true artists finds itself rewarding a kindergarten Greenwich Village for sentimentality that will be forgotten before the quickness of time has killed it. “_Litterati_” thus has become to others a name of derision, and “he heels the Lizzie Club” is a taunt. Especially, a magazine founded for the sincere promotion of literary expression is in danger before these men with the trick of verse and a desire for prominence.
It has become, therefore, the duty of the LIT. to defend itself, and to stand guard for the rest of the College, against this tendency to dilettantism, even while it welcomes to its pages the writer who is eager to learn and practice expression. Such a task is difficult, I acknowledge, because it involves a judgment between boys by boys, but it is not impossible. We have had enough poets at Yale in the past few years to be able to distinguish them generally from the poetasters, and if a fake slips by now and then, time betrays him and the laurels he has won. Many attain a kind of prominence that is strangely akin to that of a rollerskater who has taken a spill.
Yet it might be well for those interested in Yale literature to look suspiciously at the number of undergraduates who are LIT. heelers only when it is profitable, who drop out—never to write again—when the competition is crowded, or who begin to write when it is seen that there is to be a vacancy on the Board. They are unquestionably with us, accomplishing nothing more than to disgust and alienate those who really desire to write. Unquestionably, such an element is exceedingly bad for Yale, if Yale intends to be any kind of a force in literature. If the LIT. Board and kindred honors are to mean more than a badge placed somewhere on a college boy’s anatomy, we must show the pretender that he is out of place.
Of course, this must not lead to the discouragement of anyone with the slightest itching of the pen. It is the man who writes badly, yet for the sheer and indescribable love of writing, who should resent most the prostitution of our literary organizations, for to the “passionate few” creating is serious, joyous business. The “passionate few” must direct public sentiment against those who would play it as a game in the childish politics of the University. We must not permit a false intelligentsia to become associated with Yale. We cannot allow clever youngsters, fired with the aspiration of a charm for their watch-chains, to hack out verses in the feverish night before a makeup. However few, and however dry, the pages of the LIT. may be, we want them to contain the result of sincere emotion; we want the author to have given the best of his ability toward making his contribution acceptable by any editor. This is the only way a literary magazine can be written.
DAVID GILLIS CARTER.
Here where our hearts respond to lovers’ cries With ready swiftness, where our laughters leap From our lips, shall we not resolutely keep This boyhood, looking on stars with boyish eyes? Rapture, we know, grows old and subtly dies Within us,—this much we know, and wisely creep Away from age lest we disturb his sleep Where Youth intolerably weeping lies.
Is this our portion? Shall we not go far Beyond this presence, bearing our flags unfurled Exultantly beyond some alien hill Of dreams?—rise up, and up, and up, until This place we knew must seem a sorry world And the old earth a too familiar star?
HERBERT W. HARTMAN, JR.
A fresh wind from the ocean made the waves sparkle when Daniel took his cruise. He was on a solitary tour of New York Harbor in a hired motorboat, his tribute to the general pleasantness of a spring day out of doors, balmy, yet with sufficient air. A motorboat was not, he reflected, as attractive to a lover of the sea as a sailboat, but it enabled him to poke around the arms of the port more satisfactorily. Today he set off down the harbor with the breeze in his face.
At first he passed close to the docks of the enormous ships, some of which were so long their shapely stems reached far out into the stream. Nothing was so exciting as seeing their masts and the tops of their huge funnels over the top of a dock. It reminded him of a glimpse he had had of the tall, delicate spars of sailing vessels over the roofs of a seacoast town. The realization of being on the immediate threshold of the romantic sea is irresistible in its rich suggestions, linking the most prosaic person for a moment with strange places, hitherto only imagined, and possibilities of adventure, startling even at a distance from the point of view of ordinary life. Daniel thought about this and other theories of his concerning the sea as his boat sauntered past the imposing liners which so engrossed his attention. Their sharp, carefully flaring bows and the suggestion of velocity in their slanting rigging attracted him. One was just docking as he went by. It was huge, and seemed a city with a host of tugs like parasites slowly pushing it around. He could never get over the size of them. It seemed like magic,—this, building a community that floated so snugly on the water, the four red funnels above adding the emblem of something powerful in its compactness. Yet in spite of their size, the steamers seemed at a distance slim and graceful, essentially ships and obviously made to deal with the exacting ocean. Daniel saw liners with more penetrating eyes than the ordinary casual observer, he was sure.
It was not long before he was off down the harbor away from the docks. Here the waves danced to the breeze among the little boats which carried on the teeming local traffic of the port, rushing back and forth like water-bugs on a pond. The vessels that were anchored strained at the ends of taut hawsers with the wind and tide both coming up the bay. Over near the farther shore against the sun, a great ship was moving down, a massive black shadow sliding imperiously out to sea. He steered the launch near the anchored vessels, under their high sterns. Reading their names was a fascinating diversion for an imaginative person like himself, he thought. Here was the “George B. White” of Jersey City, near it the “Orphan” of Bombay; here a sloppy tramp from Beirut, there an empty freighter of Cape Town; Japanese and Chinese and Javanese vessels were there whose names he could not read, and a little ship from the Piraeus, laden with smells from Athens—dirt from her gutters and hovels, and dust from the Acropolis.
Well, well, what a highway the sea was, after all. It was fascinating, the harbor, fascinating! These great ships always sailing out on voyages that somehow still seemed perilous, and others, looking—to the imagination, at least—weatherbeaten, coming in from foreign lands.
He turned and headed out past the narrows to the slow dips of the ground swell, powerful, but almost at peace for the moment, which his little boat climbed and descended like smooth, gentle hills. The sun still sparkled, and here the water slapped more vigorously against the sides of the boat, throwing flecks of spray out and whirling back some of them to sting his face. He was getting gradually drunk, he concluded. Certainly the spaciousness of everything around him was going to his head. But it was, he later decided, really the smell of the air that did it. No sweet gasoline-sick atmosphere of streets out here, nor the faint odor of millions of his fellow-men to which he was accustomed in the buildings he frequented. The breeze was fresh and tasted strong of salt. It had a palpable vigor of its own. Not artificially intoxicating like a stimulant, but with a gusty sting. It whipped his mind and brought it up eager and sharp, like a trembling racehorse.
That air—that makes men on steamers feel so ridiculously fit without exercise, enabling them to eat and eat—tea, jam, pastry, steaks, cheeses, and then sit and read all day in one steamer chair and be ravenous again! If only he could sail on a ship, he thought. To feel so strong and finely balanced—not, as usual, subject to his little moods of depression which so often went hand in hand with indigestion, he had discovered—to feel so well tuned! He had a vision of himself as he would stand on a ship—as he had, on the only trip he had ever taken—in the very peak of the bow, looking over and watching the tall prow sweep down on and devour the unsuspecting patches of the sea. He remembered how the breeze was steady in his face and how he used almost to taste it! His hair was worried by the wind and he relished its swift buffets on his face as he stood against it, drinking it in as a hot man drinks a running stream. What nameless joy he felt, he now remembered; and how he used so to overflow with something buoyant inside him that he would ecstatically smile. Well tuned! And singing, like an old lyre at the touch!
Well, if he could get to feeling like that he would give anything, he said to himself in his conventional way—and suddenly he grew disgusted. Give anything! Lord, he wouldn’t give up a month of his most valuable time. Love the sea! He had been repeating to himself all during his little outing that he loved the sea. He was one of those few who really loved the sea. He felt that he understood it better than a good many people. As though he knew anything about it, who had never gone to sea and never would. His experience of it standing on the street-like decks of a liner and watching it; thinking about it, he flattered himself, with rather a light touch, as it were, but still from a poetic point of view.
The light touch! Everything nowadays was written and spoken and even thought of with a light touch. A light touch in connection with the sea! The old sailing vessels—swift clippers around the horn; that was the ocean! No drawing-room stuff about that. When the brutal masters carried all the press of sail they could in those tremendous storms, till the topmasts went and the gear came flying down like a thunderbolt and had to be chopped away to save the ship. Trim ships where you worked beneath the lash, and insubordination was best viewed from the yardarm. Ships used to go down and never be heard from—often in those days. But the men that lived were really children of the sea who knew its great aspects; and they knew their ships, every inch of them, from their thin spars that “shone like silver”, as the chantey says, to the bright copper on their keels.
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