Tutors' Lane

Tutors' Lane Wilmarth Lewis Alfred A. Knopf New York—1922
COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, Inc. Published, September, 1922 Set up and printed by the Vail-Ballou Co., Binghamton, N. Y. Paper supplied by W. F. Etherington & Co., New York, N. Y. Bound by the H. Wolff Estate, New York, N. Y.
To Helen and Wilson Follett
LORD TOLLOLLER: ... of birth and position I've plenty; I've grammar and spelling for two, And blood and behaviour for twenty.
IOLANTHE.
Having once, for a few months, had a literary column in a newspaper, I have come to admire those authors who place at the beginning of their books a word in which the whole thing is given away. The time that those words saved me in writing my reviews—time which otherwise would have been lost in reading the books—enabled me to write this book; a consummation which may have, in its heart, a significant kernel, and which certainly shows how funny the world is, after all.
Now, as to this book and what it is all about, I frankly am at a loss. That's the difficulty of being too near it. Whether it is realism, naturalism, or merely restrained romanticism, I simply do not know. It is awkward not knowing, for in the battle of the schools now raging I should like to take sides. I should like either to charge with the romantics, or defend with the realists. It must be good fun being pushed and shoved around, with someone's elbow in your eye and someone else's hatpin in your ear, and everyone crying, in the words of a recent heroine, I want to be outraged. But, for the present at least, I must be content, like little Oliver Twist, to look hungrily on.

The story which trickles through the book starts out bravely enough. Of this much, at least, I can be moderately sure. For a short time it looks as though something might come of it; but nothing really does. It is all so terribly obvious. There are no obstacles such as one finds in real fiction; there is no love spasm in Chapter XXV. There is no Chapter XXV at all! And so it must be perfectly clear that those who insist upon having their love spasms will be bored to death by Tutors' Lane and should on no account be allowed to look at it. There is love, of course, in an academic community; one frequently sees evidences of it; but it is love under control, properly subordinated to the all important business of uniting youth and learning—and to snatching time for an occasional rejuvenating flutter in the sacred fount itself.