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.
Valediction
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