Various

“ Tommy ought to arrive very soon.
She walked over to the pier-glass in the hall. Dispassionately she admired her beauty. She thought that she had never seen anyone so lovely. Others might be merely beautiful, hers was distinctive. Beauty was a power in itself; and when coupled with intellect—the power it might wield was infinite. ”

“ The assurance of a very few girls—and a very great number of men—was superfluous. Wilde has said that love of oneself is a life-long romance: Millicent’s was a passion! In the perfection of her features, a subtle coldness of manner, a faint expression as of calculating, which her character had betrayed into her eyes, was the nearest thing to a fault which she could see. ”

“ For our values are not those of the world of work, with which we can only incidentally help you to make terms—our values are those of the world of thought. We shall make you contemporary of all ages, and since you must after all live in this age, such an extension of your interest and imagination may make you an exile in your own day and place. ”

“ 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 should like to see inscribed over our college portals the following inscription:
“‘Generous Youth! Enter at your peril. We may so quicken your imagination as to bring you loss as the world counts it. There may be a great inventor in you now, there may only be a poet in you when you leave us; the captain of industry in you may give place to some obscure pursuit of philosophy; you are literary, we shall leave you forever incapable of best sellers; you are philanthropic, we may develop the detached critic in you ”

“ The solution in the minds of many seems to lie in the abolishment of the old college course, following the law of the survival of the fittest. This issue of our present afflictions we believe would be a regretable blunder. There should always be a place for the study of the so-called liberal arts; for the contemplation of “all the best that has been thought and said and done in the world”. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Thus roused from thoughts of “all for love and love for all”, the slandered Cherrywold girded himself against the powers of cynicism.
“You are a pack of blasphemous cowards all!” he cried. “It has been alleged that Mr. and Mrs. Stephens are the only people in the world who still believe in fairies, and that Jonah was swallowed by the whale, but I believe—”
“‘What troubles you, my little one? The dawn is far away,’” soothed Han. But, refusing to be calmed by a snatch of one of his own lullabies, Cherrywold was only prevented from assaulting his Oriental acquaintance by main force. ”

“ Without such a background many a man cannot do his best work. What place is better fitted to continue this undertaking than Yale, established in this spirit, as attested by the words of the founder, “I give these books for the founding of a college”? Professor Mather in a recent address summed up the ideal of the college in these glowing terms:
“The college does its work alongside a dozen other equally worthy educational institutions, mostly vocational. It does not compete with them; it directly supplements them and incidentally aids them. ”

“ It would be difficult for even the most blindly ardent supporter of Yale to deny that the traditional four-year course for the degree of Bachelor of Arts no longer remains intact. There are probably fewer who realize that an ever increasing number are receiving that degree after completing a course that has had little or no relation to the field of learning to which, by its very title, it is closely related. ”

“ The result is a repetition of the old story of the house divided against itself. It is just this condition, we believe, that has led to such restless, groping questionings as, “What is Yale for?” The definition of a university as being one body of which there are many members admirably illustrates the point. For the college to-day is in the anomalous position of attempting to perform the duties of two members where it formerly functioned as one. Such a state of affairs is not conducive to the health of any organization whatever. ”

“ Here are stories that are literature: they move us by the presence of the genuine elements of literature, and not by the elements of painting, music, or any other art. Their language is neither colorful nor melodious, but it is significantly expressive, related inextricably to the subject matter. They help make the short story as distinct a literary form as a landscape by Cezanne or a sonata by Beethoven. Katherine Mansfield, scarcely a year after her death, has come to be regarded as one of the most finished artists that ever worked with the short story as their medium. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Carl returned from the arduous task of dancing with his own sister (a task only to her brother; she, too, held court) , and found Tommy marooned in the stag line. He introduced him to other girls, in whom Tommy found varying charm. Carl’s sister, a mature child of seventeen, wanted to know, “Honestly now,” whether Carl drank at school.
Tommy lied like a good roommate. He reflected philosophically on the oddness of sisters who went out constantly with men who drank, and yet expected total abstinence from their brothers. ”

“ Disintegration of the long established College curriculum has been going on ever since the war. It began with the introduction of the old “Select Course” of the Scientific School into the Academic curriculum under the imposing title of Bachelor of Philosophy. This innovation was followed shortly by the institution of the Common Freshman Year. Furthermore, if a student now intends to become a lawyer, he may devote an entire year (and that his Senior year) to the study of law—and yet graduate as a Bachelor of Arts. ”

“ French novels had taught her these things—and had failed to instil a sense of personal absurdity.
Egotism was her greatest fault; she looked upon it as her highest virtue.
Her thought came back to Tommy. No man had ever been so much in love with her as he was. And he represented so many desirable things. He was appealingly good looking. He was wealthy in his own right, Carl had told her. Life with him would be tranquil and luxurious.... It might grow dull. ”

“ This may be quite true, yet there remains the question of whether or not it is the place of the college, and in particular Yale College, to offer that opportunity even in part.
The recognized place for specialization is the graduate school. The graduate student works presumably in a special atmosphere created by the common labors of a common group for a common end; the end being a particular degree desired because it has come to signify that the bearer of such a symbol has mastered the details of a recognized branch of learning. ”

“ All the aspirations of the many, all the heartless prejudice of the few, are concentrated in a toy lamp in one of the little rooms of a doll’s house. It might easily be sentimental, and very likely ridiculous, if it were not for the implacable aloofness of her art. ”

“ This utilitarian mania for taking the short-cut to one’s life-work has been in recent years the ideal of a large portion of American college men, and has left its mark on almost every educational institution in this country, by forcing them to change their curricula to meet the demand. ”

“ There would be one or two proposals, perhaps, in the last days—there had been three, at the end of the summer at Minnetonka. She catalogued the men, slowly: Eddie Pearson, nice enough—too nice, insipid; Orme Waldon, whom no amount of snubbing would rebuff; Stewart Holmes, whose egotism was such that he believed all girls secretly longed for his attentions; and so on. These were the last three of the summer’s garnerings. She wanted some one new. Tommy Squire. ”

“ A graduate school is [Pg 3] the most suitable medium for accomplishing the task in hand. It is the only reason we have post-graduate schools at all.
The existing situation in the college is exactly the reverse. Those who are working for the B.A. degree and nothing else are carrying on side by side with what are in reality pre-medical students and first-year lawyers. ”

“ The liberal colleges endeavoring to provide such short-cuts by making inroads on their liberal curricula are untrue to their genius and merely challenge impossible competition.
It may be argued that this desire for specialization at the earliest possible moment was the natural result of the ever increasing complexity of modern life and the bewildering ramifications of present-day knowledge which forced the bulk of undergraduates to accept isolation in a single subject. ”

“ In other words, assuming that the Freshman year is not very different from what it was in ante-bellum days, which is not the case, one-third of every class in Yale College is now graduated as B.A. men without more than a three years’ “exposure” to the subjects which, in the eyes of the world, are customarily associated with that educational label. ”

“ On the one hand there is a group which pursues its studies with the realization that upon the complete mastery of every detail depends in a large measure the success or failure of its life-work. On the other, there remain those who are still searching in their work for that particular field which to them will seem to be the one to which they wish to devote their future time and energy. ”

“ His prose [Pg 24] 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. ”

“ We can think of no one who can impart to the reader his own genuine enthusiasm for good books so well as Sir Kenelm Digby’s publicity agent. (Incidentally, we consider Mr. Morley’s observations on Sir Digby’s character, habits, and work as the most titillating particle of sympathetic powder to be found in the whole book.) ”

“ The Great Pan Jandrum
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. ”

“ As the most and vagueness surrounding the late war are slowly cleared away by passing time and subsiding emotions, and the conflict settles into a semblance of perspective, the more recent books that deal with it show an increasing grasp of its essentials, and a higher understanding of its trials and lessons. ”

“ 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. ”

“ A lady of high degree is accosted on Bond Street by another lady of lesser degree who requests the price of a cup of tea. The first lady, thinking it would be a charming adventure, takes the pathetic creature into her own home for her cup of tea. She is impressed by her own magnanimity, even considers doing something more worthwhile for the stranger, when the great lady’s husband appears. ”

“ It is the natural tendency of every generation to consider much less vivid and wicked those that have come before. We still hear of the “old-fashioned” mothers in sentimental appreciation or pity—as contrasted with the obstreperous rising generation.
In this light, it is interesting to read Mr. Hughes’ novel, which has as an obtrusive background the very vital and naughty New York of 1825-1875. With a slight hesitation for touches that obviously cater to our surprise, we would class the bulk of this background as authentic. ”

“ Paris is the setting almost throughout the narrative, that of an American painter whose son, born in France, is drawn by the logic of his instincts and sympathies into the struggle. The scenes and events of the war, its growing tragedy and sternness, and their gradual effect on John Campton, are recorded with an insight and understanding that fascinate, while their subject-matter grips. ”