LAYING THE GHOST

The spectre of Yale literary supremacy refuses to be downed, though various incantations have been chanted before it. Heywood, Broun John Farrar, George Chappell, and their fellow-conspirators have reared it out of an excellent brand of ektoplasm, and the creature stands, menacingly real, before the eyes of the critics who are watching college-bred literature. The latest appearance of the ghost was in a review (by one of the conspirators) of the "Eight More Harvard Poets". After declaring that of course "there is nothing in the book approaching the fire and genius of the Benets of Yale", he enters into a charming digression which explains, from his point of view, the manifest superiority of Yale literature. The scene is the Elizabethan Club after the Harvard-Yale game.

"By the looks of the undergraduates, by the pensive droop of their heads, by their strife to be polite to visitors despite the calamity, by the dim lights of the club, by the English tea, by the yearning of the club members fingers toward the breast pocket where the pencil lay, I realized that a great blow had been struck that day for the furtherance of Yale letters."

Since cock-crow and daylight have not been sufficient, the ghost must be dispersed, by the old device of hoax exposers; he must be confronted with self-comparisons, odious though they may be. First, in the Harvard scale, come the names of George Santayana, Percy McKaye, John Jay Chapman, Ed win Arlington Robinson, Robert Frost and Cale Young Rice. They, to be sure belong to the era before the ghost was raised; but they still manage to keep pace with the advancing generations. After the century mark stand such poets as Hermann Hagedorn. John Gould Fletcher, Arthur Davison Ficks, all of them forces in the newer poetry, and Witter Bynner, still the patron of Advocate poets here. And would it be malicious to include Amy Lowell herself.

Just before the war, and in the very generation with the famous Benets, come T. S. Eliot, Alan Seager, Conrad Alken, and (Robert Nathan, whose "Peter Kindred" started the series of college novels generally credited to Princeton.

In the immediate generation, a mere list of the most important poets will suggest others. Robert Hillyer, with five volumes already to his credit, stands first. After him, to mention only those who have had volumes of their own published, are John Dos Passos, Odell Shepard, J. L. McLane Jr., S. Foster Damon, and Royall Snow, along with the others of the recent "Eight".

This cataloguing is perhaps a poor but at least an honest way to attack the dark blue ghost. Yale, it is true, has a highly honorable list of its own, with he Benets and such men as John Farrar of the "Bookman" at its head. But more interesting, perhaps, is the place that Yale has won in critical and editorial, circles. With New Haven men writing the book reviews, reading the manuscripts for publishing houses, and editing the magazines, it is altogether natural that the name of Yale should be heard more often than that of Harvard in literary company. Yale itself, it must be frankly acknowledged, has not been the source of these critical inventions: merely Yale's friends among the New York literati, of whom Heywood Broun, a self-proclaimed loyal Harvard man, has been the worst offender. When the roll is called a few years later, the ghost will not be among those present.