LITERATURE IN THE COLLEGES

JOHN ERSKINE

Brown of Harvard is no more. The play of that name may still be running, but of Harvard life it is now about as accurate a picture as Trelawney of the Wells is of modern English life. At Harvard, and at all the great American universities, the dashing, picturesque young athlete is no longer the prevailing type of the undergraduate ideal.

Of course, undergraduate athletics and undergraduate athletes persist—it would be a tragedy if they did not—but the type of youth that has been rather effectively denominated the "rah-rah boy" is increasingly difficult to find. His place has been taken, not by the "grind," the plodding, prematurely old student, caring only for his books and his scholastic record, but by a normal young man, aware that the campus is not the most important place in the world; aware, in fact, that the university is not the universe.

This young man knows about class politics, but also about international politics; about baseball, but also about contemporary literature. He is much more a citizen than his predecessor of ten years since, less provincial, less aristocratic. And he not only enjoys literature, but actually desires to create it.

The chief enthusiasm at Harvard seems to be the drama; indeed, the Brown of Harvard to-day must be represented not as a crimson-sweatered gladiator but as a cross between Strindberg and George M. Cohan. At Columbia—I have Prof. John Erskine's word for it—there has lately developed a genuine interest in—what do you suppose? Poetry!

I interviewed the bulletin-board outside Hamilton Hall before I interviewed Professor Erskine, and it, too, surprised me. It was not the bulletin-board of my not altogether remote undergraduate days. It bore notices telling of a meeting of the "Forum for Religious Discussion," of an anti-militaristic mass-meeting, of a rehearsal of an Elizabethan drama. It was a sign of the times.

Professor Erskine said that undergraduate ideals had greatly changed during the last few years. I asked him how this had come to pass.

"Well," he replied, "I think that college life reflects the ordinary life of the world more closely than is usually believed. This is a day of general cultural and spiritual awakening. The college student is waking, just as everybody else is waking; like everybody else, he is becoming more interested in the great things of life. There is no reason why the college walls should shut him in from the hopes, ambitions, and problems of the rest of humanity.

"It isn't only the boys that have changed—the parents have changed too. Time was when the father and mother wanted their son to go to college so that he could join a group of pleasant, nice-mannered boys of good family. Now they have a definite idea of the practical value of a college education, they send their son to college intelligently.

"Also, the whole theory of teaching has changed. The purely Germanic system has been superseded by something more humane. The old idea of scholarship for its own sake is no longer insisted upon. Instead, the subjects taught are treated in their relation to life, the only way in which they can be of real interest to the students.

"You will look in vain in the modern university for the old type of absent-minded, dry-as-dust professor. He has been superseded by the professor who is a man as well as a scholar. And naturally he approaches his subject and his classes in a different spirit from that of his predecessor.

"We have a new sort of teacher of English. He is not now (as was once often the case) a retired clergyman, or a specialist recruited from some unliterary field. He is, in many cases, a creative artist, a dramatist, a novelist, or a poet.

"When I was in college this was not generally true. Then such a professor as George Edward Woodberry or Brander Matthews was unique. Now the college wants poets and creative writers."

These are Professor Erskine's actual words. I asked him to repeat his last statement and he said, apparently with no sense of the amazement which his words caused in me, "The college wants the poets!" The stone which the builders rejected is become the head of the corner.

But, then, there are poets and poets. There is, for example, Prof. Curtis Hidden Page. There is also one John Erskine, author of Actæon and Other Poems, and Adjunct Professor of English at Columbia University. There is also Prof. Alfred Noyes. But there are also some thousand or so poets in the United States who will be surprised to know that the college wants them. Academic appreciation of poets has generally consisted of a cordial welcome given their collected works two hundred years after their deaths.

"English as a cultural finish," Professor Erskine continued, "has gone by the board. English is taught nowadays with as much seriousness as philosophy or history. Art in all its forms is considered as the history of the race, and treated seriously by the student as well as by the professor. To-day the students regard Shakespeare and Tennyson as very important men. They study them as in a course in philosophy they would study Bergson. Literature, philosophy, and history have been drawn together as one subject, as they should be."

"What," I asked, "are some of the extra-curricular manifestations of literary interest among the students?"

"In the first place," he answered, "the extraordinary amount of writing done by the students. It is not at all unusual now for a Columbia student to sell his work to the regular magazines. The student who writes for the magazines and newspapers is no longer a novelty. Randolph Bourne, who was recently graduated, contributed a number of essays to the Atlantic Monthly during his junior and senior years.

"Many of the students write for the newspapers. The better sort of newspaper humorists have had a strong influence on the undergraduate mind; they have shown the way to writing things that are funny but have an intellectual appeal. This has resulted in the production of some really excellent light verse. Also, Horace's stock has gone up.

"During the last two years some remarkable plays have been handed into the Columbia University Dramatic Association. Not only were they serious, but also they were highly poetic.

"And this," said Professor Erskine, "marks what I hope is the distinguishing literary atmosphere at Columbia. The trend of the plays written by Columbia students is strongly poetic. This is not true, perhaps, of the plays written by students of other institutions. The writers of plays want to write poetic plays, and—what is perhaps even more surprising—the other students do not consider poetic drama 'high-brow stuff.'

"Philolexian, the oldest of the Columbia literary societies, has been producing Elizabethan plays. These plays have been enthusiastically received, and the enthusiasm does not seem to show any signs of dying down. The students come to the study of these plays with a feeling of familiarity, for they have seen them acted."

"Does this enthusiasm for literature show itself in the college magazine?" I asked.

"It shows itself," answered Professor Erskine, "by the absence of a literary magazine. The literary magazine has completely collapsed. In small colleges, far away from the cities where the regular magazines are published, the college magazine is the only available outlet for the work of the students who can write. But here in New York the students know the condition of the literary market, and the more skilful writers among them do not care to give their writings to an amateur publication when they can sell them off the campus. So the Columbia Monthly got only second-best material. The boys who really could write would not sacrifice their work by burying it in a college publication, so the Columbia Monthly died.

"The history of a literary club we have up here, called Boar's Head, is significant. It was started as a sort of revival of an older organization called King's Crown. At first the program consisted of an address at each meeting by some prominent writer. For a while the meetings were well attended, but gradually the interest died down.

"At length I found what the trouble was—the boys wanted to do their own entertaining. Now work by the members is read at every meeting; there are no addresses by outsiders.

"And here again the poetic trend of the undergraduate mind at Columbia is displayed. The Scribblers' Club, which consisted of short-story writers, is dead—there were not enough short-story writers to support it. And at the meetings of Boar's Head there have been read, during the past two years, only one or two short stories.

"The boys bring plays and poems to the Boar's Head meetings, but not short stories. Last year most of the poems which were read were short lyrics. Toward the end of last year and during the present year longer poems have been read. They are not poems in the Masefield manner; they are modeled rather on Keats and Coleridge. This fact has interested me because the magazines, as a rule, have not been buying long poems. I was interested to see that William Stanley Braithwaite, in his excellent Anthology of Magazine Verse and Year-Book of American Poetry, calls attention to the increasing popularity of the longer poem.

"Last year Boar's Head decided to bring out a little book containing the best of the poems that were read at its meetings. A number of subscribers at twenty-five cents each were procured, and Quad Ripples was published. It contained only short poems. This year Boar's Head has published Odes and Episodes, a collection of light verse by one of its former members, Archie Austin Coates. It soon will publish a collection of poems read at its meetings, and all these poems are long. Some of these poems are so good that it is a real sacrifice for the boys to have them printed in this book instead of in some magazine.

"Of course, there were always 'literary men' at Columbia, but they were considered unusual. Now they no longer even form a class by themselves. One of our best writers of light verse is the captain of the baseball team.

"Speaking of light verse and baseball," continued Professor Erskine, "there is a certain connection between the Columbia Monthly and football, besides the obvious parallel which lies in the fact that both have ceased to exist. Some of the boys express eagerness to revive the college magazine, just as they express eagerness to revive football. But it is, I believe, merely a matter of pride with them. They are eager to have football and to have a college magazine; they are not so eager to contribute to the support of either institution.

"One proof of the literary renascence of Columbia is that the essays written in the regular course of the work in philosophy and in English are better than ever before."

"Do you believe," I asked, "that being in the city has had a good effect on literary activity among Columbia students?"

He answered: "I do think so, decidedly. It has produced an extreme individualism and has given the boys enterprising minds. It is true that it has its disadvantages, it has made the student, so to speak, centrifugal, and has destroyed collegiate co-operation of the old sort. But it has produced an original, independent type of student.

"The older type of college student was interested in football because he knew that people expected him to be interested in football. The Columbia student of to-day is interested in poetry, not because it is a Columbia tradition to be interested in poetry, but because his tastes are naturally literary."

Several of the causes of this poetic renascence at Columbia had been mentioned in the course of our conversation, but Professor Erskine had ignored one of the most important of them. So I will mention it now. It is John Erskine.