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About Yale Alumni Magazine | View Entire Issue (March 3, 1898)
i SK7 We LS etc highest positions of trust in the land under a most trying ordeal. | : “ We are fortunate to-night in having Frank Butterworth, the greatest foot- ball coach Yale has ever had, with us and he will, I am sure, gratify our great desire to hear about Yale athletics, in the second session of this evening. However, I just want to touch on one more point in the Yale character as exemplified in the doings of our ath- letic teams during the past year, and that is ‘““Yale Courtesy.” “Ror two years there had been a cool- ness with Harvard. It was finally taken off the ice, and the wire removed, and when the cork popped on_ the baseball field, out bubbled “Yale Cour- tesy.” What was the result; the word was passed “Don’t dishearten them right at the start,” and so, like gentle- men, our ball nine permitted Harvard to win both games. Princeton being in the same class, the same courtesy was extended and we gave them both games. Then we all went to Pough- keepsie, again the word was passed “Don’t dishearten them right at the start.’ Harvard, handicapped by the almost prohibitive duty on foreign strokes, was valiantly struggling with two kinds of the domestic article. Cor- nell, with the impetuosity of youth, rushed right ahead, and showed a mis- erable lack of all common decency. All the while we were coaching Har- vard, hoping to pull her through to the end, and have her at least be able to say that her crew could row four miles, but it was no go. “Then we all went to Cambridge for the football game and you all know the result. “Don’t dishearten her right at the start,’ but we certainly forgot our courtesy, and did dishearten her at the finish, and then there was “H” to pay, and Harvard took them off. You may have found them in the soup. “In the meantime, Princeton had mis- interpreted our courtesy on the base- ball field in letting her win and came up to New Haven. I could now prob- ably make Butterworth ashamed of ever having thought he could speak about football, if I wanted to go on, but I don’t want to. He’ll tell you all about it. We have the tiger’s skin back of us here and it is mounted too and reg- istered. “What is left of the evening is now before you, and you may revel to your heart’s content in the intellectual and other treats which are to follow. Let us leave behind, then, the material part of the session, and board an open trolley for Olympus; many of the gods have become impatient. “In the name of the Essex County Yale Alumni Association, I now bid you all, guests and members, graduate and undergraduate, most heartily wel- come, and propose the first bumper to the first toast of every such gathering as ours, ‘‘Yale.” Prof. William Lyon Phelps, ’87, re- sponded to the toast, “Yale.’”’ He said: PROFESSOR PHELPS’S RESPONSE. “Before beginning my remarks, I wish to thank you all for the honor you have done me in inviting me to speak to the toast “Yale” and to speak at Orange. It is always an honor to speak for Yale anywhere, and it is an especial honor to speak in such a hot- bed of enthusiasm as Orange, though judging by the liquid refreshment which prevails here to-night, the name of the town might well be changed to Grape- fruit. The recent boycott on Yale has thus far produced only two positive results. First, it has given the profes- sors something to talk about at alumni meetings. This has proved a veritable godsend. Nothing is more difficult than to make a good after-dinner speech, and nothing excites more con- sternation in the mind’ of a member of the Faculty than the immediate pros- pect of having to make one. If you doubt this fact, please scrutinize the face of the gentleman who is to follow me on the toast list, and while he is speaking, examine the victim who is to be his successor. You will not need a personal introduction to either of these gentlemen to recognize them. They may easily be distinguished in this fes- tive gathering by the extraordinary solemnity of their faces. Thus the boy- cott, by giving the professors a definite subject to talk about, has accomplished one beneficial result. “The second result is equally fortu- nate. The attack has bound together in fraternal affection Yale University and the City of New Haven. This was whispered to me by a friend, and he pointed for proof of it to the affection- ate spirit manifested toward Yale at the last meeting of New Haven’s city fath- ers. Heretofore the relation existing between the city and the College has not been one of demonstrative friend- ship. To see the board of councilmen of the City of New Haven exhibiting a warm friendship for Yale is a some- what remarkable fact, and we have the boycott to thank for it. “While speaking of the boycott, let me commend as fervently as I can the golden silence of our honored and be- loved President Dwight. The Voice got a rise out of President Eliot and it took a fall out of President Patton. From President Dwight it has received exactly what it deserves, calm, com- plete, colossal contempt. The Voice is well named. terea nihil.’ I have always been told that “speech is silver and silence is golden.” The audible silence of the President is certainly golden, and the Voice is like free silver, for the more we have of it the greater it depreciates in value. To change the metaphor, those people who have been clamoring for dollar gas have at last got it. While speaking of the President, allow me to say that I cannot express in words my affection and admiration for him. -He is the head of the whole organization, and like a true soldier | stand by my captain. I am through and through an administration man. I believe in him. Outsiders cannot know with what affectionate consideration he has treated young members of the Faculty like myself, but even if 1 owed no personal debt to him, I should ad- mire him for his young-hearted Yale enthusiasm. His enthusiasm seems to increase rather than diminish with years, and I for one am glad of it. “Another curious result of the recent attacks on Yale has been the advertise- ment that Harvard has received as a conservator of morals. Now I do not wish to say anything disrespectful of. Harvard. I have been a student, a Fel- low, and an Instructor at Harvard, and no one can feel more admiration or respect for Harvard University than |] do. But, until recently, it had never occurred to me that morality was Har- vard’s long suit, and its present eleva- ~ Outside of the linguistic teachers at tion by our prohibition friends to the pinnacle of morality has a humor all its own. A Harvard professor remark- ed the other day that if the Voice was as much mistaken about Yale badness as it was about Harvard goodness, Yale must be a veritable Paradise. A DIFFERENT SORT OF ATTACK. “At home I have a large Irish setter who has many acquaintances among undergraduates and recent alumni. When he walks along the street he is occasionally assailed by small but bois- terous dogs. To these he pays no attention, but pursues the even tenor of his way in silence. If a very large dog attacks him, however, he immediately gives him what Mr. Depew has called ‘a thundering good licking.’ We can all afford to be silent when curs attack us, but a large dog at times may require some immediate attention. Now-Gov- ernor Chamberlain, in the slang of to-day, may be described as a ‘very warm dog, though there. are ‘other dogs just as warm.’ Governor Cham- berlain is a man of recognized ability, moral earnestness and personal force, and in his recent attack on Yale I have no doubt that he meant every word he said. He has made a definite, specific attack upon Yale's English Depart- ment, and although criticism from friends is always welcome, I believe that Governor Chamberlain is totally and profoundly mistaken. Speaking as the tail of the English Department, or perhaps the residuum of the English Department, I wish to say a few words in its defense. First, as to the stand- ing of its professors. Professor Beers is one of the most intimate and faithful friends I have in the world. Words fail to express how much I owe to him. But although I am so much attached to him that I should probably stand by him anyway, whether he were right or: wrong—for, regardless of the justice of the case, I always stand by a friend when he is attacked—in the present case I am certain Professor Beers in no way deserves the attack that has been made upon him. He has been for years a source of literary inspiration to the very best men who graduate from Yale, and if you will ask any of these men for their personal testimony, they will tell you themselves how much he has It is indeed “‘vox et prae- | done for them. He is furthermore a writer of extraordinary skill, and were it not that he has been handicapped by innumerable demands on his time and energy, he would undoubtedly now be occupying the place which he fully deserves to occupy—a place in the front rank of the writers of to-day. Profes- sor Lounsbury is known the world over for his equipment as a scholar, and especially for his work in Chaucer studies. Professor Cook is one of the foremost scholars in English philology in the world to-day. He has done a great deal for linguistic studies at Yale. His especial work, however, is in con- nection with the Graduate school, a work which he is eminently fitted for, both by nature and by training. He has done an immense amount of fruit- ful labor at Yale, the results of which do not immediately appear upon the surface. The most important and bene- ficial kind of work is not always that which adorns the first page of a sensa- tional newspaper. These three men, Beers, Lounsbury and Cook, are the professors of Yale’s English Depart- ment, and it is a trio that would be hard to surpass. They fortunately are men of totally different personalities, and for that very reason students who work under them get a variety of impressions. GROWTH IN THE STUDY OF ENGLISH. “There has been a steady and con- sistent growth in the study of English at Yale during the fifteen years that I have been nersonally familiar with the ‘institution, and although severe criti- cisms of our work are always welcome and will always receive attention, it appears to me that Gov. Chamberlain selected precisely the wrong time to make his attack. We are not doing anything revolutionary or startling, but we are making constant progress. It is not true that to-day Harvard excels Yale in the variety or in the quality of the courses offered in English Litera- ture. I challenge any man to compare the catalogues of the two Universities for this year and see if my statement is not true. The fact is that Yale holds a quite different theory in the teaching of English from that held by Harvard. Harvard, nine-tenths of the energy and time of her English Faculty is given to the correcting of students’ composi- tions. We have two strong and grow- ing teachers of Rhetoric; but we do not believe in devoting more time to composition than we devote to litera- ture, because we think that the latter is as more important as ideas are more important than the expression of them. We believe that if a student is a wide reader and a man of ideas, he is more apt to be a good writer than if he has learned the method of writing and has nothing in particular to say. Further- more, we do not believe in putting so frightful a burden on our English instructors. When I was at Harvard, I had to read and correct seven hundred themes a week, and sooner than do that kind of thing again I would rather be a motorman. I say this with the great- est respect for Harvard, with the great- est admiration for her English Faculty, who are nearly all my intimate friends, and with the greatest feeling of grati- tude for what I myself learned from these Harvard professors. YALE IN CURRENT LITERATURE. “Furthermore, there is at present a remarkable growth of literary life among the undergraduates at Yale. Philistinism has been the bane of Yale undergraduate life. Harvard students have been in the past better informed on, and more interested in, literary mat- ters than their brothers at Yale. The literary traditions at Harvard have been infinitely stronger than those at Yale. But we are waking up. Our College magazines show this plainly, and it is especially shown by the formation of a large number of purely literary clubs among the undergraduates. Further- more, and this I regard as an extremely significant fact, Yale students are be- ginning to make an impression in the world of letters outside the colleges. Last Summer Mr. Emerson Taylor, a graduate of the Class of Ninety-Five, and at present a member of our Gradu- ate School, had a story in Harper's Monthly. Mr. Gouverneur Morris, a member of the present Senior class, had a story in the Century at about the same time. Yesterday I took up the current number of the Atlantic Monthly, and I was delighted to find an article in it by Mr. H. W. Fisher, of the Class of Ninety-Eight. All honor to these three men! They are not only helping them- selves, but they are doing an inesti- mable service to the College. EFFECT ON MORALS. “T cannot dismiss the subject of the literary life of Yale without speaking of the extremely beneficial effect it is hav- ing on undergraduate morals. I have always believed that when a student or any other man beomes thoroughly interested in good literature, and loves to read standard books, he is safe irom many temptations of the world, the flesh, and the devil. The reason why many men yield to base temptations is because they have no intellectual re- sources; and I believe that the great interest that is now being taken by Yale students in literary matters is hav- ing and is bound to have a decidedly beneficial effect on the moral life of the University. “Now a word about athletics. The Yale Faculty believes that the manage- ment of athletics should rest entirely in the hands of the students. We be- lieve in strict supervision of the under- graduates’ studies, but we do not be- lieve in interfering with athletics. We especially dislike athletic committees composed in whole or in part of mem- bers of the Faculty, because we believe they do a great deal more harm than good. We believe this not only theo- retically, but chiefly because of the ex- perience that Harvard, Cornell, and other unversities have had in this mat- ter. A very prominent graduate of Harvard, a man identified for a number of years with Harvard’s athletic inter- ests, and a man who is personally known to many of you, told me recently that Profesor Ames had done more injury to Harvard’s athletics than any other agency had done in the past ten years. I thoroughly believe that criti- cism is just; and yet there is no doubt that Professor Ames has tried to do the. very best he could. AS TO ENTHUSIASM. “Finally, let me say that I do not agree with Governor Chamberlain in his strictures on Yale enthusiasm. We do not, of course, believe that no im- provement in intellectual and moral affairs is possible at Yale. But L[, for one, am not at present in a criti- cal mood. I have said that I admired the President for his Yale enthusiasm, and I wish that every College graduate had as much of it. as he has. I want every one of you to love the old Uni- versity with your whole heart. I want you to feel toward the College as you feel toward your own father and mother. You ought to feel so brimful of enthusi- asm that whenever you hear the word “Vale” or see the word “Yale” in print, your hearts will beat faster. 1 cannot express what the word “Yale” means to me. I do not know that I could be happy anywhere else. I had rather be a door-keeper in the house of my God than to dwell in the tents of wickedness. When I think what Yale has done for me in the past fifteen years, when | think of the kindness that my elders have shown toward my efforts, and when I think what the President, the Corporation, and the Faculty are doing for Yale, I am sure my life earnestly devoted to its service is not more than the University ought to ask and not more than I ought to give.” Prof. Phelps’s speech was received with great enthusiasm. NOBLESSE OBLIGE. Before calling on the next speaker to respond for Harvard, Mr. Francis J. Swayze, Harvard ’79, the President requested the Glee Club to sing “Fair Harvard,” and although the song is not ordinarily on their repertoire, they succeeded admirably. Mr. Swayze’s remarks were somewhat as follows: “The French have an expression which sums up a thought as perhaps the French can do better than any other modern nation, Noblesse oblige. It is the sentiment of obligation to do nothing mean or base, nothing beneath us; a sentiment which has more than once deterred men from wrong and outrage and crime, with a greater force than could be exerted by
