The Yale Bicentennial Publications

ONE of the most significant memorials of the two-hundredth birthday of Yale is the series of volumes¹ prepared by a number of her professors and issued in connection with the anniversary, “as a partial indication of the character of the studies in which the university teachers are engaged.” As originally planned, the publications were to represent, we believe, the work of a single department only. But it was soon found that no ordinary Jubiläum volume would represent adequately the variety and the extent of the intellectual activity of a modern university. As it became possible to present the results of investigations carried forward by various departments, the committee of publication were able to secure many long-planned books which awaited only the final preparations for the press. In estimating the character and purpose of these bicentennial volumes, therefore, it should be remembered that they were not manufactured to add to the glory of Yale’s great celebration last October, but rather that the celebration was thought to be a fit occasion for offering to the public some concrete illustration of the work in which Yale scholars are constantly employed.

Many of these treatises are, in the nature of the case, too technical to attract the interest of the general reader. The Studies from the Chemical Laboratory of the Sheffield Scientific School, the Research Papers from the Kent Chemical Laboratory, Contributions to Mineralogy and Petrography, even Professor Hastings’s masterly treatise on Light, and the promised Elementary Principles in Statistical Mechanics, by Professor Gibbs, that illustrious investigator to whom the Copley medal of the Royal Society was recently awarded, — none of these titles give assurance of what Dr. Johnson would call a book to hold in your hand as you sit by the fire. But that agreeable function is, after all, only one of the uses of a book, and the monographs to which we have shown the scant courtesy of “ printing by title ” in a footnote will be judged at their true valuation by the audience of scientific specialists for whom they were intended.

Another clearly defined group of the bicentennial publications is made up of linguistic studies, in which the method is now as rigidly scientific as in any other department of university research, but whose subject-matter brings the discussion into the general field of literary history. To this class of treatises, representing as it does some of the most noteworthy recent achievements of American scholarship, belongs Professor Goodell’s well - considered Chapters on Greek Metric. Professor Oertel’s Lectures on the Study of Language surveys the results of linguistic science during the nineteenth century, but devotes itself mainly to the principles which underlie changes in language. Professor Morris’s Principles and Methods in Syntax deals primarily with Latin syntax, and its illustrations are drawn largely from Plautus, upon whose writings Professor Morris is an acknowledged authority. The volume of Biblical and Semitic Studies is made up of critical and historical papers read before the Semitic and Biblical Club of the university. Professor Lang, in his Gallego-Castilian Court Lyrics of the 14th and 15th Centuries, will edit these poems for the first time, endeavoring to date them chronologically and to restore the text. Professor Cook’s Biblical Quotations in Old English Prose Writers will also be an attempt at text reconstruction, gathering into connected form the Biblical quotations dispersed through Old English literature. Professor Hopkins contributes two separate books. One analyzes the character and origin of the Mahabharata, the Great Epic of India; the collection of essays entitled India, Old and New, aims at a non-professional audience, and contains, particularly in its chapters on famine and the plague in Bombay, the record of careful and clear-sighted observations of the condition of India under British rule.

Two of the volumes in the series deal with great literary figures. Plutarch receives due honors from the hands of Professor Perrin, who furnishes new translations of the Lives of Themistocles and Aristides, with a most illuminating Introduction and Notes. The object of the book, as concisely stated in the preface, is “to bring out clearly the spirit of Plutarch as a writer of Lives : the easy and comfortable movements of his thought; his attitude toward men who are struggling with great problems of life and destiny; his amiable weaknesses as a judge of historical evidence; his relish for the personal anecdote and the mot; his disregard of the logic and chronology of events; his naïve appropriation of the literary product of others; his consummate art in making deeds and words, whether authentic or not, portray a preconceived character, —a more or less idealized character. ” This is an attractive programme, surely, and the result is a charming book. Professor Perrin deals in skillful fashion with the difficult problems involved in a study of the sources of Greek history and biography, and his work may be heartily commended to a wide circle of students, not only of Greek history, but of the art of biographical and historical composition.

Shakespeare, who paid Plutarch the high compliment of borrowing so often and so closely from the Lives, is the theme of a genial book by Professor Lounsbury. Under the title Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist, he sketches the history of the various views that have been held concerning Shakespeare as a dramatist and poet, down to the nineteenth century. This volume is the first of a series, under the general title of Shakespearean Wars, in which Professor Lounsbury proposes to write the history of the famous controversies waged over the foremost of poets. The next volume to appear will be Shakespeare and Voltaire, and a third volume will be devoted to the efforts to establish the text of the dramatist, and the linguistic and literary quarrels to which they have given rise. In the General Introduction accompanying the present work, Professor Lounsbury outlines his plan for the series, and comments upon the value of the lessons to be drawn from the quarrels of critics and commentators. “Few, in truth,” he remarks dryly, “appreciate the invaluable services which have been wrought by wrath in behalf of the advancement of learning.” The ten chapters of the book discuss, with the ample learning and tart wit familiar to readers of Professor Lounsbury’s Studies in Chaucer, such topics as The Dramatic Unities, The Intermingling of the Comic and Tragic, Representation of Violence and Bloodshed, Minor Dramatic Conventions, and other allied subjects designed to illustrate the fluctuations of Shakespeare’s reputation as a master of his art. It is a book to be read with keen enjoyment.

Of the volumes of a more strictly historical character, Professor Schwab’s The Confederate States of America, 1861—1865, a study of the financial and industrial history of the South during the Civil War, has already been reviewed at length in this magazine. There is much to interest even the casual reader in the sketch, by members of the Faculty of the Law School, of Two Centuries’ Growth of American Law, 1701—1901. It furnishes a clear statement, by American lawyers of distinction, of what we have thus far accomplished in the field of jurisprudence. The most important and instructive paper in Professor Bourne’s Essays in Historical Criticism is his workmanlike demonstration of the growth of the singular Legend of Marcus Whitman. A portion of this paper has already been printed in the American Historical Review, but it deserves reading in its present form by all who care to study the processes by which fiction, even in our own time, gets itself transformed into accepted history.

President Hadley’s volume of papers and addresses, collected under the title of The Education of the American Citizen, and commented upon elsewhere in this number of the Atlantic, may be taken as fairly symbolical of the aim of the entire series of books. Its ethical attitude is straightforwardly defined in these sentences of the preface: “ The real test of an educational system lies in its training of the citizen to meet political exigencies. If it accomplishes this result, it is fundamentally good, whatever else it may leave undone; if it fails at this cardinal point, no amount of excellence in other directions can save it from condemnation. ” This belief that the higher education finds both its justification and its method through the service it renders to the public welfare is thoroughly characteristic of the spirit of Yale.

The most cursory examination of this impressive row of bicentennial volumes suggests not only the scholarship and the practical energy which a great modern university can at any moment command, but reminds one also that all this technical power, summarizing and foreshadowing as it does the thought of generations of men, is a noble contribution to the service of the public.

B. P.