Arts and Letters

Cross was a man with many titles. He was successively Instructor, Doctor, Professor, Sterling Professor, Dean, Provost, and Governor. It is unnecessary to record his progress through the various stages indicated by these honors and the various duties, often requiring special aptitudes and skills, which were imposed upon his broad and capable shoulders.

He was elected to the Institute in 1911, entered the Academy fifteen years later, and served as its Chancellor for ten years, from 1931 to 1941. He died in 1948, after having resumed his active interest in the Academy, of which he had been a member for twenty-two years.

More remarkable than the titles listed above were the nicknames bestowed upon him, and he was both amused and pleased to be called "Uncle Toby" and "Connecticut Yankee," and did nothing to discourage their applicability. As an undergraduate in Yale College he was, because of his interest in public affairs, called "Senator" by one of his classmates. The title stuck to him, and no doubt had a part in stimulating his concern with state politics which was later to lead to such remarkable results.

But from his college days onward, his main interest was not in politics, but in letters. Cross was never one of the great teachers in the Sheffield Scientific School. He desired before all things to be known as a man of letters, and never declined a task or missed an opportunity which might lead toward that goal. A series of public lectures on the history of English fiction led to the composition of his first book, The Development of the English Novel, which proved, ironically enough, to be the most popular and useful of his many publications. It was inscribed to M. Ferdinand Brunetiere of the French Academy, whose literary views commanded universal acclaim at the turn of the century. The curious will have no difficulty in detecting the influence of the great French critic on Cross's conception of the growth and significance of the English novel.

Cross's masterpiece, however, is his life of the novelist Laurence Sterne. It grew directly out of his book on the novel, in which he felt that he had not had the necessary space to do justice to that author. It is not too much to say of it that the book revolutionized the study and criticism of the great humorist. Before the publication of Cross's study, Sterne had been looked at askance by critics and historians of English literature. He was commonly regarded as immoral, lascivious, silly, sentimental, and insincere. The young were warned away from his pages. Even the delightful Sentimental Journey was regarded as a mere soufflé, puffed up with wind and nonsense, but empty of all value. Thackeray called Sterne "a wretched worn-out old scamp." He dwelt on his indecency, and cried out, "Faugh, the foul satyr!" He asserted that in every page of Sterne there was something that would have been better away.

Now Cross was amused over Sterne's eccentric wit, laughed at his sentimentalism, and passed over his indecency without exaggerating it. From that time on, Sterne's indelicacy was regarded as innocuous, his perpetual jesting as delicious and unrivalled, and his sentiment as amusing when it was not actually a product of the heart. He was seen to be a "fellow of infinite jest and most excellent fancy," like Yorick, the king's jester in Hamlet, whose name Sterne adopted for his own. It can have been given to few critics to produce so complete and necessary a vindication of an author, who thenceforward was to be regarded as among the greatest humorists of English literature.

Yet Cross's favorite novelist was not Sterne but Fielding. To him Cross devoted his best years and his mature powers. A longer thing than his biography of Sterne—it is in three stout volumes—it inevitably lacks the gusto that had been so conspicuous a feature in his study of Sterne. Thus The Life and Times of Fielding, though a more ambitious work, was a much less necessary one. To be sure, Cross had not neglected to devote attention to the novelist's less-known publications; but the work lacked the originality of the study of Sterne. There was nothing new to say about the genius of the author of Tom Jones, perhaps the greatest novel in the language. From the beginning Fielding had been recognized as one of the glories of English prose fiction, and no critic had ever appeared to challenge the high esteem with which he was regarded. So, although Cross's book was received with great respect, and even applauded, it could not be considered as a revelation of new and hitherto overlooked achievement. The book has held, and will continue to hold, its place as a standard biography, and that alone is sufficient to keep Cross's reputation as a productive scholar alive for many a generation to come.

The publication of The Life and Times of Fielding marked the end of Cross's purely scholarly work. His ever-restless mind had passed on to new and untried fields. The university had determined on a new and dangerous experiment—nothing less than the publication of a quarterly to be called The Yale Review. Its new function (for it replaced a periodical of the same name, devoted to economics) was entrusted entirely to him. I remember very well the apprehension with regard to its future, for Cross had had no experience as an editor. But he at once made it clear that the new review was to have no merely local or academic character, nor was its university connection to be evident in any special way. It was to be a national quarterly. Such it became, and such it has remained, attracting the best talent wherever available. One of the chief features was to be a comprehensive review of modern books and productions of other than academic interest, but nothing was to be passed over because of limited appeal or difficulty. The quarterly was never to pander to publishing houses which might prove to be profitable advertisers, nor to run after books of timely appeal or provincial interest. Thus Cross, who had a fine company of scholars to draw on as reviewers, hoped to win the attention of readers who had no connection with or interest in the university which sponsored the periodical.

It would not be becoming in me to eulogize or attempt to analyze further the distinction of The Yale Review, save to point out that it is in its thirty-ninth volume, and therefore a living monument to Cross's creative skill. What its future may be now that his guiding hand is removed remains to be seen. I permit myself to observe, in passing, that its success may be judged by the number of periodicals which have sprung up in imitation of it.

Regarding Cross's career as Governor of Connecticut, I must also be judiciously brief. His administration followed immediately upon his (formal) retirement from the provostship of the university; and his candidacy was regarded as something of a joke, since the Republican "machine" was considered to be invincible. Nevertheless it was imperative for the Democrats to have a candidate, and Cross was persuaded to accept the paltry appointment. In his campaign he determined to make the public forget that he had ever been a professor. He dramatized himself as the "Connecticut Yankee," of which traditional figure he was indeed a striking embodiment, and voters promptly forgot that "the good old man down in New Haven" had ever been tarred with the academic brush. He won the election, to the dismay of his party and the amusement of the public, and reigned over the state for four terms. He was no sooner in office than he made the Democratic barons, who had counted on his being putty in their hands, aware that he knew exactly the nature and extent of the powers committed to him, and intended to exercise them. He was efficient, honest, good-natured, incorruptible, and above all else picturesque. He piloted his state through the great depression, and delighted his constituents as the very emblem of the Nutmeg State which he had loved so long, and now at last represented.

It was he himself who assumed the sobriquet of "Connecticut Yankee" and made it the title of his autobiography. He had no difficulty in acting the part. He was the thing itself, and proud to be so. But his more familiar nickname was "Uncle Toby"—a name bestowed by his friends of the Graduates' Club in New Haven at the time when he was at work upon his life of Sterne. (They probably knew nothing more of the original Uncle Toby than that he was the best known character in Tristram Shandy.) Cross was of course no more like Uncle Toby than like Romeo. Uncle Toby, or rather Captain Tobias Shandy, is remembered, with Don Quixote and Falstaff, as one of the great comic figures of all time. Like Sir Roger de Coverley, he is the symbol of a childlike innocence surviving in the midst of a naughty and perverse generation—a generation that cannot understand him and therefore considers him funny. At best he is thought of as sly—that is, as deliberately and for his own purposes concealing his knowledge of human nature under a mask of ignorance and unconcern. Now among Cross's many qualities no one would dream of including a childlike innocence. Sly, no doubt he was, as many a politician learned to his cost, yet it was not innocence but a subtle purpose that he was intent upon hiding.

In Connecticut Yankee he writes of a time when, at the age of eleven, he kept the books in a country shop. "All sorts of people," he says, "came in for trade."

They were always talking to one another, and they were newsmongers; they told racy stories in low voices which they thought I did not overhear; girls whispered secrets to one another which they thought I could not overhear or at least not understand. They were all mistaken. If I did not understand at once, I soon learned to understand. But I kept my mouth shut.

Such is astuteness, but it is hardly innocence. Cross, the boy of eleven years, was learning his lesson. In his characteristic way he was gaining from the experience whatever it was worth, for he could, like Falstaff, turn diseases to commodity. All was grist to his mill.

When, in 1948, he died, full of honors, one could not but speculate on his future in another world. Somehow one hesitated to pray that so active and indomitable a spirit should rest in peace everlasting. I can imagine no state of infinite repose in which our Connecticut Yankee would long have been content.