Arts and Letters

William Lyon Phelps was elected to the Institute in 1910, at the age of forty-five. To this membership he proudly referred on the title-page of two of his books published thereafter. Nineteen years later he was chosen president, but resigned after two years, when he entered the Academy. In 1937 he accepted the post of secretary to that body, an office which he filled till his death in 1943. He was therefore in office during the crisis of 1940, remaining loyal to what he always held to be the true function of the Academy in its relation to the Institute.

When Phelps was elected to the Institute in 1910 he had long been known as a prominent and influential member of the faculty of Yale College, where he held the Lampson chair of English Literature. His prominence, indeed, went back to the academic year 1895-96, when as a young instructor, he had the temerity to offer an undergraduate elective course of one hour a week entitled "Modern Novels." In this he included lectures not only on English and American writers (many of them living), but also on the great novelists of the Continent. Since something of the old prejudice against the reading of novels was still prevalent, the course became notorious, was widely discussed and criticized, and at length received the distinction of a comic notice in the pages of Punch. The course was promptly suppressed by a terrified faculty. To the dismay of a generation of undergraduates, it was never revived in its original form, although a part of it was included in a subsequent offering with the safe and conventional title, "American Literature." Another exciting course, offered at the turn of the century, was "Contemporary Drama," in which Continental as well as English and American productions were assigned for required reading.

In 1910, the year in which he entered the Institute, he put forth his Essays on Modern Novelists, including, among others, Sienkiewicz, Björnson, and Sudermann, in whom he had been interested ever since his youthful days. A year later, he followed this book with his widely-read volume, Essays on Russian Novelists, in which, though he had never visited Russia and was totally ignorant of the language, he wrote about Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoevski, Tolstoi, Gorki, and others with disarming delight, conviction, and, let me add, success. This was the first account in English of this important group and of the literary movement to which they belonged. In these volumes, and in those that followed, Essays on Books, Essays on Modern Dramatists, Some Makers of American Literature, and Essays on Things—all written during his membership in the Institute—the devoted reader may hear the speaking voice of the author, the voice of a lecturer with the professional platform manner. That was a golden voice, at once gracious and persuasive, and revealing an abounding confidence in his ability to make reason and the tastes of William Lyon Phelps prevail. The echo of the living voice is heard also in his religious works, Human Nature and the Bible, Human Nature and the Gospel, and Adventures and Confessions. In these, notably in the last, there is scarcely an attempt to conceal the fact that the essays were originally sermons preached from a pulpit. Those who listened to Phelps as a preacher were wont to assert that he was then at his best.

I am confident that Phelps, for all his self-assurance, hardly expected to be remembered as an essayist. He knew that on the platform as lecturer, behind the desk as professor, or in the pulpit as preacher, he was unexcelled, for he felt no uneasiness before an audience—far from it. He had a genuine love of the persons before him and a desire to give them a good time. There was a quality about all his public work which I can only describe as the gift of intimacy, the ability to make an auditor feel that the speaker had somehow a peculiar interest in him and a genuine regard for his opinions. But this spell he never succeeded in transferring to the printed page. He was perpetually, almost dangerously, plausible and engaging, but his readers never paid him the allegiance which his auditors bestowed at once and unreservedly. He preferred to be a great public speaker rather than a merely excellent writer; but he was well aware of the nature and the cost of such a preference. "It is certain," he wrote in his Autobiography with his accustomed confidence, "that a really good lecturer is rarer than a really good writer." It was the histrionic art, obvious in all his public speaking, that he could not employ on the printed page. "The lecturer, like the actor, will be forgotten," he wrote. Even more than this he conceded: "I am inclined to think," he writes, "that while writing helps lecturing, lecturing is bad for writing. The same applies to teaching. A man's teaching is improved if he writes books, but his style in writing is apt to suffer by teaching often or before large classes." He tells us that on his graduation from college he was undetermined whether to be professor, journalist, or preacher. He became all three, as he proudly announced; but nowhere do I find that he betrayed the wish to be remembered chiefly as critic or polite essayist.

I would not be so extreme as to assert that his books are not read. When you open one of his volumes—it makes slight difference which—you will find that you do not soon lay it down; but you will also become aware that it is not the subject that holds you, but the personal charm of the writer. And for this reason I suppose that Phelps will ever and anon come to life again among casual readers who happen upon his volumes almost unaware, and who will feel that they have made a discovery.

His final publication, intended to crown his life work, Autobiography with Letters, extends to near a thousand closely printed pages; and the wonder in the reader's mind is how a single life, even so long a one as his, could have contained so many unique experiences. There are no really amazing incidents in it, no hairbreadth escapes or adventures in distant lands, but rather a cento of anecdotes and observations, all memorable and all worth having. This is partly owing to the fact that the author had the ability to isolate and magnify a particular event or opinion of no apparent importance in itself, until it shone with a romantic luster. He had above all the faculty of holding all these in memory, often to the exclusion of more important matters. I recall an example of this in the last months of his life. He and I had gone to Hartford to see a performance of Ford's dreadful, late-Elizabethan tragedy with the repulsive title, 'Tis Pity she's a Whore. A dismal evening it proved to be. It was raining, and one could hardly keep from worrying over the long midnight trip home. Moreover Mr. Phelps was a sick man, suffering from an attack of asthma, and was obliged to leave the theatre during a part of the performance. When we were well started on our return, we could not help wondering whether the trip had been worth the effort. Just then it occurred to me that he might be interested, perhaps a little amused, by a remark that I had overheard in the lobby as we were leaving the playhouse. One bluestocking, in reference to certain harsh criticisms of the play—it had been reviewed in a newspaper under the heading, 'Tis Pity it's a Bore—remarked, "For my part, I feel that the play has a message for us all." I repeated this to my companion, and at once the atmosphere of mirth and gayety was restored. Phelps laughed the rest of the way to New Haven, and repeated again and again, "That alone makes the whole trip worth while." Of such materials, set down with his peculiar gusto, is the Autobiography composed.

How is one to evaluate talents such as these? Though he left behind him no literary work of the first importance, he interested others in the great authors of the world. His critical pronouncements were often gracious and exciting, rather than judicious and definitive; but, like his favorite Browning, he was always invigorating and human, and made one feel that the reflections and aberrations of a thinker operating on the enigma of life were of a consuming significance that nothing else could equal. Thus he was content to dismiss his auditors with a burning desire to read, rather than to equip them with a body of critical principles or a wide knowledge of literary history. A blazing enthusiasm for the best things that a man encounters during his passage through the world he carried with him wherever he went, so that it was felt in theatre, concert-hall, college, church, and club. He had a divinely bestowed power of enriching life, and, having found in the adventure of living an ever-varying delight, he forthwith communicated it to those about him. "You always bring with you," wrote Santayana to him, "a sort of Gulf Stream of warmth and kindness." He was not only joyous himself, but the cause that joy was in other men. At his appearance in the pulpit or on the platform, the sun seemed to burst from behind the clouds, and the dull routine of existence took on a golden meaning.