TUTORS' LANE
Tutors' LaneWilmarth Lewis
Alfred A. Knopf
New York—1922
COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY
ALFRED A. KNOPF, Inc.
Published, September, 1922
Set up and printed by the Vail-Ballou Co., Binghamton, N. Y.
Paper supplied by W. F. Etherington & Co., New York, N. Y.
Bound by the H. Wolff Estate, New York, N. Y.
To
Helen and Wilson Follett
I've grammar and spelling for two,
And blood and behaviour for twenty."
[11]Tutors' Lane
A SYLLABUS
Having once, for a few months, had a literary column in a newspaper, Ihave come to admire those authors who place at the beginning of theirbooks a "word" in which the whole thing is given away. The time thatthose words saved me in writing my reviews—time which otherwise wouldhave been lost in reading the books—enabled me to write this book; aconsummation which may have, in its heart, a significant kernel, andwhich certainly shows how funny the world is, after all.
Now, as to this book and what it is all about, I frankly am at a loss.That's the difficulty of being too near it. Whether it is realism,naturalism, or merely restrained romanticism, I simply do not know. Itis awkward not knowing, for in the battle of the schools now raging Ishould like to take sides. I should like either to charge with theromantics, or defend with the realists. It must be good fun being pushedand shoved around, with someone's elbow in your eye and someone else'shatpin in your ear, and everyone crying, in the words of a recentheroine, "I want to be outraged." But, for the present at least, I mustbe content, like little Oliver Twist, to look hungrily on.
The story which trickles through the book starts out bravely enough. Ofthis much, at least, I can be moderately sure. For a short time it looksas though something might come of it; but nothing really does. It is allso terribly obvious. There are no obstacles such as one finds in realfiction; there is no love spasm in Chapter XXV. There is no Chapter XXVat all! And so it must be perfectly clear that those who insist uponhaving their love spasms will be bored to death by Tutors' Lane andshould on no account be allowed to look at it. There is love, of course,in an academic community; one frequently sees evidences of it; but it islove under control, properly subordinated to the all important businessof uniting youth and learning—and to snatching time for an occasionalrejuvenating flutter in the sacred fount itself.
So the syllabus is little more than a nervous shake of the hand and atimid statement of a few negative "points"—a disheartening, if notpositively dangerous, affair. That there are lurking beauties, however,peeping shyly out like johnn