"I strove with none. I always hated strife.
Nature I loved, and God and Man and Art:
I warmed both hands before the fire of life:
It sinks, yet I'm not ready to depart."
When William Lyon Phelps wrote these words, warping the famed quatrain of Walter Savage Landor, he still had four years in which to get ready. Last week, Professor Phelps finally departed, after a transitory rally from a stroke. He died where he was born and spent most of his 78 busy, happy years: in New Haven.
Said President Charles Seymour: "All Yale mourns the death of her Billy Phelps." Nor would the mourning be limited to Yalemen.
Undergraduate Hero. Billy Phelps (Yale '87) entered college to study law, "got crazy about literature," never recovered his sanity. After a year's teaching at Harvard, he went back to Yale to teach for 41 years, found this "an equitable distribution" of his time. In 1895, to a college still devoted to Greek and Latin, he brought the first U.S. contemporary novel course, later added modern drama.
This breezy, tweedy, pun-loving admirer of Turgenev, Tolstoy, Hardy, James, Howells and Meredith was a great teach er, because his enthusiasm was infectious.
He had what Student Lucius Beebe, who spent a year at Yale, called "a unique ability for translating the obscure refine ments of literature into an idiom which the undergraduate mind could readily grasp." Student Sinclair Lewis, '07, called him the one college teacher of his generation able to "inoculate students . . . with his own passion for the secret joys of good literature," a man who changed the university into a "friendly concourse of human beings interested in learning."
Harvard's Philosopher George Santayana once put his finger on Phelps's success: "You always bring with you a sort of Gulf Stream of warmth and kindness."
Phelps's Whitney Avenue house, with its Irish setters, cats and parrots, was always open to New Havenites. They came to talk and borrow the books he recommended. For years his T. & B. course (Tennyson & Browning) met in four sections of 150 students each—including athletes who knew Phelps would not readily flunk a contributor to Yale's glory.
Many a senior class voted him its most inspiring professor. When he was upset in 1920 by Professor Chauncey Brewster Tinker, the Phelps heyday at Yale was passing. By then Billy Phelps's literary notions were not even modern in the eyes of the sophisticated '20s. They could not agree with him that the swing of Eddie Guest's verse was "perfect," Walt Whitman "nothing but a Sears-Roebuck catalogue with calliope accompaniment."* Some of them were interested in James Joyce, Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis. Phelps was not.
Beyond the Campus. But Phelps was moving on to greater extramural triumphs. He helped transform book reviewing from a scholarly exercise for the cognoscenti into an evangelical service for the man who reads while he runs. In 1922 he launched his "As I Like It" column in Scribner's, each month thereafter glowed with enthusiasm for the most wonderful book of the month (or year or decade).