Читать книгу The Patient Observer and His Friends - Strunsky Simeon - Страница 13

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One night after dinner I quoted for Harding the following sentence from an address by President Lowell of Harvard: "The most painful defect in the American College at the present time is the lack of esteem for excellence in scholarship." Thereupon Harding recalled what some one had said on a related subject: "Athleticism is rooted in an exaggerated spirit of intercollegiate rivalry and a publicity run mad."

That night Harding dreamt the following:

From the Harvard "Crimson" for October 8, 1937:

"Twenty-five thousand men, women, and children in the Stadium yesterday broke into a delirium of cheers when the Cambridge team in Early English Literature won its fourth successive victory over Yale. Both sides were trained to the minute, however different the methods of the two head coaches. The Harvard team during the last two weeks had been put on a course of desultory reading from Bede to the closing of the theatres by the Puritans in 1642, while Yale had concentrated on the Elizabethan dramatists and signal practice.

"Harvard won the toss, and Captain Hartley led off with a question on the mediæval prototypes of Thomas More's 'Utopia.' Brooks of Yale made a snappy reply, and by a dashing string of three questions on the authorship of 'Ralph Roister-Doister,' the sources of Chaucer's 'Nonne's Preeste's Tale,' and the exact site of the Globe Theatre, carried the fight into the enemy's territory. But Harvard held well, and the contest was a fairly even one for twenty minutes. There was an anxious moment towards the end, when Gosse, for Harvard, muffed on the date of the first production of 'The Tempest,' but before Yale could frame another question the whistle blew.

"In the second half, Yale perceptibly weakened. It still showed brilliant flashes of attack, but its defence was poor, especially against Brooks's smashing questions on the Italian influences in Milton's shorter poems. Harvard made its principal gains against Burckhardt, who simply could not solve Winship's posers from Ben Jonson and Beaumont and Fletcher. The Yale coaches finally took him out and sent in Skinner, the best Elizabethan on the scrub team, but it was too late to save the day. There were rumours after the game that Burckhardt had broken training after the Princeton contest by going on a three days' canoe trip up the Merrimac. That, however, does not detract from the glory of Harvard's magnificent triumph."

From the Boston "Herald" of October 9, 1937: