"Uncle Toby"

CONNECTICUT YANKEE -- Wilbur L Cross--Yale University Press ($5).

Generations of Yale Sheffield Scientific School students, inhabitants of what used to be known in New Haven as "Darkest Sheff." had the luck to take their Engish Lit. with Professor Wilbur L. Cross the salty pedagogue who became a four-term Democratic Governor of Connecticut after his academic retirement in 1930. What the Sheff boys ostensibly got was a dose of Chaucer, the usual Shakespeare, and a ponderable amount of reading in the 18th-Century worthies. Henry Fielding and the "lousy parson," the Rev. Laurence Sterne. But what Wilbur Cross really gave the boys was a liberal education in the Connecticut spirit. That spirit lives and breathes throughout the octogenarian ex-Governor's autobiography, Connecticut Yankee, a lengthy document whose dry-sherry tang saves it from collapsing into garrulity.

No Softy. To his friends and students, Wilbur Cross is "Uncle Toby," a nickname taken from the famous character in Sterne's Tristram Shandy who "would not harm a fly." The nickname is deceptive. The Connecticut Yankee as exemplified by ex-Governor Cross is not as taciturn as the Vermont Yankee. He is less inclined than the Boston Yankee to parade his sense of being, like the Lowells, just this side of God. He comes, of course, from "the land of steady habits''--though Uncle Toby sometimes likes to eat peas with his knife. A bit skeptical, he is nevertheless no cynic. He does not kindle, like a Boston Abolitionist, at one touch of the match. Nor would he blandly go to jail, like Thoreau, rather than pay taxes to a conscienceless Government. But if you provoke the Connecticut Yankee--or Wilbur Cross--you will discover that he is no softy, and he usually gets his way.

Example: when Yale's President Timothy Dwight the Younger demanded that English Instructor Cross drop his idea of giving a course in the "ungodly" and ''sexy" modern novel back in the mid-'gos Cross acquiesced. But he slyly observed that the study of Homer's Iliad woul 1 have to be abolished from courses in Greek, for the Iliad was obviously a story about the illicit intrigue between Paris and Helen. The next year Cross gave his course in the modern novel.

Sometimes the Connecticut Yankee's love of a sly trick resulted in the sale of wooden nutmegs to the British. Wilbur Cross would not condone such a perversion of Yankee shrewdness, but he does not mind slyness in a good cause. As a young professor he found himself loaded down with administrative work. He reflected that one way to get out from under would be to do the work badly. His idea of slovenliness was so far above most men's idea of efficiency that he found himself called upon to do more & more administrative work as he grew older. He became the first Dean of the modernized Yale Graduate School. At one point he doubled in brass as Provost of the University. He was made editor of the Yale Review, then a dreary publication, which he promptly proceeded to change into a wise and stimulating quarterly.

Liberal Education. Professor Cross's book contains dozens of anecdotes of great Yale teachers-- of William Graham Sumner, who used to thunder at his classes ; of Thomas Lounsbury and Henry Beers, who fought to make English literature a respect able study in a university that believed only in Latin, Greek and mathematics; of Arthur ("Waterloo") Wheeler, whose lectures on the French Revolution still kindle the memory of men who studied at Yale in the '90s; of Yale teacher-presidents from Porter to Hadley; and, finally, of Henry Canby and other younger men.

Some of Wilbur Cross's pedagogical detail will be of interest only to teachers and school administrators. But many of Cross's academic victories are significant. He was always against the sort of teaching that insisted upon minute parsing of every line of Shakespeare. The analytical method of teaching Shakespeare's plays was carried to such extremes that one college class reached the year's end without ever getting past the fourth act of Macbeth.

Coming back to reunion the following year, a student shook his professor's hand and said: "I got more out of that course in Shakespeare than out of any other. . . . What a wonderful play Macbeth was. I've" always wondered how it came out." Neither Cross nor Canby would have anything to do with such endless exegesis ot an author, and they managed gradually to impress their more liberal views on the Yale faculty as a whole.

The politicians who hoped to use Professor Cross discovered quite early in the game that he was onto their curves. When he was petitioned in 1932 by the Democrats to serve as their political white hope, Wilbur Cross went to work as quietly as usual to get a questionable Waterbury Democrat dropped from the State ticket. Cross did not say he would not run if Daniel J. Leary was nominated for Lieutenant Governor. But he did insist that the nomination for Governor be held in abeyance until after the nomination of a candidate for second place on the slate. Worried by the thought that Cross might not run if his wishes were flouted, the Old Guard politicians made haste to drop Leary. Some years later the "Waterbury gang" was convicted under the Corrupt Practices Act, which proved that Cross, the "innocent" from the Yale campus, had had his political nose to windward.

Cracker-Barrel Education. What the politicians did not know when they put him up for Governor was that Wilbur Cross had cut his eyeteeth while listening to political gossip as a clerk in a country store. One of Cross's earliest recollections is of overhearing a confidential conversation between Republican and Democratic town committee chairmen back in the vil lage of Gurleyville, in northeastern Connecticut. The leaders of the rival parties had just finished buying 54 votes at $5 a head, and each leader had kept $150 of the cash sent from Hartford headquarters as a "legitimate expense" of getting out the voters.

The country store in which young Wilbur Cross clerked at the age of eleven was his introduction to the world of men. The cracker-barrel view of life has always conditioned Wilbur Cross's view of literature. When other young instructors were construing Tennyson and Browning, Cross discovered a taste for the directness and raciness of Chaucer. When he came to read Henry Fielding and Daniel Defoe, the creators of the English realistic novel, he recognized the cracker-barrel philosophy in them at once. Laurence Sterne, the parson who loved a slightly smutty innuendo, was an early favorite of Cross's. The interest in Fielding and Sterne eventually flowered in the biographical studies (The Life and Times of Laurence Sterne, The History of Henry Fielding) through which Cross made his scholarly reputation.

About his own private life, Wilbur Cross is decently reticent. Two of his four children, Elizabeth and Arthur, died in childhood. But his expression of grief is limited to the observation that sometimes in a state of reverie or dreaming he sees them romping about the house and peering into his study. And Wilbur Cross has little more to say about the human race in general. You know that he savors people who have character; you know that he is willing to fight for certain ideas and ideals. But you never quite know what Wilbur Cross thinks about the New Deal or the New Yale or the state of modern literature. You have to read between the lines of his autobiography to discern the drift of his thinking on ultimate issues. But in his refusal to wear his philosophy on his sleeve, Cross is Connecticut Yankee, too.

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