Review of the June Monthly

The place of honor in the current number of the Monthly is held by Professor Schofield's article on "The Department of Comparative Literature." It is important that this new and extremely valuable department should be widely known; and Professor Schofield has here explained clearly the aims and scope of the department and the liberal spirit that underlies it. Two papers devoted to the Young Instructor, who is apparently a very disturbing character, analyze from different points of view the causes and results of his existence, and offer suggestions regarding him which will doubtless be helpful in bringing about the ultimate solution of the difficulty.

By far the larger part of the number is composed of fiction. Mr. Simonson's "Unfinished Madonna" is a delicately told story, rich in sensuous suggestion; and has a symmetry of form and a subdued harmony of tone that give it artistic quality. The characters are on the whole so well imagined that one regrets the more keenly the lapse of imagination that compels him to conclude the story by a suicide. The same regret occurs to one in reading Mr. Carb's terrible but effective character study "Leri," though in this case the suicide is not only more clearly inevitable but better justified by the dramatic effect. Mr. F. E. Green in a "Mender of Dreams" has worked out a capital situation with good effect of suspense, and has made telling use of his setting. The buoyant and graceful "travel paper" of Arminius "Concerning Watering Places Mostly German," which alluringly conjures up the atmosphere of the Continental Spa, is refreshing after so much that is subdued or gloomy (even Mr. Green's story has a dying mother in the background) and one is grateful, too, for the pure fun of Mr. H. H. Brown's "Vi et Armis." The "Afterglow," by Mr. Peter Willard, a subjective description tinged with real reminiscent and visionary tone, is the masterpiece of the number. Though the idea is sufficiently hackneyed (the vision of home that comes to a man dying in a hospital), it is treated with individuality, feeling and truth. This, observe, has brought in death again; and the one conspicuously immature characteristic of the number as a whole is that so much of the serious fiction terminates in or involves death. Undergraduate writers cannot apparently be made to see that there are tragedies of life as well as of death.

Of the four poems the most powerful is undoubtedly Mr. R. E. Rogers' "Tschaikowsky," which has been awarded the Lloyd McKim Garrison Prize. All of the verse is distinguished by unaccustomed lucidity. Mr. J. S. Reed's "Bacchanal", which might fairly be called a fine poem, has considerable charm, though, it occasionally falls into some of the faults to which this species of writing is liable.

The single bit of literary criticism is Mr. Addison's rather severely temperate but discerning appreciation of the writings of Mr. A. C. Benson. An editorial warmly endorses the suggestion of placeing a memorial tablet or a bust of Professor Shaler in the Union; and the number closes with the resolutions drawn up by the four college periodicals whereby they have joined together in subscribing to a fund for this purpose, "to which all undergraduates and graduates are urged to subscribe."