Live Articles in February Monthly

In the February number the Monthly ly has found itself. After months of laborious mediocrity, it has brought out an issue that is brilliant, fresh, vital, human; unified by a definite ideal of social progress firmly based on a pervasive sense of reality; above all, jubilantly young. At times the Monthly has seemed to stumble in premature senility; in this number it is light afoot, and fine with the virtues and the faults that we all like to claim as belonging essentially to youth.

Let us sandwich the faults between the virtues. The editorials are sparkling, thoughtful, well-balanced, for once written with an eager rather than a dutiful pen. The two leaders which follow on "Harvard's Goodies and the Living Wage"--be it noted that the Monthly when she muckrakes generously gives both sides a hearing--are eminently serious; and the second, it seems to the reviewer, effectively silences the first. For, though we grant that the present system of capital and labor may be wrong, we must in fairness admit that as long as it is in operation the College, in self-defence, can pay only the market price and no more. The Goodies are at a disadvantage inasmuch as they are ignorant of the means of forcing up the market-price by organization, strikes, etc., or are unable to carry them to success. The main leader then is sentimental, as the rebuttal points out, but there is behind the sentimentality the temper that is like to lead to the juster common-sense of the coming generations. Kindred in spirit to these articles are two translations, one of a Spanish sonnet, another of an address by Anatole France to French students. This address is a plea for vision--"Agitate and dream; and above all, oh, above all do not be too rational"; a plea for tolerance--"Be not fanatic, even with the fanaticism of acquired truth, which may react against grander truths, as yet half discovered"; a plea for universal peace--"The Rome of the Caesars attempted it, when she was queen of the universe. May your generation accomplish it!" It is not likely that there is a man in Harvard who by learning that address by heart would not be better fitted to carry on his work.

Tolerance leads one naturally to Mr. Mariett's story of undergraduate life which bears that virtue for its title--a happy, humorous, altogether real story of a grind and the way he got over it--the simplest, truest story of college life in the reviewer's memory. The other stories are cruder in execution, though less sincere in purpose, be their background the gold fields of the Yukon as depicted by Mr. Hoffman; the civilized though somewhat vague habitations of an Irene, serially being educated by Mr. Moderwell; or the dusky hillside of a pair of married lovers left in a state of suspended emotions by Mr. Hunter.

The verse in the number, as well as the prose, is marked by sincerity, but it is curiously inarticulate. For once the poets seem to have had more to say than they were able skilfully to express in rhyme and rhythm. We have that rare thing in college verse the substance more interesting than the form. Mr.

Wright in his "Dies Irae," indeed, recalls the old formula, but the picture he paints is so vididly colored that one is willing to pardon him for giving only a picture.

There, then, is the first Monthly under Mr. Mariett's regime. The reviewer, knowing somewhat of the difficulties of a mid-year issue, respectfully takes off his hat