Appropriate Number of Monthly

It is appropriate that in these last days of the college year when many men are about to face the world. Carlyle should come before us, in the pages of the Harvard Monthly, and speak out his clarion doctrines and words of hope. Mr. C. B. Harris in an admirable essay "Carlyle, The Maker of Men" takes the occasion of Carlyle's address to the University of Edinburgh to review the message of that sage. "In books lies the soul of the whole past time," "Universal history is at bottom the history of the Great Men who have worked here." "Silence is the eternal duty of men." "The man of intellect at the top of affairs: this is the aim of all constitutions and revolutions." After sounding these ringing notes about Books, Heroes, Silence, and The Young Man, Carlyle bids us "be of hope".

This number of the Monthly is further enriched by the presence of Mr. Lincoln MacVeagh's thoughtful discussion of M. Bergson and the American Character. He urges in a very forcible way the view that Bergson's philosophy is not the best food for Americans of today. Bergson is a mystic, and America needs dogmatism. Americans "need to be taught how to think, and not, as M. Bergson would teach them, how to feel." "The intellectual, moral, and social progress which the American civilization is bound to make its own, as a crown to the material progress it has achieved, must be won of thought."

These two stimulating essays are followed by several articles of which the most interesting are "Jason", an anonymous dramatic monologue, a poem of smooth metrical effect, and much beauty of phrase, and a narrative sketch "At the Third Table," by W. F. Merrill. This narrative has far too little action. It attracts one, however, by its quiet realism. The author has a sense of the values of character in a group of people at a common-place because he has observed them so shrewdly.