Review of Current Advocate

The current Advocate opens with an announcement of the judges for the Advocate Prize Contest, and with editorials on collegiate English composition, and Harvard's pallid interest in such affairs as the coming Presidential campaign. There follow an essay entitled "Harvard's Duty", two whimsical stories, named respectively "The Mitigating Circumstance" and "The Copper Pot", an instalment of a continued story called "The Mirage", two bits of verse translation, and play and book-reviews.

"Harvard's Duty" seems to the essayist to be the development of gentlemen politicians"; but from rather an illogical premise that "politics should be a career and not a business", the writer quickly comes to earth and emphasizes the paucity of political discussion in the University. We have, as he says, the Taft Club and the La Follette Club, but neither organization takes the trouble to discuss in open debate with the other the merits of its particular candidate; much less to meet the members of the Democratic Clubs or the Socialist Club. In the light of such conditions it seems superfluous, to say the least, that the Corporation should recently have established its blanket-rule prohibiting the use of Harvard halls for "persistent propaganda on contentious subjects of contemporaneous political, social, or religious interests": indeed it would seem wise for the authorities to encourage, even to the point of artificially stimulating, every effort to create a lively interest in anything deeper than class elections and minor matters of athletic management. H. G. Byng, the writer of the essay, suggests an open forum similar to the Oxford Union. The suggestion is not so novel as he perhaps supposes, but it deserves the hearty approval he has given it.

"The Mitigating Circumstance" concerns a freakish motor-boat which gives its owner two unhappy hours and affords the reader an excuse for a few smiles. Perhaps if the humor were not so self-conscious the reader might laugh outright occasionally.

"The Copper Pot" is a typical Advocate story, telling how husband and wife, each deciding on the same gift for the other, bid feverishly for a certain copper pot, and discover late in the proceedings the identity of the rival bidder.

"The Mirage" by H. L. Rogers is the first instalment of a continued story. It needs pruning, but the dashes of Old Mexican description and dialect give it decided flavor, and the reviewer for one will watch expectantly for a narrative of the rest of the Yankee station agent's experiences with Mexican peons and senoritas.

At its best, verse translation is an exquisite art: at its worst it is padded prose. Neither "The Swashbuckler's Song" from the Greek nor "Reverie" from Victor Hugo's French seems in its present form songful enough to justify the labor of the translator.

It is pleasant to see so prompt and so satisfactory a review of Assistant-Dean Castle's new novel. As the reviewer summarizes it, "The flexibility of American society and the topsy-turvyness of the world in general are well expressed in "The Green Vase'"