Reviewer Finds Monthly Improved

There are signs of change in the Harvard Monthly besides its new form. It is nearer the normal magazine in shape; its decorations have grown more seemly; but that is not all. The October issue shows an excellent and largely successful attempt to achieve the live yet dignified spirit of a good monthly review. Quite evidently the Monthly is through, for a year at least, with being a literary safe-deposit vault. Under the new board it appears bent on emerging from those purple shades where the pleasant but inconsequent art of canning the "best literary product of the University" has mildly flourished. It has tried to creep out before, only to be thrust back by a surprised and somewhat upset graduate board. The present venture seems to combine in better, certainly less vulnerable, degree the qualities of life and literature. The October number seeks to view and criticize the world within and without, yet with the decorum long considered proper to the University.

If the present issue is not a perfect specimen of its kind, it is not the fault of the board. Not only is material scarce at the beginning of the College year, but graduate editors--called in rather as distinguished contributors than as stopgaps--do not always excel undergraduates. In Norman Hapgood's article, "Germany's Disease," for instance, we have but a hurried and slight presentation of something that deserves fuller treatment and might receive better development at the hands of some undergraduate. It is well to dispute the larger avowals of Germany's "defensive" position which have gone forth backed by the authority of Harvard Faculty members, but it takes more through work than Mr. Hapgood has given it. Calling Kuno Francke, "my much admired professor" is not enough.

For the rest the number is varied, if uneven. The new department, "Here and There," a collection of aphoristic cleverisms on current topics, is an interesting departure, from which much pleasure will come when more hands than one join is its production. The book reviews are below the Monthly's average. They do not touch books worth review, and they are inconclusive as well as over-lengthy. One editorial sets squarely before the University the blight which the Freshman dormitories threaten--a College of mob-driven athletics and "class spirit." The other, under the rather surprising through flattering title, "Shall Harvard Menace Neutrality?" puts that reputed difficulty before us about as clearly as such an absurd possibility can be demonstrated.

The bulk of the undergraduate contributions are evenly divided between essay, sketch, picture, story, and verse. Mr. B. P. Clark's "Fancies" is an excellent example of the new freedom in verse that is opening up much inner spirit, even though it sacrifices part of the poet's charm. "The Copper Duke," by Robert G. Dort, has not enough atmosphere or excitement about it to make a banal invention into an exhilarating plot. Mr. Skinner's "Courtesy of War," a sketch of a French village in war time, has more cultured ease in the telling than the subject can stand. A little more vividness, a little more pungent detail, a little less attention to the courtesies of life along the way, would bring it nearer to that high-water-mark in University war-reporting which has embarrassed a recent Monthly editor with the publicity-mark, "The Kipling of Mexico." Then "Scherzo," a smart trifle, before we reach Mr. Nathan's little essay, "Poetry for Today." An admirable piece of writing in its particular field, it digs deeply enough into the life and philosophy behind poetry to bring out something of the meaning of the lyric art of the world and a bit of a forecast of what that art may become. Certainly it is an admirable example of the sort of thing the Monthly should be able to do--relate life and art. If the Monthly can accomplish that to some extent this year, it will be far on the road to fulfilling the part in the University life to which it is called.