Verse Feature of Current Advocate

The feature of the current number of the Advocate is the verse. Of the seven poems here printed the most successful is perhaps Mr. Willcox's "Philanderer", partly because the theme is definite, partly because it is not over-ambitions. Of Mr. Norris's "Lines," the best is:

"The slow moon climbs its flight of cloudy bars,"

and half of that is Tennyson's. The same Writer's "After a Little While" has in its careful workmanship a great advantage over the unrhymed productions of Mr. B. P. Clark and Mr. Boyden. These gentlemen should realize that free verse is not an easy way out of the bondage of fixed metres, but requires an even finer ear for rhythm, and should compensate for the absence of regularity of account and rhyme by still subtler musical' effects. What they give us is rather vague prose, spoiled by inversions. Mr. Denison's "Sonnet" has a good tenth line spoiled by an unmetrical eleventh, and is somewhat over-weighted by the simile in the octave. In his "Night Song," Mr. Sanger has an interesting theme, but does not keep quite close enough to it.

The stories are neither very interesting nor very well very written. The editors as well as the authors are to blame for such mistakes as "Charles Dicken's reputation," "a vastly higher strata," the wrong use of "formula" on page 26, and the sudden change of a character's name from Josh to Amos on page 29. Even if the material handed in afforded no fiction with the snap we are accustomed to expect in Advocate stories, care should be taken to avoid such examples of slovenliness.

Mr. Boyden's review of Hugh Walpole and Compton Mackenzie is admirable, not because it is the last word on these writers, but because it is a young man's unpretentious appreciation of the treatment of youth by two other young men. It avoids with uncommon tact that straining for an appearance of maturity and omniscience which is the vice of undergraduate criticism