Monthly Offers Well Varied Number

In opening a new volume--Volume LX--the Harvard Monthly offers a well varied but slender number, a bare twenty-eight pages with four of its nine articles provided by the editors. This presumably forced inbreeding speaks ili for that independent pursuit of culture which it is the special function of a large university to foster. There should be more material--and more distinctive material available. And happily it is the newcomers who take the honors.

Robert S. Nathan's leading article, "Apres Moi, le Deluge," is an exousable protest against the modern debutante's unfitness for workday life and against the marriage do convenance. But its hysterical sentence structure and three of impending disaster show lack of historical perspective: he might have seen the same force at work at "Le Preciousness Ridicules" or in the "Merry Wives of Windsor." In verse, too, it is less easy to commend his quest of esoteric effects. The odd meter of "A Lover of Boston" exhibits as tenuous a sense of beauty as his lover's defence of Corey Hill sunsets as a mate for Italian evenings. By contrast in "Bhakata-Yoga" the questionably sensuous imagery veils and almost nullifies the philosophi conception.

By way of articles, R. W. Chubb contributes a somewhat positive and summary disposal of A. R. Orage's theory of a national guild. The writer's theory is not developed as a unit that the reader may see in perspective and judge. Yet interest centres in that rather than in the critic's reaction. A commendable editorial, a pleasant book notice (hardly review), and Frederick Robinson's reaction on the "New Intoxication" complete the non-fictional prose. The last appears to miss in the phrase "the new intoxication" an implied criticism of all religion that it partakes of a kind of divine phrensy not reconciled to sober reason.

Among the stories R. S. Mitchell's "The China Billiken" too obviously patterns after Stevenson's "Markheim," lacking, however, the rationale which makes that a case suggestive of a universal problem. The character study "Truth is Stranger" involves definite types and fairly accurate dialect in a story which, true or not, might well have been sacrificed to one more plausible. Nature perhaps, but not art, "looks after her freaks." One doubts, too, whether "Kernham! Wow!" will strike many as congruous with a Maine handy man. A really charming narrative, allegedly autobiographical, in the manner of Rhibany, is Ben Lion Trynin's "Rosalie." The truth here to child life, the healthy human interest--even with comedy overdone--are indeed preferable to the usual run of undergraduate smartness and veneer. At the close--beautiful as one finds little Rosalie's roguish kiss--it seems better that the boy should have worshipped from afar unappreciated, as must be so often the case with his like. The success of "Rosalie" once more enforces the lesson to portray the life you know: even "Malbrouck," fancifully conceived and tastefully executed, lacks reality beside it. The author of "Malbrouck" to conclude might do well to excise adjectives especially when, as too often, they run in pairs