Monthly Lacks "Hot Tar"

To one who has not read its pages regularly for several years the Monthly, through its November issue, appears to be now clothed in a staid and homely sobriety which is at once grateful and disappointing; grateful because it speaks careful thought and meticulous expression; disappointing nevertheless, because the impression it leaves is one of somewhat ponderous mediocrity. We should gladly excuse graver faults if the aims of the magazine had been higher. One of its editors used to say to candidates, "Now go home and pour some hot tar into that story." With the exception of two very significant political utterances--Mr. Allinson's excellent communication on the present campaign and an editorial on "Political Clubs"--the November Monthly lacks "hot tar."

But there is much to be admired. It is true that Mr. Browdy's "Midnight Supper" contains a conventional O. Henry opening and some unskillful traces of Mr. Hardy in its stilted stage directions ("Had there not been something peculiarly ingratiating about this man, I should have maintained my custom of refusing these highway requests at all times. As it was, I stopped to argue with him,") which are inconsistent with the general style and plot. But the piece breaks into splendid originality in two speeches of Tom Gowan, the lovelorn murderer, and in the conclusion, which is far better than either the sentimentalism of the one or the fatalism of the other of the two authors whom Mr. Gowdy is consciously or unconsciously imitating. Again, many of the purely descriptive passages contain figures which are unquestionably striking. But Mr. Gowdy has not, usually, carried suggestive force beyond the realm of description into the words of his characters; and he labors under the additional handicap of a well-worn plot.

No fresher is the material around which Mr. Henderson writes his "Unseen Genius." The village half-wit who reads voraciously, with his doting mother and the stupid, brutal father, on whom he finally bends the horsewhip, is a perennially appearing subject. But here, too, there are bright spots. Mr. Henderson's local color is well painted; his realism (although I draw the line at mention of "Aunt Hitty's old entrails" being "stirred to the depths"--especially after Mr. Gowdy's remark that Jim Gowan's rival had not "a white spot in 'im from the guts up") is undeniably effective.

The number includes three pieces of verse, only one of which contains anything remotely resembling even lukewarm tar. Mr. Rickaby's sonnet about the clash and reconciliation of his Muse and his Love, though smooth enough, is cloyed with pale pink, saccharine sentiment. Mr. Nelson's "Early Frost" is skillful work on a mighty theme; but its figures, although effective hints in themselves, are too familiar to be easily coordinated into a single, sharp effect. Mr. Murray Sheehan's two sonnets on "Fate," however, bear more clearly the stamp of vitalizing human experience. One feels that Mr. Murray is saying something because he cannot hold it back--because he has something to say. And at the end of his bold plea for individuality and self-reliance there comes to the reader a sense of satisfaction--dispersal of a doubt, vindication of faith, or what you will--that is seldom found in modern poetry of any sort. But Mr. Murray is the least skilled of the Monthly's versifiers. Only the persistent reader succeeds in ploughing through the obscuitities of his first sonnet; and even he cannot help feeling at the end that the whole business would better have been finished off in fourteen lines instead of 28--doubts in the octave, triumphant answer in the sestet, for instance.

Besides the work I have mentioned the number contains a short narrative entitled "Two Friends," by Mr. Putnam; a competent criticism of Mr. Belloc's account of the battle of the Marne, by Mr. Paulding; an editorial on Harvard men in the present war; and three book reviews. These compositions are thoughtful in conception and finished in structure. They bear out and strengthen, however, the feeling which I have already expressed, that the Monthly must dare bigger things, must be willing to commit graver faults, if it is to retain its influence over undergraduate life and ideals.