Monthly Well Written Throughout

Perhaps the most striking thing about the December Monthly is that every bit of it is well written. There is not one bad thing in the number, and the good things show a really surprising command of language. Yet there is nothing very notable in the collection, one receives the same impression that one so often gets from Harvard papers: here are a lot of clever young men who have read a good deal and know how to write; they are civilized, intelligent, sensitive, literary--but they haven't very much to say for themselves. The poets, particularly fail to express anything vital or even individual. They write pretty fair verse in a good many different forms. Sonnets predominate, but there are specimens of ballade, epigram, stanzas, irregular rhyme and blank verse. There is the usual meteorological trend--snow, wind, waves, sunset and allied phenomena--but on the whole the range is reasonably wide and most of the authors are trying honestly enough to express what they themselves have felt and seen. There is no conscious imitation and very little allusion. But the total effect is conventionality. We get no new ideas, no new sensations, not even a shock, except perhaps in Mr. Paulding's

"We stink of rotten punch, our hands are smudged;"

As a lot these are respectable experiments and nothing more. Pegants is in the paddock.

The prose is more interesting, but not much more startling, and it has the same curiously generalized character as the verse. The editorials and the reviews, of course, are topical, but most of the stories, if one cut out an occasional reference to ambulances or fox-trots, might have been written anywhere in the English-speaking world at any time since 1890.

This criticism applies to Mr. Fay's story of "The Penitent Highwayman," to "The Festive Season," which could appear with slight verbal changes in the Christmas number of any college paper year after year, and especially to "A Late Spring," a story in which Mr. Cuthbert Wright subtly analyzes the emotional crisis of a young man who takes himself very, very seriously, and falls in love at first sight with a girl who is already engaged. He lives in the Bronx, or Kensington, or Evansville--one cannot tell; he has been to school in England or America, and to Harvard, Oxford, William and Mary, or the University of Edinburgh. His great experience occurs in a box at the opera in a city of some importance, and it must have happened some years ago, because he goes home in a carriage. One wonders if he knows where to tell the driver to stop, so unrelated is he to space and time.

Mr. Paulding describes an affair of the heart in very different vein. He, too, is subtle and sensitive, bat not a bit serious, and he makes us feel that his irresponsible hero is an actual human, attractive, normal Harvard undergraduate, a trivial person, no doubt, but far more appealing than the disembodied soul who suffers through the story by Mr. Wright. Mr. Paulding has not made an important contribution to American fiction, but he has written easily the best thing in the Monthly, which leads one to hope that he will keep on writing college stories with the same delicate and playful touch.

Toward the end of the number, the authors become increasingly conscious of the war. Mr. Simpson contributes a lively and amusing, though rather extravagant story in British nautical dialect of the "Blimey" school. Mr. Wolf savagely attacks Galsworthy for his attitude toward the war; it is hard for one who has not read the offending utterances to judge how far they warrant such an assault, but Mr. Wolf certainly makes his victim appear futile and irritating. At the end "A. K. MoC." interposes a few mild words in Galsworthy's behalf. "B. D. A." writes a review of Professor Perry's recent essays which is only a degree, less violent than Mr. Wolf's handling of Galsworthy, but from the opposite angle. Professor Perry, we learn, is illogical, prejudiced, engagingly naive, and delicately obscure. The reviewer makes the familiar assertion that large armies cause war, but offers no argument, historical or philosophical, to support it. How he explains the long peace in Europe between 1871 and 1914, whether he thinks Belgium was militaristic and Switzerland unarmed, or whether he similarly holds that umbrellas are the cause of rain, we do not know; but he scorns Professor Perry for not agreeing with him. One is forced to assume that he was not allowed to read Mr. LaFarge's clever little essay on book-reviewing, which appears directly above "B. D. A's" Philippic, and applies admirably to that effort--but perhaps it also applies to this effort.