Key Note of Monthly Evanescence

Whoever reads college periodicals seriously must note a return of the Monthly to its traditional function as an aesthetic and dilettante free-lance, reverting from the broader and more serious policy of recent years. The December number leaves an impression of fine skein, filmy, evanescent. One looks in vain for substance. The featured interview with Venizelos may have been intended for thought, but the style of Tartarin de Tarascon hardly enhances the glory that was, and is not, Greece.

Of the prose, one severe study, "A Legacy," by Dudley Poore, will realize its intensely disagreeable types and atmospheres. It has literary value. It recalls, however somewhat heavily, the psychological analysis of "Markheim." In romantic view, C. G. Paulding '18 perhaps best appeals to a normal college public with delicate reminiscence of a childhood love-dream. The author unfortunately at first sets an apparently older tone. There is entertainment also in Percival Reniers '16's article, "Speaking of Trifles," where his potpourri of forced daily themes resembles a theme corrector's nightmare. Of the prose pastels, "Charity" too obviously allies itself in subject and manner to Spoon River.

The verse certainly shows variety enough. "Once in Illusion?" by H. Henderson '17, it attains poetic feeling and divination of the Wordsworthian school with a tinge of Platonism. If poetry nowadays were only compatible with clearness! The verse libre of A. Kline Sp might have changed forms with "Succor," since "Sunday Chapel" is no less prosaic than Harding Scholle '17's less self-conscious effort toward oddity in form. With more earnest expression of sincere feeling this must even be a vain plea addressed to writers who nervously fret to be "different"--in vain, as long as Pegasus, instead of trying to get somewhere, fantastically pirouettes.

The more conventional plea, "In Defence of Verse Form," though less bizarre, shows in its frequent graceful lines more promise of actual power. Timotheus' lyre and Pope's lines on Atticus do consort incongruously enough with Hudibras and Keat's urn and the other members of this cento; yet, though the poet's head as well as heart be "poor-rhyming," he vallantly says what he thinks. New wine, if strong, should not be put in old bottles, but when weak, it may gain flavor from the less.

A few pages are given over to editorials and reviews. The former would seem to have strayed from the sanctum of the Lampoon. The "Reviews" are timely; they are, however, book notices--briefly descriptive, rather than critical. They close the number with its key-note--unsubstantial, evanescent.