"Advocate is Doing its Job"

The Advocate, completing fifty years and a hundred volumes, pats herself gently on the back. The old lady is out of debt--no mean achievement in literary circles. One of her sons has been President, and lots of people want him to be President again. Others have attained reputations, national or local. Surprisingly few, considering how prolific she can be at times (notice the list of Senior editors) have publicly disgraced her.

In this number fourteen of the brethren--all of the Class of 1916--present specimens of their wares. We presume that editors from coast to coast will eagerly seize upon this illustrated catalogue of Harvard's annual output. Poems? Sanger, Clark, Jopling, Denison, Leffingwell, Reniers, and Cutler await orders. Stories? Nelson, Courtney, Murdock and Crane, at your service. Convenient little page-fillers in prose? Apply to Amory, Boyden, and Lamont.

These offerings are very various. Mr. Lamont's, as usual, is vivid, but not as oderiferous and actual as some of his earlier Oriental sketches. Mr. Amory's contribution is brief: he splits an infinitive, kills a peasant, and speeds on, leaving little definite impression behind him. Mr. Boydon's effort, also, is too brief to afford much room for criticism.

Mr. Nelson's story is the longest, and perhaps the best written, of the prose specimens, but it is a little bit irritating: it is a kind of Phillips Brooks House "ad," based on the assumption that anything labelled "Service," with a capital "S," is "real" and "vital." Even the conclusion, in which the heroine throws over the Open Hearth rather than lose her life-long lover, leaves a suspicion that perhaps the author retains a conviction that to be a Boy Scout Leader or the Coach of an Uplift Nine is after all the noblest ambition of Young American Manhood. Mr. Murdock's story is shorter, and laid right here in Cambridge--Memorial clock strikes nine, and the streets are covered with slush, and all that sort of thing--but it is still further away from life as most of us know it. There is a touch of the melodramatic in its treatment of Harvard existence which discourages those of us who have been brought up in the tradition that college men should write college stories. There are so few Flandraus! Mr. Crane chooses a graduate of "L--" College for hero, and though his plot is highly imaginative he succeeds in presenting a very much more convincing picture of the normal undergraduate state of mind. Mr. Courtney is sensational: he breaks away from his cherished George Ade tradition and gives us "A Romance of the Reel" that would need more than the usual expository interpolations in large white type and interpretative music by the talented young lady to make it intelligible even to a trained "movie" audience.

Turning to the poets, we find Mr. Clark clinging to his chosen form--unrhymed and at times unrhythmical verse. "Spring" is sincere, sensitive, and despite its form truly poetic. "Soul of Man" is more incoherent and, I suppose, more completely "modern"--a riot of rich color, with no composition which the ordinary uninitiated reader can detect. Mr. Denison is modern in form only; in all other respects his "Dusk" is a very conventional piece of description.

The other poets cling to more familiar methods. Mr. Cutler's heartfelt protest:

"Distribution! Distribution!

How I seek your execution!

How I hate the trammels round my feel you Ring!

Though I know you make me broader

And fulfill the Maker's order, How especially I hate you when I sing!" will awake answering chords not only in the bosoms of his undergraduate fellow-sufferers, but even in the supposedly callous heart of many an unappreciated faculty adviser.

Mr. Leffingwell is frankly imitative, but he chooses an admirable model--J. M. Vetteredia. Some of his descriptions seem extravagant--"amber arms," for instance--but on the whole his language and his metre are sound, and one feels that he has more of "the makings" than some of his more ambitious fellow-bards. Mr. Realers announces, perhaps prematurely, that his heart grows cold; his effort rouses a suspicion that he might glow more warmly in some more suitable medium than he has chosen here.

Mr. Jopling has the war in mind, but he is an idealist:

"We have found the foe not savage.

And only a man of our kind,--"

His verse is fluent, vigorous, and animated, but he does not make altogether comprehensible the nature of the Voice that he hears--

"Clear-tongued from out the flame, With the light of a thousand ages

The Voice from the tumult came."

Mr. Sanger has stopped working on the railroad; he too, is inspired by the war, and unlike the military critics he seems to see an end of it. His constructions are a little involved and his metre is not always easy, but his conception is sustained, his language dignified, and his point of view refreshingly wholesome.

The total impression that one receives is that the Advocate is doing its job: these young authors are learning. There is nothing ultimate, nothing entirely successful, in this "show" number, but one feels that it marks the beginning, rather than the end, of literary careers.