Slight Laud for Current Advocate

From internal evidence, one might judge that the new board of editors of the Advocate had as yet had indifferent success in drawing contributions from candidates, had found comparatively little to say themselves, and had been forced to scrape the bottom of the drawer in the hope of finding something left behind by the Senior editors. Of the articles signed by names that have not appeared on the board, the best is the thoughtful "Prepared--for What?" Of Mr. E. A. LeRoy, Jr. If he is somewhat given to accepting as fact all that he reads in the newspapers, he at least reads them; and the seriousness of his attempt to arrive at sane conclusions is a welcome reassurance in the face of current talk as to the lack of intelligent interest in the war on the part of undergraduates. Mr. Burman's "Nail in the Shoe" is the best of the stories, but the reviewer is sentimental enough to wish that the cynical conclusion had not been added. Mr. Babcock's "Willie's Golden Moment" is almost as bad as a story can be. It is to a good dime novel as a melodrama of the movies to a real tragedy. As for Mr. Burk's fragmentary "Delay," a Senior editor should know better than to set such an example of halfdone work.

The verse contributions are much more numerous than the stories, but they are in general slight. Mr. B. P. Clark shows again his command of melody in the first two stanzas of his "Living Song," but here, as in his "Poplars," there is a falling off at the close. His "Yesterday and Tomorrow" is beyond me. I suppose he means to hint at the kindness of a woman and the unkindness of a man; but I fail to grasp the symbolism of

"The man came bearing a dull sun of gold Upon a cloth of blue."

In his sonnet on "Nahant," Mr. W. A. Norris conveys his impression with some vividness, and in his "Lines" he re-works, not unpoetically, a somewhat familiar thought. Mr. A. Putnam, in his "Retrospect," gives one--perhaps mistakingly--the feeling that he is putting together cleverly but mechanically a poetical puzzle picture made of pieces sawed out of other men's poems. There is no suggestion of his having had anything to express that insisted on being uttered--though this criticism applies to a good deal of the verse in the present number. Mr. Sanger's "Panama Canal," though less imaginative than some of the others, is clear in conception, vigorous in expression; and Mr. Cutler is again charmingly witty in his "Poet's Lament." His last stanza reminds us that we ought to be grateful that the issue contains no "free" verse.

In the editorials the most interesting point is the suggestion that Freshmen often fail to make the right choice of a field for concentration because they are afraid to find the courses on subjects that interest them too difficult. This seems surprising, and one wonders who gives them their ideas of the comparative difficulty of courses. One wonders, too, what kind of recognition the editor thinks that the rest of the College should give to the Harvard Poetry Society. Is not membership in such a society its own reward? Do the members really have any grievance, or feel that they are "Forced into a defensive self-seclusion by undergraduate carelessness"?

The literary and dramatic criticisms which close the number are of average quality. The reviewer of the "Pillar of Fire" would have been more interesting if he had been more specific as to the nature of Mr. Deming's charges against American universities. A detailed discussion of such a book is surely very much the business of the Advocate.

On the whole, this is not an issue calculated to increase circulation.