Current Advocate Not "High Brow"

There is one principal matter for regret--and only one--in the present number of the Advocate. Perhaps it is the well-established custom, or cherished privilege, of Senior editors to rest on their laurels. But when a class has so many good men in it as the class of 1916, and when those good men are so well represented on the Advocate staff, it is to be regretted that only one of them, Mr. Leffingwell, has contributed a signed article. Perhaps, however, the interesting unsigned editorial articles are to be credited to Senior editors.

However that may be, the editors of the Advocate of all classes deserve praise for at least two reasons. Their current number is not in the least "high brow." It is entirely and frankly unpretentious, and frank unpretentiousness is not invariably a characteristic of undergraduate writing. Also it seldom offends by incorrectness of expression. To be sure, one is obliged to ask himself in reading the review of Mr. Masefield's "Good Friday and Other Poems," whether usage has sanctioned as English idiom the illogical phrase, "centre about"? One must also ask himself what the reviewer of Mr. Conrad's "Within the Tides" means in speaking of the author's "usual superlative style." Apparently the reviewer does not mean, as one might at first think, that Mr. Conrad usually writes in superlatives. Nor is statement of fact always correct. The first article, which makes a plea for a better and more accurate acquaintance with what it calls "Harvard's past," speaks of "five-dollar" fines, it would seem in the seventeenth century, and of University Hall as an eighteenth-century dining-room, though it was not built till early in the nineteenth century. And did Daniel Webster over say, as Mr. Mansfield--no doubt quite unintentionally--would lead you to think: "I shall enter on no encomium upon Harvard"? But with only one or two exceptions besides these just noted, this number of the Advocate is correct in both fact and expression. One thing, then, the present board of editors have accomplished. They have trained their writers so that when, they go out into the world, if they engage in journalism, they can set, comparatively at least, commendable examples of correctness. Unfortunately, such examples are needed far too much in American journalism.

In substance the current Advocate does not deserve so much praise; in fact, its substance is rather thin. The most interesting and significant article is one by Mr. L. P. Mansfield, "Beauty and the Beast"--refreshing, if not at times inspiring, in its plea for individuality in these days when there is so much talk about crushing out individuality, for the sake of democratic solidarity. In his admiration of Tolstoy and "the individuality of Russian art," Mr. Mansfield, to be sure, may not seem himself especially individual. Russian art is very much the fashion nowadays. But Mr. Mansfield is entirely right in insisting that the tradition of our college is to preserve individuality. "What we are concerned with, particularly at Harvard, where we are the defenders of the faith, is to maintain what individuality we have, and to encourage more."

No other article in this Advocate is so independent and vigorous as Mr. Mansfield's. The others, in fact, suggest something of the evils which will result when individuality is no more. There are three book reviews, conventionally sane and sound, except that a good many readers will question whether "Mr. Galsworthy's Justice' as a whole falls below the dramatic level of the 'Eldest Son.'" There is a conventionally humorous consideration of that time-honored subject, "Cambridge Weather." There is a conventional undergraduate story, "The Flame," the heroine of which is like "the changing pastel tones" of the "warm amber of a Virginia sunset"--"soft, delicate, and passionless." And there is the usual amount of conventionally correct verse, with one piece, "Escaped," by Mr. W. A. Norris, that is more individual and distinguished than the rest. Even Mr. Cowley's vers libre is conventional according to the standards of "Spoon River."