CURRENT HARVARD MAGAZINE SHOWS PROGRESSIVE TREND

To those who love and study our American colleges, nothing in the days before the colossal sacrifice to duty and ideals was more depressing than the provinciality with which we kept our eyes riveted on the affairs within our own walls, shutting ourselves off from the real world of endeavor, magnifying our games, our clubs, our selves, until they became our universe. The college, the "college man," and what he was doing were the only things worth while. Fascinating above all other college questions, then, is what will be the effect on the college of the return of those who have offered all,--of

"Me that 'ave been what I've been,

Me that 'ave gone where I've gone,

Me that 'ave seen what I've seen--

--Me."

The Faculty is beginning to show how easy it is to settle back into the old rut: will the undergraduate do the same, and, despite his huge lesson and the agonizing cry of the world, say "I am not of you"? The present hurrah for some of the old fleshpots points to weak assent, but there are, on the other hand, some indications that men are beginning to look over their wall. One of these is the Harvard Magazine, the second number of which has just appeared. At last, praise be, a single publication has ventured to invite to its columns the whole university, instructors as well as students, Radcliffe as well as Harvard, and to discuss other than purely academic interests. Therefore, it is seven times welcome, and if in so new an essay it makes mistakes--as it surely will--seventy times seven to be forgiven. Its editors can well afford to laugh (and incidentally watch their pockets bulge) at pre-adolescent lucubrations in red and yellow. (How pat for anonymity that choice of colors.)

Gallishaw Raps Lodge.

The second number is vigorous, timely, promising, Dean Gallishaw, whose stout pen doesn't really need the backing of the reproduction of his fist, in Sic Transit Gloria Lodge (would not Laubiae be more euphonious?) fights the Senator as vigorously as he fought the Hun; his ardor thrills even if he isn't quite just. Perhaps,--to alter a little the words of the poet,--he sings.

I could not strive for Peace so hard

Loved I not fighting more. Miss Perkins, in the same subject, dips her pen in truth if not in flattery.

Most fortunate of all, however, for chose who love art is that at last a University publication actually dares establish a department of dramatic criticism and at the same time finds a real critics. Mr. Fletcher Smith, in the first number modestly concealed as J. F. S., not only loves real plays (not the t. b. m.'s diversions) and good, acting but knows them when he sees them. Evidently he has been well trained, has gone much to the play, read widely, and studied the work of real actors seriously essaying the same parts,--in short, he is laying broad and sound foundations for a career as a critic. We take off our hat: if some day Mr. Smith, in a metropolitan chair, is not saying things to which both playwrights and actors listen, we lose our money.

Poetry Unusually Good.

Again we rejoice; we have poetry. In these days of what Dean Briggs has well denominated "shredded prose", when polyphonic profaners of poesy, forgetful that modern plumbing has made sanitation synonymous with seclusion and solitude are luxuriously disclosing the soapy rites of their bathtubs, it is refreshing to find that among college writers of verse, usually the most imitative of new notes and squawks, some still realize that beauty is truth, truth beauty. Both Mr. Ryan, in his pantheistic God's Ghost, haunting, mysterious, dewy, curiously suggesting tones of Wordsworth and Keats, and Mr. Chambers, in the Sinn Fein, frankly swinging into Kipling's virile stride to tell how men may cheer and die, not only have something to say but show that they love music of word and of line and understand the beauty of form. Miss Campbell strives honorably but is not so successful: not even the exigencies of rhyme can justify the momentary shifting to the "plain language" of Friends--and poets.

So far as fiction is concerned we are not disappointed. Mr. Kister, who, judged by his two stories, loves the tactual, tells his grim tale well. Mr. Davidson although we early guess half of the denouement of his romance, nevertheless surprises us with the other half, and throughout the whole tale gives joyously vivid pictures of a West, not yet, we hope, wholly departed. His characters are alive, and the wind blows. In Balked Mr. Raffalovich burlesques certain modern fads, but such fads, even in burlesques, are worth neither the expenditure of Mr. Raffalovich's gifts nor the time of the paper maker and the typesetter. Mr. Raffalovich should remember, too, that ever since a certain person, named Defoe, for a few days fooled all the world, critics have justly asked whether irony from which the veil is never once lifted is, after all, quite fair.

In reprinting from the Atlantic Monthly the last published words of Frederic Schenck, untimely rapt away,--words, which, by a strange fate, discuss another's guessing at the problem Schenck himself was so soon to solve, the editors have paid a graceful tribute to the memory of a brilliant man.

For final, prayerful reading, in the solitude of our closets, we advise the perusal of what Mr. Ayme-Martin has to say about Harvard. If with this could be combined the talk which Doctor Johnston Ross gave in Appleton Chapel, Tuesday morning, we should possess a homily from the frequent perusal of which we Harvard men, could profit much. B. S. HURLBUT