ESSAYS, REVIEWS, AND POETRY GIVES ADVOCATE WIDE RANGE

The variety of fare offered by the current Advocate demands a selective appetite on the part of the reviewer. Periodicals partake of the nature of boarding houses; the hungry reader can generally envisage the sort of vegetable prose and marshmallow verse that will be set before him. The chefs of the Advocate, unusually expert, have provided this month relishes full of spice and a piece de resistance of original flavor.

Mr. Chapin's prize winning essay, "Education and College," is stimulating rather than satisfying. He contends that the college stresses memory at the expenses of intellect, that the function of a university should be to teach the youth how to think, that Harvard teaches only what has been thought. Quite true. But he is a more skilful wrecker than builder. His Ideal University is unconvincing. Certainly this college and other American colleges are busied in filling brains instead of developing minds. This is inevitable. The present academic system, bad as it is, results naturally from the fact that the majority of college students are not students at all; they are guests of an institution which will, after four years, provide them with a document valuable to the continuity of a family tradition or in the furtherance of business enterprise. The nonchalance of the undergraduate is met by the rigor of the system. The majority will not think; they must memorize. We do not admire the present institutions, but we must dig far deeper than the academic superstructure if we are to find primary weaknesses or lay the foundations for a better edifice of learning.

"A Literary Mania"

Indirectly linked with these questions is a short essay, "A Literary Mania." Mr. Colby justly asserts that the appreciation of literature has been supplanted by the glibness of a catalogue, that we no longer read with enthusiasm or perception but merely with a pedantic consciousness of literary tendencies and influences. This too is the fault of the college. After a well phrased statement of this lamentable situation, Mr. Colby wisely withdraws. Perhaps at this point he became aware of certain difficulties which escaped Mr. Chapin's observation: that if we are to lift the colleges we must first lift the epoch on which the colleges are superimposed; that the colleges are not poisoning education; that the colleges and education are poisoned together at the wells of modern civilization. For beneath all isolated mistakes lies the common ground of a sophisticated and second-rate age, an age critical but not creative, impulsive but not inspired, analytical but not scholarly.

In such an age, Freud, naturally, is extremely popular. It remains for Mr. Train to perpetrate the culminative absurdity by introducing Freud into a fairy tale. In a "Song for Children and Others," the author instructs his audience that "fairy stories are not by Grimms and Andersens, as the common legend runs, but are built up out of the subconscious wishes of children. But if you want to find out more about that, you must ask Freud, who, no doubt, knows more about fairy tales than most of us. . ." I suppose that we may soon overhear from the nursery, "Now, Mary, stop crying, and mama'll read you some pretty stories out of the Satyricon." Incidentally, I wonder what complex led Mr. Train to use "woken" as a past participle.

Mr. Wheelwright's book review begins with characteristic vigor. His references are sometimes mystifying to one who has not read the volume under discussion; evidently it covers a wide field, for the reviewer is stimulated into a series of discussions which finally are resolved into a religious question. The range of Mr. Wheelwright's opinions and the positive character of his pronouncements are provocative rather than conclusive.

The poets represented in this issue are impressive numerically at least. Mr. Cowley's "Eighteenth Century Sonnet," intentionally unorthodox in form, is the most interesting and individual of the poems. I wonder why it is secreted at the very end of the number. Of the five sonnets, Mr. Hull's "To a Cat" and the sestet of Mr. Cabot's "Late Spring" stand out as something more than a succession of words arranged with varying skill in a predetermined pattern. Mr. Morrison's "Song" contains two or three significant lines and flows along sonorously. In "Lines," Mr. Behn has conveyed a single impression through the medium of a successfully irregular verse pattern. The poem is a little too long for its purpose and contains too much exotic detail. The misspelled pomegranate might well be replaced by a homelier and more familiar apple. In general, the verse in this issue is too rhapsodic and aerial. I suppose that the feverish apostrophes to Beauty in the abstract are due to the limitations of Cambridge in the concrete.

The chief deficiency in the April Advocate is the lack of creditable fiction. In other respects, this is a well balanced number, reflecting the good taste of the editors and the sincerity of the contributors.