THE BOSTON COMPLEX

From the editorial labyrinths of "The American Mercury" Mr. Charles Angoff satellite of the more notorious Mr. Mencken, advances to deevy the Boston of today. In his essay "Boston Twilight" he buries Boston beneath rather violent verbiage. Her stage is, to quote the critic. "A paradise of leg shows"; her literature "as dead at the Hittite empire," her press, "the garbage can of American journalism." Indeed, to read Mr. Angoff's essay is to listen for long pages to a booming, often banal barrage of rather heavy wit. He buries Boston and he does so with a bang.

The less resounding measures of another critic, this time anonymous--who writes on the same subject in the current "New Republic" are a welcome change. He too is a Bostonian, yet he does not betray his old place. Instead he tries to understand and to judge wisely. "Boston", he says, "is like Harvard College twenty years from now. It is living on a reputation that is gone." And though Harvard College in twenty years will without doubt be far from such decadence, the undergraduate who has studied Boston at all can catch his meaning. Boston is in a sense "put away in lavender". And it sometimes seems as though she were living on her reputation. But that reputation is something almost worth living on. Like an old figure from another time Boston stands as a link between the progressive present and the stalwart past. In truth, she has few contemporaries in tradition, she stands alone, and not ignobly. As a writer in the "New Republic" states, she "was not made, but was born. And almost to the purple."