YARD AND CAMPUS

Mr. F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose first novel carried the name of Princeton before the public eye in a story which brought on a flood of imitators, has written a sketch of life at his alma mater for a current magazine, College Humor,--but the name has no bearing on his article. For it is not a humorous article, nor does it have that mixture of sharpness and sentiment which marked the time when "the tide of war rolled up the sands where Princeton played." He writes not now as a very recent graduate, but from the distance of over a decade; not from the inside, but as an outsider wondering what the inside, is like now, and throwing over the past all the pathos of distance.

Harvard, he says briefly, was a subject about which his contemporaries knew nothing, although they had a clear conception of Yale and an even clearer one of the standards for which Princeton stood. Here is the one point in which there seems a great difference between Harvard and Princeton. "Individualism" is one of the catch-words used to express the fact that ten Harvard men of the same class might meet in after life not only previously unacquainted, but with nothing to stamp them alike; and this helps also to explain, perhaps, why all attempts to convey the sense of glamor in stories with a Harvard background, as Fitzgerald has used the background of his university, have failed completely; why Harvard, to the average mind; never suggests the nebulous, romantic ideal of college life.