VERSE IN MARCH NUMBER OF ADVOCATE EXCELS UNCONVINCING PROSE

No new planets swim into our ken with the March number of the Advocate. In general, the verse is more distinguished than the prose, due to the unhappy extremes of the "dilapidated three story tenement" realism and the "slow peal of monastery bells" romanticism of the latter. It is singularly unfortunate that so much youthful prose depends largely on never fully-convincing atmosphere for its effect, instead of the simple homely things that the mature writer somehow finds attractive.

Of the stories and prose sketches, Mr. Upham's "Myrtle and Stella" will be longest remembered. Despite a fling at sophisticated effect through references to Dreiser and Joyce, this little study in the characters of two women profits through its sound humanity. There are no artful devices to contrast the lives of the aristocratic young lady and the second maid, and no attempts to sentimentalize the gulf that lies between them. They are, patently, what they are. And in addition Mr. Upham suggests the terrible ennui that lies upon the sophisticates, reading interminably to reach life through the book, while the less fortunate serfdom is possessing it on "Thursday evenings out." I recommend this excellent bit above the others.

"Satan in the Suburbs" by Mr. Donaldson just misses the trick. With a novel situation, that of a chance meeting of a student and the Devil in a suburban trolley, the author wanders off in a pother of pseudo-Socratic dialectic, savoring of Shaw's "Man and Superman", and getting nowhere at all. And the fatal mark of the amateur is too often evident--that of needless circumlocution.

If euphemistically one were to regard the Advocate as a writer's laboratory, one would be well satisfied with the majority of its experiments. Let these pens continue to glean teeming brains, and we shall one day see a new star.