De Voto Believes Harvard in Need of Gadflies, Bewails Fact That New Critic Does Not Sting

The hope that the Harvard Critic might sharply differentiate itself from the other undergraduate publications is not furthered by Number 1 of Volume 2. Anything in it might just as well have appeared in the advocate; in fact much of it has appeared there.

The issue has a faintly liberal tone. An editorial about the "vast unruffled dullness of the Harvard student" utilizes the favorite escape-mechanism of the contemporary intellectual: it supposes that the human race will be otherwise if the capitalistic system is destroyed. The dictatorship of the proletariat is to the romantics of the moment what solitude and the noble savage were to their prototypes a century and a half ago. It is far from that to those who are really working to bring it about, and I, for one should welcome any expression at Harvard of their realism. Mr. Strauss' "Of Harvard Bondage" is written four or five times in the first week of every composition course, especially English A. It contains a number of amiably generalized complaints about the intellectual apathy of the undergraduates and about their insulation from experience. Their novelty perished with the seventeenth century. A review of John Strachey's "The Menace of Fascism" is the ablest bit of journalism in the issue, but is content to leave the book unanalyzed, and without comment.

The two remaining articles are better stuff. Mr. Chase's "The House Plan and the Final Clubs" adequately treats a subject of local interest and importance. His analysis of the situation seems sound and his figures will be useful in a member of ways. His objectivity in a number so full of subjective assertion gives a welcome relief. His article has an additional interest to me for it signalizes the end of what was other a taboo or a scare: when I was editing a Harvard magazine I tried for two years, quite unsuccessfully, to get someone to discuss his subject. Mr. Philbrick's "A Communist View of Art" is a well written rhapsody which states a new conventionalized thesis. The intellectuals are greatly exercised just now about the relation of art and propaganda. Mr. Philbrick's assertion that it is holy and fruitful marriage has been winning along a wide front for quite a while. He identifies the artist's inspiration with religion, which is sound enough, and recognizes that Communism is a religion, which is unimpeachable. That he commits a number of fallacies in his eloquence does not in the least detract from his effect, for all such theses as his, both pro and con, transcend logic and are not subject to it. Still, the history in his penultimate paragraph is flatly wrong, and it is silly to say that a capitalist artist must cut himself off from the principles of true art. True art is my art; it must be your art that is false. Mr. Philbrick's meaning is only that he doesn't like capitalist art, which is quite all right, but something other than a law of nature. And his peroration is dubious. "This leaves us the Revolutionary ideal of the emancipation of mankind from the Capitalist grasp as the only inspiration for a really vital art in the present and future." I protest, as a connoisseur of prophecy. Mr. Philbrick can see into the future no farther than John Doe and I, and anyone who cared to predict the exact opposite would be just as right as Mr. Philbrick. It is shrewd to confine dialectic to the here and now.

The trouble with the Critic, if I may end an unpleasant review with advice, is that it does not criticize. Nothing in this issue violates the policies of the Harvard publications against which the editors of the Critic were protesting a year ago. Nothing in it is sufficiently novel, arresting or unorthodox to justify the Critic's existence as a separate publication. If it is not to be more of a gadfly than this, it ought to merge with an older sheet and boost the advertising rates. I trust that it will not. Harvard can use some gadflies, but they are a peculiarly useless insect if they do not sting. The obvious thing, I should think, is to look up some barbs