Mother Advocate "Sorely Tried"

(Ed. Note--The Crimson does not necessarily endorse opinions expressed in printed communications. No attention will be paid to anonymous letters and only under special conditions, at the request of the writer, will names be withheld.)

To The Editor of The CRIMSON:

I fear that I may violate Mr. C. R. Cherington's canons of good taste by daring to reply to his letter in yesterday's CRIMSON, and even lay myself open to the charge of writing another sarcastic and peevish communication. Mr. Cherington's letter was, of course, quite free from these faults which marred my recent letter on the Critic, and since I feel that a reply is in order, I shall strive to attain the level of gentlemanly polemic that he set yesterday.

Mr. Cherington's remarks on the financial condition of the Advocate, while interesting as theoretical speculations, are nevertheless gratuitous impertinences which I shall ignore in confining myself to subjects about which Mr. Cherington may know something.

In my previous letter I pointed out that the Critic, according to its editorial, was evidently planning to duplicate the announced policy of the Advocate. I showed at some length that this policy had been carried into effect, but my words seem to have been in vain as far as convincing Mr. Cherington was concerned. The Advocate is, by no stretch of even Mr. Cherington's imagination, the "organ of a certain specialized literary school," i.e., what Mr. Cherington quaintly calls "T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, & Co." Mr. Cherington should know, after four years of Harvard College, that Messrs. Eliot and Pound, though they once had much in common, have been poles apart for the last ten years and have even indulged themselves in polemic, one against the other. Among the undergraduate writers there are to be found followers of such divergent movements as Communism and Catholicism.

Mr. Cherington states: "The Critic does not presume, as Mr. Wade implies, to the arrogant undertaking of teaching Harvard men to think." I am glad, but then I cannot understand why the Critic editorial should contain these words: "To teach how to think and what to think about. . .' Idealistically the existence of the Critic is a tacit plea for this."

I shall pass over Mr. Cherington's stout assertation of the virility of Critic contributors and ignore his attribution to Advocate authors of the most marked physical characteristics of Pegasus, as hardly being in the good taste which he demands of me.

I recommend to Mr. Cheringt, on, with all the sweetness that I can muster in a somewhat sorely tried nature, that he pay a little more attention to facts before he burst shrieking into print again. He blithely mentions "former Advocate contributors and many others among the long-suffering reading public" as feeling the need for a critical forum. Only one Advocate writer, by no means "former," is represented by an article in the Critic, and he asked and freely obtained my permission to contribute to the new magazine.

Mr. Cherington says: "Not even Mr. Wade himself is inclined to criticize the Critic as a magazine." I am, but have refrained for fear that I might offend Mr. Cherington's cherished good taste and that I might discourage unfairly what in many ways is a laudable, if foolish and unnecessary attempt to resolve opinion at Harvard. I hope I shall not be accused of peevishness, if I remind Mr. Cherington of the fifth and sixth lines of the Dies irae:

Quantus tremor est futurus

Quande judex est venturus." H. M. Wade '35.