DURAND REVIEWS NEW NUMBER OF ADVOCATE

The following article was written especially for the Crimson by Dans B. Durand, instructor and tutor in History and Literature.

In an ironical mood Henry Adams once suggested that the tempo of historical phase increases in geometric ratio.He even ventured to prophesy that shortly after 1920 we should enter upon the "ethereal phase", approaching the ultimate end when generation would die and be born in the world of thought so rapidly so t be almost indistinguishable. A jaunt through this month's "Advocate" ,the might persuade the historian the the ethereal era had in fact arrived.

Mr.Carnahan in his "Romanticism among the Realists" sweeps us over large areas of contemporary life. "The theory of present day Fascism may be briefly. expressed as the negation of the Democratic principle." We can hardly deny this, and might also assent to the proposition that in order to forecast the future "it would be necessary to subdivide Faseism and Communism into their ideal and practical forms. We should then be able to contemplate the four alternatives in the pure splendor of their conception."

This power of grasping the essence of movements is matched by the faculty, exhibited here and elsewhere in the issue, of invoking the dead from the living. We are swung headily amoung the ghosts of invoking the dead from the living we have all been passing. From the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald," "carrying to the reader's mind the awful authority of temperance tracts," we leap to the "historic publication of 'Anthony Adverse'." There is a feeling of being on hand at an excavation of the present. In a review of Smith, Mr. Cabell is swiftly and neatly disposed of; "at this date no one whom Cabell could conceivably surprise reads Cabell." Mr. Dollard evokes the generation of Noel Coward in the same detached way, and truthfully asserts that as a playwright, he is a Pseudo-Modern, "less modern even than Maxwell Anderson, Clemence Dane or any of those who write frankly historical plays."

In short what is truly surprising about all this criticism is its archeological quality. Everything must be weighed and ticketed and dated. We seem always to be attending the birth or death of a species.

The "Advocate's" verse is less impersonal. The prevailing voice breathes a mild Spring cynicism, satire for the religion of the University (J. Le B. Bolyell), and the defenceless pedantry of scholarship (F. Cole). The most poetic note is that struck by Mr. Stanford in his lines to Yvor Winters--a work of real craftsmanship and feeling.

But the most sincere, and for that reason perhaps the best contribution is the story, "Community Nurse" by J. A. Strauss. The self-conscious detachment which the criticism labored to maintain is here replaced by an unaffected and sensitive objectivity. It is true that the realism is frequently too studiously casual, yet the tension and the pathos of a small town in the Southwest have been caught with remarkable fidelity. The articulation of the story is sometimes creaky; Jack and Laura, for instance, as characters are lorded more heavily than their shoulders can bear. Yet it would be well if all the contributors to the "Advocate" could achieve an equal simplicity.

The rest of the issue is of a more or less recurrent sort