Review of Current Advocate

The stories in the current number of the Advocate suffer from compromise. They make one wonder if such work as "Tom Brown at Rugby" or the verses of Mr. Henry Newbolt has not shown that life within a school, games, and the points of honor between man and man that games may bring out are not--if we are to have "college stories"--themes more typical and more likely to call forth the best powers of undergraduate writers than that type of college story in which the principal male characters merely sleep in Cambridge. It is to be hoped, of course, that the scenes of many stories in college magazines will be outside of Cambridge. And when they get away from Cambridge, by all means let them get farther away than Boston.

The verse is fluent and unimportant. Its technique is so much more than adequate to its thought that one feels disappointed at not getting something of more scope, more poise, and more intention.

The editorial page is partly but not wholly free from two faults which limit the influence of the college editorial. These are: first, a nagging particularity in the discussion of matters so small that they really belong in a complaint-box; secondly, a tone which is too laboriously polite and paternal to be effective when one undergraduate seriously wishes to influence the opinions or the conduct of his fellows.

In conclusion, one asks why we cannot have more critical articles, more evidence of concern with affairs outside college,--with new books, with music, with politics. Surely, when thoughtful undergraduates meet in clubs or around the midnight fire their discussions have a greater range and a nobler unconcern about mere craftsmanship than is exhibited in these pages