"Advocate" Slipshod in English

Besides the editorial articles and the news from the theatres, the Advocate contains five contributions in prose and thirteen in verse. The editors' exhortation to "study the map" is too long for its substance and shameless in its spelling. The news from the theatres tells much, but tells it in slipshod English.

Slipshod English prevails throughout the number in prose and in verse. Among the contributors the thought of composition as an art seems rare. Such expressions as, "The two lawyers . . . . are unusually realistic, perhaps due to the fact that," etc., such sentences as, "It has novelty, punch, heart interest, and almost all the other ingredients which go to make up a smashing success," should not be printed in a document that is sold for more than one cent. The only story in the number, My Friend of the Smoking Room, should be powerful or nothing. It is not powerful, nor is its style workmanlike; but it is an honest effort to express the struggle in a wrecked life. Little Doddy--or Much Wampum, an imitation of George Ade, is the saddest reading in the number and belongs to a generation that prefers colored supplements to Du Maurier and George Ade to Thackeray. To Write or Not to Write is a commendably serious and poorly written essay. The Effect of Plattsburgh is clear and helpful without distinction. The City of Dreadful Life, though marred by more adjectives than are commonly approved and by mismated tenses, shows a talent for writing and a power of expressing colors and smells. In this number of the Advocate it is the one contribution that a reader would think of twice.

Of the poems Mr. Cram contributes three, of which none shows a proper respect for the true value of words; and Mr. Willcox two, of which neither approaches his best work. Mr. Clark, pictorial as ever and musical, deserts "verslibre" and so far forgets himself as to rhyme "end" with "again"; Mr. Norris writes of the sea as "an enchanted moan; Mr. Gazzan in Dead on the Field of Honor, a poem of fourteen verses more or less rhymed, is guilty of the line "While underneath each one a heading tells;"

Mr. Parson's sonnet Beside the Sea is sufficiently poetic to be promising, though it weakens in the final verse. A weakish end mars also Mr. Sanger's little poem, which has, in general, a pretty movement. Mr. Putnam's Prayer presents a simple and attractive idea in poorly finished verses. Mr. MacVeagh's Treasure Trove is undistinguished. Mr. Leffingwell's Predestined, though faulty in certain details and needlessly long, shows poetic feeling and some sensitiveness to poetic diction.

It is a pity that so much of the verse in this number lacks both substance and form and that ambition to produce fancy work displaces ambition to produce works of art. Better poems are written almost daily in Harvard College than those which appear in this number. A similar comment might be made on the prose, which exhibits nearly everywhere insensibility to fine workmanship.

I may add the suggestion that the proof of every number be read by somebody who can spell. I write this in fear, knowing what the CRIMSON can do.