Good Specimen of Monthly

The Monthly's leading article on "Our Wavering Paternalism" is interesting and provocative. It makes us think, and it moves us to reply. The author has a lot of good ideas, though he suggests no constructive plan of reform. One regrets that he feels it necessary to crouch under a pseudonym: we should like it better if he signed his name, better still if he would stand on his feet in that Forum which he scorns and meet his opponents face to face. For his tone is sneering, and some of his statements are debatable. There are many who would like to take up his accusation of undergraduate hypocrisy--and not a few who would question his estimate of the courses in Fine Arts.

A lone editorial delivers a parting shot at the Advocate's press agent, Dr. Kuno Meyer, and expresses the widely felt appreciation of Professor Francke's attitude on the war. Otherwise the number steers clear of controversial subjects, local and international.

The poetic offerings are timely. Mr. Skinner boldly adopts "vers libra"; Mr. Nelson chooses a compromise--stanzas of two, three, or four lines, and a rhyme-scheme which wanders into couplets and out again. Three other poets show the influence of the season in a "Ballad of Love," a "Love Dream," and a "Call of the Spring." Two of these are examples of amatory pantheism, somewhat obscurely though not ineffectively expressed. Mr. Nelson's effort is simpler, clearer, more cheerful, and on the whole more pleasing.

"Marcelle's Trousseau" has not as much lingerie in it as the title suggests--only stockings. It is an agreeable trifle, not very powerful in characterization.

"The Peddler's Pack" is vivid, imaginative, individual, quaint--much the best thing in the number, both in conception and in execution. "An Aesthete's Nightmare" proves how rare the extreme aesthete type is in our midst--Mr. Dos Passos would never have to resort to such obvious and wholesome objects of art as the Venus de Milo, a Buddha, and Parrish's "Pirate Ship" if he had ever seen the animal in the wild state in his native lair--in Oxford, for instance.

Altogether this is a good specimen of the Monthly; not astonishing in any way, but well up to the high standard of the paper. There is no contribution that is not well written, no contribution that makes one feel that the editors were short of material and had to fill up somehow. It is frankly undergraduate, frankly literary, devoid of pretensiousness and and affectation, entirely normal and sane. Undergraduate publications are apt to be either trivial and careless or else over serious, too much impressed with their splendid mission. Both these pitfalls the Monthly successfully avoids.