COMMUNICATION

(The Crimson invites all men in the University to submit signed communications of timely interest. It assumes no responsibility, however, for sentiments expressed under this head and reserves the right to exclude any whose publication would be palpably inappropriate.)

To the Editor of the CRIMSON:

In the interest of larger issues involved, will you permit me to take exception to the extremely partial and uncomplimentary review of "Three Soldiers" by John Dos Passos '16, which appeared in your pages on Saturday last?

Did that review not seem to exhibit a hopeless misapprehension of the author's intent, I should hardly be thus tempted to come to the defense of a work of art that can stand firmly on its own feet. Three Soldiers has stirred up almost as much controversy as admiration for its technical brilliance. Are we to condemn the author as one who has "distorted and besmirched" human life on the grounds offered by your reviewer?

What is it that Mr. Dos Passos has endeavored to do in "Three Soldiers", which seems to your reviewer only a regrettable bid for notoriety? For one thing, he has not tried to write a history of the war, nor an exposition of its issues, nor an account of the typical spirit of the American army. He believes the war a just and righteous one; but a picture of it does not require a lot of foot-notes to that effect by Mr. George Creel. Like any artist worthy of the name, Mr. Dos Passos has attempt a portrayal of the truth about human life from a given and necessarily limited point of view, striving always for unity of purpose and expression.

What is that point of view with which your reviewer, along with Captain Coningsby Dawson, so vigorously quarrels? Is it not that of the human individual in the midst of a herd enterprise, war? What Tolstoi painted with such superb restraint in "War and Peace" and "Sebastopol", namely: what happens to individuals when the state orders them out to kill their fellow men. It is the tragedy of the State's failure to touch the souls of men, the inevitable violence and injustice to individuals in any military machine, which "Three Soldiers" depicts afresh. It has been the theme of some of the world's greatest novelists, whenever "military necessity" would allow them to touch it!

But it is plainly the point of view of the particular individuals in "Three Soldiers" which has aroused the ire of your reviewer. How long since an artist has been compelled by any canon of literature to choose for his creatures only paragons of virtue? Have we not had cur war books from the point of view of those who gloried in the slaughter, the propaganda attempts to make war attractive, the sort of thing which is perfectly "safe" to issue in wartime, at least to commissioned officers? Shall we agree that these are greater works of art simply because they tell what we would like to believe if we could? Must we remain forever, as a matter of patriotism, in that state of martial stupefaction, which believes that all American soldiers were stainless Sir Galahads? Indeed, what sort of patriotism is it that insists that the public shall go on thinking that millions of Americans liked crawling before "superiors", being humiliated, hounded, and beaten up by the scum of the M. P. force, and all the rest of the hell of war and its accompaniments?

Mr. Whitney declares the figures of "Three Soldiers" "moral and mental cowards and, like all great emotional experiences, the war merely intensifier those qualities which they already possessed". War, that is to say, is an impartial intensifier of what is latent in men, bringing out the good as readily as the bad. The whole point of "Three Soldiers" is the negation of this. War gives scope to some virtues, but who is there who will defend the thesis that it calls out more of the good in man than the bad? To gain an end, it appeals to the bestial arid the savage. It exalts the "hard-boiled", physical courage which is by no means the most difficult and rare of the virtues. The animal world is full of it. But there are other values in life which war thwarts, chokes, and prevents. Have these no night to their day in court?

If Mr. Dos Passos had any of the malignant designs imputed to him, his wrecked figures would have been of a more heroic stature. But he is no progandist, no muck-raker. It is a pity that he cannot yet receive the judgment by standards of literary criticism to which he is entitled, instead of the hasty appraisals of conventional opinion. HAROLD A. LARRABEE, '16, 1G.   October 17, 1921.