SMALL AS A MAN'S HAND

In these crabbed times of Turkish turmoil Republican uneasiness, and undergraduate suspense we are not unlike that idolatrous generation which seeketh a sign. How much better would it have been for the contemporaries of Noah had they perceived upon the horizon the true character of the little cloud, which, the chronicler states, was as small as a man's hand.

Speaking of smallness--that used to be the chief characteristic of audiences at musicales, Browning Society meetings, and lectures on early Florentine primitives. But that day is past, largely because this age of machinery is forcing all of us in self defense to be musicians or poets. And the fine arts are no longer limited to temperamental immortals. Some of our magazine poetry furnishes sufficient cause for the comment of that jealous critic who said that free verse was the very poor art of saying nothing poorly.

Be that as it may, anyone who noted the bulging entrances and carefully packed stairways of the Paine Concert Hall, night before last, is ready to swear that the appreciation of the fine arts is not confined to the indeterminate outside public or the students of Music 4. The day when Beethoven and Schumann are preferred to Irving Berlin, when the ethereal troops of fantastic actors become more real in their symphonic exits and entrances than those of the Music Box Revue,--but no, there is a limit even to predictions.

Only last week an unsuspecting individual went down to Boston to spend a quiet evening with Mr. William Shakespeare. Feeling serenely confident of the lowness of brow of people generally, he was staggered to find an unbroken line of citizens reaching from the ticket office out onto Huntington avenue. His reflections on leaving the theatre were somewhat mixed, but the muttered exclamation, "O Tempora, O Mores!" was one of them. The ejaculation has expressed the disgusted perplexity of people more often than Cicero ever used it himself, and the question, "What are we coming to?" together with the upward shrug of the shoulders, is still unanswered.

But the question is being discussed and the answer sought for every day in the papers by presidents, prelates, and the principals of high schools. Between them they have succeeded in excluding from college everybody theoretically except the professional hobo. He has none of those objectionable qualities of ancestors, wealth, social standing, or ambition. Moreover, he hails from rolling stock and has a decided preference for aristocracy, whether it be the aristocracy of brains or the aristocracy of the rough and ready. This last named qualification insures a dogged determination in, as well as an easy adaptability to, the academic life.

Altogether, if there are portents in the sky, hanging like so many clouds within sight of the Yard, they are not entirely unprepossessing. Whether they hold water or not is another question.