SOLID STERLING

Not for long can the candle of genius be hidden under a bushel; the recognizing world catches errant gleams that betray closeted flame, and cries out to know more of the modest great. This has, unfortunately not been true with the Reverend Paul Sterling, MeIrose clergyman who has just revealed himself as the prime mover in Boston's recent campaign of book censorship. In this instance Cinderella herself has been obliged to strike the hour of unmasking.

Mr. Sterling is not only an artist in the maintenance of non-existent suspense; he has been the man who, when the Watch and Ward allowed a bit of literary seepage, put his finger in the dike until the police had a chance to follow his suggestion of proscribing the subtly indecent book. The waters of obscenity have roared without, but Mr. Sterling has not been daunted. In Harvard Square, long stigmatized as the capital of Massachusetts pornographia, he found but one objectionable book, which was withdrawn with the bookseller's apology that it was on sale only because the man upstairs wrote it. Thus did purity leap the water gap.

A dealer in "putrid books for the putrid minded" is precisely the same in the eyes of Mr. Sterling as a dealer who sells typhus-filled milk. Both are to be held responsible. There are tea-tasters and there were wine-tasters; every book seller must now become his own book taster. A round sum might induce a poetaster to prostitute his art in the service of Boston. When it was suggested that some booksellers might find difficulty in keeping peace with the thirty books that are being published each day Mr. Sterling, even though he knows little of fifteen minute education and has practically ignored the Harvard reading period, declared that he could read 15 or 20 books a day. At this gait he would hit, he was bound to admit, only the higher dirty spots of our modern mound builders.

A little disillusioning it is, after all these months, to find that Mr. Sterling was he, too much like meeting an author. One was confident in the honesty of Mr. Foley's claim to the honors of creation. Sterling, Sterling. Well, Sterling.