Signs of the Times

War among Harvard men as to the form of a memorial to such of them as died in the World War has broken out again, at least among the undergraduate irregulars. Since where three sons of Harvard are gathered together three will be from two-and-a-half to four opinions about most subjects, the want of consensus about this proposed commemoration was unavoidable. A few of the choicest doctrinaires and come-outers said there should be no monument of any sort. They seemed to consider it as an encouragement of war. The majority could not breathe on these dizzy pacific altitudes. The only question was how the graduates who had played their part honorably in the war should be honored.

Towers, temples, arches, hospitals, and heaven knows what else, were suggested. Remembering the intention of arson with which the contemplation of Memorial Hall, finished in the early '70s, inspired Charles Eliot Norton, it was natural that many Cantabrigians should be doubtful and willing to wait. The exceptionally bleak, forbidding, and almost illegal ugliness of Appleton Chapel, where there are prayers and Sunday services for such as choose to go to them, must have guided the discussions toward the substitution of a humane Georgian building sympathetic with the older and the newer architecture--except the unforgivingly alien Widener Library. Appleton Chapel, on the palette of memory, has a kind of dirty, yellow, jaundiced look. It seems to leave a gritty taste in the mouth.

It is true that any place where "old" Dr. Peabody of blessed memory used to preach and Mr. Longfellow used to go of a Sunday ought to carry its benediction; but it strikingly failed to carry it in its face. The cost of building having fallen, a prudent corporation is talking of putting up the memorial chapel. Some of the children are bawling in the college papers with that zeal which sounds so funny to their elders, long vaccinated against any excess of that quality. Cambridge and Boston are chock full of churches. What's the use of building a church where nobody wants to go? A building with some athletic object, an infirmary for the martyrs of sport, would be laudable. But a church? Who goes to church? Religion is played out. So the infants bleat, trying to make somebody think that they are hard-boiled, world-weary, "pagan."

These are the lads who will bloom into vestrymen and deacons. It is safe to say that most of them come from religious families. However that may be, in the long life of a historic institution there will be periods of religious reawakening and enthusiasm as well as of skepticism and indifference. And if it is beautiful, the Georgian chapel will be sufficiently justified. In view of the rooted Cambridge inclination to multanimity, we may say that Appleton is to be succeeded by another dissenting chapel. At least the architecture will be conformist. New York Times