Criticism of Current Advocate

The most distinguished thing in the current number of the Advocate is Mr. J. M. Moore's description of the Summer School at Harvard. All the accounts of the Summer School I have read hitherto have been more or less marred by a tone of condescension and ridicule. Perhaps the facts make this inevitable; but one cannot help regretting that the Harvard of the winter terms comes so near incurring the charge of being something less than gentlemanly in its attitude towards its sister of the summer. This unfortunate tone is not altogether lacking in Mr. Moore's sketch, but it is hardly the dominant one. Some sense of pathos, a good deal of humor, and a striking power of seeing in vivid pictures, make this an uncommonly telling piece of writing. Nobody has better expressed the half-lost feeling which the Yard in July gives the "regular" than has Mr. Moore when he speaks of a group of undergraduates "feeling as if Harvard had suddenly married again, and they were step-children."

Next most notable are the two contributions of Mr. C. P. Aiken. Both the poem and the prose tale show considerable originality in conception and skill in the minor points of technique; neither quite carries conviction. The story leaves one a little in doubt as to whether it is an allegory or a hold-up; and the theme of the poem is such that at best it could give opportunity for little more than ingenious fancy. Here, as in much of his writing, Mr. Aiken suffers from a tendency to get too remote from actuality.

The description of the Bodleian is marred by inaccuracy and exaggeration, and still more by a tone which one hopes is not characteristic of what the writer ambiguously calls "the American equivalent of a scholar and a gentleman." The account of the Oxford Union, on the other hand, is full of valuable suggestion, for imitation. There is no more promising remedy for our much bemoaned slackness of intellectual interest and ambition in the College than the development of amateur debating. But this, too, we kill with professionalism, and what should be an exhilarating exercise becomes a drudgery and a burden.

The other articles and poems hardly call for special comment.