ADVOCATE IN CURRENT ISSUE TRIES HAND AT PARODY

Parody is at once one of the easiest and one of the most difficult forms of literary performance. It is an old, old business. As old, let us say, as the impulse to destroy your fellow caveman, whom you could not lick on the physical merits, by withdrawing to a safe distance and mimicking his personal mannerisms and tone of voice, or exaggerating in a drawing on a cliff-face the length of his nose or the style of his whiskers.

Classic literature is full of parody. The Batrachomyomachia--"Battle of the Frogs and Mice"-- a travesty of the heroic epic, was long attributed to Homer, and certainly is as old as the fifth century before Christ. Aristophanes mimicked Euripides with side splitting and enraging effectiveness. Cervantes' Don Quixote is sheer parody. In our own language we have a great volume of comic imitation. Shakespeare parodied and was parodied. Milton's ponderous solemnity was the subject of endless ribald travesty in his own momentous metre. Shelley did not shame to lampoon dear old Wordsworth.

It is no trick at all to imitate a writer's style, especially if there are habitual outstanding excentricities of phrase and mental twist. The real parodist gets inside of his victim's mind, and compels him, not only in his own phrase and vocabulary but in his own kind of mental operation, to make fun of himself. Perhaps the beet example of this deadly skill in modern literature is that of Charles Stuart Calverly, that most brilliant of Victorian pranksters, who fairly reincarnated the very personality of his victims, An able citizen he, by the way, and of university fame; he still stands as the only undergraduate who ever won the Chancelors' prizes at both Oxford and Cambridge - for Latin verse!

I do not know how large a part the study of parody plays in the Harvard purview of literature; therefore I cannot tell what is a fair standard by which to judge the Harvard Advocate's April 1st number with its "Mirrors of Grub Street", to which anonymous writers, presumably chiefly undergraduates, contribute a score or more of imitations of well-known writers. I assume it would be neither gracious nor fair, for have I any disposition, to apply rigid tests to an ensemble so good-especially when the whole business is a labor of love and enthusiasm, done "on one's own time", so to say, in the intervals of a busy college life. From a serious point of view, some of it is hasty and superficial; an occasional vulgar note hardly lifts the average.

But most of it is so very good indeed! "The Deacon Speaks" is so much the real Kipling that Kipling need not be ashamed to own it. The Dunsany piece, "Apotheosis and the Peer", strikes this particular admirer of Dunsany as one of the high points in the collection. "A Wessex Tale" is quite Handyesque in tone and manner, though a keener study of Hardy might reveal to the writer the secret of that sureness of touch that makes the consumate artist. Joseph Conrad in the bathtub is almost Conrad's self, and Edgar Masters' cutting edge is in at least one sample of "A Charles River Anthology". I think the honors go to "The Questioning", after Dorothy Canfield's manner and turn of mind, and "The Little Pork Chop", a is Barrie. Each is in my judgement real parody.

Altogether "The Mirrors of Grub Street" is a very creditable job. I hope to see The Advocate try it again, with a wider scope, a more serious program-and perhaps a sharper blue-pencil. Meanwhile I am, free to say that to the common or garden sort of outsider, who has been hearing-and sometimes saying himself-that the colleges are not turning out writers of good English, this display affords a most encouraging answer. Indeed, there is apparent in most of this collection a degree of literary finish and sophistication which some weary old hands might envy and emulate.