COLLEGE CRAMP

With sleet and examinations forcing continued cave dwelling the undergraduate, gazing at obscure texts and obscure days of the D.W. Griffith variety occasionally wonders both at the texts and the days. Aristotle has admitted that man is "a thinking being"--and the undergraduate--Mr. Mencken notwithstanding--is usually a man. So while the logs leap into flame or the tries to make them, his wonder becomes fused into a definite inquiry: why, after all, is he here, looking so very glum while the sun shines on other fields and making hay is so delightfully easy?

Especially does he so inquire if he is an artist--not the mental midget of pseudo-aesthetic tendencies, but the occasional person who wants to create rather than criticize, to build rather than to fresco other people's buildings with the rococo delineations of his embryonic criticism. He is mentally tired. He has learned that better writers, painters, musicians than he can ever be have not only preceded him, but have left their art for the catalogues of word epicures and the text books of higher criticism. The flames do or do not leap high in his fire place, the wind does or does not worry stray shutters and growl is cynicism--but, at all events, indignation does leap high within him--and he worries through college cramp. Yet beyond the confines of Cambridge where all is sunshine and examinations are myths there exists a phenomenon of which the disgruntled undergraduate is too seldom aware. This phenomenon might be called the profusion of mediocrity in contemporary art. It is caused by half ideated writing, silliness and cheapness--none of which, the undergraduate must admit characterizes the obscure texts--and Cambridge weather is a thing unique.

So when his inquiry becomes saner as the room, perhaps, grows more comfortable, and the wind decreases in proportion to his loss of interest in Nathan esque bitterness--he comes to realize that this disease of college cramp is, after all, not without its purposive helpfulness in his life as a writer, an artist.

He is learning--for a few years at least--what standards have and should still exist by which he is to measure the worth of his own work. He is getting ideas. And most of this profusion of mediocrity in contemporary art is due primarily to a lack of sane and sufficient standards, of sane and sufficient thinking. As an undergraduate he is free to learn these standards, to absorb that sanity. So his college cramp may not--in the end--be more than the restraint necessary for ht realization of a creative power, sufficient to overcome the mediocrity or contemporary art. "Man is a thinking being"--college cramp is the coercive restraint of university skepticism upon the creative mind. Does he weather it he is all the better able to accomplish his end--does he fail, he would probably fail anyway. And merely another victim is offered to the gods of learning--or a bonding house on Wall Street.