On the other hand, Mr. Conrad looks, if I may say it, through British glasses. The foreign qualities are easier to lay one's finger on. One can find the English only by noticing what he does not do. People have likened him to Loti-the Englishman shows up in his differences. Where Loti is brutal he is clumsy, but finer in feeling; where one is sensuous, the other is spiritual. And, most distinguishing, the Englishman has no "form." The former always has everything neatly lined up with his system, everything must be fitted into its place, all the parts be "just so." The Englishman, on the other hand, is overwhelmed by his material, and where he should shape and polish he merely records, where he should drive he is driven; and though he meanders so pleasantly that one scarcely frets, one cannot but feel that his lack of subordination, of artistic contrast, all his jumbling of the trivial and the significant, show him completely the Anglo-Saxon.

The mere technique of Mr. Conrad's work shows equally well the same contrast. Where his matter is actually turburlent his style exhibits a placid calm that rivals Turgenev. Yet, as I pointed out in connection with The Idiots, he is not so clean-cut as the Continental artists. He is careful, painstaking, nice in the extreme, but he is always a little clumsy and lacking in the finer gradations. His earlier work is very loose-jointed; take a bit from An Outcast: "On Lingard's departure solitude and silence closed round him, the cruel silence of one abandoned by men, the reproachful silence which surrounds an outcast rejected by his kind, the silence unbroken by the slightest whisper of hope, an immense, an impenetrable silence that swallows up without echo the murmur of regret and the cry of revolt." A "multitudinous tandem" surely; later he attains more nicety-there is a well turned phrase in one of his later stories:-"that faculty of beholding at a hint the face of his desire and the shape of his dream, without which the world would know no lover and no adventurer." The two qualities are hopelessly mixed.

This, be it remembered, is neither praise nor blame. It would not be impossible to find some decided faults; this, however, is merely an attempted explanation of what seems "weird" in Mr. Conrad's work. To be sure, he is very perverse he will continually do things that seem at first to reject any

such double-nature theory. He will write character-sketches, short character-comedies, witty little passages, that seem out of place in his Slavic soberness; and, on the other hand, he will sometimes display a luxuriance of fancy quite impossible in an Englishman. But he is "versatile" as they say, and this double-nationality is forced to take many disguises. A realization of that tendency, however, might possibly make his work less misunderstood, and himself less a writer's writer.

W. H. L. Bell.

Editorial.

Custom demands a word of advice to Freshmen. Enough, no doubt, has been said already, but this is a big place, bewildering at first, and the catalogue does not tell one everything; so we cannot resist one word more. And it is in fact only one word "work." It is the high-road to a reasonable satisfaction with one's college life. Some men come to college to make friends; but, though few can do without them, that should scarcely be one's sole ambition. College, unless it is to be the school for loafing that "practical" men declare it, must teach men to think and to work. This does not mean at all that every man should set out to be a prize scholar. The other forms of activity may equally well do similar service. Many men, to be sure, go through college and have a delightful time without doing the least perceptible work; others rouse themselves too late to accomplish anything. When Senior year comes closing in, however, it is apt to bring with it a few regrets. And then, neglecting the friends one makes in the achievement and the resulting social life, it is comforting to have a cup or a shingle that has been fairly earned.

A more self-interested purpose, of course, is behind all this philosophizing. That is to suggest literary work-and our literary work—to everyone that has any taste or ability in that line. The MONTHLY has attained an unfortunate name for being high and "literary," hard to make and little satisfactory when made. Literary it must of course remain-that is its only excuse for being; and we should much dislike to have it other than hard to make. But we do not want it to be forbiddingly literary, or discouragingly hard. And we have, therefore, in some degree revised our standards.

"Plain living and high thinking" is a very pretty motto; but without discussing the first part we are going to be so bold as to amend the rest. A little plain thinking is not an undesirable thing. A sort of literary-ism is

apt to pervade such work as ours in college papers. And it is that which we aim to leave out. Abstruse literary criticism, therefore, full of strange names and large resounding phrases cribbed from Brownell, is farthest from our desires. The only excuse for a literary paper is, in our eyes, that it encourage thinking on literary matters. Almost every man has some literary ideas, be they passing fads or well-worn theories. In these there is material for the only literary criticism that can have value in an undergraduate journal. The application of classic formula to a modern novelist, or the headlong reasoning of an iconoclast, either is acceptable; the only condition is that it show some actual thought. Many have an idea that to write literary criticism presupposes a stock of aphoristic phrases and a certain clever abortion of the normal sentence. Justified these accusations may be, but they need not be encouraged. It is not even the good literary handiwork that we want most, not themes and English A experiments but rather an expression of literary ideas, with reasonable respect for the King's English.

In fiction our field is a little less sharply outlined. As a general rule we seek rather to publish the most serious fiction that comes from undergraduate hands, feeling that we thereby do the most purely literary work and at the same time least infringe on the sphere of the other papers. But here, too, our chief insistence is on freedom from any literary affectation. Not that we do not expect the best possible literary forms; but we prefer the sincerity that comes of serious work rather than, again, mere cleverness of technique.

Finally there is a tradition, not altogether unjustified, that the MONTHLY cares to print only "poetry." Probably every literary paper cherishes some such fond delusion. If there is, however, any prime requisite for poetry it is that same sincerity and lack of affectation on which we are so violently harping. We shall therefore content ourselves with calling it, frankly. "verse." The word, to be sure, covers a multitude of metrical sinnings; we do not intend its use to invite everything from the crudely Kiplingesque to the "clever" verse. But we prefer to err by understatement rather than by its opposite, and to have one affectation the less. Upon verse form we put one

restriction: sonnets we accept but only the rarest. As to subject we do not encourage effusions about the going up and coming down of the sun— those have been written several times; and love meriting serious expression should properly be beyond the ken of undergraduates. All else we try, however imperfectly, to consider on its merits; and the chief merit we hold to be in vigorous unaffected verse.

This much exhortation applies not alone to Freshmen. For them it is only the ounce of prevention. For Sophomores and Juniors we trust it may be part of the pound of cure. Neither class yet has any man on the MONTHLY board. It is needless to say that any work submitted from those classes will receive the greatest possible encouragement.

The graduates have erected an

Athleticism clearly holds the stage. enormous stadium and have, in a way, and whether we willed or no, almost institutionalized our athletics. The conservative might have grumbled a little, talked about the Library's needs, and suggested that wooden benches would do for football. There is little use, however, in standing aside to let the crowd pass on its way, and giving reasons for believing that way wrong. We were bound to follow the current and do what little we could toward steering it rightly. So we are an athletic power, do our utmost to make our teams the best, and are as thoroughly athletic as we can conscientiously be. In the midst of this athletic furor, however, it is refreshing to see that our governing bodies and our graduates cling to some of the old traditions. In face of a pretty discouraging failure at New London, the Bulletin still holds out against the professional coach. That the professional coach was an advantage had just then been too clearly illustrated and driven home. In a good many departments, too, we have lapsed over into the now general custom. But there is much, outside of pure sentiment, to be said for the graduate coach.